Please welcome to the world … EGREGORE or, the Trinity of the Philtrum by Hector Meinhof

 

The face of a human foetus is formed by three rotating parts – one with the right eye, one with the left eye, and one with the mouth – meeting and growing together in the philtrum, resting on the cupid’s bow. These parts represent the Trinity.

The timeless love story of a saint and a serial killer: Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais must navigate the mechanics of genocide in a mystical apocalypse. EGREGORE or, the Trinity of the Philtrum, expands on the uniquely disturbing obsessions Hector Meinhof first revealed in Three Nails, Four Wounds: A journey into a winter landscape where mediaeval and contemporary visions of the last days combine, and horrifying rituals are played out for the gratification of a cruel divinity and mischievous child saints…

Translated from Swedish by B.J. Woodstein & John Macmillan
Photographs by Jozefien Van der Aelst and Karolina Urbaniak
Drawings by Josefin Jansson
Interview conducted by Martin Bladh

Hardbound, 164 pages, 206 x 148mm
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/product-page/egregore

 

 

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EXTRACTS

Still drunk with sleep, Jeanne found herself in one of the royal castle’s dark vestibules, surrounded by a group of noblewomen who were taking turns holding her upright. Jeanne stood with her legs wide apart, wearing a white linen dress that reached her feet, the hem and collar of which were embroidered with lilies and coiled snakes. Between her thighs there shimmered a silvery light that penetrated the fabric and illuminated the powdered faces of the assembled women. Someone or something moved in the light under Jeanne’s skirt, the hem of the dress quivered, and blurred shadows flew about in a strange spectacle: a tear fell, a banner was raised, a book was riffled by the wind, a flap of wings, a sinking cross, a grotesque nose glimpsed in profile before a paw began to spin four swords between Jeanne’s knees. Suddenly, an elbow poked out of the fabric and a small wrinkled foot slipped from under the hem (but it was quickly withdrawn). Jeanne blushed, her pulse raced and her jaws tightened (two women gripped her firmly under her armpits) and as she threw her head back, gasping and gritting her teeth, something white sparkled between her thighs. For a moment, those present were dazzled – something struck the floor and rolled over the wooden planks – and they squinted; but suddenly it was all over. The flame between Jeanne’s thighs was smothered, and the gloom and calm returned. The noblewomen opened their eyelids: an extinguished candle stump lay on the floor, splashes of red wax led into and under Jeanne’s skirt, and three howls of a dog away a church bell rang the vigil. Jeanne lifted up her skirt, a black streak of smoke curled out and a chubby female dwarf crawled forward, stood up and said:
‘The girl is intact!’

 

The red brick church was packed and smelled of lily of the valley. Jeanne sat all the way at the front with the King on her right. On her left sat a shy young knight who tried not to look at her (for he knew he was unlovable). A girls’ choir performed an antiphon by von Bingen accompanied by a small, portable hand organ whose short sides accurately depicted the outline of the church seen, respectively, from the east and the west. The bellows, which were made of a goat’s stomach, breathed deeply: ‘O, this stream of blood, that allows its cry to be heard on high…’ As the assembled fell to their knees, Jeanne whispered to the young knight:

‘We will burn together, Gilles!’
‘Fire is our true element, Jeanne,’ replied Gilles.
‘Gilles, we will die in the same fire. I swear, it’s true!’ Jeanne handed her sword to Gilles. ‘Come, come, come, burn in me!’

Even from a distance, Jeanne could see that the city had been visited by the enemy (that caudate vermin!). Black smoke billowed from the church tower, a wall had collapsed and from an old oak tree just outside the city gates a witch was hanging upside-down. As Jeanne and her men wound their way through the city’s alleys, they could see the devastation up close: bloodied walls of houses, crushed glass, a burnt-out forge, mutilated people in the gutter. Gilles rode alongside Jeanne and said, ‘I remain close to you, the virgin, because you birth the exquisite suffering that heralds every new world order.’ Jeanne smiled and said, ‘You will wake up in darkness and realise that you yourself are the darkness – a darkness awakened by your dreams. A shadow will lead you to another darkness, the darkness that resides inside your light.’ As ever, Jeanne didn’t understand the words she said, but the voices in her head were satisfied.

 

Jeanne and Gilles sat on a stone in the blazing sun before a mass grave just outside the city gates. Containing a hundred or so bodies dumped in a shallow pit and perfunctorily covered with earth, the grave was neither still nor peaceful. As if sleeping restlessly – trembling with an irregular pulse – the earth heaved up and down as the air was forced out of the bowels of the dead. If you went close, you could hear a farting sound. The stench was revolting. The voices told Jeanne what to say to Gilles: ‘If you do not close your third eye and give consciousness to your essence, and then discern, separate, split and become your own antidote – your evil dreams will be realised in reality. Gilles, my friend, you have an important task to perform. More important than mine.’

And then one rainy day, it was all over in an instant. Jeanne was torn from her horse and thrown brutally to the ground. A boot on her back pinned her to the mud. Gilles was nowhere to be seen – had he escaped? And her warriors – she saw about fifty of them lying dead on the field, but as for the others – where had they gone? Jeanne was alone; not even the ravens wanted to witness her defeat and the voices inside her head had gone silent. Should I slit my upper lip now, she thought.

Jeanne spent hour after hour under the boot without anything happening. She dozed off and dreamt of a puppy lying on its side, sleeping on top of a martyr’s grave in the desert. Occasionally the puppy’s paws moved and made patterns in the sand. Suddenly, the puppy jerked, woke up and ran away. A little girl walked up to the grave, squatted down and studied the dream traces in the sacred sand, ran her finger along the contours – and saw a glimpse of something so horrible in the future that she went blind.

Jeanne woke up. It had stopped raining. She still felt the boot against her back, and every now and then it pressed down so that her spine cracked. Some distance away, a bald old woman was walking around picking the golden spurs from the corpses of Jeanne’s knights. Surely the King must do something, Jeanne thought. She decided to remain silent – but in any case, no questions were asked of her. Three hours later, a nobleman arrived in a carriage with the curtains drawn. A snap of the whip in the twilight and Jeanne was gone.

Jeanne was stripped and her skin was shaved (the hair was burned in the castle yard). The priests read her body, pricked her with needles in search of Satan’s (insensitive) mark, and every cavity of her body was palpated in search of teats. One of the priests put his ear to Jeanne’s anus – for Satan speaks excrement when he pollutes creation. But as soon as Jeanne was found to be intact, the investigation was stopped. She was a disappointment and was taken back to her cell.

 

In the middle of the night, two guards trudged into Jeanne’s cell. The youngsters were visibly drunk. One put a wax candle on the floor and said, ‘Because virgins have such tight urethras, it sounds like hissing snakes when they pee.’ ‘If you tear a lettuce leaf under a virgin’s nose, she’ll pee on herself!’ said the other, kicking the chamber pot, which slid to Jeanne’s bare feet. Still dull from the food poisoning, Jeanne was as if paralysed and the voices screamed unintelligibly behind the light inside her head.
‘It’s potty time, Jeanne!’

The guards pounced on Jeanne and pulled her trousers off. Jeanne tried to protect herself, but had no strength to fight back. The guards lifted her up and pushed the pot under her bottom. ‘I don’t want to, don’t want to sit on the potty, thanks, please, I’m so tired,’ Jeanne mumbled with her eyes shut. But soon there was a tinkling in the pot and the youngsters crowded around Jeanne’s thighs to catch a glimpse of the virgin’s clear spring water where three glowing grains of salt from the rain before the Fall crystallised the phosphorus-smelling membrane that darkened the morning star Jeanne was incubating.

And now something peculiar happened: Jeanne tilted her head back and held her breath as the warm vapours of urine entered through her urethra and continued up through her body; through her kidneys, liver, lungs and spleen – mixed with the black bile – and paralysed her heart and flooded her brain. The body is a reflection of the universe, and as the soul, falling through the Milky Way on its descent towards the fontanelle of the new-born child, rubs against the planets and receives a dose of their temperaments and qualities, so the rising urine vapour collected the energies of the bodily organs and became an ecstatic spirit that intoxicated Jeanne’s senses and put her in a trance-like state.
Jeanne began to speak in a strangely fragile and airy voice in two octaves at once. Strange tones wound up and down like snakes on a staff:

‘In the future – hundreds of years from now – in a time more superstitious than ours, where the world is more ridiculous than cruel, where pain is meaningless and the spirit has become a ghost: I see a man – the former exorcist – he is sitting in the backseat of a black limousine speeding through the moonlit white glitter of a shaken snow globe.’
To one guard, it sounded as if the tone of Jeanne’s voice was rising endlessly, while to the other it sounded as if it was endlessly falling. ‘Limousine?’ one of them exclaimed in confusion. ‘Snow globe?’ said the other. On the edge of the castle grounds, in a small red cabin with white eaves, a dead infant began to bleed from its nose.
Jeanne continued: ‘I see the limousine driving around the snow-covered streets of Egregore. The car slows down and begins to crawl along the barbed wire fence that surrounds the castle grounds, finally stopping in front of the iron gates. The window at the driver’s seat is cranked down and a hand, clad in black leather, reaches out and presses the brass button on the intercom.’

‘Intercom? I don’t understand what she’s talking about,’ said one guard, ‘and who’s really talking?’ ‘No clue. I think our martyr has gone mad!’ replied the other.
Jeanne continued: ‘“At least the smell of death is familiar,” mutters the exorcist in the backseat quietly to himself, letting his gaze drift up the castle façade. In the strong moonlight, I can clearly see the smoke rising from the chimney, a black and dense smoke that breathes in a steady beat into this windless and starry January night. But there’s something wrong with the smoke. This is not a normal draught, occurring when warm air rises and the cold air underneath creates pressure. The natural process has been accelerated, and the smoke seems to be forced out of the crown of the chimney, as if a celestial being has hauled its bowels down to the sublunar world, sucked itself onto the chimney, and is now greedily devouring people’s burnt offerings. I hear the exorcist’s thoughts: “This is my job: to feed heaven!”

‘A rasping signal and the gates open. Two armed guards take a step to the side and salute. The limousine drives over the stone bridge towards the gate, which is slowly rolled up like a rat trap, behind which two more armed guards are stationed. The car drives into the arcade, which is illuminated by milky white lanterns mounted on the columns supporting four stories of balustraded colonnades. The driver turns off the engine, sitting quietly for a moment, before he gets out of the car, walks around and opens the back door for the exorcist.

‘“Welcome to Castle Egregore,” says an elderly man, who introduces himself as the chief physician and hastily shakes the exorcist’s hand before turning to his colleagues with an elegant gesture and introducing the security officer, followed by the chief administrator, the chief nurse, a lawyer and the housekeeper (who curtsies when the exorcist extends his hand).

 

I am with the exorcist in the morgue. The windows face the arcade and are covered with shredded black plastic rubbish bags. In the room there are five patients on stretchers. Each prisoner is fastened with six leather straps to the frame of the stretcher: by the hands (extended above the head), feet, around the waist, and at the neck. Some wail. A nurse walks around and unties the cardboard tags that each prisoner has attached to their big toe (name, registration number, date of death). A young woman from the administration follows right behind, reading the labels and checking off the names on a list. Now the patients are ready for their injection. The exorcist is left alone in the room. He walks up to an old man who grunts uneasily, and he cups his hand around the old man’s shaved head.

The chief physician enters. He hastily greets the exorcist and gestures to an emaciated woman in her 20s lying on the bunk closest to the windows. The woman tries again and again to open her eyes, but her body is heavy with drugs. The physician unlocks the medicine cabinet and fills a syringe with 200 milligrams of Spica. He walks up to the woman and nonchalantly pushes the syringe straight into her navel. ‘Do you see the sweat breaking out on her forehead? Her skin is cooling, her eyelids are twitching. Listen to her heavy breathing. Wait… She’s gone!’ The physician pulls the woman’s eyelids apart with his thumb and forefinger: her pupils are constricted, as small as pinheads. The exorcist nods thoughtfully. The physician takes another bottle out of the medicine cabinet, fills the syringe and moves on to the next patient, a middle-aged man (asleep?): ‘Elgafar,’ says the physician, ‘they die within 10 seconds.’ He empties the syringe – quickly and with even pressure – into the patient’s jugular vein. He puts his stethoscope to the patient’s chest – shakes his head. ‘10-15 millilitres is enough. It’s cheap too!’ The physician quickly finishes off the three remaining patients. A little boy hiccoughs as the needle penetrates his heart.

A new patient transport. To get to the castle, the bus has to drive through the centre of town. The bus driver says that when he passed the school, the children ran after the bus and shouted: Murder bus! Murder bus! The exorcist doesn’t look happy.

The exorcist talks to the chief nurse. She has been employed at the castle for just over two years and admits that the work is quite stressful. The chief nurse says that she previously worked at a children’s clinic. She has fond memories of that time (it was less stressful). Spica or Syrma would be stirred into hot chocolate and given to the little ones, who almost immediately became noticeably lethargic and sluggish. After that, the nurses were able to tie the children to the bed frames without any difficulty and open the windows to the starry sky. After about an hour, a thick white foam began to flow from the children’s mouths. Well, now here she was at Egregore castle… The woman leans forward confidentially and asks if he really worked as an exorcist before the war. The exorcist nods and says that unfortunately it will be even more stressful in the future.

Friday 21 April
I recognised her immediately: Gemma, wearing a washed-out cotton jumper with a hood and – of course! – her black straw hat. Gemma seems to be around nine. How old was she when she died: twenty-five? I asked one of the nurses to put Gemma in cell number 1 in the corridor outside my flat. To my relief, the nurse didn’t question this (despite a raised eyebrow). Gemma, I’m going to tear you up like a plant out of the ground. It will be as if you never existed!

 

Monday 1 May
I was inside Cecilia’s cell for a while. She was kneeling on the bed, drawing flowers (with her fingernail) on her suede blanket. She erased the flowers with a sweeping movement of her hand and drew a penis instead (with a cross on the glans).

A new transport. And there stood Maddalena, wearing an old, worn and mouldy tunic. She took my hand and followed me obediently to cell number 4.

Wednesday 3 May
Liduina has three open wounds (as big as eyes) with black edges. One sits just above her navel and inside you can see hundreds of grey worms eating her entrails. I tied a compress made with honey and wheat flour over the wound

Friday 12 May
Cecilia was lying on her stomach in bed. About every five seconds her body jerked spasmodically as she let out a short gasping moan. She was pretending I was spanking her. I’m not going to do that, Cecilia!

A funny thing about Gemma is that she falls asleep on command. If I tell her to sleep, she takes her crucifix in her hand, turns on her side and immediately falls into a deep sleep.

The city museum in Egregore burned down last night. The head burner thinks there’s a madman on the loose…

 

Saturday 13 May
Things are looking promising. Today, we killed forty patients. Not bad for our little death factory! Soon we will be able to receive a bus load a day. The burners are working in shifts around the clock but still don’t have time for it all. Dead bodies are stacked along the walls of the antechamber to the crematorium and some of them have begun to rot.

Thursday 18 May
Liduina has recurring high fevers. Sometimes blood flows from her ears. Her right arm is withered and shrivelled and is coming loose from her shoulder. Liduina claims that she was given the arm by St Anthony.

Maddalena is ecstatic. She sits motionless with one arm outstretched in front of her. She holds a glass of water, as if she was about to drink but got stuck in the middle of the movement.

Mechthild has a nosebleed. She tells us that once the apocalyptic lamb came and sucked a song out of her mouth.

Christina says that Satan snores inside her pillow, so loudly that she can’t sleep.

Friday 2 June
What a day! I was with one of the physicians in the morgue. The lethal injections were administered, and the physician begrudgingly inspected one of the corpses. Suddenly he exclaimed: ‘Hot necrophilia or cold necrophilia?’, and then pulled down his trousers and began to masturbate in front of the dead body. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Furious, I grabbed the physician’s shoulders and threw him to the floor. The physician gasped for breath and tried to pull up his pants while laughing hysterically. I opened the door and called to the burners to gather the staff. Then I kicked the physician, a metre at a time, out into the arcade. The staff gathered in silence. Three bombers flew by at low altitude. I briefly informed the staff about what had happened, pushed the physician to his knees and executed him with a shot to the back of the neck.

 

Saturday 10 June
On the cell wall, Gioacchino has painted a red snake with seven dragon heads. His index finger is bleeding and he sucks it greedily. I gave him a box of crayons.
Christina told me that she had made a pilgrimage from church to church, completely naked, smeared with the supernatural poo of demons.
Jean talks to the Virgin Mary in his dreams. The Virgin smiles and says no. She stretches out her foot. Jean kisses it.

Monday 19 June
The burner asked: ‘Why all these papers, records, regulations and procedures? And why syringes? The patients are already so lethargic when they arrive, why not just beat them to death?’ I answered something about following the rulebook but he’s right – why all these bureaucratic rituals? Everyone knows what’s going on anyway. Besides, we could throw the patients alive into the crematorium oven, or let them freeze to death in a snowdrift in winter.

Gioacchino glares at me (on the sly). He seems very annoyed that I am changing the chronology.

Monday 26 June
Hildegard, Gemma and Mechthild sit around Maddalena’s bed and take turns writing down her revelations. Maddalena holds a dose of the holy darkness from the tomb of the Word between her clasped hands.

An elderly patient whispered in my ear: ‘When Judas hanged himself, his anus burst and his intestines fell out. For Judas’ mouth had been sealed by the last holy kiss of the Word. The soul was forced to take the back road.’

Sunday 2 July
A new transport. When the patients had been counted and were beginning to be herded across the arcade, a little girl suddenly looked out from the front doors of the bus. No one knew who she was, no one remembered at which institution she had got on, she had no medical record and she was not on any list. I don’t know how or why – but she belongs to the ten. I call her Eleven and have put her in the broom cupboard between cells 7 and 8.

Monday 10 July
The face of a human foetus is formed by three rotating parts – one with the right eye, one with the left eye, and one with the mouth – meeting and growing together in the philtrum, resting on the cupid’s bow. These parts represent the Trinity. Eleven has three faces, one of which is still sleeping.

Bruises floated around under the skin, sliding in and out of each other like thunderclouds in a rain-heavy sky. A blood vessel had ruptured and was leaking into the white of one eye. The other eye was closed but swollen, and a fly was walking back and forth across the eyelid. Next to the dying child’s manhandled body there was the crumpled letter telling of Jeanne’s death. Gilles threw the child’s clothes into the fireplace and stirred them with the poker. He now had as much blood behind him as before him.

Child after child disappeared from the city and neighbouring regions. The tailor’s son, the parchment-maker’s son, the bookbinder’s son, the shoemaker’s three sons, the sailmaker’s son, the baker’s daughter, the weaver’s two sons, the farrier’s son, the sweeper’s daughter, the cooper’s son, the tanner’s son, the mirror-maker’s son, the midwife’s two sons, the candlemaker’s son, beggar child after beggar child, the hangman’s daughter. People had their suspicions but kept quiet. A legend of ghost swings was woven at dusk by bridesmaids under the apple trees.

As Gilles roamed his castle, he could sometimes sense the presence of a young woman. He was sure that it was Jeanne, who now hated him and wanted to avenge his treachery. He expected at any second to feel Jeanne’s cold, spectral hands around his neck and to hear her hissing curses in his ear. Gilles was ashamed.

The rays of impure light both cut and stitched Gilles’ black eyes, which soon consisted only of wounds which healed and tore open every time he blinked. What he looked at was also wounded, and his gaze shed scab after scab. Gilles straddled the boy’s chest. He tightened his hands around the child’s neck, squeezed until his knuckles turned white, and shouted, ‘Look at me while you die. Turn my soul into a burning, spinning sword that cuts my thoughts so that they cannot be united with Jeanne!’

In a large room in the cellar, with hay bales stacked along the walls, thirty-six flogged children hung from meat hooks in the ceiling. Gilles ordered his servants to take down the bodies, then he left the room to bury his face in his hands undisturbed. Gilles was confused, his head full of Jeanne. He loved, but the feelings did not come from him – for his love was of divine origin. Poor foolish Gilles, he had no way to escape this terrible happiness.
The dehydrated and shrivelled bodies were dismembered and burned. Their spinal cords were placed in three little chests and loaded into a small wooden boat, which slid soundlessly into the morning mist.

 

 

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INTERVIEW EXTRACTS
Conducted by Martin Bladh

I know that you have been working on different manuscripts since the publication of your debut novel Three Nails, Four Wounds (Infinity Land Press, 2018). In an earlier correspondence between us, you told me that the main inspiration for Egregore was ‘virginity as a mental state’.

You have absorbed an enormous amount of information – including medieval and renaissance demonology, astrology, Christian mysticism, holocaust studies, hagiographies, and writings on the cult and significance of the virgin throughout history – when researching this book. Could you shed some light on its development – I believe you worked on it for almost five years?

That’s right. I had a few other ideas for books that I worked on for a while, but none of them managed to retain my interest. Instead, I chose to continue exploring this notion of ‘virginity as a mental state’, which I had started to explore in Three Nails. I imagine the seven girls in Three Nails as self-enclosed, uncontaminated, remote, psychologically sterile and perfect in their untouchability. This mental state results – with no conscious effort or intention – in a kind of resistance to society. In Egregore I have made this state even more disciplined and militant.

Joan of Arc felt like the ultimate embodiment of this ideal. Having Gilles de Rais by her side on the battlefield also gave me a perfect counterpoint. The relationship between a saint and a serial killer is of course a rich subject for dark fantasies.

Egregore is very much the result of diligent reading, and the book is in dialogue with its source material. But the cornerstone is a prophetic dream I had in 2018, which I let Eleven announce at the end of the exorcist’s diary (my dream was much more precise and detailed, however). Several parts of the book have their origin in dreams, such as the one about the puppet master, who discovers that his hand is bloody when he takes off the glove puppet.

 

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The most enigmatic character of the book is the former exorcist in charge of the liquidation of the patients at the castle. But his mission is far more profound and important. Is he trying to free the saintly children from what he perceives to be demonic possession, or is he helping them to fulfil a destiny: to sacrifice themselves for the good of mankind?

Gradually, the exorcist becomes increasingly frustrated with this task, as he suffers both mentally and physically from the pressures placed on him. Like Gilles, he is a troubled character who seems to be torn between the forces of light and darkness, God and the Devil. I don’t expect or even want you to solve this conundrum for me or the readers, but now when you mention that demons ‘can accelerate natural processes’, it seems like other, sinister and diabolic forces are taking part in the exorcist’s plans. Or is the Devil maybe a necessary accomplice of the Divine? Is he in fact needed to make ‘necessary’ events unfold?

Well, what’s really going on in the castle? The exorcist seems quite uninterested in the whole thing, in this task he has to perform. His attempt to erase his and the church’s history (by destroying martyrs’ skulls and setting fires) doesn’t seem to completely satisfy him. Things go better with the children. One interpretation is that the exorcist is possessed by demons, and that he has somehow managed to transfer and use demonic powers to accelerate the life cycle of the saints. In this way, he believes he is erasing their role in history, since he kills them when they’re still children (i.e. they never became the famous saints we worship today).

Floating time is a recurring theme in this book. The exorcist kills saints who lived long before his own lifetime, and they are then buried by Gilles in the past, in the 15th century. The entire exorcist/Egregore part seems to move outside of time. It is Jeanne who, like a Pythic oracle, sits on the potty in her prison cell and narrates the exorcist’s fate in Egregore. She finds the exorcist’s diary and begins to read. The usual thing when a fictional character finds a diary is that you can read a previously described event from another character’s perspective, or that the plot continues on directly after the diary entry. But in this case, something different happens: although the diary starts on ‘today’s’ date, Jeanne then continues, without interruption, to read future entries – as if the exorcist had already finished writing the book. And since I never return Jeanne to the book’s narrative, i.e. to her sitting in the castle reading, or more accurately: in her prison cell in the 15th century, it is as if her voice disappears into the story.

 

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I find your pantheon of ‘saints’ to be most fascinating. Some are well known, others are more obscure. Out of the ten reincarnations I find the case of the Cuban heretic Cecilia Rodriguez with her constant desire for abjection – an inverted salvation which can only be reached through sin and blasphemy – to be the most captivating. I have never heard about this case before and haven’t been able to find any information about it while doing research for this interview. How did you come across it?

It was Edda Manga, a Swedish historian of ideas, who accidentally came across documentation of the Inquisition’s investigation of Cecilia R while she was at the Spanish National Archives researching a completely different matter. This discovery resulted in a thesis (Divine Revelations and Demoniac Fornication – A Study of the Eccentric Intellectual Heritage in Cecilia Rodriguez’s Catholic Thought, Glänta Förlag) that was published in 2003. There also exists a compilation of the original documents in Spanish.

Cecilia was a contemporary of the Marquis de Sade, and would probably have been his muse had he known of her existence. Cecilia had sadomasochistic fantasies of being dominated all her life, but her sexual desire was exclusively connected to the urinary canal (possibly the clitoris). In her thirties, she received a revelation in which the Virgin Mary told her that she had committed 5,000 million sins. After that, Cecilia saw it as her life’s mission to confess these sins. The problem was that Cecilia became sexually aroused precisely by confessing her sins, and therefore could not confess without committing new sins. She considered this to be something unique and that it was the devil who had planted these unnatural feelings in her. Cecilia therefore tried to reverse the logic of confession to make it work for her ‘extraordinary’ sins as well. Cecilia wrote a new moral teaching and developed something she called the suede exercise, where she demonstrated how she sinned on a vagina-shaped suede blanket in front of her astonished confessors. Cecilia also wrote down her sins as carefully as she could so that they would be available to posterity. Cecilia really did crawl around among piles of excrement and imitate a pig, as a kind of penance ordered by her confessors.

 

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You stated earlier that one prophetic dream you had back in 2018 became the kernel of the book. Do you believe in prophetic dreams, and have you experienced your dreams coming true? I know that Jung’s work was a part of your research.

I almost never remember my dreams, so when I do I imagine they‘re trying to tell me something important. I‘ve acted on what I dreamt a few times, for example travelling to another country and seeking out a certain person after a dream urged me to do so – usually with positive results. The Bible is of course full of prophetic dreamers. But whether I believe in that… in that case I‘ll have dreamed up a pretty sad future for humanity.

 

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The main bulk of the text takes place in an either ‘timeless’ or future war-ravaged world: the plotline concerning Egregore castle and the extermination operation which is supervised by the exorcist.

From what I understand, this part of the book is directly inspired by the Nazis’ euthanasia program ‘Aktion T4’, and what took place at Schloss Hartheim in Austria after the Anschluss. Is this a historic period and topic which particularly fascinates you? It might not be the obvious setting or choice for a story focused on militant virginity.

A few years ago I read up on Aktion T4 for another (as yet unrealised) book project. When, while working on Egregore, I wanted to make the exorcist the director of a death factory, it became natural to include some of the administrative bureaucracy from Schloss Hartheim, as well as the castle’s architecture (though the castle also has some similarities to Marsvinsholm in Sweden). Otherwise, the book has nothing to do with the Nazis, and the plot takes place in an undefined future.

 

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Then, we come to the inevitable question of the title and the subtitle ‘The Trinity of the Philtrum’. I might be diminishing the overall complexity of the book when I try to find a direct link between the phenomenon of the egregore (as described in the beginning of the novel) and the mysterious character Eleven. I get the impression that Eleven is this timeless, collective conception of virginity who appears, disappears and reappears throughout history. But you also write about the connection between the female orifices, mouth and the vagina, as if the virginal purity – the ‘silence’ – between these organs, corresponds to each other. And in the end, these twin lips, the vertical and the horizontal, are brutally cut open as if about to speak.

This is an obscure and unorthodox liturgy indeed. Is there a specific religious or historical connection which I’m missing?

I’ve read somewhere that the face on a human embryo is formed of three rotating main sections which come together in the philtrum. If the desert fathers had known this, they would probably have seen it as proof of the Holy Trinity.

As I see it, Eleven is not connected to the egregore. The egregore is generated from mankind’s deepest desires (which are probably no longer particularly deep). However, the origin of Eleven (I agree with you when you say that she is a timeless collective conception of virginity) lies outside history, and it is not we who have created a collective conception of virginity; that’s just what we believe – Eleven has implanted it in us (for unknown reasons).

As I write about the virginal body at the very beginning of the book (when Jeanne lies down and sleeps): ‘Sacredly sealed, it is a magnetic membrane in which prophecies can ground their quivering compass needles.’ Historically, there is a connection between the mouth and the vagina. ‘The virgin of ancient times was an acceptable vehicle for divine speech… according to the age-old analogy, one closed ‘mouth’ betokened another; silence and virginity reflect each other,’ (Burnett McInerney, Maud (2015 [2003]) Eloquent Virgins: The Rhetoric of Virginity from Thecla to Joan of Arc, Palgrave Macmillan). I don’t remember exactly what my thoughts were when I wrote the ending (the text, based on a dream, was among the first things I wrote when I began work on this book), but just as Joan breaks her virginal silence when she goes into battle and says she wants to put a cross on every map to show where she is, I see this bloody cross of lips as a sign of communication. This cross is combined with the beheading of the white snake, after which the crown and the poison are separated – but that is the beginning of a completely different story…

 

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I find Egregore to be much crueller than its precursor. It’s beautiful, but cruel nonetheless: rigorous, crystalised, Apollonian and chaste.

There is no shortage of scatological allusions, but the text lacks conscious sexual elements. In the one case when a physician becomes aroused by a corpse, the transgression is immediately punished with death. Likewise, Cecilia’s masturbation is a punishment, an inverted act of asceticism to get closer to the divine. Even the crimes of Gilles don’t seem to be sexually motivated, but driven by a mystical force, as if he’s merely a tool in a cruel, metaphysical game which he doesn’t understand. Every pleasure seemed to be linked to or ‘rewarded’ by suffering. Apart from the recurring theme of the intact hymen, there aren’t any references to the genitals at all.

Am I wrong to assume that extreme forms of asceticism are an obsession of yours? I’m very curious to know what particularly attracts you to this subject.

There is something predestined in the book. The characters have tasks that they perform like actors on a stage. As though the story were a puzzle – the motif is already there, now the pieces just need to be put in place. Jeanne will fight and then be burned, Gilles will kill children, the saints will bloom and wither, Eleven will do what elevens do… The prophecy will be fulfilled. And no one seems to question this.

I have been fascinated by saints and Christian mystics for the past decade. Their striving for mental purity, their self-control and anorexic discipline, the way some of them managed to turn their whole lives into one long prayer.

Jeanne, the saints, Eleven, and even Gilles, are united with one another without mingling. It’s as if nothing leaks out of their bodies.

A book that became decisive for Egregore is Images of the Untouched: Virginity in Psyche, Myth and Community (Joanne Stroud and Gail Thomas (eds), 1982, Texas). The book consists of a number of lectures on virginity from a variety of perspectives. Let me quote a passage on how to make a unicorn trap. You place the virgin in a forest, ‘with her breast uncovered, and by its scent the unicorn perceives it; then it comes to the virgin and kisses her breast, falls asleep on her lap and so comes to its death.’ You could interpret the unicorn as ‘the spirit’, and the ‘unicorn trap’ as a way to unite the spirit with the body. ‘The virginal nourishes the spirit, while spirit makes the virginal psyche pregnant.’ So, virginity as a state of mind means to be pregnant – that is to say: creative.

 

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https://www.infinitylandpress.com/

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Today the blog rolls out its red carpet function to help welcome the new book from those maestros of exquisite, scary looking books, Infinity Land Press, and more precisely the new tome by the daring and original Swedish writer Hector Meinhof. It’s really something, as I hope you will find out for yourselves. Thanks so much, ILP. ** Montse, Hi, Montse! Well, so far. Highest hopes here too. I’m lighting a firework. Big love, me. ** Charalampos, Oh is he now? I guess it was a false alarm about Annas, from what folks here are saying, although I haven’t checked myself yet. Did I miss an email from you? Given my dreary email habits, it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ll go find it. Love from Paris and a swivel chair. ** Connie, My vibe is that fake accounts and fake reviews by proxy are the order of the day. I tried imagining that sperm thing and it quickly turned Cronenbergian in a very unsexy way. Which, as you said, made it awesome. My pleasure on the compiling. How’s your weekend looking? ** _Black_Acrylic, Times are tough and money’s tight. So it would make sense if the escorts are forced to branch out? ** kenley, Oh, I think you got the point precisely, but then I have a weird brain. I don’t really listen to contemporary psych so much, and haven’t been so excited by what I’ve heard. Suggestions would be welcome if you’re into it. Back in the day … gosh, a lot. From obvious stuff like Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Love, Sad Barrett era Pink Floyd, and so on to I guess more currently obscure bands like Mad River, Ultimate Spinach, Clear Light, Chocolate Watch Band, Spirit, Kaleidoscope, … really a ton. Psychedelia was my ears’ bread and butter back then. What are some of your favorite bands of whatever genre past or present? ** Lucas, That was actually the first escorts post in three months because I was away from the blog traveling with the film in the middles of November and December. The upper echelon of the art world is pretty gross, even more gross than the film world’s upper echelon. Congrats on the buckled down studying of course! ** HaRpEr //, I find that really interesting too. Your description of your new book as being the first one’s aftershock makes total sense to me somehow. You should see what I wrote before I made it to ‘Closer’, or hopefully you never will. I got rid of a lot of extraneous and rather indulgent stuff before I figured my thing out. ** Alice, Hi. I’m good. I’m sorry for your yesterday’s struggle, but it’s cool you watched that Akerman. Wonderful depiction of it. I don’t know that Godard. Huh, it doesn’t ring a bell at all. Curious. I’ll go look it up. As I’ve mentioned numerous times, my dreams vanish as soon as I open my eyes. All that’s left is the lingering stress from what I can only assume were nightmares. Very nice five line encapsulation there. Warmth from here. ** Steve, Haha. I’ve never been to Locarno, but I think it would have to have practically zero in common with Cannes, atmosphere-wise. I don’t think Hollywood even bothers with it. I am going to do a gig post this month, but I haven’t made it yet. Thanks for asking. ** Dustin, Hi, Dustin. Well, they were escorts, but close enough. I remember ‘Oz’, or I remember when everyone was talking about it. I never saw it. You make it sound very interesting. Given my phobia of TV series and the time they take, I doubt I will ever watch it. But I think you’ve made me want to go look at a clip and at least get a quick sense of its outlay. Wonderful that you found something that’s so inspiring you. Nothing better. 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9: no, not yet, and thank you for the nudge. I just put that in the search window for a new browser page, and I will poke Return imminently. Good to see you! ** Right. Spend time with the book up there, won’t you? Time well spent, I will suggest. See you tomorrow.