Chapter 6
Old-Time Religion
The Reverend Caledonia M. Roundsong filled her dark green ecclesiastical robes with a matronly heft that matched her earth-mother face. As she glided down the St. Cloud University corridor, her heavy brown braids flopped against her bosom-load of jewelry.
Her chin wobbled over a short strand of ochre glass paste beads seamed with green and black. Below that, opalized blue glass glowed with inner energies. A full string of overlapping silver medalions depicted Kali and other goddesses. At the center, a tin pendant showed a wild-haired, wild-armed female with clutching fingers.
A Hopi squash blossom belt cinched her wide waist. Her outfit would have caused no comment in San Francisco's Haight in the late 60's, or along Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue for a decade after.
A couple of sincere, punk-cropped theater arts majors gave her quick, nervous looks as she stopped at a faculty office door.
She swung it open. "Knock, knock."
Dorothy Tilden slouched at her desk over lined sheets with minutely lettered pencil notations.
"Oh, hi. Come in. Have a slug?"
The drama instructor indicated something cloudy and brown in an oversized wine glass. She pointed at two bottles and a clean tumbler.
Caledonia slipped into a hard wooden chair and sniffed the wine glass. "Whoooh! What's in that?"
"Bourbon and absinthe. I got the idea from Jonathan Latimer in Headed For a Hearse."
"You are if you drink that regularly. Old-formula U.C. Med Center absinthe?"
"Better living through chemistry, yeah." Dorothy Tilden downed a good swig and peered with one eye. "You look bright with the flame of the Goddess. Or is that just the absinthe?"
"Thanks, I hope I am. I'm doing an interfaith dealie down in Grendl this evening with the Campus Crusade for Iacchus." She touched the tin pendant. "That's why I'm wearing Erzulie, the Haitian love loa. Want to come along? Loads of fun."
"Sure. She seems like a demure little miss." Dorothy Tilden poured some Maker's Mark into her wine glass. She diluted the clear brown to a smoggy murk with the absinthe.
"As you know, I'm spiritual adviser to Sigma Epsilon Xi," Caledonia began.
"A crowd that definitely needs soulful counsel."
"More so these days with Lucretia Sue Merydith larking on vacation, Gerry Vestry snoozing in the Carribean, and Maxine du Pre husking corn-or shucking and jiving, or whatever they do for entertainment in Nebraska of a summer's eve."
"Sounds like your cupboard's bare."
"Exactly. I've been asked to help process resumes for the fall rush list."
"I thought Sigma took on all comers."
Caledonia gave an offended snort. "It only seems so because we're an ecclectic house. The Berkeley chapter look me thirty years ago, after the Great Panty Raid Riot, because it wanted to break sorority stereotypes."
"I thought the recruitment was dwindling."
The minister frowned. "It is. Still, we want to judge on merits, not just on our financial needs. Mona Forbes. Gerry says she's being squired by Ron Ladrone."
"Is that the current verb? I haven't caught them gyring backstage." Dorothy Tilden tapped her glass with thoughtful pings.
"I'm not a Greek sympathizer, Cal. I had my pin jerked by dear, owl-eyed Chi Omega in my soph year on a Q.R. rap. My questionable reputation came from half a dozen soul kisses observed while I was mildly under the influence." "That's all?"
"I do admit I was petting with another girl in the fragrant autumn leaves after a marshmallow roast. Brandy went to my head." She tipped the wine glass and drank. "I haven't touched the stuff since."
"I'm curious about the emotional and physical entanglements Miss Forbes has gotten herself into," Caledonia pursued. "We have this Boy Ban for the first two months. It's going to be rough on her if she's serious about him."i The drama professor leaned back. "Mmmmm. I'd call her a good influence on Ron. She's sincere. He's... tomcatting in the innocent expression from our youth. He probably thinks of it as sharing the wealth with faculty, alumnae, and the odd fellow student."
"It'll be worse during the Ban if he's that way."
"Absence may make his heart grow fonder. Remind him of what a good thing he had going." Dorothy Tilda twined a strand of jet black hair around her little finger. "A real relationship such as Mona offers can do a lot fori him.
"Being pitched out of Chi Omega in tandem cemented Carole and I together through graduate school." She gave a fragrant sigh. "Careers parted us. I came to St. Cloud to forget . . . like Rick to Casablanca."
"And she . . . ?"
"Added a D.D. to her M.B.A. and is shoveling up the shekels in Christian broadcasting. She's got a stable of three televangelists and a cassette service."
The matronly minister's brows lifted. "Lady loves duck-we use her videos at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley."
"Looks like a blueberry muffin." The sophomore student's coppery pony tail had been cinched by an absurdly purple bow.
"Rutherford atom." Mona Forbes crinkled her eyes at her notes. She sat in a study module recessed into the St. Cloud library wall.
"What's 'Plancked Bohr' supposed to mean, anyway?" Mona shifted for the fiftieth time on the hard plywood seat. It had been three days since Rita's reminders. "Hi, Wanda."
She studied her friend's pompon costume. The glove-tight blue and white costume had a skirt wholly unable to conceal the glowing scarlet panties. "Looks like Sigma made heap bad medicine for squaw." "Hot-and-Heavy Night." Wanda made no attempt to sit down. "If you think the briefs are bright, you should have seen my fanny after it got fan-tailed. Stupid of me to break the rules, anyhow."
"I know what you mean . . ." Mona grimaced. "At least you guys only use the board."
"Don't you believe it!" The sorority girl snickered. Sweet Sigma has a broad range of methods. Someone we both know had three hours in a Playtex with a mustard plaster on each sitter for company. Following which, she crawled through a gauntlet, blindfolded. Don't think apple switches can't sting something fierce over well-prepared territory."
Mona weighed that against English rattan and found no cheer.
"You'll hear about little Lotta later, no doubt." The sophomore dropped to a giggly whisper. "Stripped to the buff and coated chin to ankles with molasses. After a roll in feathers, she could have passed for Big Bird's fuzzy chick.
"She had to march all the way from the quad right down to the house, at darkest midnight. Susie slipped the jocks the word so that they could cheer her on with a peanut wagon chorus of wolf whistles." "Yuck."
"Rules is rules. She was lucky the Greek Row is almost dead during summer. Otherwise ..."
Mona returned to her notes. "Bye, Wanda." "Okay. I have to see a man about some corks."
"Corks?"
"I'm deputy pledge trainer next term, under Gerry Vestry and Maxine du Pre." She beamed. "If I do well, I can be trainer in my junior year. So I do all the leg work, like getting the corks and the castor oil."
"I don't want to hear about it. Bye, Wanda."
The tender-bottomed coed wondered if the bid she'd she'd submitted with Sigma Epsilon Xi as her first choice might not have been one big mistake. Perhaps she didn't appreciate her cousin Rita enough.
" 'Heath debt of the universe,' " Mona muttered in puzzlement. She just had to start taking better notes.
"I dunno." Her hair a California blonde tumble of chestnut chased with gold, Judy Latimer clung to Wanda Luckett's arm. "I don't think grammy would like this."
"How did she react to your sister shacking up with Gerry's brother?" She patted the girl's cold, tense hand. Loud-voiced students milled around them.
"Nobody's told her." Judy swallowed. "I think she'd rather hear that Helen went Catholic and became a nun." Her fingers tightened. "And she told mom she'd put her head in the oven if that ever happened."
The two stared around the hall. All chairs had been cleared out so people could sit on the floor or any cushion they'd brought. A shallow stage marked one end of the room. Below it, Reverend Roundsong planted her robed backside firmly, legs extended.
A lithe, tanned gentleman with grey-touched temples, sat in a full lotus beside her. His broad mustache turned up slightly at the ends.
Dorothy Tilden sprawled on a blanket, glass full and in fine vocal flow.
"... I couldn't begin to relate to their rituals and such, though I'm sympathetic enough to Goddess worship."
"Neo-Pagans indulge in much confident rodomontade concerning 'the Old Religion.' " The man's accent had the lilting precision of Oxford, with Eton drawling in the undercurrents.
"The sainted W.C. Fields would call the whole Berkeley crowd's best claims tarradiddle," Dorothy Tilden maintained. "Nero Wolfe would label them flummery. I say, bull-puckee!"
Caledonia flicked a thick braid over her shoulder. "I've met certain Wicca practitioners who claim to have family Books of Shadows going back generations, and they assert a documented continuity of non-Christian folk religion going back into--"
"Have you seen the books-or, better, seen any reliable authentication by anyone who seriously knows manuscripts?" the drama instructor demanded.
"With all appropriate respect to the religious convictions of those present, past, and future, I have to say that Britain contains some amazing survivals from its sea-bound past." The man wore an open-collared green shirt with a pale grey silk scarf folded about his throat. The stickpin securing the silk had a long silver Tibetan dragon.
"Hmmm." Dorothy Tilden rocked onto one hip. "Margaret Murray and her woeful armchair anthropology babbling about a Horned God of the Witches and worshipers sticking it to Thomas a Becket as a consenting ritual sacrifice."
She rolled onto her back. "Murder me in the cathedral, I'm pagan!"
The Briton chuckled. "I particularly enjoyed her calling Joan of Arc a priestess representing the God Incarnate. If ber execution was truly the ritual murder of a divine victim, that takes my long-suffering people off the hook for her martyrdom."
Caledonia tucked up her legs and rested her hands where her robes stretched between her knees. "Murray got herself published by Oxford University Press. That lent enough cachet to her writings that Gerald Gardner could whip up that awful claptrap in Witchcraft Today."
"He even paid the deified Aleister Crowley fifty pounds to write the witch cult rituals he foisted onto the public as authentic goods." The man shrugged. "Where the Neo-Pagan Wiccans go wrong is with Gardner."
"And not with your Crowley, whose mind ever dwelt on sex-sex-sex?" Dorothy Tilden cawed.
"Baroness Vittoria Cremers made that charge," he admitted, "as Jean Fuller records in her Victor Neuburg book. Cremers had a heavy tinge of the shady about her, with her claims of having murdered Jack the Ripper herself and having put paid to Crowley with her Asian magicking.
"The extreme characters give the field color," Caledonia observed. "They also confuse multitudes."
She touched the tin pendant on her breast. "I know that the Haitian loa Erzulie connects to straightforward religious sources local to Dahomey."
"Have you read Robert Farris Thompson and his Afro-Atlantic cross-cultural rap?" The man asked. "What you say isn't enough for him. He reads like Zora Neale Hurston on speed-and I do genuflect before Hurston."
"Only proper." Caledonia nodded. "But whatever Thompson suggests-and I'd call him visionary rather than off-the-wall-can be checked by field research. The same type of research on European pre-Christian religions has gotten muddled up with mountebanks and spurious misdirection."
"I don't see it as any accident," Dorothy Tilden spoke clearly with her back arched and her face inverted, "that Freud and Jung's revolutionary delving into sex and the psychology of symbolism came at the same time that Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Annie Besant, MacGregor Mathers, and half a hundred other late Victorians found they could put mysticism back into the Industrial Revolution's clockwork religion.
"These people incarnated the unconscious drives of a continent to restore a whole, integral world view-with all the nightmares and genies and fucking that been creeping around the edges in erotic folklore and written-to-order pornography and whatnot."
She eyed them both upside down, her black hair a waterfall spreading on her blanket. "Just show me any evidence that any pre-Gardnerian Wicca cult existed prior to the 1880's in Britain or any other part of Europe. I don't mean wise women giving herbal douches to pubescent girls. I mean a full-throated non-Christian cult. 'Taint so.
"Does your England have any verifiable survivals from before Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and that archetypal transcendence jazz?"
"Freud had his effect," Caledonia began carefully, "and the cultural suppression of women in conventional Judeo-Christian religion fueled a lot of proto-feminist reaction when it came apart at the-"
"Excuse me--hey, listen up, everybody!" A knife-shrill New York accent sliced through the general chatter.
Enough schmoozing, already! We've got a lot of program this evening.
"First, an announcement. Rebbe Janet Silberlocke has a talk Thursday evening-that's tomorrow, guys. It's sponsored by Jews for Iacchus and she's speaking on the Luddovicher Lesbian Liberation Front. Open to the public, right here in Grendl Hall, 7:30. Free, already!
"Now, Professor Porter and Reverend Roundsong!"
At a dusting of applause, Caledonia and the man stood up. Most everyone else had settled onto the floor attentively, "I'm sorry you all haven't been listening to the conversation we've been having." he began. "For those who haven't met me, I'm Gustavus Fielding Porter. I'm faculty adviser to the Campus Crusade for Iacchus."
"And I'm Caledonia Muse Roundsong, a minister of the Church of Spiritual Liberation-gee, that's a popular word with the over-forty crowd-and the token Goddess-worshiper on the St. Cloud Theology Department faculty." She made a polite leg.
Porter resumed, "Your first question may well be: Why Iacchus, a fairly obscure and somewhat gamey lurker in the sub-basement of the Greek Pantheon?"
Caledonia cocked an eye at him. "Who is Iacchus, for all us California types who think James Dean and Marilyn Monroe are the Elder Gods?"
"Right on about Marilyn," Dorothy Tilden muttered audibly.
"I'm glad you asked that, Madame Interlocutrix. The humble Greek Iacchus was a lusty lad, born to Demeter after intercourse with her brother, Zeus."
The minister put her hands to her face. "Ooooh! Incest!
Kinky!"
"Celestial divinity partnered with earthly dirt-and-potatoes reality to produce an offspring as gargantuan in his appetite for life as Rabelais' creation or Sir John Falstaff or-"
"John Belushi, or any latter-day myth figure," Caledonia concluded for him.
"Just so. Iacchus may be seen as that divine shout yawping upward from the roots of the world. The orgasm symbolizes creation, power, vital involvement with the world. Precursor to orgasm must be the original erotic impulse.
"A playful, joyful interaction with the world-erotic in its fullest sense-leads up to the life-springing climax." He clapped his hands sharply.
"The Genesis story taken in full shows God creating us in his image and likeness as co-creators of the world with him. Note The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's. The wisest of God's chosen expressed the relationship of Adonoi and Israel-later seen as the unity of Christ and the Church-through the erotic interaction of bridegroom and bride.
"The playful exuberance which led to the world's foundation is our birthright. The Iacchus-shout released by God must be resurrected within us and channeled."
Caledonia surveyed the group. "Who else was in San Francisco during the Summer of Love? I'm it? The last survivor to tell about the Diggers giving out free bread and pre-AIDS nymphets giving free head. Okay.
"I missed the Woodstock loving rock sacrament offering communion of spirit to thousands of strangers. I did see the Woodstock Nation crumble-not at the Chicago Seven Trial, but in the chaotic mess at the Altamont Speedway. See the Stones film Gimme Shelter.
"Two images come to me from the hey-day of the Haight. I have a photo of a girl friend of mine, pregnant as a goat, standing in her wedding gown next to a uniformed beat cop holding flowers. One year later that same girl had to take a sharp knife and a heavy stick to walk down to Cala Foods because that's how dangerous it had become by 1969."
Porter took up the solemn moment. " 'Love is the Law,' quoted Aleister Crowley, 'Love under Will.' That erotic playfulness at the heart of the universe must coexist in harmony and synthesis with the rest of Creation in order to do our true will."
Caledonia held up her tin pendant. "A too-terrible homey example. Erzulie, the Haitian love deity, can drive folks mad if her energy isn't focused. The unshackling of the erotic impulse in the Sixties broke down barriers. Some of us forgot that walls protect as well as imprison.
"We opened the door in the 60's to the AIDS of the 8O's. The old flower-tripping psychedelia which hit twenty years ago has left coke-shriveled lives and shrunken veins toxic with a disease that shatters all defenses.
"Erzulie is hot stuff and worth the trip, but you can't handle her with naked, unprepared hands."
Porter concluded. "Iacchus in balance, Iacchus in right relationship-the leap of love under the Tao, whose path is the central current of life. That's what this Campus Crusade represents."
Dorothy Tilden murmured, "I haven't been so enlightened since the Marquis de Sade stopped the fucking and sucking in Philosophic dans le Boudoir to throw in a political pamphlet."
The man turned to the New Yorker who had introduced them. "Enough prologue. Have the celebrants all arrived?"
"Showtime!" The curly-haired Easterner stood up. "Come on, you guys! Places for the ritual."
Back in the hall, Judy nudged Wanda. "I don't know. This all sounds so weird."
"You told me Seth took you to that Hassidic group in Berkeley. You said that got pretty wild."
Judy wilted. "Oh, they were so drunk-I mean, there's this Scripture thing, I think, about on one day you've got to get so bombed you can't tell-well, it's two Hebrew words that sound similar, sort of-and you're supposed to be so wasted you can't tell them apart."
Her left hand waved helplessly. "I just don't know this stuff like Seth does. These guys with dreadlocks or something-one jumped onto the rabbi and rode him likea horse, beating on his head while everybody sang.
"I mean, if we did that with Dr. Scott at church they'd throw our congregation out of the whole Synod. We'd be in the paper, like those TV guys." She looked pinched-faced and worried as people assembled on the hall's stage.
A young woman with huge eyes and a rich bronze skin: wore a long white dress, ruffled low on the skirt with lace trimming the hem. A red kerchief knotted around her waist, another about her head.
A coarse woven strap supported a drum over her shoulder. She held the instrument under her left arm. Tot hourglass-shape allowed thick fiber strings to connect the drumheads of the opposing ends.
She experimentally rapped the taut drumskin with curved sticks held in each hand. A squeeze of her elbow changed the drumhead tension, altering the pitch. She thumped several times, running up and down some kind of scale.
A boy with flowing hair and an earring straddled a second long drum, riding the plain cylinder as if it were a log. He practiced patting the drumskin open handed-now a ringing slap, now a caressing spank.
Five girls from freshman to senior age had drifted onto the stage between the two drummers. They went barefoot, their sky-blue chitons draped about their bodies ala Isadora Duncan. Each held two upright hazel switches.
Professor Porter raised his voice to the audience. "This dramatized rite has been arranged by Reverend Roundsong's Goddess group and the Campus Crusade. A word about the two principals: "Backstage, each is now performing the vibration of the godnames and other invocational ritual to summon the godforms of Bacchus and Artemis. Sorry that we couldn't show you that. Esoteric orders have to keep some secrets, otherwise they wouldn't be esoteric. Right?" He drew home tolerant titters.
"Basically, the person builds in his or her mind a complete image of the chosen god. This takes time to perfect. Ignatius Loyola used similar visualization in his [practical Catholic mysticism to achieve consciousness of God."
Caledonia Roundsong asked, "How many people saw Blen Sebastian's play, The Sanctified Church, based on ZoraNeale Hurston's writings? That few? The poverty of asponse chills me-that was the theatrical experience of the decade, except for Lily Tomlin alone on the stage.
"In the Voodoo ritual at the end, Erzulie and Ghede possessed various of the characters. You saw Luisah Teish doing a good imitation of being ridden by a loa. She should know, she's an Oshun priestess herself.
"Possession in Voodoo, or Voudou, or Voudoun, like God-shouting and speaking in tongues in the Christian Sanctified churches, is rather random. The worshiper opens up and waits for lightning to strike."
Porter resumed, "Here, however, the practitioner invests the image of the chosen god with reality and projects him or herself into it. The individual makes a selective magical unity with divinity.
"We spoke of discipline. The person shapes the god around him or herself, and the deity manifests through the individual's unique personality. This is not like Shirley MacLaine and random channeling."
A broad-faced boy with a curly black beard and a round belly stepped out from the back of the stage. He wore a blue-black toga-like drape.
Judy Latimer instantly thought of John Belushi and felt ashamed. Everyone was taking this so seriously.
A short girl with tiny bones and rounded flesh entered from the opposite side. Her flawless skin clothed her and nothing more. A strung archer's bow lay in her hand.
A sharp pixie chin and close-cropped androgynous platinum hair contributed to an unearthly aura. Light touched her and seemed to wrap her protectively. Her cold, pale blue eyes held a wealth of worldly wisdom beyond her elfin appearance.
The New York voice came from the audience, reading from an open book. The two drums began to talk in rhythm under his words.
" 'Come, Bacchus, come thou hither, come out of the East; come out of the East, astride the Ass of Priapus' Come with thy revel of dancers and singers!' " The bearded fellow hopped across the stage with an exaggerated Agnes de Mille cowboy two-step. The five chitoned girls drifted around him, hazel rods waving.
Each moved as if underwater, lips undulating in slow motion to the drums. The beating instruments caught rhythms and patterns, tossing them back and forth. The girls swung their loins sensually, some to one rapping structure, some to another.
" 'Who followeth thee, forbearing to laugh and to leap' Come, in thy name Dionysios, that maidens be mated to God-head!' " The boy Bacchus crouched, broad shoulders and head swaying. Girls skillfully vaulted over him, their hazel rods thrust on high.
" 'Come, in thy name Iacchus, with thy mystical fan to winnow the air, each gust of thy Spirit inspiring our Soul, that we bear thee Sons in Thine Image!' " The boy stood up. Two girls collapsed at his feet. Hazel wands in their teeth, they pawed him sexually. He reached into his blue-black toga.
What his hand brought out bore no resemblence to a fan, yet he waved it, grinning.
Judy blinked, her face heating. She'd never seen as realistic a dildo, down to the furry scrotum.
The New York voice interpolated. "Let me be clear on the symbolism! As it says, the uninitiated self of the magician 'is a mob of wild women, hysterical from un-comprehended and unsated animal instinct.' " All five girls began to claw the air before the upraised phallus.
" 'They will tear Pentheus, the merely human king who presumes to repress them, into mere shreds of flesh.' " The quintet quivered and howled to the complex inter-weavings of the drumbeats.
"Don't just rely on the human, guys." The New Yorker nasally advised. "Situational ethics, the secular humanist trip, old-fashioned dialectic materialism, Objectivism, new design for living-you name it.
"All the purely worldly systems of belief, even the Playboy philosophy that raised you, fall before the Bacchic energy."
The girls snarled and yelped, like true bitches. They rose and circled around the priapic youth.
" 'None but Bacchus, the Holy Guardian Angel, hath grace to be God to this riot of maniacs; he alone can transform the disorderly rabble into a pageant of harmonious movements, tune their hyaena howls to the symphony of a paean, and their reasonless rage into self-controlled rapture. . .' " Judy tugged urgently on Wanda's arm. Her voice slid under the hot, driving drumming. "Uh, let's go, please."
The New Yorker's voice rose several decibels. " The High Priestess,' it is written by The Master Therion, 'represents the most spiritual form of Isis the Eternal Virgin.'" The cool-eyed pixie stepped forward, regally self-possessed. She circled the dog pack of girls and the dildo-waving Bacchus.
" 'The Artemis of the Greeks ... she is light and the body of light. She is the truth behind the veil of light. Upon her knees is the bow of Artemis, which is also i musical instrument, for she is huntress and hunts by enchantment.' "She links the ideal world in highest heaven with the reality attained on earth," the speaker concluded.
The mob of girls became an orderly chorus on their knees, wands rippling back and forth as they chanted: "Io, Pan, fleet piper, Invigorate the forest with thy musk, Let thy enchanted syrinx lift the veil, Discharge night with desire's sudden light."
The boy skipped goatishly, miming a flute player with the phallus. The wise-eyed nude pixie drifted, repeatedly intercepting him as he careered about the stage.
"Ho, Hecate, sweet intercessor, Send thy menstrual rain to draw That crystal fire from the stars, Bright dew upon the fresh-turned earth."
The naked Artemis stood, legs spread, undulating will an icily controlled eroticism to the hip-rolling drumbeats.
Judy yanked. "Wanda!"
"Io, Bacchus, whose cup inflames, Offering the blood of Iacchus, Dionysios' love-bitten lips and liver Spreading communion with all life."
The platinum-haired pixie danced nimbly, her bow laying to the compelling drum sounds. The boy chased after, phallus probing the air.
"Ho, Artemis, whose swift joy Outraces the hairy-thighed Pan, Thy beauty a promise ever-leading, Thy perfection never degraded by decay."
The chorus suddenly became a forest, their hazel wands branches. In and out weaved the pixie and the satyr. The bearded boy mugged and panted and leered. He leaped before the prancing Artemis, the phallus copiously jetting milky gusts as he squeezed the base. Fluid splashed her nude, glowing skin.
The girls stripped away their blue chitons. In sweating nakedness they assailed him with their switches. He heaved up his toga, mooning them lewdly. The hazel wands lashed at his chubby rear.
"Ooooo!" He squealed in mock pleasure. He dived for them, the dildo thrusting like a lance. It still spurted, weakly.
They began to peel the blue-black toga from him and whip his hairy, stout body as his giggles rose. Judy gripped her friend firmly and fled from the hall.
"I still get a kick out of working with youth."
Reverend Roundsong glanced about the living room. Professor Porter's decor continued to resemble an arcane bookstore that had been invaded by an anthropological museum.
She settled comfortably onto the curving seat of what seemed a small bench well scarred by use. She knew the dark wood had in fact been cut and shaped in Ghana into an Ashanti Tribe stool.
On the wall behind her, a dark Afghani Baluch pillow rug served as a decorate hanging.
"Superb drummers. They had the group ready to plow the furrows even before your nymphs stripped off." Porter selected glassware from a reddish wooden cabinet, its posts and panels elaborately carved with New Zealand Maori designs. Mother of pearl eyes flashed rainbow lights; mouths grinned, four-fingered hands reaching out past the lips. Every inch between figures seemed covered with delicate whorls and swirls.
"Glendullan for you?" He held up a snifter.
"Thanks. Your usual Talisker, I suppose?"
"It goes best with a fine cigar. The peat bites into the cloying tobacco aftertaste. Yet, I'll respect your prejudice against the weed and abstain."
He poured a tot of whisky and offered her the snifter. Uncorking a second bottle, he filled a sherry glass. "Jem de la Frontera, as thick and sweet as a Gypsy's netherlips."
He tapped on the power of his CD player. Strings hovered low in the background. He stepped over and clicked his glass against her upraised snifter.
"Power to the people." She tasted the single malt Scotch, "Mmmm. Muchisimas gracias."
He slid into a full lotus before a bookcase gaudy with academic paperback spines. Not a drop spilled. He sipped the oloroso sherry. "Mona Forbes, you asked. Sweet, innocent wench. Taking three two-unit intro courses, including one of mine."
The stereo whispered as a full chorus barely breathed an invocation: "O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress-"
"Miss Forbes is fresh from high school," he continued, "but you know that. Not gifted, but capable of intelligent work. Charmingly middle class." "Good. Sigma is overdrawn at the eccentrics' bank. We can use some mainline recruits for pure balast." Caledonia warmed her whisky with cupped hands. "What's this we're bearing?"
"Gustav Hoist's Choral Symphony, to verses by Keats." "It's not The Planets, but it has a civilized intensity." The chorus suddenly erupted: "Hear us, great Pan!
Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings-"
"Miss Forbes lives with a cousin who keeps her toeing tie line."
"Better and better. It's easier to break in fillies if they come semi-trained." She closed her eyes and reveled in the Highland bouquet as she swirled the Scotch about the snifter.
"No stranger to corporal correction." Porter watched one eye open to peer at him.
"You do know her well." The lid closed. "Don't forget the Boy Ban. No dating, no assignations, no quickies stacked in the library stacks until the Harvest Festival."
Bliss glowed from her plump face as she drank.
He stroked the raised tip of his left mustache. "Such bold conclusions. I'm a father confessor to her."
"Oh. Incest. Kinky," she mocked. Her eyes both opened. "You must call upon heroic reserves to satisfy the spiritual needs of the student bodies."
"Not all relationships demand all-night stands." He let the light play around the edges of the heavy black sherry. "There's the casual tryst before meals, to stimulate the pallate."
"The post-prandial bang-up to settle the digestion." "As Krishna chanced to remark to Arjuna during a lull in the frenzied warfare soaking The Bhagavad Gita with blood, blood, blood." He cleared his throat.
" 'No man shall 'scape from act by shunning action; nay, and none shall come by mere renouncements unto perfectness. Nay, and no jot of time, at any time, rests an; actionless; his nature's law compels him, even unwillingly, into act; for thought is act in fancy. He who sits suppressing all the instruments of the flesh, yet in his idle heart thinking on them, plays the inept and guilty hypocrite-' "
"I like that for Brother Swaggart," she nodded, "but I shouldn't criticize the competition while it's down."
" 'But he who, with strong body serving mind, gives up his mortal powers to worthy work, not seeking gain, Arjuna! such an one is honourable. Do thine alotted task!' "
"To paraphrase: A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." She rumaged in the open mouth of her sacklike purse and extracted toothpaste and toothbrush.
"Woman, too." He finished the sherry.
"You, sir, purpose lechery." The Reverend Roundsong began to slip her beads and medalions over her head. "I am bent on an ecumenical convocation, a hymn in blood and bone, contrapuntals crying praises to heaven and earth."
He helped her waft her heavy robe over her shoulders. While she piled it on the Ashanti stool, he walked to the front of a two-seat rattan couch.
Reaching down, he tugged on the front rail. The frame slid, elongating smoothly. It neatly became a futon-matressed bed. He left the twin bolster cushions in place.
Stepping to the hall closet, he brought back sheets and fluffy foam pillows. Caledonia helped him make the bed, her pantihose and halter discarded. Her full flesh undulated, cushiony softness overlaying rounded muscles.
He undressed in front of a low bookcase. Atop a gaudy yellow-green-burgundy-imperial-blue strip-woven Ghanan cloth rose a deep brown dance wand sacred to the Nigerian Yoruba god Eshu-Elegba. The knowing eyes of the trickster god observed Porter's body, darkly marked by the Corsican sun during the weeks before the summer term.
The professor extracted a chamois pouch from a brass box with a rearing centipede on its lid. "Since Indian hemp is consecrated to Bacchus, I shall donate some Thai."
He sprinkled a liberal heap of pungent leafy shards onto a sooty bronze brazier. A match set it to gentle flame.
Caledonia touched his hard muscles and greying chest hair. "Before she became a shrewish virgin, Artemis knew worship in Ephesus as the nymph aspect of the Goddess."
He lightly fondled her aureoles, dark half-dollars. "Older yet,Hecate Selene, the far-shooting moon."
She kissed his cheek, tasting the faintest trace of English Leather "I invoke her, by Hathor's milky eye, the moon-stone tear of night's splendor."
The name vibrated along her throat, through his skin.
He nuzzled the softness along her arm. "I invoke goat-fleet Pan, by that cherished Eye of Hoor, whose lamp reveals secrets the moon never sees."
The resonate name tingled from his lips, into her flesh. They sank side by side, onto the thin, firm satin-sheeted Japanese matress. Hands roamed in familiar freedom.
The stereo roistered with orchestra and song: "Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs? whence came ye? So many, and so many, and such glee? Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?"
His phallus rose as they lay embraced, face to face. Her Win, silky mound pressed against its notable length, loth continued their caresses, making only tiny movements of legs or torsos.
The hemp-sweet air pressed lovingly down upon their bodies. An energy streamed between them.
He envisioned a silver cord linking the base of his spine and his navel. Visualizing a second body of pure light bide his body of gross matter, he shifted his consciousness into that body of light.
At no time did the astral self-image leave the bounds of his physical skin. Slowly his material perceptions faded and his astral senses opened.
A second body of light meshed with his, the pearlesceant radiance that was Caledonia Roundsong.
With a coy slap to his left cheek, she dissolved into a camphor-sharp mist that swiftly dissipated. He felt his astral form grow heavier as thick, goat-scented hair sprouted along his legs. His feet knobbed into fists, then formed into hooves.
All around him lay black quiet.
Suddenly, a chittering, capering grey-furred orangutan somersaulted over him from behind. It waddled and gibbered, its great bag-like abdomen rocking as its knuckles dragged.
He followed it with easy swimming motions. His arms and legs drove him through the void after the dancing ape It receded from him, though he worked his astral muscles in smooth, vigorous strokes. As it diminished to a dot, the black perceptibly lightened to a murky grey.
He caught the scent of ocean water.
His skin felt the first faint caresses of an enveloping medium. Something surrounded him, bore him up.
That something bit at his nose. He sneezed, raising his face. Cool air touched his mouth and nostrils. Salt splashed at him as his head dipped.
He raised his face for regular breaths as the grey faded to a shimmery silver.
A brine-tangy, moon-clear sea surrounded him. He swam with clean arm strokes, his furred legs and cloven hooves threshing heavily in the water behind.
The sea narrowed, becoming a channel between huge, smooth rocks. A powerful tide poured against him. yet he fought his way up the strait.
The water soon flowed a fierce crimson, mingled with stinging red flux that coursed between the narrow cliffs, A carmine mist rose to stain the overhead moon, barely visible between the rounded rocks.
The sea channel became an estuary. The roiling river current ran pure dark ruby. He struggled to breast it. His tody passed through the narrow strait into a cove, surging with current and eddy.
The shore spread with oaks, heavy in leaf, and black poplars. The river current spewed from a high waterfall, almost completely masked in garnet mists. Dimly seen ferns and wild growths clung to the rocks.
He slipped into a twisting eddy and came to shore. He danced out onto the damp earth, leaving cleft tracks. The red mist rolling from the waterfall's spray colored, but did not obscure, the details of the moon-washed night.
He moved into the forest springing close by the cove's edge. A grating peacock screeched. Quail darted away from his tread. He heard the far rustle of a great animal, also hooved. By scent he knew it for a stag, musky with mating need.
He had left the mist behind. Silver moonlight illuminated the open ground as he stepped from the trees into a clearing. Three paths stretched farther into the wood, on the other side.
A lioness slept peacefully across one. An ivory-hided bitch curled before the second. It moved in fitful dreaming,a low puppy's whimper sounding from its throat.
A graceful centauress drowsed on her four legs at the third path's opening. Sprigs of pennyroyal had been braided into the hair that hung over her breasts. Her head slumped, her arms slack.
The naked human torso flowed into a jennet's body. The tail swished in twitches. The hooves stood steady, their golden-red bronze shoes bright under the moon. He skipped nimbly over the dreaming bitch and followed the central path. The scent of almond trees in flower grew stronger as he pursued the meandering forest track. Finally, he found a grove of black poplar and almond. A young woman curled naked on the clear ground. Her bow and quiver lay against her breasts, brushing her belly.
Cradling arms protected them. She slept with slightly parted lips.
He touched her curving spine swiftly as he settled on his haunches by her. His fingertips swept down her back to her curved buttocks. With spread fingers he massaged those warm, muscled hinds.
He touched her lingeringly between the thighs. She murmured in the night. Her breath quickened. His fingers manipulated. Lips parted. She breathed in shallow, rapid gasps.
Suddenly, she shook in ecstasy, a throaty keening vibrating in the air. She inhaled deeply, then woke.
A hiss broke her lips. The trees rustled. Long, pale serpents crawled from the leaves, wriggling down tree trunks to surround them.
Her hands seized the bow. She slid out an arrow and nocked it, rearing on her heels. The silvery snakes closed in.
He leaped backward. His furred legs drove him over the narrowing circle of serpents. His hooves spun on the ground and he fled.
An outraged cry followed him. Footfalls and the swift rustle of scales pursued him down the path. The wood darkened instant by instant as the moon set behind near mountains.
By pure starlight, he pranced into the clearing. Under the black sky he found thirteen white-haired hags, thirteen breastless girls, and thirteen women round with child. All danced, hands raised and touching, forming a great delta shape.
The bright eye of Sirius glowed overhead in the huge dog following Orion. Directly beneath it, in the center of the women's triangle, something horned and stinking stirred.
A reeking breath, damp and gritty, filled the clearing. The women parted, their lines opening as if jaws.
The whisper of scaled bellies along dirt and the stamp of the angered archeress came from behind him. Before...
By the cold Dog Star he saw the black diamond eyes in the horned head at the clearing's center. The wet-ashes stench increased. The thing reared on ass's haunches. It rotated, offering the inhuman backside. Thirteen shriveled-breasted crones howled in desire. The hairless-pubed girls echoed their lust. The child-heavy, thick-dugged women spread their legs, groaning in parody of coition.
The hot-bodied huntress sprang down the path behind him. One arm caught him around the throat. Something lanced between his goat-hairy buttocks, writhing and probing his anus.
The huntress threw her legs around his waist. Her naked toasts pressed at his nape. Arm crushing his throat, she ached down to seize and jerk his hanging lingram. The serpentine thing up his rectum forced itself higher. The motions stimulated his prostate. His male member rose, knob-heavy and tormented by his rider's grip. He danced into the arena formed by the women's lines. The archeress yanked and cruelly twisted. He skipped a wild sarrabande as the length up his backside rooted higher. Lightning bursts of sensation drove along his nerves, stabbing between rectum and phallus. His pointing gristle stained toward heaven and the winking eye of Sirius. Her hard hand goaded and guided him. She firmly danced him around the circle of women. Pregnant bellies jiggled before him, in time to his pained bucks and leaps. Slender palms clapped as merry-cheeked girls chanted nonsense rhymes. Varicose legs and stretch-blued skin bobbed in time to his enforced gallop.
His loins burned and his flanks ached. He leaped higher as the python-fat thing reared yet farther up him. He hunched and capered with desire as his rider's hand squeezed his male growth, worrying the already raw foreskin.
The homed monster spread its ass's cheeks tauntingly. Its foul breath choked the air. Thirteen wrinkled-bellied beldams laughed at his goat-footed capers. The girls' ivory milk teeth showed in the cold starlight as they tittered and pointed. Each swollen- trunked woman set her heels, chortling in harsh, navel-deep howls.
The sinewy thighs crushed about his middle. Warm breasts straddled his bent neck, tantalizing. Her left arm reached back and low.
She yanked the serpentine length free. A hard, violent release shot through his blood. Her other hand choked and chaffed at his phallus.
Sperm foamed up from his depths-yet the fingers, cruel as bronze, crushed his genital lance. She blocked the orgasm within him.
He begged and hammered his cloven hooves. His spine arched till his straining lingam jutted straight at the sky, directly into the bright eye of Great Canus.
The fingers slackened. The sperm fountained in gouts. He shrieked his joy at her mercy. One-two-seven-nine, -thirteen ... the pearlescent jets pulsed starward.
Thick ropes of semen splashed down on them, wriggling along their naked skin. The orgasmic drops splashed onto the dark, horned beast.
It shriveled. Its midnight head turned in a silent plea. Clinging gism spotted the monstrous face and ass-haunched body. Pained tears welled from the diamond eyes. The black pupils widened.
The horned thing shrank and dissolved into a dark pool of tears that watered the roots of a stunted thistle patch just ahead of the naked crones. The thirsty plant drank the brackish ooze.
The stench vanished with the nightshape. Hot breath, sharp and spicy as crushed aloes, panted along his forehead and cheeks.
The huntress released her thigh-grip and wrestled him to the earth. She sat on him, eyes laughing as she ground his back into the dirt. Her mouth darted. Their tongues meshed. She extracted wild, massaging kisses from him. Her taut, silk-haired body pressed his phallus against his belly.
The thirteen unripened girls froliced widershins around them. The worn, wise ancients shuffled their swollen- jointed feet rhythmically. The thirteen great-teated, full-wombed mothers rocked and clapped their hands.
The archeress engulfed his phallus. Her elbows took her weight and plowed the open earth as she mated lustily with him.
The closed delta rotated about them to the beat of the ancient dance. Beyond the coupling bodies, the pool-watered thistle slowly parted its prickly leaves. A thick-rooted stalk appeared. Under the light of Sirius it rapidly blossomed into a heavily lipped orchid, swaying gorgeously to the foot-stamps and coital lunges.
In the morning, Porter uncorked a cold Hop Kiln Winery late harvest Johannisberg Riesling. "A little Weihnachtwein?"
"No orange juice?" Caledonia Roundsong's fork broke into an omelet of sesame-scented, wok-fried vegetables.
"A mimosa cocktail destroys good sparkling wine and dilutes fresh O.J."
He set a champagne flute of still, amber Riesling in front of her. Thick Canadian bacon accompanied the broccoli, snow peas, and squash omelet on his earthenware plate.
"To the Ephesian Artemis," he tilted his glass toward her, "whose white bitch avatar generously whelped the first vine stalk."
She drank solemnly. "Let me propose the health of Bacchus. His wine cult made best use of the grape."
The heady pungency of the Riesling mingled with crisp, fresh vegetable tastes as they ate.
"We should one day lighten the burden of Dorothy Tilden's curiosity concerning occult survivals." Porter cut and devoured some bacon.
"She has a road to travel before she can accept that kind of initiation." The minister licked her fork of clinging scraps. "She'll take to sex magic like an eel to water, though. There's a lot of energy in that girl."
Porter let the wine cut the salten fattiness lingering on his tongue. "She sublimates royally into her theater work-but is discipline really her strong suit? Such a smirk, Caledonia; you'd thought I meant a vulgar pun."
"Her alcohol intake is no greater than your indulgence of your libido. If Mona Forbes does pledge to Sigma, remember the self-discipline of the Boy Ban."
"I'm a savior to her, not the Big Bad Wolf. To prove it, let me tell you my plan for her roommate ..."