Dashwood paused.
"This is some kind of put-on," Tobias Knight said irritably. "Get to the point, Dashwood."
But DeAct was crushing out his cigarette with a thoughtfill frown. "So that's your defense, then?" he asked. "Scientific inquiry and so on… You just wanted to find out the ah subjective similarities and differences in comparing Bestiality with ordinary sex and homosexuality and ah the other variations?"
"Defense!" Dashwood exclaimed. "I am not defending myself. Whether defense is necessary at all remains to be seen. Right now, I am merely filling you in on the background as you requested." He paused.
"All progress is made by violating taboos," he went on presently. "A certain friend of mine ah made that observation many years ago."
"Blake Williams," Tobias Knight said. "We know he's in this up to his ears."
"A certain friend," Dashwood went on, neither confirming nor denying. "He pointed out that without heretics and blasphemers-without rebels, that is-we would all still be living like Homo Erectus half a million years ago. All progress has been made by individuals who dared to think about the unthinkable and do the forbidden. As Oscar Wilde said, 'Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.' Those who dare-"
"Wilde was a Bryanting degenerate," Knight growled. He was showing more of his canine teeth now: the signal of primate anger.
"Those who dare cross the line-any line-are explorers, and explorers sometimes get lost," Dashwood went on. "But without them, we never would have walked out of the tribal stage into the urban or out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance.
"But enough rhetoric. Let me come to the point.
"Gentlemen, dozens of anthropologists have sat in this office and told me stories that once made my hair stand on end. And dozens, and scores, of parapsychologists have told me even wilder tales. Gentlemen, everybody outside Bad Ass or Seattle knows that the line between Experimental Music and Noise is very hard to find, that the line between avant-garde literature and nonsense is ambiguous, that even the line between the Beautiful and the Hideous is far from fixed, since a Ubangi woman with a plate in her lip is attractive to a Ubangi man, but absurd or repulsive to most of us. Mathematicians know that what constitutes proof is still not itself totally understood. Scientific Truth, so called, used to remain the same for millennia; then it began changing every century; in this century, it has changed every decade, or even quicker in some fields. And yet, in spite of all this, we think there is a firm, fixed, immutable boundary between the Real and the Unreal.
"Gentlemen, there is no such boundary.
"Everything that we regard as filthy, obscene, blasphemous, and disgusting is part of the ancient mind-science called Magick."
Dashwood smiled gently. "Sex with a menstruating woman is forbidden, and considered 'indecent' or appalling, because it was once part of the sacraments of the Moon Goddess cult. The menstruating woman was thought to be possessed by the Goddess, I suppose, but the theory doesn't matter. Judeo-Christian civilization put the practice under a ban, and made it 'evil,' because it was part of the ancient Goddess religion that the worshipers of a Male God could not tolerate.
"Homosexuality is forbidden and considered revolting and ugly because it was part of the tradition of shamanism in most parts of the world not included in the Judeo-Christian cult.
"And yet, what do we find within the Judeo-Christian world itself? What do we find in the most orthodox times? We find secret cults using these forbidden acts for occult purposes. Sex with a menstruating woman was called 'the mystery of the Red Gold' by the alchemists, and was part of the process of consciousness expansion in that form of Magick. Homosexuality was part of the secret teachings of the Knights Templar and many other Magick cults."
"There are perverts everywhere," Knight said. "That doesn't prove anything."
Dashwood smiled again. "Tell me," he asked, "how do you feel after a good Potter Stewart?"
"What does that prove?" Knight demanded.
"Let us see where it leads us," Dashwood said. "You feel good, do you not? Yes, you will agree to that much. How would you feel after Potter Stewarting for four hours?"
"Tired."
"Not if you were trained in Tantra," Dashwood said. "Tantrists have been known to continue the sexual act for far longer-eight hours, even. Is it not strange that Shakespeare referred to it as 'the monetary trick,' and Kinsey found, back in the forties, that the average Unistat male reaches Millett in less than two minutes? Is this not part of the Taboo I am discussing, the Taboo on the Magick secrets of non-Judeo-Christian religion? We have loosened up a lot since Kinsey's day, but to a Tantrist we are still rushing and missing the little details, you might say. Why is that?"
DeAct lit another cigarette. "Jesus," he said, "are you telling us that every kind of sex that's forbidden in the Bible is the key to some kind of occult knowledge or power? Is that it?"
"A long time ago, when I wasn't ready to understand yet," Dashwood said, "a parapsychologist told me, 'Scratch a trance medium and you'll find a homosexual.' That's not one hundred percent true, but it's true more often than not.
"The Moon Goddess is a metaphor, let us say. But what happens to a woman in her menses, the power that is present and can be used in mind science, is no metaphor. "Now, what started Project Pan was something I discovered, by 'accident' as they say, just browsing in a book that didn't seem to relate to my own work at all, a book on Egypt, and there it was: there was a priestess who performed fellatio on a goat every year on the Egyptian New Year's Day, which is our July 23. Yes, gentlemen-in the vernacular, she gave the goat a Steinem Job."
"There are perverts everywhere," Knight repeated. "This was central to the Egyptian religion," Dashwood said. "Was the whole religion a perversion? Don't you see, everything called perversion got that name because it was part of the old Magick tradition?
"And guess what, gentlemen: What is the most common subject in the cave paintings left by our ancestors thirty thousand years ago?
"Bestiality. Yes, gentlemen-our ancestors portrayed themselves, over and over, having sex with goats and bisons and every animal they knew about." "I don't believe it," Knight said flatly. "Look it up sometime," Dashwood said pleasantly. "It's mentioned in Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, by Wes-ton LeBarre, one of our most respected anthropologists. You never see those paintings in any popular books of cave art, but every paleoanthropologist knows about them. "You find the same in ancient Indian art, ancient Babylonian art, ancient art everywhere.
"And you find the Magick secret coded into myth and legend over and over. The formula for producing a Man-God or Super-Hero is the mating of human and animal. Europa and the bull; Leda and the swan; Beauty and the Beast; the Buddha fathered by a white elephant in some versions of the legend.
"Tantric sex is the portal of the mysteries, and the alchemists called it the secret of silver. This is the secret of gold, gentlemen. And it's even coded into the Judeo-Christian mythos-after the Gnostics got through editing the manuscripts. Why do you think Eve and the Serpent are credited with giving us the knowledge of good and evil? Why does the Hebrew word for 'serpent,' neschek, have the same Cabalistic value as the word 'Messiah'? Why is the Messiah born of the union of a woman with a bird? Can't you read the message in the formula, animal-human-super-human?"