Daughter to Demons

by Jeffrey M. Mahr and Levanah

Chapter Seventeen:
Diamonds are Forever

“Let us not be too particular. It is better to have
old second-hand diamonds than none at all.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator,
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar (1897)

Dr. Emrys’ office wasn’t any neater this visit than last. If anything, it was more cluttered, with the folding chairs pushed haphazardly against the walls and the elaborate pentagram filling almost the entire floor space. Emrys was behind his desk, when Jackie walked in, apparently oblivious to the repeated knocking and calls of his name before she’d wafted through the wood and glass door. She was actually surprised that she was permitted to do so, given Emrys’ reputation as the most powerful wizard in the world, but he must have been so engrossed in whatever he was reading that he forgot to set his wards. ‘It’s amazing some people are able to get out of bed in the morning,’ Jackie thought, ‘let alone live as long has he’s purported to have lived.’

She stood by his desk watching him. First, to make certain he was still breathing, but also because she was wondering if she could tell what so engrossed him. After all, she figured that her master’s degree in mythology should have counted for something. Alas, she quickly shook her head and sighed, completely bewildered by whatever it was that he was doing, which seemed to involve scribbling arcane symbols on bits of parchment and then setting them on fire using what looked a lot like a Santeria votive candle.

Amazingly, while her knocking had done nothing, her sigh was enough to distract him.

“Huh? Wha….” he pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked around. Seeing her, his face went from confusion to surprise before he quickly schooled it back into his normal neutral counselor’s look.

“Weren’t expecting to see me, Doc?” she said, raising an eyebrow to indicate that she’d caught him.

“Uh, umm, no, Miss Renfrew, I wasn’t expecting anyone.” He cleared this throat and surreptitiously brushed a hand through his flowing white hair and asked, “What can I do for you? Are you thinking of signing up for the group?”

Realizing now that she had no actual plan, now that she was here, so she wondered how to proceed. Should she spring it on him immediately, or play with him a bit? Each option had its benefits, but she finally decided to just lay it out and get it over with since it didn’t look much like she had the element of surprise despite her unorthodox entry.

“Not right this minute, actually. I wanted to ask you why you did it.”

“Did what, my dear?”

“Take the diamonds, of course.”

“Why would I take any diamonds? As you can see I’m quite well established here and diamonds are not a necessary part of any magical or mundane activities in which I am personally involved.”

“Why are you answering my questions with questions?”

“How else would a counselor counsel? Who would come back if I just told them what they wanted to know up front? For that matter, look at Cassandra. Why would you assume I would have any interest in repeating her mistake?”

“Okay, let’s assume I’m made it through the standard series of sessions.”

“Then you should already have answered your own question.”

“This is why there are so many murderous jokes about therapists, you know. I’m fairly certain I already know the answer. You took them for Lilith, I suspect using a main de gloire, called by the ignorant a ‘Hand of Glory,’ but known to the wise as mandragore, the Mandrake Root, which smells something like chicory on its own, although I’m not exactly certain how to construct such a thing. I suspect that real chicory may also have played an important part, since one of its mystic qualities is loosening locks and removing obstacles, so perhaps chicory plays a part in the preparation of the mandragore, which also grants invisibility. When combined with the presence of Ogham runes at the site, I naturally thought of the Druids. When I thought of the Druids, of course, whose magic tended toward the herbal, I thought instantly of you, Merl…. Lilith as much as admitted it when she did the same answering questions with questions and vague ‘Who, me?’ vaudeville routine you just went through. I just don’t know why you did it and what made you think Lilith would give them back afterwards.”

He raised one eyebrow and nodded, then smiled and said, “You’ve done well…,”.

Jackie interrupted him before he could finish his sentence. “Call me ‘grasshopper’ and I promise I’ll do my level best to get you locked back inside a rock with no visitors and no sun for at least as long as you’ve been alive. I can’t believe you’d trust Lilith, of all people.”

Emrys just sighed and made a small gesture. A chair rose into the air, unfolded and moved behind her. “Please humor an old man.” He gestured to the seat. “As I said, you’ve done well. I am most impressed and I will answer some of your questions, but first, a story.”

He settled a bit into his chair, and she assumed that meant that they were in for a long story. Well, she was in no particular hurry either, so Jackie took a seat in the middle of the air, since she didn’t have to put on a show to gull anyone into thinking she was human here, of all places,, and she didn’t want to sit on a prearranged chair out of general suspicion.

He raised one eyebrow, then shrugged. “Imagine that you’re an acquisitive creature who’s been alive for thousands of years, if all be told….”

“You’re cribbing from Yeats, by the way, so if this is meant to convince me that you’re not a thief, you’re going about it the wrong way.”

He looked irritated. “Who’s telling this story, me or you? Should I just shut up and let Ms. Know-It-All tell all?”

Chastened, slightly, Jackie said, “Okay. I’ll try to keep acerbic comments to a minimum.”

He smiled very faintly, a stiff upper lip twitch, then his face went back to bland superciliousness. “Yeats, of course, stole his line from me. In another life, I was called Taliesin, and was either the original creator of, or the inspiration for many of Yeats’ poems, so be careful before you level accusations of ‘theft’ against any of the Old Ones. They might not be quite as amused as I am.”

“Okay. I apologize. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.”

“Always a good start, Daughter. Sincere repentance is good for the soul.” He smiled in fatherly benevolence and made a sign in the air, obviously some sort of benediction, but not a cross.

“Could we just get on with it?” she said, irritated, and not that sincere in her repentance after all. “And I’m not your daughter.”

He smiled, as if he’d just won a close call in a tennis match, and continued, “It’s an occupational habit. Think nothing of it.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hands, as if waving away a fly. “Now imagine that you’re an acquisitive creature who’s been alive for thousands of years, if all be told …. Now imagine that it’s much, much longer than that, and that if all be told in detail, continents have shifted slightly, the Dire Wolf has thrived and died after almost two million years of dominance, and the Irish Elk has flashed into existence and vanished in the mere space of four hundred thousand years or so. How much of the world’s wealth might have passed through your hands?” He raised one eyebrow to indicate permission to speak.

“I don’t know. A lot?”

“Essentially all of it, at one time or another, and certainly all the land it sprang from. There are a few things dredged up from sea floors which might be fairly claimed as ‘finder’s keepers,’ but you might be surprised by how little of that there is.”

“So you’re saying….”

“I thought I was telling this story,” he said, with some vexation.

“Sorry.” She tried to look contrite, without notable success.

“When Lilith left or was driven out of Eden — the story varies depending on who’s telling it — which was up in what’s now Persia….” He frowned in momentary concentration, “…or what they call Iran these days — it’s so difficult to keep track — she went south, just wandering until she ran out of ground to walk upon, on what’s now called the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. She liked the climate back then, since she thought that Eden was far too hot in the summer, either muggy or hot and dry, and the winters were miserable. She quite liked the diamonds as well, which were locally plentiful in the general area. You could just pick them off the ground, or on the sandy banks of streams, and if you wanted a bigger one, you could just waft up and down the buried cores of ancient volcanoes and find all you wanted.”

“So you’re saying….”

“Exactly, Grasshopper.” He smirked. “Lilith — quite properly, in my opinion — considers all of Africa below the river Congo, but including Lake Tanganyika and Zanzibar, her personal property by right of discovery and occupation, together with all the mineral and other wealth therein contained. The fact that many humans disagree is a matter of no interest to her whatsoever, nor to me, I might add.”

“Well, that seems simple enough,” she said. Anything else?

He seemed amused. “Of course. Guess who really discovered and claimed the Americas, well before the American Indians and other Johnny-Come-Latelys came along?”

“Let me guess …. Lilith?”

“Got it in one. Would you like to go onto Double Jeopardy?”

“Sure, why not? Lilith has what she considers legitimate claim to almost the entire world, except that area previously set aside by God as Eden, the exclusive domain of Mankind as a whole, from which he somehow managed to get evicted.”

“You are a clever girl, Jackie. There are a few minor exceptions, mostly satrapies set up by one or more of the Djinni, although many of these were her common-law husbands, so when they died — and so many of them have died — title reverted to her as surviving spouse. The big exceptions are places she didn’t like, for one reason or another. She hated Equatorial Africa and the Amazon Basin in South America, because they were hot and muggy, and isn’t fond of Southeast Asia and most of the South Seas for the same reason. She claims that the moisture makes her hair either frizz or become limp, depending on her current ‘look,’ but almost every place that one would really want to live, given their druthers, either is or was hers, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Holy Probate, Batman!” she enthused without enthusiasm.

He scowled at her, then set his lips in a thin grim line and went on despite her kibitzing. “The fact, of course, that the laws promulgated by every existing human government may contradict her claims are beside the point, in her opinion, because they were promulgated by interlopers and thieves, and obtained a pirate’s title only, that is, they can keep what they’ve stolen only as long as they themselves have their hands upon it. If Lilith wants her property back, all she has to do is ask for it, or take it. She tends to do the latter, because it saves argument, and Lilith, above all, is….”

“…a lover, not a fighter. Yeah, she mentioned the same thing to me, and I have to admit that I can see a certain justice in it. It seems fair enough to me,” she said. “So Lilith had a need for her property, you agreed with her that she had a rightful claim to it, and you helped her to get it back.”

“Essentially, yes, although she has many overlapping claims on most of the world, either by direct right, or through one of her many spouses over the years. Most of those arguments I’d stay out of, if I possibly could. You may be amused to note that through Samael, the Archangel of Death, her first spouse after Adam, and still in God’s good graces, she has a partial claim to the entire Roman Empire, but specifically the entirety of the land and buildings within the Vatican City and most of Rome. It was her home for a while, you know, some time in the middle of the Ninth Century, when she became Pope, and since the Pope’s election is for life, could fairly claim to be the only legitimate Pope even now. That’s another tiff I’d stay away from, as it would likely start a holy war. I suspect she’d win, of course, since the Holy See has no divisions, as Stalin famously said, but only a hundred or so Pontifical Swiss Guards. She tends to be careless of ‘collateral damage,’ though, and I’d just as soon not take sides if she ever made an issue of it. Then again, as Adam’s only surviving spouse, and since there was never a proper divorce, she has at least a partial prior claim to everything owned by humans descended from his bigamous association with Eve, anywhere on Earth, since she was never affected by the Fall, and thus never afflicted with mortality. That was all down to Eve and Adam, the sorriest pair of dolts that you could possibly imagine.”

“I’ll be damned. I’m an heiress.”

“Well, the first is still an open question,” he chuckled, “ but the second, yes, within strict limits, so you’ll understand that it’s not a matter of ‘trust,’ but justice, and I’ve always been on the side of justice.”

Jackie thought about that for a moment. “Okay. I guess I’m on your side there, and please don’t worry. I like my new Mom, taking all in all. I’m not interested in bumping her off for any putative share of whatever. I imagine I’d have to share with a lot of greedy demons, in any case.”

He smiled again. “I’m glad to hear it, although I wasn’t worried, in fact. She’s immensely powerful, and not likely to be overcome other than by a large consortium of archangels, and it would be difficult to get enough of them to agree to do it, because many of them remember her with fondness, either as lover or spouse, and there’s also one overriding fact: To wit that, for some reason of his own, God quite likes her.”

“Oh, I can understand it,” she said. “She’s got chutzpah, and God always seems to like the ones with chutzpah, even if they aren’t quite the sort one would trust alone with one’s spouse, or ask to guard one’s valuables.”

He thought about that for a while. “I believe you may have hit the nail on the head, as you say. Like tends to like, but God’s plans are often quite obscure, so I doubt that that’s quite all of it.”

“Maybe, who knows? We all muddle along as best we can. Can you tell me why she needs the diamonds?”

“I’m afraid not; it’s not my secret to tell, but I will say that I agree with her reasoning.”

“Good enough for me. Is there anything she can do for poor Colleen, she’s quite devastated by the loss of her diamonds, you know.”

“Poor Colleen?” He laughed quite pleasantly, shaking his head in rueful admiration. “That’s rich! Look at the inventory of the missing jewels and count them up. Try to figure out exactly who the so-called ‘owners of record’ are. Just guessing, I’d estimate Colleen’s pre-insurance loss from your mother’s informal reassertion of her claims at thirty million dollars, since she had possession of many of the finest stones, which were all that Lilith was interested in. As one of the last leprechauns left alive, she’s got enough stashed away to make Bill Gates look like a street bum begging for quarters by the entrance to the subway, and could certainly afford enough diamonds to fill a bathtub she could soak in, more like a swimming pool, even after the loss of one of her smaller stashes. Didn’t she tell you that they were insured? Didn’t she tell you the full value of her holdings at Pearlmutter’s? You have to realize, Jackie, that leprechauns tend to be almost as economical with the truth as they are with their coin.“

“No, she didn’t feel obligated to share that information with me,” she said darkly. “In fact, she left me the distinct impression of the exact opposite, although looking back, she didn’t exactly lie to me as much as she allowed me to form an erroneous opinion.”

”Don’t be hard on her, Jackie. As you observed, leprechauns don’t ever really lie, as such, but they’re very sharp dealers. Did you ever read any of the old Uncle Scrooge stories? He was modeled after a leprechaun that the series’ first author and artist ran into once, which is possibly why his stories have withstood the test of time. They’re much more realistic than many people realize. They’ve been reissued, you know, so you might want to pick one or more volumes, so you’ll have a little insight into your friend Colleen.”

“I have read one or two of the original stories, a very long time ago, when I was just a girl. That bathtub thing, though; is that why leprechauns all have a pot of gold in the stories?” she asked.

“It is indeed. Before bathtubs, most people bathed — if they bathed at all — in the same pot they used for rendering, laundry, and whatever other domestic processing formed a part of their daily lives. A separate bathing facility was an unbelievable luxury, and leprechauns typically live very frugally, despite their wealth. They like to climb into their pot and roll around in their gold, claiming that’s what makes them healthy and long-lived. They’re probably right, since they’re a type of Elemental, something like your Salamander, only they embody the spirit of money, which has a duality about it, just like fire, which can create as well as destroy. So gold, or any wealth, can serve the purposes of either greed or generosity, and it’s up to those who wield it to decide whether it’s used for good or evil.”

“That makes sense, I suppose, and if Uncle Scrooge was modeled after an elemental, that explains why he liked to go swimming in his money. I live and learn, Doctor Emrys, I live and learn.”

“Hot Damn!” she cursed. Jackie had just wafted back through Dr. Emrys’ door when something that looked like it belonged in one of those old stop-motion Jason and the Argonauts movies leapt from the middle of the air and tried to decapitate her with one swipe of the biggest sword she’d ever seen. Oddly enough, the sword shattered into about a million tinkling pieces as soon as it encountered the frosted glass window, which at least evened the odds a little, so she took a harder look while the thing drew back his diminished sword with a look of puzzlement on his face which suggested that he’d been at the back of the line when they started handing out the brains.

As far as demons went, he wasn’t bad, if you managed to ignore the über-Neanderthalish slope of his forehead that made him look like he’d used his former sword to whack off the top half of his own head. He was green, of course, with the requisite slobbering fangs, bloody claws, horns, oozing sores, and bad breath, so’s you couldn’t possibly mistake him for the romantic lead, but he was male, so Jackie kicked him hard in the balls on general principles, which had the interesting and simultaneous effect of causing him to double over in agony at the precise moment he simultaneously ejaculated, shouted something incoherent, and choked because all these separate events somehow came together in one mouth — well, some of it got into his eyes — so she kicked him again for making a mess on the carpet.

Someone cleared his throat behind her, so she whirled around to face a possible new threat when she saw that it was only Dr. Emrys. “Friend of yours?” she asked, jerking a thumb over her shoulder at the recumbent figure on the floor, by now unconscious and prostrate.

After looking at him carefully — which told her that he must have some very strange friends — he said, “No, but it seems that someone doesn’t like you very much, because he was summoned for this task. Pity.” He made a few passes with his hand, said a few incomprehensible words, and the creature dissolved into flame with a shriek, leaving a sulphurous stench behind.

“Did you have to kill him?” she asked, since she viewed the idea with distaste, despite his hostile assault.

He blinked. “No, of course not. He was Compelled, and had no choice in the matter. I just sent him back to Hell, which is his proper place, and re-baptized him in fire and blood at the same time, so he can’t be summoned again until someone figures out his new True Name, which usually only happens because this class of demon isn’t very bright, as a rule, so it’s fairly easy to trick them into telling you what their name is.” He smiled. “If it makes you feel any better, I slurred my speech a bit, so it’s fairly likely that he didn’t quite catch his new name, as concentrated as he was with his personal misery, which will be a very big surprise to whoever tries to summon him again, using what he’ll probably think is his True Name, because the rules of the game allow him to eat the summoner who doesn’t get it right, which will be instantly clear to him when he doesn’t feel the bond.” He smiled again, this time a little dangerously. “I’m not fond of cowards who set innocents into harm’s way by forcing them to attack people they don’t like while hiding behind the bushes. As the Lord High Executioner said in The Mikado, I’ve got a little list, they never will be missed.”

As she left Dr. Emrys’ office building, Jackie was more confused than ever. She was embarrassed as well, because she’d completely overlooked Dr. Emrys as a suspect during her first round of thinking, because he was a Doctor, and because he looked respectable. But even if Lilith was the one stealing diamonds, it didn’t seem at all likely that she would have summoned a demon to try and kill her. In her admittedly short acquaintance with her, it didn’t seem to be her mother’s style, so there must be more than one hand being played in this game. As she’d pointed out herself, Lilith was a lover, not a fighter, and she’d probably be amused to have been found out, since she felt that she ‘owned’ the diamonds in any case, which even made her statements during the convention … truish, even if not strictly true. It’s not exactly theft if you retrieve your own property, even by proxy, and even if she’d been standing right behind Dr. Emrys while he absconded with her mother’s jewels, she hadn’t seen him ‘steal’ anything, by the same logic, and neither had Dr. Emrys ‘stolen’ anything. She gritted her teeth, suddenly furious that the two of them had blithely told the truth, but not the whole truth, and had deceived her through verbal tricks as morally dishonest as the physical sleight of hand that Tris had used to taunt her. She felt like a fool, but with that poignant sense of hurt one felt when people that one had thought to have been friends turned out not to be. She’d gone into Merl’s office as a potential client, at his invitation, even though she’d also had a private agenda. Didn’t he have a professional duty of care? Wasn’t his trickery also a type of malpractice?

She pondered this for a while, then thought, ‘Okay, so leaving aside the fact that they’d conned me, and that my feelings were hurt, there are still two real questions: Why am I a particular target, and why “retrieve” these particular diamonds at this particular time?’

She didn’t think the two things were related, or if they were, the connection was obscure. From what she’d seen at the convention, Lilith had the ceilings covered in diamonds, and she tried working the sums in her head: The largest cavern was about two and a half to three acres in size, call it three, to make life simpler. An acre is 43,560 square feet so that’s 130,680 square feet in three of them, so 144 times that is 18,817,920, and if there were only one diamond per square inch — which seemed unlikely — that would be almost twenty million diamonds on the roof of that one cave, and ten times that seemed more likely. She tried to whistle in astonishment, but discovered that she’d forgotten how to whistle, and that really astonished her. How could she have forgotten how to whistle? Why? She shook her head to get the cobwebs out. One more damned mystery to figure out.

But it was no wonder Lilith didn’t have a crew out there picking up the diamonds that had fallen from the ceiling. She probably just had them swept out with the trash, which brought her to Jumbe Mungu. Could he have been tempted to pocket the diamonds in said trash? But what would it profit him? He only had one believer, her own faculty advisor, Professor Emeritus Long in the Department of Mythology, who didn’t seem the type to covet diamonds, and why bother stealing them when bunches of them were literally laying around on the ground. Then she wondered what it was that constituted ‘belief.’ She certainly believed in Jumbe’s existence, but did that count? Did Jumbe have ‘believers’ that he didn’t know about? Jumbe Mungu meant ‘Chief God’ in Swahili, if she remembered her survey course in African religions correctly, and the introduction during the group meeting had mentioned the same etymology, but had referred it to Bantu, the usual linguistic source cited for Swahili, but what did it take to be considered a ‘Chief’ among Gods? And why would Professor Long’s ‘belief’ count for more than hers? Because she wasn’t human? For that matter, everyone in that meeting believed that Jumbe existed, and none of them, as far as she knew, were human, but that hardly seemed fair. And then again, her angel Sam had told her that she was human, as was Lilith, and she didn’t suppose that he would lie. The whole situation was making her head hurt.

In any case, if Lilith went to the trouble to ‘recover’ those particular gems, there must have been one or more gems of special interest among them, but which ones, and why? She supposed that the easiest way to start would be to ask, not that she expected an answer, not from Lilith, but why not begin with simplicity?

When she got to her parking spot, and into her car, she turned the key and almost started out for La Calaca Extraordinaria, her mother’s business and usual hang-out, as far as she knew.

Then again, simplicity was vastly overrated, especially where Lilith was concerned. Jackie could see her point; after having been alive for more than a million years, she’d seen almost everything before, and hated being bored. People who didn’t do their ‘due diligence’ before wasting her time bored her almost immediately. She wasn’t one of those unctuous ‘self-help’ gurus who claim that ‘There are no stupid questions,’ as long as someone was paying for the stupid answers. With Lilith, the first stupid question was usually the last, and Jackie had the impression that Lilith was actually cutting her some slack, every once in a while, and regretted her own smart mouth, which tended to run off on its own whenever she was around Lilith, for some reason. So her first stop was her own desk, and her small collection of esoteric texts, plus access to several academic databases that might be handy. She smiled when she thought about it, because she really loved research, discovering stuff that people either didn’t know or didn’t realize was important in ways they hadn’t imagined.

She felt a rush of pleasure when she first approached what seemed like an impossible tangle of unrelated facts, just as she imagined Edmund Hillary must have felt when he saw a mountain that looked impossible to climb. After careful inspection, she’d eventually discover a ‘toehold’ that would let her stretch a little further, and so on until she’d mastered the raw data and turned it into a hypothesis, then perhaps a ‘law,’ an accurate and predictive description of the interrelatedness of some particular set of observations, and then a theory, if she was very lucky, or very thorough. The academic world had plenty of room for both.

First though, she might as well stop and see if Dr. Long was in his office. There’s little point in having an advisor if one didn’t take advantage of their years of experience from time to time. He might have a few ideas on the subject, even if she didn’t divulge everything she knew.

At the first likely intersection, she turned right, then swung around the block until she could retrace her way back to the campus, and as she drove, she went over what she knew already in her mind. First: diamonds were compressed carbon, and so related to carbon-based life, which was to say everything living. That seemed like a likely point, in occult terms at least, if not as a nutritious breakfast cereal. Second: The diamond suit in an ordinary deck of cards represented the original coins or pentacles suits, and thus the element Earth in esoteric philosophy. Third: diamonds, and all crystals, were symbols of Order, and potential focal points for meditation and magic. She wasn’t sure, but the extreme regularity of diamonds on an atomic level seemed more suited to High Magic, or Ceremonial Magic, than to the more free-flowing and amorphous cantrips and spells of ordinary divination and invocation.

She already knew, from her research for her recent paper, that most invocations of the higher orders of demons involved aspects of Ceremonial Magic as well as the basic invocation, since one had to be able to control the inimical creatures summoned forth as well as call them, unless one merely had a death wish. Her own recent encounter with a Demon outside Dr. Emrys’ office was a case in point. If she’d been human, she’d likely be dead right now, and the same fate would await every careless summoner. So it seemed at least possible that the jewels had been used to summon or control a demon, although she had no idea how or why. The trouble with that line of reasoning, though, was that she doubted that Lilith would have any trouble at all in kicking demon butt if she had a mind to do so, and certainly wouldn’t need human gimcracks and doohickies to do so, since she herself — and she had no illusions about their relative powers — could obviously handle minor demons on her own. Her Mom, she suspected, would be Hell on wheels.

“So there you have it, Doctor Long. I ran across the use of precious gems in relation to demonic summoning and possession during my research for my paper, and wanted to pursue the topic further in another direction, but couldn’t be sure whether I might have missed something or not, so of course my second thought was to ask you, since you have much more experience in the field.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m flattered that you thought of me, Jackie, but your précis seems very thorough, and your paper was first-rate work, I want to say, from start to finish. I’ve sent it round for review, and would be pleased to sponsor it for publication, if you’d be interested.”

“I’d be honored, of course, Doctor Long, but….”

He laughed. “Of course, Jackie, back to business. I was going to mention that I remember seeing a reference, I believe it was Aleister Crowley, and of course you know how unreliable he can be, but I recall reading a passage in one of his ‘Thelemite’ hodgepodges about trapping demons in the crystalline matrices of certain precious gems.”

“Like diamonds, for example?”

“Exactly. In fact, what’s usually called the light body in Theosophy and related systems is termed the diamond body in Vajrayāna Buddhism, which itself is popularly called the Diamond Vehicle. Then too, the Diamond Realm Mandala, the ‘Vajradhātu,’ almost precisely mirrors the interior structure of diamonds as revealed by modern x-ray crystallography, so we must imagine that either this is pure coïncidence, or that the ancient Tibetan sages had actually divined something of the true structure of the universe through pure contemplation of ultimate reality. For all his faults, Crowley was an avaricious reader and the plunderer of many very real occult traditions, so managed to squirrel away a few nuggets of valuable insights and information in the midst of his ego-driven self-aggrandisement. If the Theosophic and Thelemite Light Body, or Body of Light — the ætheric manifestation of the soul — is in fact related to the Diamond Body described in the ancient Tibetan texts, physical diamonds might be appropriate for achieving mastery over demons, or even phowa, a type of astral projection in which a dying person can direct his passage into a new body of his or her choice, thus transcending karma to some extent. I’d focus on the Tibetan texts, I think, since they developed this line of thinking further than any of the other schools of Buddhist thought that I’m aware of, and in fact use the process to this present day to ensure the continuance of the line of Dalai Lamas, who are all reïncarnations of Avalokitasvara, or Guānshìyīn Púsà, or Guānyīn, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.”

Jackie furrowed her brow in puzzlement. “But isn’t Guānyīn a woman?”

“Or a Goddess. Yes and no,” he said, with phlegmatic equanimity. “It’s a common misconception, especially among those for whom Buddhism is conjoined with preëxisting thealogies, or those for whom pure compassion seems most likely or prevalent among females. Guānyīn, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, transcends male and female, and can appear as either sex, although various Buddhist traditions may prefer one incarnation or another. The current Dalai Lama has even suggested that his next incarnation may be female, and occur outside Tibet, and one supposes that he would know.”

Jackie wasn’t familiar with this at all, since her own focus had been primarily directed toward European traditions, but it seemed like a promising lead, especially since this line of spiritual transmission seemed to place great store in diamonds, or their spiritual equivalents. ‘Back to the salt mines,’ she thought to herself, and headed for home as soon as she’d said her good-byes and left the office.

Copyright © 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

Copyright © 2011 by Levanah