The coffin was open. I want you to understand that. They kept it open.
Thirteen days, sixteen hundred miles, seven states, and at every stop they opened the lid and let people look. By the end — by Springfield — the face had gone dark, the features settling into something that was no longer Abraham Lincoln but was instead the idea of Abraham Lincoln, which was always the more dangerous version and which the embalmers fought and lost against in slow, cosmetic inches. They packed the jaw with cotton. They dusted the cheeks with chalk. In Cleveland, a mortician named Brown performed what he called “restorative work” and what I would call a rear-guard action against entropy, and the crowd of fifty thousand was not satisfied but was at least not horrified, and in 1865 that was the best anyone could manage.
I was aboard from Washington. I had reasons. Several, in fact, nested inside each other like those Russian toys that hadn’t been invented yet — though I’d seen something similar in a woodworker’s shop in Sergiyev Posad, which is not the same thing as having predicted the matryoshka, whatever certain biographers have claimed. I am not in the business of predicting things. I am in the business of being present when things happen, and things were happening on that train with a velocity that made the locomotive look stationary by comparison.
My reasons, in descending order of plausibility:
I was mourning a friend.
I was monitoring a situation.
I was watching a man who was not the dead president but who was riding in the same funeral car, and who did not know I was watching, and who was about to be thrown off the train, and who would, in the fullness of time — a phrase I use with considerably more precision than most — become the most important person in American esotericism, and the most thoroughly erased.
His name was Paschal Beverly Randolph. He was forty years old, roughly the color of strong tea with a splash of cream, and he was sitting very still in the seventh car with a journal in his lap and his hand on his pistol, because that was how you traveled through the Republic in 1865 if you were Paschal Beverly Randolph: literate, dangerous, and exactly the wrong shade for the company you kept.
I had met him in Paris. Of course I had met him in Paris. Everyone meets everyone in Paris, which is why Paris exists, and why it is simultaneously the most important and the most exhausting city in any century. 1858, at the apartment of General Ethan Allen Hitchcock — soldier, alchemist, Swedenborgian, the man who had turned down command of the Union Army because he preferred to read Hermes Trismegistus, which is either the most noble or the most impractical decision in American military history and which is, in either case, exactly the kind of decision I respect.
Hitchcock’s apartment smelled of pipe tobacco and attar of roses and something else, something underneath, something that I recognized immediately because I had been smelling it for centuries: the specific ozonic scent of a room where someone has been doing real work with real forces and has not entirely cleaned up after themselves. Not hostile. Not even careless. Just — busy. Hitchcock was a busy man. The cleanup could wait.
Randolph was already there when I arrived. He was standing by the window with a glass of Hitchcock’s terrible sherry — Hitchcock’s only true failing, that sherry — and he was doing something I had not seen a man do in a very long time.
He was glowing.
Not metaphorically. Not in the way poets mean. He was radiating a quality of presence that I have spent considerable professional effort learning to identify, because it is the quality that separates the people who are doing things from the people who are performing things, and the difference matters more than most people will ever understand, and Randolph had it in spades. He had it the way some people have height. You couldn’t miss it. He stood in Hitchcock’s parlor like a small, dark sun, and the room bent around him.
He was also clearly terrified.
This is not a contradiction. The two states — radiance and terror — coexist in people who have genuine power and no protection. He had come to Paris to study, to meet the men whose books he’d been reading since he taught himself to read at fourteen, to stand in the same rooms as Levi and Bulwer-Lytton and the rest of the European esoteric establishment and to be recognized. And he was recognized. Hitchcock recognized him. Several others did too. But recognition, for a mixed-race man from the Five Points in the circles of European occultism, was a complicated gift. It came with a door that opened both ways.
He shook my hand. His grip was that of a man who had worked as a barber, a sailor, a bootblack, a dyer — hard, specific, the kind of grip that knows what it’s holding and holds it correctly. I liked him immediately. I like most people immediately, but I liked him the way you like someone whose work you already know, which is to say with an admiration that has nothing to do with charm and everything to do with craft.
“The Count,” Hitchcock said, in the tone he used when he was performing introductions he considered cosmically significant, which was all of them.
“Mr. Randolph,” I said. “Eulis?”
His eyes changed. “You’ve read it.”
“I’ve read everything you’ve published. The Dealings with the Dead in particular — the sleep of Sialam. You have the mechanism right, you know. Almost everyone gets the mechanism wrong.”
He looked at me for a long time. Trying to read me. Most people try to read me; most people see what I want them to see, which is charm and surfaces and the pleasant absence of threat. Randolph saw something else. I don’t know what. I never asked. But he nodded once, slowly, and said: “Almost.”
“Almost?”
“Almost everyone. Not everyone.”
He smiled. It was a good smile — the kind that arrives like weather, sudden and total, transforming the face from guarded to generous in the space of a breath. Then it was gone, and the terror was back, and the radiance was back, and they were the same thing, and I thought: this man is going to change everything, and it is going to cost him everything, and he already knows.
I was right. I was wrong about the timeline.
The funeral train left Washington at eight in the morning on April 21, 1865. Three hundred people aboard, in nine cars, with the coffin of the president in the last. Also in the last car: the coffin of Willie Lincoln, the boy who had died of typhoid three years earlier and who was being exhumed and reunited with his father for the journey home, because Mary Todd Lincoln had decided this and what Mary Todd Lincoln decided was, in 1865, among the few forces in the Republic that no one had the energy to resist.
I was in the sixth car. Randolph was in the seventh.
He should not have been there. That is — he had every right to be there. He had been Lincoln’s man. Lincoln had personally commissioned him to go to New Orleans and teach freed slaves to read, which Randolph had done, at considerable risk, in a city where the last organized effort to educate Black people had resulted in a massacre. He had been present for that massacre — the New Orleans Riot of 1866, though it wouldn’t happen for another year, and I am getting ahead of myself, which is an occupational hazard I have learned to manage poorly.
Point being: Randolph had earned his seat on that train in the specific, non-negotiable way that involves being asked by the dead man to do dangerous work and doing it. He had a letter. He had credentials. He had a Colt revolver in his waistband because the credentials were not always sufficient and the Colt was, and this was the arithmetic of the Republic in 1865 and it has not, if I’m being honest, improved as much as the Republic would like to believe.
I watched him from the sixth car. I could see through the connecting door. He sat alone — not because no one would sit with him, though that was also true, but because he had chosen the window seat at the far end, where the light was good for writing, and he was writing. Always writing. The man produced fifty books in his lifetime, plus an uncounted number of pamphlets, private manuscripts, correspondence courses, and a mail-order catalogue of cannabis-based aphrodisiacs that listed as its primary product something called the “New Orleans Magnetic Pillow,” which was a lodestone wrapped in herbs, which was straight-up hoodoo dressed in Rosicrucian vocabulary, which was — if you stepped back far enough — the most honest thing anyone in the nineteenth-century occult scene ever sold, because at least it worked.
His wife was named Mary Jane. He sold cannabis products. I mention this not because it’s relevant but because it’s funny, and because what is about to happen next is not funny at all, and I find it useful to calibrate.
The objection came in Baltimore.
A man — I will not name him because he does not deserve a name, though he had one, and it was a good Anglo-Saxon name of the kind that opens doors in the Republic — stood in the aisle of the seventh car and said, loudly, that he would not ride in a funeral car with a negro.
He said it exactly like that. “Negro.” Which was the polite version, 1865. Which was the version that came with the expectation of agreement, the social contract of whiteness extending itself across the aisle like a handshake that assumes the other hand will be there.
Other hands were there. Other heads nodded.
Randolph did not look up from his journal. He was writing — I could see his hand moving, the steady scratch of a steel nib on paper, the same motion I knew in my own hands from a century of scores and letters and operational dispatches. A writer’s hand does not stop for an interruption. A writer’s hand has its own momentum, its own contract with the page, and the page is more reliable than men.
But his other hand moved to his waist. Slowly. The way you move when you want the Colt to know you’re thinking about it but you don’t want anyone else to know yet.
The conductor came. A conversation happened. I could not hear it — the noise of the train, the murmur of three hundred mourners whose grief was expressed primarily as irritability, the specific acoustic quality of a railcar in motion that turns every human voice into a version of itself played through a tin can. But I could read the geometry. The conductor leaned in. Randolph leaned back. The conductor gestured toward the door. Randolph did not move.
Then Randolph looked up. And he looked directly at me.
Through two connecting doors, across thirty feet of aisle and the jostle of a train doing twenty-five miles an hour through the Maryland countryside, the man looked at me and I saw — what? Recognition. Not of my face. Of the situation. He knew what was about to happen. He knew the calculus: the letter from the president was in his pocket and the president was in his coffin and the letter’s authority had died six days ago in Ford’s Theatre and what remained was the Colt and the mathematics of one Black man against a train full of white mourners who had loved their president but did not, when the question was put to them directly, love their president’s friends.
He closed the journal.
He put the pen in his coat.
He stood.
I have seen men stand in a thousand ways across a great many centuries — men standing to fight, to surrender, to receive knighthood, to take the stage, to face the firing squad. I have seen Caesar stand and Robespierre stand and I once saw a man in Edo stand in a way that ended a war, though that’s another story and the war was small. Randolph stood the way a man stands when he has decided, with the full weight of his considerable intelligence, that the mathematics do not favor heroism and that survival is the more radical act.
He stood like a professional. I recognized it because I am one.
He gathered his things. The journal, the pen, a small leather case that I knew contained the private manuscripts — the Ansairetic Mystery, the works on sexual magic that he circulated by mail to the people he trusted, the system that he had built from hoodoo and Rosicrucianism and the traditions of the Ansaireh and his own devastating personal insight that love — literal, physical, mutual, embodied love — was the mechanism by which human beings could touch what was divine, and that anyone who told you otherwise was either lying or had never been properly loved, and in Randolph’s experience these were often the same thing.
He walked down the aisle. Slowly. Not with his head down — his head was up, his back was straight, his stride had the economy of a man who has walked through worse. He passed the man who had objected and he did not look at him. Not out of submission. Out of a precision so clean it was almost surgical: the refusal to grant the objector the status of an obstacle. You do not look at furniture. Furniture is in the way; you walk around it. This is what Randolph did. He walked around a man the way you walk around a chair that has been left in an inconvenient place, and the man knew it, and the man flushed, and the train carried on.
Randolph stepped off at the Baltimore stop. I watched him from the window. He stood on the platform with his leather case and his journal and his Colt and his letter from a dead president, and the train began to move, and the last car — the car with the coffin of the man who had sent him south to teach people to read — slid past him like a slow iron sentence.
He did not watch it go. He was already writing in his journal.
I turned back to the interior of the sixth car and sat with the knowledge that I had just watched something that mattered more than the dead president, more than the funeral, more than the war. I had watched the beginning of an erasure that would take a hundred and fifty years to complete and that would power the engine of every occult tradition that came after, and I had not intervened, and I will now tell you why.
Because I am a spy, and spies do not intervene. Spies observe. Spies record. Spies carry the information to where it can do the most good, and the most good that information can do is almost never in the moment of the event itself. The moment passes. The information survives.
This is what I told myself on the train. This is, in fact, true. It is also insufficient.
The more honest answer is that I could not have changed it. Not the ejection — I could have changed that, could have stood and said something lordly and European and invoked whatever cover I was wearing that season and created enough social confusion to let the man keep his seat. But the pattern. The pattern was already moving. It was already set. The thing that would happen to Randolph’s work — the systematic appropriation, the erasure, the stripping of every element that made it liberatory and the retention of every element that made it useful for control — that was not a choice any single man made on any single train. It was a tendency. A gradient. A shape that the world was already assuming, the way water assumes the shape of the crack it pours through.
You want to know what Blavatsky did to him? She took his Dealings with the Dead — the book that rewired American spiritualism into something with actual teeth — and she rewrote it. Not obviously. Not plagiarism in the legal sense, though Randolph would have used that word and would have been right to. She took his “sleep of Sialam” — the sexually achieved prophetic trance, the mechanism he had built from the body up, from the flesh out, from the mutual pleasure of two people who loved each other into a state where the walls between the worlds became thin — and she renamed it the “sleep of Siloam” and she replaced the sex with drugs and she replaced the love with authority and she replaced the body with doctrine. She kept the structure. She emptied the house and moved in her own furniture.
Crowley did it differently. Crowley kept the sex — he was not a man to throw away sex — but he threw away the love. He threw away the mutuality. He took Randolph’s insistence that both partners must find pleasure, that the woman’s experience was not merely important but mechanically essential to the working, and he replaced it with mastery. With the magician as operator, the woman as instrument. With “Do what thou wilt” — which is Randolph’s “Will reigns Omnipotent” with the second half cut off. The second half, the half Crowley dropped, the half that makes the whole thing work, was: “Love lieth at the Foundation.”
And the Ballards. The goddamn Ballards. Guy on Mount Shasta in 1930, claiming to have met Saint Germain — my name, the name that was stolen from me in the catastrophe that hasn’t happened yet and has always already happened, depending on which direction you’re reading time, and I am reading it in all directions simultaneously and it gives me a headache that would flatten a lesser immortal.
The Ballards took Randolph’s “Decretism” — the technique of decreeing, of focusing the will toward a specific outcome — and they turned it into the “I AM Decree.” Same word. Same form. But where Randolph’s decree was embodied, was rooted in the body’s own fires, was a shout that rose from the gut through the chest and out the mouth with the whole animal behind it, the Ballard decree was recitation. Standing in a room. Saying words. The body doing nothing. The body standing still while the mouth performed the spiritual work, which is exactly backwards, which is exactly the point.
I am telling you this from the sixth car of a funeral train in April 1865, watching a man who does not yet know any of this walk away from the coffin of his friend, and I am telling you that I could see it all already — not because I am prophetic, I am not prophetic, I am simply old and observant and I have watched this pattern enough times to recognize it the way a sailor recognizes weather. The sky was already that color. The air already had that pressure. The storm was not coming; the storm was already here. It had been here since the first time someone with power looked at someone with knowledge and thought: I’ll take that. I’ll take everything except the part that makes it yours.
I got off the train in Indianapolis. I had seen enough. The coffin would continue to Springfield without me, and the crowds would continue to line the tracks, and the face would continue to darken, and the embalmers would continue their losing battle, and the Republic would continue to mourn a man it had not quite understood while alive and would mythologize into something considerably simpler now that he was dead, which is what Republics do with their dead, and which is its own kind of stripping, its own kind of contrafactum — the borrowed melody with the original lyrics replaced.
Randolph would go back to work. He would continue writing, continue teaching, continue manufacturing his Magnetic Pillows and his hashish tinctures and his extraordinary private manuscripts. He would write Eulis! — the book that says “Love forever, against the world!” and means it technically, means it as an instruction manual, means it as an engineering specification for the generation of transcendence through the bodies of two people who love each other, and if you think that sounds like too much to claim for one book written by one man in 1874, you have not read the book, and you have possibly not been properly loved, and Randolph would say so, and Randolph would be right.
He would be dead by forty-nine. Gunshot. The newspapers would call it suicide. The courts would call it accidental. A man on his deathbed would call it murder. All three verdicts sit on the same shelf, gathering the same dust, and the truth is somewhere in the space between them, which is where the truth usually lives — not in the verdict but in the gap.
And after he was dead, the work would move. It would flow through the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and into Théon and Davidson and Burgoyne and then into Reuss and then into Crowley, and at every junction the same operation would be performed: keep the mechanism, strip the love, erase the man. Keep the mechanism, strip the body, erase the man. Keep the mechanism, strip the author’s name, replace it with a European one, and claim the tradition was always white, was always European, was always about mastery rather than mutuality, was always about rising out of the body rather than rising through it.
“I believe in love, all the way through,” he wrote, “and I will help every man, woman, and the betweenities to win, obtain, intensify, deepen, purify, strengthen and keep it.”
1874. “The betweenities.” A hundred and fifty years before anyone else found the language. He already had the language. He already had everything. And they took everything except the one thing they couldn’t take, the one thing that survived because it was encoded in the wrong medium — not in texts, which can be rewritten, not in rituals, which can be co-opted, but in music, in the body’s own response to rhythm, in the ring shout that was already ancient when Randolph was a boy in the Five Points, in the circle where everyone moves and no one watches and the collective body becomes the instrument of its own liberation.
That survived. That made it through. From the ring shout to the field holler to the gospel shout to the jook joint to the rent party to the blues to the Warehouse to every dancefloor on earth at 3am when the DJ finds the right record and ten thousand people feel the same thing at the same moment and the room becomes something that Randolph would have recognized immediately, because that’s what he was describing. The nuptive moment. The double crisis. The point where the bodies in the room stop being separate and start being a single instrument, and the music is the bow, and the sound that comes out is not something any individual could make alone.
The dancefloor is his living will. The texts were stolen. The body was not.
The train is gone now. I’m standing in Indianapolis with my coat and my cover and my reasons, and the platform is empty, and the next train east is in four hours, and I have nothing to do but think about a man who will be dead in ten years and erased in twenty and whose work will power every spiritual movement of the next two centuries without a single one of them saying his name.
Paschal Beverly Randolph. Born in the Five Points. Orphaned at six. Self-taught. Abolitionist. Doctor. Spy — yes, spy; Lincoln’s man in New Orleans, armed and operational. The man who said love was the mechanism and meant it. The man who said gender was provisional and was right. The man who sold hashish and hoodoo by mail-order and called himself the Supreme Grand Master of the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis and who was, against all probability and all social physics, exactly what he claimed to be: the real thing, in a world that was already learning to prefer the copy.
They threw him off the train.
They will always throw him off the train.
But the music doesn’t stop. The music was never on the train. The music is in the body, and the body remembers what the texts forget, and somewhere right now — in a church basement in Georgia, in a warehouse in Chicago, in a club in Berlin, in a living room in Lagos — people are moving in a circle, and the circle has no audience, and the rhythm is doing what Randolph said it would do, what he knew it would do, because he had done it, because he had been there, because he was the man in the room who understood that the room was the instrument and the people were the music and the music was the mechanism of liberation and the mechanism worked and it worked through the body and it worked through love and anyone who told you otherwise had simply never been in the right room at the right time with the right people moving in the right direction.
Love forever, against the world.
He wrote that. 1874. Ten months before they killed him, or he killed himself, or God killed him, or the gap between those three verdicts killed him, which is the most American death I have ever witnessed and I have witnessed a great many.
I’m standing on a train platform in Indianapolis in April 1865 and I’m thinking about a man who just walked away from his friend’s coffin with his back straight and his head up and his pen already moving, and I am thinking: I will remember you. I am very good at remembering. It is, at this point, the only thing I am unambiguously good at. I will carry your name in my mouth like a coal, and I will blow on it when the time is right, and when I blow on it, it will catch, and when it catches, the fire will be your fire, not mine, and the world will not be ready for it and the world will never be ready for it and that is precisely the fucking point.
Love forever.
Against the world.
The train is gone. I button my coat.
I have work to do.
Paschal Beverly Randolph. 1825–1875. Five Points orphan, self-taught polyglot, abolitionist, Lincoln’s operative in New Orleans, Supreme Grand Master of the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, inventor of Western sexual magic, and the man who wrote “the betweenities” in 1874 — a hundred and fifty years before the language caught up. Every tradition downstream of him profited from his work. None of them said his name.
The dancefloor is his living will. The texts were stolen. The body was not.