It was only in the weeks following the St. Luke’s Cathedral break-in, which the papers variously described as “concerning,” “symptom of a profound moral rot,” “blasphemous,” and of course, “satanic,” that among the members of the Black Circle of the Dark Dawn began to circulate an idea, a vague feeling really, which then swelled up into a thrilling realization – the sacramental cup they had stolen was the fabled Holy Grail. The cup of the last supper. The receptacle in which the blood of the enemy was collected.
The night of the break in, Damien, nee Julian, grabbed it so thoughtlessly. It was just another piece of loot to play around with, not nearly as important as the Host which was the reason they were there in the first place. Damien had read in a book from the public library that the true satanic black mass involves some degree of host desecration. “It is a necessary step for our diabolical development,” he preached to the rest of the conventicle. But once they had exhausted the ways you could ritually torture an inert piece of unleavened bread – never a drop of blood squeezed from it – the sacramental cup had become increasingly important in the ceremonies of the teenage Satanists. You could fill it with a variety of liquids yourself at least.
They became aware of its importance in the same way they dug into their inverted spirituality: gradually and unknowingly. A silly routine, a joke that went on so long that everyone forgot that eventually someone was supposed to laugh. You scribble a pentagram on your desk at school, sure you’ll find someone who thinks it’s cool and then you’ll never want to disappoint them by breaking the act. In time you forget you ever believed otherwise. There’s never a sudden flash epiphany – only the same light hitting them day in and day out. That’s how that brass cup, devoid of any particular quality came to be the Holy Grail. Or Sancte Graal, as the group was esoterically inclined to address it.
They took turns spitting in it; that was easy. Next, Damien exacted a tablespoon of blood from each member. As the apex of a particularly frenzied evening of ritual, he begged his girlfriend Raven, formerly known as Kayla, to piss in it.
“Why don’t you piss in it?” She objected.
Damien was undeterred. “Think of the image. It’s just another thing entirely if a woman does it.”
And then Raven thought of the covers of her Gothic metal albums, full of half naked women, more often than not covered in blood, often accompanied with some ritual accessories. She agreed to the pissing, but not in public; she wouldn’t do it then, which didn’t sit right with Damien but he didn’t dare to press her further. There are other privileges he risks losing. And whenever they have an argument, they both know his body is much less assertive than his voice, much less versed in theatrics and forcefulness. A novice in sexual confidence. Damien’s hands barely dared to graze Raven’s raised follicles and every chance meeting of their eyes always threatened to leave his fragility exposed. When he enters her, almost always in the dark, when they lie beside one another, Damien treats each intercourse as a fait accompli. The humping will soon cease as limply as it started. What a prideful little creature this devil is that can’t even lower himself to ask for comfort, which Raven would have provided anyway, because that’s who she was, beneath the purple eye-shadow and red highlights and that contentious tongue piercing. Her parents raised a good girl. Lately she prefers the praise of others to theirs. And as a good girl, Raven knows how to keep a secret and help keep up Damien’s image.
The Antichrist can hardly be a timid little boy, especially with so much at stake.
While the fact that the Sancte Graal had come into their hands was obviously a matter of metaphysical importance, the dimension of such importance was not clear to everybody. Philosophical daggers, as blunt as they can be, were drawn. Gone were the days of tentative sexual transgressions, naive bacchism and the occasional gleeful grave robbery; bitter and especially lengthy debates encroached over the time allotted to the satanic revelry, until the Black Circle gatherings became indistinguishable from those of any local communist chapter.
Billy Watkins, the resident LaVeyan, who went by the name of Frater Cain, had many times made it known that any theological implication should be disregarded.
“We spit on the cross every day, brothers and sisters,” he said on a night in which it seemed some sort of boiling point was reached, “it has not deposed the tyrant from his throne. And it won’t ever. Satan is personal liberation, freedom from the shackles of religion – any religion. This cup and the defilement we wreak upon it is the reminder of this freedom. The joy we feel is the enlightenment of Satan. The assurance that God has no power over us, that in fact he has no power at all.”
“Despite your big words, you remain a philistine,” responded Damien. He had just learned the word “philistine” and itched to use it against someone. “Can’t you see this is a sign?” he said, jerking the Graal about. “A gift from the fallen one. We have been chosen to carry his pestilent will. Something is required of us.”
“Damien wants us to swap one religion for another. We have gone beyond religion. We have no masters.” Frater Cain retorted
“We are Satan’s army on earth. We have a duty to destroy all Creation.”
What was smuggled over these ideological lines, where debates never abated and almost always developed away from the original points into arguments about the historical Jesus or gnostic cosmology, was a more personal question of authority. Damien had naturally grown into the role, but as more women joined the ranks, the other males were more prone to lock horns with him and that meant bickering and grandstanding over everything. Eventually the question of the ownership of the Grail was bound to come up.
“No one else can be trusted with it. None of you are mature enough to handle it.”
“You just need a scepter to lord over the rest of us. I can give you something else you can handle”
“I don’t need the Sancte Graal. We need it.”
“Then why are we not free to use it as we want? Why do we have to ask you to use it in our rituals?”
This went on for hours, until they agreed to let Raven keep hold of it. They dubbed her the ‘Unholy Graal Keeper’ – made a ritual out of it and everything – and she was tasked with the safety of the relic and to provide it for use only during communal rituals. She didn’t think much of it; she was happy to help kick the can down the road for a little longer, so that they could have a bit more fun. For Damien’s enemies it was a watered down compromise, the girl was just a step-away removed from the satanic caudillo, a puppet really, but at least they had wrestled the chalice from Damien’s sweaty hands. But on Good Friday, or Walpurgisnacht more pointedly, the day of reckoning for these eager darklings was gonna come. It was decided that on such occasion the Black Circle would perform a grand summoning, as the Lesser Key of Solomon prescribes; they would ask Lucifer directly to adjudicate the contending positions and grant the winner total command of the Black Circle.
The prospect filled Damien with anxiety. He was excited at the idea of receiving the blessing of the big guy below and shuddered at the idea of being rebuked. There was always a possibility. He went to Raven’s the evening before the big showdown. To see that she’d stand by him. To see if he could get some comfort for the trying times ahead. To see that nobody else had maneuvered with whispers to take the Graal from her. She’s too trusting. A good girl through and through.
Yet she didn’t answer his call. She didn’t open the door. Damien was left alone to tie himself in knots, theorizing all sorts of conspiracies and betrayals, and picturing Raven turning into a dove into the hands of his enemies.
Little did he know.
A week, a century of soul rending. Heavier than salvia. The water in this cup, still faintly smelling of urine and blood. Damien and all the other dorks would say she had been scrying into it, but she hadn’t read the tomes they threw at each other in their squabbles. “Leucomancy,” says the poindexter occultist, sadly severed from the mysteries. Raven doesn’t care about that. Her body trembles feverish, with rays of starlight parting from her breast. Her eyes captured by the spontaneous lapping, circling of the water; its scant ebullience coming in and out of existence in seconds, less than seconds, but you could live a lifetime in those small bubbles.
They are angels rising up from the deep. A luminous ladder, maybe. Come, they say, offering their hand. And so she tumbles into the dark, circling along the wet walls of the cosmos, as the guiding light of the angels is engulfed, spiraling towards the bottom, sure to drown, almost gone… if not for the time-worn nets cast by a dutiful fisherman.
Over the hill, in the place of the skull, they’re killing a man, he says.
The bridegroom waits pinned on the cross and there’s a thick crowd watching him. They’re wailing so loudly the earth throbs. Armed with a lance, its point bleeding already, Raven pierces his flesh. Not out of lust for violence. Not out of pity either. Did it only because this is what lances do. A necessary moment in the hierostory. The man up there knows. He nods approvingly before whispering to the sun. “Go dark.”
They have passed the night together on this bed of crosses. He looks healthier now. Unblemished and groomed save for the messy hair.
“Can I?” she asks, unlike the Widow’s Son who kept his tongue tied.
“You’re the Unholy Keeper, ‘course you can. Just tell me your hands are clean. I got this body brand new,” and he raises his arm and arches his torso so that the wound opens before her. It welcomes her fingers, at first gently caressing the flaps of skin so as to not cause further pain, then in timid advances she inquires innocently about his flesh.
“It’s warm,” she says and they lock eyes again. And she wouldn’t get out of there, not for anything in the world. Christ moans. This is the promised everything. Theosis actualized, Raven’s elbow deep in it and sinking quickly, lusting for nothingness, now a solitary split-ended strand of hair peeking out, before she goes to the place without language.
If she had been a saint of old, the Church would have sent a pious monk who would have transcribed her experience, edited out the nasty bits, and consigned her to the cold cellar of history where only post-grad students in feminist theory come to visit. Instead she came back to her bed, frazzled and sweaty, to a thousand missed calls from Damien and few from Frater Cain. They would leave even more in the coming weeks. Not a chance she would let their filthy hands touch the Graal again.
Come Friday, the Black Circle of Dark Dawn would get into their final argument, the one that would tear them asunder. Raven’s absence, and consequently the Graal’s, meant that Damien and Frater Cain would accuse each other of everything from coercion to kidnapping, rape and even murder. But of course, what’s crime to the avowed antinomian? A badge of honor. Neither Damien nor Cain would deny anything, which left them in the weird situation of having to suggest a worse accusation for themselves than the one just thrown at the opponent, all to maintain credibility. Finally, the rest of the Black Circle left the gathering when mundane litigiousness gave way to arcane formulas, threats of hexing, and curses in the name of Beelzebub and Belial. Once the devil princes failed to show up, the rest of the group realized there wasn’t any more fun to be had. The joke got instantly old.
It ended definitely when Frater Cain blew the whistle to the authorities about the St. Luke’s forced entry, resulting in a variety of sentences for the culprits. Damien got 3 years in jail. Frater Cain only got probation. They both enjoyed the media attention and the flooding of fanatics that ensued. Damien wrote a book in jail that has become a classic among practitioners of the sinister path.
As for Raven, she was never found either by what remained of the Black Circle nor by the law who wanted her as an accomplice. The Sancte Graal, now a regular consecrated chalice, found its place again in the tabernacle of Saint Luke’s Cathedral. The priest would not reveal how the cup came back home, fueling conspiracies about the church’s complicity. The truth was, as heard in confession by his superiors, that the man had witnessed a girl, moving skittishly around the church’s courtyard at night, and then leaving a bundle on the steps of the cathedral’s right entrance. But having locked eyes with her for a moment, as if she had felt the weight of his gaze, he heard a voice in his heart ask: “Who would punish such a good girl?”
— Vincenzo della Malva likes to write and to listen to music. He also has got a substack he someday plans to write something for. Come say on X @pinealbrand