Dealing with the sorceress

Rob’s dream-self in the first Gnosis dreamscape is so desperate for the love of Michiko Maeda’s dream-self oriental princess that he resorts to the rather dangerous assistance of a sorceress.

And I enjoyed writing that, because I have something of a weakness for sorceresses. Goes along with being a thaumatophile, I guess. Every time I have the chance to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I try to stop by and gaze at this painting, which was probably my initial visual inspiration for the sorceress scene.

Domenico Guidobono (1668–1746), "Allegory"

That’s good. Woman. Book. Assorted supernatural stuff that I can’t decode. But perhaps a little better from my perspective is this image (possibly of Circe) by the English Pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse.

John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917), "Sorceress"

Woman. Book. And still better for the mad science lover, some sort of flask or beaker right in front of her. A good image if you think that the sexist organ a woman has is her brain.

But of course Rob’s dream is an oriental fantasy, so we need an image from orientalist art to really make the visual image work. Fortunately, I have one.

Friedrich von Amerling (1803 - 1887), "The Oriental" (click through for larger image)

Woman. Book. Play of light in an oriental setting. Works for me for the sorceress!

In the garden of Eden…

Right after the super-patriotic, brave, helpful, clean, young Special Forces Lieutenant John Samson provides a demonstration of his enhanced manliness for Colonel Madder, the Colonel gives us a little theology lesson, about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden:

Albert von Keller (1844 - 1920), "Adam und Eva" (1900). What do you suppose Eve is looking at in this picture?

Colonel Madder tells us that in Eden, Adam was able to achieve an erection by wholly voluntary means, and experienced no lust, and that now Lieutenant Samson, thanks to government mad science, is in the same position. And the Colonel attributes this peculiar view to St. Augustine.

Fictional license on Dr. Faustus’s part? Ha! The fact is that Augustine devotes chapter upon chapter of De civitate dei, his most important single work, staging an amazing festival of sex-negativity, in which he ponders at length such important matters as “Of Shame which Attends all Sexual Intercourse.” And we find, in Book XIV, Chapter 24 of this theological magnum opus, the following clever bit of argument.

Seminaret igitur prolem uir, susciperet femina genitalibus membris, quando id opus esset et quantum opus esset, uoluntate motis, non libidine concitatis. Neque enim ea sola membra mouemus ad nutum, quae conpactis articulata sunt ossibus, sicut manus et pedes et digitos, uerum etiam illa, quae mollibus remissa sunt neruis, cum uolumus, mouemus agitando et porrigendo producimug et torquendo flectimus et constringendo duramus, sicut ea sunt, quae in ore ac facie, quantum potest, uoluntas mouet. Pulmones denique ipsi omnium, nisi medullarum, mollissimi uiscerum et ob hoc antro pectoris communiti, ad spiritum ducendum ac remittendum uocemque emittendam seu modificandam, sicut folles fabrorum uel organorum, flantis, respirantis, loquentis, clamantis, cantantis seruiunt uoluntati. Omitto quod animalibus quibusdam naturaliter inditum est, ut tegmen, quo corpus omne uestitur, si quid in quocumque loco eius senserint abigendum, ibi tantum moueant, ubi sentiunt, nec solum insidentes muscas, uerum etiam haerentes hastas cutis tremore discutiant. Numquid quia id non potest homo, ideo Creator quibus uoluit animantibus donare non potuit? Sic ergo et ipse homo potuit oboedientiam etiam inferiorum habere membrorum, quam sua inoboedientia perdidit. Neque enim Deo difficile fuit sic illum condere, ut in eius carne etiam illud non nisi eius uoluntate moueretur, quod nunc nisi libidine non mouetur.

The man, then, would have sown the seed, and the woman received it, as need required, the generative organs being moved by the will, not excited by lust. For we move at will not only those members which are furnished with joints of solid bone, as the hands, feet, and fingers, but we move also atwill those which are composed of slack and soft nerves: we can put them in motion, or stretch them out, or bend and twist them, or contract and stiffen them, as we do with the muscles of the mouth and face. The lungs, which are the very tenderest of the viscera except the brain, and are therefore carefully sheltered in the cavity of the chest, yet for all purposes of inhaling and exhaling the breath, and of uttering and modulating the voice, are obedient to the will when we breathe, exhale, speak, shout, or sing, just as the bellows obey the smith or the organist. I will not press the fact that some animals have a natural power to move a single spot of the skin with which their whole body is covered, if they have felt on it anything they wish to drive off—a power so great, that by this shivering tremor of the skin they can not only shake off flies that have settled on them, but even spears that have fixed in their flesh. Man, it is true, has not this power; but is this any reason for supposing that God could not give it to such creatures as He wished to possess it? And therefore man himself also might very well have enjoyed absolute power over his members had he not forfeited it by his disobedience; for it was not difficult for God to form him so that what is now moved in his body only by lust should have been moved only at will.

Colonel Madder’s point exactly. You can find the relevant Latin text of Book XIV here, and an English translation here. I can make lots of strange shit up, but not this.

Just to recap here: St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Doctor of the Church, and the most important Christian writer in the thirteen-century span between St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas, went on for sentence after sentence in his most important work speculating about the exact psychological mechanism through which Adam got his pecker up before the fall.

I wonder what the pious “family values” types would have to say about this, if they knew. Which I’m pretty sure they don’t.

_Gnosis Dreamscapes_ now available

The fifth Gnosis College script, Gnosis Dreamscapes, is now available. Professor Rebecca Waite is busy with new and highly-questionable experimental undertakings, proving that you can’t keep a good mad scientist down, while meanwhile our various heroes and heroines are up against it, facing a more motivated enemy than they ever did before. Am I making a spoiler if I say that whether they all make it, or several do not make it, depends rather centrally on what theory you hold in the metaphysics of personal identity? Also, there be pirates in this script. Really! So surf over…and enjoy.

Traveling by tube

Dr. Strangeways feels no small dismay when whatever rogue government operation he’s ultimately working for decides to dispose of his experimental material, but that’s an occupational hazard of being a mad scientist on Uncle Sam’s payroll. Dr. Faustus, on the other hand, delights in the image of naked girls, suspended in their tubes of nutritive and respirative fluid. That’s real mad science for you, and squee for the thaumatophile. (It’s also an opportunity to get the sinister Frau Kupler and her operation back into the plot, and set up more mischief, which will be coming in future scripts.)

Whence this peculiar image? There are many possible sources and precedents, which I’ll discuss in this and future posts, but the one that stands out most in my imagination is from a typically whacked-out Hong Kong movie, a live action version of a Japanese animated movie called Wicked City.

There are different races of humans and non-humans occupying parallel dimensions and villainous monsters and some kind of terrible super-drug and doomed inter-species love and…oh, I give up. I can’t really make that much sense of it, but there is a scene in which a non-human character named Gaye, played by the lovely Michelle Reis, gets captured by the human authorities and suspended in a tube full of fluid for some reason. I’m mean, I’m sure it was vital to, uh, National Security or something that she be naked and on display.

I’ve done my best with the images, which are blurry and poorly lit in the film. We do get one close-up.

Unlike the luckless State Home inhabitants, Gaye does get liberated in rather spectacular fashion, when her boyfriend shows up, punches out the technician on duty, and shatters the tube.

Depositing Gaye on the floor. If you ask nice, I might just post a picture of that as well.

It didn’t influence the writing of the scene, but I was tickled to find the tireless Drake over at Medusarrific (issue #33, p. 15) diverted momentarily from his more typical set of stories of beautiful women who unexpectedly turn into stone, plastic, or gold statues to explore the girls-in-tubes theme. He even hit the mad science theme right on the money.

I won’t provide an enlarged version here — I encourage you to visit Medusarrific for that.

Black Mass

What with all the generalized do-badding, and all the uses and abuses of religious settings going on around Gnosis, I guess it would only be a matter of time before someone decided on performing a Black Mass.

Félicien Rops (1833 - 1898), "Black Mass" (or "The Sacrifice") 1883

Just not that kind of Black Mass, fond as we all can be of Félicien Rops (intriguing gallery here).

This kind of Black Mass.

Alexander Scriabin‘s Sonata No. 9, performed here by naughty (but clearly virtuosic) young Arthur Kaufman, first seen in Invisible Girl, Heroine precipitating an orgy. A talented young man indeed!

The point at which Maureen walks in on him to settle his hash respecting the aphrodisiac she stole from him is approximately here in the score.

The dynamics marking in the score at the end of the crescendo shown in the third measure is only f, but I have yet to hear a recording of this work in which the performer interpreted that to mean anything other than “wicked loud.” I wouldn’t know how to characterize the technical demands of this piece other than “wicked difficult.” Small wonder Maureen had little trouble dropping in on Arthur.

And if you want to see it performed, you’re in luck, because YouTube has Yevgeny Sudbin doing just that.

Scarier than some old ritual with daggers and alters, or at least so it seems to me.

That astonishing power

At least twice in my life I’ve had the experience of being overwhelmed by arousal at a fantasy that simply brewed up while on a long walk when my mind had a chance to wander. An early version of the Apsinthion Protocol was one of these; it happened to me as a graduate student walking back from the university library very late (they had kicked me out at closing time, 1 a.m. as I recall). Maybe it was just fatigue or weary confusion from too many hours spent among obscure tomes, but I found myself jogging along through the lonely dark wondering if I would make it home without…well, you know.

(The first time I attempted to write down something like the Apsinthion Protocol happened as a way of distracting myself during a really boring academic colloquium I attended sometime later. I was sitting at the back of the room. Given the extent to which so many academic colloquia resemble collective wanking sessions, perhaps my behavior was less inappropriate than it might otherwise seem.)

Something like Strangeways’s obscene technology, building on the conceit that female orgasm is such a powerful force that properly channeled it can rend the fabric of reality and result in spontaneous teleportation, was also something that inconveniently occurred to me on a long walk, this on a hot summer day, this in search of a video rental outlet that I had heard had a more interesting sci-fi collection than the ones in town. The fantasy that happened then was of subjects who voluntarily did this — there is something about that leap into the unknown that I find astonishingly compelling as fantasy. The conceit (one that Vinnie Tesla has also explored) lies at the base of both Strangeways’s technology and also the very strange ritual that Maureen will eventually learn about.

Promised you I was strange, didn’t I?

(And the trip to that video store? Paid off. I was able to rent a VHS copy of Galaxy of Terror, a cult-fave that’s pretty hard to find.)

Demonic male animals

And just in case you think that the reflections in the most recent post but this about the potential for carnal relations between human women and non-human animals were just the the work of an eccentric turn-of-the-century psychologist fixated on the site of women urinating, consider the following from a much more current scientist, Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham in his 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.

Nature is dangerous.

In the lion’s den

The strange encounter which Dr. Strangeways makes inmate Sandy submit to has its own long pedigree. And not just in art, or in mad science, but what is arguably real science as well.

The possibility of sexual excitement between women and animals involves a certain degree of sexual ecitability in animals from contact with women. Darwin stated that there could be no doubt that various qadrumanous animals could distinguish women from men–in the first place probably by smell and secondarily by sight–and be thus liable to sexual excitement. He quotes the opinions on this point of Youatt, Brehm, Sir Andrew Smith and Cuvier (Descent of Man, second edition, p. 8). Moll quotes the opinion of an experienced observer to the same effect (Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis, Bd. i, p. 429). Bloch (Op. cit., p. 280, et seq.)… discusses the same point; he does not consider that animals will of their own motion sexually cohabit with women, but that they may be easily trained to it.

—Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume V

So I guess now we can figure out what gave Strangeways the idea, yes?

Pertinent artistic representations exist, at least erotica involving women and big cats:

I have yet to find a <em>photographic</em> example of a model in tight with a lion, though perhaps that’s a bit too much to expect (the most elementary kinds of safety considerations make it clear that some things are only for fantasy). I regret not having handy an image of a woman in media coitus the way Sandy finds herself (even less likely as a photograph, certainly!) Though images suggesting leonine sexual menace certain can be found, such as on the paperback cover to the left.

And that’s hardly surprising. For not only is the lion a powerful and threatening animal, but it’s also a real-world example of astonishing sexual stamina (a subject I’ve touched on a little bit in the blogosphere before). If Wikipedia can be believed, a pair of mating lions will copulate 20-40 times per day. Strangeways’s first round of test subjects must have been very busy.

It’s good to be King. Or maybe Queen. Or maybe both!

Strangeways’s machine II — golden girls

That Strangeways’s elaborate, will-subverting sex machine involves the temporary growing of a golden “second skin” on its occupants is a fantasy that has a pretty obvious origin, one that I and probably millions of others encountered on television as an adolescent.

Yep, Goldfinger (1964). Probably no one could have gotten away with showing that much of Shirley Eaton in a mainstream movie (or in 1970s-80s television) had she not been wearing all that gold paint. But as it was, they could, and she because the stuff that erotic dreams would be made of, for decades.

And perhaps even today. There’s at least one guy out there who’s seems to have been far more influenced by this scene than I. (Possibly Drake at Medusariffic was also more swayed by it, although Drake’s A.S.F.R. thing involves the whole woman turning to gold, rather than just being coated with it.) This is a German artist who’s taken for himself the name of Goldfinger and made an entire fetish of the gold body paint thing, with spectacular results. Like this…

And this…

And (oh my) this…

I was directed to Goldfinger’s fetish work by this post by Michael Blowhard, which links to all sorts of other good stuff, including the only example known to me oferotic Russian-language hip hop that uses an accordian. [Update on May 6, 2018: The old link appears to be long-since broken, but you can find the video in the Internet Archive. You can find the Russian-language lyrics here and the English-language lyrics (with some mistakes that don’t account for the fact that some of Nastya’s exclamations are in Italian) here.] Really.

Strangeways’s machine I

Sometimes catching little snippets of a sci-fi story is highly evocative, perhaps even more so that the story itself. I had something of that experience a few months back when Bacchus at ErosBlog sent me a link to this posting of an oddity over at the online fanzineShowcase.

The point of the posting is to show us something form an old British magazine called Zeta, published in 1968.

This issue was devoted to a weird science fiction story. It was hard to make much sense of the story from the post (probably because the story didn’t make a huge amount of sense to begin with) but there were some intriguing text-image combinations, including one of a woman in a machine:

“What are you doing to me?” Now, I think that the story here is actually that this woman is being abducted as part of a weird all-woman Mars Needs Women-type scenario. But the curious thing is, I think I find the text-image combination here more erotic if I don’t have, or can put out of my mind the original “genuine” context, because it is at that point that one’s imagination can go to work and start filling in the story that I like.

And I hope that perhaps it can also be the basis for beginning to fill in the story you like.