The Initiates arrived at the appointed time. Many of them chose to wear masks, mostly Venetian, some of animals: they wanted to be known only by the leaders of the Order.
Olanna was waiting on the altar, naked and facedown. The only light came from candles. Everything happened very fast. The chants began and then the women, some with a scream, others with a strangled gasp, felt the blood start to flow from between their legs. Olanna moved like a snake on the table, and the smell of semen and blood made her nostrils flare. Soon she threw herself to the floor. The Serpent was out of their control. They couldn’t touch her when the black light shone, and they didn’t.
Do you hear her? shouted Christopher Mathers, the leader. Do you hear? Many people nodded, and Mathers broke all the rules and protocol and left the protective circle. He went to get paper and pens and gave them to those who could hear. The Serpent was speaking, and they transcribed those words that were murmured in the spaces between the stars, between life and death. Each used their favorite writing system, and each wrote in the language they heard. That’s how it’s still done today, though the Ceremonial is very different, because no one bleeds—not menstrual blood, at least—and because it’s no longer sexual, and it continues until early morning, when the medium withdraws. The transcriptions, like now, turned out very different from each other, and some were impossible to comprehend. No matter, said Christopher Mathers, euphoric: the Black Serpent speaks to us and says more than we can understand, but the little we are capable of learning will suffice.
Christopher Mathers called this stage “the oracle phase.” When it ended, Olanna was unconscious in a pool of her own blood, her forked tongue hanging from between her half-open lips. Women and men embraced and cried, naked; some couldn’t look at her, others dropped their masks. Only George sprang into action, and when the black aura left Olanna, he approached her and picked her up. They hadn’t prepared a room for her, though George had explained the procedure. He lay her on the first bed he found, and the sheets were soaked through right away. She was racked by fever. He knew she was going to die. Not that night, but soon. Nobody could endure the intensity of the Darkness’s visit. And his father was going to use her often. Every day, if he could. George had seen the man’s ambition. Everyone would support him: Olanna was the medium but she was also a savage; none of the Initiates believed her fully human.
Lily burst into the room and covered Olanna and sent for ice, fresh water, jasmine flowers. In the other room they could hear Christopher Mathers explaining to the male Initiates that they must contain their semen, and he beat those who had ejaculated. He also enquired about the ecstatic visions they’d had. Olanna burned with fever for two nights. Christopher Mathers didn’t want to call a doctor, saying that the chemicals could ruin the energy fluid, and he spoke of Apanga and Bindu and the purity of secretions. He was worried, though. On the third day, Olanna emerged from her semi-unconscious state and accepted some soup Lily had ordered prepared. That same night they held another Ceremonial.
Olanna survived two months. The night of the final ritual was almost no different, except that the Darkness surrounding Olanna lunged—there was no other way to describe it, George said in his diary—and when it touched one of the Initiates, a young woman with her face covered, it opened a deep cut in her left arm. She was rapt in ecstasy and didn’t feel the pain, but later she almost lost her arm, which required several operations. After the Darkness leaped, Olanna was motionless as always, silvery and red, but now frighteningly thin, her teeth protruding, her skull perfect under her skin, her eyes sunken. She no longer stuck out her tongue. When George picked her up, he was surprised: she was cold. No fever. He didn’t think it was a good sign. In her final delirium, Olanna wept. Lily dried her tears: her father-in-law had ordered her to collect them in small containers that looked like test tubes, but she had only done it once before telling her husband that she would not obey that cruel man. Couldn’t he see the ribs that seemed to want to rip through Olanna’s skin, or how her beautiful color was turning gray, how the scars on her face looked white? Olanna, you don’t have to do this, Lily had told her, naked except for her flapper’s headband that crossed her forehead and kept her short hair in place. In less than an hour, the Princess of Nri and the medium of the Darkness stopped breathing. Lily cried with her hands submerged in a bowl of ice.
Lily and George took care of Olanna’s burial in Highgate, the most beautiful cemetery in London, though it was in decline in those days. Lily had a stone sphinx carved and ordered it placed beneath an oak tree. The grave had neither name nor dates: the burial of an African teenager in a state of malnutrition caught the authorities’ attention, but the Mathers’ money could silence any scandal. Christopher would have preferred to keep her body or use her ashes for rituals, but George put his foot down. Don’t take all her dignity, he pleaded. She gave us so much. His father permitted the grave.
Years later, however, it would be desecrated. Few people know this, but Olanna’s skull, embellished with jewels, is used by the women of the Order in secret meetings, in dances and invocations. I attended at least two, in London. I say at least two because Florence let me use psychedelic drugs in certain rituals, and sometimes, in my dreams, I remember the skull with its forehead shining red—it’s set with rubies—and I remember a woman lifting her skirt and displaying, between her legs, what looked like a long tail.
It was Lily who decided to go with her husband to Africa: George had to return and control the family’s business, this time at trading posts on the Niger River. On the long, happy voyage there, Lily got pregnant. But they didn’t turn back home: the child would be born in hot lands and, with any luck, he would be a great master, powerful and compassionate. A child who would come to change the Order and its practice of exploiting mediums.
George Mathers, who had never before gotten sick in Africa, not even with a stomachache, came down with malaria during his first week on the Niger. He died without ever recovering consciousness. Lily lost her baby, and she also had fevers—what illness it was exactly, the western doctors didn’t know—it seemed like malaria, but it could have been anything—and she survived it, but only for a few months.
The news reached London quickly. Christopher Mathers handed over control of the Order to his youngest son, Charles. He had lost two sons already, and he felt worn out and old.
It would be Charles Mathers’ daughter, Florence, who would confirm the arrival of the most powerful medium the Order had found, in Argentina, one winter night in 1962: the fragile blond boy who brought the Darkness, this time in the house of another blood family, the Bradfords. Again, in the jungle and the heat. Florence confirmed his arrival, but I found him. The medium manifested in front of me and for me.
What the Darkness dictates to the Order are instructions about how to achieve the survival of consciousness. To call them “instructions” is inaccurate, but it’s the simplest term to help explain what happens. Every time it speaks and communicates through the medium, it dictates the steps necessary for that transition. Those steps are what the Darkness dictated when it came to Olanna, and also during the trances of the Scottish youth, though in those first sessions they couldn’t decipher the meaning of the words. The method is transmitted in a very slow, spaced-out, and enigmatic way. Everything is written down in a sacred Book. What we believe, and what the Darkness—and, as such, the Order—offers, is the possibility of maintaining existence on this plane forever. But the Darkness is fickle. Sometimes it speaks and there’s no way to find meaning in what it says. Sometimes it utters only isolated words. Sometimes it dictates methods for other ends, generally hurtful ones, because such a god can only be cruel. Often it tells brief stories about its solitary existence in an empty wasteland: it invites us to visit but it doesn’t say how, because its nature is fickle.