In Man we Trust (1)

(On reading Dr. Thomas Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names)

The Doctor has dissected the human body and found no soul therein. He has attended far too many difficult and messy births to do anything but shudder at gaudy images that portray the sacred mother and her child. Has seen too many cases of the clap picked up through ill-advised encounters in the rougher parts of town to entertain romantic fantasies about the joys of state-unsanctioned love.

To occupy his leisure hours and exercise his mind the Doctor sets himself the task of tracing out the origins of the various family and given names his fellow Britons bear. But the Doctor does not realise that a rose may grow from shit; it had never crossed his mind that the brightest and most fragrant blooms oft sprout on stems whose roots reach down to realms which a Victorian gentlemen would not wish to contemplate, still less mention in mixed company. Still, medical training does much to remove squeamishness, and however unpleasant he may find the vistas of reality which open up before him as his research proceeds, he will not flee the light into the safety of a new dark age, although the shocks of revelation piling one upon the other push him near the brink. In everything his time and land professes to hold most holy he finds the most intimate and indissoluble connexions with just those things his time and land would rather not discuss at all, still less hear spoken of in church.

The final straw descends when a ship ties up in port and from a crate of kumquats unattended on the quay a clutch of solar phallic fiery flying tree serpents emerge into the night. By the time the beasts have all been rounded up by council dogcatchers, some eight hundred and thirty one dockworkers, streetcleaners, sailors on shore leave and random people in pubs have been bitten, and the Royal Infirmary is quickly overwhelmed. The Doctor and his colleagues work their fingers to the bone, and thanks to their ministrations all bar two hundred and twenty-eight of the victims make a full recovery; but by the time he makes his way home in the hope of catching sleep, the venom has seeped through the Doctor’s skin and been carried to his brain. As in his fevered dreams the serpents twine around his spine in a phantasmical caduceus, the final barriers collapse and crores of phalloi shamelessly arise from names and symbols which even in the nineteenth century of the common error all England had thought fit to print in books for general circulation. The sacred tree of Nineveh becomes a giant vaginal slit, the hair about tied up in tufts while seven clitorises sprout fantastically from the top and winged genii and priests makes oblations of testicles and scrotal sacs—their own, or whose?

Eight hundred and sixty-four prostitutes, driven from the docks district by police and vigilante gangs, pitch their tents upon the Doctor’s lawn and by the light of moon and sun invite all passers by to enter the holy of holies. A humble tortoise pokes its head out from its shell and calls to mind an image that makes the Doctor blush. A chalice filled with water mixed with sacremental wine suggests to him a horror that he dare not set in print; he can but darkly hint that under this symbolic form the Roman church keeps up a rite once so violently denounced when carried out for real.