Jeffrey Ford
“Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs — descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds — were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity.”
What drew me to this quote was the idea of a hideous nocturnal fertility cult that has survived secretly through centuries. The word fertility made me wonder what it could refer to in a story, and I was thinking that while watching the news and eating my dinner. In the space of a half hour there were three commercials for drugs treating erectile dysfunction. It took a while, but, eventually, I said, “Oh, yeah, fertility.” The creepiness of the ads made me ponder them in light of the story idea. What I noticed was that whatever they were about, they certainly weren’t about fucking.
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The past evolves into the future, and, with training, one can spot it in its new guise, the way a dinosaur can be found in a raven by a paleontologist. As with creatures, so with traditions. The ancient moves among us in our rituals. One of the most fruitful of enterprises a scholar can undertake is to trace the trail of evidence from the dawn of humanity to this very moment.
Take for instance the Order of the Haunted Wood, a secret society that is still not widely known but whose influence has been persistent. Its traditions and rituals go back, most likely, to some pre-language era when humanity was barely out of the trees. The purpose of the Order was, through the use of supernatural forces, to bestow fertility on those of its members who needed it. In clandestine night meetings, they summoned the spirit to enter the bodies of the afflicted, and, as Baron Menifer recorded (1453) in his Practices and Preachments of the Order of the Haunted Wood, “that which lay down, rose up.”
There are scant accounts of the group’s doings through the centuries, because it was frowned upon for members to speak openly about its affairs, but there were enough initiates who broke with that code to allow a basic understanding to be able to now be pieced together. Literal mention of the Wood died out somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century, although some scholars point to a notice in a local newspaper from Manhattan in 1972, a tiny piece in its want ads that read, “TOOTHW, midnight, Wash Sq. Prk,” as evidence of the society’s continued existence.
One need not grasp for such flimsy proof of the society’s pervasive influence, though. All one need do is turn on the television, sit back, and, before long, on any channel, you will come across a commercial for a product that addresses the problem of erectile dysfunction. These commercials, whether the viewer knows it or not, are bursting with the symbology and ritual of the Order. There are those who will, but I won’t go so far as to suggest that the Haunted Wood is directly behind these products and their ads. I subscribe to the notion that what is played out in the seemingly insipid dramas of these minute-and-a-half promos comes from a kind of collective unconscious, an ancient spell that has twined its way through the history of male minds to blossom anew, metamorphosed, in the fleurs du mal of advertising.
You know the commercials first by their music. Notice the snare drum played softly with brushes at a calm but steady pace while the flute and saxophone carry a lilting metronomic harmony. The setting is always well-to-do, upscale, in living rooms and kitchens furnished as if from the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. The implicit message is the poor can’t afford an erection, and, since it is always a male and female couple, none but heterosexuals deserve one.
There is a fellow, too well dressed for home, in a V-neck sweater and khakis, hair slightly greying but perfectly in place. He has all his teeth, and they are pure white. There’s a smirk on his well-tanned face. He is watching his wife at some menial task, for instance, as in the recent spate of commercials for a product called Doalis or its fast-acting co-product, Dofran, loading the dishwasher. Her age, the crow’s-feet, the frown lines, seem to have been applied by a makeup artist with a gracefully subtle hand. Her hair is done in a youthful style, mid-length, without adornment. He leers as she bends over in her camel hair slacks to place a glass on the upper rack, but it slips out of her hand and falls to the floor, shattering.
She winces, and he gets a silent chuckle out of it. He shakes his head in a condescending manner and then slowly approaches her from behind. He is smitten by her ineptitude. As he draws close and wraps his arms around her, a friendly but warning male voice says, “You never know when the call to action will be upon you. Sometimes it arrives, like a thief in the night.” She turns around, surprised by his embrace with a look that is disturbing in its glee. They laugh. Cut to a shot of them cleaning up the glass, he with the broom, she with the waste pan. “Be ready,” says the disembodied paternal voice, “for those moments when the unexpected becomes a reality. Just take one Doalis with a glass of water twelve minutes before the event for desired results.”
In the next scene, they sit down on the couch in the living room, and she pours him a glass of water from a pitcher. They laugh. The voice returns with a litany of side effects — stuffy nose, failure of vision or hearing, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, testicular alopecia, stroke, cardiac arrest, bleeding from the anus and/or ears, liver failure, dizziness, homicidal thoughts, terminal halitosis, or an erection lasting more than six hours. Then the music comes up. The woman makes a foolish face, and they continue laughing. “Doalis,” says the voice, “or, for readiness in three minutes, try Dofran.” In the last scene, we see both the woman and the man, from behind, each naked in their own separate barrel, facing a blazing sun.
The first thing one must know in order to follow any analysis of this drug commercial in light of its Haunted Wood influences and shared symbology is that in the rituals of the Order there were absolutely no women present. It is the one element of the ritual that has remained completely intact through time. In its most ancient practice, the part of the female partner was played by a male member of the Order wrapped in an animal skin. Later, in agrarian culture, the woman was a straw-filled scarecrow with a painted face and an apron. Late 19th century iterations of the female entity called Vigra were dress-making dummies and early store-window mannequins. If one studies closely the woman of the contemporary television ad, it is evident that neither is she an actual woman but an avatar of Vigra as well. What woman laughs so much where humor is so blatantly absent? A madwoman? No, a goddess of laughter, confabulated by the male psyche from the misty dawn of consciousness. She traditionally laughs at the subject before he achieves an erection and laughs when he has one.
Baron Menifer described this sacred trait of hers as “the eternal jocularity; a song of cosmic futility.” Vigra is an agent of chaos (the shattering of the glass akin to the shattering of the world), but also a bringer of water. Bear in mind, though, she does not participate in the sexual act, but instead is the physical manifestation of a creative force that through her supernatural presence awakens a dreaming sex from hibernation. Ejaculation is withheld by the subject in order to bestow that gift upon the real partner.
The moniker that eventually coalesced around the cult, for it had many names throughout the centuries from ancient Egypt to the culture of the Picts, the Order of the Haunted Wood, comes from Gotland, an island that lies off the coast of Sweden. In the 1400s there was a wealthy Dutch nobleman, Fabianus Adelheid II, who kept a large forested estate on the island’s southern shore. He only stayed at the castle once every three years, and, for the autumn months he was in residence, there were visitors from every part of the world. These were the first international meetings of the Order, then known to its members by a passel of different titles, although they shared the same ritual. It so happened that the forest surrounding the estate was haunted.
Apparently, Adelheid’s father, who was a member of the Estates General of the Burgundian Netherlands, established the place as a hunting retreat. The patriarch’s first wife, Leentja, in six years of marriage, never became pregnant. The councilor was impatient for a male heir, and so, one day when taking his wife out riding on the estate, he brought her to a secluded part of the forest and supposedly strangled her so that he might marry anew without the bother of beseeching annulment. Her body was never recovered, but, in the years following, her spectral form was often seen, flitting among the fir trees, weeping. To be fair to poor Leentja, whereas her husband was not, when Fabianus was born to the new wife it was whispered by all that he bore a closer resemblance to a local swineherd than his father.
I mention this morsel of history in relation to a number of aspects of the commercial. First and foremost is that the Order held its rituals in a clearing in this forest. The music described above, with its reliance on the lightly brushed snare drum, is reminiscent of the practice of “tapping the tree,” wherein members of the group lightly struck a fallen log with branches of dead leaves in an incantatory rhythm meant to enhance the concentration of all present and to coax natural energy from the setting. The lilting sound of the flute is, of course, the wind in the trees, and the saxophone is the distant weeping of Leentja.
In a clearing of the Haunted Wood, the subject was stripped naked and made to wear a pair of strange crystal spectacles known as the Dimsight, which fractured his vision of the waking world and prepared him for the nightmarish reality of the summoned realm of the supernatural. As the Syrian merchant Abdul-Basir Fakhoury, once a subject of the ritual as a guest of Adelheid, attested in his deathbed memoir about the Order, The Summoning of Desire, “To see through Dimsight was to see reality splintered and replaced with the liquid flowing energies of night’s domain.” Let us not forget that before these spectacles were donned, the subject was administered a honeyed dough ball brimming with hallucinogens like foxglove, belladonna, and minced pieces of the mushroom Stropharia cubensis. The subject was given clear water from a nearby stream to wash this down. I know you must be ahead of me here and have already noted that the images of water and drug have their equivalencies in the commercial, but did you guess that the shattering of the glass by the woman in camel hair slacks stands in for the fracturing of reality by the Dimsight?
To fill in some finer points not so readily evident, I return to the reliable Baron Menifer and his invaluable book. In the words of the good Baron:
Never having been at a loss to raise the rooster, myself, although always willing to lend assistance to a fellow in a woebegone condition, I can only give second-hand accounts of what the subject of the ritual experienced when wearing the Dimsight and three sheets to the wind from the effects of the ingested honeyed ball we knew in each of our given languages as The Load of the Toad. A stately gentleman, who had been a librarian in the far-off university/trade city of Timbuktoo, part of the Songhai Empire, and went by the name of Modibo, told me, through an interpreter, “The mind boils, the heart toils, breathing is foiled and the breeches are soiled. My multifaceted vision suddenly shattered and I beheld Amna (his culture’s name for the entity Vigra). She was both old and young, beautiful and frightening, with mid-length hair and dressed in a cloak of camel hide. She moved around me, laughing, laughing, laughing, till her laughter bored into my mind. I felt it traveling down my backbone like a caravan of ants, through my blood like a fleet of burning ships, to gather in my nether regions and sprout a grove of agonizing thorn trees. I cried out, feeling I was drowning in magic. Before I succumbed to my pain and fear, Amna ripped off her face to reveal she was a man in disguise, the Lord of Death. As I slumped to the forest floor, the bone-faced specter recited the fatal possibilities of the ritual, the Two Dozen Errant Paths to Destruction. It was made clear to me in my thoughts that my only salvation was in an erection.”
You can readily match the camel hair slacks with the camel hide cloak. The laughter, I’ve discussed already in relation to Vigra. This brings us to Lord Death’s recitation of the Two Dozen Errant Paths to Destruction, which, of course, is now represented by the litany of side effects. Contemporary pharmaceuticals have whittled this list down, as in the case of Doalis, to about a dozen and a half dangers. The progress of modern science. Certainly, though, Death is still at play in the ritual. In 2000, one well-known brand of drug meant to combat erectile dysfunction resulted in the deaths of over five hundred of its users. Imagine what the yearly tolls are now. And what of that disembodied voice in the commercial, the one now warning and paternal? Is this the evolution of the voice of Death? Jimmy Stewart from the 6th dimension? No longer does the cosmic spirit of Mr. Mortality command with inevitability and wrath, but now minces out warnings with a postmodern bourgeois inflection. I’m guessing that you have already apprehended where my train of thought is heading. If not, stare out the window and wait for it.
I’m moving on to one of the most significant correlations between the ritual of the order and our contemporary advertisement. As mentioned previously, the last scene of the commercial shows the man and the woman, naked, each standing in their own separate barrel, staring into a blazing sun. A curious way to end a piece that hopes to ultimately engender togetherness of a most basic sort. The iconography of the scene is rich with the spirit of the Haunted Wood, because what was noticed through time by the members of the secret society was that, although the ritual worked and an erection resulted, there was also a kind of vague apprehension that the supernatural power that produced it brought with it a kind of consciousness and gave the impression that there were now three rather than two in bed. The Order termed this threesome The Trinity. They came to understand that it was really an ancient cosmic entity out of Nature that was performing intercourse with the partner. The couple are in a blaze of passion, as the couple are in the blaze of the sun, yet they are also separated, not only as in the commercial by barrels, but also by the presence of Lord Death, who, if I may for once be straight forward to emphasize a point, is doing all the fucking. The Order, discovering this dread reality, accepted it as the price of the ritual.
Recently, a group of a hundred men were given samples of Doalis. They were later interviewed as to its effectiveness and asked to speak candidly about the experience. One statement by a retired diplomat, William Cottly, is enough evidence of the similarity of the drug’s effect with that of the ritual. “Things are definitely popping,” he said. “Doalis, like Mussolini, keeps the trains running, each boner like a moray eel in rigor mortis. But now, when I do my wife, she is constantly looking through me and whispering gibberish as if someone else is present. My dick burns from within with a dry heat. These are mere inconveniences, though, in light of the results.” And so, a bona fide endorsement from a high powered professional man, but reaching the same exact conclusion as the ancient Order of the Haunted Wood. The past, my friends, is with us.