(28 December 2001...February 2002)
(24 pgs.)
SYNOPSIS
In Malkuth FBI agents Ball and Drucker are in pursuit of
the new militant Promethea whilst Prometheas (5) & (6) plus Boo boo arrive
at Geburah, a Mars like location which is totally red. Prometheas (5) & (6)
are trapped in the world of shells where Asmodeus reigns in the form of a giant
spider. Back in Malkuth Promethea (2b) manages to overcome the mayors' demons by
eating them and in Geburah Promethea (6) manages to calm down and by treating
Asmodeus with respects lets him show his true aspect which is actually
human.
In our world Promethea(2b) escapes from the 2 FBI agents. Back in
Geburah Boo boo and Prometheas (5) & (6) leave to go off into Mercy.
QUOTES
“Mars sort of symbolizes anger.” – Promethea(6)
“Nah.
You’re thinking of Goofy. The planet of tantrums and brawls.” – Boo-boo, pg.
4
“…they’re a bunch of $#&in’ showoffs, treatin’ the kabbalah like a
$&in’ tourist map. They gotta ‘do’ everywhere, see?” – Boo-boo, pg 5
“I’m
still angry, but it’s not that sort of angry-horny anymore. Now it’s angry
scared. We’re someplace bad.” – Promethea(6), pg 9
“..we saw Asmodeus before.
He didn’t look like that!” – Barbara
“I do not look like anything.” –
Asmodeus, pg 10
“Sophie hurt everyone. Tricked Grace. Tricked Stacia. They’re
suffering right now.” – Asmodeus, pg 11
“Has it occurred to you that I can
banish you by simply killing your host body?” – Grace/Promethea(3)
“Has it
occurred to you that might be what we want?” – Legion of demons inhabiting Mayor
Baskerville, pgs 12-13
“A sharp lump of metal against the eternal evil within
mankind. You never know. It might work.” – Baskerville
“You know, Darling.
You’re absolutely right. How silly of me to think I need a sword against
you…when all I need is the intelligence it symbolized.” – Grace/Promethea(3), pg
14
“You’re part of us somehow, aren’t you?” – Grace/Promethea(3)
“Huh.
Even assuming that’s true, we’re clearly a part of you that you can’t control.”
– Baskerville
“No. We can’t. Not until we stop pretending that you’re some
force outside us, causing all the harm in the world. Not until we’re prepared to
own you.” – Grace/Promethea(5), pg 15
“It eats emotion, and I think it likes
anger best.” – Promethea(6)
“Approach us with fear, with hatred and revulsion
and we will be fearsome, hateful and vile. Approach us humanely and with
respect, and we will be human and respectable.” – Asmodeus, pg. 17
“We’re
much closer to you than the Gods for example. The motives of Gods are
unfathomable, whereas we demons rage and cheat and bellow. We’re like you.” –
Asmodeus, pg 17
“Like gods or angels…or humans for that matter…Demons have
many identities. We are legion.” – Asmodeus, pg. 19
“The Qlippoths are
generally understood as hells, although the word means husks or shells. It’s
what remains once the sacred energy in things has departed.” – Asmodeus, pg
19
“If Qlippoths are husks left when good departs, does that mean evil isn’t
a real thing, in itself? It’s just an absence of good, like dark’s an absence of
light?” – Promethea(6), pg 19
“We’re all part of the same thing, ain’t we?
It’s just I’m partying’ in the penthouse, while you molest first-graders in the
boiler room. You just got stuck with the dirtiest job is all. You ain’t so bad.”
- Boo-boo, pg 20
“All of us, we can only see in others what we recognize from
ourselves, okay? Now I’m an angel. We look at life, an’ that’s all we see, man.
Angels.” – Boo-boo, pg 20
“What about demons. What do they think when they
look at life?” – Barbara
“We think the angels are running a scam. That’s what
we’d be doing.” – Asmodeus, pg 21
“Show your faces here again and I’ll rape
you with burning marlinspikes.” – Asmodeus
“Heheh. Demons, man. Ya gotta love
‘em.” – Boo-boo, pg 21
NOTES & ANNOTATIONS
Geburah
Reality Creator Workbook
Series
This would probably win hands down in a competition for the reddest comic
ever published. 16 pages or two thirds of the issue are almost entirely
red.
According to the color symbolism chart on this page red
can signify:
Excitement, energy, passion, desire, speed, strength, power,
heat, love, aggression, danger, fire, blood, war, violence, all things intense
and passionate
Here's a good page if you're interested in the symbolism of colors
in the Bible.
Page 1: This is our introduction to FBI agents Lucille Ball and Karen
Breughel.
Panel 2: According to Claire Jordan:
a wet-vac is a
powerful vaccum cleaner/hoover capable of sucking up liquids (elastagel in this
case).
Panel 3: Note the AMEN sign above the Weeping Gorilla
poster.
Panel 4: The first time we find out the full name of one of
the 5 Swell Guys – Marvel William Hamilton.
Panel 5: g-men : a
g-man is an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is an abbreviation
for Government man.
Panel 6: Nice photo of Promethea sent by Bill
Woolcott’s version to Dennis Drucker.
Pages 2-3 top panel: Note the huge forearms rising from the ground
with fists clenched, wearing some sort of armour.
Page 2, panel 2:
Great Balls of Fire is a Jerry Lee Lewis song.
Here are the lyrics.
Page
3 Panel 2: Hood : A neighborhood, usually in the inner
city.
African American Vernacular English, short for
neighborhood.
Definition takes from Dictionary.com
Note the Mars symbol on the
floor.
Some information about Mars the God of War from:
Wikipedia
Messagenet
Classic
Myths
Pantheon
Page 4 Panel 2: Goofy
is a famous Walt Disney character.
Pages 6-7 top panel Coming out of
the ground are the Gods of War, justice and Strength. Who can name them?
I'm
guessing they're Horus, Ares (or Mars) and Thor but I could be wrong.
Claire
Jordan writes
Ares/Mars definitely, Thor possibly, Horus I don't think so.
If that's an Egyptian deity it should be Mont or Mentu, falcon-headed god of
war. He may also be Ashur, Assyrian god of war: there seems to be some confusion
as to who the eagle-headed and winged deity seen in Assyrian carvings is but he
is sometimes identified as Ashur.
Pages 8-9: Asmodeus in the form
of a giant spider has his sigil on his back. Here is the seal of Asmoday thanks
to TL.
It came from a German Satanists Home Page.
Asmodeus
Note
that the spider web is made up of hundreds of smaller spiders. All those weird
faces must be people whom Asmodeus has trapped.
An extract from the Alan
Moore interview in Arthur Magazine Issue
#4 page 22:
I also had an experience with a demonic creature that told me
that its name was Asmoday. Which is another name for Asmodeus. And when I
actually was allowed to see what the creature looked like, or what it was
prepared to show me, it was this…latticework. If you imagine a spider, and then
imagine multiple images of that spider, that are kind of linked together-
multiple images at different scales, that are linked together-it’s as if this
thing is moving through a different sort of time. You know Marcel Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase, where you can see all the different stages
of the movement at once? So imagine that you’ve got this spider, it was moving
around, but it was coming from background to foreground. What you get is sort of
several spiders, if you like showing the different stages of its movement. Now,
imagine all of those arranged into a kind of shimmering lattice that was turning
itself inside out as I spoke to it.
Image found on page 32 Arthur #4
shown below
For an earlier example of Asmodeus appearing in an Alan Moore story see page
171 of Across the Universe: The DC Universe stories of Alan Moore (2003)
which reprints a Secret Origins starring the Phantom Stranger story from January
1987 entitled Footsteps Asmodeus
Here are a couple of webpages with information
about Asmodeus:
Occultopedia entry
Page 10 Panel 1: Qlippoth.
Pages
10-11: Note the dead or dying tree with the serpent at the bottom just about
to swallow Malkuth.
Page 12: Geburah
Pages 14-15: Octopus like creature but with 12 legs instead of 8. A
dozenopus(?).Sun symbol above it.
Claire Jordan writes that it looks like the
head of Cthulhu.
Thanks to TL for the following:
an extract from Alan
Moore's interview with Dave Sim (Cerebus #
218)
After my initial apparent experience with non-ordinary states in
the early January of 1994, I went through a superficially similar but
subjectively very different-seeming experience about a month later, in the
February of that year. I'll leave out the details, but the upshot was that I
found myself seemingly in conversation with an entity that at first identified
itself as "One of the Nine Dukes," and then upon closer interrogation as
"Asmoday." Its "body," when I asked it to show me what it looked like, consisted
of a shifting and shimmering latticework of repeated spider motifs, all
identical but at different scales. These, while keeping their colouring
consistent, appeared to be constantly turning themselves inside out through a
spatial dimension that was foreign to me, becoming on the reverse a similar
shifting lattice, this time with a reiterated lizard motif This would turn
itself inside out and become the mesh of spiders again, and so on. As a constant
background to this effect, there was a beautiful pattern composed of
peacock's-tail eyes. The entire thing was like a 360-degree sphere or field of
presence that surrounded my head, moving and speaking lucidly to me (and with
great politeness and charm, it must be said).
As with my first experience, other magicians were with me at the time (although not the same people). I remarked to one of them at the time when I was apparently speaking to the supposed entity that it seemed to me that the creatures body was actually a sort of display, since a physical body would clearly have been completely redundant. I wondered if the "bodies" of such creatures aren't more in the nature of the "icons" that people use to represent themselves when surfing the net? Perhaps the perceived forms were more like compound symbols, characters in an unknown language that were meant to impart a kind of non-verbal information to us. At that moment, it struck me that the. entity I appeared to be seeing was conveying to me several things by its apparent form: Firstly, it was highly skilled in mathematics and in the visual arts that pertained to mathematics. Secondly, it had at least one more spatial dimension to play with than I did, and it seemed to take an almost smug delight in pointing this fact out to me. There was a quality of likeable vanity that seemed to imply that the emotional range of the entity was not vastly different from that of a human being. (This has not been the case with some of the other "species" of imaginary creature that I like to imagine I've encountered, and thus seemed worth noting.)
Days later, after the experience, I did some research to see what I could find relating to the demon Asmoday or Asmodeus as he is more often known. It seemed that Asmodeus is considered to be the patron demon of mathematics and handicraft, which fit in with my general perception of the creature but proved nothing one way or the other. There was also some fascinating material on this particular demon's ability to grant an "Asmodeus Fright," wherein the magician will be plucked up into the air by the demon and allowed to fly over his town. On looking down, the demon-borne conjuror would see all the houses below as if their roofs had been removed, so that the occupants inside could be seen going about their lives. This was a fascinating and compelling medieval image, but again didn't seem to signify for much.
Asmodeus is also mentionned in a vision of the catholic saint Francesca Romana (1384-1440). There, Asmodeus was shown to her as the demon of lust and gluttony (see Joseph Goerres, Die christliche Mystik, vol. 2 and 3, Regensburg 1838)
Page 15 Panel 3: Vepar
Vepar’s
sigil
Pages 16-17: Asmoday or Asmodeus in his spider form with the
sigil on his back.
Asmodeus
Asmoday
Page
16: panel 1: Asmoday will eat you now...Altar Ego notes
Two other
works of literature where a giant spider threatens to eat our intrepid heroes
(or in this case heroines) are Shelob in Lord of the Rings and Aragog in Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Does anyone know of any others?
Page 17
panels 1 and 3: Note the club on Asmodeus’
cheek.
Claire Jordan adds
the club on Asmoday's cheek goes with his
style of dress, which is Georgian/restoration dandy. There was a fad for
artificial "beauty spots" at the time.
Panel 4: Book of Tobit see 3:8 and
3:17
about the
Book of Tobit.
Pages 18-19: The tree of life is here shown with 7
serpents heads eating 7 sephiroth. this symbolized the Garden of Eden after the
fall. See the illustration in the Golden Dawn's 4th knowledge
lecture.
Page 18: Claire Jordan writes
note the FBI agent's
coy reference to "number two" (excrement) on the wall - which the other one then
describes as "some fancy shit" - being literally descriptive, though perhaps by
accident - I think the joke is she says "fancy shit" because that's a cliché for
anything complicated and unusual: she's not thinking about the fact that this
really *is* shit, and if she did think about real shit she too would probably
call it by some polite euphemism.
Page 21 Panel 3: Marlinspike
definition
Nautical
A pointed metal spike, used to separate strands of
rope or wire in splicing.
From Dictionary.com
Asmodeus
Page 22 all
panels: That look like the Hindu goddess Kali to me.
She
is the goddess of
dissolution and destruction.
Page 24: Note the Sunflowers an
appropriate image as the next issue is inspired by Vincent Van Gogh
Still to be
fixed up later 8 normal pages or one third
Malkuth: Evil 8 and 5 Swell
Guys
All unconscious front of mayor's office
FBI agents Ball, Lucille and
Brueghel, Karen
Marvel William Hamilton (first time we get his full
name)
G-Men
Sophie Bill Grace Green haired This is War
Fist statues in
ground pointing to the entrance to Geburha
Sphere 5 Geburha strength stern
judgement
Boo boo smoking joint once more
This hood looks tough (as in
neighbourhood)
Mars Warbringer
Angry landscape
Angels angry about
humans anger stern part bit keep eye on judgement
War is not about anger but
about strategy cold decisions cold judgeemnt only what fire stands for not real
fire
Universal will moves suns & planets not human will
Universal fire
Good not scary exhilirating powerful
Steve placid half assed
wizard
Always take this route to godhead
Wizards who offs treat Kabbalah
like a tourist map gotta "do": everywhere
Energy of god purged of impurities
anything flawed or weak
Mars tobacco smoke red war justice strength
iron
Power over darkness
All evil
Promethea end strong injustices wrath
mighty wrestlers places rush people starved poisoned was sacred our anger is
righteous
Stone evil hides find fury with nothing dark prevail rage
Don't
get angry affecting adrenaline remember your judgement or you're lost
Too
late
Angry horny angry scared
Bad world of shells
Black bark other side
of tree
Demon regent Asmodeus
Slippoth adverse tree of life spritual
anti-matter
I do not look like anything
Wrathful forever in red
Hate
beetles in your womb devour you
Fat stupid bragging anger pissing
wretchedness
Hate myself fat old woman get off I'll kill you
Scorned her
mother ignored her husband ugly worthless squirming in muck
Trash ignorant
little bitch
Sophie hurt everyone, tricked Grace, Stacis suffering right
now
You're not asmodeus He had 3 heads and rode a dragon
Demons cannot lie
we are more than one identity one place
Asmodeus trapped Qlippoth
Geburah
Our self in the scarlet place has broken contact. Can't watch
comrades tortured in hell illusion demoralize lying we can't lie
Stinking
little disease anger I can banish you by simply killing your host body
That
might be what we want death of a blameless mentally ill man
Better out than
in
Smelly little monsters. Solomon died before he could banish you. That's
why you're all still here
Impressive ritual sword
Slashing sharp lump
metal vs. eternal evil within mankind
How silly of me sword intelligence it
symbolized. Demons psychotic little weevils
Hell delights ruin humanity
Poppet eternal evil within mankind.
Part of us a part of you that you
can't control
Not until we stop pretending that you're some force outside us
causing all the harm in the world
Not until we're prepared to own you.
Opposite of disowning you, pretending you're not part of
us
Vepar
Turbulence kill men cruelly I've done that. Not very palatable or
easy to swallow worst bits of us never are…dearhearts…entrée
Asmoday (not
Asmodeus) will eat you now Grace surrounded devils picture vanished dead chewing
our emotions it likes anger best
Scum filth no hate fear anger chews stuff up
and feeds it back to us
Lord Asmodeus w're traspassing here & treated you
without respect Forgive us
Bubbles fade…much better…human
Approach us with
fear, hatred revulsion and we sill be fearsome hatefull and vile. Approach us
humanely & with respect & wel will be human and respectable
You
reflect us somehow don't you?
Motives of gods unfathomable whereas we demons
rage & cheat & bellow. We're like you. We're much closer to you than the
gods.
Ancient Persia I loved human princess afraid she married a mortal
killed him on their wedding night seven in all. 7 tombs for 7
grooms.
Biblical Apocrypha Book ot Tobit
How I came to be associated with
anger & wrath.
Anger is Grace's weakness
Finally learned to swallow
her anger along with everything else
Legs slug..no. 2 on the wall..demon
signatures…want to ask some questions about Dennis Drucker
Once sh'd eaten
all the demons including me she just flew away
Demons have many identities.
We are legion
Qlippoths generally understood as shells word means husks or
shells…what remains once the sacred energy in things has departed
Sacred
energy is meaning meaning moves on thing becomes a husk
Beauty without
meaning is hollow pride
Stern judgement without judgement becomes empty
rage
Hust shell qlippoth me
Evil absence of good. Dark absence of
light
Killing 7 of your girlfirend's fiances & sending her nuts isn't
called love stalking…Drove into Egypt burning incense & fish livers
Holy
Guardian Angel holidays
I am you you dope
Brimstone boy we're all part of
the same thing ain't we
You really like him.
You think the best of
everybody because that's what's in you
Universe not cruel unkind
Just
acan't afford to get sentimental…judgement stern energies work pure nothing
unworthy no crap
Geburh's where the world gets the shit beaten out of
it
Gets me hot
Violent sex raging volcanos
Soldier boy
atmosphere
Cute breath sex
Strength don't only use it for fighting…any
decisive activity
19 Strength lust broad lion rollin' rock
2 meaning
strength to mercy
some drunk ho' riding a lion amoral strength
compassion
judgement tempered with mercy blue