They were priestesses, newly graduated from the divinity college of Vassar. They wore tall conical narrow-brimmed black hats, their hair was unbound and hung to their hips, their breasts were as bare as those of any other virgins; but those would have to serve for five years more before they put on the matronly bras. Not for them tonight the seed of the Sunhero; their participation was confined to initiating the ceremonies. They wore flaring bell-shaped white skirts with many petticoats beneath; some of these were belted with live and hissing rattlesnakes, the rest carried the deadly snakes around their shoulders. In their hands they held ten-foot whips made of snake hide.
Drums began beating; a bugle blared out above the drums; cymbals clanged; syrinxes shrilled.
Screaming, wild-eyed, the young priestesses ran down Pennsylvania Avenue, clearing a way before them with their whips. Suddenly they were at the gate surrounding the yard of the White House. There was a brief mock struggle as the Honor Guard pretended to resist the invasion. Some of it was not so harmless, since the archers and the priestesses had well-deserved reputations as vicious little bitches. There was a hair-pulling and scratching and breast-twisting, but the older priestesses applied their whips to the bare backs of the overenthusiastic. Howling, the girls sprang apart and quickly came to a sense of the business at hand.
These pulled out little golden sickles from their belts and brandished them in the air in a threatening but at the same time obviously ritualistic air. Suddenly, as if he had dramatically staged his entrance—and he had—John Barleycorn appeared in the main doorway of the White House. In one hand he carried a half-empty bottle of whiskey. There was no doubt where its contents had gone. He swayed back and forth and fumbled the cord at his neck before he managed to find the whistle at its end. Then he stuck the whistle in his mouth and blew shrilly.
Immediately, a howl rose from the street where the Elks were assembled.
A number of them burst past the Guard and onto the porch. These men wore little deerskin caps with toy antlers protruding from the sides, deerskin capes, and belts from which hung the tails of deer. Their breechclouts were balloons in phallic shapes. They did not run or walk but pranced on the ends of their toes, like ballet dancers, simulating the gait of a deer. They threatened the priestesses; the priestesses shrieked as if frightened and scattered to one side so the Elks could pass into the White House.
Here, inside the great reception room, John Barleycorn blew his whistle once again and lined them up according to their rank in the frat. Then he began walking unsteadily up the broad curving staircase that led to the second floor.
He disgraced himself by losing his balance and falling backwards into the arms of the chief Elk.
The chief caught the Barleycorn and shoved him to one side. In ordinary circumstances he would not have dared to deal so strongly with the Speaker of the House, but knowing that the fellow was in disgrace made him bold. The Barleycorn staggered to one side of the staircase. He fell backwards over the railing and fell on his head on the marble floor of the reception room. There he lay, his neck at an odd angle. A young priestess rushed forward, felt his pulse, looked at the glazing eyes, then drew out her golden sickle.
At that moment, a whip cracked across her bare shoulders and breasts and left a line from which blood oozed.
“What do you think you are doing?” screamed an older priestess.
The young priestess crouched low, head averted, but she did not dare to hold out her hands to protect herself from the whip.
“I was exercising my right,” she whimpered. “Great John Barleycorn is dead. I am an incarnation of the Great White Mother; I was going to reap the crop.”
“And I would not stop you,” said the older priestess. “It would be your right to castrate him—except for one thing. He died by accident, not during the Planting Rites. You know that.”
“Columbia forgive me,” whimpered the priestess. “I could not help myself. It is tonight’s doing; the coming to manhood of the son, the crowning of the Horned King, the defloration of the mascots.”
The stern face of the older priestess splintered into a smile. “I am sure that Columbia will forgive you. There is something in the air that takes us all out of our senses. It is the divine presence of the Great White Mother in Her aspect as Virginia, Bride of the Sunhero and the Great Stag. I feel it too, and—”
At that moment there was a bellow from the second story. Both women looked up. Down the steps poured the mob of Elks, and on their shoulders and hands they bore the Sunhero.
The Sunhero was a naked man magnificently built in every respect. Though he was sitting on the shoulders of two Elks, he obviously was very tall. His face, with its prominent supraorbital ridges, long hooked nose, and massive chin, could have been that of a good-looking heavyweight champion. But at this moment anything that might have evoked such terms as “handsome” or “ugly” was gone from his face. It bore a look that could only be described as “possessed.” That was exactly the term anybody in the city of Washington of the nation of Deecee would have used. His long red-gold hair hung to his shoulders. Out of the curly masses, just above the forehead and the hairline, sprouted a pair of antlers.
These were not the artificial antlers that the Elk frat wore. They were living organs.
They stood twelve inches above his head and measured sixteen inches from the outer tip of one to the outer tip of the other. They were covered with a pale shiny skin, shot through with blue blood vessels. At the base of each a great artery pulsed with the throb of the Sunhero’s heart. It was obvious that they had been grafted onto the man’s head very recently. There was dried blood at the base of the antlers.
The face of the man with the antlers would have been distinguished instantly in a crowd of citizens. The faces of the Elks and of the priestesses were individual, but all had a look that belonged to their era and could be called cervine. Triangular, with large dark eyes and long eyelashes, high cheekbones, small but full-fleshed mouths and tapering chins, they were cast in the mold of their times. But a sensitive onlooker would have known that this man on the shoulders of the cervines, this man with the face emptied of intellect, belonged to an earlier era. Just as a student of the portraits of humanity can say by looking at this face, “He belongs to the Ancient world,” or “This man was born during the Renaissance,” or “This man lived when the Industrial Age was just getting its stride,” so the student could have said, “This man was born when the Earth swarmed with humanity. He looks vaguely insectal. Yet there is a difference. He also bears the look of the original of those times—the man who managed to be an individual among the insects.”
Now the crowd carried him down the broad steps and out onto the great porch of the White House.
At his appearance a tremendous shout rose from the mob in the street. Drums thundered; bugles blared like Gabriel’s trumpet; syrinxes shrilled. The priestesses on the porch waved sickles at the men dressed like elks, but they did not cut—except by accident. The Elks on the outside of the mob shoved at the priestesses so they staggered back and fell on their backs. There they lay, their legs up in the air, screaming and writhing.
The antlered man was rushed down the sidewalk, out through the iron gates and onto the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. Here he was seated on the back of a wild-eyed black stag. The stag tried to buck and rear; but the men held on to his antlers and the long hair of his flanks and prevented him from racing headlong down the street. The man on the beast’s back grabbed its antlers to keep from being thrown. His own back arched. The muscles on his arms knotted as he forced the mighty neck back. The stag bellowed, and the whites of his eyes shone in the torchlight. Suddenly, just as it seemed his neck must break under the force of the man’s arms, he relaxed and stood trembling. Saliva drooled from his mouth, and his eyes were still wide, but they were frightened. His rider was master.
The Elks formed in ranks of twelve behind the stag and rider. Behind them was a band of musicians, also of the Elk frat. Behind them were the Moose and their musicians. Next was a group of Lions wearing panther skulls as helmets and panther skins as cloaks, the long tails dragging on the cement. They held on to the ropes of a balloon that rose twelve feet over them. This had a long sausage-shape and a swelling round nose. Beneath it hung two round gondolas in each of which sat pregnant women, throwing flowers and rice on the crowd lining the street. Behind them were the representatives of the Rooster frat carrying their totem, a tall pole surmounted by the carved head of an enormous rooster with a tall red comb and a long straight beak knobbed at the end.
Behind them, the leader of the other frats of the nation: the Elephants, the Mules, the Jackrabbits, the Trouts, the Billy Goats, and many others. Behind them, the representatives of the great sisterhoods: the Wild Does, the Queen Bees, the Wood Cats, the Lionesses, the Shrikes.
The Sunhero paid no attention to those behind him. He was staring down the street. Both sides were lined with crowds, but evidently they had not assembled by accident. They were organized into definite ranks. The group closest to the streets was composed of girls from fourteen to eighteen. They wore the highnecked, long-sleeved blouses which opened at the front to exhibit their breasts. Their legs were concealed by white bell-shaped skirts with many petticoats beneath, and their red-nailed feet wore white sandals. Their long hair was unbound and fell to their waists. Each carried a bouquet of white roses in her right hand. They were wide-eyed and eager; they screamed, over and over, “Sunhero! Horned King! Mighty Stag! Great Son and Lover!”
Behind them stood matrons who seemed, from the advice they shouted at them, to be their mothers. Those wore high-necked, long-sleeved blouses too, but their breasts were covered. Their skirts lacked the petticoats to give them the bell shape; they fell straight to the ground except in the front, where they wore, beneath the skirt, bustles to give them a pregnant appearance. Their hair was coiled up into buns and Psyche knots, and in each were stuck the stems of red roses, one for each child they had borne.
Behind the matrons stood the fathers, each clad in the garment of his particular frat and holding in one hand the totem of his frat. In the other he held a bottle from which he drank frequently and occasionally passed forward to his wife.
All were shouting and screaming, straining forward as if they would crowd onto the street. This was not in the plan, since the way had to be left open for the passage of the parade. The Honor Guards and the Vassar graduates rushed out in front of the stag and its rider. The Guard jabbed with arrows at those who crossed a white line on the curb, and the priestesses struck out with their whips. The virgins in the front ranks did not whimper or shrink at the blood drawn from them, but instead yelled as if they liked the sight of their own blood.
There was a hush. The drums and bugles and Panpipes ceased for a moment.
Maidens appeared from the White House, carrying on their shoulders and hands a chair in which lolled the body of John Barleycorn. These maidens were dressed in the garb of their sisterhood, long stiff cloths dyed green to look like corn leaves and on their heads tall yellow crowns like ears of corn. They belonged to the Corn sisterhood. They were carrying out the single male member. He was dead. But apparently the crowd did not realize it, since they laughed at the sight of the body. It was not the first time he had passed out in public, and nobody except the Corn Maidens knew the difference. They took their appointed place in the procession just behind the Guard and priestesses and just ahead of the Sunhero.
The drums began again; the bugles blared; the syrinxes shrilled; the men roared; the women screamed.
The stag lurched forward with its rider.
The man on its back had to be restrained from climbing down and joining the teen-aged girls who lined the street. They were shouting suggestions that would have made a sailor blush, and he was shouting back at them in kind. His face, which had been emptied of intellect as he came down the steps, was now demoniac. He struggled to leave the beast. When the Elks pushed him back, he hit at them with his fists. They reeled back, their noses broken and bloody, and fell on the street where the marchers trampled them. Others took their places and gripped the Sunhero with many hands.
“Hold on, Great Stag!” they shouted. “Wait until we get to the domes! There we will release you, and you may do what you want! There the High Priestess Virginia waits in the aspect of the Great White Mother as maiden! And there wait also the most beautiful mascots of Washington, tender maidens filled with the divine presence of Columbia and of America, her daughter! Waiting to be filled with the divine seed of the Son!”
The man with the antlers did not seem to hear them or to understand them—part of which might be explained by the fact that his speech, though American, was a variant of theirs. The other part was explained by the thing that possessed him. It made him deaf to anything but the roar of blood in him.
Though the paraders made an attempt to pace slowly toward their destination, six blocks away, they could not help increasing speed as they came closer. Perhaps the insults and threats of the young girls to tear them apart if they didn’t hurry had something to do with it. The whips and arrows drew more blood. The girls nevertheless pressed in, and once a girl made a fantastically high jump into the air and knocked over a priestess. She scrambled up and leaped again onto the shoulders of an Elk, but she lost her footing and fell headlong into the group. There she was treated savagely; the men ripped off her clothes, pinched and gripped her everywhere until they drew blood. One man intended to anticipate the Sunhero, but this blasphemy was prevented by others. They knocked him over the head, and then kicked the girl back into line.
“Wait your turn, honey!” they shouted. They laughed, and one yelled, “If the Great Stag isn’t enough, the little stags will accommodate you later, baby!”