THE BEAST IS ANCIENT

I saw Him first in a vision which was preserved

In some cavernous subterranean beneath the upper ground,

Where through fiery columns which men had made with their natures

I saw Him sitting.

The lesser devils at His command bid me to fornicate

And to commit acts upon the souls who languished there

Whose tormented faces circumscribed the limits of His dominion.

What was that trimorphous face I saw? What words can describe it?

A face which immortality had engraved

For nothing reached his eyes but boredom born of insatiable hatred.

His ears were mute to all beside the sound of human suffering,

And knew no music nor laughter nor the gentle songs of birds.

His scarred flesh bore the mark of His number

His teeth were whetted on the bones of genocide

His fingers scuttered like ten lizards in tandem around His phallus

Which he used to seed the world with violence.

No one word was voiced from that gaping mouth

But multitudinous hexes from His hundred babbling tongues.

And also there He uttered numbers

And by that black art which is mathematics

He spontaneously manifested thing upon thing upon thing

Until all men were swallowed up in them

And each held no meaning beside the accumulation of their numbers.

He planted abstraction in the minds of men who lust for wisdom

As he placed fire in the hands of men who hunger for power.

When I gazed down into the lower depths

I saw the colossal anthill of men.

They were His slaves, and his slaves were slaves also unto themselves

Through vice and secrets and fetish, and all other things that are of darkness

And thus are of Him.

I can tell thee that no light shone there

But that my visions were formed of the shadows of shadows.

I can tell thee too that God was absent there

And thus love was absent also,

And that everything man holds dear to his heart

Was trampled under foot before my aching sight

By hordes of blind and deaf souls that had been transmuted into dogs

Yanked along by chains and leashes—as the pets of devils.

When I awoke it was spring

And the southerly wind was fanning the soft green grass

Where the cows were dozing like cherubs in their cots

Where streams of beautiful sunlight were falling from the blessed blue sky

As if to intimate paradise upon the earth

Whispering to all men that the truth is here whosoever should heed it.

And so from that bleakest vision I emerged in wonderment

At how a man could imagine such a thing—

That the sun may not shine tomorrow.