Instant recap: As Marcus and Venus made love they expanded into Gods, who arranged a divine marriage to take place at the moment of climax. The nuptial was interrupted by the intrusion of an uninvited guest: the dark Goddess Kali, who overshadowed Venus in the midst of the sexual act.
13. Eroskrieg
The flash of fear triggered Marcus' battle-forged instinct to take the offensive. The love he had been feeling for Venus instantly turned into rage at the adversary. His erection remained at maximum calibration throughout the maneuver, and now it was primed for war. But with his inner eye he saw that Kali was about to strike with an exactly-matched counter-weapon: vagina dentata, with fangs as formidable as those protruding from her mouth, and razor-sharp incisors which he knew from a murky ancestral memory could bite through the leg of a horse. In the split-second before the yoni-jaws closed on his lingam he worked a spell to transmute its flesh into indestructible plasmant, a substance derived from the pure nothingness which underlies all creation. The teeth shattered as they clamped onto it, inflicting nary a scratch on the plasmantine cock while Kali howled in pain and outrage.
Marcus tried to withdraw his Shivalingam from the Kaliyoni, but found he could not ~ he was bound into it by a kind of suction, which was drawing him toward an orgasm that would suck out his seed. He felt sure that Kali knew of his intent to not ejaculate, and was determined to foil it. If she ingested his physical essence in this way, she would be poised to dominate him body and soul. If only he could hold out against the pull, could retain his semen and induce a mutual upgasm, the divine love and light would surely break the Kalispell, and Venus would become herself once more. As hopeful as this strategy seemed, he soon realized that it would be impossible to execute. Not only was the suction getting intolerably stronger, but he would have to actually feel a sense of loving oneness with the loathsome creature who was vampirizing his vitals and trying to destroy him.
As soon as he accepted the futility of the plan, he was able to concoct another. If Kali wanted his seed, he'd give her more than she bargained for ~ he'd marshal all his warrior-force and fire it into her like a guided missile with an atomic warhead. This, after all, was the purport of his vision in Vietnam when he incorporated Shiva the Destroyer in the image of a nuclear explosion. Since Kali was an immortal Goddess it wouldn't kill her, but it would certainly blow her away.
The sexual intensity was rapidly approaching the point of no return, but just as he psyched himself to deliver the blow, he thought: What about Venus? It was a mystery why Avice had become the mortal vehicle of Kali, but the assault he planned would kill her body, and do terrible things to her soul. He couldn't do it!
Instead he gritted his teeth and battened his hatches, and succeeded momentarily in resisting the pull of Kali upon his lingam. She flared again in rage, and conjured such a mighty numenal Charybdis that it began to suck Marcus' entire body into her gaping womb, starting with the lower half. He was aghast ~ now she would swallow him totally and steal his soul. He would be imprisoned inside her forever, just like... like....
He recoiled from the memory as from a snakebite, but the awful truth was that he had inflicted this fatal karma on himself ~ it was his payback from an event on the battlefield when he had eaten the soul of a noble enemy, and still held it captive inside himself. It was a Viet Cong who was a spiritually advanced Buddhist and martial artist, whom he had fought and killed in a gruelling one-on-one conflict. Summoned by the thought, this soul now arose within him and became aware of the situation. Would it gloat at the prospect of Marcus reaping his just desserts? No ~ it became a radiant presence, a harbinger of redemption. And Marcus knew what he had to do.
While maintaining a vice-grip on Svadhi, his sex chakra, he opened the whole length of the Shushumna above it, the subtle tube running up his spine to the top of his head. The soul of the VC flew up the passage with the speed of thought and escaped through the aperture of Brahman. There was a burst of brilliant light, for the being attained the supreme liberation in that moment, and vanished into Nirvana.
Kali was blinded by the flash and recoiled, releasing her hold on Marcus. He swiftly extricated his legs and butt from her Gorgoncunt, but she recouped just in time to grab his cock again with her labia. So here they were back in the stalemate, but Kali upped the ante: the magnitude of her form increased and grew even more diabolic. She was now a part of the Earth, as Venus had been in beatific mode; but the Kaliform opened up its deepest bowels, where the creatures of Hell disport eternally in the layers of magma.
And then she became the tree. Marcus found himself fucking the great fallen trunk of the Shakti Tree, which transmogrified into a horror out of Sleepy Hollow or the realm of C'thulhu. Clawed branches tore at his flesh and writhing limbs imprisoned his body in the bark of their grip. Furthermore, the monster reeked of the racial essence of those who had imprinted it into the tree with their rites. As noble as the Amerindians might have been in their own proper sphere, they were still dasyus ~ non-Aryans. Even if the imagery was all an illusion wrought by the Kalispell, Marcus' flesh crawled with the sense that he was repeating his other great sin in Vietnam, when he raped a native woman after a battle.
At last he realized there was no escape for him. Kali was a numenal being, not dependent on a physical body for her life and energy. Even were he able to counter every weapon she used against him, his stamina would inevitably flag ~ she would wear him down and finally slay him, just as he had done with the Viet Cong warrior. He had no choice ~ he would have to launch the bomb while he still had enough energy, and he was already seriously depleted.
What, then, of Avice? His heart ached with the prospect of doing her harm ~ and this empathy shone like a beacon through the gruesome Kaliform, enabling him to see her. She was still deep in erotic trance, though her face displayed pain and distress. The sight of the Venus-girl infused Marcus with heart-melted love and compassion. Would this hinder the martial force he had to hurl at Kali? Maybe ~ or maybe it was a solution to the devil's bargain that was foist upon him.
In the Asgartha ashram a key mental exercise was to contemplate the personal beliefs that carried the strongest emotional charge and egoic investment for you, and then to embrace the opposite of each with equal fervor. It was incredibly difficult, but when successful it broke the bond of attachment to the original subject. So now in this life-and-death challenge could Marcus sustain his raging hatred for Kali simultaneously with his love for Venus? If only he could, it might protect the innocent girl from the blast at the adversary, even though these two were nested as one. Without pause for a further thought, he plunged into the effort with all his heart and soul and will.
His body verged into orgasm, and the two forms of erotic stimulation, the martial and the sexual, fluidly melded together. This inner alchemy happened in tandem with a change in the aspect of his lover: Avice expanded back into her Venus-form, her ravishing beauty now of the same magnitude as Kali's ugly demon-form. And at the very instant that Marcus began to come, the features of the two Goddesses merged into one.
There she was, a seamless amalgam of light and dark, of all the good and evil rendered to men by women: she was the voluptuous lover and the castrating bitch, the adoring spouse and the faithless slut, Penelope and Medea, Aphrodite and Medusa. Yet somehow her face was perfect and whole, on a plateau above the conflicting antipathies.
Marcus was utterly mind-boggled, but his orgasmic fusillade was beyond recall. His nuclear-powered ejaculate struck home in the womb of KaliVenus, and she convulsed in ecstatic agony. "Yes!" she screamed, "let me have it, let me have it all! Fuck me, kill me, fuck me, kill me! I love you, I hate you, I love you, I hate you! Yes, yes, yes!"
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14. Death and Resurrection
The man and woman who embodied a God and Goddess were swept into an all-consuming mutual orgasm. In the very first pulse their eyes opened and locked into contact. In astonishment Marcus saw Venus' eyes turning into mirrors, as happened the first time he made love with Gail in Vietnam. It meant that they were about to converge into one, and then he would almost certainly be hurled back into that strange dark night where his soul was eternally alone. He tried to head it off and blinked his eyes, which momentarily stopped the meld. Venus looked incensed at this ~ her eyes widened and locked on his again and she said in a crisp, commanding voice: "Choose death and be saved."
With these words, the thickest opaque veil between human beings fell away from them, as they looked at one another and mutually realized that "I am you!" The next instant they fell all the way into each other's eyes, and were pulled up through a tunnel or tube or bottleneck, from which only One emerged at the top. As he feared, Marcus found himself back in the nightmarish emptiness, holding life in one hand and death in the other.
Marcus' previous experience of being alone in a void between life and death was described in R. Marcus Part 3: Blood and Vision
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This state has been described as the ultimate Hell, for the experiencer is overwhelmed by the subjective certainty that the entire universe has been subsumed into himself, and that he sustains it with his thunderously beating heart. On his first trip to the Ultrasphere Marcus chose life, which manifested as the conception of his son Eric in the act of love with Gail. Now Venus had adjured him to choose death, the unthinkable act which he had rejected then, out of fear that it would bring the end of everything. This decision seemed confirmed afterwards when his teacher Vasudeva explained the experience to him, and spoke of souls "who would choose death and be lost".
So here he was hoist on the cross of a supreme dilemma: should he heed the advice of his impeccable, enlightened Acarya, or of a Goddess whose will was cleanly divided between his salvation and his destruction? Though the words had come from the lips of Venus, they may have actually been spoken by Kali behind the mask. Marcus agonized over his choice for a timeless span in that realm beyond the continuum. At last he found something firm enough to lead him away from the razor's edge: the love of Venus which filled his heart. If it were an illusion or a deception, it was still worth dying for ~ this was his conviction, and steeled him to take the risk.
Thus the heart and the mind and the will of Marcus became hermetically unified, and he was ready to embrace death with his whole being. In synched response, the dread archetypal source of all death coagulated into a dagger in his right hand, which in one fell swoop he plunged into his Sacred Heart. There was a moment of shock, a sense of falling; a moment of terror, which dissolved into bliss. And then there was nothing at all. It was as if he had stepped into the darkness surrounding him and been swallowed by it, so that only the void remained.
In the next instant (or the next eternity) the nothingness exploded into infinite light and substance. It was inhabited by a Godlike consciousness of unfathomable magnitude, beyond the poles of life and death, untinged by hope or fear. This entity beheld a panorama of unending creation, worlds beyond worlds, and knew itself as their Source. Yet it had a distinct recollection of how its yang and yin halves had united on one of those small marbled orbs, and how the singular being had made the supreme sacrifice for the sake of love. Therefore the Infinite Allness beamed down an imago of itself upon that world; it descended to the hidden glade as a light-being, a humanoid shape that blazed brilliant as the Sun. It settled onto the patch of grass in the lotus posture, and gradually densified. When it reached the cusp between the astral and etheric layers of condensation, it knew it must split again in half in order to regain physical form.
The being remembered how it first came to this world in an expedition from Thule. Their lightship emerged from the white hole in the Sun; it was peopled with radiant androgynes, which split in half to become the Gods and Goddesses of the planets. This being was the one that had cleft into Mars and Venus, and now prepared to do so again, with a further condensation into the incarnate man and woman.
The glowing plasma began to fission: its head became two heads facing each other, and the same with its arms, legs, and torso. It stuck slightly at the chest, until one twin pulled back farther and retained an extra dollop of plasma which rounded into her breasts. At the next node their hearts separated plasmically but were still one in the solar radiance, a sphere that was like a living cell, with its nucleus in the heart of the yin being. When their navels drew apart, she became aware that a new plasmic form was nested inside her, and her heart's love generated a special radiance for it, one that could never be known by the yang being, though he, too, sensed the embryo's presence. Things got sticky again at the Svadhi-node, and as the yang twin pulled back, a thick tube of plasma formed between them, attached to both their sex chakras.
Mars/Marcus said to Venus/Avice: "Here was the fatal juncture which disrupted our wedding. You bear the lodestone of our love and our child inside you. Will you now surrender to me the decisive edge of power?"
"Yes, I swear it!" she sang in joy, her love effervescing as a fountain of light. At that moment the lingam snapped free of her loins, and the recoil left a hole as her yoni. In a few seconds the ether thickened to the third density, and there they sat in their physical bodies, their limbs intertwined though no longer their loins. They remained in silent embrace for a long time.
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15. The Eternal Troth
Alex Grey ~ Lovers
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The Sun was getting low, and a cool breeze roused them to get up and put on their clothes. They sat down again on the grass tete à tete and hand in hand.
"It wasn't a dream," said Venus ~ "I remember it all too clearly and it was so real. Though parts of it were like a nightmare. I mean, why in the name of God did I turn into Kali? I only knew about her from my Oriental Mythology course."
"She's universal," said.
"Like a Jungian archetype?"
"Exactly ~ and he knew too that the Gods are real, but he had to cast them in the psychological cloak to speak to the modern mind."
"Okay, I get it. So if Kali was in my unconscious, what made her pop out right at that crucial moment?"
"You flinched at the troth. You couldn't give yourself up to it unconditionally. You had reservations, a big unconscious blockage."
"Wow, I remember that now, or most of it. I said something about the Sun."
"It was the Supernal Sun, who we worship as Solarians. It's the Infinite Creator, with whom we just attained perfect identity, at least while the experience lasted."
Venus gasped as the memory flooded into her and verged into a re-experience. They hugged each other sideways and looked at the Sun in the west, bathing them not just in light but Supernal glory. When they pulled apart and resumed their talk, they sat in a residual nimbus of the divine radiance.
Marcus resumed: "You weren't being asked to give up your personal relationship with this. That wasn't the issue."
"I see that now. But what was the real issue?"
"The same one you described with your previous lovers, and very succinctly with Roger."
She thought for a moment, then said, "Dominance and submission?"
"That's it. Our conscious desires are not always the ones that drive us from the core of our beings. You wanted a dominant lover, but when you finally got him your own lust for dominance found itself thwarted."
"Oh yeah, I see it! And so my... inner Kali reared up and tried to take over!"
"Right. She always had her way with the other guys, so there was no need to get ugly about it."
This made an impact on Venus, and she paused to reflect. At length she said, "So the kind of relationship we're going to have will be a whole new experience for me." He nodded with a broad smile, and she continued: "It turns me on just thinking about it, but my conscious mind knows that it's only the bottomside of my sexual desires. And I also know from painful experience that when certain kinds of erotic fantasies come true in real life, instead of just in the bedroom or the sex club, there's a weird psychological flip that makes it awful, unbearable. Like if it were the Middle Ages and some barbarian captured me and made me his slave. Nice fantasy, horrible reality."
Marcus made a face of mock horror. "So do you think I'll brutalize and barbarize you?"
She giggled and squeezed his hands. "We're One in the Sun. How foolish if I feared you'd do that to your other half!" The divine light drew them into a tender hug and kiss. After another reflection she said, "But you have the power to do it. This is the scary new thing for me. And though you'll never abuse your power, you might use it in ways that are... very unpleasant for me. Like, hard to deal with."
"And have you never had a hard taskmaster in your young life?"
"My father sometimes, but only on hardcore issues. He's a real sweetheart ~ I'm blessed to have such a father."
"Sounds like a good precedent for your romantic sweetheart." They laughed and kissed again. Marcus said, "There are more big memories that haven't popped back into your conscious mind since the experience."
"What, things that happened up there in... Heaven? Or on the trip back to our bodies?"
"There was something that came up in our conversation in that other physical vehicle, the Range Rover."
"Oh! Our cosmic orgasm was a big disconnect from all that. But let me cast back to it." She sat and thought, and her face went through several changes of expression, until finally it lighted up. "Oh my God! The ménage à trois!"
Marcus' smile had a slight ironic twist at the corners. "You were so overwhelmed by our new love-bond that you forgot you'll have to share it." She was still stunned, and her mind refused to clarify the implications, so he continued: "'Ménage' is no longer the appropriate term ~ it has a casual ring to it, as if it were something illicit. But as it turns out, we got married here."
Her face softened and her hand pressed against her heart. "What a miracle! I'll never forget the scene with the Gods, even though it was spoiled by the... ugly part. But then the real climax was becoming One. Now I know what the Pranksters meant when they talked about merging into the White Light and becoming God. And we didn't even need acid!"
"But won't you feel like you missed out on the traditional trappings ~ standing at the altar in a gown, and all the rest of it?"
"Not a bit! The white gown is the symbol, the White Light is the reality."
Marcus did a double-take, and beamed at her. "I can see that the experience was very enlightening for you. Not many put it together so quickly."
"I know I'll never be the same! And I'm looking forward to finding out what other ways I might have changed."
"I know it'll be all for the good! But the important thing right now is that we both know that we're really married, even though no church or state will recognize it. So what does that make our triadic relationship?"
After a pause she said: "A polygamous marriage."
"Right!"
"What a mind-blower! How are we going to deal with it? I mean, apart from the illegalities and such. I'm just thinking about you and me and... Gail. Whoa!" Her face was a huge question mark.
"There are precedents," he said, "and models. As you must know from your studies, polygamy was practiced in a lot of past cultures, and still is in a few today."
"Let's see, " she said, "I know that upper-class Muslims are allowed to have four wives, and the Hindus even more, but that pretty much got squelched when the British took over."
"Ah! Interesting that you bring that up, or even psychic. Remember our talk by the creek about reincarnation?"
"Hmm... yes I do. You said that your guru helped you remember a past life."
"That's right ~ it was in India, and I had four wives. You were one of them." Venus was blown away again. He continued: "Actually I remembered that part later ~ just last night, in fact. It happened when I helped Gail to remember her last life, which was with me in India as another one of my wives."
It took a few moments for Venus' mind to unboggle, helped by a hug and a kiss. At last she said, "So none of this is any kind of accident or coincidence. We're being led along by some kind of larger destiny." Again he was impressed by her acumen, and his big-eyed smile encouraged her to continue: "I guess it'll be easier for the three of us to work things out if we really were in it together before."
"It'll make something else easier too. There's another big memory, from right before we, um, recoagulated."
This time she got it instantly: "I'm going to have a baby!"
They hugged. He said, "Sorry the tantric birth control got derailed."
Through joyful but ambivalent tears she said, "That... that's okay, it was part of the larger destiny. But what a change in... my plans, my ideas for how my life would shape up."
"The biggest change in the plan was when you met me."
"That's really true. So now you were saying that... the collective marriage in the commune will make it easier to deal with raising the baby."
"It sure will!" He pondered whether to reveal Eric's past-life identity, but shelved it for later.
Perhaps she was still tuning into the tenor of his thoughts, for she said: "The past life thing ~ for the three of us it'll be sort of like picking up where we left off. Is that the purpose of reincarnation? So people can have different kinds of relationships over a really long period of time?"
"Yes! That's one big purpose, among others."
"Wow! I can see that relationships like that could get pretty deep. It also helps to explain why some people can get deep really fast ~ like love at first sight. It's actually a reconnection from the past."
"I think our love goes back a very long way. Do you remember what you said as the Goddess?"
"That our union would be invested with an adamant... something."
"'The adamantine bond of our agelong love.' And then it got even better when we rose from the dead and came down from Heaven. Our marriage troth is rooted in that everlasting Oneness beyond space and time."
"We won't have to die again to get back to it, will we?"
"Not at all. That was the last covenant we worked out, when you gave me the power of your own free will. This created a bond that will keep Kali under control."
"So I've still got her, then?"
"You need her ~ she supplies a lot of your fire and driving force. But if she ever gets out of hand again, the fiat you gave me will enable me to deal with her on your behalf, and it'll never need to get ugly again. The shadow will loom over us now and then, and we'll have to struggle, but never again in a deadly battle of wills."
"Oh, thank God! So to get back to the luscious Oneness, we just have to..."
"Make love."
They kissed, but drew apart at the first sign of arousal, for the Sun was about to set, and they still had to trek through the tunnel and up the hill. They gathered their things and set off, and the evening twilight seemed more like a glorious dawn.
The End of the First Tale