Girls Against God

We can pick up a print copy of The Hammer, and assume it contains traces of another reader’s kinks, the mounting desire, the climax and that pathetic mortal dread that follows. The absorbent paper soaks up the body’s signature, the musical notations of desire. The stains symbolise what the book itself describes with the utmost empathy and precision: The Way Whereby a Formal Pact with Evil Is Made.
Terese adds the book to her tablet, searches different words and discovers that sperm is mentioned a total of sixty times, appearing throughout the book. That feels like a disproportionate number, and at the same time, in light of the paper’s consistency, completely fitting. Venke thinks that word searches and word counts could be our modern ingredients list. In which case, The Hammer of Witches would make for quite the interesting brew.
The text describes semen as a sacred fluid, unlike the filthy blood of menstruation. Semen is white, too: the sacred stains cover the black ink with white, layer on layer, exceeding the paper’s capacity for absorption. A whiteout of witchcraft, like a form of social cleansing, an erasure.
The book repeatedly describes how the inability of devils and witches to reproduce has been verified, and that they instead collect men’s sperm to create perverted demon children. Those who might threaten the balance of power in society are often described as sperm collectors. Europeans were referred to as such when they began to infiltrate the portside brothels of Nagasaki and other Japanese cities. When Europeans appear in shunga, Japanese erotic art, they are frequently, and strikingly, shown collecting sexual juices in cups and other containers. Witches’ brew.
Witches are sperm collectors, then, according to The Hammer, which does not know that its very own pages have performed the same task. In an attempt to pinpoint what witchcraft is, the book itself becomes a blasphemous document.
It’s impossible to predict what the effect might be if we were to rip out the most porous pages of the book, crumble them into the witch’s cauldron over a low heat, and then drink a nice cup of tea from the brew. But that’s what we have to do to create our own rituals. And so we sign our own formal pact, in blasphemy with each other. We enter into a magical triangle: a satanic community, spawn of Satan.
It’s been a few months. I’ve completely abandoned the idea about Munch joining a band and the Puberty revenge scenario. I’ve put the disk with the film file in a drawer. Instead, I study rituals. I’m sitting in the witches’ den watching Otto Muehl’s therapy scenes in the film Sweet Movie over and over again. The scenes depict Muehl’s real-life Friedrichshof commune, in what is obviously the mid-1970s. Everyone eating together around a table. It feels like a party. People play with their food. Its consumption looks like a revolutionary ravaging dance. Then the members of the commune start throwing up, at first a little hesitantly, and then with practised professionalism, their fingers digging the food out from deep down in their throats. When they’re done, they start shitting, as if they’ve been digging further and further into themselves, further down, inside the body, downwards through the chakras, all the way to the deepest and dirtiest, the most frightening and perhaps also the most human. In the end a few of them sit in a ritual circle, shitting on their plates. The other participants watch and cheer them on, and later they honour the faeces, dancing with full plates of excrement and offering the contents to each other and to the camera. As a finale they smear the skin of one participant with shit, then smear several more. They smear each other’s outsides with each other’s insides.
The poo ritual is a version of HHHHH, a display (and total transgression) of everything that was silenced or repressed in postwar Austria. I recognise it; it’s the biblical sick, a catharsis of repressed social democracy. The commune delights in society’s most private waste. It’s social critique in the form of an attempt at a parallel utopian society that lives out both primal desires and revolutionary artistic visions. Through performing these forbidden, primitive actions, the commune tries to do something creative with the dark-brown colour that the Austrian (and European) postwar era had repressed as deeply as possible and never reckoned with: fascism.
Sweet Movie’s main character, Miss Canada, winds up in the commune after a series of degradations. At the start of the film she is crowned the most innocent girl in the world. The competition is a beauty pageant in which girls from different countries spread their legs before a vagina inspector. When Miss Canada lies down in the gynaecologist’s chair and spreads her legs, an almost sacred light beams from her cunt, a light that these days would remind you of a laptop opening (‘… and then there was light’). After winning the competition, the innocent girl experiences a series of humiliating sexual encounters, representing her deep submergence in the buried trauma of postwar Europe. And now she’s here with us, a spectator to the faeces ritual.
The first time I saw the film, watching the ritual was dark and horrifying. It was a descent into hell, total chaos. It’s a much more violent assault on the senses than misanthropic black metal. Rewatching the film now, I’m not as frightened and I can understand what’s cheerful about the shit ritual, that destructive energy in actions that transgress and mock all boundaries. We’re far from The Hammer’s consequences for ritual transgression; punishment and torture have been replaced with excitement and banter. But I also see the structures within this so-called complete transgression. I see Otto Muehl, the alpha male who reigns over this highly hierarchical commune. I know about the abuse that grows from this hierarchy; I see the evil in