When I say “we,” I’m referring to Stephen and our friends, most of them children of members of the Order: Sandy, who was studying Middle Eastern history at Cambridge; Tara, Stephen’s most stable lover, heiress to a shipping company; Robert, who brought us to the best concerts in the city and helped to organize some of the free festivals; Lucie, who wanted to be a photographer but worked as a model and was horribly jealous of Penelope Tree. But, above all, when I say we, I mean the trio that was me, Stephen, and Laura. It wasn’t a requirement, but the Order encouraged us to live under the premise of the magical androgyne; that is, we could choose lovers of the same sex for rituals and for life, so that that energy would embrace us and aid us in our mystical work. Stephen was nineteen years old, I was eighteen, Laura twenty-two. We were young and bold: we never hesitated to follow the suggestion because almost everyone our age and in our circle lived like that. Acid is a very sexual drug, and under its effect, the idea that sexes should relate only to their opposites seems absurd.

The world seems like the Order, Stephen would say, and of course he wasn’t referring to the world as a whole but to ours, the world of young bohemian heirs, libertine and powerful, who had invented the London scene in the sixties. Radical political positions, hedonism, sexual promiscuity, weird clothes, kids with too much money: that stuff was similar to the Order. But the spirit of the age, the hippie canon, now that was identical. It has never been easier to blend in, said Florence, and that was partly why she allowed the young Initiates to participate in the ambient esotericism. People talked about thought police, William Blake, and Hölderlin at parties, they read Castaneda and Blavatsky, they looked at Escher pictures to stimulate their trips, they discussed UFOs and countryside fairies. It was common to smoke hash, and, while the pipe went around, page through Le mystère des cathédrales or argue over whether the best Tarot was Crowley’s or Rider–Waite’s (or, as Laura and I insisted on calling them, Frieda Harris’s or Pamela Colman Smith’s). The I Ching was consulted, the Ouija board used, trips taken to Primrose Hill where the ley lines started, demarcating a map with megaliths aligned across the magical territory of the islands; we sought the spiritual sun Blake had glimpsed. One morning, Sandy thought she saw a black light, the god Brân and his crows, on Tower Hill. We went on the alert, but nothing happened. Tara, with her enormous fortune, brought us objects, rugs, and clothes from Morocco, her favorite place in the world, which I never got to see.