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GERALD
“I spent two days with Richard/Rita, Gerald.” “All going well?” We both were avoiding the sharp-toothed pronouns, he, she, his, her, and the like. “As far as I can judge. Of course…” Since his exorcism, Richard/Rita had lived in an in-between land of his mind. There was disquieting indefiniteness about him. “Of course. I understand. But Richard/Rita is at least clean.”
....while true cases of Exorcism take their toll, they are not simple horror tales for frightening readers and moviegoers. For all that evening we were delving deeper not into horror, but into the frame of love that makes it possible to expel horror. And the case of Richard/Rita was important beyond many another, exactly because it centered on our ability to identify love, and on the dire risk of confusing that love with what we can only see as its physical or even chemical components. It became clear that for Father Gerald the importance centered on the same point. Richard/Rita had carried the confusion to ghastly extremes. But for those who could come to know and understand his case, there is a lesson to be learned.
...We turned around to stroll back toward the house. “Well, anyway, Gerald, what difference did the exorcism make to all this?” “I suppose the best way to say it is the simple way. R/R thought for years that gender and sex were the same thing, for all practical purposes. So did I, come to think of it. Don’t know about you.” We were coming up to the house, and the light fell on his face. “You may remember from the transcript. The crux of the Girl-Fixer’s resistance lay there. [“Girl-Fixer” was the given name of the evil spirit expelled from Richard/Rita.] And it took all that talk and pain to let me see it.”
He stood facing the windows, his face and eyes bright and clear. “In a nutshell, Malachi. As I now understand it since the exorcism, when two people—a man and a woman—love each other, are making love, I now understand they are reproducing God’s love and God’s life. Sounds banal. And it sounds trite. Even sounds evasive and vague and feathery. But that’s it. Either that, or here you have two more or less highly developed animals copulating—rutting, whatever you want to call it—and the ending is just sweet sweat, a few illusions, perhaps, and then a let’s-get-back-to-normal-existence sort of thing. Do or die. Now-or-never. Go bust in the effort. Anything you like. Could even learn from kangaroos, if that were the way with it.” He turned his head in a comical way and said: “Ever see two kangaroos courting and copulating? I did. In a documentary. Extraordinary, Extraordinary.”
He shook his head. “Well, apart from any practical significance that might have for you now, Gerald, you being celibate and all that…” “And with a few more months to live,” he said gently but not testily, as if to make quite clear he took into account the deadline of his life. “Okay. Apart from that, maybe we’ll get back to that subject. But ex- plain something to me. Isn’t there an in-between stage? I mean: men and women aren’t just animals. But neither are they performing an act of worship of God. Or are they? Is that what you’re saying?” “Aaaah! The good-and-natural-act business.” He was mimicking someone I did not know, probably some professor of his seminary days. “Well.” This last word was said with sardonic emphasis. “As I now understand us men and women, we go through this world finding our way through facts and facts and more facts. Mountains of facts. But no matter what we do or get to know, all the time we are experiencing spirit. God’s spirit.” He looked across to the lights of the nearby town. “And sometimes it’s an experience in thoughts we think. Or it comes in words we hear. More often, it’s an experience by intuition. A direct ‘looking-at.’ Some of those perceptions come like messages sent you. You hear children laugh- ing, or see a beautiful valley in the midday sun. But you’re mainly passive. At other times, you’re doing something. And that’s better still. Like when you have compassion for someone, or forgive someone.” We were down again at the tulip beds. He stopped at the middle one, where he had been working earlier, and looked at the silent flowers. They gleamed with wisps of color in the distant reflection of light from the
He turned away from me and faced the mountain range. His voice came in short murmurs, as if he were reading cue cards visible only to him. “You remember the Girl-Fixer, and my struggle with it. You remem- ber?” The crux of that struggle between Gerald and the evil spirit pos- sessing Richard/Rita had concerned the meaning of love and of loving. “Well,” he continued, “on the plateau of love—and I don’t mean the cli- max of an act of love only, but the plateau of love itself—man and woman are both caught up in a dynamic of love. No past. No standing still. No anticipation. No then, now, and next. Just the black velvet across which all stars flash. No oblivion. All…” “But, Gerald, God—where’s God in all this? You started off talking about God, as if the lovers were locked into an intuitive sharing of God’s life.” He wheeled around and said almost fiercely: “That’s God! That’s what God is like.” He turned away again, as if looking for inspiration. “God’s no static and immutable quantum, as we understand those words. That’s the God in books. But—an eternal dynamic, always becoming, without having begun, without going to an end. Becoming without changing. No then. No now. No next.” As he turned and started to walk back toward the house, I fell into step with him. “But there are two in our case. Man and woman,” “Ah,” he said, tossing his head backward in a slight gesture, “that’s the condition we’re in. And that’s the price.” “The price?” “Yes, the price. In order to have that participation in God’s being, the two must reproduce God’s oneness. Must love. Truly love. You can’t fake it.”
“But what part—if you can speak like that—of God does a man reproduce and what part does a woman reproduce?” “None. By himself and by herself. Or in himself or in herself. None. Nothing that is physical. Only in love and loving.” “Well, in love and in loving, what do they reproduce?” We stopped halfway up the garden. Gerald was looking at me steadily, as if searching for something. After a moment, he drew in a deep breath and said softly: “As far as I know, God is beautiful, is beauty itself. Beauty in being. Being that is beauty. And God’s will is in full possession of that beauty, that being. In human love, woman loving is that being’s echo; and man desiring is that will’s parallel. In their love, will is locked with being. They sim- ply reproduce, know, participate in God’s life and love, in God’s self some way or other. Otherwise, let’s go back to those kangaroos—or chimpanzees.” “Well, even granting all that,” I said to him as we started to walk again, “tell me, what does masculine and feminine mean for you now, in the light of all that?” “Remember Richard/Rita’s crux?” He looked at me, knowing I did.
...This had been the center of the Pretense in the exorcism. Richard/Rita had presumed the ultimate source of masculinity and femininity was the same as that of sexuality—the body, the chemistry of the body. “And none of Richard/Rita’s most extreme efforts, even the operation, worked for him. He wasn’t basically androgynous. No one is, for that matter. We’re basically and immutably masculine or feminine. Nature may goof and give us the wrong genitals for our gender. No matter. Apart from a mutant form of that kind, our sexual apparatus corresponds to what we are—feminine or masculine. Androgyny is baloney.” I laughed at the rhyme and the slang. But I had a real difficulty. According to Gerald the feminine—femininity—corresponded to God’s being; the masculine or masculinity, to God’s will. The essence of God, in our human way of thinking, would be feminine in that case. “If you are correct, Gerald, God, to speak in human terms, is feminine rather than masculine.” “Of course. More powerful. Creative. In her own being, the ultimate theater—not the object—of human longing.” “What about the He’s and the Him’s and the His’s of the Bible? And Israel like a woman God loves and woos? And all that?” “Just a good dosage of Semitic chauvinism. Plus a lot of ignorance. And a good deal more of all men’s chauvinism down the ages. Men have been in charge from the beginning. Even in Buddhism. Just because the Buddha was a man.” “So, feminine is something of the spirit essentially?” “Only of the spirit” “And masculine also?” “Right. A bird doesn’t fly because it has wings. It has wings because it flies. A man isn’t masculine because he has a penis and scrotum, nor a woman feminine because she has vagina and womb and estrogen or whatever. They have all that—if they have it—because she’s feminine and he’s masculine. Even if they lack some or all of those things, they are still masculine and feminine.”
..."I am not crying because of missed opportunity or frustration. So help me.” He wiped his eyes again. “In one way, I don’t know why I am crying. And, at the same time, I do know very well. Once you finger the innards of a situation such as Richard/Rita was in, I think the terrible fragility of human love becomes more beautiful and you are frightened for its safety. Poor R/R and his delicate dreams! He really, genuinely yearned to be feminine and to love as only woman can.” He turned and faced toward the house. His eyes were still wet and glistening, but washed bright: “Is that why lovers sometimes cry tears at their happiest moments?” Apparently, at that moment, the tears started to flow again, because he looked away quickly toward the mountains. “Many a woman and many a man must have had R/R’s same beautiful dream,” he said through the pain, “saw it within finger’s touch, reached for it, and found it blighted before they held it.” A pause. “I don’t know why I cry for them. Feeling for them, perhaps. For only Jesus can mend the fracture of their spirit.”
I asked Gerald if, mingled in his knowledge and his partial regrets, he thought of the loss of children he might have had. He replied that his having or not having children was something else again. I pursued the point, however, suggesting that perhaps one lament of deep pathos and suffering for him in Richard/Rita’s case was Richard/Rita’s total inability to have children. No matter how much love Richard/Rita dreamed of and achieved, it could never be a life-giving love. His would always be a crip- pled dream.
....he quoted Jesus: “‘In the Kingdom of Heaven, they neither give their daughters in marriage nor are given in marriage.’ No marriage there,” he commented musingly. “No need for it.” “Gerald, about Jesus.” He broke in on me. “He was—is—God. No woman, no human love making was needed to enrich him.” “Can we make love then, do we make love, because we are merely human?” “Only because we are human. Once possessed of God and possessed by God, there’s no point in making love. You have all that human love can give you and much more. Love itself.”
****************************************
...All were to assemble at 8:00 A.M. the following morning. For Gerald there were some swift seconds with an awry note. He was the last down the pathway out to the road where he had parked his car. As he turned back to close the latch on the gate, he saw Richard/Rita silhouetted in the main doorway of his little house. Gerald could not at that distance read the look in Richard/Rita’s eyes, but Richard/Rita’s hands caught his attention. When the pastor and Gerald had left him at the door, Gerald remembered clearly, Richard/Rita’s right hand, with open palm toward them, had been raised slightly in a goodbye gesture. The left had been resting on the doorknob. But now, as he looked back at Richard/Rita, the right hand was splayed out like a claw pointing toward him. The left, palm turned up, fingers slightly curled, was held stiffly.*
[*ETA --- BAPHOMET GESTURE...]
Gerald felt a shudder in his spine. “Come on, Gerald! Someone walking on your grave, I suppose?” It was the old pastor pulling his leg good-humoredly. Richard/Rita waved to them again and went inside.
RICHARD/RITA
The story of Richard O. is only in part, but nonetheless importantly, the story of a transsexual. He was born physically a male, but with an ineradicable desire to be a woman. In his childhood his ideas and wishes were nebulous. In adulthood he firmly believed that each one of us can be male or female, masculine or feminine; that each one has an almost equal dosage of maleness and femaleness, of masculinity and femininity, be- fore culture and civilization and social environment, as the persuasion goes, make little boys little boys and little girls little girls. He finally underwent the transsexualization operation—successfully, in medical terms. He then took the name Rita.
...Richard had a very clear and very early understanding of the difference between femininity and masculinity, and he was attracted by the seeming mystery of the feminine and repelled by the inadequacy of being restricted only to the masculine. From the age of sixteen on, Richard’s aim was to let the feminine in him emerge, so that he could supplement his mascu- line inadequacy with the self-sufficient mystery of femininity. From sixteen to twenty-five he actively sought, in full confidence and trust, to think, feel, and act “androgynously”; he was persuaded that he could have the union of feminine and masculine in himself. But the result was a great aloneness (not, at that stage, loneliness) with none of that desired union. At twenty-five he sought in marriage the same union. It did not work; he found neither the unity nor the union of love; and the androgynous persuasion in him withered. From his divorce at age twenty-nine, through his transsexualizing operation at age thirty-one, up to his exorcism at age thirty-three, he developed into a “watcher on the sidelines,” jealous of the supremacy of the feminine, fascinated by the essential function of the masculine. The mystery of femininity became something to unshroud; in Richard’s case his unshrouding of it amounted to blasphemy and a type of physicomoral degradation which haunts him today. The vitality of the masculine be- came a weapon for him; he saw it as a means of death. By the end of the summer 1971, he had voluntarily become possessed by an evil spirit which responded to the name of “Girl-Fixer.” This poss- ession had started many years previously.
[Richard/Rita's childhood development seemed normal:]
....Each child was sent to kindergarten, then public school, and afterward to college. In their world there was no hint of the social developments which were to mark the 1960s and 1970s. Coast-to-coast television was just on the drawing boards. Female liberation was unborn. Later trends such as unisex and bisexuality were hidden. Homosexuality was still in the closet. Sexual permissiveness and the wholesale dilution of the family as a unit were unknown. The young had not yet been seized by the radicalizing passions of 20 years later.
****************************************
[As Richard/Rita began to give himself over to the dark spirit seducing him:]
....'There was one last, clutching moment when something in him warned with a sharp voice. (TO R/R IT SEEMED THAT SOMETHING OF THE WORLD OF NATURE & ITS FEMININE MYSTERY WAS 'CALLING' HIM - he responded thus
....But, after an instant’s inner pause, he appeared to himself to let go, willingly to accept, and to do so in almost poetic language: “I don’t know you. I want what you are. I want to be in that mystery. I don’t want a man’s hardness and strength. I want your wholeness.” He actually spoke the words. They tumbled out half-whispered, incredulous—for his brain kept telling him he was alone at night on the mountainside. But something more powerful, not in his brain, kept enticing him. He responded: “I want to be a woman…yes…man woman.” He did not know the sense of what he was saying, but he kept saying it. And everything that night re- sponded to him in turn—infallibly, it seemed to him—and said: “You will be. You can be. You will be. Secret. Strong. Mystery. Open. You will be. You can be. Woman. Man. Soft. Hard. All. You will be. You can be.”
But no longer now was knowledge a thrust outward to grasp an objective, to obtain an exact pinpointing with the lens of logic—“fixing the cross-hairs on it,” as his shooting-enthusiast father used to put it. In that melodized condition, all objectives were received within a delicate maze of sensibilities, emotions, reactions, intuitions. And, over all, a sense of sacrament, of pact with what made water and earth and air simulta- neously strong and tender, soft and unyielding, masculine and feminine.
....Moira [R/R's original love interest] remembers protesting with all the earnestness she could convey and trying to tell Richard that his “plan” sounded like the hardest and maddest thing in the world. “No!” Once again his tone had changed to a rough note. She caught a glint at the back of his eyes which recalled her dim memory of an Alsatian baring his teeth and growling at her long ago when she was three. Now she was afraid. He told her abrasively: “Only a few can get it.” He was smiling, but she did not like the smile. “That’s the name of the game,” he remarked some moments later. [first hints of possession]
....Without knowing it, he was probing deep into one of the most mysterious elements of human personality: gender. In retrospect we can see how the peculiarities of his personal makeup were responsible in some degree for his later development. They do not, however, explain in any way the onset of possession.
...Toward the end of his second collegiate year, he had a conversation with his father, who was taken aback to find his son spouting what seemed to him to be very advanced and unorthodox ideas about sexuality. Richard had read all of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, George Sand’s Indiana, and a host of other books his father had never heard of. He could quote anthropologists and social scientists in support of his views about matriarchy and woman’s superior power and status. His father consulted the rabbi of the local synagogue. And, during the following Easter vacation, Richard and his father went to see the rabbi. The rabbi found Richard quite sensible and his views reasonable. He pointed out to Richard and his father that the original Hebrew in the Bible does not say God created Eve, the first woman, from a rib of Adam. The word used at this place in the Bible means “one of two matching panels.” He further pointed out that this Bible account is essentially androgynous. “So man and woman are equal halves of the same entity,” concluded the rabbi, “but woman is most like God because she has the womb of creation in her.” It was all very confusing for Richard’s father. But Richard found in it a fresh impetus for his dreams of femaleness.
.....He had one constantly recurring dream day and night. Once and for all, he fancied, everybody knew he was woman and man all in one. It was public knowledge, he dreamed, and accepted joyfully and admiringly by everyone. He wore either male or female clothes, according to the ebb and flow of his sexuality. His skin was either smooth or hard, his voice metallic and masculine or husky and deep, his hair long or short, his mind logical and rationalizing or intuitive and feeling, his breasts round and full with marked nipples or flat and formless, his genitals male or fe- male. But he was chiefly female and feminine—with a very marked pecu- liarity. In his dream he had, as a man, attracted a beautiful woman who pos- sessed his own female face and body. She was he in female form. When they made love together, he was not merely a male entering a female. He was a female taking a male into her secret mystery. He not only had the male sense of arrival and expansion. He had the female sense of falling through the velvet veils of that mystery where wreaths of creation and shaping forms of arcane worlds wove around him with soft murmurs of love.
....Longing and loathing were becoming so intertwined that the more repulsion he felt, the more readily he gave in to longing. But this only brought on increased loathing, so that longing and loathing became one. And both were coming from inside himself. He was their source. The higher he went on that first level of ecstasy, the lower he went on that second level of disgust.
....Richard was now in the second stage of his development. His old idea of an androgynous self had melted. On his trips for the company business, he spent time regularly with prostitutes, and occasionally had relations with female clients and office personnel. He repelled any homosexual advances. He admitted to himself after a while that in all these sexual encounters it was not a genuinely male sexual desire that impelled him. It was rather a jealous curiosity about the female and the feminine. He was always watching on the sidelines. No woman ever came back to him a sec- ond time. And more than one prostitute remarked as she left him: “You’re freaky.” He once invited a woman to Lake House because he wished to have relations with her while listening to the wind. Everything went well for a while, but something frightened her, and she fled from him as precipitately as Moira had. It was frustrating for him. He could only speculate about the female ecstasy and experience.
....he wondered what sort of lovely death that could be under the knife of female pleasure and secret power, and what sort of enshrined mystery a woman possessed that enabled her to live and die all over again the next time. For that was how he thought of it. But, in the meantime, his own identity—sexual and otherwise— underwent an eclipse. For three years he never listened to or looked at another human being. He merely heard and saw them. He lost, therefore, any grasp on his own identity. He had no clear perception of who he was, what he was about, where he was going, where he came from. The pattern of his identity was in disarray: an essential piece had been withdrawn invisibly but with shocking results. All the earlier personal lines, geometrically clear and personally pleasing, had melted into a criss-crossed haze. The fine tones and delicate shades of taste and distaste, like and dislike, attraction and repulsion lost stability and definition. All were now clouds and swirls of the unknown and the unpredictable.
....He stood helplessly hip deep in the running streams of impulses where before a sharp instinct or a brilliant perception had teamed with a never-failing voice in his heart. The self he originally proposed to free and ennoble had become indeterminate; it was colored by any element injected into him. He was a cracked bell jangling to the blow of any hammer. He was a bag of emptiness blowing and puffing on insubstantial air. Living now in an inner uncertainty of selfhood that nothing could dispel, he had become the reality of his former nightmare: a nonperson for himself. What he had cherished as a dream of happiness had become in reality an empty void.
...he did know what he had to do. In the new year Richard went to New York. In previous years he had read extensively about transsexuals and the new transsexualizing operation. He now put himself under the care and supervision of a doctor who assured him that within 16 to 20 months, if all went well with the tests and preparations, he could have the operation, remove all trace of his male inadequacy—this was how Richard looked at his genitals—and acquire the organs of a woman. In late 1970, after passing successfully through the psychiatric examinations, and the necessary changes in the chemistry of his body having been produced by repeated treatments, Richard underwent surgery and emerged successfully from his conva- lescence in a new state of almost delirious happiness. He returned to Lake House. His mother and father came to see him, as did his brothers and sisters. They had become reconciled to his new status as well as to his newly adopted name of Rita. His boss at the insurance office was per- suaded by his father that Richard could do the same work even better than before.
...He had a varied sexual life: he did not discriminate between old and young, ugly and beautiful. It was enough for him that he was desired and that they all found in him something that mystified them while holding them.
...Nothing he did ever produced a ray of hope in this direction, until he met Paul.
Paul, a Chicagoan, a former minister who had turned to banking and brokerage and become a millionaire in the process, was a very impressive character. Tall, good-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair, suave, well dressed, educated, a very good conversationalist, Paul had a brilliant smile. He and Richard/Rita liked each other from the first moment they met at a cocktail party. Richard eventually told Paul his life history. He was surprised by Paul’s matter-of-fact reaction.
What amazed Richard/ Rita more than that was Paul’s understanding of his difficulty in having intercourse and in its aftermath. “I think something can be done about all that, Rita,” he said. “But you will have to consummate a carefully arranged marriage.” “Marriage? But marriage is impossible—at least very difficult,” an- swered Richard. “Not the marriage I have in mind. You just need the right partner under the right circumstances. You don’t realize it, but you have been preparing for quite a while for this marriage. Leave it all to me.” Richard/Rita did not understand what Paul meant, until he participated in the Black Mass on June 21, 1971.
The invitation he received from Paul was ostensibly for a midnight party. It was a sultry night without a patch of wind. When Richard/Rita ar- rived around 10:00 P.M., he was struck by the lavish surroundings. The house, dating from the previous century, stood in its own grounds. About 80 guests were drinking and eating a cold buffet around an open-air pool illuminated by tall, thick candles. Another 40 guests were dancing inside in the ballroom. The air was full of chattering, laughter, music, and cel- ebrations. Paul immediately introduced Richard/Rita to a table at which two young women and their escorts sat. Merriment pervaded the group. Everybody was excited and happy. From his position, Richard/Rita could see both ends of the pool. At each end there was a long table covered with food, drinks, ice buckets, and flowers. Behind each table, a long, wall-high, embroidered red curtain hung from a pole. A butler in black evening clothes stood motionless by each curtain.
Richard/Rita felt surprisingly at home. He joined in the laughter and talk around the table, and cheered as some of the more mellowed guests shoved each other fully clothed into the water. At 12:45 P.M., Richard/Rita suddenly noticed a hush. Nobody was speaking any longer. The stereo music had gone silent. Without his real- izing it, about three-quarters of the guests had departed. The two couples who had been at his table had excused themselves shortly before, saying that they wanted to dance. The guests who remained had fallen silent. They stood in two groups at either end of the pool, facing each other across the water.
Then, Richard/Rita noticed his tall host signaling to the two butlers. With a solemn movement, they pulled aside the curtains. When the curtains parted, Richard/Rita could see a low altar table at either end of the pool. Above each altar there hung an ornament in the shape of an inverted triangle. At its center there was an inverted crucifix, the head of the crucified resting on the angle of the apex of the triangle. From the interior of the house he now heard the low peals of an organ. And someone was burning incense there, so that the fumes drifted out lazily and lay across the air like slowly twisting blue serpents. Then the guests started to undress in an unconcerned fashion, each one dropping his or her clothes where they stood.
As if on signal, both groups turned and started to come around the sides of the pool toward Richard/Rita. He started to get up when Paul’s hand fell on his shoulder gently but firmly: “Wait, Rita.” The naked guests filed around him and stood stock-still. Nobody had yet spoken a word. Then Paul took Richard/Rita’s arm so that he stood up. Twenty pairs of arms stretched out from all sides; and unhurriedly, calmly, they un- dressed Richard/Rita. His host, Paul, was nowhere to be seen at that mo- ment. Then one guest, a young blond man in his late twenties, came forward. Around his neck he wore a narrow black stole. There was a ruby ring on the index finger of his left hand.
“Rita,” he said evenly to Richard/Rita, “I am Father Samson, willing minister of our Lord Satan. Come! Let us adore.” His voice, the hands and fingers of the guests, the low organ music, the sultry night, the light feeling in his body, the languid odor of the incense, all this fell into a pattern of softness which Richard/Rita felt all around him. He turned as gravely as the others and walked in procession around the pool, past the tall candlesticks, until they reached one of the altars. Now he had no further difficulty in understanding what they required of him. He waited passively and quietly. They easily lifted Richard/Rita and placed him on his back flat on the altar. Father Samson then appeared carrying a chalice. Someone placed a small folded cloth on Richard/Rita’s pubic hair. Samson stood the chalice on the cloth. Then Richard/Rita heard three voices chanting the opening words of the old Latin Mass: “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” to which they added the extra name: “et domini nostri Satanas.” Richard/Rita now understood. He felt a strange exultation.
Father Samson had begun reading from a black-bound book held by another naked guest, a woman of about thirty-five. He gestured gravely as he proceeded. The others had grouped themselves around in two concen- tric circles: the inner circle, all males, had placed, each one, the left hand on some part of Richard/Rita’s body. Those in the outer circle, all females, had placed their hands on the hips of the males. Just before the consecration, a woman pricked a vein in Richard/Rita’s arm, letting some drops of his blood fall and mix with the wine in the chalice. Once Father Samson had uttered the words of the consecration (“This is my body…”), the guests paired off, lay down on the floor, each man lying between the legs of a woman. Father Samson parted Richard/ Rita’s legs, mounted the altar, entered Richard/Rita fully, took the chalice, sipped it, held it to Richard/Rita’s lips so that he could sip it, and handed it to the nearest pair. While this pair was sipping the chalice. Father Sam- son started rhythmically to push and pull in Richard/Rita, saying as a refrain: “Say-tan!…Say-tan!…Say-tan!,” lengthening the first syllable as he drew partially out of Richard/Rita and hitting the second syllable with hard emphasis as he drove into Richard/Rita. As each pair handed on the chalice, they started to copulate following the rhythm of Father Samson, until all—men, women, and Father Samson—were chanting and copulating in unison. Richard/Rita was the only silent one. He lay, eyes closed, while Father Samson chanted on him.
...For the first time Richard/Rita felt a strange tingling starting at his buttocks, up through his spine, up the nape of his neck, around his skull, down into his shoulderblades, past his middle and abdomen, in around his vagina and down through his groin and calves, to the tips of his toes. For all the world it felt as if an electrifying fluid was being poured into him from Samson. Richard/Rita opened his eyes to look at Samson, but the light was too dim, and the blue trails of the incense were weaving through his vision.
Richard/Rita could hear heavy breathing, but he could see no face, only the outline of a head. He murmured: “Father Samson…Lord Satan… Father Samson…Lord”—but he was interrupted by a harsh, grating sound of single words coming to him through the heavy breathing. “Girl-Fixer!… Girl-Fixer!…Girl-Fixer!” Richard/Rita no longer heard the chant of “Say- tan!” Now all seemed to be joining in “Girl-Fixer!…Girl-Fixer!…Girl-Fixer!” Father Samson’s index finger was now deep in Richard/Rita’s rectum, massaging, scooping, probing, pulling, pushing. Richard/Rita felt his own semen being loosened and flowing; and, inside him, he had a sharp sensation of very hot, sticky oil squirting around the wall of his vagina as he heaved and shook. “Have me! Girl-Fixer!…Father Satan…have me…smell me…# me…through…through…” Richard/Rita’s voice rose steeply into a loud scream. The organ notes thundered, filling the air. As each pair of the guests reached orgasm, they screamed and groaned in a jumble of half-words: “Sayt…#…take…Sayt… have…smell…#…prick…” "me…smell me…# me…through…through…” Richard/Rita’s voice rose steeply into a loud scream. The organ notes thundered, filling the air. As each pair of the guests reached orgasm, they screamed and groaned in a jumble of half-words: “Sayt…#…take…Sayt… have…smell…#…prick…”
The scene subsided slowly. As the waves of pain, pleasure, and exultation ebbed in Richard/Rita, he knew that he now had a shadow—or, at least, that is how he described it. It was not glued to his body, nor did it fall on the ground beside him wherever he went. It was like a twin spirit or soul of his own soul or spirit. And it possessed his own thoughts, memories, imaginations, desires, words. Richard/Rita again opened his eyes. Father Samson was gone. Paul, his host, unsmiling, grave, helped him off the altar and motioned him to stand, legs well apart. One by one each of the guests came forward on their knees. Bending the head and pronouncing the long word “Say-tan!,” they clamped their lips over his vagina and sucked. Then they backed away out of the pool area.
When the last guest was gone, Paul handed Richard/Rita his clothes, helped him to dress, led him around the house to the front, where a limousine waited with its engine ticking. The chauffeur opened the door for Richard/Rita. “You belong now, Rita. Serve him well” was Paul’s parting phrase. As he lay in bed later, Richard/Rita could sense his shadow near him and with him. He felt secure. When sleep came, it was dreamless and deep. The aftermath was terrible. He now found that all his sexual activity— whether in fantasy or in fact—had become of the same texture as that repulsive level on which he had moved the night of his wedding to Moira. And it reduced all pleasantness, pleasure, beauty, joy, ecstasy, to sexual terms which today he characterizes as “animality.” It made him feel and think and live like an animal in heat, an animal which by a freak accident had been provided with a self-conscious mind and memory, but which would shortly lose those faculties and revert to being just animal.
Richard/Rita is the only ex-possessed person I have known who still has a clear memory of what precise differences the culmination of possession made to his inner self—mind, memory, will, emotions, imagination. The entry point of continued possession, its bastion, was his imagination. In listening to him, one has to remember Richard’s specific problem: gender and sexuality were one and the same for him. Once possession was completed, it seemed to him that he had an invisible but tangibly felt shadow, a twin of himself but yet distinct from him, and that from that point onward self-control and direction in him were exercised by that twin. He points to the fluid or electrifying effect he received from Father Samson at the Black Mass. For it now appeared to Richard/Rita that in his conscious hours all his thoughts and willing and remembering and sensations (and, therefore, all he said and did in the view or hearing of others) came in a very different way. Now continuously his imagination— rather than his memory or his senses or his reasoning mind—received “imprints” or “messages”: images, pictures, diagrams. There was also some other force or influence he could not accurately name. But because it specifically, directly, and exclusively concerned his sexuality, he calls it the S-factor.
Once his imagination received one of those “messages” or “imprints,” then the whole internal mechanism of thinking, willing, remembering, and feeling with his five senses came into play. The control thus exercised on him was absolute. If he smelt an odor, if he desired something, if he remembered anything, if he thought or reasoned, it was all made possible by a prior “imprint.” And consequently any words he spoke or actions he performed were made possible only by that source. The exercise of his sexuality—his desire and its consummation—was under the strictest control. The desire came without warning: it did not arise due to any exterior stimulus. To cap it all, there were other moments: hours of high possession when the control exercised over him acquired an intensity which blotted all else out. In “normal” time of possession, he was still self-aware, i.e., he saw and felt himself under the inescapable influence of those “im- prints,” but it was he himself who thought, remembered, imagined, spoke, walked, acted. At the “high moments” of possession, it seemed to him that he no longer did any of those things. The very insides of his soul or spirit seemed to be drenched in another’s being.
...He himself felt reduced to a tiny pinpoint of identity, to be imprisoned in the most solitary of solitudes, while every fiber and sinew of his life was permeated with an alien tyranny, a brute authority. And, as he is able to relate it now, only in that microscopic reduction of himself did he spontaneously revolt. There he had no memory of the past—only a memory that there had been a memory. Nor had he any anticipation of the future—only a consciousness that anticipation was impossible. Neither praying nor cursing, neither praise nor blasphemy was possible there. It was an undivided and infinitely sad present, an awareness of oneself surrounded by utter blackness and nothingness. The very self of Richard/Rita always refused (although it could do nothing about expelling) that constant shadow.
Richard/Rita is emphatic on one point: the strict separation and distinction between the detectable and measurable area of his thoughts, emotions, memories, external actions, sensations, etc., on the one hand; and, on the other, the self he never ceased to be. All through his enigmatic experiences, that detectable and measurable area varied and changed under the influx of differing intensities, as masculine and feminine, male and female traits ebbed and flowed in him. Psychologists would, justifiably in their terms, describe it as rather extensive changes of personality. But the self—whether reduced to the pinpoint of possessed slavery or free within the general control of the central point in his imagination—that self never ceased to be the same.
Asked about the suffering specific to possession, Richard/Rita says that the genuine pain of possession does not come from any physical distortion, deterioration, or ravages—these most of the time provide the possessed with a savagely twisted pleasure and thrill. But it lies instead in what he calls the “mirror of existence” of the possessed. The unpossessed, the normal person, is aware of the self he is only when it is reflected in another person or in things other than himself. And, without ever realizing it, when we perceive ourselves reflected in someone else or in objects other than ourselves, we instinctively compare that reflection of the self with an ideal measure we have formed but which we usually leave unspoken, even unthought. It is, however, ever present to us when we make comparisons of ourselves. This is the third, the hidden third, necessary for all comparison between two things. To be feminine, male and female traits ebbed and flowed in him.
To be self-aware is to be able to compare our selves with the reflection and with the ideal measure. The possessed has no such awareness. For in the state of possession, the self-consciousness and self-awareness of the possessed becomes absolute solitude. There is no hidden third, no ideal. Metaphorically speaking, in possession a mirror is held up in which the self of the pos- sessed sees only itself in itself in itself in itself and so on in an infinitely receding number of self-containing, self-mirroring images, with no end in sight. And this awareness is, by definition, complete and unending soli- tude. For those near Richard/Rita—his office colleagues, his immediate family, the few friends he had made in the immediate neighborhood of Tanglewood, there was a marked change in him dating from June 1971 onward. Their memories of this change are unanimous and date from about the time of the Black Mass—of which they knew nothing, of course.
Richard/Rita now always wore male clothing; but ordinary people, who did not know his story, could not make out exactly whether it was a man or a woman they were meeting in Richard...
originally posted by: LordAhriman
Is the Christian God not androgynous?
originally posted by: Topcraft
originally posted by: LordAhriman
Is the Christian God not androgynous?
What makes you think that? He is defiantly male, why do you think we call him father?
originally posted by: Topcraft
a reply to: randomuser
Well, I do respect your interpretation, but I’m not too sure that you believe in the same God that I do. I do know that you don’t follow the same Bible that I do, so there is that.
originally posted by: Topcraft
a reply to: randomuser
To clarify, we do have the same Bible, different translations. That would be one of the major differences between us. One could argue they are different bibles. Do you believe that I could change one word in a sentence and change the intended meaning? How about if I changed words in the Bible thru an alternate translation, could I not change the intended message?
Our other major disconnect is that you believe that you are governed by Mosaic law. I believe that Christ fulfilled that law. We both can’t be right. If God sent his son to us, don’t you think the reason was to “ update “ the message?
Your belief comes from the same source that mine does, but in the relatively recent past there was a split, and our Bible was re-translated and turned into your “ version” of the Bible. I follow the original translation.
I admire your faith in God, I just mistrust your organization, and leaders.