An Interview with Michael Bertiaux

 High up, on the thirty-third floor of a residential apartment
 block on South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, lives a Voodoo
 priest.  He is a gently spoken man with intense eyes, heavy-
 rimmed glasses and a dark, full-bodied beard.  By day he works
 as a government-counsellor, hearing welfare grievances
 mainly from the Haitian community in the city.  In his private
 time, however, he celebrates the mysteries of Guede and
 Legbha, the Voodoo counterpart of the dead and risen Christ.
 Michael Bertiaux is by no means a typicai occultist. lndeed
 it is difficult to say whether - in the traditional sense - he
 is a black or white magician.  He's not really sure himself.  
 Most occultists, he says, resort to techniques at both ends of 
 the spectrum. However he does admit that'life is so complex that
 we sometimes have to do things to survive that would have
 been considered, at one time, forms of black magic.'

 Bertiaux, like many occultists, is a Capricorn, and also has
 a Neptune ascendant.  Born in Seattle on 18january 1935, he
 grew up in a family that was primarily Theosophical.  His
 father tended towards Zen Buddhism, while his mother was
 interested in spiritualism and the de'veiopment of psychic
 powers.  The Bertiaux ancestry was a combination of English,
 French and Irish.

 Like a number of ceremoniai magicians, Bertiaux's career
 began within the ranks of orthodox religion and then
 departed for the fringe.  Educated initiaily by jesuit fathers, 
 he later attended an Anglican seminary in order to train for a
 career in the Church.  He graduated with honours, was
 ordained, and became curate of an Anglican parish in West
 Seattle.  It was shortly after this that his career took an oblique
 turn towards the occult.

 An opportunity arose for Michael Bertiaux to teach philo-
 sophy in the Anglican church college in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
 He decided to go, and as part of his training in 'culture shock'
 transitions, studied with the distinguished anthropologist
 Margaret Mead.

 The first visit to Haiti was only for three months but some
 interesting contacts were made.  These included traditional
 Voodoo practitioners with French esoteric leanings who were
 keen to see their system of Haitian magic adapted for an
 American audience.  They introduced Bertiaux to the key
 concepts and asked him to help them present the more
 positive side of Voodoo which, so far, had not been available
 in the West.  Bertiaux was intrigued and promised to stay in
 touch.  He returned to Seattle, maintained contact with the
 vouduns from Haiti, and began to see that his spiritual path
 was changing direction.  It was becoming increasingly clear to
 him that he would have to leave the Anglican church to join
 tiie Haitian mystery tradition.

 The French occult connection in Haiti derives from two
 eighteenth-century mystics, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and
 Martinez de Pasqually.  The latter was a Rosicrucian disciple
 of Emanuel Swedenborg, and the founder of an occult group
 cailed the Order of the Elect Cohens.  He was inspired by
 Gnosticism and the Kabbalah, and believed that one could
 oniy gain spiritual salvation by tontacting the Divine Source
 of All Being, and by participating in an initiation ceremony
 to invoke one's Holy Guardian Angel. Saint-Martin joined de
 Pasqually's order in 1768 and after the leader's death in 1774
 became the dominant figure in the group.  Collectively they
 became known as Martinists.  There were Martinist orders in
 several different regions of France: in Foix, Bordeaux, Paris
 and Lyons - and by the end of the eighteenth century, also
 in Haiti.  However here the tradition tended to blend with
 Voodoo.

 After a period in abeyance, Martinism revived in Haiti in
 the 1890s and between the two world wars the so-called Neo-
 Pythagorean Gnostic Church came into being.  This church
 advocates the invocation of angels and planetary spirits, is
 highly ritualistic, and regards the Eucharist as the central
 initiation.  Members of the clergy claim to be clairvoyant, often
 have visions during the Mass, and speak in a mystical language
 which - as Michael Bertiaux later explained - is a type of
 'Slavonic Voodoo', resembling the Pent‚costal speaking-in-
 tongues.

 The present head and supreme hierophant of the Gnostic
 Church in Haiti is Dr Hectorjeane Maine.  Born in Haiti and
 educated in France, Drjean Maine was initiated by a Martinist
 bishop and now lives in the mountains near Leogane.  Michael
 Bertiaux's role within the Church is to be its representative
 for all Caucasian-American members.  He was formally
 initiated into the Gnostic-Voodoo mysteries on 15 August
 1963.

 The following year he resigned from the Anglican Church
 and moved to Wheaton, Illinois, where he worked as a
 researcher for the Theosophical Society.  This brought him
 into contact with several prominent Liberal Catholics, includ-
 ing Dr Henry Smith, Bishop Stephan Hoeller and Bishop
 Gregory, who was also a key figure in the Russian Orthodox
 Church.  Liberal Cathoiicism maintains a high dertee of cere-
 monial, and appeals to many mystically inclined Theoso-
 phists.  Its influence has left its mark on Bertiaux to the extent
 that in his ceremonial workings he could easily be mistaken
 for an Eastern Orthodox priest.  However it becomes apparent
 that the forces he is invoking lie well outside the range of
 mainstream Christian beliefs.

 In the late 1960s Michael Bertiaux began to swing back
 more heavily into the Voodoo tradition.  Several Haitian
 vouduns had moved to suburban Evanston - there was a
 sizeable Haitian community in Chicago at that time - and
 Bertiaux was consecrated as an adept within an organization
 known as the Monastery of the Seven Rays.  Bertiaux considers
 this occult order to be the 'magicai offshoot of Roman Cathol-
 icisrm' aithough it is rather less likely that the Vatican would
 consider it so.

 Certainly, the role of the dead and risen Christ remains
 central to the cosmology, but the spiritual atmosphere is quite
 different from that in Christianity.  There is a strong input
 from Voodoo - a central magical technique is to transform
 one's consciousness into that of an'astral tarantula', and one's
 occult powers are obtained from Voodoo spirits of possession
 known as loas.  A far cry, indeed, from the orthodox scriptures.
 The Monastery's cosmology - or map of higher conscious-
 ness - resembles the Kabbalistic Tree of Life except that the
 Hebrew god-names are replaced by their Voodoo counter-
 parts.  In Bertiaux's magical ceremonies - which feature
 monotone chanting, specific ritual gestures made with the
 fingers, and the extensive use of impiements like the censer,
 bell and magic crystal - most of the real work is done on the
 inner planes.  The key to working magic, says Bertiaux, is the
 development of powers of visualization.

 On the walls 'of Bertiaux's apartment hang numerous oil
 paintings of Voodoo gods, and these are used as an aid to
 stimulate the imagination, to sumnmon the Spirit from what
 he calls the 'ocean of the unconscious'.  Among these works,
 which Bertiaux painted himself in a primitive, atavistic Hai-
 tian style, are representations of the Voodoo witch-goddess
 Maconda,'a powerful and stabilizing influence in ritual'; the
 Voodoo god of lakes and rivers, who confers telepathy on his
 devotees; and the crucified Guede, god of the dead.  The latter,
 says Bertiaux, is associated with Christ as the resurrected
 saviour, but aiso demonstrates that 'while the body may die,
 the spirit cornes back many times, taking on a physical
 embodiment and resurrecting itself continuously through a
 cycle of reincarnations...'

 But it is Bertiaux's concept of the astral tarantula and the
 idea of the temple as a magical space-ship that are the most
 extraordinary of all.

 One of the techniques advocated in the Monastery of the
 Seven Rays is to visualize oneself surrounded by creatures so
 horrible that they ward off magical attacks from the hostile
 possessing entities of inner space.  As the magician energizes
 himself in ritual, or during his meditations at night, he begins
 to attract what Bertiaux calls'negative vampires'- the spirits
 of the dead.  It is vital, he says, that one should appear strong
 and inpregnabie on the astral planes - and it is for this
 reason that he has to imaginatively extend the magical circle
 in his temple into a strong psychic sphere, guarded at the eight
 points by different Voodoo loas.  Meanwhile the magician
 transforms in the astral imagination into a were-tarantula and
 prepares to direct his space-ship to different regions of the
 inner cosmic cerrain.  As a 'spider-sorcerer' or 'spider-
 magician', writes Bertiaux in one of his order papers, 'you
 have woven your web by meeting with your own magicai force
 each of the eight sources of cosmic energy.  Thus, cosmic
 energy is met by god-energy...'

 Bertiaux explains this further within the broad context of
 Voodoo ritual:'Every time we do a ceremony we participate somehow 
 in the god consciousness, or the energy behind the ceremony.I
 thlnk it is a form of possession without a doubt, and repres-
 ents the way in which the gods manifest themselves in human
 experience ...'

 'Voodoo and Gnosticism both work with the number eight
 because it is a significant power zone.  In Voodoo it is repres-
 ented by the mysticai symboiism of the spider of space, the
 space deity.  It represents the way in which the mind of the
 priest makes contact with all the possibilities of the world of
 space and time.  For the magician to achieve a certain state of
 power he becomes that being in order'to mediumisticaily
 receive the powers from the god behind the animal form.'

 So how does the temple actualiy become a 'space-ship' and how does 
 the spider-magician function within it?
 'The Temple is a space-ship because it is a way of moving through the 
 different spaces of consciousness.  In fact the gestures of the ritual 
 are designed to build a spherical vehicle for the priest's activities 
 in bther worlds.  The priest is a spider because what he is doing is 
 actualiy bringing into his own life the experience of other worlds, and 
 then he's joining himself through the web of his consciousness, to all 
 the different parts of the spiritual experience.



'Every time he does something - a gesture, a word, a
 movement with some object - he is, in a sense, making
 contact between his web and something outside it.  What he
 is doing is connecting himself to those worlds and
 dimensions.'

 However, in the particular forms of Voodoo practised by
 members of the Monastery, there is also something of a
 magical trade-off.  As the order papers make ciear, some spirit-
 entities are allowed to penetrate the protective web and draw
 on the magician's life-force in return for providing specific
 occult powers that are desired.  Summoned as the magician
 arouses himself erotically, the spirits 'come down upon his
 body' draining the vitality of the mind and replacing it with
 psychic power.  It is a method fraught with dangers for it is
 the very epitome of spirit-possession and leaves the occultist
 - at the moment of mental surrender - open to all manner
 of occult forces.  As Bertiaux warns his students: 'Does this
 occult exchange provide sufficient compensation for the man
 who must sacrifice himself to nocturnal appetites of the most
 perverse type?'

 Presumably, in his own case, the risks have proven worth-
 while.  Also known to order members as Michael Aquarius,
 Bertiaux is now one of the chief adepts of the Monastery of
 the Seven Rays and has been largeiy responsible for dissem-
 inating its mysteries by mail to correspondents around the
 world.  And although Voodoo magic ciearly has its dark side,
 Bertiaux believes that a substantial part of what he does
 ritually has a positive side too.  The invocation performed
 before us in the temple is intended he says, "to distribute
 force'.  It is'... a healing intended generaliy for the whole face
 of the earth, for all humanity, and for all those beings in need
 of some kind of spiritual strength.

'What we are doing in our rituals is describing what is going
 on in the spiritual world,' - portraying and summoning the
 spirits through gestures, magical impiements and ceremonial
 regalia.

 There is no doubt that in his dramatic red and gold robe Michael 
 Bertiaux presents an imposing form.  Seated on a chair beside his 
 paintings of Voodoo spirits, he has a regal air - a high priest serving 
 exotic gods before an even stranger altar. Yet it is this sense of 
 ceremonial grandeur which makes one pause and take stock, just for a 
 moment.  Many storeys below us, in the streets of Chicago, up-tight taxi 
 drivers and frenzied commuters bustle about their daily routines unaware that 
 strange spirits move among them.

 [This interview was originally done by Neville Drury, and published in his book 
 'The Occult Experience']