Tag Archives: religion

Progress in Research: Chapter Three, Page Eleven

The aftermath

Lola has been buttfucked but good.

(Click on the image for larger size. Creative Commons License
Progress in Research: Chapter Three, Page Eleven written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

It’s tricky to find a really good image for something as dramatic as this, but I shall note that if you go to Goolge and do an image search on “anal sex Jesus” you can come up with some very curious artifacts, like this one, which some alert person photographed and which does seem thematically apropos.

No, I don’t know how to interpret this either, really, but it can be found at Llama Republic.

Progress in Research: Chapter One, Cover

March is now here, and you all must know what that means: a new volume of the Tales of Gnosis College is beginning its serialization. And Lon has come up with a real corker of a cover to start the new volume, one which draws on a grand old tradition in European visual and literary arts. Who are these young people, and how did they find themselves in this rather awkward-looking predicament? You’ll have to read the chapter to find out…

Two naked young people chained to a dungeon wall, dominated by a nun!

(Click on the image for larger size. Creative Commons License
Progress in Research: Chapter One, Cover written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

Slavery morals

Let it not be said that Colonel Madder is an amoral individual.  Clearly he thinks things like Marie’s abduction through.

MADDER

(handing him the dossier)

Transmit this to the Kupler op, and make arrangements to receive a transfer into the special operations account.

HORST

(leafing through the dossier)

She’s very pretty. Are you sure nothing about these ops bother you, sir?

MADDER

(leans back, calmly)

Nothing in either Hebrew or Greek scriptures forbids slavery, Horst, and some of us are inclined to the view that its classification as an evil is merely a heresy of secular liberals. Did not St. Paul himself enjoin slaves to obey their masters? In any event, we are having no one killed, and as long as the girl still lives, there will be an opportunity for repentance, as I once explained to your predecessor, prior to his unfortunate disappearance.

HORST

The girl will suffer terribly, I do not doubt.

MADDER

The evil of suffering is another liberal heresy, Horst. The presence of suffering reminds us of our fallen nature and brings us closer to God.

HORST

It is heartening to see that you have thought this through, sir.

And that’s worth reflecting on, and not just because it’s an opportunity for posters like me to post from the world’s abundant collection of slave-market art.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, "Slave Auction in Rome"

No, clearly this is an opportunity to look a little more at Colonel Madder’s reading, because when he tells us that nothing in the Greek or Hebrew scriptures forbids slavery, he’s not making it up.  And he could have gotten it from Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation.  Read below, or if the embedding doesn’t work, follow this link.

Food for thought.

Henri-Frederic Schopin, "The Slave Market" (detail)

Back in my graduate school days we sometimes had a saying:  “One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens,” and that seems to be true here.

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.

Invisible Jesus sex

Maureen Creel sure stumbles on something unorthodox when she tries to figure out who (or what) is shtupping Lola in the chapel.

As the distinguished proprietor of Bondage Blog has observed and as I have myself argued on occasion, there’s kind of a submission and suffering kink going on in Christianity.  Here are the first two verses of real hymn that neither of us is making up:

1.	Make me a captive, Lord,
	and then I shall be free.
	Force me to render up my sword,
	and I shall conqueror be.
	I sink in life's alarms
	when by myself I stand;
	imprison me within thine arms,
	and strong shall be my hand. 

2.	My heart is weak and poor
	until it master find;
	it has no spring of action sure,
	it varies with the wind.
	It cannot freely move
	till thou hast wrought its chain;
	enslave it with thy matchless love,
	and deathless it shall reign.

Full words along with a score and midi music available here, if you’re interested.

Unsurprisingly, someone is willing to push the metaphor, and not just weirdos like me.  There’ a real sex toy — honest! — called the Jackhammer Jesus, a crucifix in the form of the dildo, so I’m not making up some weird fetish just to advance the plot.

“Invisible man having sex with girls” is of course also a well-established trope — I had to throw in the anal Jesus thing just to give it a touch of originality.  You might well be familiar with it’s appearance in comics especially.  It shows up, for example, in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill‘s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a story of a group of late-Victorian characters (many with mad-scientist origins) who group together to fight the enemies of the British Empire.  The Invisible Man is one of them.  He is first “seen” in the series in a girls school, busily having his way with the students (some of whom, impregnated, interpret their experiences as divine visitations).

And of course there is also always that classic of European comic-book erotica, Milo Manara‘s Butterscotch, which has a merry time with the whole Invisible Man theme.

As with so many kinks, the roots of this one turn out to be ancient.  Remember that we have asked before the question about why people put so much energy into thinking about possible morality-free zones?  Well, as it turns out, people in fifth and fourth century B.C.E. Athens were thinking about this as well.    In Book II of Plato‘s Republic, Glaucon, a young companion of Socrates, challenges Socrates on the value of justice using — you guessed it! — a story about an invisible man.

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result-when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.

So now Glaucon, who’s clearly been giving the matter a lot of thought, quickly jumps into the “invisible man having sex” theme, before swiftly moving into the more philosophical challenge.

Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other;,no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.

Whole text available here, in case any of you want to see how it ends.

Nuns behaving badly

Well, young Willie sure manages to get himself into a complicated and interesting scrape through his illicit invasion of the Magdalene College facilities.

That he should do so is not too surprising in the context of the Gnosis College fictional world, which of course draws on ever pornographic tradition I can find that I find at all interesting.  And as I’ve noted before, anything involving closure, secrets, hiddeness is likely to provoke interesting erotic speculation and narrative.   And convents, and cloistering girls’ schools, doubly so.  In the near term, as many readers of this blog will already know, there is a tradition of movies called “nunsploitation,” which is exactly what it sounds like and even has entire sites devoted to its exploration.  Talk about kink!

The whole kink goes back much further than ’70s exploitation cinema, of course.  The Italian poet Pietro Aretino (1492 – 1556) is regarded by some as the inventor of modern pornography.  He wrote a famous dialog between a cortesean and her career-minded daughter, the Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia, the first part of which contains an extensive discussion of the putative sexual habits of nuns.  (For those of you who like that sort of thing, I am happy to report it is now available in English translation under the title The Secret Life of Nuns from Hesperus Press.)  And of course, we must also note that the immortal Diderot wrote (originally as a prank)  a book about a girl in a convent called La Religieuse, (French-language text here) in which simmering lesbian desire plays no small role.

But probably none of the sources surpass what when on in the imagination of the Marquis de Sade, whose Historie de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du Vice contains the following scene (the translation I use is taken from Camille Paglia‘s Sexual Personae, p. 241.  The original French text is taken from here.)

Les religieuses bolonaises possèdent, plus qu’aucune autre femme de l’Europe, l’art de gamahucher des cons …délicieuses créatures ! je n’oublierai jamais vos charmes…Ce fut là, mes amis, où j’exécutai ce que les Italiennes appellent le chapelet. Toutes, munies de godemichés et placées dans une salle immense, nous nous enfilâmes au nombre de cent ; les grandes en con, les petites en cul, pour ménager les pucelages. Une des plus âgées se mettait à chaque neuvaine, on l’appelait le pater ; celles-là seules avaient le droit de parler : elles commandaient les décharges, elles prescrivaient les déplacements, et présidaient généralement à tout l’ordre de ces singulières orgies. The Bolognese nun possess the art of cunt-sucking in a higher degree than any other female on the European continent…Delicious creatures! I shall ever sing your memor…It was there, my friend, that I executed what Italian woman call the rosary: all fitted out with dildoes and gathered in a great hall, we would thread ourselves one to the next, there would be a hundred on the chain; though those who were tall in ran by the cunt, by the ass through those who were short; an elder was placed at each novena, they were the paternoster beads and had the right to speak: they gave the signal for discharges, directed the movements and evolutions, and presided in general over the order of those unusual orgies.

“One hundred nuns linked by dildoes!” commented Professor Paglia, perhaps a little breathlessly.  “The style of Busby Berkely or the Radio City Rockettes.”

What a shame, really, that the divine Marquis was condemned to live in a world of only eighteenth-century technology and before science fiction had really been invented.  I mean, I guess I’m doing okay, using nuns and ropes and electric motors and natural young-man concupiscence to convert advernturous Willie into the core living component of a room-sized fucking machine.  There’s a decent mad-science feel there, I hope. But just think of what Sade might have done if he had had cyberpunk or steampunk or even just Frankenstein to read!

Whatever he came up with would surely have been worthy of inclusion in Lucien’s library, right up there with the score of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il re Lear and Shakespeare’s history play Richard Nixon.