(from The Smart Set, March, 1922)

THRENODY.— Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a day when Jupiter was the king of all the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And what of Huitzilopochtli? In one year — and it was but five hundred years ago — no less than 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remem-
bered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried on with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted, he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, he is now the peer of General Coxey, Richmond P. Hobson, Nan Patterson, Alton G. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey.

Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother, Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was almost as powerful: he consumed 25,000 virgins a year. Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles! But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quetzdcoatl is? Or Tlaloc? Or Chalchihuftlicue? Or Xiehtecutii? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazoltcotl, the goddess of love ? Or Mictlan? Or Ixtlilton? Or Omacatl? Or Yacatecutli? Or Mixcoatl? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitles? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of hell do they await the resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Or that of Tarvos, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods as violently as they now hate the English. But today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them.

But they have company in oblivion: the hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsalluta, and Deva, and Belisama, and Axona, and Vintios, and Taranucus, and Stdis, and Cocidius, and Adsmcrius, and Dumiatis, and Caletos, and Moccus, and Ollovidius, and Albiorix, and Leucitius, and Vitucadrus, and Ogmios, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose — all gods of the first class, not pikers. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them — temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, wizards, archdeacons, evangelists, haruspices, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels: villages were burned, women and children were butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence. Worse, the very tombs in which they lie are lost, and so even a respectful stranger is debarred from paying them the slightest and politest homage.

What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley?
What has become of:

Resheph
Baal
Anath
Astarte
Ashtoreth
Hadad
El
Addu
Nergal
Shalem
Nebo
Dagon
Ninib
Sharrab
Melek
Yau
Ahijah
Amon-Re
Isis
Osiris
Ptah
Sebek
Anubis
Molech

All these were once gods of the highest class. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Jahveh himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor or Wotan. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following;

Bile
Gwydion
Ler
Manawyddan
Arianrod
Nuada Argetlam
Morrigu
Tadg
Govannon
Goibniu
Gundfled
Odin
Sokk-mimi
Llaw Gyffes
Memctona
Lieu
Dagda
Ogma
Kerridwen
Mider
Pwyll
Rigantona
Ogyrvan
Marzin
Dea Dia
Mars
Ceres
Jupiter
Vaticanus
Cunina
Edulia
Potina
Adeona
Statilinus
Iuno Lucina
Diana of Rhesus
Saturn
Robigus
Furrina
Pluto
Vediovis
Ops
Consus
Meditrina
Cronos
Vesta
Enki
Tilmun
Engurra
Zer-panitu
Belus
Merodach
Dimmer
U-ki
Mu-ul-lil
Dauke
Ubargisi
Gasan-abzu
Ubilulu
Elum
Gasan-lil
U-TinHlir ki
U-dimmer-an-kia
Marduk
Enurestu
Nin-HMa
U-sab-sib
Kin
U-Mersi
Persophone
Tammuz
Istar
Venus
Lagas
Bau
U-urugal
Hulu-hursang
Sirtumu
Anu
Ea
Beltis
Nirig
Nusku
Ncbo
Ni-zu
Samas
Sahi
Ma-banba-aima
Aa
En-Mersi
Allatu
Amurm
Sin
Assur
Abil-Addu
Aku
Apsu
Beltu
Dagan
Dumu-zi-abzu
Elali
Kuski-banda
Isum
Kaawanu
Mami
Nin-azu
Nin-mah
Lugal-Amarada
Zaraqu
Qarradu
Ura-gala
Suqamunu
Zagaga
Ueras

You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask your pastor to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: you will find them all listed. They were all gods of the highest standing and dignity — gods of civilized peoples — worshipped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

Related posts:

1. Wholesale Gods
2. HL Mencken on Christianity and Agnosticism
3. Raising the dead…

Kevin

Axis Mundi was formed as a solo project in 1998 after Joe Morgan and myself dissolved URILLIAsekt. URILLIAsekt has a bootleg video that has been passed around infrequently, but there was no official releases.

I first recorded under my own name “Kevin I. Slaughter”, releasing a cassette tape limited to 9 copies. These nine copies were given out and I think that I’ve lost my own version of it. Shortly after this Heather Fraser began wirking with me on music and in performances, and I released “Popular Music We All Love”

Heather

“Popular Music…” is a compilation of tracks from the first 4 years of Axis Mundi’s musical work. It has been the only full length release to date, and currently we plan on it being the only one.

The CD has been released 4 times in an “official” capacity (whatever that may mean), with each version being slightly different. I have my own very convoluted “artsy-fartsy” reason for doing this, and if you ever meet me and don’t know what to say, you can bring this up and that’ll be good for at least a few minutes of conversation.

I uploaded the tracks to Soundcloud.com so they are available once again (warts and all), and they’re in the last known order/arrangement.

Even the most doltish listener will quickly pick-up on the fact that I stole existing music and sounds with impunity. Most of the work present is more of a collage than song-writing, and at no point do I make the claim of originality or talent for that matter. My most frequently used equipment was a couple of tape decks and a primitive sampler.

The track “Transitional Pulse” is just that, a marker between older tracks and newer (at the time of release).  Some of the tracks are effectively soundtracks to films unmade, some only make sense when they were performed live. There was always a heavily visual aspect to my performances. “Man Sun” is literally a soundtrack to a video, it was a school project where we had to manufacture our own “creation myths”, so I chose the concept of Helter Skelter and produced a psychedelic video montage and the audio that appears here.

“Brocken” was a live performance of Matt G. Paradise’s “A Night on the Brocken” ritual, published originally in his magazine “Not Like Most.”

“Frustration” is a recording of a Dorothy Parker poem, with guitar by Erin C. It’s followed by a sort of remix from a performer I worked with at the time.

The last track is a recording I made of reading an excerpt from a Barnaby Conrad book on bullfighting. .

Axis Mundi “Popular Music We All Love” by Kevin I. Slaughter

Flyer for my 24th birthday show.

I also found a review penned by Tracy Twyman, and I believe it ran in her magazine Dagobert’s Revenge:

Popular Music We All Love
review by Tracy Twyman

Joseph Campbell defined the Axis Mundi as, “the imagined axis linking the Earth’s surface with the lower world (Hell) and the upper world (Heaven) at the metaphoric center of the Earth.” And that is exactly what this CD does, taking you on a trip from the depths of infernal madness and obsessive compulsion, on through the profane and unhallowed mire of our mundane, temporal existence, across the vast, chaotic chasm of Choronzon known as the Abyss, and on into that ineffable and sacrosanct region which we call the Divine, all done in a process of three stages which can be interpreted to represent those three levels of being which I have just described. And yet, oddly enough, the songs on this CD were never meant to be together. As the liner notes explain, “Popular Music’ Is a compilation of tracks derived from live performances and home taping sessions… This is not intended as a standard album, but merely a reflection of an ongoing process.” It is mostly the work of one Mr. Kevin Slaughter, known for his program on the Radio Free Satan broadcast network, along with some help from Heather Fraser and unnamed others.

The first track, “Sound of Music”, is a good example of what it would be like to play your Fisher Price Tone-a-Phone in the sewer. The next track, “Her Muse”, is one of those “depraved ravings” pieces in the vein of Sisyphus Autopsy, written from the point of view of a stalking ex-boyfriend who has captured his prey and is now trying to convince her, probably at gunpoint, that they belong together. On “Thanks for the Memories”, someone mumbles incomprehensibly over an instrumental of “A Kiss is Still a Kiss”, an over-modulated version of “Funky Cold Medina”, and a soup of various static-filled samples. “Popular Media” is perhaps the most wry in its humor, an actual recording of Kevin Slaughter calling up a radio talk show to discuss “racialist music”, including the moronic comments made by the host of the program. And in “Mi Amore”, women scream as their bodies are cast into the flaming pits of Hell. The last track, “Man Sun”, is very interesting, as the narrator explains concepts of infinity, eternity, God, Abraxas, dualism, unity, and equilibrium, mixed with reenactments of speeches made by Charles Manson and his followers. As more of a “stream of consciousness” piece than an act of premeditation, this compilation works very well. I’d like to see what they do when they plan it out ahead of time. A more standard full-length CD entitled, Love Songs, is scheduled for release in the coming months.

 

In addition, while I was at it at least, I’ve uploaded some miscellaneous tracks that were never released properly. First is an unfinished recreation of a novelty album first released on 78 titled “Hard to Get“. I don’t know the orig. artist name or anything at this point, but the female voice is my dear friend Erin:

Hard To Get by Kevin I. Slaughter

And finally (unless I find other junk on my hard drive to append here), this is a track created for an HP Lovecraft tribute compilation CD that was cut from the final release. The title of the track is “Invocation Inebriation“:

Invocation Inebriation by Kevin I. Slaughter

Related posts:

1. The Seafarer, a self-portrait of Kevin I. Slaughter
2. A Titillating Tale of Love (ebook) Vintage Smut
3. Kevin I. Slaughter on Nerve.com

I plan on having it recorded and then edited and up on YouTube, but I cannot say how long it will take.

I thought I’d post something I found archived away in some dark subfolder on an old hard drive, to entertain you while I’m gone. I will be tweeting some, I’m sure, and you can follow me there.

The date stamp on the text file for this shows 3/12/2005. I don’t know where it came from…. I’ve fixed a few typos, but there may be more.

The Black Mass

The whys and wherefores of the most abominable of all sexual rites. Where Satnism began and where it leads.
by William Lindsay Gresham

“And thou, thou whom, in my quality of priest, I force, whether thou wilt or no, to descend into this host, to incarnate thyself in this bread, Jesus, Artisan of Hoaxes, Bandit of Homage, Robber of Affection, hear! Since the day when thou didst issue from the complaisant bowels of a Virgin, thou hast failed all thine engagements, belied all thy promises. Centuries have wept, awaiting thee, fugitive God, mute God! Thou wast to redeem man and thou hast not, thou wast to appear in thy glory, and thou steepest. Go, lie, say to the wretch who appeals to thee, ‘Hope, be patient, suffer; the hospital of souls will receive thee; the angels will assist thee; Heaven opens to thee.’ Imposter! thou knowest well that the angels, disgusted at thine inertness, abandon thee! Thou wast to be the Interpreter of our plaints, the Chamberlain of our tears; thou wast to convey them to the Father and thou hast not done so, for this intercession would disturb thine eternal sleep of happy satiety. Thou hast forgotten the poverty thou didst preach, Vassal enamoured of Banquets! Thou hast seen the weak crushed beneath the press of profit; thou hast heard the death rattle of the timid, paralyzedby famine, of women disemboweled for a bit of bread, and thou has caused . . . thy commercial representatives, thy Popes, to answer by dilatory promises and evasive excuses, sacristy shyster, huckster God! Master, whose inconceivable ferocity engenders life and inflicts it on the innocent whom thou Barest damn-in the name of what original sin?-whom thou Barest punish-by the virtue of what covenants? -we would have thee confess thine impudent cheats, thine inexpiable crimes! We would drive deeper the nails into thy hands, press down the crown of thorns upon thy brow, bring blood and water from the dry wounds of thy sides. And that we can and will do by violating the quietude of thy body, Profaner of ample vices, Abstractor of stupid purities, cursed Nazarene, do-nothing King, coward God!” This diatribe, nothing if not eloquent, is more than a passage at the climax of one of the world’s most hair-raising novels. It represents the unconscious content of the minds of millions of the faithful, when driven to utter desperation by the “bludgeonings of chance.” The scene in the book is a Black Mass, devoted to the adoration of Satan and the blaspheming of God, being said by an infamous unfrocked priest, Canon Docre. The hero, a writer named Durtal, who is working on a biography of Gilles de Rais, has been taken to the Satanic mass by his mistress, the languorous Mme. Hyacinthe Chantelouve. Disgusted by the obscenities in the violation of the Host, the agnostic Durtal drags his entranced mistress away and into a shabby wineshop for a drink to clear his head. But the publican suggests that they take a room upstairs since they are obviously gentlefolk and the tavern is patronized by riffraff. The room contains a rickety bed, a cracked chamber pot and two chairs. When they are alone Hyacinthe, still in the grip of the Satanic mass, turns to her lover:
“Her eyes were sombre, mad. She enlaced Durtal. `No!’ he shouted, furious at having fallen into this trap. `I’ve had enough of that. It’s late. Your husband is waiting for you. It’s time for you to go back to him-’
“She did not even hear him. `I want you,’ she said, and she took him treacherously and obliged him to desire her. She disrobed, threw her skirts on the floor, opened wide the abominable couch. A look of swooning ecstasy was in her eyes and a smile of joy on her lips. She seized him, and, with ghoulish fury, dragged him into obscenities of whose existence he had never dreamed. Suddenly, when he was able to escape, he shuddered, for he perceived that the bed was strewn with fragments of Hosts . . . he was not absolutely convinced of Transubstantiation-he did not believe very firmly that the Savior resided in that soiled bread-but-in spite of himself, the sacrilege he had involuntarily participated in saddened him.”
The novel ends with the realization of Durtal that Mme. Chantelouve is bad medicine and he had better split fast, which he does. This leaves him (or Huysmans, who is always the
hero of his books) in his chronic state of disgust at the idiocy of human beings. The book was strong meat in 1891. The Victorians loved it.
Joris-Karl Huysmans was the author of “La Bas,” was a desperate little guy-a wary-eyed, quiet, buttoned-up sort of character who spent his life as a clerk in a government office and wrote his novels on the taxpayers’ time. This and the toadying and intrigue necessary to keep his sinecure, probably set up in his unconscious such an operation of self-loathing that he had to project it onto mankind.
He was tormented by the age-old Riddle of Evil or, as it is squeamishly titled by philosophers, “The Ethical Problem.” He finally died reconciled to the Faith of his Fathers but to the last he was hag-ridden by fears and anxieties and could not retire for the night without drawing a magic circle with an imaginary fiery sword about his bed and sealing the doors and windows with holy water.
And he had good cause for anxiety, for he was one of those hypersensitive souls who had thought long and hard about man’s suffering and could not quiet his doubts and indignations by superficial panaceas of radical politics.
He was hooked on the dilemma of Dualism. Unless a person is by nature tough-minded, or has come to terms with Pain and Evil through religion or philosophy, it is better not to dig too deeply into the history of the human race. But in choosing for the subject of his greatest book the Black Mass, Huysmans was able to blow off a lot of steam through the lips of the detestable Canon Docre. This device has probably saved many writers from the foolish farm, or at least helped; the raging aggressions of the unconscious, too horrible to be given conscious expression by our proper selves, can always be foisted on fictional villains.

MY FAVORITE VERSION in English of “La Bas” is a translation with the title “Down There,” made many years ago by my old friend from Greenwich Village days, the poet Keene Wallis. In it, the passages of Durtal’s fictional book on Gilles de Rais and his sodomic slaughter of peasant’s children in his tower set off a chain-reaction of nightmare in my psyche which had farreaching effects. It led, in time, to a study of Satanism, its theological derivations and the folk-ways out of which it grew.
If there is one word which describes the background of the Black Mass it is “confusion.” But some fairly clear points emerge:
The “natural” or folk religion of mankind is a polytheism of good and bad forces or gods, angels and demons. As the tribes grow more complex in their culture and found cities, thinkers emerge. They postulate a First Cause. This cannot, as a creator, be considered Bad or Destructive, else it would be licked before it started in the creation business. The next thought is that out of the original creative force there develop two forces-dark and light, good and bad. How the original Unity manages to bust up into warring factions is just a sample of the natural anthropomorphic tendency of man to make God in his own image and the universe a macrocosm of human society.
While monotheism was not an invention of the Jews, theirs was the first and boldest statement of it in the Western world on a mass level. Christianity, deriving from Judaism, was faced from the first by an embarrassing need to reconcile the God of Love, as preached by the prophets and by Jesus, with the earliest form of Yahweh, the God of Vengeance, found in the older books of the Old Testament.
When one people are conquered by another the gods of the vanquished become demons to the victors. And when Christianity finally overran Europe the old gods fled in all directions. Some became identified in the folk mind with Christian saints, and their worship-or veneration-went on practically without intermission. But there was one of the old order which was banished to outer darkness by the fathers of the Church. This was the Thracian god Dionysus-or Panby Zeus out of Semele, the earth-goddess; his symbol was the black goat or simply the phallus. He was in charge of fertility and of the vine. And a festival in his honor was quite a whing-ding, with animal sacrifices, generous drinking and you-know-what.
The Church found that you can take the peasant out of paganism-by decree-a lot easier than you can take the paganism out of the peasant. And for centuries, side by side with Christian worship, were held Sabbats, attended by thousands of the country people, in which a “priestess” or officiating witch approached the black statue of the goat-man, the old god Dionysus, now re-named Satan by the Church. She lit a torch from the blazing brand set between his horns, and went into a liturgy which began: “Save us, Lord Satan, from treachery and violence.” She then kissed the phallus of the image, and on occasion lowered herself upon it in ritual coitus.
Being saved from “treachery and violence” took on a very specific meaning as the ages passed in Europe and the feudal lords became ever more grasping, gold-hungry and brutal. The Sabbat became a folk-ceremony, invoking the Old Power against the God of the cathedrals-and the rich barons who had taken Him over, according to the tillers of the soil. The French historian, Jules Michelet, author of the classic book, “Satanism and Witchcraft,” works himself up into a fine lather of rage at the enormities perpetrated on the common people by the barons. From our more sophisticated age we can argue that they were probably no worse than a bad case of the Third Reich.
The workings of the peasant mindare obvious-”God helps the baron and his soldiers rob us and rape our daughters. God is the enemy of Satan.Therefore Satan is on our side; let us pray to him.”
Thus the ancient Sabbat is one tributary of the Black Mass. There is another, and again, it derives from the reaction of men under unbearable conditions.
There is an important fact about the development of Christianity which we are hardly likely to learn in Sunday school and this is what it was really like to live as a Christian in Rome between A.D. 30 and A.D. 400. It must have been like trying to live, raise your children, worship God and transact your business, in a town where a lynching is going on constantly. For this mass lynching was the spirit of the “games” which politicians put on to keep the mob quiet and buy themselves into office. The Emperor Trajan, in 107 A.D., to celebrate his conquest of Dacia, sponsored a series of “games” which went on for 122 days; in addition to the chariot races and other events, the crowd was sent into screaming ecstasies by the slaughter of 10,000 animals and 11,000 people.

A HERESY started early in the days of the Church, and I think it did not have to be imported from the Balkans or anywhere else. I think it grew out of such a scene as this:
A young Christian merchant, on returning to Rome from a business voyage, finds that his wife and children have been scooped in by one of the periodic round-ups of Christians to provide victims for the games. He wishes to die with them, but is dissuaded by his friends since he holds an important position in the church. All efforts to spring his family by bribery fail, or else he simply cannot raise the money. He is drawn to the arena on the fateful day by an impulse he cannot deny, hoping that his prayers can shorten their torments. After an elaborate program of bear-baiting, setting foxes afire after their tails are drenched with oil, and gladiatorial combats, the Christians are brought out, the women naked, their hands tied behind them. They are fixed to stakes driven in the sand. Then their children are paraded before them; the girls are raped by specially trained leopards, the boys torn to pieces by mastiffs. Our young Christian’s wife is hung head-down while a pack of half-starved hyenas tear off her face and breasts. Still alive, she is lowered, again tied to the post, her abdomen sliced open and her viscera drawn out and given to dogs to worry and fight over. Finally, to speed up the show for the other events, one of the arena attendants runs his short sword up her body and she is dragged out the Gate of Death. The attendants have a Good Thing Going for Them-selling the bodies to relatives so they can be given Christian burial.
Our young husband does not try to reclaim the body-other members of the church do it for him. The elders try to console him, pointing out that the rewards of Heaven are in store for those who die as martyrs for the Faith. The man sits in a catalepsy, unmoving, uncaring. Eventually he seems to recover enough to take care of his shop and attend the secret services of his church but something has changed in him. Finally he is approached by another Christian who hints that the Church fathers have got it all wrong -this world is hell, the creation of Satan. Sex is sin in any form-look at the way the mob howls at the sextorture events in the circus. Only by denying the flesh, mortifying it and eventually leaving it, can true life be found. This doctrine was supposed to have begun with a Persian sage named Mani in the second century A.D. and to have infected the Western churches under the name of Manichaeism, but I don’t think we have to look for an import. I think it is a return to the “natural” religion of opposites and their eternal struggle-bad against good, night against day, winter against summer; the origin of it is in the very dualism of man’s perceptive apparatus which early in life tells him that there is a difference between “I” and “that.”
The Persian dualistic doctrines held that there would be an eventual triumph of the light or good forces over darkness and evil but there were doubters.
The tenet that marriage itself is a sin got stern reproof from the Church, but the idea took hold. If God is good, why did he create Evil? This was the big question. And the answers men demanded had to be answers which would satisfy their mode of thinking, which was bound by dualism.
There arose in the Church, like a viper in its bosom, the secret sect of the Cathars, who denied all the sacraments of the Church because they were administered with Matter, and Matter was of this world and of the Devil. They rejected the Virgin Mary because God was much too holy to have entered anything so vile as a woman’s body. Leaders of this heresy were called the Perfect and were initiated into its innermost secrets after incredible austerities. A Cathar priest, saying an ordinary mass, would say certain phrases backwards in symbolism of the Catharistic reversal of the basic tenets of Christianity. This woman-sex-flesh-despising cult grew and flourished like the green bay tree, subject to various additions and perversions wrought in it by time. At last it infected the powerful order of warrior-monks, the Templars.

THIS ORDER had been founded with the best of intentions in Jerusalem in 1119 A.D. by nine knights; its purpose was to defend the Holy Sepulchure and the pilgrims visiting it. For 140 years the order grew and flourished, conducting a perpetual Crusade against the Saracens. When the Moslems finally captured the Holy Land, the order retired to its island of Cyprus and its many castles throughout Europe. It had become a powerful, rich and autonomous organization, answerable only to the Pope. Its members swore personal poverty, chastity and obedience. As the order grew in riches, poverty didn’t mean much: they lived like kings. And at first they had eschewed women, but when you keep a bunch of soldiers cooped up in a castle long enough something’s got to give, and there were rumors that the Templars preferred each other to women. Nature, it seemed, had triumphed in the end. In any order with 9,000 castles and manors, it is obvious that there must have been a few gay boys in the crowd. And there is no doubt that many of its members were secret Cathars. But that the entire order was officially Catharistic, there is evidence to the contrary.
Anyhow, King Philip IV of France, called the Fair, wanted to destroy the order for the best of all possible 14th century reasons-robbery. On the night of October 13, 1307, he ordered the arrest of the grand master and the other high ranking officers of the order. In Paris 138 Templars were “examined” for a month during which time 36 expired at the hands of the examiners and the others confessed anything the king wanted confessed, chiefly to denying Christ and spitting on the cross.
Philip had built better than he knew. He had invented a brand new racket-accusing people of heresy and witchcraft so as to confiscate their property or pay off old grudges. The essential evidence against the accused was “The Queen of Proofs”-his own confession in court. The brain-washing went on around the clock. This attack on the Templars set in motion what has come to be known as the great Witch Mania which terrorized Europe for three centuries before it finally gave way to commonsense and common decency.
The witch hunters all unknowingly obeyed one of the maxims of modern merchandising-”Find a need and fill it.” The Church was now definitely on the side of the strongest armies and the richest nobles; the poverty-stricken serfs needed little urging to revert to the old god of the phallus, so abhorred by the mitred bishops of the rich. The witch Sabbats began to be held in secret but more devotedly: the more heat was put on the more conversions there were to the worship of Satan. In the popular mind the terms “God” and “Devil” had simply been transposed, only “God” was not allied with the folk, was not in favor of liberty, equality and fraternity.
And still the tormenting paradox of Evil in a world designed and created by a good God, tortured the sensitive intellects. Many gave up and in regard to Evil followed the maxim, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” And this included a great many parish priests who sat up all night with dying parishioners and hardly had enough to eat in payment for their devotion to their jobs. Word began to get around that if you said a mass in a certain way, with certain objects under the altar cloth, it would cause the death of an unwanted landlord or husband. Wealthy men-or their wives-were willing to pay for such services.
Some of the more threadbare gentlemen of the cloth began trying to find buried treasures by means of magical changes in the mass. Between 1673 and 1680 in France alone some 50 priests were executed for sacrilege.
King Louis XIV, the Sun King, was occupying the splendid and bankrupt throne of France. Adultery in court circles was all the rage and a man in love with and faithful to his own wife would have been laughed out of court as a hopeless “square.”
Religious ideas had changed a great deal since the ruin of the Templars. Now the cognoscenti began experimenting with atheism, or occultism, in which the powers of the Devil were now assigned to elemental forces which could be controlled by the proper rituals. There was a great casting of horoscopes to find out what the King would do next. And at this point there arose one of the most infamous women of history, Catherine Deshayes, known as “La Voisin.”
La Voisin, from an old house in the suburbs of Paris, operated a racket right across the board; she dealt in poisons easy to administer and hard to detect called “powders of inheritance” for doing away with people
who had left you their estates in their wills. She sold abortifacients, performed abortions on the premises, cast horoscopes, read the Tarot cards for her customers and, for a staggering fee, would arrange a special Black Mass with genuine consecrated hosts and a real priest, using the body of a naked woman as an altar, a magical operation guaranteed to produce results. The king’s mistress, the Marchioness of Montespan, took part in one of these, occupying the place of dishonor on the altar and “receiving” the host in proper Satanic fashion. At least this time the Host, when violated, was violated in a place reserved for royalty. The purpose of the operation was, of course, to insure Montespan’s continued hold over the King.
La Voisin and her gang-which included her lover, Nicholas Levasseur, the executioner of Paris, who provided fat from the bodies of executed murderers to make Black Mass candleswere finally caught, tried and executed in 1679. But La Voisin was made of tough stuff. Never once did she let slip the name of a single customer.

THE ROUGH and tumble 17th century was drawing to a close and for another hundred years nothing much was heard of the Black Mass in Francealways a center of its activities.
In the 18th century in England some young rakes, led by the notorious bully and seducer, Sir Francis Dashwood, founded a Hell Fire club and a mock order of “monks” with “nuns” to match but the morale of laity and clergy had gone so to pot that nc one of importance minded.
It was not until the great upsurge of occultism in the 1880′s that the Black Mass came into its own again, sometimes an actual Satanist mass by sincere worshipers of the goat-headed god, more often a fraud for the extraction of money from tourists. In the latter category it formed part of the entertainment of the gay French capital up to World War II, in company with exhibitions usually involving one woman and three men, or liaisons between a woman and a Great Dane, a Shetland pony or even a small python. It was to one of the peep-show-type Black Masses, without a doubt, that the nervous novelist, Huysmans, was conducted by one of his occultist lady friends while he was writing “La Bas.” For he was nothing if not thorough.
Today, the Black Mass seems to have died down for a time. A few years ago the Vicar of the parish of Yarcombe in Devonshire, reported that the church had been disarranged one rainy night when it had been left open to serve as a refuge for benighted wayfarers. The candles had burned to their sockets, one candlestick held the paw of a white kitten which had been hacked off. A prayer book lay face open on the floor and when recovered it was observed that the lines “Give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness,” had been crossed out with diagonal lines of black-grease pencil. But such resurgences are sporadic.
There remains, of the elementals which tormented Joris-Karl Huysmans, only the philosophical Problem of Evil. And it has two viable antagonists in the modern world.
In the early 19th century the biggest double-dome in Europe belonged to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Beginning with the idea of Pure Being, derived from Lao Tsu of China, he worked out a theory of reality as Absolute Idea, best exemplified in the Prussian State. To him good and evil were necessary opposites as war was necessary for eventual social progress. His theories struck fire in the brain of young Karl Marx who, as he put it, “turned Hegelian Idealism right-side up” with his “dialectical materialism,” which has gone on to dubious glory as the religion of Communism. Marx said, “The philosophers have only described the world; the point, however, is to change it.” If, in this process of change, the individual loses his life, it is of no consequence. This takes care of the paradox of Good and Evil by making the triumph of the toiling masses, led by their self-appointed vanguard, the Communist Party, the only Good-and keeping the Party members so busy they don’t have time to think of bourgeois philosophical nonsense.
But there is another solution to Huysman’s horror.
Out of the mysterious East in the 1930′s there began to come rumors of a psychological-religious method or discipline which, once achieved, answered, or more properly dissolved, all doubts and dilemmas. It captured the imagination and curiosity of psychologists, scientists and avant garde intellectuals; in the 17 years since Hiroshima enough of its results have become known to widen the circle of interest, as yet still among the intelligentsia. It consists of a discipline which makes the U. S. Marine Corps boot camp training seem like the first day in kindergarten. But for those who perservere, it is claimed, the shell of dualism which imprisons the human mind splits like an abscess and the divine certainty beyond all opposites comes flooding in. The name of this discipline-religion in Japanese is, of course, Zen.

Related posts:

1. French Vogue – “Devil Worship Is The New Black!”
2. The source of white genes in black Americans
3. What discovering a mass murderer’s manifesto can do for your site… (UPDATE)

This is the same magazine that is known as Cosmo, and features monthy “10 Ways To Make Your Man a Slave” type articles.

I just thought it was interesting to see something on Ingersoll, so I scanned and OCRed it.

————

Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll is without oubt one of the greatest popular orators now living. Ingersoll will never receive the full credit due to his great success as an orator during the present generation, as his vehement assaults on the Christian religion have aroused so many and such powerful enmities. But without regarding his creed, judging him solely by his power as an orator, no nation can to-day produce his equal. There is poetry, wit, humor, sarcasm, and tenderest bathos in nearly every lecture he delivers, whether on religion or politics. Colonel Ingersoll is not invited by the lyceums to lecture in their regular courses, as his infidelity arouses the opposition of all orthodox committees. But his fame is such that he does not need aid in procuring audiences. Whenever he wants to lecture, he sends out an agent, “hires a hall,” nd lectures at his own risk, and almost always, when in large cities, to his own great pecuniary benefit. In the smaller towns the church influence is always too much for him, and it does not pay him to lecture there.
While coming from New England one day with Mr. Beecher, I found Colonel Ingersoll in the same car. After a pleasant salutation between the two, the Colonel went to his seat. In his mischievous way, Mr. Beecher said “I have written that man’s epitaph.” He showed me, written on the margin of a newspaper, with his pencil, “Robert Burns.”

Related posts:

1. Robert G. Ingersoll Oratory Contest, Washington, DC
2. Robert G. Ingersoll Oratory Contest 2010 – This time I won…
3. Secular Blogging / Ingersoll Oratory Contest First Place Video

“I was weak as a baby when I was born, and indeed it was several weeks at sea before I was able to hoist a sail as well as the rest of the crew.

 ——————————————-

I LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT SEX

By Corey Ford

“You see this here fish, June?” old Britches asked me one after­noon. “This here fish is called a sucker. It’s called sucker because it will swallow almost anything. There’s hundreds of thousands of these suckers, June, and most of them read travel books.”
I never forgot the lesson that he taught me.
My life at sea started at a very tender age. In fact my first im­pression upon opening my eyes on the world was of being dangled unceremoniously upside down by the heels, while the family doctor spanked me repeatedly with his open palm. It seemed to me even then that this spanking business was starting pretty early, and I objected in my childish treble.
“Hey, what the hell?” I piped.
“Rockaby, baby,” replied the doctor kindly, seizing my ankles and slamming me against the mattress until I was red in the face.
“Listen, no damned son of a — can get away with that!” I gasped, my father’s blood roaring in my veins. “Rockaby, baby, eh!” and wrenching loose a slat from the cradle I swung on him with all my strength. Two hours later I reported aboard the Ethel M. Dell with my duffle wrapped up in a triangular piece of white linen.
I was weak as a baby when I was born, and indeed it was several weeks at sea before I was able to hoist a sail as well as the rest of the crew. In the meantime my father turned me over to the care of old Britches. Britches was the sail-maker on our boat—that is, when the wind fell off and we were becalmed, it was old Britches that Father called on to make sail—and from the time he first took charge of me until he perished in the fatal fire that finally destroyed our boat, he devoted his life to my care. For fourteen years he taught me the mysteries of the sea; and although I abused him and pestered him and embarrassed him as only a child can, yet everything that I am today I owe to him. Poor old Britches!
I recall Britches as the only man who was older than Father. His life was just one more of those mysteries of the sea. Nobody knew where he came from—some said he was a descendant of Robert Britches, the poet—but when he and his brother came aboard to sign on the Ship’s Articles, he fiddled with the pen for a moment and then said : “Our father’s name was Britches, Skip­per, and if you don’t mind we’ll just sign on the same way.”
“Just a couple of sons of Britches,” answered Father, who knew a good joke when he saw one.
So the old sailor signed the Articles just “Britches,”1 and for fifteen years he went by no other name. In appearance he was un­like any other sailor I ever saw, an effect which was partially caused by the fact that he always wore a derby hat and carried a riding-crop. To discreet inquiries as to the purpose of these articles, he would only reply: “You never can tell when you might find a horse,” but it was generally believed that they referred to some romance of his buried past, and that in his youth he might have been thrown by a favorite mount. Whatever was his secret, Britches never told. He had a pleasant face surrounded by a fringe of red hair, and a wide comfortable lap, which did not disappear when he stood up, as most laps do, but merely ran around behind him and showed up under an assumed name. I spent many happy hours in that lap, learning some of the mysteries of the sea.
The first mystery which had to be solved was the question of feeding and clothing me during that initial trip. Fortunately the question of clothes was settled with promptness and dispatch. Britches had a pair of yellow oilskins and an old sou’ wester, which he had worn, man and boy, for fifty years and by which he set great store; but when the question of clothing me arose, he did not let any sentimental attachment deter him for a moment in his decision. Without hesitation the loyal old sailor grasped his scis­sors and with trembling fingers cut out the seat of a pair of father’s best pants. Soon I was clothed as shipshape and tidy as Britches and all the rest of the crew, except Father. For fourteen years old Britches was my guardian, nurse and severest critic, and no sacrifice was ever too great for his faithful old heart to make.
Although the question of clothing me was easily settled, the puzzle of how to feed me did not prove such an easy matter. Father’s friends had warned him that he was crazy to take a baby to sea; and their dire predictions seemed about to be borne out. Even old Britches was baffled. To be sure, he manufactured me a very handy milk-bottle out of an old gin bottle that Father had lying around in his bunk, half full; and he also designed a work­able nipple out of the first mate’s galoshes. But when it came to filling the bottle, his ingenuity gave out.
Three days out of Frisco the supply of milk which Father had put aboard for me was exhausted, and we were forced to turn back and get more. This supply in turn was exhausted three days out, and Father had to turn back once more. The third time he got as far as four days out, but inasmuch as it took him just that much longer to get back to Frisco again, it really didn’t help much. After this state of affairs had continued for a month or so, Father grew pretty discouraged. It began to look as though we would never get more than three days out of Frisco until I was weaned.
“We’ve got to do something pretty soon,” he said disconsolately to Britches. “We’re way behind schedule, and our milk bill is get­ting something fierce.”
“Can’t we get milk from the ship?” suggested Britches. “A ship is she,” he added philosophically.
Father shook his head.
“We could milk her rudder,” urged Britches.
“How do you know?”
“I heard a farmer say so once.”
“You misunderstood.”
There was a long silence.
“If we had some cream,” said Britches, “we could add some water, and make milk out of that.”
There was another long silence. When Britches opened his eyes again, Father had left.
The following morning I was crying with hunger, and in des­peration Father turned in at Norfolk Island to see if he could buy something for me to eat. He sent Britches in one direction down the island, and he went another, seeking to solve this feeding prob­lem. His search was in vain. The native women refused to accom­pany him back to the ship—after all, they said, if he was so darned anxious for them he could come ashore—and after combing the island all day Father returned that night discouraged and empty-handed. Britches met him at the gangplank with a broad smile on his round face.
“Cap’n, I settled the feed problem fer the kid!”
“Where is it?” shouted Father.
With a sly grin Britches laid his finger astride his nose, tip­toed aft to the fo’c'stle, and pointed proudly to his prize. Father peered through the shadows, and saw a terrified goat tied to one of the bunks, balancing dizzily on its legs and bleating feebly.
“Cap’n, I hada helluva time gettin’ it,” said Britches, “but I finally traded your compass, sextant, and chronometer for this here dairy.”
It was the best trade Britches ever made. Father was so grateful for the goat that he gave Britches the special privilege of cleaning up after it, as long as it stayed on the ship. The happy sailors named the goat “Sweetheart,” and it soon became the pet of the fo’c'stle.
Unfortunately I was not destined to have my bottle of milk that night, nor for many nights to come. The moment we put to sea “Sweetheart” became violently seasick, and meantime I grew hun­grier and hungrier. Father knew that seasickness, like a broken leg, was purely mental; but unfortunately neither the goat nor I fully appreciated this advice. For weeks it lay in its bunk in the fo’c'stle, moaning and groaning and hoping to itself that the boat would sink; and for weeks I lay in my bunk, starving to death. The crew tended the goat day and night, bringing it appetizing tidbits and magazines to read; but despite their efforts “Sweet‑heart” steadily refused to give milk. After a month had passed, Father’s suspicions began to be aroused. He decided to go aft to investigate.
That night he approached my bunk with a steaming platter of goat-meat.
“I’m afraid there’s no use waiting any longer for that milk,” he said sadly.
“Why not?” I demanded in surprise.
” ‘Sweetheart’ will never give milk, June, little girl.”
“What’s the big idea?”
By way of answer Father sat down quietly on the bunk beside me; and while I devoured my first square meal he opened his worn old Bible and turned its pages till he found a certain chapter in the Old Testament called the “Songs of Solomon.” And then in a gentle voice, while the ship creaked and the waves hissed under our bow, he read to me the explanation of the question that I had asked.
That was the first time I ever realized there was such a thing as Sex.

1 His brother left the ship immediately afterwards, having come aboard, in fact, just for the sake of the gag.

COREY FORD
A product of New York by birth and education, he has not limited his range of living and writing. His latest book “War Below Zero,” co­authored with Bernt Balchen, tells the story of Greenland. He also wrote “Short Cut to Tokyo.” It is amazing that the same man can write such incredibly ridiculous themes as the one we selected here. Sometimes he uses the pen name of John Riddell.
Corey Ford is widely known for fiction and satire which he con­tributes to magazines, and for his books such as “The Gazelle’s Ears.” He can give you serious reading which makes you think, or the most delicious nonsense which makes you chuckle. The latter applies to “1 Learn Something About Sex.”

His wikipedia page is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corey_Ford

Related posts:

1. BOOK NERD :: Stories for Men / Tales for Males – Contents
2. BOOK NERD :: “Eugenics And Sex Harmony” 1942, selected Illustrations

Archive.org has the 1933 edition, and I noticed different versions of illustrations!

I’ve posted just a few below:

Related posts:

1. BOOK NERD :: The Book of Forbidden Knowledge – free ebook on archive.org, + process notes
2. BOOK NERD :: “The Leopard’s Spots” by Thomas Dixon Jr. – Cover and Illustrations – Reconstruction Trilogy 1 of 3
3. BOOK NERD :: “The Clansman” by Thomas Dixon Jr. – Cover and Illustrations – Reconstruction Trilogy 2 of 3

I told her I’d scan my copy and send a PDF, but since I’d been finding so much incredible stuff on Archive.org lately I decided to upload it there so that everyone could have a digital copy if they wanted.

I figured I’d roughly outline my process with a few images:

I scan ever page individually at 400dpi in 24bit color. I have scanned them 2-up before, but the time saved at the scanner is lost in separating the images of the two pages in editing. For ease I just flip the book upside down ever other page so that I lay it on the platen in the same spot every time:

This means that every other page is upside down, but not a problem. I set the scanning area to be a bit larger than needed, so that if I don’t place it exactly in the same spot, I don’t end up cutting off something I need.

Once I have the scans, I import them all into photoshop and use the cropping tool to get the bulk of the text block with a little extra. You can rotate the area you crop to help straighten it out. From there I just click Image>Image Rotation>180 and it’s right side up.

I save each page with the correct page number, the above being ForbiddenKnowledge-pg01.tif, and the covers will get a -C1 for front, -C2 inside front, -C3 inside back, -C4 back.

I then open one image and create a Photoshop Action that strips the yellow paper color from the page (Image>Adjustments>Replace Color) and then use the curves to give the page a crisp dark black and white (Image>Adjustments>Curves) and finally convert to Grayscale. I close that image without saving and then use the Batch command with the new Action to zip through the directory of interior page images.

After this is done, I put them all into an InDesign file and exported to a PDF without compressing the images. I uploaded that PDF to Archive.org and it had automagically processed it before I was able to finish writing this blog, allowing me to put the following inline:

I started scanning this 36 page booklet at 11:20 this morning and posted the blog at about 1:20pm.

Related posts:

1. Free Laffs & Juggs 40 page ebook preview…
2. Eugenic oriented non-text media on Archive.org
3. BOOK NERD :: “Eugenics And Sex Harmony” 1942, selected Illustrations

Related posts:

1. BOOK NERD :: “The Clansman” by Thomas Dixon Jr. – Cover and Illustrations – Reconstruction Trilogy 2 of 3
2. BOOK NERD :: “The Leopard’s Spots” by Thomas Dixon Jr. – Cover and Illustrations – Reconstruction Trilogy 1 of 3
3. BOOK NERD :: “Eugenics And Sex Harmony” 1942, selected Illustrations

The scans below are from a later edition, as it includes illustrations from the 1915 film .. ahem… photo-play, Birth of a Nation. The original illustrations can be found here.

Related posts:

1. BOOK NERD :: “The Leopard’s Spots” by Thomas Dixon Jr. – Cover and Illustrations – Reconstruction Trilogy 1 of 3
2. BOOK NERD :: “The Traitor” by Thomas Dixon Jr. – Cover and Illustrations – Reconstruction Trilogy 3 of 3
3. BOOK NERD :: “Eugenics And Sex Harmony” 1942, selected Illustrations

I have not read this trilogy, and actually own quite a few of his novels (10 plus 2 duplicates of different printings), but have only recently begun reading his work starting with his anti-communist book “Comrades” (1909).

The Reconstruction Trilogy is composed of three novels:

• The Leopard’s Spots (1902)
• The Clansman (1905)
• The Traitor (1907)

Below are scans of the cover and title page from the 1903 edition. It is missing the illustrations ”The Hon. Tim Shelby” and “It was Dick!” for reasons unknown to me. It includes a “Historical Note” that the other did not.

Related posts:

1. BOOK NERD :: “The Clansman” by Thomas Dixon Jr. – Cover and Illustrations – Reconstruction Trilogy 2 of 3
2. BOOK NERD :: “The Traitor” by Thomas Dixon Jr. – Cover and Illustrations – Reconstruction Trilogy 3 of 3
3. BOOK NERD :: “Eugenics And Sex Harmony” 1942, selected Illustrations