Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

—Walter Benjamin

As far back as I can remember ... I always wanted to be a collector. A collector, it's often seemed to me, has more fun than a writer. Both attempt to stop, or kill, time. But only the collector is truly at home with things. If there are some human beings who prefer animals to people, then there are those, like me, who prefer things to animals, people, and, what is more, all other examples of loutish sentience. Things, after all, have distinction. They have depth. Human beings, by comparison, are as undifferentiated as they are shallow, and animals are simply messy, detestably anthropomorphic, or absurdly fierce. But things? Things offer us a life, a rich, numinous inner life that the vegetable, animal and human worlds cannot provide. By surrounding ourselves with things, we take upon ourselves the gallant task of attempting to still Time's insufferably beating heart. The Czech animator Jan Svankmajer once said that his flat and studio were 'full of things that have a profound effect on me; and since I communicate with dead things rather than living people, according to the psychologist Erich Fromm, I am a necrophile. That relates partly to my introverted childhood, partly to my belief that places, rooms and objects have their own passive lives which they have soaked up, as it were, from the situations they have been in and from the people who made, touched, and lived with them.' Svankmajer — whose Alice in Wonderland is as delirious and as haunting as De Quincey's account of his own, somewhat more disreputable, dream-child, Ann — embellishes the bare bones of my speculations with pink, fragrant, imaginative flesh. I too, collector manqué that I am, have yearned to become an Ed Gein of porcelain, automata, rare prints, and, of course, books. To the effect that — in wholly aspirational vein — I recently acquired five out-of-print titles by Sax Rohmer, which I presently embrace:

· Nude in Mink, 1950 (UK title: Sins of Sumuru) 
· Sumuru, 1951 (UK title: Slaves of Sumuru) 
· The Fire Goddess, 1952 (UK title: Virgin in Flames) 
· Return of Sumuru, 1954 (UK title: Sand and Satin) 
· Sinister Madonna, 1956 

Sax Rohmer (a pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Wade, or Ward) is, of course, best known for creating the arch criminal Dr Fu Manchu, the 'yellow peril incarnate in one man' who possesses 'all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race'. (The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, 1913; US title The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu.) He is the sinister Oriental, the embodiment of irrational, racist fears and prejudices about the East prevalent during the first half of the twentieth century, and beyond. Sumuru — in many ways the female counterpart of Fu Manchu — likewise embodies certain anxieties and fears regarding women, both during the first half of the 1950s and, more generally, during the period of Rohmer's life, 1883-1959.

Sumuru first appeared in Shadow of Sumuru, a 1946 BBC radio serial consisting of eight half-hour episodes. The serial was later worked up into the novel Nude in Mink, which, along with the four titles that followed, now represent the scarcest, most collectable items in Rohmer's oeuvre.

Follow me, then, into foggy, postwar London streets. Follow me to New York, Jamaica, Egypt, and France. It is the early 1950s. 'Some rare evil threatened civilization.' (Nude in Mink)

The threat is the feminine. The evil is ours.
 

Who was Sumuru?

'It was said that she was an ice-cold, fascinating genius whose hypnotic powers impelled all men to do her bidding. It was said she was a fanatic who ruled her followers with oriental despotism.' (Nude in Mink)

A genius, yes, and the head of a worldwide secret society: a fanatical eugenicist with plans to reconstruct humankind and exterminate all those she deems 'ugly' and who stand in her way.

'"Mad or sane, she's a danger at least as great as Hitler was."' (Nude in Mink)

She has contacts in high places and she often enjoys diplomatic immunity. She has 'circles' in all the chief capitals of the world.

'"I go about the world freely and luxuriously. I maintain the personal staff of a prime minister. I have thousands of followers. But Scotland Yard can never interfere with me."' (Nude in Mink)

She is addressed as My Lady, or Madonna.

Of indeterminate nationality, she possesses multiple identities. Like a black widow spider, she binds men and women to her with silken chains. And like all black widows, she is a female Bluebeard.

'Sumuru was a will-o'-the-wisp. She constantly submerged her identity in new marriages. All the grooms had been wealthy, and all, to date, were dead. Her first recorded husband, the Japanese Marquis Sumuru, had committed hara-kiri. Then came Baron Rikter, who had died in her arms, leaving her his vast fortune. Lord Carradale, her third recorded husband, was killed in an air crash. She inherited the great Carradale airplane business. The old Duc de Séverac figured last on the Scotland Yard list.' (Sinister Madonna)

Her personality is 'electrical and infinitely disturbing.' (Nude in Mink)

Moreover, she is beautiful. And in her beauty — the 'beauty of a poised cobra' — there is danger. '"She's said to be today's most beautiful woman. Several men, including a celebrated French poet, have committed suicide over her."' (Sumuru)

'Sumuru, smart as a fashion plate, smiling, gay ... could calmly order a man's secret execution.' (Nude in Mink)

To her male opponents she is a slave-trafficker, a kidnapper, and a murderess, her beauty a delicious, addictive, but nevertheless quite deadly poison.

She is a courtesan, too, a grande cocotte. '"Many men have desired me. But the only men to whom, temporarily, I have given myself, have been unusually wealthy. Love I have never encouraged. Today, I am quite unusually wealthy, too — and free."' (Nude in Mink)

'"It was my recognition of the fact that men are driven by appetite and not by wisdom that led me to learn to despise them."' (Sumuru)

'"Those I could not chain in my will I chained in my arms."' (Sumuru)

'She was a wanton, he told himself fiercely, a common teaser, a high-society call girl. To love her would be insane, to cast aside self-esteem, dignity, to lose the respect of decent men for the embraces of a magnificent harlot.' (Sumuru)

She recruits, tutors, indoctrinates, and finally brainwashes the world's most spectacularly beautiful young women to ensure that her organization — the Order of Our Lady — may one day seduce the world.

'Sumuru employed the beauty of women to secure the serfdom of men!' (Nude in Mink)

And, of course, to enforce 'the discipline of beauty'. (Sumuru)

She lives in mock-Eastern palaces — abodes redolent of scenes from the Arabian Nights — reclining like a couchant sphinx in silk-curtained recesses, or else idling in marble rooms beside lily ponds and banks of mimosa.

She employs efficient thugs culled from the four corners of the Earth, each one representing the perfidious characteristics of their respective race.

She is a skilled pharmacist, in the fantastical tradition of the infamous she-devil Marie Madeleine d'Aubray, the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who, during the reign of King Louis XIV, poisoned her father and two brothers in order to secure the family fortune and end interference in her adulterous relationship. (E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote a story about the poisonously divine marquise, or rather about the seventeenth-century affair known as 'The Affair of the Poisons', entitled Mlle de Scudéri, A Tale of the Times of Louis the Fourteenth.) The Marquise de Brinvilliers was executed for her crimes in 1676, but Sumuru thrives, bending men's will to her own with banes, philtres, potions and exotic hypnotics.

She travels through London in a Rolls Sedanca de Ville; through the fog-shrouded English countryside at breakneck speed in a supercharged Buick; through New York in a Hispano-Suiza; or else she eludes capture by taking to the skies in top-secret aeroplanes, such as the batlike Carradale Super-Hornet, the 'fastest jet plane in the world', which climbs into the air with an eerie shriek reminiscent of a V-2.

Her calling card? A piece of near-white material resembling vellum. Written upon it, in Old English gilt letters, the signature La Femme.

She is a mistress of treachery, a domina of deceit.

She seems not one woman, but many women: a twentieth-century Ayesha: everyman's ideal and the world's desire.
 

Sumuru: Her Mystery

'"Nobody who has ever seen her has been able to describe Sumuru."' (Nude in Mink)

The most that can be said, perhaps, is that her profile conjures up half-forgotten memories of a Greek cameo. After that, all descriptions are reduced to the silence that informs superlatives. A single photograph exists. But it provides little help.

'The picture showed an exquisitely chic woman wearing a tailored suit and a waist-length mink cape. The suit was of some light material; shoes, gloves, and hat were dark. To the hat was attached a diaphanous veil through which little could be seen of the face except remarkably fine eyes looking out as through a mist.' (Sumuru)

'"She has very fair skin. I have no idea what colour her eyes are. She has a magnificent figure. It's my honest opinion — although I know it sounds silly — that she's a sorceress. She can cast spells — with her voice, and with her eyes ... Sumuru seems to possess the magic of appearing to every man as his ideal of feminine perfection. In other words, the world's desire. Speaking from experience, I doubt if there's one man alive who could resist her. As well as her infernal beauty, she has the brains of any two men of genius."' (Sumuru)

'"Have you sometimes asked yourself why I never change? Have you asked yourself if I might be the Wandering Jewess?"' (Sumuru)

'"She was the subject of an unfinished sonnet left by Romain Ravillac, the young French poet who jumped overboard from a liner two years after the war. In it, among other things, he refers to her as 'clarté du soleil entrelacée', which I take to mean woven sunshine. On the other hand, a stolid Russian diplomat, who met her in Paris, speaks of her as dark, sombre, and also as 'a deep, secret well.' That she is a woman of unusual beauty seems to be established. In all other respects, accounts differ. But if you can imagine one possessing the arts of Circe and the allurements of Calypso, the brains of Winston Churchill and the soul of a Himmler, you will have formed a rough impression of the Marquise Sumuru.' (Nude in Mink)

'Had she vanished at that moment he could not have described her. He could never describe her, afterwards; for no one had ever been able to describe the Marquise Sumuru. But he could never forget her voice.' (Nude in Mink)
 

Sumuru: Her Voice

She possesses a voix d'or, and her conversation is akin to the music of a harp, her laughter 'divine music — with a counter melody of hell interwoven'. (Nude in Mink) 

'When the woman spoke, her voice, which a young French poet had once described as "a nocturne for harps and strings," made strange music in that harem apartment.' (Return of Sumuru)

'It was a magic voice; mystic melody ... It created music like that of harps softly played.' (Nude in Mink)

Her voice is 'hauntingly musical but imperious'. (Sumuru)

'She had laughed, that soft, trilling laugh, which possessed a quality akin to the note of a nightingale.' (Nude in Mink)
 

Sumuru: Her Smile

She has a smile that is 'half voluptuous, half contemptuous'. (The Fire Maiden)
 

Sumuru: Her Eyes

There are certain gemstones that, when cut en cabochon, display a luminous band reminiscent of the eye of a cat, a quality called 'chatoyancy'. Fu Manchu has 'gleaming, chatoyant eyes, greenly terrible'. And his face is 'that of an archangel of evil ... wholly dominated by the most uncanny eyes that ever reflected a human soul, for they were narrow and long, very slightly oblique, and of a brilliant green'. These 'inhuman green eyes' glitter 'catlike' so that Fu Manchu seems 'a figure from the realms of delirium'.

Sumuru, his female counterpart, has equally abnormal eyes. 

'She had the longest eye lashes he had ever seen; they seemed to weigh her lids down, for she kept them nearly always lowered.' (Sinister Madonna)

'Her eyes were nearly closed, so that they glinted through heavy lashes with an effect of smouldering fire.' (Nude in Mink)

'Her eyes gleamed like jewels through lowered lashes.' (Return of Sumuru)

'Her black lashes lay on her cheeks.' (Sinister Madonna)

'Fair lashes, untouched by mascara, swept up so as almost to reach the pencilled eyebrows.' (Sinister Madonna)

'Through heavy lashes, points of light glittered as if from hidden jewels.' (Sumuru)

Sumuru has 'impossibly long eyelashes'. Indeed, her eyes are 'so shadowed by heavy lashes that no one could have defined their colour'. (Sumuru)

Nevertheless, we know that colour has to be a species of green, however refined out of the range of normal human perception. Verdant green, emerald green, jade green, bottle green, acid green, lime green, or one of any shade of poisonous chartreuse: Sumuru's eyes, inspected with the appropriate psychosexual viewing apparatus, would surely reveal themselves to possess a 'greenness' that evokes the spirituality of Persephone's boudoir and all other loci of sex, death, and ecstasy. Oscar Wilde had argued (in his essay Pen, Pencil and Poison, 1889) that the love of such a colour is the prerogative of a 'subtle artistic temperament'. Wilde was citing the recherché, if murderous, temperament of the Victorian art critic, dilettante, antiquarian, and collector, Thomas Wainewright, known to us today chiefly for the ingenious manner in which he poisoned so many of his contemporaries. 'Like Baudelaire,' Wilde adds, 'he was extremely fond of cats.' Baudelaire had his own 'Green-eyed Venus' in the person of the actress Marie Daubrun. (Je veux te peindre ta beauté / Où l'enfance s'allie à la maturité, he announces as he sets out to praise her kittycattish, neotenic charms.) The cycle of poems inspired by Daubrun includes "Le Poison" and "Le Chat".

From "Le Poison":

Tout cela ne vaut pas le poison qui découle
De tes yeux, de tes yeux verts,
Lacs où mon âme tremble et se volt à l'envers...
Mes songes viennent en foule
Pour se désaltérer à ces gouffres amers...

But none of these can match the poison in
Your eyes, ever so green,
Those troubled waters where my soul is seen
Reversed, and dreams crowd in
To slake their thirst for bitterness and spleen...

(Trans.: Walter Martin)

From "Le Chat":

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, amiable bête,
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard...

I see my mistress in my mind. Her glance,
Like yours, endearing beast,
Cold, searching, cuts and shivers like a lance...

(Trans.: Joanna Richardson)

Ever since I was a small boy, I have perceived in beautiful women, cats, and toxicity a curious symbiosis. For if beauty is poison, poison — and so endeth the lesson — is always quintessentially beautiful.

All toyshops are demonic, and childhood is pervaded — necessarily pervaded — by delirious poisons ... and visions.
 

Sumuru: Her Ears

'Her ear, which resembled a pink shell, had an unusual formation. There was no lobe. It was like the ear of a faun. A faint, unfamiliar perfume breathed momentarily on the air — and she was gone.' (Sumuru)

She is Titania, Queen of the Fay.
 

Sumuru: Her Complexion

'"You thought, perhaps, that I was Japanese!" She laughed. Her laughter resembled a peal of fairy bells ... "Did the dark womb of Japan ever produce skin as white as mine? Am I shaped like a geisha?"' (Nude in Mink)

The word 'porcelain' is derived from porcellana, used by Marco Polo to describe the Yüan dynasty pottery (1279-1368) he saw during his sojourn in Cathay.

In Europe, the secret of true porcelain was discovered about 1707 at Meissen, Saxony, in the reign of Augustus the Strong. After 1756, under the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, Sèvres became the focal point of Europe's 'porcelain century'. The painter François Boucher and the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet (who directed Sèvres modelling between 1757 and 1766) were among the artists who contributed to the enterprise.

I like to imagine Jean-Antoine Watteau (he who described himself as 'libertine in spirit, but prudent in morals') at Sèvres, too, adorning vases with scènes d'opéra — made-up faces, gorgeous costumes, painted backdrops — and celebrating not only the century of porcelain but the century of the feminine, too.

Watteau (as well as being famous for painting commedia dell'arte figures) invented a style known as the fête galante — small, pastoral compositions that explored the psychology of love. 'The term characterises those gatherings of men and women, usually dressed with studied refinement, who flirt decorously, dance, make music or talk freely, in a landscape or in a sumptuously unreal architectural setting.' (Marianne Roland Michel, Watteau, 1984). It's a style, or perhaps, rather, theme, that reflects Couperin's music, and which Verlaine acknowledged and explored in the crepuscular world of his delicate, shimmering verses. Watteau's L'Embarquement pour l'île de Cythère (which created the new category of fête galante in 1717) evokes, according to the Britannica, 'the wonderlands of opera, romance, and epic' and 'represents the country of the impossible dream, the revenge of madness on reason, and of freedom from rules and morality'.

The Goncourts wrote: 'The great poet of the eighteenth century is Watteau. A world, an entire world of poetry and fantasy, issuing from his mind, filled his art with the elegance of a supernatural life ... Watteau renewed the quality of grace. It is no longer the grace of antiquity that we meet with in his art: a precise and tangible charm, the marble perfection of Galatea, the seductiveness — exclusively plastic — and the material glory of a Venus. The grace of Watteau is grace itself. It is that indefinable touch that bestows upon women a charm, a coquetry, a beauty that is beyond mere physical beauty ... All the fascination of women in repose: the languor, the idleness, the abandonment, the mutual leanings upon one another, the outstretched limbs, the indolence, the harmony of attitudes, the delightful air of a profile over a lute, studying the notes of some gamme d'amour, the breasts' receding, elusive contours, the meanderings, the undulations, the pliancies of a woman's body; the play of slender fingers upon the handle of a fan, the indiscretion of high heels peeping below the skirt, the chance felicities of demeanour, the coquetry of gesture, the manoeuvring of shoulders, and all that erudition, that mime of grace, which the women of the preceding century acquired from their mirrors...

'Love is the light of this world; love impregnates and permeates it, is its youth and its sincerity; and when you have traversed the rivers, the hills, the garden walks, when you have passed the lakes and the fountains, then the Paradise of Watteau opens before you. It is Cythera.' (Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, French Eighteenth-Century Painters, 1859-75)

In Watteau, the human and the artificial come together. For Calder, that is truly paradise. If I have a vision of my own death (and presuming that death to be one that lends me a final, merciful grace), then it is a vision of closing my eyes and seeing two figures running towards me across an autumnal field. One is a young woman, the other, a small girl-child whom the woman holds by the hand, the child struggling to keep pace with her mother. Both have broad smiles — beautiful smiles that lance my heart with joy — and though they never say a word, the whole world shouts out that I am welcome, that I have never really been away, and that, with the sun setting, and the landscape soon to be bathed in soft moonlight, I am in Cythera, where I'll sit down beside those I love and, in the ever-deepening silences that frame the liquid warblings of nightingales, know that I am at last home.

Bruce Chatwin's character 'Utz' (in the novel of the same name) had collected Meissen and Sèvres 'to reflect the moods and facets of the "Porcelain Century": the wit, the charm, the gallantry, the love of the exotic, the heartlessness and light-hearted gaiety — before they were swept away by revolution and the tramp of armies.'

These are the masculine armies of the night. The tramp, tramp, tramp of men in black leather uniforms, endlessly marching, marching, marching through the iron metropolis that stands in refutation of all that is delicate, graceful, feminine...

'Hitler did not inject ideology into the arts. It was always there and, as philosophers from the time of Plato observed, it was always and necessarily there. This is why even in democratic societies today there are continuous threats against free artistic expression, justified with the same arguments Hitler used about corrupting the public mind...

'The artist creates his own world out of nothing. Hitler took the existing world and tried to turn it into his own. His dream was to create a culture-state in which Germans were to listen to music he liked, attend operas he loved, see paintings and sculptures he collected and admire the buildings he constructed ... And he also believed he was Prospero in thinking of himself as the all-powerful tool of destiny, not perhaps able to make water run uphill and reverse the seasons but to change human nature, the face of Europe and the course of history.

'More than any other single person, Hitler made the twentieth century what it was and largely created the world we live in today.' (Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 2002)

Sumuru is the enemy of the iron metropolis and its iron men. She seeks to institute another, more seductive, dictatorship of porcelain: a thousand-year feminine Reich, a Cythera, cruel, beautiful, and imperious.

'" I didn't believe there was a human being anywhere in the world who radiated such force! Her spirit so transfigured her flesh, seeming to shine through like a white fire through delicate porcelain ... I experienced a sensation of being in the presence of something unique, dynamic, dangerous."' (Nude in Mink)

Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!
 

Sumuru: Her Body

'The golden voice was imperious, though the beautiful body remained almost inert, only the faintest movement of the ivory breasts betraying emotion.' (Sumuru)

'Sumuru rose gracefully. The mink cloak, her only covering, slipped slowly to her feet.' (Sumuru)

'My Lady inhaled deeply. Her firm breasts rose as in defiance.' (The Fire Goddess)

To copulate with a demon is to be irredeemably damned. Faust engages in this perversion in the anonymous Faustbuch (1587), the English translation of which inspired Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604). In this play, Helen of Troy — the demonic succubus who destroyed armies and laid waste to entire civilizations — is summoned from the underworld to seal the mad, bad doctor's fate. Helen is a vampire.

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies...

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, act 5, scene 2

'Drake Roscoe had never dreamed such a figure could exist. Ivory, he thought, yes, warm, glowing, living ivory. Long, flowing lines passed into curves of breath-taking beauty, forming a body so essentially feminine and so subtly sensuous that his first sensation was one of awe, and only after interminable moments, during which Sumuru did not move except for the faint rise and fall of her lovely breasts, was he aware of the prickling of intolerable and yet frightening desire ... Sumuru was fire and ice, her body beckoning yet repelling. No mere man could hope to attain this incredible perfection.' (Sumuru)

The goddess's acolytes are everywhere. A girl in a streetcar, or a flapper in a nightclub, may — according to Hart Crane — constitute incarnations of Helen, barricaded within the banality of the modern world, yet radiant still.

There is some way, I think, to touch
Those hands of yours that count the nights
Stippled with pink and green advertisements... 

—Hart Crane, "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen"

The earth may glide diaphanous to death;
But if I lift my arms it is to bend
To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing
The press of troubled hands, too alternate
With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.
I meet you therefore, in that eventual flame
You found in final chains, no captive then—
Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
White, through white cities passed on to assume
That world which comes to each of us alone.

—Hart Crane, "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen"

'Sumuru wore a perfectly tailored grey suit. She sat at a large and workmanlike desk in a small but workmanlike office. For all her elusive but arresting beauty, she might have been mistaken for a capable secretary.' (Nude in Mink)

But nothing can ultimately conceal her Eastern charm.

'The barely concealed swell of one perfect breast, the ivory mound of her lovely hips, the long, tapering lines of her beautiful legs.' (Sumuru)

There is another story of Helen. The poet Stesichorus and, later, Euripides in his play Helen, relate that she and Paris were driven ashore on the coast of Egypt and that Helen was detained there by King Proteus. The Helen who travelled on to Troy was a phantom ...

Sumuru, too, is a phantom: the objectification of our fantasies and desires.

Men go to war over such things.
 

Sumuru: Her Wardrobe

In the first decade of the last century, a 'Salome Craze' — otherwise known as 'Salomania' — spread across Europe and America, inspired by the Salome of Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss. Toni Bentley, in her book Sisters of Salome (2002), writes: 'Incarnating Salome, women gained a very particular forum for liberation, not through cries of victimization but, in the ultimate of ironies, by appearing to act in accordance with a misogynistic point of view. In accepting the premise, they subverted it. When a woman put on Salome's veils for herself, a magical transformation occurred for she then contained in her being both misogyny and feminism, thereby embodying, literally, the cultural debate of the time.'

At the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the dancer Little Egypt performed the faux Oriental 'hootchy-kootchy'; later, Maud Allan — who danced a twenty-minute dance of the veils that owed little to either Wilde's play or Strauss's opera but everything to early twentieth-century notions of the femme fatale — attired herself in one of the prototype costumes of the Western 'cabaret' belly dancer (a costume that, if scandalizing many, won the approval of Gustav Mahler).

Though her nationality is said to be unknown, Sumuru — plainly a focus of those elements of the 'sinister Oriental' that Rohmer had previously exploited — is as much related to Helen, Sheba, Judith, Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, and, indeed, Salome, as she is to Fu Manchu. She dresses accordingly. 

'She wore the trousered indoor dress of an Eastern woman, of so flimsy a texture that it exposed rather than concealed the lovely, ivory-tinted curves of a perfect figure. Her hair was entirely hidden by a close-fitting turban.' (Sumuru)

'My Lady wore one of her indoor Eastern dresses. It was of fine gold tissue, so that at every slightest movement the curves of her lithe body gleamed like silver through a golden mist.' (The Fire Goddess)

'She wore the housedress of the harem — baggy trousers, embroidered sandals and a silk brassière. The gossamer texture revealed rather than concealed the perfect curves of her ivory body.' (Sinister Madonna)

'Sumuru wore one of her Eastern dresses, gold gauze shot with many colours of a tissue so fine that her white body gleamed through it like marble seen through a rainbow.' (The Fire Goddess)

'She wore her favourite rest dress, a dress not unlike that of an Eastern odalisque.' (The Fire Goddess)

'An enamelled girdle from the tomb of an ancient Egyptian queen and pale blue sandals completed an ensemble more than slightly arresting.' (Return of Sumuru)

But however diaphanous her cobweb robes, however much they scarcely veil the shadowy outlines of her perfect body, Sumuru invariably sleeps 'in that naked innocence in which we are all born'. (Return of Sumuru)

In 1918, Noel Pemberton-Billing, an independent British MP who ran a newspaper called The Imperialist, announced that the Germans had a 'Black Book' detailing the lecherous behaviour of more than 47,000 British men and women — behaviour, so TheImperialist claimed, responsible for British losses in the war. Marie Corelli, the popular author, suggested that those who had seen, or who intended to see, Maud Allan dance Salome were to be counted among the degenerate 47,000. TheImperialist changed its name to The Vigilante and ran the headline 'The Cult of the Clitoris' under which it announced that Maud Allan was the leader of a gang of perverts intent on bringing down the British Empire.

Maud Allan sued; Pemberton-Billing won; and Salome left the courtroom in disgrace to die forgotten in 1956 at the age of 84.

They had accused the wrong woman, of course.

Sumuru, reclining upon her fur-strewn divan and placing a jade cigarette holder meditatively between her lips, reflects upon the miscarriage of justice and — as she always does when considering the universal ridiculousness of men — laughs her beautiful, imperious laugh.

'"Perhaps you are thinking that I am dressed in this — barbaric — manner in order to seduce you from what you probably regard as your duty. But you are wrong. This is my customary dress — when I am at home..."' (Nude in Mink)
 

Sumuru: Her Minks

'Sumuru ... opened the door of a deep, wide closet, and sighed ... It contained dozens of the most perfect mink coats, cloaks, wraps, and stoles, many of them unique of their kind. They ranged from snow white to deep, shimmering brown, almost black ... Our Lady caressed them lovingly, sighed again, and closed the door.' (Sumuru)

Mink. Our Lady never wears any fur but mink.

According to Richard Krafft-Ebing: 'Adoration of separate parts of the body (or even articles of clothing) on the ground of sexual urges, frequently reminds us of the glorification of relics, sanctified objects, etc., in religious cults.' (Psychopathia Sexualis, 1886)

Sumuru's fetish, like all fetishes, is in essence anti-patriarchal, her own cult a cult of the clitoris that seeks to usurp and replace paramount reality. 

'While emerging within the framework of a phallic order,' writes Tina Papoulias in The Sexual Imagination (1993), 'the fetish threatens that order by fixing sexuality away from its "proper" manifestation and focus of attraction — that is, the genitals of the opposite sex — and ultimately away from the gendered body altogether. It moves sexuality towards a preoccupation with the fragment, the inanimate, the meaningless, and since the fetish is an object out of place, its power erupts outside a hierarchy of "normality" and "morality". Fetishism is classified as a perversion in that it pushes to the limits and disrupts a phallocentric, or penis-focused, sexual order.'

Sumuru is a lover of things, of reliquiae: a collector who surrounds herself with the voluptuousness of animal remains. She accumulates, catalogues, and displays her fur hoard with the sacerdotal fervour of a cannibal or headhunter. And like all collectors, she is a subversive, a necromancer who makes war against the banality of life by evoking the bestial spirits of the dead.

'With one hand she held about her a wrap or cloak which Donovan recognised as that lure of souls, mink, and which therefore must have been worth several thousand pounds.' (Nude in Mink)

Sumuru's supply of this precious fur is seemingly endless. '"I am happily placed in regard to mink — a fur I adore. I have a mink farm in Alaska."' (The Fire Goddess) 

'Dolores laughed. It was a charming, friendly laugh. "Madonna, she loves mink. Everything with her is mink. She has a mink farm. And all the finest skins she keeps for herself." Dolores closed her eyes, shrugged her fur-covered shoulders. "She is incroyable, Our Lady!"' (Return of Sumuru)

She is indeed incroyable. She is Wanda von Dunajew, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs. In 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper, Sacher-Masoch wrote in Revue Bleue: 'Whether she is a princess or a peasant girl, whether she is clad in ermine or sheepskin, she is always the same woman: she wears furs, she wields a whip, she treats men as slaves...'

Fur has, of late, had bad press. The 1990s saw the 'I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur' poster sponsored by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) that featured Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, and Elle Macpherson posing déshabillées, sans furs and sans modesty. And David Bailey shot a similar poster featuring a model dragging a blood-soaked fur coat along the ground. The tag reads: 'It takes 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat, but only one to wear it.' (As Anna Massey's blind 'mother' says in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom [1960]: 'All this filming isn't healthy.') But fur has returned to the catwalks, as it has to the streets, to once again corrupt us. Fur is carnal. And a woman in furs is a predator.

'"Do I behold you clad in mink? The reward of a wealthy marriage, or the wages of sin?"' (Sinister Madonna)

Sacher-Masoch could surely have conceived of 'nothing more extravagantly flattering' in which to apparel the goddess of sin, Sumuru — nor could Swinburne, that great poet of pain, hope for anything more from her than the wages of sin.

Ah thy people, thy children, thy chosen,
Marked cross from the womb and perverse,
They have found out the secret to cozen
The gods that constrain us and curse ...

And they laughed, changing hands in the measure,
And they mixed and made peace after strife;
Pain melted in tears, and was pleasure;
Death tingled with blood, and was life.
Like lovers they melted and tingled,
In the dusk of thine innermost fane;
In the darkness they murmured and mingled,
Our Lady of Pain...

O daughter of Death and Priapus
Our Lady of Pain...

—Charles Algernon Swinburne, Dolores

Sumuru: Her Exhibitionism

'"I think," he said harshly, "you are a reincarnation of a Greek courtesan. Phryne could have taught you nothing of the art of seductive exposure."' (The Fire Goddess)

'Her pose, like her dress, was that of an instinctive exhibitionist.' (Return of Sumuru)

'No fan dancer in the world had anything to teach Our Lady of the art of subtle exposure.' (Sumuru)

In Mythologies (1957) Roland Barthes says of striptease: 'The furs, the fans, the gloves, the feathers, the fishnet stockings, in short the whole spectrum of adornment, constantly makes the living body return to the category of luxurious objects which surround man with a magical décor.' The woman who strips is driven back into the mineral world, becoming an 'absolute object, that which serves no purpose'.

Striptease, like maquillage, seeks to achieve the condition of death. The naked dancers and the painted face are attempts to shroud time and time's accomplice, movement, and make of woman an objet d'art for the connoisseurship of an audience of necrophiles: those collectors and artists who are in love with the subtle, tremulous life of things, the 'absolute object ...which serves no purpose'.
 

Sumuru: Her Environs

Behind rose-tinted curtains in 'a semi-circular recess, a sort of shrine, approached by three marble steps and veiled by pink gauzy curtains' she is discovered 'sunk luxuriously' like a pagan empress in the 'perfumed nest' of her divan. Bella, her adolescent Nubian maid, attends her pleasure. (Return of Sumuru)

Environs and wardrobe enjoy a kitsch harmony. The so-called 'Turkish' or 'Moorish Style' flourished during Rohmer's youth, from the latter half of the nineteenth century until the late 1920s. It reflected that taste for the exotic that had previously been expressed by writers such as Baudelaire, Nerval, Flaubert, Burton, and, in the twentieth century, Gide, Conrad, and Maugham. The divan that Sumuru so loves to stretch out upon like a spoilt, pampered cat is, on one level, a couch without back or sides; on another it alludes to the Persian name for a collection of poems — a meaning that emerges in Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (1819). Sumuru, in other words, languishes upon, and within, the perfumed ambience of a century-and-a-half of Orientalism.

Je ne suis pas une femme, je suis un monde.

It is pertinent, then, to suggest that Sumuru is not so much the female Fu Manchu, but rather that she is his prototype and that the diabolical doctor is only a Sumuru in masculine disguise. The East, in Western perception, is feminine and embodies all those elements of femininity that the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found so disturbing and sinister. The East, understood less as a geographic or cultural-historical entity than as a reflection of the Western mind, is the fatal female par excellence.

Both Nerval and Flaubert, according to Edward Said (in his famous study of 'western conceptions of the Orient' entitled Orientalism [1978]), were 'thoroughly steeped in aspects of European culture that encouraged a sympathetic, if perverse, vision of the Orient'. Said goes on to write: 'Nerval and Flaubert belonged to that community of thought and feeling described by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, a community for which the imagery of exotic places, the cultivation of sadomasochistic tastes (what Praz calls algolagnia), a fascination with the macabre, with the notion of a Fatal Woman, with secrecy and occultism, all combined to enable literary work of the sort produced by Gautier (himself fascinated by the Orient), Swinburne, Baudelaire, and Huysmans ... In all of his novels Flaubert associates the Orient with the escapism of sexual fantasy.'

From the hub of the world that is Sumuru extends a labyrinth of marble corridors, an Arabian palace with mushrabiyeh windows where, it is rumoured, the great Victorian Sir Martin Lorimer painted his famous picture The Slave Girl. 

'There were pillars of varied characters, pillars from Egypt, Syria and Greece, supporting a painted ceiling. Oriental rugs and skins of animals were strewn about the marble floor. Beside a square pool guarded by a figure of Pan, banks of mimosa flowered and filled the air with their heavy swooning perfume ... A high, sweet note, that of a bell or of a silver gong, split the hushed silence, hitherto unbroken except for faint stirrings of lily leaves in the pool when one of several large golden orf swimming there disturbed them.' (Nude in Mink)

'Sumuru lay on a pile of mink rugs beside the lily pond, one hand in the water, coaxing her pet golden orf to leap out playfully.' (The Fire Goddess)

'The execution of my orders, Caspar, is not only possible, it is unavoidable. Nothing is impossible. Everything can be. Preserve the harmony of the mimosa pool. In contemplating it I find peace.' (Nude in Mink)

Orf, or Leuciscus idus, is a member of the carp family. It grows up to 50 cm and the ornamental variety — which Sumuru obviously keeps — is orange. Mimosa refers to any member of Mimosaceae, so named from the movements of the leaves that react to light, darkness, or to touch, by closing together, with an upward movement that seems to 'mimic' animal sensibility. The species of mimosa known as the 'sensitive plant' elicited the following lines from Shelley:

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want, 
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.

—"The Sensitive Plant" (1820)

Venus in furs — no doe in heat, but a cat who stalks the fog-bound alleyways of the Western night — devours the insects she calls men.

Her library in Casa Montana, Jamaica, confirms her perverted, anthropophagous tastes:

'Some of the thousands of volumes were of great age, but all the bindings were well preserved. They were works in many languages ancient and modern; for Henrique Montana, who had collected them, had been an accomplished linguist, a man of vast and dark learning, and an epicure of strange pleasures.

'These volumes covered a variety of subjects. Many were in manuscript, ranging from rare Arabic scripts, beautifully bound, dealing with the tortuous and exquisite refinements of Eastern passion, to German scientific studies and obscure works of philosophy. A large section dealt exclusively with medicine, but more particularly with poisons. There were priceless Latin texts dating back to the days of the Borgias, as well as recent studies by modern toxicologists. The largest section of all dealt with magic. In this were writings in many tongues, covering the history of man's attempts to win secret power, from the earliest times up to Eliphas Levi, and later.' (The Fire Goddess)
 

Sumuru: Her Pets

'"I am never truly happy except when I swim."' (The Fire Goddess)

And she is only truly happy when she can swim in the company of her pet barracuda, Satan.

'The swimming pool (one day to become an object of wonder to those who had not seen it before) probably had no duplicate anywhere in the world. The bottom and sides appeared to be made of crystal, or of some thick, crystal-clear glass. Below the crystal bottom of the pool, and behind the crystal sides and ends, was a much larger pool, so that the bath itself might be said to hang suspended in it.

'Here were coral grottoes and all sorts of marine plants, and swimming about in this miniature Caribbean were numbers of gaily coloured tropical fish of grotesque but charming shapes, among them a grey and ominous barracuda some four feet long...

'Sumuru's sport was peculiar.

'She would dive into the pool and swim along the crystal bottom. Instantly, the brilliant fish, purple, green, scarlet, would disperse. But always the barracuda attacked. Dashing his vicious snout against the glass separating him from his prey, he would snap at a white arm, a tempting breast, only to retire foiled, baffled — and then attack again.

'Sumuru would tempt and taunt the killer fish as long as she could remain underwater; then, coming to the top, breathless, she would laugh delightedly.' (Sumuru)

She also keeps an Indian cheetah called Rajah and two black pumas, Siva and Kali.

'"I can tame wild animals — even men." The pumas turned, leaped onto the divan, on either side of her, and lay there, watching Dexter. He stood still. She laid a hand on each glossy head, and the killers became, in a moment, two big purring cats.' (The Fire Goddess)

'"Your passion, Madonna, for wild animals as pets sometimes makes you difficult to approach."

'"Which may explain my passion for wild animals as pets, Ariosto."' (Return of Sumuru)

She is a catwoman. (Fu Manchu is described as 'lean and feline', but Sumuru is the apotheosis of felinity: svelte, with the appearance of a somewhat spiteful Siamese, and possessed of an impeccable pedigree, she displays not only a cat's slinky grace but also its predilection for narcissism and treachery.)

'Drake Roscoe walked quietly into the large enclosure that housed Sumuru's collection of wild animals. This consisted chiefly of specimens of various members of the cat family.' (Return of Sumuru)

Like all catwomen, however, her real pets are human males.

Her menagerie? The unctuous major domo, Caspar, a man in a black robe, skullcap and red slippers, with a face that is a smiling mask of old ivory, who glides through Our Lady's apartments like a somnambulist shod in whispering slippers; the gorilla-like, yet strangely lithe Philo, who has a hairy, narrow forehead, bulging calves, phenomenal shoulder span, and long arms that are out of all proportion to his torso; Ariosto, Our Lady's chief physician and chemist — tall and athletic with a dark moustache, brilliant eyes 'that might have frightened a nervous patient', and a face that would have been handsome if not so saturnine — and 'a scientific genius, but a sadistic scoundrel'.

'"You were Washington's must trusted agent,"' Sumuru says to Drake Roscoe, '"Now what are you? You are Drakos, one of my many slaves who serve me.' (The Fire Goddess)

'My Lady used her cast-off lovers as she used every human being who fell into her power — to further her ends.' (The Fire Goddess)
 

Sumuru: The Order of Our Lady

'"The Order is an organization of women, for women—" (Sumuru)

In the boudoirs of rich, beautiful, and chronically bored young women, one may discover, flung open on a nightstand, dresser or vanity table, a 'book delicately bound in cream calf, upon which appeared in Oriental lettering the title "Tears of Our Lady"'. (Sumuru)

'"You may have read Tears of Our Lady." The magic voice had Mary enthralled. "You know now, for I have told you that I am 'Our Lady' of the title, that I wrote that book. It is the primer of the creed to which we are dedicated. Does the cult of beauty appeal to you, child?"' (Sinister Madonna)

'"You know our creed, Viola — to restore beauty to a world grown ugly. And to bring about its success, we must sometimes use ugly methods."' (Sumuru)

'"She would read to me at night from a book called Tears of Our Lady. At first I thought it was a religious work of some kind ... Then I found that 'Our Lady' was the name by which the author was known, and, at first, what she had to write about really shocked me. Yes. I began to be horrified; then, in some way, I became fascinated. It was an evil book. I am quite sure of that, now. But it was dangerously clever...

'"In a sense, it was about sex; but there was nothing really objectionable in it as far as this was concerned. It was entirely different from any book I had ever read. Even now, I can't explain in what way. But it conveyed the idea that women, as what Our Lady called 'the vessels of the soul,' had been degraded for generations to the place of — oh, mere implements. And, somehow, it made the fact quite clear that men, really, should take that place, if humanity was to become sane, and that women must direct them."' (Sumuru)

'"My Lady desires beautiful and clever women," Melissa murmured nervously.

'Sumuru exhaled aromatic smoke.

'"Give me a sufficient number of them, Melissa, and I can conquer the world! With an army of female beauty, allied to intelligence, I can win to my cause the male genius of Europe, Asia, Africa and America!"' (Sinister Madonna)

And seduced by Our Lady's creed, a multitude of bored, rich, disappointed Misses, Fräuleins, Señoritas, and Mademoiselles turn their backs on their former lives, run away, and embrace the Order.

'"All those missing are young girls, and all of them acknowledged beauties."' (Sumuru)

The initiation ceremony into the Order of Our Lady — during which a novice reveals herself naked to an audience of her fellow sisters — is known as the 'offering up'. The audience is asked if the candidate is worthy of acceptance. If the novice is indeed accepted, she becomes a full member of the sisterhood, rather like a bride of Christ — if, that is, we accept that the Carmelites, Ursulines, or Poor Clares, are, at heart, religio-erotic Orders.

'In the illumined niche thus revealed stood what might have been taken for a lovely nude statue — had it not been for the slow rise and fall of her snowy breasts, breasts that bore rosy nipples.' (Sumuru)

Sometimes, the offering up involves dangers: 'Grouped on the slope overlooking the fir and the shrine were a number of women, young and shapely, robed in filmy white ... A sort of musical sigh swept around the natural amphitheatre. "Our lady ..." The graceful figure extended white arms, dazzling under the moon, threw phantom kisses to the ecstatic disciples watching, enraptured.

'She addressed them briefly. They listened in silence. Then, a tall, slender girl, her red hair seeming to reflect the glow of the fire, stepped out from the doorway.

'She came down the steps, slowly. The fire leaped up before her, as if in salute, red flames tingeing her snowy robe. She continued to advance, a smile on her lips. A subdued cry, the moan of many voices, mingling rapture and horror, greeted every step.

'Unhesitatingly, the white-robed girl walked on, and on — right into the heart of the flames! They leaped high, casting sparks into the air. The white robe disappeared as a tongue of fire dissolving in space.' (The Fire Goddess)

 There is a eugenicist 'Egyptian college' which resembles a large convent school — the 'College of Initiates' — and a 'Greek school' where children of members of the Order are trained.

'There was a certain parallel with the ideals of a totalitarian state in this breeding of a future race dedicated to the glorification of woman, the outlawing of ugliness, the abolition of war.' (Sumuru)

In this brave new world, what would be the fate of men?

'"Only those with great physical beauty or great brains, or both, would survive. They would be mated with her elected women and so produce a perfect race."' (Sumuru)

'For the women of our Order there are no someones. They live the lives of cloistered nuns until I choose a someone for them. My wishes must be obeyed. I do not mar my penitents with whips. I have other methods.' (Nude in Mink)

'"There is no marriage among members of the Order, only Our Lady's 'consent to love.' Members are sometimes permitted to marry outside the Order, for certain reasons; but such marriages are not encouraged ... 'The Order of Our Lady' has ramifications throughout the world. It includes members of the highest and most honoured families, both men and women. Its ostensible purpose is to remove ugliness and squalor, breed a beautiful race, and cede man's rule of affairs to the rule of woman."' (The Fire Goddess)
 

Sumuru: Her Babylon

Caspar says to his Madonna: 'You have the body of a beautiful girl, but a soul which was already old in Babylon.' (Sinister Madonna)
 

Sumuru: Her Uroboros

'Roscoe's gaze became fixed upon those patrician curves. He felt sure that Sumuru wore no stockings, and, just discernible on her left ankle, he detected a faint outline.

'"Are you admiring my justly celebrated legs, or looking for the linked serpent?" She raised her foot, shod in a dainty black shoe, and pointed the toe like a ballet dancer. "You can see the mark clearly now. Shall I restore your normal muscular activity so that you can come and examine it more closely?"' (Sumuru)

'"One of the few things I have learned about the Order of Our Lady ... is that members of the gang have a design representing a snake with its tail in its mouth, delicately tattooed around the left ankle ... It's done so lightly as to be practically invisible through even the finest stocking. But it's always there."' (Nude in Mink)

In Idols of Perversity (1986) —a study of 'fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siècle culture' — Bram Dijkstra writes: 'The symbol of woman, the self-contained round, the uroboros, began to appear with increasing frequency in turn-of-the-century art. A drawing simply entitled "Woman", which appeared in Jugend in 1896, showed a woman suspended in time, caught in a state of suspended animation, in the uroboric circle of her primordial materiality, quite literally represented by the archetypal symbol of a snake biting its own tail.'

Sumuru's uroboros is a brand that marks the female animal in question as belonging to a breed apart: a group of women sharing distinctive characteristics, descended (one may speculate) from common ancestors that go all the way back to Babylon and perpetuated by means of artificial selection. 

'It isn't tattooed. It's painted on the skin with some secret preparation. It's hardly visible. But it can't be removed.' (Sumuru)

In Sex and Character (1903) Otto Weininger argued: 'Woman is always living in a condition of fusion with all the human beings she knows, even when she is alone; she is not a "monad", for all monads are sharply marked off from other existences. Women have no definite individual limits.'

Sumuru, and the women who constitute the Order of Our Lady, represent undifferentiated Nature. 

Nicholas Cooke, in Satan in Society (1870), had taken the argument further. 'There is far less variety of temperament among women. They seem, in this respect at least, to be cast in a more common mould than men. It would seem that, in the designs of Providence, each man has to follow the paths of a special destiny, and consequently is endowed with special aptitudes. The common destiny of women does not exact those profound and essential differences among them which are remarked among men.'

And Max Nordeau, the German polymath and author of that vitriolic attack on late nineteenth-century culture entitled Degeneration (1895), was inspired by 'scientific' texts to opine: 'Woman is as a rule, typical; man, individual ... There is incomparably less variation between women than between men. If you know one, you know them all, with few exceptions.'

No man can adequately describe Sumuru because she is a genus — and, as such, a generic character, not an individual. She is woman. Or rather, she is the summum genus of woman: a template, a representation.

The men who are engaged in running Sumuru to ground develop a fitful paranoia regarding the endless pageant of slender, female ankles that pass beneath their inquisitorial gaze.

'"Did you notice her ankles?"

'Harper's expression was indescribably complicated.

'"Her ankles, sir?"

'"Exactly: her ankles."

'"Well — ahem — they were very well turned, if I may say so."

'"Did she wear a bangle on either, for instance?"' (Nude in Mink)

'He was holding her tightly now. "All Sumuru's women have a faint mark on one ankle — a sort of tattooed slave bangle. It means that they belong, for all their lives, to 'Our Lady,' doesn't it?"

'He felt her shudder.

'"They may not think of it as a slave bangle. They may be proud of it." She lifted her coat and raised one slim ankle gracefully. "Please inspect me. Because you might as well know."

'Tony McKeigh inspected, with intense but restrained interest. Under a spider-web stocking he could just detect the faint outline of a snake holding its tail in its mouth. As the raised foot was lowered he murmured, "You have adorably pretty legs."' (Sumuru)

'Out came a little flashlamp. He sank to his knees. Linda quickly raised her feet, to assist his search. A decimal point too late.

'On one of those slender ankles he had seen in the beam of his lamp a scarcely discernible, faint tattoo.

'He picked up the lighter, pocketed his torch, and started his own cigarette.

'"You have dangerously pretty legs," he remarked. (Sinister Madonna)

'An interview with Nursing Sister Marlow had proved disappointing. She was a very pretty girl but he had hoped to catch her out of uniform. He hadn't been successful, and her thick, white stockings had entirely concealed her skin. If only she had worn sheer nylon!' (Sinister Madonna)

Snake worship has been widespread throughout history. The ancient Greeks made offerings to snakes. The kings of ancient Egypt had images of a cobra on their crowns: the uraeus. In Tibet there is a belief that rivers are abodes of snake gods and that their king 'Lu' lives in a crystal palace at the bottom of a lake. And in South India, the Lingayat — who worship Siva — take their name from the tiny, ophidian linga that they wear hanging by a cord around their necks.

Like the Lingayat, the Order of Our Lady is a phallic cult. Its objective: to exploit the cultural trappings of phallicism to enthral, manipulate, and corrupt the Order of Masculinity. This is the mission of the sacred punk whore, the sisterhood of Salome, who, as Toni Bentley has said, appears 'to act in accordance with a misogynistic point of view' but who, in accepting, inflating, and parodying such a premise, subverts it.

In Bihar, India, the Santhal tribes name their young girls 'Visha kanya' meaning girls with poison...

Ishtar's sacred beast was the lion. The ancient Egyptians worshipped the lion- and, later, cat-goddess Bastet (who is most often represented as a lioness or a woman with a cat's head), but the Babylonian cat-priestesses (who in order of ascending seniority were the ishtaritu, qadishtu, naditu, and entu), while seeking to emulate and embody the feline ideal, worshipped the male exterminating principle: the snake.

'Salammbô unfastened her ear-rings, her necklace, her bracelets, and her long white simar; she unknotted the band in her hair, shaking the latter for a few minutes softly over her shoulders to cool herself by thus scattering it. The music went on outside; it consisted of three notes ever the same, hurried and frenzied; the strings grated, the flute blew; Taanach kept time by striking her hands; Salammbô, with a swaying of her whole body, chanted prayers, and her garments fell one after another around her.

'The heavy tapestry trembled, and the python's head appeared above the cord that supported it. The serpent descended slowly like a drop of water flowing along a wall, crawled among the scattered stuffs, and then, gluing its tail to the ground, rose perfectly erect; and his eyes, more brilliant than carbuncles, darted upon Salammbô.

'A horror of cold, or perhaps a feeling of shame, at first made her hesitate. But she recalled Schahabarim's orders and advanced; the python turned downwards, and resting the centre of its body upon the nape of her neck, allowed its head and tail to hang like a broken necklace with both ends trailing to the ground. Salammbô rolled it around her sides, under her arms and between her knees; then taking it by the jaw she brought the little triangular mouth to the edge of her teeth, and half shutting her eyes, threw herself back beneath the rays of the moon. The white light seemed to envelop her in a silver mist, the prints of her humid steps shone upon the flagstones, stars quivered in the depth of the water; it tightened upon her its black rings that were spotted with scales of gold. Salammbô panted beneath the excessive weight, her loins yielded, she felt herself dying, and with the tip of the tail the serpent gently beat her thigh; then the music becoming still it fell off again.' (Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô, 1862)

The cat-priestesses belong to the female Moon — the snake, to the patriarchal Sun.

The Britannica declares that Bastet 'was native to Bubastis in the Nile River delta but also had an important cult at Memphis. In the Late and Ptolemaic periods large cemeteries of mummified cats and their attendant priestesses were created at both sites, and thousands of bronze statuettes of the goddess were deposited as votive offerings.'

Dead, reduced to inanimate objects, the mummified cat-priestesses attain the ne plus ultra of femininity and become representations of themselves, that is, representations of representations (the fate, perhaps, of all women): a collection of dolls and mannequins preserved for all eternity as a bulwark against the failings of that other woman, life.

Oh, to walk amongst those ancient tombs...

In Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992), Elisabeth Bronfen observes: 'The equation between femininity and death is such that while in cultural narratives the feminine corpse is treated like an artwork, or the beautiful woman is killed to produce an artwork, conversely, artworks emerge only at the expense of a beautiful woman's death and are treated like feminine corpses.'

For a cat-priestess, snake worship represents the passionate worship of art, the self-authoring she-dandy's desire to become a work of art, a thing, a collectable, an exquisite corpse. 

The coiled serpent of Our Lady envelops the body of her followers. (One may recall Nastassja Kinski enjoying the embrace of a Madison Avenue python in the service of promoting that empire of beautiful dead things that we call the empire de luxe.)

'"Once any woman ... belongs to Our Lady ... no one can ever get her ... away again."' (Sumuru)
 

Sumuru: Her Perfume

'"You have noticed that my fur is perfumed with spikenard? The secret of its preparation is supposed to be lost, you know, although it was highly prized in the days of the Caliphs."' (Nude in Mink)

The Himalayan plant Nardostachys jatamansi is of the valerian family Valerianaceae. Its underground stems yield the perfume traditionally known as spikenard.

'"No one uses that perfume — or no one I have ever met — but one woman."' (Nude in Mink)

'"Only one living person knows the secret of its preparation."' (Sumuru)

The woman at Bethany who anointed Jesus with precious oil is traditionally identified as Mary Magdalene (even if some say that her identity was intentionally changed by Pope Gregory the Great to reflect the popular opinion that she was the anonymous sinner of Luke). She 'opened an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured it on his head.' (Mark 14:3-4). 'Nard' is a corruption of the Greek 'spikenard'. It is mentioned elsewhere in the Bible: 'For the King's banquet, my nard gives forth its fragrance.' (Song of Songs 1:12). The Roman Catholic Church traditionally reads from the Song of Songs on the Magdalene's feast day.

The Bride anoints the King at the sacred marriage, or hieros gamos, conferring upon him divine and temporal authority. The Order of Our Lady is a secret order; though it seeks to instate the rule of women, it operates almost solely through men. It too must create kings and seek to seduce and bring to heel government ministers and prelates. The Order's existence has, of course, often been suspected: the seventeenth-century persecution of witches being a case in point. But no man has ever understood the true nature of the clandestine threat that Sumuru and her army of beautiful women pose.

'Mary' or 'Mari' is an ancient name of the great mother goddess of the Near East. 'Magdala' means 'high place' or 'temple', such as the triple palace in Jerusalem, temple of the high priestess Mariamne, who, as Herod's wife, conferred kingship upon the executioner of John the Baptist, prophet of the new patriarchal order of the Son and the Father: the Order of Masculinity Sumuru seeks to usurp.

Mary Magdalene is identified in Mark and Luke as the woman who was possessed by seven demons. (According to Babylonian legend, Ishtar, upon descending into the underworld, danced the dance of the seven veils, a dance that, then as now, is defined by an erotic propitiation of the kingdom of death.) Marlene Dietrich's real name was Marie Magdalene Dietrich. Her femme fatale film persona, as developed in Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), as well, of course, as in The Blue Angel (1930), prefigured Sumuru's own high campiness. Like Dietrich, Sumuru is also a Magdalene (that Magdalene known in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip as 'the most beloved disciple, whom Jesus often kissed on the mouth'), Sumuru, the fallen woman, whose perfume is like a sweet, poisonous miasma wafting through those pseudo-Arabian palaces where, like Ishtar and Salome, she lives in a state of demonic possession, dancing for her Messiah's kisses, the head of the Prophet, and the sexual enslavement of all mankind.
 

Sumuru: Her Umbilicus

'"I observe, Caspar," the golden voice went on, "that you are cultivating the custom of the Indian yogi who contemplates his navel. You, however, are even more original. You contemplate mine. Might I ask if you find this exercise rewarding?"

'Unmoved, smiling serenely, Caspar shrugged his slight shoulders. "The Arab philosophers, My Lady, with whose works you are more familiar than I am, and who recognized desire, as Madonna does, for the lever that moves the world, have told us that the navel is one of the seven steps to seduction."' (Return of Sumuru)

Belly dance is one of the oldest dances in the world. It is the same dance of death that Salome — the adolescent necrophile — danced on Herod's birthday when John the Baptist languished in the dungeons that lay deep beneath her little, dove-like feet. The navel — the evil eye of the feminine daemonic — is the focus of this fatal dance.

'The navel,' says Dr Christina Flook in her book Fell Umbilicus (2004), 'is not merely the symbol of birth but of original sin, too. Specifically, of feminine sin. Or, rather, the sin that is femininity. Lilith (in the guise of her alter ego, Eve) was the first of the ishtaritu, that is, the sacred whores who serviced the temples of Ishtar. She seduced Satan, the great serpent, and brought sex and generation into the world, for then as now, the King of Hell was in love with her and did her bidding. Ever after, her daughters bore the omphalic scar that is the mark of the witch.'

The Pythia, or Pythoness, was the priestess of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, where a fetish stone — called the omphalos — was believed to mark the centre of the world. 

The omphalos is the centre of the world. It is the locus of sin and sexuality, just as femininity is the sin of sins and the locus of the world's desire.

Sumuru knows this and becomes an oracle herself, communicating the will of the Dark Goddess to the world of men.

It is to be suspected that she also knows that a synonym for 'witch' is pythoness. (For example, Chaucer, in the Friar's Tale of Canterbury Tales, refers to the Biblical 'Witch of Endor' [Samuel 28] as a 'pithonesse'.) The witch is the bride of the great serpent. As such, the inquisitors and witch-finders who pursue Our Lady seek to strike at the centre of her world and desecrate her satanic altar, the omphalos. 

Bejewelled with a ruby, the navel thus comes to symbolize martyrdom.

'He was becoming fascinated, knew it, and resented it. He had wondered at the time if the tradition of the "beautiful spy" had perhaps a solid foundation.' (Nude in Mink)

In the 1974 Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun we learn that Francisco Scaramanga — a freelance assassin who dispatches his victims with bullets made of solid gold — has killed British agent Bill Fairbanks in Beirut. Moneypenny informs Bond that Fairbanks died in a cabaret in the company of a belly dancer called Saida, but that Scaramanga's involvement remained unconfirmed due to the fact that the bullet couldn't be found.

Roger Moore, playing a Bond one might more reasonably expect to find in a 'Carry On' movie, proceeds to Beirut. There, in the same cabaret where Fairbanks met his end, Saida (Carmen Sautoy) informs him that the gold bullet passed through its victim's neck. 'I take it out of the wall before the police arrive,' she says, posing before him in the classic brassière, coin belt, and split skirts of a belly dancer. 'And now it is my lucky charm. I never dance without it.' It is, in other words, the little slug of gold that bejewels her exposed navel.

The spent bullet winks at us from the fleshy declivity in which it has found a home.

The incident involving Fairbanks and Saida doesn't appear in Ian Fleming's book. (Indeed, the book and the film are in effect quite different affairs.) However, in chapter three of The Man With The Golden Gun (1965), the 'dossier' on Scaramanga offers some interesting background material on the whole subject of guns, gods, gold, and martyred umbilici: '"It is a Freudian thesis, with which I am inclined to agree, that the pistol, whether in the hands of an amateur or of a professional gunman, has significance for the owner as a symbol of virility — an extension of the male organ — and that excessive interests in guns (e.g. gun collections and gun clubs) is a form of fetishism. The partiality of Scaramanga for a particularly showy variation of weapon, and his use of ... gold bullets, clearly point, I think, to his being a slave to this fetish..."'

The moon is feminine, the sun always masculine, symbol of the Sky God that displaced the Mother Goddesses of the Near East.

And when the sun is gold, and burns at its brightest, the moon turns red.

Sumuru's Alaskan mink farm satisfies only one aspect of her fetishism. Another, darker aspect, is served by the ruby mines she owns in North Africa. 

The ruby mines are to be feared.

'"I have been thinking for some time, Ariosto," My Lady went on softly, "of sending a practical scientist to reorganize my ruby mines."

'But, hearing those words, Ariosto's tanned cheeks paled suddenly. He stretched out both hands imploringly.

'"Madonna! For God's sake don't say that! I confess my madness. But think of the years of service — of devotion."' (The Fire Goddess)

Sumuru says to her major domo: '"The ruby mines are my Siberia. I have only to suggest to any of our people that a visit to the ruby mines might enable them to adjust their perspective in order to reduce them to abject humility. You know it well."' (Sumuru)

And what are they for, these rubies, except to adorn wanton umbilici? The ruby in the navel beloved of belly dancers is a symbol of that martyrdom hinted at in The Man with the Golden Gun: the sacrifice of the sacred harlot — or votary of the moon — to the phallic sun god, or male exterminating principle. Scaramanga (whose golden bullet, worn teasingly by one flirting with death, becomes blood red when the dance of death begins in earnest) is an agent of the sun, an avenging emissary of the Order of Masculinity: the kind of man — the only kind of man — with whom Our Lady and her sisterhood may expect to experience love.

And we may call it love, even if it is not a love with which we are necessarily familiar. For Sumuru and her kind: 'Erotic motivation ... is caprice, based on chance and not relationship ... There is a kind of love not rooted in relationship. It is unstable and unreliable and yet love all the same.' (Thomas Moore, Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism, 1990)

The ruby mines are feared because they reveal this awful truth: love is sometimes possible — a love ecstatic as it is tragic — only between Hades and Persephone, Thanatos and Eros, Death and Sex.
 

Sumuru and Rigor Kubus

'"This formidable woman had gone far ahead of the recognised pharmaceutists. Whether she, herself, is a highly accomplished chemist or whether she employs one, we don't know. But her knowledge of drugs is phenomenal."' (Nude in Mink)

'"Sumuru employs some of the most ghastly weapons ever invented. She's adept in the use of obscure poisons. Some of her victims have been blinded by a mere puff of powder, others struck dumb. And there's a horrible thing called Rigor Kubus, a sort of fungus that invades the system and apparently turns the body to something like stone."' (Sumuru)

'"She wants everyone to know what happens to anybody who crosses her. You see, this damned woman is apparently the only person who has ever succeeded in cultivating the fungus."' (Sumuru)

'"Every member of the Order will have heard that to attempt to betray me means death by Rigor Kubus."' (Nude in Mink)

According to Rohmer, the poison Rigor Kubus is so called because its first recorded appearance was among the Kubus, a primitive tribe in Sumatra. It finds an entry in a catalogue put together by the Dutch physician Van Voorden in 1923. 

'It is caused by the spores of a minute fungus. It invades the lymphatic membranes and multiplies incredibly. As it moves on, it first reduces complete paralysis and then brings about a blood change which converts living tissue to something as hard as marble.' (Nude in Mink)

'"The principle upon which it operates is unknown. But, once assimilated, it is self-destructive."' (The Fire Maiden)

We first encounter the effects of Rigor Kubus in chapter 2 of Nude in Mink. Sir Miles Tristram is described as having led an 'unsavoury private life'. His study exudes an atmosphere of 'pathological eroticism' and is crammed with books 'almost exclusively of an erotic character'.

The passage goes on to state: 'There were a number of statuettes which would have shocked the most liberal-minded observer and some framed photographs of an artistic depravity...

'Indian antiques, chiefly sadistic in design, crowded a glazed cabinet...

'And in the chair, hunched forward, one podgy hand clenched on the desk, and the other resting on a Chinese snuff-box, was Sir Charles Tristram, a vast carnal figure, his face that of an aged satyr, his several chins bulging over the collar of his dinner jacket.' (Nude in Mink)

The effects of Rigor Kubus, however, can produce even more bizarre results: two men and a boy walking through the early morning mist on Reigate Heath discover Ian Forrester, a Shakespearian actor lured from a playhouse by one of Sumuru's women during a performance of Hamlet. 'It was the daft boy who approached the pallid statue of Hamlet — who touched it — who fell back, shrieking — who ran like a hunted, wild thing across the Heath, directionless, without purpose.' (Nude in Mink)

Celie Artz is introduced as a 'study in voluptuous curves sheathed in a black frock with a plunging neckline from which some of the curves threatened to escape'. (Sumuru)

But later we find her standing 'at the foot of an ornately carved antique bed, her left hand clutching one of the two mahogany posts. Her right hand was pressed to her breast. A look of indescribable horror rested on her face, which still retained traces of great beauty. A sheathlike black gown followed the curving lines of her magnificent figure, and Tony remembered and shuddered.

'"Touch her," one of the detectives invited grimly. Everyone watched him as he stepped forward and laid an unsteady finger on Celie's shoulder. Everyone saw him change colour, saw him conquer revulsion and nausea.

'"My God! What is it? She's been turned into stone!"' (Sumuru)

Kingston, Jamaica, 1952: 'Mortimer, riding in the rear, was already scrambling out. The crowd seemed to be surrounding a small patch of shrubbery enclosed by railings, in which, mounted on a stone pedestal which occupied the middle of the patch, something stood enveloped in a black cover. Apparently a statue awaited unveiling.

'As the sergeant pushed his way through, Gilligan jumped out, too, and followed him. They reached the rails almost together. Excited coloured people pressed in behind them.

'"Know anything about this, Mortimer?"

'"No, sir. Evidently nobody does."

'"Let's take a look."

'Inspector Gilligan stepped over the rail, stooped, and pulled part of the black cover aside. He seemed to freeze. He was looking at a bronze plate fixed to the pedestal.

'"What is it, sir?"

'Gilligan, teeth clenched, stood up, reached for a cord intended to release the black cover, and pulled.

'The cover fell.

'A whisper of awe swept around the watching group.

'An exquisite nude statue stood gleaming in the morning light; at first glance, a work of pure genius in the lost art of chryselephantine carving. It was a life-sized figure of a beautiful girl, wrought in what looked like mellowed ivory. The hair had a metallic lustre and might have been wrought in bronze. The eyes were closed, and the full lips slightly tinted. On one arm the statue wore a barbaric gold bracelet.

'The plate screwed to the pedestal to which the figure was fastened read:

'MELISANDE DE CROIX, who, with two male companions, Mokombo and John James, murdered Louis Laporte, Minister of Agriculture, on the night of May 15th, 1952.

'Some of the coloured people had recognized the beautiful figure. A horrified murmur arose, "Melisande! Melisande!"

'Inspector Gilligan turned to Mortimer. The sergeant's face was ghastly.

'"Let's get on. Must send a crew to have her moved."

'They made their way back to the car, leaving the dead Melisande, turned to stone, in the midst of a gaping crowd — Sumuru's adieu to Jamaica.' (The Fire Goddess)
 

Sumuru: Her Philosophy

'"Few men and women alive today are capable of understanding me. Those few that are, I try to find, try to make them listen."' (Nude in Mink)

'This singular woman insisted that she, alone, could save the world from a Third World War, which would destroy civilisation. She had the financial resources and was building up the necessary organisation for her reign of beauty. It was not and would never be a reign of terror. But she would brook no interference.' (Nude in Mink)

'"Our world has been brought to the edge of disaster by ugliness. Ugliness of body and ugliness of mind. If, like the old Greeks, we had worshipped beauty, do you suppose that the horrors of the recent war with Germany, the present threat of Soviet Russia, could ever have fallen upon us?"' (Nude in Mink)

Is Sumuru an aesthete? Yes, but not as Pater and Wilde were aesthetes. She is a student of Bataille. Bataille contends that 'art for art's sake' — that response to the philistinism of the industrial age — is a subterfuge. Art, far from being non-utilitarian and 'innocent', in fact re-channels the dark forces otherwise repressed by liberal capitalism. Freud's metapsychology proposed that the progress of civilization led to the release of increasingly destructive energies: war, and the fears and anxieties that feed it and feed off it. Sumuru understands this. Beauty is not innocent. It is evil. And her embrace of 'beauty for beauty's sake' represents an embrace of evil, a channelling of the forces of Eros-Thanatos into an esthétique du mal.

'"Beauty, properly used, is power. Beauty must take the place of ugliness. Our order controls more beauty, and therefore has greater secret power, than any society the world has known. By means of this we command some of the greatest intellects in the spheres of art, science, and politics; for men, however brilliantly gifted, readily become enslaved by beauty ... We inspired the madness that destroyed the man Hitler.' (Sumuru)

What is the nature of this madness?

In 1878, Émile Zola prepared to write Nana. 'The philosophical subject,' he noted, 'is as follows: A whole society hurling itself at the cunt. A pack of hounds after a bitch, who is not even on heat and makes fun of the hounds following her. The poem of male desires, the great lever which moves the world. There is nothing apart from the cunt and religion.'

In the novel Nana, the eponymous heroine is satirized in a newspaper article: 'The Golden Fly ... was the story of a girl descended from four or five generations of drunkards, her blood tainted by an accumulated inheritance of poverty and drink, which in her case had taken the form of a nervous derangement of the sexual instinct. She had grown up in the slums, in the gutters of Paris; and now, tall and beautiful, and as well made as a plant nurtured on a dungheap, she was avenging the paupers and outcasts of whom she was the product. With her the rottenness that was allowed to ferment among the lower classes was rising to the surface and rotting the aristocracy. She had become a force of nature, a ferment of destruction, unwittingly corrupting and disorganizing Paris between her snow-white thighs, and curdling it just as women, every month, curdle milk. It was at the end of the article that the comparison with a fly occurred, a fly the colour of sunshine which had flown up out of the dung, a fly which had sucked death from the carrion left by the roadside and now, buzzing, dancing and glittering like a precious stone, was entering palaces through the windows and poisoning the men inside, simply by settling on them.'

This is the sickness not merely of venereal disease, but of female sexuality itself. The sacred prostitute, revealed as an enchantress not only of Heaven but also of Hell, makes war with beauty, poison, and nympholepsy.

'Was there some grain of reason in this woman's philosophy, or was it all due to her insidious sex appeal?' (Sumuru)

'Drake Roscoe stared hard at Dick. "Why do you suppose she collects beautiful women from all over the world?" he inquired. "For bait, Dick, to catch the big fish. In a tight corner, she's not above offering herself. Sex, in Sumuru's eyes, is simply an infallible method of conquering men that an all-wise Providence has given to women."' (Return of Sumuru)

'"She could impose her will on a conclave of cardinals as easily as on a conference of women lawyers. It's sheer hypnotism."' (Return of Sumuru)

'"Our order seeks to guide the evolution of humanity — to evolve a perfect race. We date back to Pythagoras, and the task was taken up and the system improved by Plato. I myself am such a product, without one blemish in the selection — for even a long line of beauty and intelligence can be destroyed by a single misalliance."' (Return of Sumuru)

'"Pretty? She's beautiful — the most beautiful woman I've ever seen! She's brilliantly clever, too. Linda lent me a wonderful book she has written. At first it rather frightened me, the ideas were so utterly revolutionary and so frankly stated."

'Curly became interested and suspicious. '"Sex, I suppose."

'"Yes. Her theory is that there can be no peace in the world until all that is ugly has been destroyed — ugly philosophies, ugly art, ugly people. She says that only highly trained women can bring this about."' (Sinister Madonna)

'"While women move in silence, seemingly supine, their influence is exercised unnoticed. When women are forced to strike, the stroke is fatal."' (Sumuru)
 

Sumuru: Her Flirtations with Danger, with Death

'"Sumuru has a complex character. One of her peculiarities is her love of danger. She enjoys nothing more than to have the police on her track. She despises all police, as she despises me. She believes, and with good reason, that she's above the law."' (Sinister Madonna)

'"I love to give the hounds a run! Now, already, they will be in full cry. My wits against Scotland Yard — and the Secret Service. How easily I could have vanished — like a mirage, and left no trace. How undramatic to do so!"' (Nude in Mink)

'"You invited this, My Lady!" Philo bravely sustained a glance of those strange eyes. "You play with danger. It is your sport."

'"Danger, my friend? How dull life becomes unless we live it dangerously!"' (Sumuru)

'"I love the game for its danger! Without its danger — God, how it would bore me!"' (The Fire Maiden)

'There were powerful and treacherous currents which swept around the headland, and it was a long swim. But Sumuru wasn't born to drown. She loved danger and she swam like a fish.' (Sinister Madonna)
 

Sumuru: Her Punishment (The Punishment of Beauty)

'He heard a sound of splashing. Reaching to his holster, he crept on.

'From a crystal ledge he looked down into a crystal pool. He was transported to the tropics. Palm fronds above, rainbow fish below, and, just coming to the surface of this miniature magic lake a swimmer naked except for a cap of gold.

'Sumuru came up the steps and faced him. Her wet body was like an ivory statue that a rainstorm had drenched. Her wonderful breasts lifted challengingly at him.

'"Please don't shoot me. I admire your courage in coming alone. But I know you came for me."' (Sumuru)

But on other occasions a would-be assassin may come like a lover:

'She was asleep in moonlight now.

'Naked and unashamed, a child at rest, she lay on her side facing him. Her body looked virginal, the lovely casket of a pure spirit. Her face, half in shadow, was the face of a Madonna, unlined, unsullied by traffic with a coarse world. A slight, regular movement of her breasts showed that she slumbered peacefully.

'Sumuru! Witch of the world! Thief of souls!

'Drakos' strong fingers opened and closed convulsively. Though he were damned for it, yet it would be a good deed ... That white throat...

'He choked down a cry which rose nearly to his lips. Sumuru stirred, threw her arm over her eyes and turned her head aside.

'Drakos, trembling, drew back. He was drenched in nervous perspiration. He returned, past the tinkling fountain, the cushioned divan, and on to the ebony and bronze door.' (The Fire Goddess)

Cleopatra died of her own hand, her means of self-deliverance the coiled serpent that lay within a basket of figs. 'This is an aspic's trail,' says one of Cleopatra's guards on discovering his dead queen, 'and these fig-leaves have slime upon them, such as th' aspic leaves upon the caves of Nile.' (William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, act 5, scene 2)

In London, on the Thames embankment, we commemorate Cleopatra with a monument to phallicism and, by extension, the snake-god that killed her. 

Cleopatra's Needle dates from about 1500 BC and stands 69 feet 6 inches high, has a rectangular base that is 7 feet 9 inches by 7 feet 8 inches, and weighs 180 tons. The portraits of several great society beauties are buried beneath the obelisk's plinth.

The Washington Monument — a modern obelisk — was completed in 1884. It stands 555 feet high and celebrates the male exterminating principle as embodied by a new world empire.

'The beauty of woman is a double-edged sword,' says Sumuru to a man she had hoped would mate with one of her women. She concludes, as if addressing all men: 'Let the scabbard be strong.' (Sumuru)

Sax Rohmer does not have Sumuru die. But if the series of novels she appears in had encompassed her demise, it would be a death, one feels, engineered by her own hand. However, unlike Cleopatra, such a death would be inadvertent, a result of treachery returning to bite itself, like a snake biting its own tail. 

Sumuru would die by Rigor Kubus.
 

Sumuru: Her Death

If you want something visual
That's not too abysmal
We can take in an old Steve Reeves movie.

—The Rocky Horror Show

On consulting Katz's Film Encyclopedia I see that the 1960 Italian-French production The Thief of Baghdad was directed by Arthur Lubin, a man who had previously directed '"Abbott and Costello" comedies, several "Francis, the Talking Mule" episodes, and such high-camp items as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944) and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946). From the late 1950s he worked mostly for TV, directing episodes for a number of action series and producing and directing the entire output of the "Mr. Ed" series.

The Thief of Baghdad stars former muscleman Steve Reeves. And throughout — with his huge shoulders and tiny waist — Reeves lets his muscles do the acting, resembling nothing so much as a Tom of Finland drawing brought to life. He plays Kareem the thief. After falling in love with Amina, the Sultan's daughter (Georgia Moll), Kareem engages in a quest to find a blue rose. In so doing, he hopes to win his beloved princess's hand.

The quest provides the action for the central part of the film. Kareem passes through various trials: living trees; a beautiful sorceress called Kadeejah whose palace, or rather nymphenberg, is inhabited solely by beautiful women; an invisible wrestler; and a dozen faceless sentinels. At last, conveyed to his objective by means of flying horse, he finds the blue rose and returns to Baghdad.

But the episode that is of relevance to us here, of course, is his encounter with the 'beautiful sorceress' Kadeejah (Edy Vessel). 

'I am Kadeejah,' she says, introducing herself. 'You have braved many perils before coming to me. You are very courageous. I bid you welcome, Kareem.'

Kareem: 'You know my name?'

Kadeejah: 'Of course. I beg you to accept my hospitality and stay with me for a while.'

Kareem: 'I am very grateful for your kindness, my lady, but I must be on my journey.'

Kadeejah: 'You could stay just this evening.'

Kareem: 'It's much more important I continue my search.'

Kadeejah: 'Don't worry, Kareem. I know what you're thinking. No one will find the blue rose before you do.'

Kareem: 'How do you know?'

Kadeejah: 'If you promise to stay with me till tomorrow, I will let you see your princess.'

Kareem: 'All right, I promise.'

She gestures towards a pool. Its enchanted waters reveal a scene of Baghdad. On seeing Amina, Kareem walks away, making as if to depart.

Kadeejah: 'Kareem?'

Kareem: 'I must go, Kadeejah, before it's too late.'

Kadeejah: 'But I let you see Amina. Don't you remember your promise to stay with me till tomorrow? Tomorrow I will show you myself the secret of where the blue rose is hidden. You must believe me. And you must have faith in me.' (Claps.) 'Take our guest to his room and make him comfortable.'

Kareem: 'Thank you.'

One of Kadeejah's female attendants escorts Kareem into a garden. The garden is filled with statues, all of men. Pausing, he recognizes in one such statue the face of a man he gave water to in the desert: a fellow questor.

Kareem: 'Asan!'

Evening. A courtyard. Kareem and Kadeejah sit next to each other on a couch surrounded by Kadeejah's attendants. Before them, female dancers with bejewelled navels rise from a mist like demonesses from the underworld. They perform the dance of the underworld: Ishtar's and Salome's dance: the dance of death. 

Kadeejah: 'Kareem, in the world you have left behind, friends become traitors, and love turns to hatred. But here everything is different. Friends are true friends, and love goes on for ever. Why not remain here with me? Oh, I know you will leave tomorrow, but just for this evening let me believe that you won't go away.'

Kareem: 'You're a very beautiful woman, Kadeejah. If I stay, then I'm afraid I would never want to go.'

Kadeejah's exotic costume is like something Gustav Moreau might have designed for Sarah Bernhardt, if Bernhardt should ever have played Salome. (Bernhardt had rehearsed Wilde's play before the play was banned in 1892.) Wilde himself had suggested that Salome be naked: 'Totally naked, but draped with heavy and ringing necklaces made of jewels of every colour, warm with the fervour of her amber flesh.' And Kadeejah's costume, strung with jewels, confers upon her a hyper-nakedness: that paradox by which apparel transforms the body into that most artificial of painterly subjects, the nude. Her maquillage has a similar effect. Arthur Symons wrote (somewhat in imitation of Baudelaire): 'There is a charm, which I cannot think wholly imaginary or factitious, in that form of illusion which is known as make-up ... The very phrase, painted women, has come to have an association of sin, and to have put paint on her cheeks ... gives to a woman a kind of symbolic corruption. At once she seems to typify the sorceries, and entanglements of what is most deliberately enticing in her sex ...' (Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands, 1918.) Kadeejah's elliptical, heavily made-up eyes are certainly corrupt — indeed, they are enticingly catlike. Louis-Ferdinand Céline describes such eyes in his novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932): 'I took careful note of the unusual shape ... the outer ends of which tilted upwards more sharply than is common among French women. The eyelids also inclined toward the eyebrows on the temple side. A sign of cruelty, but just enough, the kind of cruelty you can kiss, an insidious tartness like the Rhine wines one can't help liking.' Kadeejah — that is, Edy Vessel — possesses the same ocular signature, though not to the degree of fellow Italian actress, Ornella Muti, whose elliptical, startlingly green eyes are a sine qua non of all things feline. Rohmer was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. A man of his time, he was fascinated — morbidly fascinated — by the East, and in particular, by Egyptian mythology. In 1920 he wrote The Green Eyes of Bâst. Bast, or Bastet — the Egyptian cat-goddess represented as a woman with a cat's head, carrying a sistrum in her right hand and a breastplate surmounted with a lioness in her left — is a variant of the archetype known as the Sphinx: an image of human womanhood melded with divine animality. Bast, like the Sphinx (like Ishtar, Astarte, Isis, and Aphrodite, but, in particular, like Lilith, whose notoriety extended to giving birth to demonesses and succubi), is the mother of all catwomen.

Sumuru, of course, is a catwoman, just like Kadeejah, and Ornella Muti would surely have played her to perfection.

Kadeejah: 'Then you really must leave?'

Kareem: 'Yes, I must.'

He watches the dancers. The music swells. And while he is thus distracted Kadeejah leans forward. The monstrous jewel that adorns the ring upon her fourth finger is equipped with a hidden compartment. With a flick of her thumb, that compartment is revealed. Powder falls from it into Kareem's goblet. She picks up the goblet and offers it to him, smiling.

Kadeejah: 'Kareem? Would you like to make a toast?'

Kareem: 'To what, Kadeejah?'

Kadeejah: 'A toast to the love that you have denied me.'

He takes the goblet, and then sets it back down upon the table. Kadeejah reclines. Kareem embraces her.

Kareem: 'If you really love me, I'll stay.'

They kiss. Kareem rises to his feet and, unbeknown to her (she is still preoccupied, one feels, by the aftertaste of their brief, but smouldering, intimacy), switches his goblet for her own. She stands; takes it.

Kadeejah: 'Let us drink now. To the two of us.'

Kareem: 'To a long life together, Kareem dearest.'

She drinks, stares at him, appears suddenly confused, her face a mask of mute inquiry. She gasps. Steps backward. Ahhh, no, she sighs, clutching at her solar plexus. Again, she sighs. She drops her goblet, and then, as she stands stock-still and strikes a pose ... slowly turns into stone. There is the sound of thunder. The flash of lightning. Kadeejah's attendants flee the palace, which, collapsing about them, is soon inundated by water.

Shirley Eaton (1937- ) played Sumuru in Lindsay Shonteff's 1967 The Million Eyes of Su-muru and Jess Franco's 1968 The Girl from Rio. (She also appeared in Franco's 1968 The Blood of Fu Manchu, which cannibalised unused Eaton footage from The Girl from Rio, thereby providing an ironic, if wholly unintentional, conflation of Rohmer's male and female icons in a single narrative.)

However, she meets Sumuru's fate (a fate we must only imagine given that Rohmer shied from the fictional realization of an appropriately fatal dénouement to his series) not in these films, but in Guy Hamilton's 1964 Goldfinger. Eaton plays Jill Masterton, the professional 'companion' of Auric Goldfinger.

Bond: 'Why do you do it?'

Jill Masterton: 'He pays me.'

Bond: 'Is that all he pays you for?'

Jill Masterton: 'And for being seen with him.'

Bond: 'Just seen?'

Jill Masterton: 'Just seen.'

Bond: 'I'm so glad.'

Despite this exchange, there can be little doubt that Jill Masterton is a priestess of Ishtar, that is, a Babylonian sacred whore, who, in Goldfinger, has found a patron she hopes to seduce, manipulate, and ultimately destroy. For her pains, she is herself destroyed, the victim of a homicidal act of reverse Pygmalionism. Jonathan Coe, in his introduction to Eaton's autobiography Golden Girl (1999), writes: 'Shirley was soon plucked from the ranks of the Carry On and Doctor films to die a gloriously kinky death in the third Bond movie, Goldfinger. The image of her naked body covered from head to toe in gold paint has become one of the key symbols of the 1960s.'

In Ian Fleming's 1959 novel on which the film is based, Jill Masterton's sister, Tilly (whose relationship with Bond had begun when 'Their eyes met and exchanged a flurry of masculine/feminine master/slave signals') informs us:

'"He has a woman once a month. Jill told me this when she first took the job. He hypnotizes them. Then he — he paints them gold."

'"Christ! Why?"

'"I don't know. Jill told me he's mad about gold. I suppose he sort of thinks he's — that he's sort of possessing gold. You know — marrying it. He gets some Korean servant to paint them. The man has to leave their backbones unpainted. Jill couldn't explain that. I found out it's so they wouldn't die. If their bodies were completely covered with gold paint, the pores of the skin wouldn't be able to breathe. Then they'd die ... Goldfinger had had her painted all over. He had murdered her."'

Effectively turned into a statue — resembling something like a monstrous golden hood ornament, perhaps — Shirley Eaton/Jill Masterton experiences the fate of a treacherous woman who has had the tables turned upon her and suffered death by Rigor Kubus: the fate of Sumuru.
 

Who is Sumuru?

'"Who is Sumuru?" he asked, abruptly.

"I don't know. No one knows."' (Nude in Mink)

Astar is one of Sumuru's real names, asserts Drake Roscoe, the former Secret Service agent who has fallen disastrously under her spell. 'She is known in Cairo as Princess Astar.' (Return of Sumuru)

And Astar sounds suspiciously like a shortened version of Astarte.

'The rows of books in a mahogany case were broken by figurines and images of pagan gods and goddesses. Immediately facing the desk, a statuette on a pedestal, the work of a brilliant Belgian sculptor who had died young, represented Astarte, the Syrian Venus.' (The Fire Goddess)

Astarte was the Phoenician goddess of love. A class of sacred prostitutes called qedesha served her temples. (In Egypt a goddess called Qedeshu is represented nude, posed frontally on a lioness or leopard and holding arrows in her hands.) In the Bible she is known — along with all other Near Eastern goddesses — as Ashtoreth, a conflation of the Greek name Astarte and the Hebrew word boshet, or 'shame'. In ancient Israel, sacred prostitution was practiced publicly (Solomon, married to foreign wives, 'followed Astarte the goddess of the Sidonians' [1 Kings 11:5]) until the reforms of King Josiah, in about 621 BC, after which the cult places to Ashtoreth were destroyed. (In 300 AD, the Emperor Constantine ordered the destruction at Aphaca — in Phoenicia, or Canaan — of one of the last temples dedicated to Ashtoreth and sacred prostitution. And ever since, it seems, we have been burning witches and their counterparts: the heretic, the foreigner, the Jew.) Astarte's Akkadian counterpart was Ishtar. Later she became assimilated with the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Greco-Roman Aphrodite, Artemis, and Juno.

'The figure of Sumuru haunted his dreams, but as something aloof from his life, not, indeed, of this world, as a vision of Isis unveiled in a secret shrine; lovely but terrible.' (Nude in Mink)

Sumuru is an incarnation of Ishtar, a spirit as old as Babylon in a young woman's body. Her followers are sacred harlots. It is beauty that she extols and that is her weapon, and — though it is something the men who accuse her, pursue her, and fear her know but cannot admit — it is beauty that must be punished.

Probably the most famous Egyptian goddess after Isis, Bast, the cat-goddess, was originally associated with the sun, but after contact with the Greeks she became a goddess of the moon.

Like the priestesses of Ishtar, the followers of Bast did not worship the lion. These cat-priestesses worshiped the male exterminating principle: the snake. Ostensibly, their worship — the worship of all sorceresses whose rituals devolve upon phallicism — was directed to one end: manipulation and control. In reality such rituals become acts of erotic oblation: transgressive acts that, in breaking taboos, rupturing boundaries, and celebrating the petite mort that is akin to the sacred loss of self, instil in their congregation the worship not of sex but death. (Bataille's understanding of pornography is that it is ultimately about death, not sex, and in the Hellenic world that gave birth to our own, Ishtar and Bast's sacred whores are, of course, pornai.)

The cat-priestesses belong to the female Moon; the snake, to the patriarchal Sun. The union of Moon and Sun is the alchemical wedding of opposites, the hieros gamos celebrating love and hate, compassion and cruelty, life and death.

According to the Brittanica, Bast 'was native to Bubastis in the Nile River delta but also had an important cult at Memphis. In the Late and Ptolemaic periods large cemeteries of mummified cats, as well as mummies of the cult's attendant priestesses, were created at both sites, and thousands of bronze statuettes of the goddess were deposited as votive offerings.'

Dead, and reduced to inanimate objects, the cat-priestesses become representations of representations — dolls and mannequins filling the shelves and curio cabinets of a maniacal collector's Wunderkammer — preserved for all eternity as ideals of 'the eternal feminine'. Oh, to walk amongst those ancient tombs. Oh, to be a collector...

'"Tonight, watching her cast a spell over all those women, it came to me that her beauty must be unnatural, that a woman who possessed such enormous power must be far, far older than she appears to be."' (Sinister Madonna)
 

Sumuru: Endless

Why did Sax Rohmer stop writing about Sumuru? Perhaps because the logical conclusion to the series — a conclusion worked out not only in The Million Eyes of Su-muru and The Girl from Rio but also by twentieth-century history — is the prospect of sexual, or sexualized, warfare and gendercide: a radical subject Rohmer might be expected to have been uncomfortable with, given the constraints of the popular medium he was working in and the 'secret life' of his time.

Gendercide manifested itself in Nazi Germany. We are more familiar with it by the name of genocide, or The Holocaust. 'Holocaust' is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word 'olah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. The Nazis invaded the feminine East to put to death the Mother Goddess and her incarnation in the Jew and the Slav — to offer her up on the altar of a new Order of Masculinity. The Nazis waged war against the 'yellow peril': the degenerate races of the Orient. Fu Manchu, who, in reality, was always the woman, Sumuru, was Sax Rohmer's encapsulation of his fears and prejudices of the East, which was always fear of a feminine 'Other'.

In The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) Wilhelm Reich argues: 'The racial theory is not a product of fascism. On the contrary: it is fascism that is a product of racial hatred and is its politically organized expression ... Race ideology is a pure biopathic expression of the character structure of the orgastically impotent man.'

In Goldfinger the novel, the dossier on Scaramanga concludes: '"I have doubts about his alleged sexual prowess, for the lack of which his gun fetish would be either a substitute or a compensation. I have also noted, from a 'profile' of this man in Time magazine, one fact which supports my thesis that Scaramanga may be sexually abnormal."'

The assassins, and devotees, of the sun god would, perhaps, have found something of a home in Hitler's Germany. For as Reich goes on to say: 'The sadistically perverse character of race ideology is also betrayed in its attitude towards religion. Fascism is supposed to be a reversion to paganism and an archenemy of religion. Far from it — fascism is the supreme expression of religious mysticism ... fascism countenances that religiosity that stems from sexual perversion, and it transforms the masochistic character of the old patriarchal religion of suffering into a sadistic religion. In short, it transposes religion from the "other-worldliness" of the philosophy of suffering to the "this worldliness" of sadistic murder.'

What is anti-semitism if not the characterization of the feminine East as the embodiment of sensuality and feminine threat? The Ewige Jude is the Ewige Frau: the Whore of Babylon. Racism is misogyny by another name.

In the final pages of Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity we read: 'Gynecide was indeed an extravagant fantasy, but, as the world was to discover all too soon, genocide was not. Salome and Judith were both Jewish women, as the intellectuals of the turn of the century did not tire of pointing out. As such, they combined the crimes of women with those of a "degenerate race." If women's prosaic, everyday presence made it impossible for most men to maintain a constant sense of enmity toward them, the Jew was still there, guilty of the same crimes as woman ... The deadly racist and sexist evolutionary dreams of turn-of-the-century culture fed the masochistic middle-class fantasy in which the godlike Greek, the Führer, the lordly executioner, leader of men, symbol of masculine power, at last moved by his assistant's marginalization, would kill the vampire, set his trusty servant free, and bring on the millennium of pure blood, evolving genes, and men who were men. If it was difficult to execute one's wife — not to say inconvenient — there was always the effeminate Jew. Fantasies of gynecide thus opened the door to the realities of genocide.'

The question has often been posed: why did the Jews not make greater attempts to resist their Nazi murderers? Answers usually focus on the undisputable facts that they had no access to arms, were often surrounded by native anti-Semitic populations who collaborated with the Nazis, and the Nazi policy of collective reprisal. Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) — a piece of 'porno gothic', according to Pauline Kael, about a sado-masochistic relationship between an ex-Nazi and the woman he sexually abused in a concentration camp — argues, with all the fearlessness of a cinema terminally astray in the no-man's-land between bad and appalling taste, that there might be another, far more uncomfortable answer.

Susan Brownmiller, in her book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), offers the following reminiscence: 'I was nursed and nurtured on fairy tales, but as a child of World War II, there were other, stronger rape images that came into the home. My parents had a favourite art book that held a place of honour on the coffee table, and on one of its pages there appeared a popular example of a propaganda poster from World War I. This was the Rape of Belgium, also known as the Rape of the Hun. There are several variations of this poster, but in all of them Belgium is pictured as a beautiful young maiden with long, flowing hair lying prostrate at the feet of the towering Hun, complete with pointed helmet. The purpose of the poster in terms of World War I propaganda is simple: Defenceless Belgium is the tragic victim of the German war machine. But the propaganda message I received at age eight in 1943 was slightly different. Belgium was beautiful, even if she was lying on the ground.

'I was drawn again and again to the Rape of Belgium because she was so pretty — unlike the overblown, embarrassingly naked Venuses and the stiff Madonnas that filled the rest of the book — but it puzzled me that she was lying down. "Why doesn't she hit him and run away?" I once asked my parents. "It's just a picture, dear" was their response. But was it just a picture? For into the house there soon came Belgium's sister from World War II. In the new drawing, a political cartoon, a porcine Nazi was hauling off two gunnysacks of plunder from a tiny cottage. And cowering prostrate near the doorstep, clutching a baby this time, was a beautiful young girl with long, flowing hair.

'What jumps does a child's mind make when confronted with such compelling proof that to be beautiful is to lie crumpled on the ground? This was the middle of World War II, the German Army had marched through Belgium a second time, and I was a Jewish girl growing up in Brooklyn. I could not help but conclude that the Hun and the Nazi were one in the same and, therefore, I had to be Belgium. In the next year I fantasized myself to sleep at night with a strange tableau. A tall and handsome Nazi concentration-camp guard stood near a barbed-wire fence. He did not menace me directly — after all, I had no idea what the actual menace involved. For my part I lay there motionless, at a safe distance. I was terribly beautiful.

'My concentration-camp daydream struck me as peculiar and dangerous even as I conjured it up, and I soon rooted it out of my fantasy life. No doubt the end of World War II helped to speed its annihilation: Jews were no longer international victims. I use this painful remembrance to set the stage for an examination of female victim mentality, and how it is conditioned.'

There have been other, lesser films cast in the mould of The Night Porter: Sergio Garrone's SS Experiment Camp (1976) and SS Camp 5 (1976), Bruno Mattei's SS Girls (1976), Cesare Canevari's Gestapo's Last Orgy (1976), Luigi Batzella's The Beast in Heat (1977), Fabio De Agostini's Red Nights of the Gestapo (1977), and Rino Di Silvestro's Deported Women of the SS Special Section (1977). 

Susan Sontag, in her essay Fascinating Fascism (1974), writes: 'The eroticisation of fascism can be remarked in such enthralling and devout manifestations as Mishima's Confessions of a Mask and Sun and Steel, and in films like Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising and, more recently ... in Visconti's The Damned and Cavani's The Night Porter ... Why has Nazi Germany, which was a sexually repressive society, become erotic? A clue lies in the predilections of the fascist leaders themselves for sexual metaphors. Like Nietzsche and Wagner, Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the "feminine" masses, as rape. (The expression of the crowds in [Leni Riefensthal's] Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy; the leader makes the crowd come.)'

The complicity of the victim in totalitarian structures — that is, in sexually repressed, censorious structures, such as that of Nazi Germany — is underwritten by that society's inability and unwillingness to accept pleasure as a worthy principle. Such societies are moralistic and cruel, towards themselves and others. The complicity of the victim in totalitarian structures of the imagination, however, paradoxically undermines historical totalitarianism by confusing diktat with freedom, cruelty with pleasure, death with life.

Andy Black, in his essay "The Story of O" in Necronomicon, Book Three (the 'journal of horror and erotic cinema' edited by Andy Black): 'Jaeckin's film still retains a heightened erotic charge throughout and convincingly portrays the concept of pleasure in slavery — a problematic concept in other films with a Nazi slant such as Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter. In fact, one (then) member of the French National Assembly, Eugene Claudius-Petit, remarked that "... it was perhaps futile to fight against the theories of Nazism if we are prepared today to accept what Mr Himmler dreamed about as long as it is presented in an attractive way." The fact that any eroticism was vetoed during Hitler's reign in power and that such product was actually banned from German cinemas' during the Nazi rule, show the ultimately misguided nature of Claudius-Petit's argument.'

The thematic concerns of Cavani's kitsch, but wonderfully camp, grotesque, and finally poignant hymn to the master-slave dialectic (and, by extension, of the subtexts contained in the Sumuru books) subvert the punitive monopoly of fascist authoritarianism by translating its theatrical machinery into a game plan where the right-to-punish is upstaged by the right-to-pleasure and finally by love.

In Coldness and Cruelty (1967), Gilles Deleuze writes: 'In a text that ought to invalidate all theories relating Sade to Nazism, George Bataille explains that the language of Sade is paradoxical because it is essentially that of a victim. Only the victim can describe torture; the torturer necessarily uses the hypocritical language of established order and power. "As a general rule the torturer does not use the language of the violence exerted by him in the name of an established authority; he uses the language of the authority ... The violent man is willing to keep quiet and connives at cheating ... Thus Sade's attitude is diametrically opposed to that of the torturer. When Sade writes he refuses to cheat."'

'The colour is black,' writes Sontag, 'the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.'

The 'secret life' or 'secret history' of our time is the account of our fears, anxieties, and prejudices, in other words, our dream and fantasy life. Reich called fascism 'the expression of the irrational structure of mass man ... fascist mysticism is orgiastic yearning, restricted by mystic distortion and inhibition of natural sexuality.' Sax Rohmer was a man of his time. His xenophobic novels display a similar orgiastic yearning: to wage war against the feminine daemonic. To exterminate it.

The two Sumuru films made in the 1960s belong to a certain school of kitsch that we might call the 'Amazon' genre, or 'Half-Naked Women Plan to Take Over the World.' In Queen of Outer Space (1958) a rocketship lands on Venus to discover that the planet is ruled entirely by women (one of whose number is Zsa Zsa Gabor); in Cat Women of the Moon (1954), astronauts from Earth discover an all-female civilization living beneath the moon's surface; in In Like Flint (1967) the eponymous agent matches his wits against a secret society of women plotting world domination; and in Octopussy (1983) James Bond finds himself at odds with (though is eventually aided by) another such all-female phalange. The Million Eyes of Su-muru and The Girl from Rio share a similar premise (they have little in common with the Sumuru books, but, as Eaton, in letter to Sight and Sound, has said, they have a 'large cult following' adding 'you should see the fan mail I get'). And, in their finales, they enter territory that Rohmer balked at dealing with: shoot-outs, indeed, whole-scale massacres: the gendercide of Sumuru's armies of glamorous women — the Shebas, the Cleopatras, the Salomes of the eternal, feminine East.

In Fell Umbilicus Dr Christina Flook comments (somewhat luridly, it must be said): 'In one of the key closing scenes in The Million Eyes of Su-muru, two of Sumuru's female guards — dressed in uniforms that are designed to display the fell umbilicus — are shot to death by the Chinese army storming her redoubt. The guards are repeatedly machine-gunned. And from their agonized poses (they clutch their bellies in the cinematically formulaic manner of beautiful women engaged in a sensual pas de deux with Death) it is evident that they have been shot in and around their respective navels. As such they have suffered a ritual wounding consistent with the punishment of feminine evil, or the punishment of beauty: an ancient wounding that might have been catalogued by such luminaries as Sir James Frazer and Mircea Eliade if their attempts to understand primordial myths through religious symbology had extended to a study of dying goddesses as well as dying gods. But what anthropology has ignored, popular culture has embraced, even if that embrace has been largely ignorant of the dark myth it gestures towards and perhaps unconsciously seeks to resurrect. Those who celebrate the ruby in the navel — Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Shakira, and their ilk — understand, if only in the hot, silent eloquence of their blood, the destiny of Sumuru.'

In 2002, a new Sumuru film, simply entitled Sumuru, went on limited release. It is a story of two astronauts who crash land on an alien planet only to discover a world where Amazonian warriors rule and men are slaves. The film sounds unremarkable and is so far removed from Rohmer's original conceptions that it is hardly worth commenting upon.

If one were to imagine a sixth Sumuru title (or a film that fleshed out the hypothetical vectors of its imaginative parameters), one is tempted to propose that Sumuru and her women should acknowledge consanguinity to their real-life, mid-twentieth-century counterparts — the Jews, the Slavs, and all other scapegoats who stood in for the mythical, feminine East — by suffering their fate in all regards save one, their persecution and death characterized not by horror but by the subversive, life-affirming ecstasy of a Liebestod: death alchemized by orgasmic transcendence.

Today, we have a real-life Fu Manchu in the person of Osama bin Laden. Like Dr No — a Fu Manchu clone — he hides away in a secret mountain lair conspiring the overthrow of the masculine West. Unmediated by art, the richness of our inner lives ferments and turns to poison. Can a real-life Sumuru — and our febrile response to such a 'threat' — be far behind?
 

Sumuru: Goodnight

I retreat into the shadows and, with that ludic detachment that is necessary when surrounded by the coruscating evil of this world, throw myself into the life of the collector, to live as a shadow amongst shadows. I become the forgotten sibling of John Fowles' misfeasor Frederick, surrounding myself with books, books, books, each one like an asphyxiated butterfly frozen in time, stone, and death, each one like a gold-plated woman.

As Walter Benjamin posited, ownership is intimacy. The collector serves his possessions, his little slaves. He lives through them, finds in them the selfhood he craves, and immersing himself in their cold, diffident quiddity — a life so much deeper, more realized, than his own — becomes a slave himself by means of an aesthetical metempsychosis: a devotee of the objectified world, the intimate of its secrets, promises, and languorous bliss.

I pick up Nude in Mink and scan its pages. The reader recreates the text, but the text is complicit, like a whore: she reaches out and offers herself up to the annihilating eye: Sumuru, the Semitic priestess of Ishtar and Bast, displaying herself provocatively like a cat in heat before the cruel Northern snake-god.

George Bataille, in Eroticism (1957): 'Following upon religion, literature is in fact religion's heir. A sacrifice is a novel, a story, illustrated in a bloody fashion. Or rather a rudimentary form of stage drama reduced to the final episode where the human or animal victim acts it out alone until his death.'

Bataille advocated a strategy of "surfascism": 'the problematic idea of utilizing avowedly fascist means to achieve nonfascist ends.' (The Story of the I: Unearthing George Bataille by Richard Wolin, Bookforum, Spring 2004.) Perhaps Bataille would have appreciated The Night Porter, or some other exploration of society's neglect of savage needs — games, spectacles, art, and perverse sexual activity — that seem to subsist only at the limits of experience and which challenge society's one-dimensionality. Perhaps he would have appreciated Sumuru, not for what she is but for what she promised.

I extinguish the light, place Nude in Mink on the bedside table and, blowing my fetish, my gilded doll, my dead thing, a phantom kiss, bid Sumuru goodnight.