1200 years later, Marvel Comics’ Jack Kirby created a supergod Thanos who ‘courted Death itself in the alluring form of a robed, hooded, voluptuously breasted female figure,’[79] an erotic siren, a Playboy centrefold sporting the double-Ds of death and desire. In other Marvel Comics editions, Death appeared the instant before someone dies, taking the form of a lover. At Captain Marvel’s death, it materialized as his greatest love Una (truth).
Returning to other superheroes and demigods, during the Trojan war (ca. 1194–1184 BCE), the Amazon warrior Penthesileia, seeking atonement after unintentionally killing her sister Hippolyte while firing an arrow at a stag they were hunting, vows to kill the Greek hero Achilles. After slaughtering many men, including Podarces, she comes to blows with Telemon Ajax before battling Achilles, the noble son of Peleus impaling her and her wind-swift horse with his host-destroying spear. As the bodies lie quivering in the dust, Achilles removes the Amazon’s war helmet and is ensorcelled by the goddess-like beauty of the daughter of the war god Ares. Wishing he had taken her for his bride, he falls upon the body in remorse and lust, and later kills his fellow Achaean Thersites for calling him a ‘perverted man.’[80]
Taken from an historical account by Phylarchus (third century BCE), Parthenius of Nicaea, the last of the Alexandrian poets, writes in his Erotica Pathemata (of the sorrows of love—circa first century BCE) of Dimoetes who married Evopis the daughter of his brother Troezen. But the girl loved another, her own brother. When Dimoetes discovered that the siblings were having sex, he told his brother. Terrified and stigmatized, the young girl put a noose around her neck and, damning Dimoetes, hanged herself. Maybe eroticized by the suicide, Dimoetes, walking along the beach, saw the body of an extremely beautiful woman roiling in the surf; he dashed in and pulled her to the shore. He fell in love with her and took the corpse back to his dwelling where his desire overwhelmed him and he had sex with the dead body. He kept her as long as he could, but the body began to deliquesce and disintegrate, and, finally, the putrescence became too much and he interred her in an opulent tomb. Even then, his passion would not abate and, his sexual obsession with a corpse undimmed, he killed himself with his own sword.[81]
Achilles, Dimoetes, and Carl von Cosel each honour their dead lovers with a magnificent burial, or build tombs for them—Achilles arranges for the ashes of his would-be corpse bride to be interred in King Laomedon’s tomb within the walls of Ilium. These men fall under the classification of necromantics, obsessed with their love and desire for a singular loved one, rather than erotic compulsion to have sex with corpses, as in Karen Greenlee’s case. However, in the building of tombs, Achilles, Dimoetes, and von Cosel transfer their desire to a spiritual communion with the dead—similar to Mochean culture, as a device to either disable time (von Cosel’s rebuilding of his lover’s body), or to reverse time (Achilles taking of the dreaded and warlike Penthesileia as his posthumous bride), or folding time and space as in Dimoetes’s transubstantiation (sublimation) of his incestuous wife’s hanging body with the drowned body he preserves.
Composed between the third and sixth centuries CE, the Babylonian Talmud accused King Herod the Great of necrophilia.[82] In 29 CE, after sentencing his second wife Mariamne the Hasmonean to death for alleged adultery and conspiracy to murder—an executioner strangled her with a silken cord—the repentant yet delirious and psychotic Herod had his beautiful dead wife embalmed in honey and stored in his palace for the next seven years. His sexual desire for his mellified wife remained as strong as when she was alive. The contemporary Judeo-Roman historian Titus Flavius Josephus states that, ‘His love for Mariamne seemed to seize him in such a peculiar manner, as looked like Divine vengeance upon him for the taking away her life; for he would frequently call for her, and frequently lament for her in a most indecent manner.’[83] Herod even outdid Achilles, Dimoetes, and von Cosel by building the Mariamne Tower, a sumptuous fortress palace in Jerusalem, and one of only three buildings to survive the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the future emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus in 70 CE.
These edifices, these architectures of forbidden yet realized desire, these tomb/wombs for an object already and always gone, are structures of anti-repression, fortresses of desire as a ‘countereffect of lack.’ If desire is the ‘abject fear of lacking something,’[84] then the maintenance of the body, even if it is an inanimate vessel for sexual congress, is also an attempt to preserve and sustain the real, for ‘if desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as the autoproduction of the unconscious.’[85] The dead agents of desire were as real to the Moche, to Achilles, to Herod, to Dimoetes, to von Cosel as their priests, warriors, slaves, and fellow workers, they were products of the necrophile’s reality, produced out of the flow of saliva over their dead bodies, the end product of semen within, the passive bodies synthesizing with the active functions of the partial objects—mouth, penis, testicles—of the living lovers, the architects of their sumptuous sarcophagi, their thanatic stone boudoir.
The Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1622-1695) wrote:
His twin brother Thomas hints that he may have breached that mark, transgressing morality and religious teachings in the pursuit of magic. Thomas Vaughan, alchemist Kabbalist, Rosicrucian, and occultist explains in his essay ‘Aqua vitae non vitis’, ‘On the same day my dear wife sickened, being a Friday, and at the same time of the day, namely in the evening, my gracious God did put into my heart the secret of extracting the oil of Halcali, which I had once accidentally found at the Pinner of Wakefield in the days of my most dear wife. But it was again taken from me by a most wonderful judgement of God, for I could never remember how I did it, but made a hundred attempts in vain. And now my glorious God (Whose name be praised for ever) has brought it again into my mind, and on the same day my dear wife sickened; and on the Saturday following, which was the day she died on, I extracted it by the former practice: so that on the same day, which proved the most sorrowful to me, whatever can be, God was pleased to confer upon me the greatest joy I can ever have in this world after her death.’[87]
The editor notes that the ‘former practice’ involved the ‘dark fashion’ of ‘viscous and spermatic humidity’[88] in order to extract the ‘menstruum universale’. The Metaphysical poets equated love with death, sex with decay, inspiration with expiration. George Herbert’s ‘Mortification’: ‘That dumbe inclosure maketh love / Unto the coffin, that attends his death,’ and in ‘Death’ Herbert believes death’s ‘bones with beauty shall be clad.’ Donne, militantly positive, states in ‘Death, be not proud’ that from death ‘Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, / And soonest our best men with thee do go,’ in these poems there is an almost erotic sense of the presence of death, Marvell even invokes the terror of vermicular necrophiliac rape in an attempt to seduce his mistress.
80
Quintus of Smyrna,
81
Parthenius,
82
Aryeh Kasher and Eliezer Witztum,
87
Thomas Vaughan,