|
Demon Horde
the concept: a heap of demonically-made-up people (red skin, pointed ears, leering expressions, barbed tails, garters and stockings on most of them) writhing with lust, either piled onto a bed or in some kind of pit, under bright red/orange lighting. i saw this image for the first time hundreds of years ago, when i was a child. it was the cover to a Black Sabbath Album - "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath", from memory - featuring red-orange demons cavorting (i say 'cavorting' because i can't remember exactly what they were doing. but i remember how it made me feel). occasionally i'd find similar images. Boris Vallejo did one. Max Ernst did one (albeit less detailed - "The Horde", 1927). i decided that it was only a persistent guilty fantasy of very religious types who railed against demons during the day but who lusted after them in dreams at night. which doesn't make it 'evil' or 'sick'; once you've labelled it and you have its causes and effects, you can avoid it. or not. it becomes just another option. i had to revise my theory when i was invited to join a friend from the Social Archaeology department in experiencing an alien Virtual Reality construct. that's what it was like; boiling inside a pool-sized jacuzzi built of molten lava, and we were flickering orange-yellow-burning-coal-coloured beings who had profiles like elf-king mantises and knowing, evil smiles. this was a very good construct; the translation from whichever alien format it had originally been in was perfect. the annoying flags that would usually pop up to say "sensations are being applied to your body which your brain is not equipped to interpret" were not present. either the aliens were fairly similar to humans, or the translator had been able to translate all of the alien sensations into human ones. there was a sense of body, and of arms and legs. the sense of touch felt amplified, or intensified, to the point where none of us could bring ourselves to touch anyone else because of the intensity of the sensations. as time went on, however, some of us became acclimatised to it and hesitantly touched fingertips to lips and so forth. |
|
|
( top )
All work on this site is © Nikolai Kingsley unless otherwise stated. |