the eunuch-priest, that traditional helpmate o f the
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priestess, an honor no doubt not intended for him here.
Conversely, only men have been permitted to serve
male gods; eunuchs and women, synonymous here,
have been strictly excluded from those holy rites. The
proper conclusion therefore is that man, not woman, is
the divine object of The Image: he is the priest; he serves
a male god in whose image he was created; he serves
himself. Were that not the case, woman, as the worshiped, would serve herself, instead of serving herself up like turkey or duck, garnished, stuffed, sharpened
knife ready for the ritual carving. That a man becomes
the master of the master means, despite Reage’s assertions to the contrary, that women should serve men, that women are properly slaves and men properly masters, that men have the only meaningful power (in our culture —that power allied to and defined by force and
violence), that men created in the image of the Almighty
are all mighty. Single-single think brings us closer to
the truth in this instance than double-double think.
The Image is rife with Christian symbolism. One of
the more memorable sequences in the book takes place
in a rose garden chosen by Claire as the proper proscenium for Anne’s humiliation. In the rose garden, Claire directs Jean de Berg’s attention to a specific
type of rose, special in its perfect beauty. Claire orders
Anne to step into the flowerbed and to fondle the rose,
which Anne handles as though it were a moist, ready
cunt. Claire orders Anne to pick the rose and to bring
it to her, which Anne does, though not before she feebly
protests that there is a prohibition against picking the
flowers and that she is afraid of the thorns. Anne’s
hesitation necessitates punishment. She is ordered to
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lift her dress while Claire first strokes Anne’s cunt with
the rose, then jabs the thorn into her thigh and tears
the flesh very deliberately. Claire kisses Anne’s hands as
a poetic drop o f blood flows. Claire then pushes the
stem o f the rose into A nne’s garter belt. T h e thorn is
caught in the lace, and the flower is fastened, an adornment fraught with symbolic meaning. Even Jean de Berg finds the performance a bit overdone:
I answered that it was indeed a great success, although perhaps rather overburdened with symbols, in the romantic and surrealist traditions. 8
T h e rose as a symbol has powerful occult origins.
Eliphas Levi says o f it:
It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppression
o f spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like grace,
she was a daughter o f God; it was love refusing to be
stifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt against
sterility; it was humanity aspiring towards natural
religion, full o f reason and love, founded on the
revelations o f the harmony o f being, o f which the rose,
for initiates, was the living floral symbol. 9
T h e rose became for Christian mystics “a rose o f light
in the center o f which a human figure is extending its
arms in the form o f a cross. ” 10 However, the official
Church, in its unending struggle against carnality and
nature, posited the rose as a symbol o f both in opposition to the lily, which represented purity o f mind and body. The Image takes a stand on the side o f official
Christianity by using the rose as an instrument o f pain
and blood-letting.
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The photographs which Claire shows to Jean
de Berg are also overflowing with symbolic importance.
The photographs are a series of conventional sadomasochistic poses. They chart the torture and mutilation o f a victim, in this case Anne, and culminate in what is apparently the brutal stabbing, the actual death, of
the victim. Together they reveal a woman’s preoccupation with her own body, a narcissism which is concretized in the last photograph, which is of Claire herself, faceless, caressing her own cunt. This narcissism is a
flaw which defines woman, and to atone for it a woman
must, in the glorious tradition of O, consent to and
participate in her own annihilation. Such is the scenario
which permits her a Christian salvation, which redeems
her o f the sin of Eve and the subsequent sin of her own
self-love. The photographs are “really nothing more
than religious pictures, steps along the way of a new
road to the cross. ” 11 The road, however, is an old one,
well traveled, and if the cross is difficult to reach via
this particular road, it is only because the bodies of
martyrs other than Anne and Claire lie piled so deep.
It is only too obvious that the tortured, mutilated
woman who appears first as Anne, then as the more
impersonal victim of the photographs, and finally
in a dream of Jean de Berg’s as a dead body “pierced by
many triangular stab wounds in the most propitious
areas” 12 is the secular Christ of cunt and breast, Eve’s
fallen, lustful, carnal descendant, the victim who, unlike
Jesus, is suffering for her own sins, the criminal whose
punishment scarcely equals the horror o f her crime.
That crime, of course, is biological womanhood. Jesus
died for us once, the crucifixion he suffered sufficed, we
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73
are told, for all time. Anne, Claire, O, all will be forced
spread-eagle on the cross until death releases them, and
then again. No cruelty will ever be proper atonement
for their crime, and thus set the rest o f us free.
Christianity has one other image o f woman, Mary,
the Madonna, the Virgin Mother. Jean de Berg dreams
o f Claire as the Madonna shortly before he beats and
fucks her. Surely that demonstrates the psychic significance, in a sexist culture, o f the Madonna figure.
Just as Anne on the cross was a profanation o f the
sacred nature o f women, so is the concept, the Lie,
o f a virgin mother, separate from her cunt, separate
from nature, innocent by virtue o f the abandonment
o f her real, and most honorable, sexuality.
T he worship o f virginity must be posited as a real
sexual perversion, crueler and more insidious than
those sex models condemned by the culture as perverse.
T h e Christian institutionalization o f that worship,
its cultivation and refinement, have aborted women in
the development and expression o f natural sexuality by
giving credence to that other: woman as whore. T h e