This week we'll look into a once-celebrated instance of British military intelligence using the magic of illusion to bamboozle not the enemy but British youth. As we shall see, Edward Lansdale was not the first psy-war operative to recognize the value of having "supernatural beings" appear out of thin air. Consider the famous Angels of Mons.

World War I got off to a bad start for Britain. Outnumbered and hemmed in, the British army found itself fighting for its very life after only a few weeks. On July 23, 1914, the same day that Japan entered the war on the side of the Allies, 70,000 English troops were deployed near the Belgian town of Mons. They were hoping the forts of Namur, a little up the road, would hold off the German advance until reinforcements could arrive. The forts crumbled like so many cardboard boxes before the Kaiser's Kruppstahl howitzers. Suddenly Mons became a very dangerous place to be British.

The Brits couldn't stand and fight. They would have been trapped. But they couldn't run for it either. Soldiers die in the largest numbers when they run, because it is when they turn their back to the enemy that they are least able to defend themselves.

To their credit, the British kept their heads. They retreated slowly in good order, fighting a series of skillful but costly delaying actions. They managed to stay intact as a fighting force but were pushed to the gates of Paris before sufficient reinforcements arrived to check the German advance. They even managed to advance a few miles, but then the brutal stalemate set in.

Even though things looked grim, especially to the folks back home, the British retreat had been a first-class piece of soldiering, and the last even remotely competent generalship of the entire war. You'd think the British government would have simply bragged a little and given credit where credit was due. But that wasn't enough. They told one of the most outlandish lies in all of military history. It's downright uncanny how many people believed them.

Things did indeed look grim. Stopping the German advance had very nearly exhausted Britain's troop reserves. Recruits were needed desperately. Not only that, but in the new era of total war, the civilian population had to rally en masse to support the Allied cause, and quickly, or all was lost for sure. Grim indeed. But all was not lost. John Bull had a wizard up his sleeve. Actually, he had a bunch of them, an entire secret society of them. And therein lies a tale.

Enter Arthur Machen, writer of horror stories, dedicated occultist, and secret society member. Machen was an active member of the Society of the Golden Dawn. The Society was primarily the brainchild of occultist S.L. MacGregor-Mathers. MacGregor-Mathers is best known in occult circles for his translation of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage as Delivered by Abraham the Jew unto His Son Lamech: A Grimoire of the Fifteenth Century.

This seminal book was the original source for key elements in the teachings of the famous "black" magician Alistair Crowley (rhymes with "unholy"). Crowley was Mather's chief rival for the hearts and minds of the Golden Dawn membership, and those of occultists of the era in general. He believed that "every man and every woman," and not just Mathers's clique, "is a star." Mathers believed in hereditary government and in authoritarianism in general. He believed that man could become Superman here and now, but this of course was only for the few. You can guess which of these two characters I find the more endearing.

In particular, Crowley lifted from Abramelin his central concept of preparing oneself for the practice of magic, or "Magick" as he called it (rhymes with "stage shtick"), by undergoing a six-month, yogalike meditation called the "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel."

Who was Abramelin the Mage? For that matter, who was his chronicler, Abraham the Jew? A medieval court magician was far more than a mere prestidigitator. He was a scientist in an age of near-ubiquitous ignorance, at least in Europe. Ceremonial magic was far from all he did. But consider for a moment ceremonial magic itself. Specifically consider the tools with which he worked his ceremonial magic. What is ceremonial magic, anyway? It is, among other things, a form of meditation in which consciousness is altered through the ritual use of objects, words, costume, incense, intoxicants, and belief. The Christian Mass is considered one form of ceremonial magic. Yeah, this stuff works. Consciousness is definitely altered, no question about it. What else happens? Opinions vary.

On the Christian altar is found a chalice and the host. On a mage's altar is found a wand, a chalice, a pentacle, a scourge, a blade, and some salt. They are symbols manipulated in "real" time and space in order to manipulate the subconscious. They are solid, three-dimensional icons that the practitioner manipulates on his or her altar with results on the subconscious not unlike the effect that moving icons on your screen has on your computer's RAM and hard drive. To have control of the symbols is to have control of that part of the mind that thinks in symbols, i.e., the subconscious. To have control of one's subconscious in a world where most people can't tell themselves from their own minds gives one a tremendous advantage in life.

The medieval mage went through a lengthy period of training in which he made these tools from scratch. His athame (his magical blade), for example, was more than merely the symbol for logic. He made it from his own hands. He found and dug the ore. He melted it and forged the blade and made the handle himself. In the process he became a competent geologist, a mining engineer, a metallurgist, and a knife- and swordsmith. These were the kind of men the magi were. They kept records of their meditative techniques and their scientific discoveries. These were called grimoires. They were always in part or in the whole encrypted. Some of their encryption techniques are very sophisticated, way "ahead of their time." The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage is one of the better grimoires.

One can't help but wonder what other secret techniques and technologies these underground scientists had at their disposal and kept to themselves. Remember, electroplating was known to ancient Egyptians. Archeologists have uncovered a working battery from the second millennium BCE. The ancient Greeks had computers. What can only be described as an airship was seen by thousands flying over the Bay Area nearly a decade before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. There are extremely sound political, military, and for that matter personal, reasons for wise but selfish men to keep the secrets of certain technologies to themselves. Money and power head the list.

Any good grimoire included many encoded and/or encrypted instructions as to how to perform a variety of seemingly supernatural feats. Interestingly, one of the feats that the study of Abramelin's grimoire allegedly enabled Abraham the Jew to perform was extremely reminiscent of the alleged ops described in my last column. He claims to have made a phantom army numbering 2,000 artificial cavalry suddenly appear at a crucial moment, much to his employer's delight.

Frederick I, better known as Frederick the Quarreler, was at war with the Hussites. He had lost the greater part of his army near Brux in 1425. But his wife, Catherine, summoned the whole of Catholic Germany to unite in a crusade against the Hussites. Twenty thousand strange and foreign warriors came unexpectedly to range themselves under the standard of Frederick (according to Mathers). Mathers noted that Abraham's claim of 2,000 artificial cavalry supplied could easily be a slip of the pen – and in any event rumor would soon magnify the number anyway. Rumor is a mighty force in its own right.

In theory at least, Western magical tradition and the underground science behind it stretches in an unbroken chain of magi from ancient Egypt, or before, clear through the Society of the Golden Dawn and beyond. Well, maybe. Probably not. But knowledge definitely does pass along, hand to hand as it were, even "secret" knowledge. Whole societies have been devoted to the practice. The Society of the Golden Dawn was one of these.

Golden Dawn members were not the mediocrities a rationalist might expect to find in a mysterious order. Members included, among others, the cream of England's literary and artistic circles, and not a few scientists. William Peck, Astronomer Royal of Scotland, was a member. So was Gerald Kelly, who was subsequently knighted and made president of the Royal Academy. The celebrated engineer Allan Bennett was a member. So was Bernard Shaw's friend Florence Farr, as was Gaiety Theater founder Annie Horniman. Future Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats belonged, as did the love of his life, Irish revolutionary Maude Gonne. So did Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and Sax Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu tales and of Brood of the Witch Queen. Brodie Innes, author of The Devil's Mistress was a member. So was Algernon Blackwood, one of the greatest masters of the tale of terror. These were the people with whom Arthur Machen dressed up in costume and chanted by candlelight.

The first edition of Machen's first tale of horror, The Great God Pan, was adorned with a frontispiece designed by Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley did not join the society despite efforts of Yeats to recruit him. But it was Machen's subsequent book, The Three Impostors, which includes a paranoid tale about an insomniac white-powder enthusiast, that earned Machen an invitation to join the Golden Dawn.

His superbly written tales sold poorly. By 1914 Machen was forced to take a day job as a reporter for the London Evening News. Oh, the ignominy. Newspapers of the day regularly published fiction, both serialized and short, mixed in with news – itself often fiction. This practice was briefly revived in the 1970s when Tales of the City graced the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. Ah, those were the days. Wouldn't it be nice if all the fiction one finds in the newspaper was clearly labeled as such?

As the German army romped through Belgium and the British retreated to the village of Mons, Machen's editor requested from him a patriotic short story of the supernatural. Machen reluctantly obliged with a dismal piece of hack work titled "The Bowmen," in which Saint George, in shining armor, and his angels, dressed as the archers of Agincourt, come to the rescue of the British army. Machen was, in public at least, thoroughly ashamed of this tale and wished only to forget it. To his alleged utter stupefaction, soldiers wrote in to the Evening News, swearing on their honor that they had seen with their own eyes the angels of Saint George mingling with their ranks at the battle of Mons.

For a brief period Machen enjoyed the national fame his finest work had failed to bring him. Time and again he insisted that "The Bowmen" was fiction. Nobody believed him. Now just between you and me, I'm perfectly willing to bet my left testicle that it was not ordinary "soldiers" who wrote those first letters to the Evening News – it was British military intelligence. In any event, rumor would soon magnify the "event" anyway. Rumor is a mighty force, indeed.

The "Angels of Mons" were clearly a part of psy-op. It worked. It worked superbly. A whole generation of British men volunteered en masse to join the "Angels." Many did. They went to their slaughter willing, singing as they went, in part because of something they believed had appeared in the sky. It was decades before aerial holograms were even imagined. People will believe the damned things if they're told that they happened in the sky above them.

Which brings us to the UFOs, a psy-op if ever one was. Now don't get me wrong here. I would dearly love to believe that those mysterious lights in the sky were visitors from another world. I especially would like to believe that they are something out of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and not something out of Independence Day or War of the Worlds. Maybe some are. There are certainly some intriguing anomalies in the historical record, some quite recent. And after all, those cattle aren't mutilating themselves. I am steadfastly opposed to rejecting the otherworldly and transdimensional origin theories out of hand. Anything's possible. But hard evidence is sadly lacking. On the other hand there is an abundance of evidence that the majority of these phenomena are of purely terrestrial origin. We'll look at that next. So stay tuned.