The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  Peter of Maricourt was in his most natural element here, for the human beings he encountered had for so many hundreds of years been accustomed to just such predatory explorers that they were as little surprised by the strange appearance of some of them as by the weird accents of others, or by the extraordinary weapons used by yet more unusual apparitions.

  As may well be imagined a large portion of the retainers of Lost Towers had been supplied from dwellers in this sea-bordering marsh-land which was inserted, so to say, along that coast between high-rolling chalk hills like a wet wide-open entrance-gate between towering walls.

  Lilith of Lost Towers found most of her female intimates in the human hovels sprinkled along these desolate haunts of unusual sea-birds interspersed with wild geese and wild ducks. Nor was it unnatural that this strange maiden herself should in some of her moods, when out of touch it might be with both her parents, pay lengthy visits to these intimates of her own sex in these lonely places.

  “As it happened however,” so the wisest chroniclers, who are also the humblest, are always being reduced to admitting, Lilith’s chief confederate didn’t live in the midst of these sea-marshes but on the edge of a quite different stretch of country. This was an expanse of rough, wild moorland, covered with heather, which, as long at any rate as local memory went, had been regarded as once belonging to the ancient Welsh god or king whose name was Llyr or Lear. The woman in this case was Mother Wurzel, who lived in the part of this moor and from which there was a rider’s track leading to what was once the important Roman city of Durnovaria, where Lilith’s friend as a practiser of both black and white magic had clients of many different sorts.

  Petrus Peregrinus had visited the rather unusual abode of Mother Wurzel more than once in his expeditions through Wessex, for it was his practice, when he had too soon exhausted the money he had earned by soldiering, to make use of the innumerable tricks which his pet lodestone could play to keep him in bread and in cheese and in wine.

  The habitation of Mother Wurzel was founded upon a very small circle of tall upright stones. The stones must have originally come from the isle of Portland, but they looked as if before being brought here they had stood in a much wider circle; for they had a rather uneasy expression, as if they were not receiving their due of respect in their present crowded and somewhat humiliating position.

  And yet the maker of this queer habitation cannot have been totally indifferent to the elements of dignity and beauty, for great care had been taken with regard to making the superstructure harmonize with this queer base. The space within the circle had been given a smooth marble floor and a roof arched as carefully as the crypt of a cathedral, and there had been placed over that one single wooden chamber entirely built of oak. The first time Petrus entered this dwelling, which was called Deadstone, he enquired of Mother Wurzel how on earth she had got possession of it; and she explained that it really belonged to the Lord of Lost Towers, but that he, under his daughter’s influence, had made it over in perpetuity to herself as his daughter’s friend.

  Having got safely clear of the formidable Lord Edward, it didn’t take the wanderer from Picardy very long to reach Deadstone, and after an enjoyable night there, for Mother Wurzel’s middled-aged daughter, whose name was Puggie-Wuggie, had more deliciously wicked little ways when once you had her by your side in bed than any feminine being Petrus had ever known, he was allowed the privilege of meeting Lilith herself.

  When once these two were together, however, things moved more crucially; and everything, at least for our student of magnetism, became much more complicated. In the first place there happened to him something that had never happened to him in his life before. He became completely infatuated with this fatal young lady.

  The scrupulous chronicler of these agitating events has to endeavour in his narration of them to proceed as cautiously and meticulously as the events themselves seemed to be proceeding. As always with the actual impacts of life, there were so many different currents joining our special stream of events that this same stream was constantly being thickened here and thinned there, darkened here and lightened there, rendered bluish here and greenish there, and even splashed, it might be, with horrifying drops of blood at certain other places in its course.

  At least that is how it all presented itself to Peter of Maricourt; and it did so with such ever-increasing, and now and then with such overlapping, overwhelming, overpowering, and almost drowning force, that he felt as he looked at her that, whether she yielded to his obsession or whether she didn’t yield to his obsession, it was now quite as important to him to remain in sight of her as it was to know that he, the gate-keeper’s son in the manor of Maricourt, was really and truly the long rumoured, long predicted, long prophesied Antichrist of sacred tradition.

  The little red point of Peter’s tongue didn’t stay quiet any longer within the inner side of its menacing port-cullis. It came out; or, as a more elegant historian would say, it issued forth. What in plain words it did, this tongue of the enemy of Christ, was to lick both its upper lip and its lower lip, a proceeding that would have been a staggering sight for Peter’s only friend, his precious lodestone, if that object, now pressed so nervously against its owner’s organ of generation, had possessed the power of vision.

  “You are asking me, my beautiful one,” he was now saying to Lilith, “what I want you to do for me at this juncture. Well! I’ll tell you exactly what’s in my mind. I think the thing for us to do is to go as quickly as possible to the Fortress, while this ex-bishop from Cologne is still there.

  “Since I’ve found out how perfectly beautiful and irresistible you are, it has come over me that if I want to stop this man’s interference with everybody’s affairs in this part of the world—and you know how deep the gulf has already grown—down to the centre of the universe—between Bonaventura, and his dicegames with Satan, and Friar Bacon and his attempts to change the creative methods of God by getting some parcener of Eve to help him in the making of Adam. You know of course, my beautiful one, the difficulties we have to surmount if we really are to put a stop to this man’s meddling? But here is my plan, my dear, if you’ll help me to carry it out.

  “In the first place we’ve got to pretend that we are horrified, beyond all expression, by this assault on Bacon’s Brazen Image, which must be to us of course the work of a loyal believer in Christ; and not only so but must contain within itself a splash, a spark, a breath, a sip, a sigh, a bubble, a dewdrop of that Spirit they believe in, who, at Pentecost, descended from Heaven in the shape of a thousand flames of fire and lodged on the heads of a crazy crowd of Jewish madmen.

  “Of course it was in the shape of a dove that the Thing descended on Jesus himself at his baptism in Jordan. But by the time of Pentecost Jesus was already ‘ascended’, and when this Ghost they call ‘Holy’ ‘descended’, it came as a sort of Substitute for Jesus to keep things going till the event they call the ‘Crack of Doom’ or the ‘Last Day’.”

  While Petrus was thus lecturing her on what, if they were to be successful in destroying it all, it was necessary for them to know, he was embracing her with every portion of his mind and not a few portions of his body.

  “What we’ve got to do, my loveliest of all possible Eves, is to remember how long these confounded doctors of the church have been confusing our brains with their absurd problems about the embryo in the womb. This poor little urchin of a formless foetus begins by being on a par with the vegetable world, and has only got what they call a ‘vegetative soul’. Then, when it is a tiny bit bigger, and is being definitely fed upon the substance of its mother’s life, it is promoted to share the lives of all baby-creatures of the animal world and is allowed to possess what they call a ‘nutritive soul’. But just listen to this, my sweet,” and, as he spoke, his amorous caresses made it clear that he would not in the least object to becoming the begetter of the kind of creature he was describing.

  “What we’ve got to remember is that this luckless infant only posse
sses 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.

  And Petrus of Maricourt swore within himself that it was upon him, and upon him alone of all men living or dead, that the burden of the tremendous deliverance was laid.

  “I am the one,” he cried to the very tune of his embraces of Lilith, “appointed from the dawn of history to lead the revolt of all natural earthly life, whether human, animal, vegetable, or mineral, against this accurst inhibition, inspired by these mad religious teachers from Palestine. Anti-Christ! Antichrist! Anti-christ! That is what I am. And the crazy joke of it is that this Jesus, whom they call the Second Person of this Trinity they’ve invented, always said that we were all the Sons of God.”

  At this point Petrus of Picardy scrambl
ed to his feet, and bending down modestly and courteously over his companion arranged and tidied her disturbed garments.

  It was nearly dark by the time Peter of Maricourt and Lilith of Lost Towers passed that glen of the Welsh Tinker which was so near the gate of the Convent. They were on their way to the Priory, where they hoped to waylay Albertus Magnus, who had—so local rumour informed them—been invited that night to dine with the Prior. It was in the mind of Petrus Peregrinus that they might encounter young John there too, setting off for home from his daily visit to the imprisoned Friar. This possibility however Petrus refrained from communicating to Lilith, though exactly what his motive was for this particular piece of rather curious reticence he would have been himself puzzled to say, although it might enter the head of a mean-minded chronicler that it had something to do with the good looks and youth of the person in question.

  It was in any case much less of a surprise to the girl from Lost Towers than to the man from Maricourt when up from the Tinker’s Cave, where these children of Israel had been stealing between their separate duties a celestial hour of delicious happiness without troubling their heads about Welsh gods or Welsh tinkers or Welsh witches, came the giant Peleg holding his Ghosta by the hand.

  The path upward of the ascending pair crossed irrevocably the path of the couple who were skirting the edge of the declivity, so that an encounter was inescapable. Any aboriginal spirit at this juncture, whether that of a deity, or a tinker, or a witch, who possessed the power of reading the thoughts in alien brains, would have been fascinated, as it darted like a sand-martin from cavity to cavity in these unusual skulls, to note the absolute difference between what was going on in all four heads.

  Lilith was wondering whether she lost anything by the fact that the deliciously wicked delight, which she derived from leading people into mischief while she satisfied her senses with their erotic embraces, had never been, even to the faintest wafture of such a thing, touched by the breath of romantic love. “What the devil can that feeling be like?” she wondered irritably.