Category: religion

Analysis of ‘Barfly’

Barfly is a 1987 film directed by Barbet Schroeder and written by Charles Bukowski, who also does a cameo. It stars Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, with Alice Krige, Frank Stallone, Jack Nance (whom you might remember from Eraserhead), and JC Quinn.

Barfly is a semi-autobiographical film with Henry Chinaski (Rourke) as a fictionalized version of young Bukowski. The film was entered into the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme D’or. Dunaway was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama. Barfly was also nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards: Best Actor for Rourke, and Best Cinematography for Robby Müller.

Here’s a link to quotes from the film, and here’s a link to the whole film.

Destitute LA alcoholic/writer Henry Chinaski exemplifies the Dionysian lifestyle, and it goes way beyond the obvious link with drinking. To understand the extent to which Henry embodies Dionysus, we must understand everything the wine god represents beyond just wine: dancing and pleasure, or partying, and irrationality and chaos, including passion, emotions, and instincts.

More important than even these, though, to consider how Nietzsche discussed Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy, the god represents disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy, and unity, as opposed to the Apollonian principle of individuation. What does wine itself represent, when emptied from the bottle or wine glass and poured into one’s mouth? It represents a dissolution of boundaries (i.e., the bottle or wine glass that gives shape and boundaries to the drink), and in entering the drinker’s body, the wine becomes one with the drinker. The intoxication from the alcoholic drink causes blurred vision and slurred speech–more dissolution of boundaries, more non-differentiation.

Thus, in Henry, we have not only a drunk, but also a law-breaker and a brawler…that is, one who doesn’t respect societal boundaries. His fists cross boundaries to hit the face and body of Eddie (Stallone), the “unoriginal, macho…ladies’ man” bartender he so despises. Henry’s hands cross boundaries to steal a sandwich right out of the hands of a man who’s just paid him to fetch the sandwich, or to break into a neighbour’s apartment to steal his food and wine.

Henry, as a writer, is the Dionysian artist whom Nietzsche saw as having “identified himself with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction” (Nietzsche, page 49). In total unity of everything, there is no ego, no self, no individuation, and no boundary between self and other. The contradiction of identifying self with other is painful, because the ego one is attached to is an illusion, whereas the fragmented existence is the only reality, like that of mutilated Zagreus.

Henry is much like Zagreus after that first fight with Eddie in the alley behind the bar. He’s lying all bloody on the ground, practically left for dead. Later, after being hit several times on the head with a purse held by angry Wanda (Dunaway), he looks at his bloody head in the bathroom mirror and recites improvised poetry, which includes the word, “euphoria.” He’s seeing his Lacanian ideal-I in the reflection, seeing his suffering Zagreus-self as a role model to live up to.

Getting drunk is, as we all know, an escape from all the suffering of the world, a manic defence against life’s depressing realities. Bukowski once described drinking as a kind of slow suicide; it’s a pleasure that ends the pain of life by throwing oneself into death, or at least trying to.

Freud wrote of two opposing ways of achieving pleasure, either through Eros, the life instincts that include libido, or through the death drive (called Thanatos by Freud’s followers), since death brings the organism back into a state of total rest, just as the achievement of libidinal pleasure tries to do. “To die, to sleep, no more,” as Hamlet said.

Similarly, just as the Hindus and Buddhists hope to achieve moksha or nirvana through a dissolution of the self (be that in the form of Atman realizing its identity with Brahman, or in the form of realizing, as the Lacanians do, that the ego is an illusion, that there never was a self to begin with–anattā), so do Dionysian types like Bukowski, Henry, and Wanda attempt a kind of ego death, but through drink, and through all things considered sinful or self-destructive.

In other posts, I have written of the ouroboros as symbolizing the dialectical unity of opposites. The serpent’s biting head is one extreme opposite, and the bitten tail is the other; every intermediate point is corresponded on the relevant place on the serpent’s coiled body, which represents a circular continuum. Thus, heaven or nirvana can be seen at the biting head, for example, and hell can be the bitten tail. The normal spiritual quest goes to the head away from the tail, that is, along the length of the coiled body towards the head; the Dionysian, in contrast, gets to the biting head by passing across the bitten tail. People like Henry are trying to get to heaven by passing through hell first, as Christ did.

This perverse pilgrim’s progress of Henry’s explains why he is content to be left beaten to a pulp in an alley at night, helped by no one. It explains how he can look at his bloody head in a mirror and say, “euphoria,” how he can think that people who never go crazy must lead “truly horrible lives,” that “nobody who could write worth a damn could ever write in peace,” and that “endurance is more important that truth.”

Wanda as a drinker is going through the same pilgrim’s progress. After some heavy drinking one night at home, she is lying in bed and imagining she’s dying. She imagines an angel has come to take her away. She’s saying this to Henry as some beautiful Mahler, the andante moderato third movement from the sixth symphony, is playing. Henry is so convinced she’s dying that he calls some paramedics, who correctly conclude that she’s just drunk.

The point is that with each experience of suffering, the Dionysian pushes himself further, into even greater suffering, a move further towards the ouroboros’ bitten tail in the hopes of finally passing it and reaching the head of paradise. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

After being beaten by Eddie several times, Henry keeps coming back for more. He’ll do occasional jobs here and there, since he’s got to have at least a little money to live…and pay for drinks, of course!…but he is loath to get a regular job and join “unoriginal” society. (He’ll only try to get one for Wanda’s sake.) He’s been in jail twelve times, but he keeps breaking laws at every opportunity.

Now, one shouldn’t confuse his coarseness for a lack of culture. He’s a talented writer of poetry and prose, so talented that his writing has touched publisher Tully Sorenson (Krige), whose wealth and intervention in Henry’s life represent where Apollonian order intersects with Dionysian wildness. He listens to classical music, Mahler and Mozart in particular. He hates movies (as did Bukowski, who really needed a financial incentive to write the script for Schroeder’s film!), but he likes Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism, by the way, is a Buddhistic opposition to existence.

His aspiration towards ego death is in such an advanced state that when Tully, on meeting him face-to-face for the first time in his frequented watering hole, asks him who he is–“the eternal question”–and he gives her the eternal answer…he doesn’t know.

Tully’s intervention into his life represents not only the intersection of the Apollonian with the Dionysian: it also represents the intrusion of capitalism into the world of the lumpenproletariat, which Henry so perfectly personifies. She is a wealthy book publisher, wearing fashionable clothes, living in a beautiful, large home, and–let’s face it–hoping to turn a profit off of his talent. Having a basic sense of class consciousness, though, he can’t accept her world, “a cage with golden bars.”

His class consciousness, knowing that “nobody suffers like the poor,” doesn’t mean Henry’s at all motivated to help organize anything like a worker’s revolution. Men like him are why Marx and Engels didn’t see any potential in the lumpenproletariat. Like so many of the poor, Henry feels incapable of pulling himself out of poverty, let alone doing so for the working class in general; hence the wish to escape his misery through drink.

Instead of supporting a vanguard-led revolution, he simply lives as an anarchist would in an otherwise capitalist world. He does what he likes, and has no respect for authority. His stealing of food, as is Wanda’s stealing of corn, is a kind of putting into practice the socialist ideal, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The same can be said of Wanda’s living off of Wilbur’s charity.

Henry’s meeting of Wanda in the bar where we see the Bukowski cameo is serendipitous, for in this meeting we’ll see the beginning of a relationship that will mitigate his misanthropy. His leaving of his dump of an apartment to live in hers, in a way, can also be associated with his Dionysian lifestyle, since as a chthonic god (i.e., of the underworld or of agriculture…recall that corn Wanda wants!), the wine god can also be associated with matrilineal and matrilocal forms of social organization.

Indeed, Henry’s anger at Wanda over her cheating on him isn’t based on some patrilineal notion that he ‘owns’ her: he explicitly acknowledges not owning her. He simply cannot stand that she’s slept with Eddie, of all men!

Henry’s jealousy of her over Eddie, paralleled with her jealousy of him over Tully, has as a coincidence how, when either of them is cheated on, the other has gone off to look for a job. Henry, after coming back to the bar from his job interview, tells Jim (Quinn) that he hates how society tells us we all have to do something, or to be somebody–i.e., to have a job and form one’s identity around it. Similarly, when upon meeting Wanda, Henry asks her what she does, she says, “I drink,” instead of saying a job title. So in betraying themselves to the capitalist system by trying to get jobs, they end up betraying each other sexually.

During Henry’s job interview–with a woman with beautiful, pantyhose-covered legs he ogles and gets a “hard-on” from–he answers “none” to questions about hobbies, religion, education, and even his sex. Once again, he’s demonstrating his Dionysian dissolution of identity…as well as his satyr-like lust.

After Wanda has beaten and bloodied his head with her purse and stormed out of her apartment, he gets back at her by throwing her clothes out the window, once again demonstrating his Dionysian disregard for people’s boundaries.

His Lacanian lack of an ego, combined with his lack of respect for boundaries and his embrace of violence, indicates his experience of the undifferentiated, traumatic, and nonverbal world of the Real. His writing of poetry and prose, however, bring him back to the verbal, social, and cultural world of the Symbolic, as does his making of money from that writing, through Tully’s cashed cheque of $500, which allows him to buy rounds of drinks at the bar to win “all [his] friends,” who will surely give him emotional support for his next fight with Eddie. His moment of “euphoria” in front of Wanda’s bathroom mirror, idealizing himself as an eternal fighter, a Dionysus, is Henry’s experience of the narcissistic Imaginary.

There are other Dionysian personalities in Wanda’s apartment building, mind you, than just her and Henry. Wanda’s next-door neighbours are an old man and woman, the former of whom, it seems, is physically abusing the latter. Henry notes, in near-Buddhistic fashion upon hearing the nastiness next door, that hatred is the only thing that lasts.

Still, even a Dionysian like Henry has a sense of gallantry, and after being fed up with the disturbing fighting he’s been hearing through the wall, decides he wants to help the poor old woman over there, right when he’s finally met and chatted with Tully. He breaks down the neighbours’ door to confront the old man over his vicious treatment of his woman. As it turns out, though, she likes being hurt by her man! It’s a kind of sadomasochistic kink that they’re into, another Dionysian embrace of violence and transgressing of boundaries.

It doesn’t take long for Tully to realize that her Apollonian world is incompatible with Henry’s. Not only can’t she convince him to be “a non-drunk,” and not only can’t she compete as a drinker with him, but she is horrified with his violent nature, gutting the old man with his knife, and driving his car into and pushing the car of two “unoriginal,” publicly kissing lovebirds into an intersection. Henry sees another Eddie in that man, and wants to trespass beyond his boundaries.

It’s an amusing example of projection when rich Tully, annoyed with Henry’s confrontational attitude toward two “romantic” lovebirds in their car, that she calls him “a spoiled asshole” (my emphasis). It’s even more amusing when Henry says that she “hired a dick [Nance] to find an asshole,” my favourite line in the whole film!

One cannot have Dionysus without Maenads, and Henry has one in Wanda. Her jealous fury over Tully having slept with him causes her to have violent designs on the rich, wealthy publisher.

Indeed, Tully’s disapproval of Henry’s wild dipsomania, and her wish to take him out of that unruly world and into her tame, Apollonian one, makes her into a kind of female Pentheus, the king whose banning of Dionysian worship caused him to be lured into the wine god’s sylvan milieu and torn to pieces by the Maenads, as is presented in Euripides‘ tragedy, The Bacchae.

Similarly, Tully feels pulled into Henry’s world, in spite of her opposition to it, and as soon as Wanda smells the perfumed proof of Tully’s closeness to Henry, the hostilities between the two women begin. This tension is building just as that between Henry and Eddie is being rekindled, the latter being annoyed over the former’s tardiness in paying for all the drinks he’s offering everyone in the bar to buy their friendship and backing in the two men’s upcoming fight.

Wanda grabs Tully by the hair and pulls her, screaming, off her barstool, just like a maniacal Maenad. Tully fights back as best she can, even biting Wanda’s hand; but her bourgeois sense of decorum just can’t let her endure in a fight, so she knows she has no hope of taming Henry. She leaves Dionysus in his world, and she returns to that of Apollo.

Now, this ‘catfight‘ won’t be the only entertainment of the night, since Eddie is hungry for revenge after his humiliating loss the last time. Henry is all too happy to oblige, of course, and the film ends with the eternal recurrence of Dionysian violence with which Barfly began.

After all, hatred’s the only thing that lasts, isn’t it?

Analysis of ‘Pulp Fiction’

Pulp Fiction is a 1994 film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, based on stories by him and Roger Avary. It stars John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, with Harvey Keitel, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stolz, Rosanna Arquette, Maria de Medeiros, and Christopher Walken.

Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. It was also nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Travolta), Best Supporting Actor (Jackson) and Actress (Thurman), and Best Film Editing (Sally Henke). It won Best Original Screenplay.

The film is widely considered Tarantino’s magnum opus, and as a cultural watershed, it has influenced many other films and media in terms of style. Pulp Fiction is on many critics’ lists of the greatest films of all time.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

The main themes of the film are sin and death (as in, “The wages of sin is death“), as well as redemption, or at least attempts at it.

There is a vague sense of these themes already as Pumpkin (Roth) is telling Honey Bunny (Plummer) that he doesn’t want to rob liquor stores anymore because it’s too dangerous: either the couple will have to shoot the owners of the stores, or the owners, like “Grandpa Irving…with a fuckin’ Magnum in his hand,” will shoot them. Sin leads to death. Pumpkin attempts redemption, in a way, by not wanting to rob liquor stores anymore, but fails in that attempt by saying he wants to rob the restaurant he and Honey Bunny are dining in.

Failure at redemption in this film is best summed up in something Manohla Dargis says at the end of the Foreword to the script for Pulp Fiction: ‘When Jules [Winnfield–Jackson], Tarantino’s killer who witnesses divine intervention, says, “I’m trying real hard to be a shepherd,” it’s a miracle that he’s trying at all.’ (Tarantino, p. 4)

The plethora of pop culture references in Pulp Fiction–from its soundtrack, starting with “Misirilou” and “Jungle Boogie,” and continuing with references to McDonald’s burgers and TV show pilots, to all of the many movie allusions–is a reflection of what could be called the sin of idolatry, the worship, as it were, of pop music and movie stars, as well as commodity fetishism. We are all mesmerized by the production of images, sounds, and commodities, oblivious to the effort of workers in making these things all a reality.

Before I continue with the conversation between Jules and Vincent Vega (Travolta) as they approach the apartment where they’ll kill Brett (played by Frank Whaley), Roger “Flock of Seagulls” (played by Burr Steers), et al, I want to discuss my interpretation of who Marsellus Wallace (Rhames) represents. I see the crime boss as God, but in more of a Demiurge, Old Testament sense, than a Christian one.

The stealing of the briefcase by Brett et al is a sin not in the mundane sense of, say, stealing diamonds, but more as a form of blasphemy. Some in the mid-1990s believed that Wallace’s soul was in the briefcase, and I tend to go with that. The briefcase thus is in a way rather like the Ark of the Covenant, its contents representative and associative of God’s presence. The Ark of the Covenant was kept in the Holy of Holies, by the way, which was the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle, where God’s presence appeared.

With these interpretations in mind, we can now begin to understand what’s going on when Jules is telling Vincent why Marsellus had Antwan Rockamora, or “Tony Rocky Horror,” thrown out of a window for having apparently given a foot massage to Marsellus’ wife, Mia (Thurman). According to Vincent, such physical familiarity with the crime boss’s wife is in “the same ballpark” as having performed cunnilingus on her, or, to use Jules’s most apt choice of words, “stickin’ your tongue in her holiest of holies.”

Both offences, Brett’s and Antwan’s, are comparable to the desecration of a holy place, a kind of blasphemy. If Marsellus is God, Mia (a possible pun on Maria) is a kind of ‘Mother of God,’ as it were. Getting too physically familiar with her, given that she, as his wife, is bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, is tantamount to getting too physically familiar with him. Fornicating with her is thus comparable to raping him. I’m reminded of the 75th of Martin Luther‘s Ninety-Five Theses: “To consider papal indulgences so great that they could absolve a man even if he had done the impossible and had violated the mother of God is madness.” (Lull, page 28)

The juxtaposition of Brett’s and Antwan’s sins is significant, one dealt with immediately after the other. Mia later telling Vincent in Jackrabbit Slim’s that Antwan had only shaken her hand, and that only he and Marsellus knew why the latter had the former thrown out of a window could be the mere denials of an adulteress; and a “foot massage” could be a euphemism for, if you’ll indulge me, foutre, since a direct discussion of adulterous sex with Mia the ‘Queen of Heaven‘ would be a blasphemous taboo.

Remember how Jules compares Brett’s theft of the briefcase, a stealing of Marcellus’ soul, to having “tried to fuck ‘im and Marcellus Wallace don’t like to be fucked by anybody except Missus Wallace” (remember this in light of the later incident with Zed [played by Peter Greene]). Immediately after Jules says this, we get the Ezekiel quote, linking these incidents with God and sin all the more.

Before I go into the Bible quote, though, I’d like to discuss the significance of Jules asking Brett what Marsellus Wallace looks like. Note that there is no image or form for the Jewish or Islamic God, and to give God an image or form would thus be blasphemy. Small wonder Brett is unable to answer Jules’s question until the threat of being shot dead is too urgent to leave unanswered. All Brett can say is “What?”

If you were to look up Ezekiel 25:17, you would find only this: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” The rest of what Jules says–inspired by the words of an offscreen narrator at the beginning of an old Sonny Chiba martial arts film, Karate Kiba (The Bodyguard, 1976)–is nonetheless central to Pulp Fiction‘s themes of sin and death. Associating these words with the Bible, and therefore with God as represented by Marsellus, is thus fitting.

The wages of sin is death, Brett. Having read the Bible, you should know that. You may have gone into this thing with “the best intentions,” but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Antwan was luckier: he only got a speech impediment. Still, all this fear surrounding the offending of Marsellus is enough to get Vincent, soon to take Mia out on a date while her husband’s away, very nervous.

Now, I’ve said that Marsellus represents God, but hardly in the Christian sense of personifying absolute good. After all, that briefcase’s combination is 666. As I said above, Marsellus is more like the Old Testament Demiurge, creator of the physical world (remember, Marsellus could give Jimmie [played by Tarantino himself] “a whole bedroom set” to replace the linen being sacrificed to help cover up Vincent’s accidental shooting of Marvin [played by Phil LaMarr), associated by many Gnostics with Satan.

In other posts–including two analyses I did of Tarantino films–I’ve written of mafia men, criminal businessmen, as being symbolic of capitalists, exploitative owners of businesses. Marsellus owns a large topless bar called Sally LeRoy’s. Religion has routinely been used by the ruling class to keep the masses in check. Many consider God to be protective of capitalism against ‘Godless’ communism. Marsellus is God, and he’s a capitalist.

An example of Marsellus’ exploitative nature is seen when he fixes a fight, paying boxer Butch Coolidge (Willis) to go down in the fifth round of an upcoming fight. A significant moment in Marsellus’ speech to Butch, meant to motivate the boxer to keep his end of the deal and really lose the fight, and thus to be known thereafter as a palooka, is when he says, “Fuck pride!” Pride is a deadly sin not only in the Christian tradition; Greek myth is full of stories of the fall of hubris.

I’m guessing that when Vincent calls Butch a palooka at the bar, the latter feels “a slight sting…pride,” which not only pushes him to win the fight, infuriating Marsellus, but also to shoot Vincent when he emerges from the bathroom.

After this, and just before his “date” with Mia, Vincent goes to buy some heroin off of Lance (Stolz). When we see Vincent shooting up, then driving high as a kite to the Wallace house to pick her up, we see what could be deemed a reversal of Marx’s old dictum: “Opium [or, in this case, heroin] is the religion of the people.” Glory to God in the…highest. When he goes into the house, we hear Dusty Springfield singing “Son of a Preacher Man,” reinforcing the film’s association with religious matters. Mia will “be out within three shakes of a lamb‘s tail.” (In the film, she says, “two,” but in the script, she says “three” [Tarantino, page 44].) When Marsellus’ Queen of Heaven is ready to go, we get to join in on Tarantino’s fetishization of her bare feet.

Their date in Jackrabbit Slim’s, a restaurant that pays homage to 1950s pop culture, demonstrates how capitalism exploits our idolatry of celebrities, movies, and rock ‘n’ roll. Note how an admittedly delicious milkshake in the restaurant costs five dollars. Commodities sold here are so fetishized, they’re named after famous directors, TV hosts, comedy duos, or radio/TV sitcom characters: for example, you could order a “Douglas Sirk steak,” a “Durwood Kirby burger,” a “Martin and Lewis shake” (vanilla), or an “Amos and Andy shake” (chocolate).

Waiters and waitresses do cosplays, if you will, of movie or rock ‘n’ roll stars: Vincent’s and Mia’s waiter is Buddy Holly (played by Steve Buscemi), and another one is dressed like James Dean; waitresses include Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren, and…Jayne Mansfield must have the night off. Performers impersonate Ed Sullivan, Ricky Nelson, etc. Of course, getting Travolta to dance is a pop culture reference in itself, even though Vincent’s iconic dance scene with Mia was written before Travolta got the role.

When Vincent and Mia return to her home, her wearing his overcoat, he’s feeling nervous about the temptation to fuck his boss’s wife. She wants drinks and music, which in a way could remind us of Mrs. Robinson’s attempt to seduce Benjamin Braddock in her home. Mia plays a cover of Neil Diamond‘s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” performed by Urge Overkill. The becoming a woman soon sounds a lot like Benjamin becoming a man soon, thanks to Mrs. Robinson. This is Vincent. He’s a little worried about his future.

He goes to the bathroom, the first of three times we see him do so in the film. Whenever he leaves the bathroom, there’s the danger of death. Since the wages of sin is death, using the bathroom–to take a shower, as we’ll see Butch do later, or to clean oneself out (to remove the filth and sin inside you) with the toilet, as Vincent does, and as Jules and Honey Bunny say they’ve got to do–is symbolic of an attempt at redemption, a cleansing of oneself of sin. As clean as you may be when you come out of the bathroom, though, you know you’ll have to return to the water of that Ganges.

Vincent does a monologue in the bathroom to help himself resist the temptation of seducing the drunk and stoned Mia, reminding himself that Marsellus’ wanting him to take her out while he’s away is a test of Vincent’s loyalty to his boss, just as God tested such men as Abraham. In sticking to his commitment not to take advantage of Mia, Vincent thinks he’s leaving the bathroom cleansed of sinful thoughts, redeemed, and safe from death…

…except that Mia, thinking the bag of heroin in his coat pocket is cocaine, has snorted a line of it, is ODing on it, and is dying.

Now he has to redeem himself again by saving her life, so he rushes her to Lance’s house for an adrenalin shot. After all, isn’t her taking his drugs up her nose, making her a “fucked up bitch,” a lot like her taking his d… up her…, as Antwan may very well have done? Ironically, a phallic needle stabbed into her breastplate, jizzing adrenaline into her heart, saves her. Her shock from coming out of it, seeing that needle in her chest, seems comparable to that of the Mother of God if she were violated. Girl, you just became a woman.

The next sequence shows Butch as a child watching a cartoon on TV. It’s one of those low-budget productions, using Synchro-Vox technology, superimposing talking lips on a static cartoon drawing–Clutch Cargo.

Staring in a daze, transfixed before a TV, being lulled into its illusion and suspending disbelief: all of these are so symbolic of the idolater adoring his image, his fetish, imagining there’s the spirit of a god inhabiting the carved piece of wood or metallic statue. And yet the poor quality of Clutch Cargo‘s limited animation is so obviously fake. The impressionable boy is totally immersed in the story, all the same.

Some critics think that Pulp Fiction‘s allusions to TV are more central to the film than its references to other movies or to popular music. Apart from Clutch Cargo, consider the many TV references in the film: Speed Racer, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Avengers, The Three Stooges, The Flintstones, I Spy, Green Acres, Kung Fu, Happy Days, and of course, Mia’s fictional TV pilot, Fox Force Five.

All of this TV idolatry reinforces the theme of sin in Pulp Fiction, a movie title inspired by old magazines “containing lurid subject matter.” Butch is told by his mother to turn off the TV and listen to Captain Koons (Walken) tell the story of all the trials and difficulties of getting a watch from Butch’s great-grandfather to his grandfather, then to his father, who gave it to Koons in a POW camp in Hanoi where the two had to hide it in their rectums to prevent it from being confiscated by the Vietnamese, and finally Koons is giving it to little Butch. These men are now the boy’s new heroes, new idols replacing those on the TV for his pagan adoration. Accordingly, the boy watches the captain with as rapt a look on his face, while Koons tells his story, as little Butch must have had while watching the cartoon on TV.

The childhood memory of Koons giving him the watch seems to have been a dream, for immediately after it, we see present-day Butch wake up from it in a shock, as if it were a terrible nightmare. The dream ought to have been disturbing for him, since he’s been reminded of the heroic efforts of the men who passed on the watch to him, while he’s about to let himself be made into a mere palooka.

The disappointment he feels like he’ll be to the men in his family looking down on him from heaven feels like too much for him, so he feels that “slight sting…pride.” The outcome of the boxing match he’s supposed to lose illustrates just how deadly a sin pride can be, for not only does Butch not lose the fight–he beats the other boxer so badly that he actually kills the man.

He rushes away in a taxicab in such a hurry that his boxing gloves are still on. His driver, a pretty Colombian woman named Esmerelda Villalobos (played by Angela Jones), has listened to the outcome of the fight on the radio, and she’s fascinated to have met a man who’s actually killed someone with his fists. Sin and death so permeate this film, not only do we have a plethora of murders, profanity (including outright pornographic dialogue), racial slurs (i.e., Tarantino’s by-now-typical fetishizing of the n-word), theft, idolatry of pop culture, etc., but we also even have admirers of crime.

As far as attempts at redemption are concerned, or at least attempts at repentance, when Butch learns from his driver that brutal beating of his opponent in the ring actually killed him, all he can muster is, “Sorry ’bout that, Floyd.” Then, when she asks him how he feels about having killed the man, he says he doesn’t feel at all bad about it. So much for repentance. “If saying ‘sorry’ ever meant anything, what are the police for?” as my wife would say in Chinese.

Hiding away with his girlfriend, Fabienne (Medeiros), Butch hears her talking about how she wishes she had a pot belly (translation: she wants to be pregnant). He says he’d punch her in her ‘pot belly,’ which, after walking in the shadows of his heroic father (as well as Koons), grandfather, and great-grandfather, sounds like the unconscious expression of a Laius complex. Butch doesn’t want there to be any more sons to have to pass a watch on to.

A symbolic attempt at redemption occurs during his shower (recall the bathroom as a place of purification), but he fails to attain grace when he taunts Fabienne by calling her a “retard,” getting her angry. His ‘taking it back’ sounds as insincere as his having said “Sorry” to Floyd for beating him to death in the ring.

Her forgetting to get the watch when packing all of their things forces Butch to go back to his apartment to get it, risking facing Marsellus’ men, at least one of whom (namely, Vincent) is waiting for him there. Butch’s killing of Floyd, then running away, is cowardly compared to what the previous men in his family went through, especially to keep the watch.

Now, in retrieving the watch from such a dangerous place, Butch can prove that he’s as brave as his dad, and his dad, and his dad. In effect, Butch is redeeming himself here. Indeed, in a scene cut from the completed film, when Butch has driven back to the apartment, he says in a monologue, “This is my war…This watch is a symbol…of how your father, and his father before him, and his father before him, distinguished themselves in war. And when I took Marsellus Wallace’s money, I started a war. This is my World War Two.” (Tarantino, page 114)

Butch goes into his apartment and gets the watch. Thinking he’s safe in there, he goes to the kitchen and puts some Pop Tarts in the toaster (more commodity fetishism, as with the watch), but he sees a small, compact submachine gun on the counter. He picks it up.

Vincent emerges from the bathroom, his second time to do so in the film (because of Pulp Fiction‘s scrambled order of scenes), but his third and last chronologically, of course, because this time he gets killed. Recall how I pointed out above that the use of bathrooms in this film symbolizes only attempts at purification–and therefore at redemption–and yet sin is still there (Vincent’s intention of killing Butch), so the wages of sin is still death.

Fittingly, Butch doesn’t fill Vincent with bullet holes until the Pop Tarts pop up from the toaster and are ready to be eaten. Commodity fetishism is a…product…of capitalism. Capitalism kills.

Butch wipes his fingerprints off the gun and leaves. He is driving back to Fabienne most confidently, but at a stop light, he sees crime boss Marsellus walking by, just as Marion Crane, in her car, saw her boss walk by in Psycho.

Yes, bosses can be that scary.

After Butch rams Fabienne’s car into Marsellus, he comes to and tries to shoot Butch, then Butch runs into a pawnshop, where he and Marsellus fight until the owner, Maynard (played by Duane Whitaker) pulls a gun on them, and the two end up in Maynard’s back room basement/dungeon, tied up and gagged. A corrupt cop named Zed arrives (Peter Greene, as I mentioned above), and he pulls a “squeal like a pig!” routine on Marsellus.

Given how extremely allusive Pulp Fiction is, we can see how this particular scene has references not only to Deliverance but also to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Allusions to the latter film are not limited to Butch’s considering the use of a chainsaw as a weapon to fight off Maynard and Zed; recall how Maynard slams the door shut to the room in which the rape is to occur, similar to how Leatherface slams shut that metal door after having cracked Kirk’s skull open with that big hammer and dragging the body into the back room where other terrible exploitations of the human body will soon occur.

Consider my use of the word exploitation in the context of the rape of Marsellus, who as a crime boss is a capitalist. Maynard, as the petite bourgeois owner of the pawnshop, is also a capitalist. Zed, as a cop, works as a protector of private property, of the capitalist system. None of this, however, means that all of them have to be friends.

As Marx once said, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929) In this case, one capitalist fucks many others, that is, Maynard has his cop friend fuck many others, since I suspect that Maynard and Zed have pulled a Deliverance on many people, capitalist or non-capitalist.

As a crime boss, Marsellus represents the lawless, anti-government, “free market” version of capitalism. Maynard, with his cop-friend in Zed, represents the more state-oriented version of capitalism. This latter version isn’t any more ethical than the first, mind you. The differences don’t matter: capitalism is capitalism–it fucks us either way.

The connection of this scene with capitalism should be clearer when we remember that Butch’s and Marsellus’ original offence was having barged into Maynard’s pawnshop, his private property, to fight to the death. Incapacitating them, having Zed arrest them, then haul them off to the police station should be enough. Instead, Maynard and Zed think they have the right to rape them.

The owners of private property have no qualms whatsoever about exploiting the very bodies of those who have no such property. Maynard’s and Zed’s mistake is in assuming that Marsellus is not also an owner of private property…in fact, much more private property than the two hicks combined.

This barging into someone else’s property, only to be subjected to unspeakable horrors, is something Pulp Fiction echoes from Deliverance (the four city men canoeing into the mountain men’s area of the forest), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Kirk et al going into Leatherface’s house), and Psycho (Crane and Detective Arbogast entering Norman Bates’s private world).

Maynard’s and Zed’s even worse mistake is thinking they can get away with raping God, as I see Marsellus. Note that immediately after the Butch sequence, we return to the scene of Jules telling Brett his Ezekiel quote, beginning with him reminding us that Marsellus doesn’t like getting fucked by anyone other than his wife. So when Butch returns with the samurai sword, kills Maynard, and points it at Zed, Marsellus “will strike down upon [Zed] with great vengeance and furious anger…and [Zed] will know [Marsellus is] the LORD…” Zed took away Marsellus’ manhood, so Marsellus takes away Zed’s manhood by taking a gun and blowing his dick off.

Fair trade.

Zed’s about to feel the full weight of the wrath of Marsellus (i.e., Medieval, pliers, a blowtorch), but Butch, in having rescued the crime boss from his rapists, has achieved redemption for his sins. Butch has only to leave LA, never to come back, and never to tell anyone about the degradation Marsellus has just been put through.

In ‘The Bonnie Situation,’ when the fourth man (played by Alexis Arquette) comes out and shoots at Jules and Vincent at point blank range, but doesn’t even scratch either of them with the bullets, Jules concludes that God must have intervened and saved His two gangsters’ lives. Well, of course: Marsellus wants his soul back, and he needs Jules and Vincent to bring the suitcase containing it back; they can’t do that if they’re dead, now, can they?

There’s an interesting irony in the fourth man missing his targets, which in turn brings about Jules’s need to repent of his sin and redeem himself. Sin, or hamartia, literally means ‘missing the mark.’ Sin has saved Jules’s soul.

As they’re driving back to give the suitcase to Marsellus, with Marvin in the backseat, Jules and Vincent are discussing the miracle that saved their lives. Skeptical Vincent (who later dies, recall–he of little faith) is swearing, and repentant Jules is chiding him for blaspheming (though later, Jules himself will be cursing and swearing plenty; after all, so much of what we see is only an attempt at redemption).

Marsellus helps Jules and Vincent out of their next predicament, Vincent’s accidental shooting of Marvin in the car, by sending Winston Wolf (Keitel), a cleaner, who tells the two gangsters how to remove all evidence of the killing. Marsellus is God, and Wolf is one of His angels.

As Jules and Vincent are cleaning up Marvin’s bloody mess in the car, Jules–in spite of his apparent religious conversion–refuses to forgive Vincent for his careless, gory mishap with his gun. Vincent, reaching the limit of how much abuse he can take, tries to get Jules to understand that one should forgive those who admit to wrongdoing (Luke 6:37). In other words, repentance should lead to redemption.

Jules will have none of that (recall Butch’s empty-sounding “Sorry” to Floyd, and his tepid taking-back of his “retard” insult to Fabienne). Vincent’s warning that he could blow if he hears much more abuse only makes Jules nastier. Jules is about to blow up like a nuclear bomb. In fact, not only is Jules more abusive, he also insists that Vincent pay more for his killing of Marvin by cleaning up the victim’s brains and skull in the back seat. So much for even trying to repent and redeem oneself.

The cleaning of the car, as well done as it is, may not purify Vincent of his sin of accidentally…hitting…the Marvin mark, but Winston spraying a hose of cold water to get the blood off of Jules and Vincent just might do it, if only symbolically.

Redemption still comes at a price, that is, to the two gangsters’ pride, in how they have to replace their bloody suits with Jimmie’s dorky-looking T-shirts and shorts.

At the restaurant (where Pumpkin and Honey-Bunny are), Jules explains why he doesn’t eat pig’s meat, which he insists isn’t because of being Jewish (or Muslim, for that matter), though that might as well be why, since he considers the pig to be a filthy animal, and the wrathful God assumed to reign in the universe of Pulp Fiction sure seems to be of the non-Christian Abrahamic type. Indeed, we only hear “Jesus Christ” when someone is swearing. There’s no Divine Rescuer dying on a Cross to bring redemption to the sinful world of this movie. Everyone has to try to achieve it by himself.

A funny thing is that, after Jules hands off the case to Marcellus and quits being a gangster, he says he’s “gonna walk the Earth.” I’m reminded of Job 1:7, when Satan says he’s been “walking up and down in [the Earth].” The suggested association of Jules with Satan (though in Job, he admittedly isn’t the embodiment of radical evil as he is in Christianity) reinforces the sense of how tenuous Jules’s commitment to redemption is.

Vincent’s response to this is that Jules’s wandering of the Earth, perhaps never knowing where God wants him to be (after all, as I see it, Marsellus is God in this film, and Jules imagines his redemption, in all irony, is to leave God!), means that Jules will become a bum. Remember that Marsellus, as a crime boss, is a capitalist, and trying to live outside the capitalist system–especially in the post-Soviet, neoliberal world of Pulp Fiction, is at least to risk homelessness.

The invisible hand [!] of God stopped those bullets from killing Jules and Vincent, but only to get the case with Marsellus’ soul in it back to him, not to make Jules quit working for his boss. Jules thus has a most misguided idea as to what redemption is…and this ties in with the film’s theme of how redemption is so often just attempted.

Still, Jules isn’t completely wrong. Skeptical Vincent stays working for Marsellus, and he’ll be killed leaving Butch’s bathroom. He’ll get a kind of omen of this danger upon leaving the restaurant restroom, as he did leaving Mia’s bathroom.

When, during the restaurant robbery, Pumpkin points his pistol at Jules, telling him to open the case, he has the same look of awe on his face that Vincent had when looking inside it at Brett’s apartment. No, the case doesn’t contain diamonds, or cocaine, or anything ordinary like that. That orange glow must indicate something…spiritual.

When not only Jules is pointing his gun at Pumpkin, but Vincent, out of the restroom, is pointing his gun at Honey Bunny, she’s so scared, she’s “gotta go pee.” Since the wages of sin is death, she’s got to rid herself of the filth inside her by using what Vincent just did.

Jules has Pumpkin get his “Bad Motherfucker” wallet out of the bag of all the restaurant customers’ stolen wallets; he gives Pumpkin all the money in it–“about fifteen hundred dollars.” Jules is buying Pumpkin’s life with it. He’s paying a kind of ransom so he doesn’t have to kill Pumpkin.

Next, we get the third recitation of the Ezekiel quote, but instead of it being an expression of the wrath of God, Jules says it calmly. Now he’s actually thinking about what the words mean, instead of just saying them to sound like a badass before killing someone.

Jules has always said it as a judgement of the sin of the man he’s about to shoot. Now, as he says it, he’s judging himself. He’d like to think he’s “the righteous man,” as we all do when we judge the sins of others. But as much as he doesn’t like to admit it, he has to: Jules is “the tyranny of evil men,” killing for a capitalist crime boss.

His last words are so important, for they encapsulate so many of the themes of Pulp Fiction: he’s trying really hard to be a shepherd. It’s all about the attempt to redeem oneself of one’s sins, not whether one succeeds or not. The attempt at purification could be literal, as it is here with Jules and Pumpkin, or it could be symbolic, like all those trips to the bathroom, to clean oneself out from the inside by pissing or shitting, or to clean oneself on the outside, as Butch does during his shower.

Redemption is never fully attained: Jules hasn’t shot Pumpkin or Honey Bunny, but he hasn’t foiled their robbery of the restaurant, either. The couple leave with their bag of money feeling that robbing people is, if anything, even more dangerous than it was with the liquor stores.

The God of Pulp Fiction isn’t the Christian one, and the lack of Jesus is a conspicuous absence. There is no Good Shepherd: there’s only Jules trying to be one. This trying to be good, when we’re among the most sinful, is often the best kind of good we can hope for. There are no illusions here about a Holy Spirit guiding us down the path of righteousness; we just do the best we can…if we’re even doing that.

These attempts, however bumbling, awkward, and foolish, they make at redeeming themselves are part of what makes the characters of Pulp Fiction so relatable to us–at least on an unconscious level; and this, I believe, is a big part of what makes this film so enduringly popular.

Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, a Quentin Tarantino Screenplay, New York, Miramax Books, 1994

The Ouroboros of Music

Introduction

I’ve written a number of articles on how the ouroboros, normally a symbol of eternity expressed in endless cycles, can also be used to represent the dialectically unified relationship between opposites. The serpent, coiled into a circle and biting its tail, can represent a continuum that, instead of being conceived as a straight line with both extremes at distant, opposite ends, can also be coiled into a circle, with the opposite ends meeting, where the serpent’s head bites its tail.

I believe that this close relationship between opposite extremes, the one phasing into the other, or the one being an immediate reaction to the other, can be applied universally. I’ve tried to demonstrate this universality with a number of examples, usually Marxist ones, as with dialectical materialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, the workers’ state, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

As for (largely) non-Marxist topics, I’ve also attempted to apply my ouroboros symbolism to more-or-less mystical ideas, to psychoanalysis, and to philosophy. Now, I’d like to try to apply it to music.

What I’m about to attempt here will surely be far from exhaustive, but what follows are, I believe, some quite significant aspects of music, some important parameters of it. These include consonance vs dissonance, dynamics, planned structures vs non-planned ones, rhythm vs arrhythmicality, and simplicity vs complexity as alternating in different periods in music history. I’ll be examining examples from classical music, jazz, and rock. I’ll be discussing the psychological effects of such music more than the actual physical properties of the sounds.

Now, before we begin, I want to state at the outset that I am no trained musicologist or historian of music, so take my opinions here with a generous grain of salt. Just so you know, however, that I’m not a complete musical ignoramus, either, I have demonstrated what musical knowledge I do have, for what it’s worth, in these analyses: on two Gentle Giant albums, three Pink Floyd albums, one by King Crimson, one by Van Der Graaf Generator, one by the Who, by Jethro Tull, by Rush, and by Frank Zappa. I’ve also analyzed works by a number of modern classical composters, including Richard Strauss, Béla Bartók, Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Igor Stravinsky, and Edgard Varèse.

Finally, I’ve also composed and recorded (though not always very well) my own music, including mostly modernist classical compositions using Finale software, and pop songs on which I sang and played all of the instruments. For good or ill, all of these will give you an idea of what I know…and don’t know…when it comes to music.

But enough of this. Let’s get started.

Consonance vs Dissonance

As Schoenberg says in his Harmonielehre, one should not think of consonance and dissonance as dichotomous opposites, but rather as on a continuum from most familiar harmony to least familiar harmony: “the distinction between them is only a matter of degree, not of kind. They are no more opposites than two and ten are opposites, as the frequency numbers indeed show; and the expressions ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’, which signify an antithesis, are false. It all simply depends on the growing ability of the analyzing ear to familiarize itself with the remote overtones, thereby expanding the conception of what is euphonious, suitable for art, so that it embraces the whole natural phenomenon.” (Schoenberg, p. 21)

The difference, only a relative one, between consonance and dissonance is especially apparent in the contemplation of the overtone series, wherein the first overtones after the fundamental are the octave, the perfect fifth, the perfect fourth, the major third, the minor third,…and only by our reaching of the eighth and ninth harmonics do we come to major seconds, then by the fifteenth and sixteenth harmonics, we get a minor second, the harmonics in between these being microtonal.

So as Schoenberg points out, the only dissonances to be designated as such are the major and minor seconds, and their inversions, the minor and major sevenths respectively, and the major and minor ninths, which are just the seconds plus an octave, as well as the diminished and augmented fourths and fifths, etc. (Schoenberg, p. 22)

Unisons and octaves are, of course, perfect consonances, as are perfect fifths and perfect fourths (this latter particularly if the upper tone is perceived as the tonic). Note how the tense major seconds and their inversions, the minor sevenths, as well as the sharply dissonant minor seconds and their inversions, the major sevenths, are just a step or half-step away from unisons and octaves respectively. In these, we have a basic example of the ouroboros of music, a shift from the bitten tail of extreme dissonance to the biting head of perfect consonance.

A parallel thing happens with respect to the dissonant next-door neighbours of perfect fifths and fourths. The tritone, regarded as strongly dissonant, is only a half-step flat of a perfect fifth, or a half-step sharp of a perfect fourth. Major, and especially minor, sixths are also only a step or half-step above a perfect fifth. Again, perfect consonance and extreme dissonance meet where the ouroboros’ teeth bite its tail.

Unlike the harsh use of dissonance in twentieth-century classical music, the traditional use of dissonance in the art music of previous centuries always kept it subservient to consonance; harmonic tension had to be resolved, and fairly quickly, too. Most people intuitively feel that this subservient role is justified, since we usually can tolerate only so much harshness. This subservience also acknowledges the universal nature of the ouroboros of music: to hear the full range of musical expression, one must pass from the bitten tail to the biting head.

The seventh degree of the major (or melodic or harmonic minor) scale is called the leading tone because, traditionally, one cannot just stop on that note. This tone leads us back to the tonic: it “will bring us back to do,” as Julie Andrews once sang. Incidentally, there’s also a descending, or upper, leading tone, going from a flat second to the tonic. According to Allen Forte, the strongest melodic or harmonic progressions are by half-step, or as I would call it, the ouroboros of shifting from extreme dissonance to the proximate, perfect consonance.

Suspensions and retardations are more examples of shifting from dissonance to consonance, sometimes from extreme dissonance to perfect consonance, as in the 4-3 and 9-8 suspensions by a half-step, or the 7-8 retardation, also by half-step. Again, it’s these stepwise, short distances from dissonance to consonance that demonstrates the ouroboros-like proximity of the harmonic extremes.

A way to intensify dissonance before resolution is to add a minor seventh on top of the leading tone, in the context of a dominant seventh chord. Thus, a tritone, from the third degree of the (Mixolydian) scale (leading tone) to the seventh degree, becomes a major third in the resolution with mere half-step movements in the intervals’ notes closer to (or farther away from, if they’re inverted) each other (or, if the dominant seventh chord resolves to a minor tonic chord, the minor seventh moves by a full step to the minor third of the tonic chord; either way, the movements from dissonance to consonance are only slight). Further, sustained harmonic tension can be created through secondary dominants leading up to the final resolution.

Now, so far I’ve only discussed the relationship of dissonance with consonance largely in the context of diatonic harmony (that is, except for my brief reference to the descending leading tone). The chromaticism of the music of the Romantic period intensifies dissonance all the more (listen to Wagner‘s Tristan und Isolde for a noteworthy example); since this music is still traditionally tonal, though, its necessary resolution to consonance further brings out the ouroboros of extreme dissonance, the bitten tail, to peaceful consonance, the biting head.

The pushing of this dissonant chromaticism takes tonality to its limits in the music of Richard Strauss (i.e., Salome and Elektra) and Gustav Mahler. Then, we get post-Romantic, Impressionist composers like Debussy and Erik Satie, who often sidestep tonality while refraining from harshness. Examples of such sidestepping include Debussy’s use of the whole-tone scale in such compositions as Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and the use of quartal harmony in Satie’s Fils des étoiles.

Matters get even more dissonant, though still rooted in tonality, if in a vague, expanded sense, in Bartók‘s music, as early as such pieces as his first string quartet. His use of axes of symmetry were meant to prove to Schoenberg that one could treat all twelve semitones equally, yet remain tonal. Note how the extreme chromaticism of that string quartet mentioned above resolves with a closing chord, at the end of the final movement, on A, with fifths (E) and ninths (B). Now, such a chord is quite consonant…by Bartók’s standards.

Stravinsky‘s experiments with polytonality, as well as his use, from time to time, of the octatonic scale, in such compositions as The Rite of Spring are nonetheless still basically tonal, and they end in at least relatively consonant harmonic resolution. The same can be said of much of Ives‘s music, in spite of the many clashing independent parts. Dissonance generally is resolved, if imperfectly…a kind of hovering between the bitten tail and the biting head of the ouroboros.

It’s when we come to the Second Viennese School that we have the “emancipation of the dissonance.” Not satisfied with the use of the whole-tone scale and quartal harmony in his Chamber Symphony No. 1, Schoenberg wanted to treat all twelve semitones as equals. His experiments with atonality led to a need to structure the apparent melodic and harmonic chaos with his twelve-note system. Though I have a deep appreciation for this kind of music, unfortunately, most listeners have untrained ears, and therefore they find it virtually impossible to distinguish the tone rows used in it. One often cannot even make sense of the unresolved dissonance; to the average listener, this music sounds as if it has no beginning, middle, or end. One languishes, it seems, at the bitten tail of discord.

The ‘chaotic’ sense of modernist dissonance is more apparent in such music as George Antheil‘s Ballet Mécanique, much of the music of Varèse and Messiaen (this latter’s especially since the 1940s), and Stockhausen works like Gruppen and Kontakte. As a result, the classical avant-garde has been unpopular, and the average listener drifted away from it and towards jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.

Though these two popular forms started out with harmony that’s simple enough to follow, they, too, grew more dissonant over time. Examples in jazz start out with the altered and extended chords played by Thelonius Monk; dissonance later intensified with the avant-garde and free jazz of players like Cecil Taylor, with his flurries of tone clusters on the piano, or Ornette Coleman‘s improvising in no recognizable key.

Rock music grew more harmonically adventurous first with the Beatles, who proved that pop can embrace a whole world of harmony beyond twelve-bar blues and clichéd progressions like I-vi-ii-V. This experimentation continued in the psychedelic era, with Frank Zappa‘s music, and ultimately with progressive rock in the 1970s, with bands like King Crimson and Gentle Giant in particular daring to play harsh dissonances. In all of these examples, we can see a cyclical movement all the way around the body of the ouroboros of music, from the bitten tail of extreme dissonance to the biting head of simple harmony, then along the serpent’s coiled body back towards the tail–that is, more and more harmonic adventurousness in both jazz and rock.

Sometimes, the extreme dissonance of modernism in postwar classical music simply leads to, largely if not absolutely, an abandonment of sounds of definite pitch, as can be heard in such examples of music exclusively for percussion as Varèse’s Ionisation, John Cage‘s Constructions, Stockhausen’s Zyklus and Mikrophonie I and II, and Iannis Xenakis‘s Psappha. After hearing a litany of screaming cacophony, the sound of pitchless instruments can feel restful in comparison, a shift from the serpent’s bitten tail to its biting head.

Dynamics

As far as going from one extreme of dynamics to the other, from absolute silence–the serpent’s bitten tail–to deafening loudness–the biting head–is concerned, we find ourselves starting and ending with the postwar avant-garde. That is to say, we can start with Cage’s ‘silent’ works, his 4’33” and his 0’00”, and end with examples of danger music, which sometimes uses sounds so loud that they may risk deafening the listener and/or performer. Loudness leads to silence.

Less extreme manifestations of this sort of thing can be found in dance clubs and rock concerts, in which the booming music may not cause permanent, profound deafness, but it may weaken one’s hearing, requiring one, for example, to turn up the volume to an extreme loudness, just to be able to hear the talking on the TV with reasonable clarity.

Extreme loudness, the serpent’s head, leads to the silence of the hearing impaired, the tail, then to extreme loudness again, turning up the volume as a movement along the serpent’s coiled body from its tail back to its head.

From Planned Sounds to Non-planned Ones

The dialectical relationship between what is planned in music and what isn’t manifests itself in many forms. Though music is notated, there’s also plenty of room for interpreting how exactly to play those notes from performance to performance, even in precisely notated classical music or film scores.

Part of the great skill of jazz musicians is to be able to improvise, to invent melodies on the spot during a live performance. If they play a wrong note, it’s advisable to play it loud, to give off the illusory impression that they “meant to do that.”

As for soloing in rock music, the playing is largely prepared and practiced, with a little wiggle room for impromptu variations on a few notes here and there. Zappa noted this general tendency among rock guitarists while contrasting it with his own, totally improvised playing, not knowing at all what notes he would play until the very moment he began the solo onstage, fully aware of the risk of making the occasional mistake in front of his fans.

Such is the yin-and-yang relationship between planned and unplanned music along the coiled body of the ouroboros. As far as the area of the meeting extremes is concerned, where the head bites the tail, we can return to the postwar avant-garde. On the one hand, there is total organization in the form of total serialism in the 1950s music of composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, as well as the player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow; on the other, there’s the aleatoric music of composers like Cage, the extreme of which is noted in the aforementioned ‘compositions,’ 4’33” and 0’00”.

Rhythm vs Arrhythmicality

The basic units of rhythm can be broken down to twos and threes, resulting in simple duple or triple times, then compound times. Common time can be subdivided into twos and threes, such as eighth notes of 3 + 3 + 2, or sixteenth notes of 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 2, or into other syncopations. We follow the beat hypnotically, not needing to think about it.

Next, we have odd time signatures, such as 7/8, 5/4, 11/8, or 13/8, as commonly heard in progressive rock and jazz-rock fusion. Then, to make rhythm even more irregular, we can have constantly changing time signatures, as we hear in The Rite of Spring. Now, instead of being hypnotized by the beat, we have to think about it and figure out all of the changes in order to follow and understand the music. Unconscious listening has thus changed to conscious listening.

Matters get even more complicated when we throw in irregular subdivisions of the beat, beyond triplets and going into quintuplets, septuplets, etc. An extreme example can be heard in that opening set of seventeen rising diatonic notes played at extreme speed on the clarinet from Gershwin‘s Rhapsody in Blue. The legato notes are played so fast that they sound like a glissando. We pay no attention to the rhythmic values of these notes, because quite simply, we can’t.

Then there’s the serialism of rhythm, or ‘modalizing’ of it, as heard in pieces like Messiaen’s “Mode des valeurs et intensités,” the second of his Quatre Etudes de rythme, for piano. The accents and durations of the notes are completely divorced from conventional notions of ‘expressivity,’ but they must be played exactly and figured out by the listener (following the music with the score in hand, no doubt!) in order to understand what is being heard. The same basic understanding of how to hear the accents, durations, etc., of total serialist compositions is to be kept in mind when listening to such music by Boulez, Stockhausen, etc.

Rhythmic irregularity, though precisely planned, as noted in the above-mentioned music by Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen (as well as in the player piano music of Nancarrow), next shifts to a total lack of perceived rhythmic pulse, as in free jazz and the avant-garde experiments of Cecil Taylor. Taylor’s Units would play seemingly endless flurries of atonal phrases backed by drum rolls and arhythmic licks (notably by Andrew Cyrille). One doesn’t tap one’s foot to this music, yet perhaps one will sway one’s head and shoulders in circles to it.

As a result of these extremes, one goes back, from consciously working out a planned but extremely complex rhythm, to unconsciously listening to arrhytmicality. The ouroboros of music has come full circle once again.

Historical Cycles of Simplicity and Complexity

We can find these cyclical moments in the history of Western music at a number of times, especially in the modern era, but I’ll point out a few, when music rose in complexity to an extreme that was eventually felt to be excessive (the biting head of the ouroboros), and then there was a reaction against it, a return to simplicity (the serpent’s bitten tail).

In early Western music, we had monophony, as has mostly been the case in traditional forms of music in the rest of the world. From the monophonic singing of the old Church modes in Gregorian Chant (which used melisma to add sophistication and musical interest), complexity began in the use of organum (perfect fourths and fifths sung parallel to the original melody), which was the beginning stage leading to polyphony. When parallel melody was felt to be rather ‘primitive’ sounding, an interest in creating independent, but harmonious, melodic lines began.

Now, the fascination with experimenting with polyphony, which included polyphonic settings of sacred texts, led to increasingly complex music. Consider the wildly experimental, expressive, and chromatic music of Gesualdo in the late Renaissance period as a noteworthy example.

The Church became concerned with all of this growing complexity in its sacred music, since it became difficult to make out the religious texts sung in all of those intricate vocal lines. (The fact that secular tunes were being mixed into religious music didn’t ease the minds of Church authorities, either.) So there was an urge, at the time of the Counter-reformation and the Council of Trent, to simplify sacred music and tone down all of the tangled vocal polyphony. Such composers as Palestrina were considered ideal in the simplicity of their sacred music.

Homophony, beginning in sacred music, came to replace polyphony as the dominant form in European art music, the simplicity of one melody over a chordal accompaniment being preferred over the complexity of many independent melodic lines heard all at once. Small wonder JS Bach’s music, with its contrapuntal intricacy, wasn’t appreciated during his life, but rather the homophonic music of his sons, Johann Christian Bach and CPE Bach, was preferred back then.

By the Romantic period, the strict adherence to classical forms, such as the sonata form, binary form, minuet and trio, and rondo was beginning to be felt to be too limiting, and so 19th century composers were using these forms in looser and looser ways. Combining this growing freedom with more emotional expressivity and chromaticism, Romantic-era music was getting more complex.

By the 20th century, these movements towards more and more freedom, expressivity, and chromaticism was making music so eccentric, complex, and dissonant that it was beginning to alienate audiences. Some composers, like Stravinsky and Hindemith, were already toning down their modernism by resorting to neoclassicism, finding musical inspiration in the more remote past, though still presenting it with a quirky, modernist slant.

Postwar avant-garde classical music, such as the aforementioned total serialism and aleatoric music of the 1950s, as well as such developments as the micropolyphony of Ligeti, was also alienating listeners with what was perceived as its excessive complexity. And so by the 1960s, a new kind of music began: minimalism, with its simple, repetitive melodies as composed by such musicians as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley.

In jazz, the complicated riffs of jazz-rock fusion in the early-to-mid 1970s were soon replaced by such leanings as simple, often Latin American, styles. One might think of how the jazz-fusion of groups like the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever, with their flashy, virtuosic solos and tricky time changes, was a hot thing in the beginning, but then got simplified by the late 70s. Similarly, the popular Latin American simplicity of mid-to-late 70s Weather Report replaced the band’s originally intense experimentation early in the decade.

The peak of progressive rock experimentation had come by the mid-70s; then punk rock and new wave came along, and their popularity forced the prog dinosaurs to simplify their sound by the late 70s, as can be heard in the shift in musical style by bands like Genesis, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, and even UK (consider the difference between their first and second studio albums, from original drummer Bill Bruford‘s subtle use of dauntingly tricky meters to Terry Bozzio‘s more extroverted, but simpler, harder-hitting style). Yes’s 90125 was also essentially a pop album (as was Big Generator), with only the instrumental passage at the beginning of “Changes,” written by Alan White, sounding like prog, with its shifting from a bar each of 4/4 to 6/8, then from a bar of 4/4 to two bars of 6/8.

Asia, though being a prog supergroup with members like John Wetton, Steve Howe, and Carl Palmer, were essentially known for playing pop songs, such as their hit single, “Heat of the Moment.” The 80s King Crimson, like JS Bach in his own day, were a band born too late, as it were: the complexity of their music required too much intelligence for the average listener to appreciate, so they could only be a short-lived cult band. Still, even they wrote a few songs that could be deemed more or less radio-friendly, like the funky “Elephant Talk” and “Sleepless,” and the pop-oriented “Heartbeat.” King Crimson were the exception that proved the rule, as far as 80s pop was concerned.

Since the simplification of 80s pop and rock, some examples of a return to complexity (to an extent) have existed, i.e., the odd time signatures that Soundgarden liked to play in the 1990s, among other examples. But mainstream rock since then has simplified again, with a few exceptions here and there, along with the hybrid prog/metal of groups like Dream Theater.

Conclusion

I hope the examples I’ve shown have demonstrated how the dialectical relationship between opposites, as I symbolize with the ouroboros, can be applied to a number of aspects of music and music history: consonance vs dissonance, loudness vs softness, rhythm vs non-rhythm, and simplicity vs complexity in music history.

The wave-like, or serpentine, motion between opposites is, I believe, one of the keys to understanding all of life…rather like listening to…the music of the spheres, if you will.

Trickle-down

Wealth trickles down to the poor, they say, like
how
the
sons
of
God
went
down
to
wed
our
girls.

But that descent led to the Flood, so many drops
of
rain
on
to
the
land
to
end
all
of
life.

Thus, those in power will not allow the trickle-down,

even though their Church insists the Word was flesh,
the
Son
of
God
come
down
to
us
to
save
us.

does.
gold
as
sky,
the
met
and
rose
who
Word,
and
The trickle-down’s a myth to trick us, like the Flood,

Lamps

Sometimes,
a man’s words
are a lamp for your
feet, and a
light on your
path ahead.

Nobody
puts a lamp
under a bowl,
but on a
stand, to
light all.

But some
put lampshades
on their heads to be
the light
of the world, when
really they’re just fools
who don’t know the light
from the dark, and they
lead everyone astray,
instead of
edifying us.
Do not be
blinded by
their false
illumination.

Analysis of ‘The Sacrifice’

The Sacrifice (Offret) is a 1986 Swedish film written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It stars Erland Josephson, with Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall, Sven Wollter, and Valérie Mairesse. Many of the crew had worked in Ingmar Bergman films.

The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s last film, and his third film as an expatriate from the Soviet Union, after Nostalghia and the documentary, Voyage in Time. He died of cancer shortly after filming it; in fact, he was too ill to attend its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. It won the Grand Prix there, as 1972’s Solaris had.

The film also won Tarkovsky his third FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, and his third Palme D’Or nomination. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. It was considered as a nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 59th Academy Awards, but it didn’t get the nomination.

As was a problem with Stalker, the shooting of The Sacrifice included a failed attempt to capture something important on film: this time, the climactic burning down of the house of Alexander (Josephson), because the only camera used to film the burning jammed, thus ruining the footage. The house had to be reconstructed at great expense in two weeks, and the burning was more prudently re-filmed with two cameras.

Here is a link to quotes, in English translation, from the film; and here is a link to the complete film, with English subtitles.

The film begins with a shot of a detail from Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished painting, Adoration of the Magi. The detail from the painting shows the baby Jesus receiving a gift from one of the Magi. As we look at this detail, we see the credits and hear the aria “Erbarme mich, mein Gott” (“Have mercy, my God”), from JS Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

When the credits have all been shown, the camera shot slowly moves upwards, so we see the palm tree in the top centre of the painting. From this, we go to a distant shot of a tree that Alexander is planting near the shore at Närsholmen, on the island of Gotland. The tree is Alexander’s gift to the land there, just as Jesus received gifts with a tree in the background, one associated with the Virgin Mary (partly from the verse, “You are stately as a palm tree,” from the Song of Songs—7:7). A movie called The Sacrifice fittingly has gift-giving as a major theme.

Just as we see a celebration of Christ’s birth in the painting, with a tree in the background, so is it Alexander’s birthday, with him planting a tree, and he’s soon to receive gifts. Also, just as Christianity is a fusion of Biblical and pagan elements (as I argued here), so is The Sacrifice a combination of Christian and pagan elements, as we’ll soon see.

Trees have been sacred in both paganism and Christianity, and Leonardo’s painting, with its ruin of a pagan building in the background (not that we’ll see this part during the credits), shows the supplanting of paganism by Christianity.

Alexander asks “Little Man” (a boy played by Tommy Kjellqvist), his son, to help with the tree. Alexander speaks of an orthodox monk planting a barren tree on a mountainside. The tree was to be watered every day until it came to life; after three years of this constant work, the tree was finally covered with blossoms! In this story, we learn the value of systemic work.

This notion of constantly doing something would be contrasted with constantly talking, something Alexander has a problem with, and even admits to himself. A former actor turned journalist, critic, and lecturer of aesthetics, he will later quote Hamlet: “Words, words, words,” sharing the Dane’s opinion that words are useless, and action is needed (while also doing plenty of the former and not enough of the latter).

In this connection, we should remember that, for the great majority of the film, Little Man doesn’t say a word, because of a throat operation he’s recently undergone. Only at the very end of the film does he say anything, which is, “In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?” As a mute for almost all of the film, this innocent child is almost as Christ-like as the baby in Leonardo’s painting, who also would have been without a word to say.

Action without speech would thus seem to be the moral ideal of the film…and yet Jesus–committing the ultimate salvific act, his self-sacrifice on the Cross–is called “the Word” at the beginning of the Gospel of John. This Jesus had many important words to say in all four Gospels, too, of course, including his parables. Tarkovsky in fact called this last film of his a “parable,” according to his book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1985).

On the other side of the coin, one may question the moral validity of Alexander’s actions to save the world from a nuclear holocaust. Salvation by adultery? Salvation by arson? Do such actions really appease an angry god, be he Christian or pagan?

As a result of such considerations of works vs. words, one can see a dialectical relationship between these in terms of their worth. Both words and actions have their share of validity vs. worthlessness.

A similar dialectical relationship can be seen in theism vs. atheism in the film, as I also noted in my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Otto (Edwall) arrives on his bike as a postman to give Alexander a telegram wishing him a happy birthday, with jocular allusions to Richard III and The Idiot (Alexander has played both King Richard III and Prince Myshkin on the stage, back in his acting days.)

Otto asks Alexander about his relationship with God, to which the latter answers, “nonexistent.” This attitude is soon to change, though, when he learns from the news of the threat of WWIII. There are no atheists in fallout shelters, apparently.

Otto discusses his interest in Nietzsche‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which it is famously declared, “God is dead!” Yet later, Otto will discuss his belief in witches, angels, and the bizarre idea that Alexander can prevent nuclear war through having a sexual union with Maria (played by Guðrún Gísladóttir), one of his house servants, who is also, according to Otto, a witch “in the best possible sense.”

We can see a dialectical relationship even between that English king and Russian prince whom Alexander once played on the stage: the former is clever, but as ugly morally as he is physically deformed; the latter is simple and naïve, yet has a good heart. Such ambiguities and equivocations can be found throughout The Sacrifice, for spirituality here is at one moment portrayed as the highest good, and the next moment, the highest foolishness.

Speaking of foolishness, while he has Little Man sitting on his lap among trees further away from the shore and closer to his house, Alexander tells the little boy about what a difficult thing the fear of death is. It sometimes makes us do things we ought not to do…and yet it is this very fear of death, in a nuclear holocaust, that drives Alexander not only to sleep with Maria, but also to burn his house down, in some superstitious hope that these acts will save humanity from destruction.

At home, Alexander has received a gift from Victor (Wollter), the family doctor who did Little Man’s throat operation, as well as a close friend of Alexander’s family. The gift is a book of pre-Renaissance art depicting Christian saints; Alexander is most pleased with it, since though his relationship with God is “non-existent,” he has aspirations to bring it into existence. There’s a sense he’s been waiting for a catalyst to make this happen–it’s coming soon.

His English wife, Adelaide (Fleetwood), also an actress and fluent in Swedish, appears in the house with her daughter, Marta (played by Filippa Franzén). House servants Maria and Julia (Mairesse) are preparing the birthday dinner, and Otto will soon arrive with his own gift for Alexander, a huge, framed, old map of Europe.

“Every gift involves a sacrifice,” Otto says.

Is adultery with one’s maid a gift to God? Otto seems to think so, in spite of Exodus 20:14.

Is burning down one’s house a gift to God? Alexander seems to think so, as we’ll see.

There’s a sense of coolness not only between Otto, the postman, and bourgeois Victor, but also between Maria and bourgeois Adelaide, who finds the odd Icelandic servant frightening; bourgeois Alexander also finds her a bit “odd.” Otto, Maria’s neighbour, is more acquainted with her, and thus thinks better of her. It shouldn’t be surprising to find fellow proletarians warmer with each other, but alienated among the bourgeoisie.

Studying the map, Alexander imagines it to depict a much happier Europe than that of the modern world, just as he was idealizing in his mind the book’s pictures of ancient saints. He prefers the world of the past to that of the disillusioning present.

He discusses his having given up on acting due to a feeling that his identity dissolves in his roles. He came to be ashamed of impersonating other people. Adelaide preferred him as an actor, fell in love with him then; but she has grown disenchanted with him as a mere bookish, loquacious intellectual now.

Her disenchantment with him seems to have led to alienation in the family, an aloofness between him on the one side, and her and Marta on the other, while he is trying hard to be close with his son, to compensate for that alienation.

These issues lead to a suspicion that Adelaide has been having an affair with Victor. In fact, given that pretty Marta is barely of the age of consent, and that we see Victor touching her in a creepy way later on, I suspect that our good doctor has been in bed with both mother and daughter! Could this be why he wants to take a job in Australia, to escape the guilt of his tangled sexual indiscretions? I’ll discuss these issues in more detail later on.

After discussing his hobby of collecting evidence of the paranormal, Otto suddenly collapses on the living room floor. When the other guests check on him, he insists that he is alright; apparently, an evil angel has passed by and touched him.

Almost immediately after that, the guests hear jet fighters flying low, just above the house, and causing such a shaking that a large jar of milk falls off a shelf and breaks on the floor. All of the guests are disturbed by the jets except Otto, who remains still on the chair he’s gone to after his fall. It’s as if he knew the jets were coming, and he is equating them with the angel that touched him.

Alexander has been outside, looking at a miniature model of his house, something Little Man and Otto have made for him as a birthday gift. Upon beholding the model, Alexander quotes Macbeth in the original English: “Which of you have done this?”, which originally was the Scottish King’s frightened response to seeing the ghost of Banquo, whom he’s just had murdered. It’s as though Alexander, seeing himself in the future and seeing the ‘ghost’ of the house he is to burn, is feeling a similar guilt and looking for someone else to blame it on, to project it onto.

He goes back into the house to find all the guests listening to a news report about what seems to be the beginning of WWIII and a possible nuclear holocaust. Everyone is in a state of shock, but Adelaide reacts in the most extreme way, having a complete mental breakdown and needing a sedative from Victor.

A few interesting things should be noted about Adelaide in connection with what used to be called ‘female hysteria.’ Her hairstyle and dress remind one of the fashions of the 19th century, the last in which diagnoses of ‘hysteria’ in women were common. She calls out to the men to “do something,” to come to the rescue of the Victorian-minded woman. A prominent symptom of ‘hysteria’ was hypersexuality; now, while Adelaide is flipping out, and Victor is embracing her from behind in an effort to restrain her (holding her almost like a lover), her legs are spread out on the floor, revealing sensuous hosiery and high heels.

I’m not at all trying to revive bizarre, antiquated, and indeed sexist theories of mental illness in women (Freud himself, not exactly one to be called a feminist, was one of the first people to acknowledge symptoms associated with ‘hysteria’ in men, thus contributing to the decline in the diagnosis of this spurious medical condition.). I’m merely making links here between Adelaide’s mental state, her sexuality, and foolish old world thinking. After all, Alexander is about to engage in some hysteria of his own.

The needle that Victor sticks into Adelaide’s arm, to sedate her, can be seen as a phallic symbol. Some in the 19th century believed that genital stimulation could treat women’s ‘hysteria,’ including the use of the first electric vibrators [!]. My point in bringing all of this up is to show how it’s hinted, in symbolic and literal form, that Victor and Adelaide are lovers.

As Victor is embracing her, Alexander is further off, looking out a window: shouldn’t her husband be holding her? In this we can see the family dysfunction hiding behind a birthday party.

Victor asks Julia if she wants a phallic shot of sedation, she who’s shown no signs of mental breakdown, but who is as pretty as Adelaide. The maid walks away without a word, as if disgusted by the doctor’s apparent lechery. Then he goes over to pretty Marta to give her a shot. She says she doesn’t need the shot, but he insists, with a lecherous smirk and that creepy touching of her face that I mentioned above, that “it’s absolutely necessary.” That shot is symbolic Rohypnol…isn’t it?

Alexander would rather have drinks than the doctor’s offered shot. Otto doesn’t want a shot, either. (Perhaps by sedating the two men, Victor would have a chance to get at Mother and daughter, with Julia being discreet enough not to say anything.) Marta offers to go upstairs with Victor, while Julia watches over Mama [!]. A little later, we’ll see Marta get naked in her bedroom, knowing that Victor is still around, and Otto has left.

The phones are dead, and the electricity is out. Julia refuses to wake Little Man and have him traumatized with knowledge of humanity’s impending doom.

Alone in a room near sleeping Little Man, the Leonardo painting hanging on the wall, Alexander takes a look at it, then says the Lord’s Prayer. Teary-eyed, he is now entering his own version of ‘hysteria,’ behaving foolishly in a state of fear. Terrified of nuclear war, he has come to what he has been waiting for all of his life: to bring back into existence his relationship with God.

Note how contradictory his prayer is. After finishing his recital of the Lord’s Prayer, he on the one hand offers all he has to God, including his son (as mad as Abraham must have been), then he begs God to restore everything to what it was before the news report. In this prolix prayer, he offers to be mute for the rest of his life. His ‘brevity’ is like that of Polonius–the soul of folly.

His prayer thus demonstrates a paradoxical attitude towards faith and spirituality in this film: it’s illuminating and comforting, yet foolish. The terror of nuclear war urgently needs an escape, yet the opium of the people is no more than that–an escape. Fittingly, after his prayer, Alexander gets on a couch and sleeps to escape his fears.

Before we see his dream, though, we see an example of one of the family problems that he must at least be suspicious of: that scene I mentioned above, of Marta getting naked in her bedroom, happens now. She calls for Victor, saying she needs him [!]. Alexander hopes to save the world, and he can’t even set his own family issues right!

Alexander’s dream, in black and white, begins with melancholy Japanese flute music and dripping water for a soundtrack. It depicts him looking out of a window from a dark room to see snow on the grass. Since he has fears of WWIII, this snow could be seen as symbolic of a nuclear winter. Outside now, he’s stepping in the mud and puddles of melted snow, symbolic of a return to formless, primordial Chaos after the destruction of the world.

He bends down and moves some leaves and trash aside to reveal a number of coins. So much of the motive behind Cold War hostilities, leading to the danger of nuclear war, is money: either the greedy love of it, or the urge to transform society so that it can be shared by all or be eliminated altogether.

He walks in the snow, looking around. More of those coins are seen in the snow, among the puddles, mud, and trash. He sees the bare feet of Little Man in the snow, so vulnerable in the danger of WWIII, and he speaks fearfully for the boy, who then runs away. We hear the sound of approaching fighter jets, which blow aside everything on the ground as they fly by.

He wakes from his dream with a jolt.

Otto returns, to tell Alexander what, apparently, he needs to do to save the world from nuclear war. He must make love with Maria, one of his house servants! Since Otto, as we know, has an interest in the paranormal, and Maria is “the best” kind of witch, such rationalizing is all we need, it seems, to be convinced of this “last hope” as a viable solution.

Alexander sneaks out of his house while Adelaide and Victor are sitting together at a table outside [!], and he uses Otto’s bicycle to ride over to Maria’s home. All of this subterfuge just reinforces the sense of alienation in Alexander’s marriage.

When he arrives at Maria’s home, then begins what must be the most bizarre seduction in human history. Seriously: how does a man convince a woman (his employee) to have sex with him, saying that their tumble in bed is the only way nuclear armageddon can be prevented?

He starts by discussing a time when he was a boy and his mother was ill, and he wanted to tidy up an unweeded garden, so it would be more pleasing to her eyes. After doing so with the utmost diligence, he regrets his gardening efforts, preferring the unruly beauty of the original garden. The story seems to be teaching us not to tamper with nature, not to change anything from its original state, for it may have beauty despite its messy imperfections.

Il ne faut pas cultiver notre jardin.

When he’s come to the point of asking to lie with Maria, he points to his temple a pistol he’s taken from home, implying he’ll kill himself if she doesn’t consent to the sex. One is reminded of when Richard Gloucester, a role Alexander has played, remember, threatens to stab himself if Lady Anne won’t accept the evil hunchback’s hand in marriage. So Maria gives herself to Alexander. Indeed,…

Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?
Was ever woman in this humour won?

The fact that, when the lovemaking happens, we don’t see it done the usual way, but rather Tarkovsky has us see the two lovers floating, turning together in a circle over her bed, emphasizes that it isn’t the sex act per se that matters, but what their physical union symbolizes.

And when we see the sex in a symbolic sense, we can see how it finally makes sense. Consider who Alexander and Maria are in relation to each other. He is her employer. He is an affluent bourgeois, she is a worker. Their sexual union symbolizes the removal of class differences. Their lovemaking represents the sublation of the material contradiction between the upper and lower classes, which is vital in ending nuclear brinksmanship between the US and the USSR, as I’ll explain in more detail later.

Now, many will object to my interpretation on the grounds that the oh, so spiritual Tarkovsky wasn’t exactly a card-carrying Marxist-Leninist. There was friction between him and his mystic visions, on the one hand, and the atheistic Soviet authorities, on the other hand. After all, he left the Soviet Union to make his last movies, like The Sacrifice, for the sake of pursuing artistic freedom, did he not?

That friction between him and the Soviet government was there, but it’s been exaggerated by bourgeois, imperialist propagandists (as one can see in liberal Wikipedia). The fact is that Soviet censorship had been softening little by little over the years, ever since the death of Stalin in 1953, three years before Tarkovsky’s first student film and nine years before Ivan’s Childhood, his first feature film. Though the Soviet censors would have been sensitive to anything even remotely, subtly critical of communism, they would have also recognized Tarkovsky’s obvious genius, and would have known that promoting that genius would have been good for the USSR’s global reputation; so a balance between censorship and indulgence was sought.

Recall, also, that Tarkovsky’s son insisted that his father was no political dissident. While Tarkovsky was surely no doctrinaire supporter of the Soviet system, being someone born, raised, and educated in the USSR, he would have at least unconsciously absorbed some basic socialist values, like closing up the gap between the rich and the poor, something this sex scene can be seen to symbolize.

There is a dream sequence seen while Alexander and Maria are making love, in which we see her in the hairstyle and clothing of Adelaide; this shot suggests a wish-fulfillment of Maria being his true soulmate. This vision, along with one–immediately after another brief shot of Leonardo’s painting–of naked Marta chasing after chickens (representing cowardly Victor, who’s running off to Australia after his sexual misconduct?), reinforces our understanding of the failure of Alexander’s married life, his own unconscious acknowledging of that failure.

As they make love, we can hear Maria’s voice, comforting Alexander, trying to soothe his pain and ease his fears. It’s easy to see how he’d prefer her to his emotionally volatile wife, whom, indeed, we see lurking in the darkness immediately after we see naked Marta.

He wakes up on his sofa, back at home. The power and telephones are back. His beloved Japanese flute music is playing on his stereo. He later puts on a Japanese robe, as if about to perform some kind of Shinto ritual.

The electricity having come back, right after the supposedly salvific lovemaking, implies that all is back to normal, that God, satisfied with Alexander’s ‘gift,’ has prevented nuclear war. Still, Alexander is not assured of the world’s safety, of this Nietzschean eternal recurrence (i.e., from the end of the world to its new beginning) that Otto had promised, so Alexander–in his ongoing religious hysteria–feels he must make the ultimate sacrifice: burn his house to the ground.

Further evidence of his family’s dysfunction is seen when, as he’s sneaking around behind them in his frenzy, Adelaide and Marta are upset to have heard of Victor’s plan to leave them and go to Australia. The women complain of Alexander losing his ‘friend,’ but they’re really just jealously upset about losing a lover. Victor, of course, just wants to run away from facing the responsibilities of his own sexual misconduct.

Alexander must be aware that he’s been made a cuckold: he’d be overhearing their conversation as he’s sneaking around, and he must have seen and heard previous hints of their fooling around behind his back. Part of his reason for burning down the house, rendering Adelaide and Marta homeless, must be out of spite; yet with no consideration for Little Man, whom he deeply loves, Alexander is still being irrational.

And again, I must ask, especially if the lovemaking with Maria (also Alexander’s unconscious revenge against his adulteress wife) is enough to save the world: why would burning down his house appease God? Didn’t He prefer His Son’s crucifixion?

My answer to this, as with the lovemaking with Maria, is that its meaning is symbolic. Alexander’s house, where his maids work, is his property. Private property, which we socialists wish to abolish, is places: farmland, factories, office buildings, apartment buildings–the means of production.

The acquisition and accumulation of capital (which must ever expand), along with the ruthless and jealous wish to protect ownership of it, have led to the export of capital into other countries, as well as competition over who will exploit the most of those countries. This has resulted in two imperialist world wars, and with the American invention of the atomic bomb, fears of nuclear war.

So, to avert nuclear war, Alexander’s burning down of his house can be seen to symbolize a bourgeois sacrifice of private property. (This message is especially relevant to us today, in our current Cold War with Russia and China–hence my urgent recommendation of this film.) Class war is the inevitable result of rich landowners leaving very little for the poor to live with. Bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat, being so intolerable for the poor, necessitates class antagonisms and socialist revolution.

In the modern world, imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism makes war inevitable, as a competition for land and resources. The Manhattan Project brought in the nuclear age, resulting in the necessity of the USSR, China, and the DPRK to develop their own nuclear weapons programs, to prevent the US from bombing them as Japan had been bombed. To prevent nuclear war, then, the class antagonisms of capitalism and imperialism must be ended–hence, the abolition of private property, as Alexander’s arson symbolizes.

It’s fitting in this connection that, as the house is burning down to the ground and his family, Julia, and Victor return from their walk to watch the fire in horror, Maria arrives on her bicycle and Alexander runs up to her, falls to his knees, and kisses her hands. This is symbolic of the bourgeois ceding power to the worker, as linked with the burning down of the house as representing the abolishing of private property.

Bourgeois Adelaide and Victor take him away from Maria, he runs back to her, and they take him away again, Adelaide growling at Maria, “Don’t touch him!” This symbolizes capitalist attempts at counterrevolution. As a bourgeois himself, Alexander can thus be seen as like Engels.

Now, the above is my allegoric interpretation of Tarkovsky’s “parable.” On the literal level, however, it’s obvious that Alexander, driven to hysteria by the fear of nuclear annihilation, has simply gone mad in his religious ecstasy. Just as Tarkovsky was, as I speculate, ambivalent about socialism, so was he ambivalent about spirituality and religion, seeing both the good and bad sides in it. Spirituality can give comfort, and it can cause one to go mad. Tarkovsky’s genius allowed him to have just as nuanced an attitude towards religion as he had towards socialism.

It’s safe to assume that the paramedics, presumably answering a call from a neighbour about the arson, will drive Alexander to a mental hospital. His family has fallen apart just as he has mentally. There is no spiritual edification to be found in this scene, except for the allegory I provided.

With the end of this family’s world achieved in his arson, the eternal recurrence brings us back to the beginning with Little Man tending the tree. Finally, he can speak, and he quotes the opening of the Gospel of John as mentioned above. His question, “Why is that, Papa?”, seems to be another example of Tarkovsky’s ambivalence towards religion. The quote from John affirms it, while the boy’s question challenges its validity.

The lesson that the parable of The Sacrifice seems to be teaching us is that spirituality has its good and bad sides, and that we must be forever mindful of both. It’s a wavelike dialectic, going up and down and up and down.

‘Resurrecting Ptah,’ an Erotic Horror Short Story

I: Dedication

This short story is dedicated to my Facebook friend, she who goes by the intriguing pseudonym of Dorian Grey (I must do an analysis of that novel one of these days; in the meantime, there’s this one, which has lots of allusions to the novel.), and she whose AI art is full of black cats, witches, mushrooms, cat-women, nuns, etc., which have inspired this story as well as my other one, “Sister Sorceress.” This story is also dedicated to her “old familiar,” Peta, and a friend of hers, Cain Helsson. I hope they like what I wrote.

II: Loss

Clara Jefferson bawled as she held the dead body of Ptah, her beloved black cat named after an Egyptian god, in her arms. The loss of this pet, her only friend in this whole rotten, cruel, uncaring, stinking world, was unbearable to her.

The one thing that gave her the hope to carry on was that she had been practicing sorcery for so long. The shelves on her walls were filled with books on such topics as ceremonial magic, how to contact the spirit world, various spells, world mythologies and religions, and the like. At the age of forty-five, Clara had been studying these books for almost thirty years. She was a master, and now she was about to work out a master plan to resurrect her cat.

It was either resurrect Ptah, or kill herself, for she knew she could never live without him. She hadn’t become a master of the spiritual and magical arts just to commit suicide, though.

She already knew, from memory, a number of rituals and spells she could use in aid of bringing Ptah back to life; but this would be such a difficult and complex act of sorcery that she would have to study hard, in the minutest detail, to get this done right. She put the cat’s body on the floor and immediately reached for a few books on her shelves.

She spent hours perusing these and many other books, jotting down notes, ignoring her hunger and fatigue. After reading enough, for the moment, she decided it was time to summon the spirits to give her aid and counsel.

…and which spirits were those that she confided in?

Trusting few, if any, people in this world of liars, cheaters, abusers, rapists, and corrupt politicians and clergy, Clara had sought the rarest, most obscure religious traditions she could find, searching for one untainted by the lure of money and power. She learned of the ancient pagan traditions of the Liput, an old tribe living on a small island off the west coast of what is now Finland. Over two thousand years ago, the Liput practiced animism and a kind of polytheism that phased into pantheism, or a spiritual oneness of all things. Such ideas appealed to Clara.

III: Summoning Divine Aid

Deep in a state of meditation, she was beginning to hear the soft, inarticulate moans of Talas, the Liput goddess of the sea. Soon, those moans became intelligible speech, the ancient language of the tribe, in which Clara had become fluent after years of rigorous study.

I know what you want, the goddess said in Clara’s mind. Are you aware of the great price you will have to pay to get Ptah back?

Yes, I’m aware, Clara said in her thoughts to Talas. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. I still want my cat back.

It is not natural to move the energy, which has left your cat, back to its body, the goddess warned. All life comes and goes, Clara. You must accept that. You should allow the energy of Ptah to flow where it will in the universe, wherever that may be, as far away from you as it may be. Give up your attachment to your dead cat, and your suffering will end.

I want my cat back! Clara insisted in her thoughts. She was moaning and sobbing. I’ll do anything to get him back!

Very well, Talas answered. There is a way to bring Ptah back, but you will need the aid of Lechi, the Liput god of mischief. In your studies of us gods, you’ll know his ways. He can be outright evil if he wants to be. However you negotiate your way into getting his aid, you will have to be extremely watchful of his tricks. Ensuring that you have come the closest you can to having your genuine cat back, in body and spirit, while also ensuring that he can do as little wickedness to you, in body and spirit, as possible, will demand the subtlest and cleverest use of spells and ritual magic that you can possibly muster.

I’m aware of the complications and dangers, Clara told Talas. To work with Lechi, while making my ritual flawless, will be like navigating a mine field. Still, I want to do this.

I will summon Lechi for you tomorrow morning. For now, study your books thoroughly. Take no detail for granted. Think of every possible obstacle, for he will find ways to get through your protective walls. Good luck, Clara.

Thank you, Talas.

Remember that the cat you resurrect, even through the best and most careful of rituals, won’t be absolutely the same as Ptah was. It may be the most ingenious of facsimiles, but it can never be exactly the same cat, however close it may come to such sameness.

I’m prepared to accept that.

Also know that as tight as your security is against Lechi, he will find some way to get at you, however slight that way may be for him. What he does to you will be, at the very least, something unsettling, something disturbing. Your safety against him may be impressively close to perfect, but never absolutely perfect. He is a god, after all, and you are just a mortal. You will have to accept whatever he demands from you in return for his aid, however you may circumscribe it.

I understand, Clara told Talas before the goddess vanished.

IV: Fear of Violation

After reading through all of the relevant passages in her books, anticipating what to expect from Lechi, Clara got out all of her tools and magical weapons, laying them out all over the floor of the red room where the ritual was to be done. These weapons were all daggers and swords, and the tools included several wands. A large magic circle was drawn on the floor, with a pentacle inside.

So many daggers and swords were needed to repel Lechi’s advances, since Clara knew, from her extensive reading, of how lewd and lascivious the god was. His sexual proclivities, being often quite perverse, triggered the most sensitive of feelings in her, for Clara was first raped by her father when she was a teen. In fact, she got into magic in order to learn how to protect herself from his lust.

Her mother had ignored her cries for help when he was preying on her, conniving at it, even, so Clara would satisfy his desire so her mother wouldn’t have to. It was for reasons such as these that Clara eventually used her magic to kill both of them in a car accident, then collect their vast amount of money and property so she could live self-sufficiently without need of a job.

She’d feed herself through gardening and a vegetarian diet; her garden was also where she collected various magical properties and drugs from her herbs and many mushrooms. Having no job was a blessing: no need to deal with so may people in whom she had no trust.

She did her rituals in the nude, and sometimes peeping Toms would watch her through her windows at night. Though forty-five now, she used her magic to ensure she’d always have the shapely, buxom figure of a twenty-year-old. Nine lecherous men in her neighbourhood liked her for her beauty, though through her magic, she made sure they’d never get their filthy hands on her!

She shuddered every time she realized any of those nine men were looking in her window during her rituals, often feeling PTSD flashbacks of what her father had done to her. This was why she needed so many consecrated daggers and swords, all fanned out in a circle surrounding her: they were a crucial part of her magical, protective wall, ensuring that no one could ever get inside her house, already protected with an electronic security system to be extra sure, or get at her body.

In fact, she was so sure of the efficacy of her daggers and swords that she found it amusing to think that those voyeurs/potential rapists all wanted the lovely naked body they saw, but could never have it. Her tantalizing of those men was her torturous punishment for all rapists.

Still, dealing with Lechi would be far more difficult. She’d need more than her daggers and swords to keep him away from her. They would be necessary, but not sufficient; and sure enough, having her delicious body would be one of his demands in exchange for his help in resurrecting Ptah. Clara would have to be extra subtle in tricking him into thinking he’d get what he wanted, while ensuring he’d never actually get it.

V: Lechi

The next morning, nude and meditating in the red room, sitting in the middle of her magic circle and pentacle, she summoned Lechi.

You are lovely, he told her mentally, in what felt to her like a grunt of lust, as he studied every inch of her body. I already know what I will want in return for helping you get your cat back.

Talas told you? Clara asked him in her thoughts.

No, I read your mind just now, my pretty.

She shuddered, knowing how difficult it would be to stop a mind-reader from knowing of her plan to cheat him out of having her. She would have to bury her thoughts and feelings deep down in her unconscious if she was to have any hope of him not detecting them.

I know what you want from me, she told him. I know your reputation as an incubus. Please spare me the filthy details. Just tell me what I have to do to get Ptah back, and I’ll do whatever you want.

One detail I must share, he insisted. I want to have you in a physical form, not just as a spirit. I want to enjoy you sensually.

Very well, she told him while a tear ran down her cheek. What must I do in the ritual to bring my cat back from the dead?

One thing crucial to the success of your ritual will be the collection of nine human skulls, he said.

May I dig them up from a graveyard? she asked.

No! You must have nine people decapitated. Have someone else do it for you, to deflect the bad karma away from you. Your killing of your mother and father is already a bad enough karmic burden for you. Find a young, strong, but naïve man who is in love with you; such a man would be willing to do anything for your love, and your magic and mushroom drugs should make him all the more obedient to your will. Gordon Marsh, from your neighbourhood, would be a good choice.

She trembled again at the realization of how thorough Lechi’s knowledge was of her private thoughts–to know of her killing of her parents–and of her neighbours. He’d only just come here, and already he knew of Gordon, one of the peeping Toms! Outwitting this god would be a formidable task. Still, she wanted Ptah back, and would do anything to have him again.

Why must it be nine skulls, specifically? she asked Lechi.

Come, come, Clara! A sorceress who has practiced for as many years as you have should already know of the symbolism of nine. Three symbolizes completion, so three times three reinforces that completion. Also, cats have nine lives, don’t they? Not literally, of course, but my point is that not only can I help you get Ptah back, but I can also allow you two potentially to live forever together…would you not like that? That is what the ‘nine lives’ will symbolize. Finally, I am aware that there are nine people in this neighbourhood whom you would like to see dead, are there not?

Yes, there are, she answered, remembering not only the eight peeping Toms other than Gordon, but also the woman she suspected of poisoning her cat for always trespassing in her garden, Ms. Bellows…that bitch! Still, such killings would be dangerous to her in terms of karma, as desirable as they were to her, so her next question to Lechi (though she already knew the answer to it) was this: and why must I have nine people die so Ptah can live?

Oh, Clara, I am disappointed in you! You surely know the religion of the Liput better than that! You’ve read of the unity of opposites as a central feature of the tribe’s belief system. There is also the unity of life and death. To have the one, you must allow its opposite. To bring about Ptah’s life, you will have to bring about someone’s death.

Yes, I suppose so, she acknowledged.

And with my willingness not only to help you bring your cat back, but also to let you and him live potentially forever in love and happiness, surely you will be willing to let me enjoy you while I am in physical form? he asked. She could feel his lewd smirk. Not only do I assure you that I will not hurt you at all, but I will also make it most pleasurable for you, even more than for myself.

His promises reminded her of her father’s words before raping her: “Don’t worry, honey,” Dad would say while unzipping his fly. “I’ll be gentle. In fact, I’ll make it better for you than it is for me.”

She cringed at the recollection, but she couldn’t let on to Lechi that she was unwilling to indulge the god in his disgusting desires. Very well, she told him. As you wish.

Good, he replied. Go find that young man, Gordon Marsh. Get him to hack off the nine heads. He, as one of your peeping Toms, could be incited to do the violence with a combination of you promising him he can enjoy your charms with a spell you can put on him to make him more obedient.

Yes, Lechi, I’ll do all of these things. Just help me get my cat back, she begged.

I will keep my promises if you keep yours, Clara.

He vanished.

VI: Preparations

Resurrecting Ptah would test her skills at magic to the maximum. Could she outwit a god? Could she ensure that Lechi kept his promise to her while she failed to keep her promise to satisfy his lust? She would have to set up powerful spells to keep him bound to his promises, while also sufficiently augmenting her sword-and-dagger protection against his every attempt to ravish her.

Also, she’d have to ensure, through her own spells and the structure of her ritual, that the resurrected cat really was Ptah, in body and spirit. Though Talas was right to remind her that the resurrected cat could never be 100% Ptah, Clara had to try to bring him as close to that 100% as possible–97%, 98%, at least.

She certainly didn’t want the new cat to be anything like “Church,” from that old Stephen King novel. She wanted a cat to cuddle, not one to recoil from.

She immediately went to work at preparing her spells and ritual for defence, for restoring Ptah as faithfully as she could, for deflecting away from herself the bad karma for the killings, and for charming Gordon into committing them.

Her extensive study of the ancient Liput language, a ritually powerful one, allowed her to remember certain ambiguities of meaning that she could use to her advantage. She could remember them without need of consciously thinking about them, which mind-reading Lechi might pick up on and thus thwart her plans.

One such ambiguity was in the meaning of the Liput word zvarge, which could mean “container” or “cage.” She could use this word in her ritual when putting Lechi’s spirit in the body of her cat. Ptah’s body would contain his spirit, yet also cage it, that is, trap it. The nuances of zvarge could be used to trick him into thinking he’d be put into a body–pita in Liput–when really he’d be trapped in her cat…forever able only to see and hear her, and to receive Clara’s touch, but never able to control Ptah’s body.

Lechi would thus be like John Cusack’s character at the end of Being John Malkovich: trapped in a girl’s body, forced to see, hear, and sense only what the girl wants to, and never able to control her body. Clara planned to do the exact same thing to the souls of the nine decapitated people, as well as with Gordon when she was finished with him. She’d sense the longing of all of them in Ptah’s eyes, while only receiving the affection of her cat. She considered such a punishment–such an imprisonment–fitting for all those potential rapists, as she saw them.

She would be sure to say the words zvarge and pita (this second word with the accent on the second syllable, making its pronunciation identical with that of Ptah) nine times, to reinforce the completeness of the imprisonment of all those lechers, to ensure her safety…and revenge.

The nine skulls would be used to augment the protective power of her swords and daggers, making it sufficient to keep Lechi away. She’d have the spirits of the nine decapitated to act as eunuch guards, so to speak, of her body, to ensure no violation of her.

Another convenient ambiguity in meaning was that of the Liput word slivu, which literally meant “decapitated,” but which metaphorically meant “castrated,” “emasculated,” or “impotent.” Her saying of this word nine times in her ritual would also ensure no danger of rape.

Clara would say these words with no especial emphasis on them, to suggest no alternative meanings to the basic ones, while allowing the ambiguities to slip by, undetected by Lechi. She felt she was safe.

VII: Gordon

Now that everything was planned, she had to find Gordon. He seemed a rather simple soul, easily manipulated. He was easy to find, too, for all she had to do was look out her front window and there he was, standing before her house on the sidewalk, looking in, obsessively hoping to see her.

Trembling and reluctant, she nonetheless put on her best smile, went over to her front door, and opened it.

“Hi, Gordon,” she said. “Come here. I wanna talk to you.”

“Oh, hi, Clara,” he said, amazed that she finally noticed him. Smiling back, he hurried over to her. Now standing on her porch two feet in front of her, he was trembling and excited. “What can I do for you?”

“Actually, it’s what I can do for you,” she purred, “if you do something for me, that’s what matters.”

“Oh?” he asked stupidly, his erection pushing painfully against his pants.

“Yes,” she said, still smiling. “Did you know I’m a witch?”

“A witch?“

“Yes.” she dropped her black dress, revealing her frontal nakedness to his amazed eyes.

He was overcome with the sight of all of that lovely, creamy flesh. Unable to resist, he reached over with one had to grab one of her large breasts, and with the other to stroke her shaved vulva.

“Uksha leida binko!” she shouted at him, the Liput words shooting at him like bullets from a machine gun, and the magic causing an electric force field to form, protecting her body from his intrusive fingers, giving them a shock.

“Oww!” he shouted, sheepishly pulling his hands back.

“You may look, but not touch!” she said angrily. “Only when you have done what I want you to do will I let you touch me. For now, enjoy only looking, to motivate you to do my will.” She turned around to give him a view of her curves and her callipygian behind. He gazed at her milky skin, stunned at its flawlessness.

“W-what would you have me do, goddess?”

“Robaya kinestro koubra,” she said, making her dress rise up and go back on her body. “You’ve seen enough, and as you can see, I really am a witch. How old do you think I am?”

“I dunno. Early twenties?”

“I’m forty-five. I look so young because of my magic. That should be enough to convince you that my magic is real. Do you believe I’m a witch now?”

“Not the ugly kind, that’s for sure,” he said. “I’d say you’re a goddess, with your beauty.”

“Aww, you’re so sweet,” she said, smiling and caressing his cheek, which made him sigh and moan. “Are you ready to do what I need you to do, Gordon?”

“Yes, Goddess! I’ll do anything for your love!”

“Anything? Even decapitate nine people with one of my consecrated swords, remove all the flesh, hair, and innards, and give me the skulls for a ritual I need to do?”

He stood speechless and motionless for about ten seconds.

Finally, he asked, “H-how w-will I avoid jail?”

“My magic will protect you from the police,” she assured him.

“What if these people a-are too strong for m-me to overpower them?”

“My magic will give you the strength you need.”

“What if I can’t…I m-mean, what if I don’t have the…stomach to do a-all this bloody business? Cleaning o-off skulls, a-and everything?”

“My magic will give you the ability, physical and emotional, to do all of that.”

“L-look, I’m really crazy about you, Clara, but I-I don’t know if I’m u-up to killing a…”

“Shadzock abba ultika!” she said while looking dead straight into his eyes. He felt a line of energy go straight from her eyes into his.

He was shaking, his eyes and mouth wide open.

“You will do what I need you to do, Gordon. You will not flinch. You will not question it. You will obey me from the beginning to the end.” She kept her steely eyes fixed on his the whole time. “Do you understand, Gordon?”

“Yes, I understand, Clara. I will obey you.” He stood there in a trance.

“Good. I’ll go and get the sword you will use to kill the nine people.” She went back into the red room, got the sword, and returned to him. “Here it is. You will kill these nine people from our neighbourhood: Kurt Davies, Ron Sweeney, Bill Wynn, Shaun Holmes, Jim Fredricks, Phil Sulikowsky, Chris Culig, Jon Schmidt, and Ms. Adrianna Bellows. You know all of them, right?”

“Yes, I know them all. Those eight guys are all big and strong. Your magic will help me win in fights with them all? I hate them all for always watching you, knowing they’d probably have a better chance with you than I could ever have; so I’ll be glad to get rid of them…with your help, of course. But why Ms. Bellows? What did she do to you?”

“She killed my cat, which I want to bring back to life.”

“Oh, you have enough power to do that, eh?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then, you’ll have enough power to help me kill those guys?”

“Of course I will,” she said with perfect confidence.

He smiled.

“Those guys bully you a lot, don’t they?”

He sighed and frowned, then said, “Yes.”

“Then you have all the more motive to kill them. Go.“

VIII: The Killings

That night, Jon Schmidt was parking his car in his garage. After he got out and closed the door, he heard a shuffling noise in the shadowy corner behind a stack of boxes near the door into the house. He stepped forward.

“Is that you, Ginger?” he asked, thinking it was his cat.

As he got closer, he saw a human figure in the shadows.

“Hey, who are you?” he said defensively.

Gordon emerged from the boxes with the sword.

Jon laughed. “What? That’s you, Scrotum Breath? WIth a sword? You’re gonna kill me with that? You’re so weak, I bet you can’t even lift it.” He continued laughing.

Gordon felt a surge of magical energy buzzing in his arms. That warm tingling was his cue to action. He raised the sword effortlessly to the level of Jon’s neck.

Jon was impressed. “Wow, you can lift it.”

Gordon swung the blade in a graceful arc, cutting off Jon’s head in a smooth stroke.

**************

About a half hour later, Jim Fredericks was sitting on a chair in his backyard patio enjoying a beer and listening to music on his iPod. He’d had his eyes closed for much of the time, so Gordon was able to sneak in with his sword and a large bag holding Jon’s head.

When Jim opened his eyes to reach for his beer, though, he saw a black silhouette moving in the bushes by his fence. “Who is that?” he whispered, then removed his earplugs and got up.

He stepped off the patio and walked across the grass with caution, as tipsy as he was. That human silhouette in the bushes remained unmoving.

“What are you doing on my property, whoever you are?” he said, squinting and failing to make out any details that might have identified the intruder.

Gordon remained silent and still as Jim came closer.

“This isn’t funny. Get off my property, or I’ll pick you up and throw you out.”

Jim was now right in front of the bushes.

“Come out of there!” He brushed a few leaves aside and saw a familiar face. “Scrotum Breath?”

The sword went through his gut before he could laugh his first “Ha.”

************

Twenty minutes after that, Gordon slipped through the unlocked back door of Jim’s next door neighbour, Ron Sweeney, whom Gordon saw lying fast asleep on the living room sofa. The TV was left on, at a low volume, but enough to mask any sounds of Gordon entering and approaching.

By the time Gordon was standing right in front of the sofa, though, with the sword raised up high and ready to come down, slicing into Ron’s neck, his eyes were half open, just making out the black outline of Gordon’s figure.

Ron whined and trembled at first, then switched on the nearby lamp. “Scrotum…?”

The sword had already sliced through before he could say “Breath.” His head fell on the floor and rolled a few times in the direction of the TV.

***********

Carrying a bag with three heads, our swordsman got to the house of Chris Culig about a half hour later. He was taking out the garbage, at the side of his house.

Chris reached for the lid of one of the garbage cans. Gordon was in it, his sword coming up and stabbing Chris in the chest before he could say that hateful nickname.

************

Shaun Holmes lived two doors down from Chris, so Gordon could get there and ready to kill in about ten minutes. Clara’s magic was working like a dream, for though he could hear the screams of neighbours and police car sirens, he felt a kind of force field surrounding him, assuring him that, no matter how sloppy and careless he was being with these killings, he was easily eluding the cops.

Again, the door was left unlocked, thanks to Clara’s magical influence, so Gordon was able to slip inside. Sensing, again, through her magical guidance, that Shaun was coming down from the bedroom to get a bite from the fridge, Gordon waited by the kitchen.

Shaun went in the kitchen with the light left off. He opened the fridge door and focused on all the food he saw there: chicken, a half-finished cherry pie, three quarters of a chocolate cake, etc. He licked his lips as he thought about which food to choose. Finally, after ten seconds of consideration, he chose the pie.

He took the plate of pie out, then looked up from the fridge. The light from the opened door alerted him to the presence of his killer, who hacked his head off after he gave a gasp.

The clanging of the sword against the freezer door, and the smashing of the plate on the floor, were noisy enough to rouse his wife from their bed; but Clara’s magic muted the sounds.

***********

Kurt Davies lived several blocks down the road from Shaun, but Gordon was able to get to him within about ten minutes, because he saw a drunken Kurt staggering on the sidewalk just a few houses from Shaun’s. Gordon tiptoed a few feet behind his next victim.

He particularly hated Kurt for, among many other reasons, inventing the “Scrotum Breath” nickname. Now that he had confidence in his skill at wielding the sword (with Clara’s magical guidance, of course, since normally Gordon was rather spastic), he wanted Kurt to see who his killer was.

“Hey, Kurt,” he whispered from just by Kurt’s right ear.

“Huh?” the drunk said while turning his head.

“This is for you, courtesy of Scrotum Breath,” Gordon said while swinging the sword. Kurt was only able to say the “Sc” before the blade slashed through his neck.

*************

Killing a woman would be hard for Gordon to do, even with Clara’s magic pushing him to do it.

Ms. Bellows’s house was just a few houses down the street from where Gordon had put Kurt’s head in the bag. Though slowed down with reluctance, he knew he had to get it over with, and her house’s proximity made now the sensible time to do it.

He went up to her porch and put his hand on the doorknob. When he turned it, he was relieved to find it locked at first…then he heard a click, unlocking it. Clara’s magic, for sure.

He gulped and stepped inside. She had to be in bed asleep by now. He found the stairs and went up them, as slowly and quietly as he could.

Ms. Bellows was an unpleasant woman, to be sure: cranky, often crabbing at people for some petty reason or another. She once growled at Gordon for walking on her front lawn. But did she deserve to die, and in such a bloody way?

At the top of the stairs, he was now walking down the hall to where he could hear her snoring in her bedroom. At the door and about to turn the knob, he was hesitating: killing those guys for Clara was fine, even enjoyable, but decapitating Ms. Bellows was too much.

Just then, he heard Clara’s voice whispering in his ear: She killed my cat, whom I loved dearly and who deserves to be avenged. Kill Ms. Bellows, and you can have me forever, Gordon.

He turned the doorknob as carefully as he could, not that she’d hear it over her snoring. He walked over to the bed. He raised the sword over his head.

He heard police sirens outside. His hands were shaking. He felt that force field around himself, giving assurance that the cops wouldn’t get him, but he still felt pangs of guilt over killing a defenceless, middle-aged widow in her sleep, all just over a cat.

He looked back from the window and down at her.

Her eyes opened.

She saw his dark silhouette standing over her.

She gasped, shook, and clutched her weak heart.

He brought the sword down, silencing her forever.

***********************

As he lugged the heavy bag of heads out of Ms. Bellows’s house and back to the sidewalk, amazed that the cops taking Kurt’s headless body away on a stretcher found him invisible, Gordon was shaking and nauseous over this last killing. At least there were only two left to kill now, and they were guys he didn’t like at all.

Phil Sulikowsky’s house was on the other side of the block from Ms. Bellows’s, so Gordon had to lug that big, heavy bag all the way around. When he got there, he saw Phil walking his dog, returning from the park.

They were facing each other. “What’re you doing out with that bag, Scrotum Breath?” Phil asked, then chuckled. “Hey, I got some chocolate for you.” He gestured with the plastic bag of his dog’s shit.

Gordon was so angry that he raised the sword and rushed at Phil, even screaming, knowing Clara’s magic would make everyone else deaf to it.

“Hey, what are you…?” Phil said, eyes agape. “No!”

His head spun a few times in the air, blood spraying everywhere.

***********

One more man to kill: Bill Wynn, Phil’s neighbour from across the road.

Baggy-eyed, exhausted, and emotionally drained, Gordon plodded over to the house like one of the undead.

He stood by the porch, with the sword hidden behind him, looking through the front window and seeing Bill in his living room. Bill looked back, saw Gordon, and went over to his front door.

He opened the door and said, “What the fuck are you doing on my lawn, Scrotum Breath? Get out of here.”

“Come out here and make me,” Gordon hissed.

“You telling me what to do? Oh, you’re gonna get it now.”

Bill went out on the porch with a balled fist. He went down the steps and on the grass where Gordon was. Before he could swing, though, the sword suddenly appeared and went through Bill’s gut and out the other side. Gordon’s bloody work was finished.

IX: The Ritual

Everything was now ready. Gordon had brought the bag of heads to Clara’s house. She had him run bath water over all of them, and as the water poured from the shower nozzle onto each head, she said a magical formula in Liput and waved a magic wand in the shape of a pentacle, making all the skin, hair, eyes, ears, and everything inside each head dissolve and disintegrate, and leaving only nine skulls.

Since Gordon had blood all over him, she even used her magic to clean him and his clothes. She needed all traces of the violence removed from her ritual, to ensure that no bad karma would contaminate it.

Everything was laid out as planned in the red room, around the magic circle and pentacle. The swords and daggers were fanned out in all directions, with the nine skulls at the tips of the swords (including the one Gordon had used), all along the periphery of the circle and facing outwards, to keep out any unwelcome spirits, including Lechi’s, most especially, for the moment at least.

Clara, nude, was sitting in the middle of the circle with Ptah’s body in her lap; she’d used magic to keep the corpse from decomposing and putrefying. Gordon was standing in the circle, facing her, but also in a magically-induced trance, to ensure that he couldn’t interfere with the ritual in any way.

Indeed, she was worried that the magic she had used on him wasn’t as effective as she’d hoped it would be. During the killings, he’d showed signs of reluctance and hesitation that shouldn’t have been there at all. She would have to use stronger formulas and incantations to keep him fully under her control.

After all, she had no intention whatsoever of keeping her promise to satisfy his desires in bed, any more than she did with Lechi. Their souls were to be trapped forever in Ptah’s body, able only to see, hear, and feel her passively; the cat alone would retain control of his body.

When Gordon and Lechi were to realize that they were being double-crossed, they were naturally going to try to get out of their prison in Ptah’s brain. Clara was going to have to ensure the prevention of such a danger. She knew some incantations that surely would work to stop these two would-be lovers.

Just before the ritual began, she gave Gordon a cup of hot tea she’d prepared. “Here, Gordon. Drink this.”

“Thank you,” he said, taking the cup and saucer from her. “What is it?”

“Just tea,” she said with a smile. “It’ll help you to relax during the ritual. Drink up.”

As he sipped it, she watched him, noting how he was–in spite of the trance she’d put him in–still shaken up after having killed those people. She needed him to be totally calm, relaxed, in a meditative, suggestible state of mind.

…and magic mushroom tea would do the trick.

He gulped it all down, suspecting nothing, even as he saw her lips moving, whispering a secret incantation to make the drugged tea take effect faster.

Within ten minutes of his having drunk all of it, she was ready to begin, for she could see that his trance-like state was now complete with the aid of the tea. She began the ritual by summoning Lechi, and having the god’s spirit enter Gordon’s body, feeling all of his physicality.

What is this? Lechi thought. Gordon is…under the influence…of mushroom tea. I can feel his…euphoria, and his dazedness. I told Clara…to have him…ingest her mushroom drugs…so she could better…control him…while he was killing…the nine people…not during…this ritual.

She then used this incantation–“Ud Lechi eek zvarge im atta dis Gordon”–to ensure Lechi’s caging, or containment, in Gordon’s soul, or self. There was yet another useful ambiguity in the Liput language: atta could mean self, or soul.

Lechi, already addled by the high from the mushroom tea, wouldn’t notice the ambiguous meaning of atta. The god would think that his spirit was being contained in Gordon’s self, his person, his body, rather than caged in Gordon’s soul. Lechi would think he was merely being put in Gordon’s body so he could enjoy sex with her, rather than being eternally imprisoned in Gordon’s soul. This spiritual incarceration would ensure her safety against ever being sexually assaulted.

To be sure of this safety, Clara of course said this incantation nine times, each time pointing herself in the direction of one of the nine protective swords. Her next incantation would be this: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan dis atta zvarge im pita sola chi!” That is, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims’ souls be safely contained in the body [of Ptah]!” Again, she chanted this nine times in the direction of each sword.

Finally, she intoned the following: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan slivu its im pita atta zvarge solachi!” Or, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims beheaded/castrated be, safely in the body/soul/self of Ptah!” Again, there was ambiguity in the meaning of these words, beyond the ambiguities already explained. Did her words mean, “the decapitated nine victims,” or did they mean, “May Lechi, Gordon, and the nine victims be emasculated, made impotent, in Ptah’s body”? Clara was hoping to slip this meaning by drugged Lechi without his suspecting; and she chanted this last incantation nine times, in the direction of each sword.

At the end of this chanting, she noticed, as expected, that Gordon was getting sluggish, enervated. He was having difficulty staying on his feet. Now Clara chanted, “Ptah, vivoka! Schlink bur ta tenki!” Or, “Ptah, come to life! Embrace the souls entering you!” And this was said nine times in the same way as before.

She looked down and saw Ptah’s body beginning to stir, ever so slightly. A tear of joy ran down her cheek. She was shaking with expectation.

Gordon fell to the floor, motionless, but with his eyes looking straight at hers, accusing her. She shuddered, knowing that not only was Gordon looking at his betrayer, but also Lechi was. Still, that same look of anger and heartbreak seemed to reassure her that those souls would truly be trapped in Ptah’s body forever.

Outside, there was the sound of the sirens of approaching police cars. Then, Gordon did something unexpected.

He got up.

With hate in his eyes, he plodded like a zombie towards her.

She gasped.

Lechi won’t be contained? she wondered.

Then, Gordon tripped, she used her magic to raise up a sword under him (the same one he’d used to kill the nine victims with, fortuitously), and he fell on it.

Now he would stay motionless.

She could hear the cops barging into her house, so she quickly wrapped a nearby black blanket around her nakedness.

“Oh, God, please help me!” she screamed as the cops came into the red room and saw Gordon lying on the floor in a widening pool of blood. “He just barged in here and tried to rape me and kill me with my sword!”

“Then why has he been stabbed with it?” a cop asked.

“He got clumsy, tripped, and fell on it,” Clara said in sobs. “Earlier today, he barged in here, stole my sword, and ran off with it. I normally use it with all these others for my rituals, but he had this crazy look in his eyes, always yelling, ‘Revenge!’.”

“That’s plausible,” a second cop said. “That’s Gordon Marsh lying there dead. I knew him. You should’ve seen how clumsy he was. All those guys whose heads were cut off, they used to pick on him. I don’t know why he killed Ms. Bellows, but the rest of the girl’s story makes sense to me.”

“Nine decapitated victims,” a policewoman said, “with one of her swords, and nine skulls lying here. The swords are for your rituals, are they? Satanic rituals, by chance?”

“Of course not,” Clara said, then lied, “they aren’t real skulls. They’re all made of plastic.”

“They sure look real to me,” the policewoman said, reaching down and about to pick up a skull.

“Ni tchah!” Clara shouted, suddenly making all the police oblivious to the skulls.

“Well, we’re going to need to borrow your sword for evidence,” the first cop said. “You’ll get it back when we’ve finished the investigation. Apart from that, I’d say the girl’s story fits in with everything else we’ve seen. We’ll need a full testimony from you as we put together the rest of our investigation here.”

“OK,” Clara said, thinking, I’ve finished the ritual. The cops’ taking away my sword shouldn’t negatively affect my magic. The souls are all safely trapped in Ptah’s body. Speaking of which…

She looked over at her cat. The body was stirring a little more. Her heart was beating faster with hopefulness.

X: The Cat Came Back

Clara had to get dressed and go to the police station to give her full testimony and help the cops finish their investigation. It took hours! Thankfully, they didn’t think any more about her magical practices than those of the harmlessly eccentric behaviour of a kook loner.

By the time she finally got back home, though, the sun was already up. She was exhausted, and just wanted to strip and fall down naked on her bed.

As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, though, she heard something that gave her a sudden burst of adrenaline, making her run the rest of the way.

She heard a meow.

She ran into her bedroom and saw Ptah lying on the bed, licking himself and purring.

“Ptah!” she screamed with tears of joy running down her cheeks. “You’re back! I’ve got you back!” She got on the bed, picked him up, put him on her lap, and stroked him. She couldn’t stop weeping. She was shaking with happiness.

Then, just to make sure, she picked him up and looked all over his body to see if anything at all was different about him. She knew, as Talas had told her, that the cat wouldn’t be 100% the same as before, but he seemed amazingly close to that 100%, for she saw absolutely nothing different.

All of his fur was black, he had his claws, though he knew to keep them in whenever she held him, for she’d used her magic to teach him never to scratch her, even by accident. She abhorred declawing.

The only thing that seemed different, and even this, ever so slightly so, was the even greater love she saw in his eyes, obviously the result of the trapped souls of all of those in Ptah’s consciousness, those of the men–and Lechi–who lusted after her.

XI: Nodding Off

Looking into Ptah’s loving, longing eyes with soaking wet, teary eyes of her own, she whispered, “I love you so much.” Then she kissed him on the top of his head, put him at the foot of her bed, and began undressing.

She giggled as she saw the cat staring at her as she got naked, thinking, This is all you boys in there will ever have of me. When fully nude, she turned around for the cat and giggled some more. See me fulfilling my promise to you, Lechi and Gordon? The cat just sat there looking, with that caged desire in his eyes.

She lay on her back on the bed with her legs apart at about a forty-five-degree angle, with her right foot touching Ptah. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, taking a deep breath and relaxing.

When she opened them, she looked down and saw, of all the bizarre things, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman licking her between her legs! It felt so good: Clara was getting wet, her labia were beginning to swell, and her clitoris was hardening. Oddly, Pfeiffer’s tongue felt much smaller than a human tongue, but it was still effective. Clara closed her eyes, sighed, and moaned softly.

She opened her eyes again and looked down, but now she saw Julie Newmar’s Catwoman licking her! The tongue’s size felt the same, but so was its deliciously tickling skill as good as ever. Clara was getting wetter, sighing more and more, and moaning louder.

Newmar put two fingers inside Clara, gently and slowly moving them back and forth while tickling her vaginal walls. A third finger was rubbing against her hardening clitoris. While she felt all of these thrills, Clara found that those fingers inside her felt more like one thick finger–in fact, it felt hairy, even fuzzy.

She closed her eyes again and decided not to wonder about the oddity of the sensations; she’d rather just have enjoyed them. She was fidgeting on the bed and letting out little yelps of pleasure.

She opened her eyes and looked down again. Instead of seeing another actress as Catwoman again, though, this time she saw Sister Rosalie Mason, her old grade ten teacher of religion class. This nun, with her pretty face and kindness to Clara (as she’d been enduring her father’s abuse), caused her to have a lesbian crush on her back then in her teen years; so seeing her in her habit, licking her, was just all the more enjoyable. She was soaking wet between her legs, her clitoris fully engorged, and her labia swelling.

She closed her eyes for a few seconds, anticipating an even better lover on opening them. When she did open them, though, she looked to her left and saw Ms. Bellows, standing by the foot of her bed and grinning maliciously.

Then she looked straight up and saw Gordon. He was also looking at her with a malevolent smile. Instead of tongues and fingers, she now felt a phallus moving in and out of her…a furry one, but nonetheless a phallus.

Gordon said, in the panting voice of Lechi, “You actually thought…that your feeble skills…at magic…would be a match…for my power? You did need…that ninth sword…to lie in position…with all the others…to ensure…the efficacy…of your spell. Now all of us..will enjoy you…every time you sleep!”

Clara now felt phalli entering her anus and her mouth. She sensed in them the presence of Bill Wynn and Ron Sweeney. Soon after, she felt a phallus between her breasts, with invisible hands pushing them together and wrapping them around the invisible phallus. This, she sensed, was Jon Schmidt.

The fact that these were all incubi is what kept if from being physically impossible. Next, she sensed the phalli of Kurt Davies and Shaun Holmes respectively in her left and right hands. After beginning to masturbate these invisible masses of meat, she felt two more, those of Phil Sulikowsky and Jim Fredericks, pushing against her left and right armpits respectively. Finally, the invisible hands of Chris Culig took her feet, put them on either side of his invisible phallus, and had them rub it.

None of this probing hurt; in fact, her arousal was soaring. She was sweating and moaning a high-pitched “Mmm!” with every thrust she received, them all being perfectly synchronized. Finally, after another minute, she climaxed with a scream, then they all sprayed bukkake, soaking her with come from head to toe.

The incubi all disappeared. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth wide open, the sides of her lips curled up in a smirk. She let out a long sigh. Then she opened her eyes.

Instead of seeing Gordon on top of her, she saw her father.

“I told you I’d make it good for you,” he said in Lechi’s voice.

Clara woke up screaming. Shaking all over, she needed a few minutes to calm down and feel her heart rate slow down to normal. She whispered over and over, “It was just a dream. It wasn’t real. They never had me.”

Finally calm, she looked down to the foot of the bed. A puddle of come had soaked the sheets between her legs. Ptah was sitting just behind it, with his tongue sticking out.

“A wet dream?” she whispered. “I haven’t had…one of those…since I was…in high school.”

Then she looked at Ptah again. His right front leg was soaked in her gushing. He was looking at her with those loving, longing eyes. He was purring.

“Oh, my God!” she yelled, then, “No, no. That could not have happened. Not my Ptah, no. H-he just…he dipped his leg in the puddle, that’s all! Yeah, I gushed quite a lot, and that’s how he g-got so much of his leg wet with it. That explains it! I just had a dream about those men. They’re all trapped in Ptah’s consciousness; my ritual was c-complete, perfect! There’s no way they could have got out of the mental prison I put ’em in.”

She picked up her cat and hugged him.

“I got you back, Ptah! That’s what matters. I’ve had bad dreams before. They just reflect my unconscious traumas, that’s all. I have you back, and that’s what’s important, even if you did put your foot in my–no, that couldn’t have happened! My life is complete again with you. I’m so happy to have you back, Ptah! I love you so much.”

She would spend her whole day petting, feeding, playing with, and cuddling her cat. That look of longing and love in his eyes never stopped, not even for a second. She was in an ecstasy with him right until sundown, when she would go to bed with him at the foot of it. She would fall asleep smiling from ear to ear.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

Ay, there’s the rub.

‘Sister Sorceress,’ an Erotic Short Story

Mary MacDillon, 22, thought nothing of her being moved to a new convent in a new city. She assumed most of the nuns here, just as they were in the one she’d just left, would be almost all plain-looking or much older than she.

As soon as she came in, however, she noted a peculiar thing about the place. Not only were there, as she first started looking around at all the nuns, more…and more…young, slim nuns with pretty faces, but all of them were young, slim, and pretty…without exception!

What a strangely fortuitous occurrence, she thought…with a bit of a shudder. It was paradoxically good and bad luck for her. Secretly, she had lesbian desires that her strict Catholic upbringing would never accept, so being surrounded by unattractive women would keep her safe from temptation. But now,…

The bad luck was precisely that this was also good luck.

She whispered a “Hail, Mary” prayer over and over again as she approached the cell where she was to sleep. As she looked over the sea of faces of nuns walking by, hoping to see at least one wrinkled face or one obese body, yet being disappointed (and secretly thrilled) to see only beauties, she noticed one nun from a distance who lifted up her tunic to reveal a creamy-smooth white leg with a…tattoo?…up towards her left thigh.

No, it couldn’t be a tattoo! Mary thought. What self-respecting nun would have one of those on her body? My eyes must have been deceiving me! It was a large birthmark of some kind, surely.

Finally, she reached her cell. “Here you are, Sister Mary,” said Father Funn, the only male (also young and handsome, not that she was interested) who lived in this convent…alone in his own cell, surely! He put down her two bags of luggage by the door. “In you go now, and meet your cellmate. If you need anything, you know where to find my cell.”

“Thank you, Father,” she said as he turned around to leave. “Goodbye.” She faced the door. Before opening it, she took a deep breath and said another “Hail, Mary.” Lord, don’t put me to the test, she thought as she slowly turned the doorknob. Please, cellmate, be fat, old, and ugly.

She opened the door wide. Not only was her cellmate not fat, old, or ugly, she was also…not…dressed.

Mary stared at the naked loveliness of her new cellmate with her eyes and mouth at their widest. The young woman had her back to Mary, who in a daze was admiring her coffee-coloured skin, her curves, and her round buttocks. Her hair was a wavy cascade of brown that draped down to just below her shoulders.

She turned her head around to see Mary. She grinned from ear to ear. “Oh!” she said in high-pitched delight. “You must be Sister Mary MacDillon, my new cellmate. So nice to meet you finally. I’m Sister Jessica Bell, but everyone calls me Jessie.”

She turned around and walked towards Mary to shake her hand, displaying her frontal nudity–firm, medium-sized breasts with erect, brown nipples, and all her pubic hair removed!–in all insouciance.

Mary, in her amazement, had forgotten that the door was still open.

“Mary,” Jessie asked with a smirk, “do you want to display my body to all passersby, or do you want to close the door?”

“Oh! I’m sorry,” Mary said, snapping out of it and immediately turning around to close the door.

As the door clicked shut, Jessie began to say, “Father Funn just passed by before I reminded you of the door. I’m sure he just got the best thrill he’s had in a long time.” She giggled lewdly at this.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said again, trying to look Jessie straight in the eyes and not look any lower. Why does she have to be so immodest?

“That’s alright,” Jessie said. “It’s my fault. I just returned from the shower and took off my bathrobe. It’s been such a hot day that I didn’t want to put anything on at the moment. Instead, I was making some tea, which just heated up the cell even more. Would you like some? It’s really tasty.”

“Oh, yes, please, Jessie, I’d love some.” Why won’t she put some clothes on? God, why are you putting me to the test?

“Have you eaten dinner? They just finished serving it, and we all just ate in the dining hall, so I think you’ll be too late to have some.”

“Oh, I’ve eaten already. I’m quite tired actually, and ready for bed.”

“Oh, good,” Jessie said, handing Mary a fresh cup of hot tea.

Mary brought it up to her nose. “That’s quite a unique aroma.”

“Yes, I combine a lot of special ingredients–herbs, spices, mushrooms, and other things–to get a unique flavour. Try it. It’s also very healthy.”

“Yes, of course,” Mary said, then took a sip. “Mmm. As you said, it’s really tasty.” She turned away from Jessie for obvious reasons, put the cup on the bedside table, and looked with alarm at the one bed she was to share with Jessie every night, Jessie who was as unashamed as Eve was before eating the forbidden fruit. Trying to take her mind off her temptation, Mary reached down to her bags to begin unpacking, and said, “I always thought cells were supposed to be lived in by only one person at a time. In my previous convent, we all slept together in a dormitory, but I thought I’d be alone in my cell here.”

“Well, there are budget constraints in our convent, so we nuns are paired up in our cells,” Jessie explained, still not bothering to put anything on. “Often, new nuns like you are paired up with nuns like me, who have been here for quite a while, to show the new girls the ropes. Only Father Funn sleeps alone in his own cell, and I hardly need to explain to you why that is.” She giggled lewdly again.

“I see,” Mary said with a sigh of annoyance at Jessie’s flippant attitude. Mary took some clothes out of her bag and put them in a drawer by the bedside table.

“Drink your tea,” Jessie said. “Don’t let it get cold.”

“Oh, I won’t.” Mary picked up the cup and had another, larger sip, then went back to unpacking. She looked out the window for a moment: the sun was setting. She noticed, while still trying to resist the temptation to look at Jessie’s body, that her nude companion wasn’t having any tea for herself. “Aren’t you going to drink some?”

“Oh, I’ll have some a little later. You just enjoy yours for now.” After that, Mary noticed that Jessie was whispering something to herself…was it in Latin?

Once Mary finished unpacking, she began taking off her habit. It would feel good to take it off, for as Jessie had observed, it was a really hot day; though Mary had her own reasons for sweating so profusely–her nervousness, for the eyes of ever-naked Jessie had lit up to note her undressing. Mary had another gulp of her tea and tried not to think about that naughty nun.

She made sure that she had her nightgown ready to throw on as soon as she was stripped down to her bra and panties, for Jessie was still looking at her. Jessie also hadn’t drunk any of the tea she’d made, though Mary finished her cup and gave it back to Jessie with a “Thank you,” naïvely not even considering the possibility–with all of her worries of her naked cellmate watching her undress–that there might have been something…unusual…in that tea.

Mary got into bed and closed her eyes, now feeling remarkably relaxed. “Good night, Sister Jessie,” she said, then let out a big sigh and let herself go.

After turning off the light, ever-nude Jessie climbed into bed beside Mary, using the dim night light from the opened window to watch her silhouette drift into…what Mary would assume to be…unconsciousness.

Jessie continued chanting in Latin, but no longer in whispers. Mary was able to make out fragments of what Jessie was saying, the first fragment being, “Blessed art thou among women…” Was Jessie chanting the ‘Hail, Mary’ prayer? Mary wondered. Whatever she was chanting, it suggested that Jessie was a good nun after all, if a little eccentric.

Next, Mary heard, in Latin, “He who loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love,” emphasizing the word love. Again, Mary felt reassured of Jessie’s commitment to her faith. Her nudity must have been an anomalous occurrence, nothing more. Mary was able to relax even more, though something in her was making relaxing surprisingly easy.

Then she felt a light, brief kiss on her lips.

Instead of rising from her bed in wide-eyed shock, though, Mary just enjoyed the sensuous touch of Jessie’s lips. She opened her eyes slowly and saw…her young mother’s face? No, that couldn’t have been: her mother was now fifty-five and living in a city on the other side of the country. Mary must have been having a dream.

The dark room was moving left to right in slow waves, as Mary saw it. A spot of moonlight from outside, coming in the window from Mary’s far right, was trailing in a wavy line when her eyes moved to the left, away from it. She felt her body undulating with the waves in the air all around her. She felt as if she were merging with her surroundings.

She felt another kiss on her lips. Her eyes, having adjusted to the dark, met those of her kisser, and she could make out Jessie’s face this time. Again, though, instead of being shocked, she welcomed the kiss. Something in her body was telling her there was nothing sinful about what she and Jessie were doing.

She felt more soft kisses on her lips, cheeks, nose, and forehead. She fell Jessie’s hands stroking her hair and caressing her cheeks. Jessie said in Latin, “These three last forever: faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love,” this last word being stressed, as before.

Now Mary felt Jessie moving up on the bed to bring her breasts level with Mary’s face. She felt the raspberry nipples of those sugary breasts brushing gently against her face. Mary opened her mouth and took Jessie’s left nipple inside. She sucked on it for several seconds, then looked up at the face of her naked lover.

The face shifted back and forth between being Jessie’s and being her mother’s. Still, Mary wasn’t shocked: she just enjoyed her ‘dream.’

Jessie moved back down to bring her face level with Mary’s again; as she moved down, she brushed her breasts against Mary’s chin, neck, and chest.

They resumed kissing, but this time with Jessie sliding her tongue deep inside Mary’s mouth. Jessie put Mary’s right hand between her legs, soaking her fingers. She also put her hand under Mary’s nightgown and slid her fingers under her panties to touch her in the same, wet place. As she stroked Mary’s vaginal opening and hymen, Jessie did more Latin chanting, but this time it was nothing from the Vulgate Bible or anything Mary recognized as being even remotely Catholic. In fact, Mary felt herself to be in such a dream-state that she couldn’t make out the meaning of this Latin at all; she only knew that it was Latin.

She didn’t want to listen to or interpret any Latin, anyway. These were the best sensations she’d ever felt in her entire life! After another minute or so of this delectable touching, she let out a high-pitched sigh with Jessie, and they both climaxed. In Mary’s dream-state, she had a vision of a river flowing from between her legs.

**********

She woke up just as the sun was beginning to peek through the window. She saw Jessie in an almost unrecognizable form: she was fully dressed, in a nun habit!

Jessie looked over at her with an unexpectedly innocent smile. “Oh, you’re awake!” she said. “Good morning, Sister Mary. You must be hungry. Hurry up and get dressed if you don’t want to miss breakfast in the dining hall.”

“Oh, yes,” Mary said as she got out of bed. Nowhere on her body did she feel any traces of the sensations she’d felt the night before, though she remembered them all vividly. It was just a dream, she thought.

As she changed into her habit, Mary found herself always wanting to look at Jessie’s pretty face. Oddly, now that her cellmate was finally decent, this was when Mary found she couldn’t stop staring at her.

Jessie didn’t exactly look like Mary’s pretty mother, though her eyes and voice bore an uncanny resemblance to those of her mother. The humble, pious attitude that Jessie was demonstrating now, in radical contrast to her vampish ways the night before, also reminded Mary of her beloved, almost saintlike mother.

The fact that Mary had…dreamed?…of receiving such sensual pleasure from naked Jessie only cemented her feelings for her cellmate all the more.

Was she falling in love with Jessie?

Oh, nonsense!

That couldn’t be!

Mary was wedded to Christ!

Jessie took Mary to the dining hall, where they sat across from each other and ate breakfast together. As they talked about the daily routine of the convent, Mary couldn’t stop looking deep in Jessie’s eyes, sighing at the sound of her voice, and grinning at her beauty, knowing what anatomical delicacies were hiding underneath her habit.

She imagined the bread she was biting into was Jessie’s flesh.

“After breakfast, I’ll need to take a shower,” Mary said.

“Be quick about it,” Jessie said. “We have to go to deliver crates of food to an orphanage on the other side of town.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Mary said, then drank from a glass of milk while looking down at Jessie’s chest, and remembering the relevant part of her…dream?

**********

She hurried over to the shower, went in, got naked, and ran the water over her body as she lathered the soap in her hands. As she rubbed the lather on her upper body, she looked at herself in a tall mirror on the other side of the room. She frowned at what she saw.

Small breasts, pale skin, a bit of flab on my belly, and an excess of pubic hair, she thought. I wish my body could be as attractive as Jessie’s is. I’m sure that would please her more.

After rinsing off her upper body, she rubbed some lather between her legs. She yelped in shock at what she felt down there…or rather, what she didn’t feel down there.

My hymen is gone! she thought with a gasp. My virtue! My virginity…is gone? That can’t be!

How could she have lost it? How could it have disappeared? Nothing happened the night before. She’d only had an erotic dream…didn’t she?

And even if Jessie had really seduced her, if she had punctured her hymen, why wasn’t Mary at all sore?

**********

After her shower, she quickly rejoined Jessie to help with delivering the food to the orphanage, always trying to stop herself from staring at her beautiful cellmate…but rarely succeeding. The bright, hot sun reminded Mary of God looking down on her from heaven. At least the act of charity to the orphans had a somewhat mitigating effect on her guilt.

She was touched by the devotion she saw in Jessie as she gave to the orphans, working so hard to be of help to them in all ways possible. Jessie’s actions so reminded Mary of her mother’s charity. The love was swelling in Mary’s heart.

When they returned to the convent, Mary went into the church to pray at a pew.

When she bowed and did the Sign of the Cross before the altar, she looked over at an icon of the Virgin Mary. On the face of the Blessed Virgin, she imagined she saw the face of her mother, what seemed a disapproving face, and Mary felt a pang of shame.

She hurried over to a pew, knelt there, and put her hands together. She remembered St. Paul’s words in his Epistle to the Romans: “God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.” She shuddered at the memory of that verse, one she’d always successfully used before to control herself.

God, help me, she prayed in her thoughts. Deliver me from the Evil One. Help me to love Jessie in an honourable, decent, Christian way. A tear ran down her cheek.

She looked up from hearing the sound of shoes tapping on the floor of the aisle to her immediate right. Father Funn was walking by. She got up and went over to him.

“Father?” she said from just behind his left shoulder.

He looked behind himself. “Yes, Sister Mary?”

“I know this is abrupt, but do you have time to receive my confession?”

“Why, yes, I have a few minutes,” he said. “Come this way.” He gestured to an exit leading to the confessional booths.

They went over and got in.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Mary said with a trembling voice.

“Be at peace, Mary,” he said soothingly. “The Lord is always willing to take back any lost sheep who have strayed from the flock.”

“I have had…,” she began, “…impure thoughts.”

“What kind of impure thoughts?” he asked with…a smirk on his face?

“Lewd ones. Lustful ones. Unnatural ones. Shameful ones.” She began sobbing. “And I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself from thinking them again.”

“With God, all things are possible,” he reassured her. “Remember that the Lord helps those who help themselves.”

“Yes, Father! Thank you!”

“I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he said, doing the Sign of the Cross with her.

She left the confessional so determined not to have sexual feelings about Jessie, that she would prove it every time she was around her, as a test of that determination. She went back to the pews to pray.

***********

That evening, after hours of prayer at the pew, she returned to her cell.

I will not have romantic thoughts about Jessie, she insisted in her thoughts as she approached Jessie, who was outside, tending a garden just beside the cell. Among the flowers and herbs she grew there to make her tea were a number of rather large mushrooms. The sun was sinking low, leaving darkness all over the convent.

Mary came up beside her cellmate. “Good evening, Sister Jessie.”

Jessie looked over at her and gave her such a disarming smile that Mary, shivering with pleasure, already lost half of her resolve not to think of Jessie in a sexual way. “Good evening, Sister Mary. I’m about to make us some tea. Would you like to watch how I make it?”

“Oh, yes, very much!” Mary sighed, then thought, Now, I can see if she is drugging the tea…which, surely, she isn’t! “You said last night that you mix mushrooms in the tea. What kind of mushrooms are they? I had such a wild dream last night, not the kind of thing I would ever describe, for modestly’s sake!” She tittered a little. “Those aren’t those ‘magic mushrooms,’ are they?”

Jessie let out a loud laugh. “Oh, no! Of course not! That must have been a wild dream that you had! No, these mushrooms only have a medicinal effect on the consumer. Whatever ‘wildness’ you experienced in your dream was something already inside you, I assure you.”

Though Mary felt reassured that there was nothing psychedelic about those mushrooms (and, surely, Jessie was telling her the truth about that!), she found it disturbing to think that that whole dream’s contents were just ‘something already inside her.’ Mary had always hated the unbridled sin of her unconscious mind, something she could never control.

Jessie finished collecting the ingredients for the tea, and she took them into the cell, Mary following closely behind her.

“Oh, I’m so glad it isn’t as hot today as it was yesterday,” Jessie said as she stood in front of the kettle, getting the tea ready. “These summer days have been killer. But I can tolerate keeping this habit on, at least for the moment.”

Mary let out a sigh of relief…yet of disappointment, too.

“I must say, Sister Jessie, that I admire how loving and caring you were to the orphans today,” she said. “The smiles you put on all the kids’ faces as you talked to them. Your charity is truly an inspiration.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Jessie said. “I’m just doing the Lord’s work. It isn’t me; it’s the Holy Spirit working through me.”

“Your humility and charity remind me of those of my mother, as I saw in her when I was a child,” Mary said, looking over at Jessie with such yearning.

“Your mother must be a remarkable woman. I’m flattered to be thought so similar to her.”

“You are, Sister Jessie, in so many ways,” Mary sighed.

“That’s very sweet of you to say–thank you.” Jessie, having finished making the tea, brought two small cups over. “Here you are, honey.” She handed Mary a pink china cup, while keeping a yellow one for herself.

“Thank you.” Mary was relieved to see that yellow cup this time, to see Jessie sipping from it. Mary thus felt encouraged to drink from hers.

(What she didn’t realize was that Jessie had made mushrooms for Mary’s tea, and no mushrooms–and different herbs–for her own.)

“OK, I’m getting little too hot now,” Jessie said, and she undid her guimpe and tunic, which for her, unusually, had front zippers. When unzipping and pulling them wide apart, she revealed a black, lace brassiere holding those creamy breasts in shape, the sight of which made Mary salivate and pant audibly. Jessie looked over at Mary, whose eyes immediately looked away. Jessie smirked.

Mary drank a gulp of tea. She looked out the window to see the growing darkness and the sun almost fully set. She yawned. “I don’t know why I feel so sleepy. Apart from moving the crates of food, I didn’t do much–just a lot of praying.”

“That’s fine,” Jessie said, continuing to undress and now just in her bra and panties. “Let’s just go to bed.”

Mary took no more than split-second, furtive looks at Jessie, who was now removing her bra. “Yes,” she yawned, “I suppose I should…take this…hot thing…off, too.”

Smiling Jessie removed her panties, turned off the light, and got into bed. Mary, too tired to reach for her nightgown, just stripped down to her underwear and got into bed. She lay on her back, closed her eyes, and let out a long sigh.

“Good night, Sister Jessie.”

“Good night, honey.”

Mama used to call me ‘honey,’ Mary thought.

That soothing, undulating feeling was beginning to flow all through Mary’s body again. She could hear Jessie whispering something in Latin again, though again, she felt too drowsy to make out the meaning of the words; she could only distinguish the pronunciation as distinctly Latin.

She felt Jessie’s hand on her right thigh.

A shiver of pleasure…and fear…rode up and down all those waves she felt permeating her body.

Still, Mary felt too much in a stupor to resist.

Jessie’s hand was playing with the elastic on Mary’s panties.

“Jessie,” Mary said in a slurred voice. “When I…showered today, I noticed…that my hymen…was missing.”

“Really?” Jessie whispered, then kissed Mary on her right cheek.

“Did you have…anything to do…with that?”

Jessie’s finger slid under the panties and began playing with Mary’s pubic hair. “I’m liberating you…from your theological prison cell.” She gave Mary a peck on the lips.

“Are you?” Mary sighed. “Ooh!”

“Purity and innocence…are lies…Not even Adam and Eve…were innocent…in the beginning.” Jessie was giving Mary kisses on her lips, cheeks, and neck as she continued whispering.

“That can’t…be true. Ah!“

“Oh, it must have been. If they were truly, utterly good, neither would have…given in…to temptation…and eaten…the forbidden fruit…There was never…a Fall, so Christ’s death…as redemption…was meaningless. There was never…primordial grace, and so there’s no grace…for us to return to…through Christ’s death. Let’s sin bravely.”

Mary opened her eyes and, her eyes adjusted to the dark and with plenty of moonlight and starlight shining through the open window, she could make out the silhouette of Jessie standing up on the bed, with her back and ass to her, her legs spread apart on either side of Mary. She wasn’t nude, though: Mary looked up and saw Jessie wearing a white coif and black veil on her head, but a tight-fitting, shiny black leather outfit was covering her from her neck to her feet, which were in black high heels. The outfit showed off Jessie’s curvy figure and round buttocks most flatteringly.

Jessie looked down at Mary over her left shoulder and asked, “Do you like it, Mary?”

“Sister Jessie,” Mary said in sighs, trying to regain at least some self-control, in spite of how stoned and turned on she was, “dressing like that…is so disrespectful…to your vows…as a nun. Remove the coif…and veil…at least.”

“Mary, what coif? What veil? I’m naked, head to toe.”

“But,…that skin-tight…black outfit…you have on.”

“I’m not wearing any outfit, Mary. I’m displaying my body, for your viewing pleasure. I know your secret desires, Mary. Don’t be afraid to express them.”

“How do you know them?”

“I have my ways. Let me help you liberate yourself, Mary.” Jessie bent down, bending her knees and lowering her back, so Mary could see what she had hiding between her legs and buttocks. Now Mary no longer saw the black clothing or the nun’s headdress. She saw naked Jessie’s delectable secrets, which were coming closer and closer to her face.

Jessie, on all fours now and facing Mary’s feet, pulled off her panties and spread her legs out wide. Both of them began tasting each other. Though Jessie was pure of any urinary or fecal smell–in fact, her vulva and anus smelled fragrant from a fresh shower–Mary was worried, after having used the toilet just before returning to their cell, that her own body odour would be most unflattering.

Yet Jessie was licking, kissing, and sucking without complaint.

(Actually, her magical, Latin incantations, herbs, and mushrooms all served to obliterate any and all unpleasant smells. Mary would learn the next day that Jessie’s magic would make even more, shocking changes to her body.)

In any case, Mary soon forgot her worries about her body odour, for she was too busy enjoying giving and receiving physical love. She no longer regretted the loss of her hymen, for Jessie’s long tongue was now free to probe deep, deep inside, tickling Mary’s vaginal walls with its tireless flickering.

It felt so good, so physically good, that she realized something.

This is no dream! she thought. This is really happening!

Both women’s sighs were rising in pitch and volume as they approached climax. Mary had a vision of two dams bursting, with rushing water coursing out between two pairs of legs. Mary’s was a river; Jessie’s, a waterfall.

…and Father Funn just happened to be passing by their cell window at that very moment.

***********

The next morning, Mary woke up with her panties back on, as if never taken off. There were no vaginal secretions as she had felt the night before, which she found inexplicable. With the sun peeking through the window, Jessie was fully dressed in her habit.

Mary saw her smiling face…O, that lovely face!

The two exchanged good morning wishes.

“Sister Jessie,” Mary asked. “What…did we…do last night?”

“We’ll discuss it tonight, Sister Mary,” Jessie said, moving about the cell in a hurry to get ready to go. “Get dressed. We have a busy morning. There’s a soup kitchen downtown where we volunteer every week on this day, serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the homeless. We’ll be leaving about a half hour after breakfast. You’ll want to hurry if you hope to squeeze in a shower before we go.”

************

Though they ate facing each other in the dining hall, they said little to each other, Mary fearing that the other nuns would overhear their conversation and pick up hints as to what they were doing every night. She saw Father Funn walk by their table with a smirk that made her even more paranoid.

************

After breakfast, she hurried over to the shower with a change of underwear. She had put on her habit so quickly after getting out of bed that she didn’t take a minute to notice anything different about her body. But now that she was naked and in the shower, she saw herself in that mirror; the changes couldn’t be ignored.

Larger, firmer breasts.

No flab.

No pubic hair.

No paleness of her skin.

Perfect curves.

There was no other way to explain these changes.

Jessie was a witch.

Her tea and incantations were part of her spells.

Any pleasure Mary took in the changes in her body were overridden by the horror she felt in knowing what Jessie really was.

She’d bewitched Mary.

She’d defiled her.

She’d debauched her.

She’d led her astray.

She’d made her break her vows of chastity.

Mary remembered, with a shudder, Exodus 22:18.

************

After her shower, she joined Jessie and the other nuns to go to the soup kitchen to serve meals to the homeless there. Again, these acts of charity helped to soothe and ease her guilt…to an extent. That blazing, blindingly bright, hot sun outside reminded her of God’s judgement.

As she served the homeless with a smile, she saw the same loving smile on Jessie’s mesmerizingly pretty face. Mary saw no trace of phoniness in the sorceress’s smile: it looked perfectly sincere, like that of a genuine servant of Christ.

She recalled Paul’s words: “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”

Still, Mary couldn’t understand how Jessie could fake being a Christian so skillfully. Her charity looked so authentic, and it made Mary feel all the more in love with her.

It was also challenging her faith in God; for how could He allow this to happen?

Inwardly, she shook with shame at her sinful love. She remembered Paul’s words: “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.”

Speaking of doing what she hated, she slipped a knife under the sleeve of her habit just before the nuns all finished and left the soup kitchen to return to the convent.

*************

That evening, as the sun was setting and darkness was about the envelope the convent, as soon as they’d returned, she went to Father Funn to give her confession again. In the booth, she was weeping; he had that enigmatic smirk on his face again.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she sobbed.

“Be at peace, Mary,” he said calmly. “The Lord is always willing to take back any sheep who have strayed from the flock.”

Mary remembered that these had been his exact words from last time: they sounded like a meaningless formula now!

“I have had…more impure thoughts,” she sobbed.

She couldn’t bring herself to complete her confession and admit to the sexual contact with Jessie…not only out of her personal shame, but also because she didn’t want to expose the shame of the woman she loved.

“Have you any more confessions to make?” he asked after noting her awkward several seconds of silence.

“N-no,” she said, bowing her head in shame over her cowardice in not fully confessing.

“Very well,” he said in a voice that sounded almost bored. “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Both of them did the Sign of the Cross–so formulaic.

She stepped out of the booth and slowly walked back to her cell, frowning. I feel no peace from that at all, she thought. Surely Father Funn suspected that my confession wasn’t complete. God wouldn’t have…couldn’t have allowed such absolution…if He truly existed.

It was getting darker and darker outside.

She fondled that knife in her sleeve.

**************

She walked into her cell and saw Jessie standing naked by the window, outside of which was the black of night. Jessie was facing Mary, with her usual insouciant display.

Mary began shaking, and clasped the knife, keeping it hidden in her sleeve. “Are you making more tea?” she asked with a frown.

“I don’t think I need to,” Jessie said with a smile. “Not the kind I was making for you before, to free your mind.”

“Those mushrooms really are magic mushrooms, aren’t they? You literally do magic with them, don’t you?”

“They, as well as my other herbs and my incantations, don’t do anything more than bring out what’s already inside you, Mary.”

“You’re a witch masquerading as a nun.” Her eyes tearing up, Mary let the knife slip down so Jessie could see the blade pointing at her chest.

“You aren’t going to stab me, Mary.” Jessie took a step toward Mary.

“‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ from Exodus.”

“‘Thou shalt not kill,’ also from Exodus.”

“‘The devil can cite scripture for his purpose,’ from The Merchant of Venice,” Mary said with a shaky voice, the hand holding the knife shaking even more.

“I’m not a witch, Mary,” Jessie said, taking another step closer to Mary. “I’m a sorceress.”

“What’s the difference? the Bible makes no distinction.”

“A witch uses her magic to harm. A sorceress uses it for good.” Jessie came closer to Mary. “My spells are liberating you.”

“Liberating me from what? I love my religion.”

“You didn’t become a nun out of love for Christ or the Virgin Mary. You became one to please your mother.”

“Your witchcraft makes you read people’s minds,” Mary said, weeping.

“So, you admit it’s true?” Jessie asked, stepping forward and now with Mary’s knife mere millimetres from her breast.

“You read my mind…when I saw myself…in the bathroom mirror yesterday,…and you know…that I didn’t like…how my body looked,…and you used your magic…to change my appearance,” Mary said in sobs.

“Don’t you like how it looks now? You wanted your body to please me more. It didn’t have to be changed. I liked your body as it was, with all of its supposed imperfections. I can change it back, if you wish.”

“N-no.” Mary kept sobbing. “But you seduced me…made me fornicate with you. You robbed me…of my faith in God.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

Her face contorting with rage, Mary brought up the knife, ready to stab Jessie in the chest.

“You won’t kill me, Mary. You’re in love with me.”

Mary stood dazed for several seconds.

“Y-yes, I am.” Mary lowered her head, brought her arm down, and let the knife fall to the floor. Now she was sobbing loudly. Jessie put her arms around her.

“No!” Mary said. “Let me take this off first. If I’m going to sin with you, at least let me not dishonour the habit.”

Jessie helped her remove the tunic and guimpe, revealing–to Mary’s shock–a black corset with red lacing, and knee-high black boots with high heels, with red crosses on the knees.

“How did these get here?” Mary asked with a gasp, then she looked at Jessie, realizing how foolish her question was.

Jessie smirked lewdly as she looked at Mary. “I like it.”

“Well, I don’t. It’s tasteless. Help me take it all off. I’d rather be as nude as you; it would feel less indecent.”

“Very well; as you wish,” Jessie said, still smiling at the sight.

Mary, now nude, turned off the light, and they got into bed.

Jessie lay on her back, and Mary got on top of her. They exchanged kisses on each other’s lips, cheeks, and necks. Mary cupped Jessie’s breasts in her hands, giving them slight, gentle squeezes. Jessie fondled Mary’s bottom, giving the cheeks stronger squeezes.

They were rubbing their crotches against each other, then they put their legs in a scissor-position, rubbing their vulvas against each other and feeling their clits getting harder, and their labia swelling, moistening all over.

They were so focused on their pleasure that they paid no attention to how voices can carry. Their sighs, moans, and squeals were getting higher and higher-pitched, and louder and louder. The squeaking of the bed was getting louder and faster in rhythm, too. The wide-open window was no help in keeping the crescendo of their sin a secret.

A few members of the convent passed by their cell and heard the approaching climax. One nun peeked in the window, but saw only grinding silhouettes in the dark. The other passers-by were on the other side, listening at the door.

Finally, Father Funn rammed into the door, breaking it open. The other nuns came in after, one of them turning on the light and exposing the nakedness of the lovers, who never bothered pulling the blankets on themselves, it being such a hot summer night.

Their viewers were in bathrobes and slippers. Mary tried to pull the blanket over her body, but Funn stopped her.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “Both of you will come with us as you are. There will be no hiding of the truth.”

Mary walked out of the cell in tears, her hands covering her breasts and crotch. Jessie, walking beside her with her arms at her sides, made no attempt to cover her nakedness; she kept a lewd smirk on her face that Mary couldn’t understand. Funn walked behind both of them, his eyes never straying away from the sight of their tasty buttocks.

Mary and Jessie were taken to the open-air court area in the middle of the convent. All the other nuns were assembled there, in their bathrobes and slippers. All were looking at the naked duo with expressionless faces that weeping Mary could barely make out in the dark, with only moonlight and starlight to keep the black from being absolute. Not knowing what they were thinking, while imagining they could only be judging and condemning her sin with Jessie, was torturing Mary. Jessie, on the other hand, just kept smirking.

A bench was in the middle of the large courtyard, with two paddles lying at its sides. Mary and Jessie were taken there.

“Kneel before the bench,” Funn said. “Put your heads on the seat. Don’t move.” He picked up the paddles and gave one to one of the nuns. “Cooperate, you two, and this will be over with in a few minutes.”

He and the nun called out numbers with every whack they gave Mary’s and Jessie’s buttocks. Both girls screamed with each strike: Mary, bawling; Jessie, grinning.

“Jesus, help me!” Mary wept between screams. “Beat the sin…Oww!…out of me!…Oww!“

“Oww!” Jessie screamed. “You’re making my…Oww!…bum all red!…Oww!“

Out of the corner of Mary’s teary eye, she saw something odd.

The nuns all removed their bathrobes and kicked off their slippers. They were now as naked as she and Jessie were.

“Twenty!” Funn and the other paddler called out.

“We’re finished,” he said. He and the nun put down their paddles, then removed their bathrobes and slippers, too.

Mary and Jessie looked behind them, and all around the courtyard. Mary’s eyes and mouth were agape. Jessie was still grinning lewdly.

Everyone there was naked.

Funn was fully erect. Mary looked away with a blush, and back at Jessie.

“They’re all the same as you, Jessie?” Mary asked.

“…and you, now, Mary,” Jessie answered.

“Nuns by day, nudists by night?” Mary asked.

“Think of it as a dialectic of asceticism and eroticism,” Jessie explained. “We worship the Lord by day, and the Lady by night.”

“Lady? This indecency is worshipping the Blessed Virgin?”

“Look up in the night sky and see the Lady in her half-moon phase,” Jessie explained. “Half lit up, half dark. There is the Goddess, known by many names: Luna, Selena, Mary, Nut, Ishtar, Inanna, and so on. And in the daytime, there is the Lord, also known by many names: Sol Invictus, Helios, Jesus, Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, etc.”

“You’re all pagans? This is blasphemy!”

“Is the largely unpunished sexual abuse of children by priests, of nuns, any less blasphemous to the Church?” Jessie challenged. “At least we’re honest with our sexuality here.”

“As for your question of paganism, I think I can explain, Mary,” Father Funn said. “We here are a dialectical mix of pagan and Christian, to be exact. When we do our daily charity, we are sincerely Christian, but also because the world–being as prejudiced as it is against paganism–would only accept charity from the Church. But enough of this! Let’s get on with tonight’s ritual! Our weekly orgy must be done, to raise power and spread the energy of real love, grounded in the body, throughout the world, to save it from war, greed, and hate!”

“But people outside will hear, and suspect us,” Mary said.

“Not with our magic, which has, if you will, soundproofed the area,” said the nun next to the priest (Mary noticed a genuine tattoo on her upper leg; it said…Motorhead? She must have been the nun Mary saw on her first day here!). “Nobody outside will hear a thing; don’t worry.”

“But an orgy?” Mary said. “I don’t want to be involved in an orgy.” She looked over at Jessie. “I love you, and you alone. I don’t want to make love with anyone else. What I’m doing with you is fornication enough!”

“Very well,” Jessie said with a smile as she got on top of Mary. “You and I will have only each other.”

They resumed their tribadism there on the grass. Funn entered the tattooed nun. Though Mary and Jessie looked only in each other’s eyes, they heard a surrounding sea of moans and sighs. All the other nuns paired up, engaging in the licking, kissing, and fingering of vulvas, or with lips wrapped around nipples.

The group sex had a ritualized rhythm, with synchronized grinding and groaning. Everyone’s sighs and squeals rose together in pitch and volume, getting faster and faster, and resulting in a collective orgasmic scream.

As everyone lay back on the grass, panting with satisfaction, Mary looked up at the stars with a grin.

Whether the Queen of Heaven was Mary or the moon-goddess no longer mattered to her.

Jessie was right.

Mary was now free.

*************

The next morning, the nuns arrived in a van at a homeless shelter near downtown, delivering used clothes there. As they all cheerfully took the boxes of clothes off the van and gave them to the volunteer workers at the shelter, Mary found herself looking at Jessie’s pretty face as often as she could.

That mix of the sensual and the saintly that she saw in Jessie, knowing what delights her habit was hiding, made Mary all the more in love with her. She looked up at the shining, hot sun–the Lord, the Son, Helios, Tammuz, whichever–and smiled, waiting for the glowing Lady to peek out of the darkness that night.

She licked her lips, wanting more of that tea.