John Powys - The Brazen Head

“What we’ve got to remember is that this luckless infant only possesses a real soul when it is separated from its mother. What they try to drag in is the old Jewish Jehovah as the Creator of heaven and earth. And at this point, my beautiful one, we’ve got to remember that the great Aristotle, whom they all regard as the wisest of thinkers, taught that there never was a beginning, but that the matter out of which our world sprang into existence contained, and still contains in its own nature, all the creative energy that is needed. You do see, don’t you, my precious, how confusing these learned doctors are? You know, don’t you, how they tell us that we must hate the Jews because the Jewish Priests wanted Pilate to crucify Jesus?

“And yet they are always telling us that Jesus himself was the Son of David, and a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The truth is, my darling, we’ve got to make it clear to everyone we have any influence over that this whole business of the Christian religion is full of paradoxes, blunders, manias, idiocies, and ridiculous contradictions.

“Now listen, my pet; wouldn’t you like to come up with me now, as they say Satan was always wanting Jesus to go up with him, to the top of some high hill near here to see the wonders of the world and the glories of them?”

The simple-minded chronicler of these events can only record at this point that the daughter of Maldung of Lost Towers gave Petrus of Picardy a very piercing look. But with this piercing look there was mingled — and no other female in the wide world could so charge a single glance — an overpowering appeal and a desperate cry, a cry that was thrown into the very heart of her seduced-seducer, a cry that sounded like: “Take me! Take me! Take me! or I shall melt into thin air!”

“What about our visiting the Cerne Giant?” she whispered. No sooner did this murmur become audible than Petrus leapt to his feet elated and transported.

“Yes! yes! yes!” he cried; and began in his excitement to make a most curious gurgling noise, a noise which, if anyone who did not know him had heard it, would have suggested the bubbling and exploding, the bursting and dissolving, of a miraculous stream of salt water that had somehow or another got into the centre of a rushing waterfall of fresh water.

Nor did it take these two very long to climb up to the Cerne Giant, which was still as it had been for thousands of years — just a figure on the summit-slope of a grassy chalk hill where the grass had been religiously, though most heathenly, prevented from invading by the least fraction of an inch the preposterous picture, in white upon green, of a monstrous giant with his sexual organ erect, awaiting, you might say, the thousand-years-postponed arrival of his female partner, with whom he might play the immemorial game in full and shameless sight of the far-off sea and the eternally receding sky.

Petrus Peregrinus had removed his hand from the magnet beneath his clothes; but he still kept using his short sword in its black scabbard to assist his steps and to play one part of a third leg. The arm and hand and fingers, however, which, like the wind-tossed branches sprouting from a tree that had the power of motion, belonged to whatever activity he chose to exert on his left hand, were entirely free during their rapid ascent to that expectant Cerne Giant.

It must indeed have been a profoundly religious, as well as a profoundly sacrilegious, instinct in more than a thousand generations of Wessex men and women, that had preserved this defiant superhuman figure, thus exposed in the chalk-grown grass on that particular hill. Never once, from beginning to end of their association, would Pierre de Maricourt, have been able to say that any movement he ever made in connection with Lilith, whether in his mind or with any portion of his body, was ever made on his own initiative. Everything he did or said or thought would have struck him, had he ever tried to recapture it, as pure and simple obedience to Lilith.

And yet, always there, close to his side, was his magic lodestone, ready to be brought into contact with every motion of his will, whether towards exertion or relaxation, whether towards attraction or repulsion, whether towards love or hate.

Plug! Plug! Plod! Plod! thudded his short black-sheathed sword-dagger into that grass-grown chalk hill. He could hear the sound of a bell tolling in the bell-tower of a monastic church at the foot of the hill behind him; and he found himself taking a queer satisfaction in mixing the sound of this monotonous bell with the feeling of pressure in the palm of his right hand from each step he took supported by his leather-covered weapon.

Wild, strange, weird, and often quite mad, are the thoughts and fancies of every one of us with regard to each other; but, when we come to face it, the most crazy and indeed the most disturbing and upsetting of all our imaginative excursions are when, as a man, we have a woman, or as a woman, we have a man at whom to let fly.

Plod! Plod! Plod! But while he ascended that hill, to the sound of the holy bell of Cerne, Peter’s left hand and active fingers found time to untie every knot, loosen every tape, release every pin, disentangle every fold of the most intimate garments of the lovely creature at his side; with the result that, when their four feet and his plodding stick finally touched the chalk-white base of the Giant’s throne, there was nothing for it but a mutual collapse beneath the generative tool of that gigantic figure and an unavoidable union of their two bodies then and there.

No man will ever know what thoughts, and still less what feelings, passed through the consciousness of Lilith, while Petrus wreaked upon her the full measure of his unconscionable lust; but the thoughts and feelings of our great specialist in magnetism were very definite. Although with his face buried in the disordered tangles of Lilith’s hair, he could not see the sea, nor the Isle of the Slingers, nor that majestic beach of semi-precious stones that has come to be named Chesil, Petrus was in some curious and peculiar way conscious of these things.

As he merged his life with Lilith’s, it seemed to him as though the whole cosmos were being cleft in twain. It seemed to him as if he were himself all the oceans and seas and lakes and channels and estuaries and rivers in the world, and as if the slender form he was clasping were all the continents and capes and promontories and islands, round which, and across which, and into the heart of which, all these waters, salter than tears, were pouring their life.

And as these desperate paroxysms of ecstatic union went on beneath that shameless symbol of primeval audacity, it seemed to Petrus as if he were something more than those wave-curves and wave-spoutings. It seemed to him as if he were at that transcendant moment a real, actual, living incarnation of all the creative semen of human life from the day of Adam, the first man.

He felt as if beneath their united bodies the whole of that haunted West Country, from the furthest promontory of the Isle of Slingers to the furthest shoals of the mist-darkened Severn, were heaving up towards the Moon.

Was it, he thought in his nerve-dazed trance, that ever since Joseph of Arimathea brought the blood of Jesus to this coast, consecrating thereby the Mystery of Virginity and throwing a strange and desecrating shadow upon the greater Mystery of Procreation, there had been a craving, a longing, a hungering and thirsting, in the whole earthy substance of this portion of the West, so that the actual soil and sand and stones and rocks and gravel and pebbles of Wessex, along with the very slime of the worms beneath and the slugs above and the spawn of the frogs and the scum of the newts, and the cuckoo-spit of the smallest insect, had been roused to revolt against this preposterous edict of unnatural purity.