vOYAGE:O'Side

by Francis Kroncke

CHAPTER 10

  Therefore the devil can collect and make use as he will of human semen which belongs to the body. (Malleus Maleficarum, 1486)

  The rickety hay wagon comes to a full stop, as suddenly as one holding their breath and bellowing their cheeks, however, the friar’s body still moves forward...undulating with the yet rolling heaves and jerks of the ocean of dirt he has sailed upon these last several decades. Germany being his ocean, upon which he has voyaged—seeking out the depraved you!’s so like the Prior. For Friar Otto’s special mission, that which the revered Inquisitors have assigned him, is to ferret out the witches, warlocks, sorcerers—all the demons!—hiding behind masks of religious piety—friars and nuns, especially behind priestly charisma. It takes his eyes discerning no movement from the trees to stir that part of himself which motivates his calves to clamp the wagon’s edge and in concert with hands lift and dislodge, discharge him onto the solid earth—“terra firma” flits through his mind as this reflex motion is half-completed. Another flashes onto the not-so-firma, that of the world discovered now not so long ago by Columbus—a thought fitted with a half-prayer in praise of the Father’s eternal Bountifulness and Majesty...the other half being in penance for questioning why God would allow another Italian—Botticelli, now this Genoan!—to be His messenger. To his Teutonic mind the warm weathered southerners were a most Undisciplined! tribe of romantics.

  Verily, it was because of such widespread lack of Discipline throughout Christendom that Friar Otto started out in that awakening year, 1488, to walk, ride in the back of oxcarts, sit upon donkeys and plodding plow horses...as presently, to hoist himself upon this harvest-to-market cart so arriving here in the End Time year of 1505—a century he was confident would witness the Second Coming of the Christ. He was near ending another journey—pilgrimage, suffering voyage—always with the Holy Rosary thick around his waist, ever faithful to his inspired Dominican brothers, whom the Papal Bull extolled as “our beloved sons,” the Inquisitors Extraordinary Jacob Sprenger, O.P. and Heinrich Kramer, O.P. It was to their charge that he has been faithfully responding—to restore the Order’s “Practice of Strict Obedience”—and, with Sprenger in heaven and Kramer on his death-bed, it is to faithfully champion and sustain their divinely inspired mission that Friar Otto has journeyed here. He has come specifically to honor his cherished brother Kramer in his last hours. To honor the memory of the truly sainted Sprenger, gone near ten years. To honor them this specific itinerary was mapped with visits to unmarked personal sites of the cruelest qualities of pain—self-inflicted, crushing knee-caps, scraping every point of earthly contact—knuckles, elbows, forehead, heels. Here, suffering even more horrifically than he had on his very first journey to reach Sprenger’s professorial classroom at the University of Cologne. So inspired—terrible of heart!—back then, he had continued onto the University at Erfurt, then trekked to sit at the feet of the eloquent Heinrich Kramer in Regensburg—back then as now suffering more days than not, all day upon his knees, creeping forward...doing so because for him every Inquisitional journey demanded an ever more severe Discipline. To ever more torture his body so as to purify his soul. So he explored the varied landscapes of pain...beloved pain!…from dirt in his food to block its delights, to sleeping naked in the snow until his now arthritic feet and hands were deep blue, to drawing upon his own flesh a landscape of scars and pockmarks—ever revealing through ugliness the beauty of his soul, ever his body the canvas that Botticelli should have painted!

  As with all those who would ever come to feel the Friar enact God’s righteous anger upon their bewitching bodies so it has always been and remains pain that cleanses and makes him ready to sit before and hear from the lips of those specially chosen, those who are truly the disciplined warriors of God...his brother Inquisitors.

  On his now long-ago maiden voyage, as Friar Otto entered the University’s Grand Hall, he had heard Sprenger’s voice declaiming upon the essence of the Inquisitor’s mission...words which the Friar already knew by rote:

  “… yet their power (devils) remains confined to the privy parts and the navel. For through the wantonness of the flesh they have much power over men; and in men the source of wantonness lies in their privy parts, since it is from them that the semen falls, just as in women it falls from the navel.”

  The majestic Dominican continued, “As Job himself has taught us,”—the verse in Chapter 41 writes itself in the air for all to hear—“Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.”

  Ah! How often the Friar has since then tortured himself with this anatomical revelation. How his meditation upon the sainted professors’ text—the magnificent Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Satan”)—has opened to him the greater depth that exists behind Scripture’s literal words, that which the blessed Origen called the anagogic, the mystical...that which is known only to the few, these who see the Other Face of God, know the Left Hand as it belies the Right Hand. As he recalls this day as back then and every day hence when he daily reads the Malleus, the mystical revelation is that the map of his fated and priestly journey follows the route marked out by the singular, most exquisite torture of the body and hence of the soul—the crucifixion of the sexual organs of males and females. For the Malleus claims that

  …the power of the devil lies in the privy parts of men.

  This is why Friar Otto has subjected himself to every bounce and jolt of the road as he travelled up from the south—unnoticed to others that his genitals are chafed by stones in his undergarments. Verily, “The power of the devil lies in the privy parts of men.”

  Fatefully, the Friar’s life-altering journey had begun back then with but an innocent glance at Botticelli’s Venus...innocent but just a moment’s bewitchment cast by the delicacy of his art, the allurement of his colors and the seductiveness of his line. If the artist had been there beside him, the Friar has no doubts that Botticelli would proclaim his craft as unveiling the majesty of Her, of the Blessed Mother, the Most Holy Virgin, through the Beauty of Her Daughters, these Natural Creatures. He believing as the artist must, who, along with all the misguided teachers of “natural theology”—“The Devil’s Own!” damns the friar in blinded thought—erroneously believing that Nature reflects the Supernatural—“as above, so below” their justification. But “Nature” so the Friar knows was and will always be fallen. As such, the painting should be titled not the Birth of Venus but the Fall of Man.

  Ah, the soothing, comforting but yet terrifying and terrorizing words of the Malleus flood over and through him as in his mind he recalls and yet gazes once again upon Botticelli’s painted message—revelation! Once again, his eyes, enchanted, fall down upon the soft and surrendering lines of her flesh...cascading like waterfall from her breasts down and swirling around her thighs and calves and ankles like light rising from below. Oh, Friar Otto sees, watches, observes, follows along this map, this detailed map of—what else but Sin, Depravity, Sorcery? She, her body, simply a map of flesh drawn by the hand of a devil—which given its sensuous beauty, its ravaging of every profane sensibility forces him to inhale her scent, be drawn by the allure of her golden hair, gasp at the innocence of her moonstone flesh, slightly pink like crushed rose petals. Oh, he presses the tip of his tongue, tenderly to her eyes, filching a sip of sweet honey. Oh, the agony! Oh, the pangs of piercing Desire! Oh, the cruelty of this Depravity!

  “...the power of the devil lies in the privy parts of men.”

  A torturer of the privy parts of all the demons, this is his calling. It is the glorious fate that the Father has set before him. It is simply to be that Friar Otto’s gaze shall never unlatch itself from Venus’ navel. Never.

  “And so they are to be put to the torture in order to make them confess. Any person, whatever his rank or position, upon such an accusation may be put to the torture, and he who is found guilty, even if he confesses his crime, let him be racked, let him suffer all other tortures prescribed by law in order tha
t he may be punished in proportion to his offenses.”

  This the message, the unifying vision, that which the friar has dreamed...seeing himself in personal combat with the Devil, sighting himself as a High Priest—being transubstantiated into the Son made present through his consecrated hands...celebrating the Holy Mass but in like manner celebrating as he tortures, as he pierces and presses, twists and hacks, savages his way through that which is the blockage, the barrier, the Refuge of the Devil, namely, the body itself. Verily, the Body—that which is flesh, All Flesh. More, which is Her, Her gift, Her bequeathal, Her heritage—birthing She, Mother Eve, present in all women...all women’s bodies being maps of Her, sensuous maps, beautiful maps, soft maps which men follow to perdition. But nothing more to be tortured than genitals, these the private passageways, caves of Satan’s hellish darkness...they that are entered through the piercing pleasure, the locking action, that which is keyed and opened using the phallus.

  Ah, the phallus which is lance, which can be—Oh, Sweet Suffering Jesus!—the blessed Centurion’s Lance, but which for most sons of Adam is but the Devil’s Key...inserted into her who is Her here present. So let there be no counterclaim—Devil’s defense!—that Botticelli does not show her private parts, not expose her, not throw her out in all her depravity. Such is but the Devil’s trickery. Behold! Satan casts her as Innocence, as Virginity, as Pure...but Friar Otto knows about the navel, its mystery and mystical meaning. “For wasn’t Adam without a navel?” Verily, as most of the priests and friars and brothers here conjoined in common vision all know that Adam had no navel because he was created by the Father, not born from a mother goddess! To hold otherwise is to preach the Devil’s Message, which is what is being preached during the Satanic, depraved Black Mass. Alas, Friar Otto knows only too well what Botticelli has revealed—that her Venusian body, that the body of all women can only be redeemed through a frenzied torture of their hidden, most private parts—Her passageways to eternal damnation!

  As the friar kisses the hand of this last to die of the two greatest messengers of Christ—Heinrich, his beloved teacher, inspiration...this sainted Dominican, speechless in a coma but forever eloquent through that which Friar Otto and many others hold as second only to the Bible as the twin treasures of Christianity, the Malleus, he recalls,

  “But let no man think he may escape by pleading ignorance.”

  At the funeral of this most fervent Inquisitor, Friar Otto concludes his sermonic eulogy with this challenging accusation—directly pointing with right arm at full length, index finger indicting all the you!s—“let no man...!” At they who have come here to praise but to whom the preacher delivers what he knows his most beloved teacher has left as his final instruction to all—be not ignorant, ceaselessly search out the witches! The Friar steps down from the pulpit with these two majestic books, one under each arm. One, the revelatory book of God’s Good News. The other, the practical book with the discipline that empowers all the faithful to hammer out the truth and beauty of the Good News. Friar Otto is ever amazed at the power of this Hammer, a power it must derive from the holy Friar Kramer himself, for at the very moment the funeral Mass for Heinrich Kramer ends—Ite missa est!—all about the church Friar Otto hears echoing Lucifer’s cry, wail, moan, scream, bellow...then with a gusty wind the Adversary flees! Verily, the Malleus will ever live in the hearts and souls of those here who also dream the Malleus...who seek to enflesh its sacred voice within their hearts and souls.

  As the two sainted, heavenly Dominicans now implore with their celestial voices, so does the Lord bless and anoint Friar Otto within this waking dream—Go ever forth and hammer Satan!