and strangling prostitutes upon the altar, and sacrificing children to a demon called Alocer. He was said to have taken a particular pride in impurifying consecrates with semen and replacing blessed Mass candles with candles made of baby fat.
Faye rubbed her eyes. This was not what she would call light reading.
Demonic aorism demonstrated an impressive organizational structure. Each sect was governed by a prelate or mastrum, one said of formidable psychic and magical powers. Several apostates operated under the prelate, and from there the rank structure descended to various grades of underlings who carried out insurgent duties. Prelates were thought to be immortal through reincarnation, and purified by each life, while lower members were promised favorable position in Satan’s eternal congregation. Church desecration often served as initiation for new members; as vassals rose in status, assignations rose in extremity: the abduction of children for sacrifice [usually young girls from prominent religious families], the murder of priests and clergy members [priests were routinely sodomized or forced to have sex with sect odalisques before execution], and innumerable other grievous sacrilegious activity — archival documentation proves quite exhaustive and grueling. Poisoning was another activity of choice; aorist “operatives” frequently contaminated consecrants with toxins, sickening and sometimes killing whole congregations during Mass. Catholic records, in fact, indicate a surprisingly intricate use of toxins and narcotics by aorist sects. Pharmacological knowledge during these times was scant; however, one sect vassal apprehended by the Holy Inquisition near Florence told his confessors that prelates possessed “the divine wisdoms of the Lords of the Earth,” and that a demon named Deittueze “gifted mastri [prelates] with sacred knowledge of holy elixirs which blind, kill, corrupt the body, arouse the chaste, or cause to become mad.” Deittueze bears a striking resemblance to an Assyrian demon called Deitzu, the malformed half-son of Ea [the god of the underworld]. Deitzu was a despoiler, an incarnate, and himself “Lord of Amasha,” or cultivator of the flowers of Hell. [See NARCOTICS, RITUAL USE OF]
Aorism, like Babylonian mythology, presents an interesting demographic of worship. Sects worshiped an assemblage of patron anti-saints or lesser demons, and it is through such demons that the aoristae engaged in their most active oblation. In 1390, aoristic activity became so rampant that the Congregation of the Holy Office began to plant its own spies. These attempts failed miserably and with embarrassing promptitude, though a handful of successful infiltrations did help to corroborate the records. One interesting account from the Archives of the Holy Office tells of a young deacon named Michael Bari, who was sent to imposture himself within a sect operating out of Vasr, a large township in what is now western Hungary. Though questionably translated and obviously recounted from a strong Church viewpoint, Bari’s narrative tells of a shocking scene indeed. “The Praeta [prelate] dressed in cope, cassock, and mitre, stood before the Holy Altar, bloody handed in mock profference. Beside him stood two surrogoti [probably higher ranking vassals], naked, betranced, and aroused. Upon the floor they had fashioned their most damnable emblem, the trine, formed of the ground bones of priests, and severed hands of abbots served as the emblem’s stars. They drank gustily of the cup — the Holy Chalice! — which they’d filled with the blood of a prostitute, and then of the paten consumed collops of her sullied privates. The blasphemous communion had then been passed to the rest of their evil congregants, the Praeta incanting divinations in the guttering light, of which I had been blessedly spared for I with a few others bore aside their luciferic black candles, reciting to myself the Prayer of Our Lord… To the altar, a girl of her teens had been fettered, stripped of all garb, and she lay not in horror but in arousal forced into her blood by their demonian elixirs. Then the detestable Praeta intoned words I’d unthus heard — the Devil’s tongue — erecting his red hands. The navis grew hot though it was a chill night, and the air thickened as fevered blood. Then, and most horribly, one surrogot mounted the bliss-shrieking odalisque [one who is abducted for sexual purposes] of which he immediately penetrated her privates right upon the Altar, and the other surrogot fornicated unto her mouth. Here the black congregation, so too entranced by their noxious rootmash [an aphrodisiac, probably a cantharidin extract], began to partake of each other in all manner of indecorousness, laving upon each and other’s privates, and fornicating all manner of orifice, as they called out the name of their most vile Baalzephon. For much time mine eyes remained upon this carnal festival of flesh and profanation; these blasphemers, through the abuse of their bodies and the utterance of the most iniquitous words, rejoiced in the ultimate offense against our Lord — the most unspeakable acts. The vision shall never leave my memory! But later the festivities abated, the offenders exhausted in their Devil’s bliss. Many of the women rose naked in the sordid light, some with bosoms bloodied having offered the men to drink, and men crawling off those ignoble companions now too ravaged by sin to rise of their own. I looked again upon the Altar. The drugged odalisque had been taken down and lain within the trine. Now the votaries stood in full attention and silence as the Preata faced them, whispering further abyssal praise to their horrible master. The words, though I did not know them, seemed to arrogate some physical form that I cannot metaphor, and, as the thickened black words emanated from his lips, the two surrogoti…changed. They’d become something more or less than men — hideous misshaped things that could be born only of Hell’s most tenebrous chasms, and released guttural moans from their gnarled and hirsute throats sounds not of men or of anything of the earth. The battered odalisque lay still beneath the monstrous things, the joy of Satan on her dying face. Much blood pulsed awfully from betwixt her splayed legs, and then the first surrogot knelt, its chest like hillocks and its member stout and large as a man’s forearm, and it raised the black dolch up and plunged it down into the young girl’s belly. “Hail, Father!” proclamated the Praeta, and came the response of the nefarious congregation: “Baalzephon, hail!” thus repeated in cadence as the surrogoti completed their evil work. They tore out the girl’s innards and held them ahigh, they beslickened their bodies with her blood, and about their thick necks and members looped her entrails in monstrous glee as the Praeta raised his hands above and exclaimed: “Aorista, Father! Aorista!” Sickened in body and poisoned of mind, I blinked, and in the passing of that blink, the girl had vanished. Three nights later I fled their evil fold and escaped to the Rectory of Maijvo in the west.”
“Aorista,” Faye muttered, and pushed the book away.
She looked up Prelate in the same text:
PRELATE [also prelates, or mastrum]: The liturgical leaders of activistic sects, predominant among the aorists. Prelates were thought to be reincarnatible, psychic, and wise. They were also inexplicably wealthy, supposedly financing their aorist activities through treasure granted via Satan or apostate demons. One prelate, apprehended near Paris in 1399, confessed to inquisitors: “He bestows treasure upon the faithful.”
Next, Faye looked up
BAALZEPHON: A demon of higher orders. He reigns over fertility, passion, and creativity. European sects, between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, according to the Church registry, knew Baalzephon as the “Father of the Earth,” or “He who stands closest to the earth,” and is said, due to this proximity, to encourage his worshipers to incarnation rites. Baalzephon’s appearance is not known. His sign is the triad, or trine, of black stars.
BAALZEPHON: An incubus.
