There are certain clap-bookers and clap-trappers who are making artificial men, or introducing artificial elements into real men. And these artificial contrivances are then able to stride about on their own movement like godlings.
Tractatus, Lament of the TimesIntroduction
Not to Mention Camels is a metaphysical novel about identity, consciousness, and moral consequence across multiple worlds. The narrative follows a protagonist known by several names (Pilger Tisman, Pilgrim Dusmano, Polder Dossman) as he traverses "alternate" or "aspect" worlds through the mechanism of death, evading ultimate accountability while accumulating power as a cult figure.
The novel begins and ends with a death-weighing. It opens with the execution and "world-jump" of Pilger Tisman and closes with the execution and apparent damnation of Polder Dossman. Chapter 11 calls Tisman and Dossman persons of the same complex. It does not explain whether they are also the same person.
Premise
Pilgrim teaches that billions of alternate worlds occupy the same local space and that skilled world-jumpers can carry memory and identity beyond death. He makes this the basis of a promise that consequences, debts, and guilt can be escaped, and the plot follows his attempts to make good on it.
Pilgrim admits a dangerous possibility: Prime World, the original required by his own reasoning about copies. He fears it as the place where logic and final accounting prevail. Although he treats the risk of reaching it as negligible, the possibility undermines his claim to limitless escape.
Structure
Opening: The Execution of Tisman
Chapter 1
Pilger Tisman, a cult figure convicted of "shockingly murderous and irresponsible deeds," is executed by mustard gas while doctors attempt to prevent his consciousness from escaping. Despite their efforts, he successfully world-jumps, his "person-tone" sounding triumphant and mocking as it departs.
Ending: The Execution of Dossman
Chapter 15
Polder Dossman, having risen and fallen as a cult figure, dies in circumstances that echo Tisman's execution. After his apparent extinction, screaming is heard deep beneath the witnesses. The ending points toward damnation, though the narrator insists that the screaming must be an imitation.
The Fifteen-Year Question
The narrative states that the central action occurs "about fifteen years" after Tisman's execution, then qualifies the figure: "Or it may be that a fifteen-year leap to upstream cliffs had created the illusion of such an interval." The qualification follows from the novel's metaphysics, in which time and sequence operate differently across worlds. The protagonist's manipulation of both is part of his power and contributes to his eventual undoing.
The Three Movements
After the opening chapter, the narrative falls into three broad movements. Each movement follows a different aspect of the protagonist, and the aspects are related persons within one complex of identities.
Movement I: Pilgrim Dusmano
Chapters 2–9
After world-jumping from his execution as Pilger Tisman, the protagonist resurfaces as Pilgrim Dusmano, a charismatic lecturer at Rampart University who preaches amorality: "Recompense cannot be real; debt and guilt are not real; punishment and death are only illusions." He encourages students to master world-jumping, to "kill themselves strategically," to treat existence as infinitely renewable.
Pilgrim runs a mysterious import business where commodities arrive through "the slight deplacement of two coincident worlds," so that his commerce depends on the same metaphysics he teaches. He has "half a dozen simultaneous lives" and a growing cult of devotees. But he also has enemies: Cyrus Evenhand, holder of a supreme secret office, commands eight henchmen (Blut, Brut, Flut, Glut, Gut, Hut, Mut, Wut) sworn to destroy him. And he has one "powerful friend," Noah Zontik, the "umbrella man," whom God has commissioned to protect Pilgrim even into hell.
Pilgrim commissions a knacker to seize the fortunes of Evenhand and his henchmen. When the two quarrel over payment, Mary Morey eviscerates the knacker and James fills and coats his corpse with molten gold. This gilded body becomes the Holy Knacker, installed in the Golden Grotto. Pilgrim is subsequently captured and executed by horses in Chapter 8; Chapter 9 follows him and his companions through the Narrow Corner.
Movement II: The Legacy Worlds
Chapters 10–11
The novel moves to Cannes World, one of the Nine Worlds of the Legacy, a celestial pleasure-realm reserved for the rich. The epigraph introduces a theological loophole: "The rich have a special Legacy: The Nine Lives to La Spezia. After they die they are permitted to live nine more lives of pleasure almost hysterical in its immediacy and extent before they go to hell."
Here the protagonist appears as Pelion Tuscamondo, watching the Perpetual Animation Festival, where live actors are dismembered for entertainment. Through Albert Fineface, he buys publication of his personal testament in the Group Unconscious, the ocean underlying minds and creatures. Chapter 11 shifts the focus to Palgrave Tacoman on Oraioi Polloi. Despite Lorica's warning and offer of free transcendence, Palgrave pays Aurelion to advance his admission among the archetypal devil-angels, then dies in a ritual boar hunt.
These chapters extend the protagonist's ambition from world-jumping to shaping the minds of others. The Nine Worlds exist outside time: their inhabitants' aspects continue enjoying them forever, even when another aspect suffers elsewhere.
Movement III: Polder Dossman
Chapters 12–15
On a stark, sharply drawn world, the protagonist is Polder Dossman, rebuilding his cult. Hector Bogus, a local Eidolon and Media Lord whom Polder recognizes as a counterpart of Trenchant, becomes his reluctant promoter and eventual tormentor. Og Scath, corresponding to Noah Zontik and Lorica, acts as protector. Polder claims the restored zodiacal signs of the camel and the boar.
Polder succeeds in moving Shining Mountain, but the exertion breaks him and the equal opposing force dissolves his cult. His decline culminates in the death-weighing of Chapter 15. The doctors find human flesh, eidolon fiber, and regressive or camel flesh mixed together and conclude that he is an experimental model assembled and altered over time.
In the final scene, Hector Bogus torments a still-fluttering sliver of Polder's heart in a cabinet. The sliver stops, but after three seconds Polder is heard screaming far below. He has died convinced that this is Prime World; Bogus disputes the likelihood. The scream points toward damnation, although the narrator calls it an imitation of a soul in hell.
The Nature of the Protagonist
Throughout the novel, questions accumulate about the protagonist's nature. The doctors' final analysis finds him composed of three substances:
Human Flesh
The remnant of whatever original person he once was. The doctors note that "human remnants are easily discoverable."
Eidolon Fiber
Artificial material added by "eidolon-masters" who saw he was "an incurable rogue anyhow" and made him an experimental model.
Regressed Flesh
"The humpbacked clay," the primordial flesh associated with the camel, which is his totem animal and the source of his power.
Noah Zontik offers another account. He calls the protagonist a "projection of several hundred very bright persons," a composite formed by the collective imagination of his cult. "We project what we want to be. Apparently we want to be crawling evil things."
The Camel Motif
The novel's title points to the camel, which recurs throughout as a symbol. The camel is described as "second-best in everything": as steed, pack animal, draft animal, and source of by-products. It stands for the protagonist's nature, which is nearly the best, slightly deficient, and a substitute for something more authentic. The camel is also his "totem animal" and the source of his regressed flesh.
The camel also invokes the biblical image of the needle's eye. The rich have their Nine Lives to La Spezia, but those timeless pleasures do not spare the protagonist's tenth aspect its suffering. Because pleasure in the Legacy Worlds and perdition for another aspect coexist, his claimed escape from moral consequence is incomplete.
Thematic Summary
Not to Mention Camels is centrally concerned with moral consequence. Unlike the protagonists of Fourth Mansions or Past Master, Pilgrim/Polder is evil: a murderer, a manipulator, and a corrupter of souls. The novel examines whether evil can escape consequence by fleeing through parallel worlds, whether the rich can buy their way out of judgment, and whether an artificial man can be damned.
The final scream contradicts the protagonist's promise of escape without consequence, although the narrator insists, ironically, that it must be an imitation.
A Mystery
One mystery surrounding the novel is the following note in one of Lafferty's reading copies. What Lafferty meant by "do not use" is unknown.
Chapter Guide
Summary and analysis of each chapter, with epigraphs and key passages
[About: The Execution of Pilger Tisman]
"With mortal coil in death uncurled / And body ripe to dump or doff it. . ."
With mortal coil in death uncurled
And body ripe to dump or doff it,
We stand like dummies on a world
Or be like sharpies jumping off it.
Summary
Pilger Tisman, a cult figure convicted of "shockingly murderous and irresponsible deeds," lies dying in a medical amphitheater, attended by three doctors (Wilcove Funk, Jon Austin, and Jude Ravel), a coroner, and a brigadier of police. His sentence mandates he "die with discomfort" (via Yperite/mustard gas) and "take nothing with him."
The doctors are engaged in an unusual task: "weighing" Tisman's death. In this setting, a small percentage of dying persons, and two-thirds of cult figures, manage to "take something with them" when they die: typically memory, identity, or consciousness. These elements are physically weighable, and the doctors use special equipment to prevent Tisman from world-jumping.
Dr. Funk is described as having a "huge head, with heavy orbital ridges" and a "protruding muzzle," with "great good humor" and "a steep amount of animal in him." He notes that Tisman is a "frustrated-in-death man" and a "betrayed-in-death cult figure" who failed to deliver his planned showy death. He adds that "that girl" (Maria del Mar), who was "responsible for many of the showy elements of his career," might have reminded him of his planned death scene had she been present.
The chapter introduces several concepts: the cerebral juglans (the "remembering acorn," a brain nodule containing compressed memory essences, which Funk has "marred" in an attempt to prevent escape); the person-tone or call-tone (an audio translation of one's aura, unique to each person); and the corona spectrum (the electrical shell surrounding a person, translatable into light and color). Tisman's readings are exceptional on every measure. His aura contains "a hundred nonchromatic colors" and his tone is "a whole orchestra full of randy harmonics." His humor, even in delirium, is feared: "large, craggy, towering humor, outrageous, noisy, overflowing, and fearsome."
The brigadier grows increasingly hostile, demanding Tisman "expire evenly, quickly, and forever" with no "echo, or any afterglow or after-sound." When the coroner detects delta pattern impulses (about three per second), a sign that Tisman is "getting ready for a leap," the brigadier orders: "Stomp on his damned fingers! . . . Don’t give him a handhold. . . . We want him dead and done for."
The doctors paralyze his centers, mar his juglans, and dim his corona, but they fail. Three seconds after Tisman is declared dead, his cerebral juglans collapses as its content is physically removed ("Someone had stolen the meat from that acorn"). His aura flickers outside the body at a distance, then flicks "out of the world." His person-tone sounds again "triumphant in its resurrection" and mockingly takes up the tune of a current song hit. The brigadier shouts "Heads will roll!" Dr. Ravel grimaces and whistles the hit song of that title, whereupon Tisman's departed tone joins the tune, creating "horror and ultra-purple fun."
Dr. Funk conceals something Tisman left behind, a "token" that "shone through the flesh and bones of his hand" and "occupied the world, in a very thin but complete manner." He hides this for days.
Tisman's burial is attended by only two mourners: Maria del Mar and her brother Jacob del Mar, who hangs back at a distance with "silent, sobbing motion." The chapter closes with a note on time: "All of this happened about fifteen years before our subsequent action. Or it may be that a fifteen-year leap to upstream cliffs had created the illusion of such an interval."
Key Passages
We still don't know what death is, but we do know that nothing ever winds all the way down without winding something else up.
Dr. Wilcove FunkThere should be several special categories for them: possibly, 'Dead, subject to continuance,' or, 'Not so dead as all that.' Alive and dead surely aren't the only two alternatives.
The CoronerI tell you that this man is a dazzle!
Dr. Jon Austin, on Tisman's auraThat man-tone had better not be heard from some location outside the body. . . It had better not sound again. And it had better not mock.
The Brigadier of PoliceAnalysis
Chapter 1 introduces the death-weighing that Chapter 15 repeats, as well as the novel's central metaphysical premise, that a person can pass through death and survive it. The doctors' failure to prevent Tisman's escape shows the protagonist's power. The brigadier's fury introduces the political dimension, since he is "firmly under the finger" of Tisman's "one powerful enemy."
The “Heads Will Roll” moment, in which Ravel whistles the hit song and Tisman's departed tone joins it, blends horror and dark comedy and turns the brigadier's threat of punishment into a joke at the officials' expense.
The parallel naming of mourners (Maria/Jacob del Mar) with later characters (Mary/James Morey; Moira/Jake Mara) hints at the name-shifting that will characterize the novel's treatment of identity across worlds. Dr. Funk's concealment of Tisman's residue, which "occupied the world, in a very thin but complete manner," foreshadows the ghost worlds and counterworlds that cult figures create.
[About: The Philosophy of World-Jumping]
"With stones for bread, for fishes snakes. . ."
With stones for bread, for fishes snakes,
For men synthetic leaders chilly,
The god Electronus now makes
Creations of Old God look silly.
Summary
The chapter opens with a cosmological exposition presenting three apparently contradictory beliefs about reality, all of which it declares equally correct. Scientists posit billions of worlds scattered through space; "fringies" believe billions of alternate worlds occupy the same local space; transmigrationists hold there is one world with a fixed number of souls (about 3.5 billion), with "three of every four persons" being mere "reflections." Pilgrim Dusmano teaches his students that these are "three aspects of the same thing" requiring only "a tri-mental view of space and of being."
Dusmano lectures at Rampart University, propounding amorality: "Recompense cannot be real; debt and guilt are not real; punishment and death are only illusions." He encourages his students to master world-jumping, to select their destinations, even to kill themselves strategically: "Self-destruction is one strong possibility that is always open to us." He mentions exotic destinations, among them an environs where young males were "horned and hoofed during the rutting season," and he insists these worlds are "about as real as the world we're in now."
The students respond variously. James Morey admits he doesn't understand Dusmano "in this world," reasoning that if the multiverse theory is true, some alternate self must understand. Rhinestone Suderman, a "large, fair-haired young female person," declares "Mr. Dusmano is right, of course, but I don't understand him," confessing paradoxically that she "keeps knowing" she's attracted to him despite denying it. Howard Praise asks directly: "Sir, are you really suggesting that we kill ourselves?" Dusmano confirms pleasantly.
Student Mary Morey, a "freckled, rusty-haired, unlarge girl" with eyes in "high relief," presses him about "the catch." She insists: "Anything that can be named has its chance of happening. . . Name the catch to us." Dusmano refuses with "sudden starkness": "No! I'll not name it to you! I'll not think of it at all!. . . Never, never think of the extremely improbable failure. That way is madness." After he leaves, Rhinestone proposes forming a cult: "We’re compelled to. . . . By a compulsion, of course. By a blind compulsion." She suggests calling Dusmano "chaotic" rather than "mixed up": "This gives us more scope."
Later, in the Prismatic Room of the Personage Club, Dusmano reveals "the catch" to Noah Zontik: Prime World. Though the odds of landing there are "as small as a grain of sand compared to a solar system," Prime World is where "logic would prevail," where "they keep accounts," where the four eschatological things (death, judgment, heaven, hell) are real. "Oh, Noah, would I ever have to pay!"
Noah challenges Pilgrim's self-image as a "prime person," arguing that he is instead a "derivative," "the projection of several hundred very bright persons," a "shimmering sundog" cast by dull prime flesh. "Only ionized gas can shine with such light. And the most shining gas of all is swamp gas."
Agitated, Pilgrim twists his small scarf ("the scarf with which I do small miracles"), and it expands into a mantle or cloak. Arrayed in it, he goes "right through the walls of the Prismatic Room and the Personage Club in incipient flight," ascending with finesse and covering half a city in seconds. Noah watches from the window, muttering "I never will know how he does such things."
Halfway across town, Pilgrim descends into an unspecified house and "quickly killed a startled man there," one of Cyrus Evenhand's eight henchmen (code-named "Hut"). With his dying breath, the victim rasps: "A bit casual, was it not?" The narrator agrees that the killing was sordid and inelegant and that the cult narrative will need to recast it. Pilgrim himself thinks: "This will have to be heavily redacted, revised, scripted, dramatized, before it can enter into the gestes of my cult."
Evenhand, revealed as a "good man" working behind a mask, learns of his associate's death and sets his other henchmen to watch Dusmano. The chapter concludes with Noah Zontik's backstory: God directly ordered him to be Pilgrim's "friend and shield," warning that if Pilgrim "goes to hell for a final place, you will go there too."
Key Passages
The space of the countless universes . . . was identical with the familiar local space and was in no way larger than that local space. . . . A man with a good right arm might throw a stone clear across space, but of course it would be an endless rock that he threw.
Prime World is murk, it is mud, it is miasmic fever. It would not be possible to world-jump from Prime. Hairy and fetish hands coming out of that earth would grip one about the ankles. . . According to students of that dark contingency, there are only two ways off of Prime World. And the one of the two that sounds the most bearable to me is named hell.
Pilgrim DusmanoYou are not a dull, muddy, logical, fevered, low-sky original, Pilgrim. You are an exciting, though shallow, derivative. . . You are a projection, even a secondary projection, and you catch the light, as do all such gaseous projections.
Noah ZontikSay that he's 'chaotic,' rather. . . This gives us more scope. . . Let us start it on the broadest possible basis: chaos. Dusmano is our man, the chaotic man, soon to be more than man, with our aid.
Rhinestone Suderman, on cult formationAnalysis
This chapter sets out the novel's philosophical premise, a multiverse in which moral consequence can be evaded except in the single case of Prime World. The conversation between Pilgrim and Noah reverses Pilgrim's assumptions. If Prime World is degraded and fetishistic, then "prime people" would be the sordid originals, and the glamorous Pilgrim would be derivative shimmer. The argument disturbs Pilgrim, who insists "I am an authentic original" while his behavior bears out Noah's description.
The students' responses show different relationships to charismatic evil. James Morey's observation that alternate selves might understand Dusmano reflects the novel's theme of fractured identity. Rhinestone's "chaotic man" speech suggests that cults manufacture their own theology, since she chooses chaos over confusion because it "gives more scope." Mary Morey, who becomes the protagonist's most constant companion, already shows the part she will play. She is partisan but clear-eyed, and she demands that the catch be named.
The murder of Hut, and especially Pilgrim's thought that it must be "redacted, revised, scripted, dramatized" for his cult, shows how Media Lords operate. The act is sordid, and the legend has to be constructed afterward. The victim's dying words ("A bit casual, was it not?") pass an aesthetic judgment on evil done without style.
The introduction of Evenhand, who is good, masked, and anonymous, establishes the political dimension. In this "postanarchic" world, rulers must stay hidden or be destroyed. Pilgrim's graceless murder of Hut begins the war between the two men.
[About: The Commerce of Worlds]
"Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons. . ."
Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons that know not how to distinguish their right hand from their left, not to mention many camels.
God (Jonah 4:11)Summary
The chapter reveals Pilgrim Dusmano's "half a dozen simultaneous lives." Each morning follows a pattern: first, cultivating students at Rampart University (grafting selected brain scions onto them); then political machinations with Noah Zontik; finally, attending to his mysterious commerce. Manipulating minds is described as one of his "high pleasures." He lives "entirely for pleasure," lacks conscience, and selects the most exquisite pleasures, including "moulding, sometimes eradicating, sometimes forcing, sometimes raping these minds and psyches and individualities."
Pilgrim is described physically: handsome, with contoured and flowing fair hair, a powerful yet intricate, almost feminine voice, entering early middle age. He cultivates his shimmer and dazzle partly by paying the popular press to call him "hypnotic, electric, magnetic, transcendent."
Most of the chapter concerns Pilgrim's import business. Its anomaly is that he "could not quite remember where he got the stuff he sold." His main terminal features a "shimmering and enigmatic floor" that seems to smell of "bi-location." Millions of tons of commodities arrive through "One Smooth Operation," not by teleportation or any visible conveyance. A bright student theorizes it involves "the slight deplacement of two coincident worlds" generating "incredible force."
The trade requires that "messengers" be sent to "Supply" every week. Employee Aubrey Pym asks for a raise; Pilgrim selects him and his family as this week's messengers. The process requires specific conditions: "apprehensive, nervous, determined, daring, creative in mind for the saving of your persons." Pilgrim admits he doesn't remember what he does to send them: "there's a sort of haziness involved whenever a messenger is sent, as though there were something so outrageous about the manner of sending that the whole business had to be kept hazy."
The destination is "Dongola," a name Pilgrim intuits but cannot explain knowing. Mrs. Pym recalls the Hemsteds went there earlier that year, noting "it's far, little known," and those who go "forget those left behind." When Pilgrim grants Aubrey a doubled salary with fringes like the bangles on a carnival girl's jacket, the smaller Pym child remarks: "Showy, but not cover much."
A voxo call interrupts: Noah Zontik demands angrily why Pilgrim killed "Hut" that morning. Pilgrim explains that Hut (one of Evenhand's eight associates) was arrogant, and "it gives me pleasure to kill arrogant men." He calls the killing his "ante in the game," a necessary declaration of war, since a cult figure needs a well-known group to oppose him.
The chapter also introduces Dunlunk's Fifth Law: "Any action in any world will inevitably set up parallel actions in parallel worlds." The law explains why Pilgrim cultivates students even though he will not stay long, since his influence carries into corresponding worlds. The chapter ends as "blind lightning" strikes.
Key Passages
He was a walnut with a small and tasteless meat inside. But it was recognized that he was of a rare and special species, and somewhere out of the encounter with him there would be a more ample and a nuttier harvest.
Pilgrim lived entirely for pleasure; that much must be understood about him. He hadn't any conscience; one who travels as often and as far as Pilgrim did must lighten his baggage of all such unessentials.
'To be in the right frame of mind is a requirement for arriving at a new frame of existence'—that's a motto that we jumpers often use among ourselves.
Pilgrim DusmanoWhy did you kill Hut this morning?. . . He has been arrogant with me in the past, Noah, and it gives me pleasure to kill arrogant men.
Noah Zontik and Pilgrim DusmanoAnalysis
The chapter's epigraph, from Jonah and the source of the novel's title, stresses moral ignorance ("know not how to distinguish their right hand from their left") alongside the literal camels, which gain significance as the novel proceeds. In the passage, God's concern extends to those who cannot distinguish good from evil.
The commerce shows the cost of Pilgrim's world-jumping. He profits from connections between worlds, and "messenger" families sent into the unknown pay for it. The enforced forgetting, both Pilgrim's and his employees', suggests that the mechanism is too terrible to know consciously. Chapter 4 reveals the Pyms' dispatch to be ritual murder.
The voxo call about Hut's death connects Chapters 2 and 3 by giving Pilgrim's "casual" murder a name, a context, and consequences. Noah's angry question shows that the war with Evenhand has begun: "which one of us will they kill for the next action? You, Pilgrim, or me?"
[About: Blood and Intelligence]
"In calm agenda of the day / Why should such mere dispatch be chilling?"
In calm agenda of the day
Why should such mere dispatch be chilling?
A jeweled glance, five pints to pay,
A kid that took a lot of killing.
Summary
Pilgrim is attacked at the commodity arrival area by a man of great strength, Mut (code-name "Courage"), one of Evenhand's henchmen. The attacker performs a "ritual killing," drawing five pints of Pilgrim's blood into an antique tankard while Pilgrim prepares for a world-jump. Pilgrim's hands are free, and while he is being bled he picks Mut's pocket and takes his wallet.
Pilgrim survives the attack (a "short ritual sleep or death") and discovers something has changed: "There had been a change in his eyes. It was as if they were really opened for the first time. Much brighter, but much more fractured." His eyes have become jeweled and inhuman.
The wallet reveals Evenhand's entire network. The eight henchmen have German-derived code names: Blut (blood/family), Brut (brood/spawn), Flut (flood), Glut (blaze), Gut (property), Hut (shelter; killed in Chapter 2), Mut (courage, "but careless"), and Wut (rage). Evenhand's own code is Rut, "the rod or the scepter or the authority." Pilgrim realizes Evenhand holds the highest secret office: "the holder of the office like none other in the country." He decides to destroy this "good giant."
Meanwhile, Evenhand learns from Mut that "about Dusmano, he bleeds red," so he is probably human. Mut offers to "rip out the software," but Evenhand restrains him. Then Mut drinks the five pints of Pilgrim's blood "in one big draft."
At the chapter's climax, Pilgrim sends the Pym family as "messengers" by cutting their throats with a ritual stone knife on stone benches. The family accepts its fate with docility, except the youngest child, who glares with "basilisk's eyes" and threatens: "I'll hide in the passages and in the glaciers, and I'll trap you there. . . I'll knock you clear into hell when you try to pass." Pilgrim has "one hell of a time cutting that kid's throat." Afterward, he feeds the bodies through a "people-grinder," but one hate-filled eye survives, "riding the remaining effluvium" and glaring at him.
Key Passages
The jumpers have a saying that an unprepared death may cost one the advantage of two or even three lives. And the jumpers also have a saying about being on the wrong end of a ritual killing.
I hadn't any idea that Evenhand was so innocent a man as that. . . so absolutely spotless a man. But he has been certified so or he would not occupy such office. Well, I hold no brief for innocence or goodness or spotlessness. They have no more than clinical interest for me.
You can cut my head clear off, but you can't kill me. You might be able to send me away from here, but I'm not going to go all the way to there. I'll hide in the passages and in the glaciers, and I'll trap you there the next time you have to travel.
The younger Pym childAnalysis
The epigraph anticipates the chapter's main events: "jeweled glance" (Pilgrim's new eyes), "five pints to pay" (the blood ritual), "a kid that took a lot of killing" (the defiant child). The chapter reveals that Pilgrim's commerce depends on human sacrifice and shows that a victim may become a threat across worlds.
Mut's blood-drinking and Evenhand's restraint set the two in contrast. Evenhand is the "spotless" ruler who externalizes his "spots" into his henchmen. The chapter also clarifies the political structure. In the postanarchic world, rulers must be anonymous and certified innocent, and they delegate their necessary violence.
[About: Image and Shadow]
"An idol-thing with jewel eyes / And kindness' milk grown thicker, curder. . ."
An idol-thing with jewel eyes
And kindness' milk grown thicker, curder,
With tampered shadows, Scanlon skies,
And token, microcosmic murder.
Summary
Pilgrim leaks Evenhand's identity to multimedia reporter Randal Muckman in three words: "Evenhand is Consul." The information spreads instantly via Muckman's "tinsel broadcast," attributed to "a high, wide (of the mark sometimes), and handsome source," which the intelligent populace understands to mean the devious Pilgrim.
At the Daylight Museum, Pilgrim works on his image-creation with Mary Morey, who notices his transformed eyes: "Your eyes look funny today. . . like cracked glass or jewel." James Morey lurks in the shadows, in keeping with the pattern that defines the pair: "Mary in the sunlight, James in the shadows." Experiments have suggested that "Mary had no shadow at all except her brother James."
The museum curator observes Pilgrim's abnormal shadows: "He exteriorizes badly or unevenly. . . There's a lot of raw bloodiness associated with his pleasures. Where else would those red tinges in all his shadows come from?" Pilgrim's shadows change even when he doesn't move, throwing "whole parades" independent of him. The curator suggests "the shadows may have been prime, and the fleshed Pilgrim may have been derivative." He suspects that Pilgrim is insane but can "leave off being insane anytime he wishes," and that he sets aside time each day to enjoy insanity as "a planned pleasure."
Among new exhibits from "Melchisedech Duffy's Walk-In Bijou in New Orleans" is a wooden statuette by Groben with live eyes, small brown eyes that "snapped" and "crackled." Mary recognizes them as Pilgrim's old eyes, now that he has dead jeweled ones. Disturbed, Pilgrim orders James to drown the statuette in a crock of water, a "microcosmic murder" of his former, living self. James reports: "It’s hard to hold him down. . . . He’s in panic. . . . The statuette is screaming underwater."
When the curator learns that Evenhand is Consul, Pilgrim celebrates the prospect of a collective killing. He calls it a devil-revel and a national pleasure, especially intense because the victim is good. The curator's horror contrasts with Pilgrim's delight in turning public murder into ritual and heritage.
The curator shows Pilgrim an eyepiece from the mask of a Consul destroyed in his father's time. Pilgrim distinguishes tragedy from his preferred Greek Katastrophy, a collective ritual of torture and murder. Their discussion of statues and icons also links successful image-making to material empty of personality, a thought that reassures Pilgrim about his own cult image.
Key Passages
The shadows may have been prime, and the fleshed Pilgrim may have been derivative. One fleshed shadow is easier to posit than that all those snapping lively things were the shadows.
He is a pleasure seeker in all things, but for balance he pushes it too far. There's a lot of raw bloodiness associated with his pleasures. . . I suspect he's insane, but I believe he can leave off being insane anytime he wishes. It's a case, though, where he will set aside a special half hour here, an hour there during the day in which to enjoy his insanity.
The Museum CuratorCurator, we kill him because he is Consul. And because he is a known man now and is vulnerable to be destroyed. And because it is almost the most burning pleasure of them all to destroy a marked person utterly.
Pilgrim DusmanoThe people! The people know not how to distinguish between their right hand and their left. . . Fortunately we have instant agitators. . . We will force the people to partake of the strong pleasure.
Pilgrim Dusmano (echoing the Jonah epigraph)Analysis
The epigraph again anticipates the chapter's images: "idol-thing with jewel eyes," "tampered shadows," "microcosmic murder." The Daylight Museum and its rules (no color causing fever rise above four points, no "unease index" exceeding 75/62) contrast with Pilgrim's bloody shadow-play. The novel's world contains multiple museums for different tastes, including a literal "hell (out in the Southgate complex)."
The live-eyed statuette gives physical form to the question of where Pilgrim's humanity has gone. His old eyes live on elsewhere, while his current eyes are dead jewels. The drowning is a symbolic self-murder that destroys what is left of his living nature. James's report that the statuette is "screaming underwater" makes clear that it suffers.
Pilgrim's speech about destroying the Consul echoes the novel's epigraph from Jonah: "The people know not how to distinguish between their right hand and their left." He embraces this moral confusion, using "instant agitators" to channel collective bloodlust. The "Greek Katastrophy," the ritual torture and murder of a virgin or innocent, becomes the novel's model for political destruction, in which the pleasure lies in destroying goodness because it is good.
[About: The Media Lords]
"Eclectic outrage is our rule: / To strain at gnats that soil and sin us. . ."
Eclectic outrage is our rule:
To strain at gnats that soil and sin us,
And pass huge camels to the stool.
And still there are great camels in us.
Summary
Pilgrim dines at the Media Club, where he is honored as both a Lord Temporal (for his commerce) and a Lord Spiritual (for his influence on "cults and quackeries," his "creative deviations and his decadent deformations"). As a "Pioneer of Pleasure," he is cultivated and essential to the Media People, who need personalities like his, "empty of real personality" but capable of acquiring "cultic and electronic presence." He is the "Newest of the New Men."
Young Lords Spiritual report success: three of Evenhand's henchmen (Gut, Blut, Flut) have been "unmasked" and published as "Plague-Rats behind the Masks." "Blut has already been killed," reports Cordcutter. "The people got to him before we had hardly started on our instigation." Pilgrim gives them more: "Mut is Satterfield." The remark identifies Strength-in-Serenity as one of the masked men. The young Lords "swarm out like gnats" to find or manufacture evidence against him.
Lord Fairfronter wears the tiny "Pilgrim Staff" pin marking him as a cult devotee. He asks about succession. Pilgrim explains his theory of parallel selves: "I’m a bundle of sticks, Fairfronter. I’m a million long and skinny sticks bundled together." When he goes, he can "send another self after me as Paraclete." His jeweled eyes, recently developed through "a sudden mutational jump," now bring "unbelievable light."
A spy named Trenchant ("the Rubber Knife") challenges Pilgrim, arguing that he is destroying the world's foundations by hunting good rulers. Pilgrim dismisses him: "How stop me?" he asks. "Why would anyone want to stop me? I am an elemental force." When Trenchant calls gnats "whispers of evil," Pilgrim proclaims: "I'm no whisper of evil. I'm a shouting of evil!" Young Media Lords seize Trenchant, leaving him "bloodily unmanned" with an eye dangling, but Pilgrim intervenes: "My kill." He dismembers Trenchant with his bare hands: "Swift, sure pleasure, vital and mortal." Pieces are distributed to "interested organizations." A young Lord brings Pilgrim the "Camel's Revenge" badge from Trenchant's neck.
[Interspersed: Evenhand listens remotely, wondering if such "dingy madness can really be of effect." Mut tells him, "I should have killed him this morning," but adds that figures like Pilgrim are fungible and interchangeable. Evenhand reflects that faith commands loving sinners, but questions loving "a reticulated mechanism" like Pilgrim.]
On the veranda, Noah Zontik confronts Pilgrim about his "reprehensible" behavior. Pilgrim reveals he will arrange for the Camels to kill him that night, trapping them into doing it: "I always wanted to be done to death by mad Camels." He declares he is leaving this world tonight, as is Evenhand: "an appointment against each other at a tricky place over the edge." As for Prime World, he says, "That also I will begin to worry about in a hundred billion years."
At the chapter's climax, the chef serves Pilgrim a final course. "It's Blut," he whispers in "intense transport." Pilgrim eats with "a godly gleam in his eye": "The burned flesh is pleasant in my mouth."
Key Passages
The Media People needed such persons as Pilgrim. And he, empty of real personality and interested in acquiring the finest cultic and electronic personality in the world, needed the Media. The production of such as himself, the chopping down of uncultic and unelectronic persons, that was what the Media had been all about for a long time.
I'm no whisper of evil. I'm a shouting of evil!
Pilgrim DusmanoI can always send another self after me as Paraclete. . . The winnowing out of my lesser selves is not displeasing to me.
Pilgrim Dusmano on parallel selvesThe burned flesh is pleasant in my mouth.
Pilgrim Dusmano, eating BlutAnalysis
The epigraph ("strain at gnats. . . pass huge camels") inverts the biblical image. The Media Lords are "Lords of the Gnats," manufacturing tiny evidence to destroy good men while ignoring monstrous evils. Pilgrim accepts the comparison and enlarges it. Trenchant calls gnats "whispers of evil," and Pilgrim answers that he is "a shouting."
The Evenhand interludes give the antagonist's view. He sees Pilgrim as a "reticulated mechanism" rather than a human being and questions whether Christian love extends to such creatures. Mut's observation that cult figures are "fungible" anticipates the Paraclete theory, according to which Pilgrim's selves are interchangeable.
The cannibalism scene makes literal the novel's imagery of consuming the innocent. Pilgrim eats Blut (German: blood or family) with "a godly gleam," in an open parody of the Eucharist that turns the Media Club into a place of communion in evil.
[About: The Holy Knacker]
"For he who lives more lives than one / More deaths than one must die."
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
— O. Wilde
And when the ritual hounds are done
The dead are you and I.
Summary
Pilgrim engages a knacker, a professional who processes the "affair-bones" and "fortune-marrow" of the dead, to harvest the wealth of Evenhand and all eight henchmen. The knacker is a "Lord Spiritual" in his way, having made great "unhandy disposals." The work takes place in the All-Effects Hall behind the Golden Grotto of the Pilgrim Cult, with Mary and James Morey operating the furnaces.
The knacker gives Mary and James a "numinous quality," a golden glow that grants exceptional strength. He explains that the trick is ancient and known to only three men at a time: "one of those men, for all those millennia, has always been an ancestor of mine." He projects new faces onto them resembling honored dead cultists, then cautions: "Be careful that you two don’t harm or break anything. . . . Numinosity is always accompanied by exceptional strength." Thus disguised, they retrieve the entire gold hoard of the Mut/Satterfield cult: "A bit over twenty-six thousand kilograms."
Pilgrim initially plans to gild Mut's corpse as a cult image. The knacker, however, insists that all the Mut gold belongs to him and refuses to process Wut's fortune until it has been secured. Pilgrim orders Mary to seize him before her numinous strength fades. She pins him and begins to empty his visceral cavity while James melts the gold.
As the knacker dies, he threatens: "I also am leaving this world today by your decision. . . I'll prepare a welcome for you in a new place." When Pilgrim mocks him ("You’ll go to no new place, knacker. . . . You don’t know how"), the knacker warns of "the bad-death touch of the knackers."
Pilgrim taunts: "You wanted all the gold, knacker. Now have it. Have a belly full." James pours more than 200 kilograms of molten gold into the knacker's opened body cavity, then dips the entire corpse in the flash-furnace vat. The resulting statue bears an expression of "the strangest compassion ever," because Mary had held a dead goat-kid before his dying eyes, and the knacker, whose profession was disposing of dead animals, responded even in death to "a goat-kid asking care and disposal."
The gilded statue is installed in the Golden Grotto. Mary names it: "The Holy Knacker." James stands sobbing in the shadows, his gold lust and blood lust drained away. Pilgrim observes: "You dipped it so well and so cannily, boy, that the soul had no chance to escape. It's trapped inside, forever."
Key Passages
You break thieves' honor, Dusmano. . . How slow thieves are at understanding that in the postanarchic world thieves' honor has become a patchy thing! But I build my own honor so high that no one can see just how broken it is.
You dipped it so well and so cannily, boy, that the soul had no chance to escape. It's trapped inside, forever.
Pilgrim Dusmano[About: The Cult Gathers and Pilgrim Dies]
"To save a self, perdition bent, / What does a ten-thumbed, murksome meddler?"
To save a self, perdition bent,
What does a ten-thumbed, murksome meddler?
Which plea to God should he present,
The unctuous umber-ella peddler?
Summary
Twelve cult members gather in the sunlight of "the last sunny day ever in this world for us": students Mary Morey, Rhinestone Suderman, and Howard Praise; museum curator Clarence Music; Media Lord Randal Muckman; Doctors Medical Judas Raffels and John Augustine; Spurgeon from Pilgrim's commerce; Cordcutter and Fairfronter; Noah Zontik; and James Morey, "sitting in the shadows."
Noah Zontik explains Pilgrim's nature: "Pilgrim is not merely the projection of one particularly dull person . . . He is the projection of several hundred very bright persons. And ultimately . . . he will become the projection of millions of persons of all sorts." He adds: "We project what we want to be. Apparently we want to be crawling evil things, for Pilgrim is such." Noah confesses the paradox of his commission: "I have a commission from beyond to guard him forever, and to share his destruction if I cannot avert it. I believe that I have this commission from beyond, but I do not believe in any beyond."
The conversation turns to the postanarchic world: "We had rejected all rule so completely that even now, in the post age, we will have no ruler unless he is anonymous and masked." Noah connects Pilgrim to the Media Lords, calling them the "true Lords of Unreason and Darkness." Dr. Augustine remarks: "I have the oddest feeling that I have attended Dusmano at his death at some earlier time." Dr. Raffels confirms: "Me too."
Dr. Raffels shows a new power, clairvoyance (a "little illuminated theater in your head"), and sees events across the city in real time. He narrates how the Media Lords turn on Pilgrim: at a fine dinner, the great Lords look around and ask "What next? Who next?" They all turn their eyes toward Pilgrim. "It could have gone either way," and Pilgrim could have devoured them all with his "extensible jaws of the python." But his mind "tires easily after a nervous day." "They beat him back. Pilgrim bolted. He rushed out from that fine Club. Now he is a fugitive."
The Media Lords' militia breaks in with "jackboots," demanding Pilgrim's location. Dr. Raffels has eaten the cult bread and drunk from the grace cup without ritual, thus "breaking the cult," and he reveals that Pilgrim is hiding "in the largest thorn thicket" along his parkway. "I wish there were a way for me to withdraw from his cult," Raffels says. Noah protests they are under protection, but the militia leaves with Raffels as guide.
As the party leaves, Noah predicts that a persimmon tree will wither but refuses to look back. Mary does look: there is no tree at all. Spurgeon's inventories show that there never was one, so the expected biblical miracle does not take place.
The Execution: Pilgrim emerges from his thorn thicket (which he has caused to be in "green-thorn time" despite autumn) and momentarily rallies. He becomes again "the cult figure without equal," the hypnotic, magnetic, transcendent man with flowing hair and dripping hands. He preaches an antinomian sermon: "I preach you the declared thing with no opposite to restrict it. The high without the low. . . the sin without the remorse, the right without the wrong."
Mary Morey recognizes what he is: "He was an Anti-Christus." And when Pilgrim sees horses being brought, he realizes that he is to be torn apart by horses, a "distracting" death. His composure collapses: "He began to squall when they tied the horses to him."
The militia pulls him apart piecemeal: one arm, one foot, finally his head. Doctors Raffels and Augustine declare him dead and collect stipends. Mary Morey insists on following: "Don't let him get too far ahead of us or he'll go into panic." Without permits to be killed, she and James are given "clean and fast" deaths. They are scored with a ritual sword and then torn apart by horses. Noah Zontik follows: "He'll need my umbrella over him wherever he goes." Then Raffels. Wut (in rage so great it terrifies the horses) is killed by garrote. Augustine escapes by "private conveyance."
Key Passages
I myself am anticlimax. But who is climax? I am antihero. But there is no hero anywhere.
Pilgrim Dusmano's final sermonThis wasn't one of his better deaths. . . He isn't at his best today, militiamen. When you put in your reports, could you make it seem better than it was?
Mary MoreyWe project what we want to be. Apparently we want to be crawling evil things, for Pilgrim is such, even where white is black and up is down. Why are we like that? I don't know. We aren't bad individually, except where we touch him.
Noah ZontikNobody who has ever really believed can cease to believe. One may say that he has ceased. One may act as though he had. One may defame and defile and revile what one has believed in. But that one still believes, however blackly.
Dr. John Augustine[About: The Narrow Corner]
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. . ."
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.
— Matthew
You know how that camel does it? He just closes one of his own eyes and flops back his ears and plunges right through. A camel is mighty narrow when he closes one eye and flops back his ears. Besides, they use a big-eyed needle in the act.
Summary
Following Pilgrim's execution in Chapter 8, this chapter follows the cult figure and his companions through the Narrow Corner.
The Narrow Corner: Three figures climb a molten, precipitous path through the afterlife: the pan-morphous cult figure (Pilgrim in shifting forms: ape, teras, troll, tityrus, man, Enacian, or frog); and his two servitors, who appear as an ariel and a dog (Mary and James Morey). Confronting them are three enemies: the Holy Knacker (ape-shaped, smelling of lime-fluxed gold); Wut (wrathy and infuriated); and the demented Pym child (pervading the space as a fire-drake, that single hate-shot eye "riding the effluvium").
A battle follows. The dog (James) destroys Wut but is flung into the bottomless chasm, falling forever. The ariel (Mary) fights the fire-drake child but loses her wings and falls. The pan-morph defeats the Holy Knacker, realizing that the knacker's threat has been fulfilled: "I'll prepare a welcome for you." The knacker falls into the pit.
The pan-morph, wounded and clarified into a single human form, remembers his new name: Polder, "that which has been reclaimed from the amorphous ocean, that which has taken solid form and will change no more." He slips and falls from the Narrow Corner into the chasm but is caught by "hiatus," by "a Legacy": "a bright roll of nine rich lives and worlds which were pleasant little pieces of eternity."
Key Passages
But it is molten rock and rock crystal, and the garish lights that ripple over and through it are the killing fire.
Analysis
The Narrow Corner is where enemies meet again after death. The chapter names those who "shaped" this space, among them Alighieri (Dante), Christ in Matthew, Maugham, and Blake, which suggests that it is a collective projection of human intuitions about death.
The name Polder, associated with land reclaimed from water, marks a clarification of the protagonist's previously shifting form. His fall is interrupted by a Legacy of nine rich lives. Chapters 10 and 11 explain that these are timeless aspects that cannot be used up in sequence.
[About: The Nine Lives to La Spezia]
"—the guarantee / From Lambeth that the Rich can never burn. . ."
—the guarantee
From Lambeth that the Rich can never burn,
And even promising a safe return:—
"We let such vain imaginaries pass!"
Then tell me, Dives, which will look the ass—
You or myself? Or Charon? Who can tell?
They order things so damnably in hell.
The rich are different from us.
FitzgeraldThere is a compensation and counterpart to the "Eye of the Needle" edict. The rich would not have accepted it without this. The rich have a special Legacy: The Nine Lives to La Spezia. After they die they are permitted to live nine more lives of pleasure almost hysterical in its immediacy and extent before they go to hell.
Clement Goldbeater, The Enniscorthy ChronicleSummary
Chapter 10 moves the narrative to Cannes World, one of the Nine Worlds of the Legacy, a celestial pleasure-realm reserved for the rich. The chapter opens with three epigraphs that set out the theological framework: Belloc's sardonic verse about Lambeth's "guarantee" that the rich cannot burn, Fitzgerald's remark that the rich are "different," and a passage from the fictional Enniscorthy Chronicle explaining that the rich have negotiated a special arrangement, nine additional lives of "pleasure almost hysterical in its immediacy" before they must face hell.
The nine worlds of the Legacy (Cannes, Oraioi Polloi, Hy-Brasail, Smart Set, Savona, Delectable, Theleme, Luogo Perfetto, and La Spezia) form "a promontory or cape" in the Milky Way, visible only to those with "jeweled eyes." Time functions differently here: there is no "at the same time," only nine "momentums or powers." A single lifetime on Cannes encompasses ten thousand days per year, ten thousand years per lifetime, ten thousand dramas per day.
The Perpetual Animation Festival
The chapter centers on the Cannes Perpetual Animation Festival, where "live persons" must be used for all dramatic roles, a condition meant literally. This day is "Doré Day," with ten thousand dramas based on illustrations by Gustave Doré. The focus falls on Jehu's Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel, a drama in which Jezebel's dismembered body parts ask riddles of their discoverers.
When a viewer named Janie notices that the Jezebel pieces are artificial rather than human, a scandal follows. The Marshal of Animations is dragged before the elites by a rope around his neck. He explains that they had "gone through more than a hundred" young women that morning and had run out. As punishment, his own daughter is made to play Jezebel. She is dismembered in earnest, and her severed hand delivers a new riddle that is not in the script:
"Who thus forgets, in hell or hot: / No drop of blood will be forgot?"
The Marshal is then beheaded and dismembered, and his head adds an unscripted verse of its own. The episode shows what eternal pleasure means for the rich in the Legacy Worlds: their entertainment consumes actual lives, and the audience answers for none of them.
Pelion Tuscamondo
The protagonist appears here as Pelion Tuscamondo, "a handsome man with contoured and flowing fair hair," who has the familiar "shimmer" and "dazzle" and is called "the hypnotic man, the electric man, the magnetic man." He watches dramas with his "frequent couch companion" Janie, including The Resurrection of Lazarus, an audience-participation drama in which the elite viewers use their "group mind" to move a cup of water perpetually out of reach of the thirsty, putrid Lazarus.
Pelion, dissatisfied with the staging, orders mountains for the backdrop, and by virtue of his "Faith Sufficient" and his "station and connections," Gothic Doré mountains appear. This display of power draws the attention of Albert Fineface, "a factor in some very dubious transactions."
The Testament Transaction
Fineface offers Pelion what he has been unconsciously wishing for: the ability to publish his personal flame and image across all existence. The mechanism is the "pervading water," known on some worlds as the "Group Unconscious" or "Folk Ocean," an underlying ocean that connects all minds. Fineface explains that this ocean is "made up of the personal testaments of a group of devils," each distinguished by its literary or eidetic style.
There are approximately one hundred such "scrivener or eidetic devils," catalogued like chemical elements (new devils are discovered as new elements are discovered). For a "fabulous expenditure," one might buy membership in this inner circle and become a Media Lord whose testament shapes the collective unconscious of all creatures, "from the fire-flame spirit-flesh of the ethereals to the gamy and humpbacked flesh of the camel (your totem animal, is it not, Pelion?)."
Pelion pays the toll. The chapter ends with a parenthetical note: "(A nonessential change in worlds and lives and persons happens here.)", signaling the change of focus to Palgrave Tacoman on Oraioi Polloi in Chapter 11.
Significance
Chapter 10 marks a turn in the novel's metaphysics. It shows that the protagonist's ambition extends beyond world-jumping to becoming one of the forces that shape the collective unconscious. The Legacy Worlds carry the privilege of wealth as far as it can go, offering timeless pleasure that can coexist with damnation. The Lazarus drama, with its thirsting victim and its cruel audience, foreshadows Polder's thirst in Chapters 12 and 13 and the torment of the final chapter.
The chapter also introduces the camel flesh that the doctors find in the protagonist's body in Chapter 15. Fineface speaks of the "gamy and humpbacked flesh of the camel" and calls the camel Pelion's totem animal, which links the protagonist's regressed nature to the animal named in the novel's title.
[About: Nine Worlds unto Satiety]
"Nine worlds unto satiety / Of joy unending till you hate it. . ."
Nine worlds unto satiety
Of joy unending till you hate it,
Nor any way to cool it be,
Nor any way to terminate it.
Summary
The chapter explains that the Nine Lives to La Spezia do not follow one another in sequence. They are eternal and run parallel to ordinary existence. "The Nine Lives to La Spezia are not over with. They are still going on; they go on forever." The nine worlds exist outside time as "nine momentums or powers."
The focus shifts to Palgrave Tacoman on Oraioi Polloi, watching dramas on Hieronymus Bosch Day with his couch companion Jeanie and associate Albrecht Fairbrow. An "umbrella salesman" waits for an audience. He is Lorica, "one of the elite, and an adept and powerful man," who sells worlds, systems, and galaxies rather than small notions.
Lorica warns Palgrave: "Don’t buy it, Palgrave. . . . You’ll pay too much to become an archetype." He urges him not to seek "existence in billions of minds" or to manipulate "the pit that is under the worlds," since there are "enough devils already." But Fairbrow and a Putty Dwarf encourage Palgrave toward the "great creative ocean," the "underlay pit" that is the source of power and influence. The gold-symbol devil-angel Aurelion, the "seventy-ninth recording spirit," is pushing Palgrave's membership application for "this always exciting and ever new cartel that creates." Fairbrow urges: "Dare to create!"
Palgrave pays Aurelion the required sum. As he does, he becomes aware that "his own cranky testament had been multiplied a billionfold," and that a new element corresponding to himself has been manufactured. He has been accepted into the "unstable-hundred company of the archetypical devil-angels," becoming a "communicating god" of the atomic numbers, "an unstable god of an unstable element." His testament, with its "old humpback-flesh camel motif," is already working in the under-minds.
The chapter ends with a ritual boar hunt. The ariel and dog (versions of Mary/James Morey) arrive seeking to protect Palgrave, but he initially refuses them. Fairbrow is killed by a rogue boar, and his dead face looks at least as much like Palgrave's as his own. Then the king boar comes: "erect and high headed" at the end of the coursing alley, "a bestial and outstanding red brown fire." Palgrave salutes with his lance and charges. The beast impales his horse and tosses them both high. He makes a good Adonis in the staged death.
Key Passages
The Nine Lives to La Spezia are not over with. They are still going on; they go on forever. Remember when you are in hell that there are still nine other versions of you enjoying the nine lives of almost intolerable pleasure and enjoying it forever. It is always a cooling thought, and they can't take it away from you.
[About: Camel Town]
"I'll tell you a story about Mary Morey. . ."
I'll tell you a story about Mary Morey
And now my story's begun.
I'll tell you another about her brother,
And now my story is done.
Summary
Polder Dossman awakens with "horrible thirst" on a ragged hillside, suffering the "Resurrection Blues" of world-jumping. His companions are now Moira Mara (the ariel, whose wings were torn off at the Camel's Eye) and Jake Mara (the dog, whose brains were scrambled). A Hand of Heaven points down at him, a "meteorological manipulation paid for with gold."
The world is "sharp-line": everything is drawn as if by "straightedge and French curve," and colors appear as fine parallel lines rather than as chromatic depth. They descend to Camel Town, "the second-best town in the world in every way."
A young camel-seller describes the camel as "second-best at everything": as steed, pack animal, and draft animal, and for butter, cheese, leather, flesh-meat, and dozens of other uses. "Camel Town, best in nothing, is second-best in everything. It reminds me of people."
The young man reveals himself to be Oak Scath (Og Scath), the protector who has been "waiting for you for many days, for a year, for three." He speaks of holding "the schirm, the breastplate, the lorica, the umbrella" over Polder, though "he doesn't deserve it." A genuine but invisible Hand from Heaven points to Polder with cloudy subscript: "Protect this least of mine."
Key Passages
As a steed, the camel is second-best to the horse. As a pack animal, it is second-best to the jenny-ass. As a draft animal, it is a close competitor to the ox. . . The camel is second-best at everything.
I must hold the shield over him, the schirm, the breastplate, the lorica, the umbrella. He needs protection, though he doesn't deserve it. The Hand from Heaven that is visible over him is a meteorological manipulation paid for with gold. But there is a genuine and invisible Hand from Heaven pointing to him.
Og Scath[About: The Puppet-Master]
"My corpse, my core, my nerves, my nous, / Are artificial, gimp and gaster. . ."
My corpse, my core, my nerves, my nous,
Are artificial, gimp and gaster.
But whose the artifice? And who's
The artificial puppet-master?
Summary
Polder visits Hector Bogus, a local "Eidolon or Media Lord," seeking to have his cult promoted. Bogus is a skilled technician who animates small effigies by giving them "galvanic shock" between brass balls, then watches them run about his desk. He places one in a torture cabinet, burning it in white-hot fire: "It is fun to manufacture a small person of exquisite and intense response and appreciation of pain and of time . . . One can study a soul in hell by this device." He explains that the pain is real to the animation even if the animation is not "real."
Bogus warns Polder that he is nearing the end of his worlds and compares him to a manufactured animation. Polder recognizes Bogus as a counterpart of the younger Trenchant, the false Lord Spiritual. Bogus in turn recalls Polder as Pilgrim, calling him a false Peter Pilgrim. Their exchange questions the continuity and authenticity of both men.
Polder demands that Bogus publish his cult advertisements, but Bogus refuses: "no responsible publisher would." Their confrontation escalates. Polder insists: "Power is made to be abused! That's the whole purpose of it. . . The evil will always turn the good over a fire." Bogus counters that this world has "discovered the Larger Thing" and practices restraint: "Deliver me from evil! Deliver me from serious evil and from evil seriousness. . . Let me walk in the light and hear the laughter of God." He dismisses Polder: "You're a miniature effigy, a badly made one."
After Polder leaves, Bogus "suddenly, roguishly, rather boyishly" modifies the Hand from Heaven, making it seize Polder "by the scruff and the crine," dip him in a vat of corrosive sublimate "for a moment (till he was dead)," and deposit him in an ash-box. But Og Scath arrives: "you’ve gone too far. You’ve killed him! He was one of the protected ones." Bogus revives Polder with galvanic shock between the large brass balls of a giant condenser. Polder awakens with terrible thirst, croaking: "The thirst, the thirst, the terrible thirst!" He drinks green camel milk and whey, shuddering and moaning, and then begins declaiming "with wonderful power" in a language none understand.
Key Passages
This little thing I have just put into the torture cabinet, it is living eternities and eternities of screaming pain in every second. I built this intense appreciation of time into it.
Hector BogusYou're about through, Dossman. You know that, don't you? You're into your last world.
Hector Bogus[About: Mountain-Moving]
"A tidal wave, a forest fire / So hot and strong that nothing caps it. . ."
A tidal wave, a forest fire
So hot and strong that nothing caps it,
A juggernaut, a gobbling pyre;
What power ventures to collapse it?
Summary
The Polder Dossman cult grows rapidly. Polder is now believed to be an Archetype, a Zodiac Lord, and one of the High Seven Dice Throwers (the star Merope has returned to the sky). Millions join the cult; each receives "a tongue of fire that hovered over his head night and day."
Polder sends abdication commands to every ruler on the world and then to twelve billion worlds. The cult holds meetings at which millions gather in impossibly small spaces, all speaking to Polder at once in his "high gibberish." He heals, blesses, curses, and withers, and he kills hecklers with lightning, leaving "twitching corpses."
But the hecklers grow stronger, shielded against Polder's attacks. They issue a challenge: "Gibberish can be faked. . . There is one proof that will convince." The proof is mountain-moving: if Polder has true faith and power, he must move Shining Mountain.
Polder moves the mountain. It rises amid earthquake, lightning, roaring boulders, and flaming trees, then moves off to the south and east. Seven clusters of boulders fall and kill the seven main groups of hecklers.
The mountain-moving is the height of Polder's career and the beginning of his collapse. The Hand from Heaven is destroyed. The cult dissolves. "Mountain-moving will always set up an equal force in the opposite direction, and the effect of that equal force was to dissolve the Dossman cult." Polder withers, riding his camel through barren lands, convinced this is Prime World and he will fall to hell everlasting. All his followers abandon him: "I don't want to see your living face again."
Key Passages
Any description of mountain-moving is understatement. It can't be helped. It wasn't illusion. Nor was it some tricky weightlessness. The mountain rose and moved in its full weight and mass. There was earthquake, there was airquake, there was skyquake.
Polder, you are in Nine Worlds. You are there now and forever. You are present nine times in Nine Worlds. . . Nine-tenths of you are in the pleasure worlds right now, and the worst that can happen to you is that the other and present tenth of you will fall to hell eternal. You'll still be in good shape on the percentages.
Hector Bogus[About: The Last Jump]
"Be he an avid Jump or Jimp, / Be he a crippled or outcast one. . ."
Be he an avid Jump or Jimp,
Be he a crippled or outcast one,
He comes onto (no mind what scrimp)
An end of jumping. This the last one.
Summary
The novel closes with Polder Dossman dying under observation. Doctors Vonk, Hans August, and Judah Raphaelson correspond to Funk, Jon Austin, and Jude Ravel in Chapter 1, also recalling Augustine and Raffels in the Dusmano world. Og Scath acts as coroner and Hector Bogus as brigadier of police. Their task is to weigh the death, not to save Polder.
A "light companion" in death, the good man Longram, has been butchered by mobs to provide spectacle. He has been "disarmed" (his arms pulled out by the roots), mutilated, and given torture gas. He must fulfill the dramatic requirements Polder is "too empty a person to fulfill." Doctor Vonk confirms that Polder must "die with discomfort," and Longram will bear those discomforts "in addition to his own."
The doctors analyze Polder's body. Dr. Vonk (huge head, heavy orbital ridges, protruding muzzle, large back-brain) confirms: "Oh, he was alive . . . And he was human, or he had been human somewhere along the way." But Polder was "an experimental model made by several experimenters," eidolon-masters who added to him piecemeal. He is composed of "eidolon fiber, human flesh, regressive or camel flesh all mixed together." The "regressed flesh" is "primordial flesh, what is sometimes called the humpbacked clay," the camel flesh that accounts for his totem.
Og Scath offers to be "the one powerful friend" ("I'm not very friendly to him anymore, but it is written somewhere that I would go to hell for him, or with him"). Bogus offers to be "the one powerful enemy" ("it is written somewhere that I will stomp on his fingers as they weaken on his last handhold"). When asked how Polder "bust so badly," Bogus explains: during the mountain-moving, "the overload failed to blow, and the creature blew instead."
Bogus performs one final cruelty. He cuts a sliver of Polder's still-fluttering heart with a pocketknife, gives it galvanic shock between two small brass balls, and places it in a torture cabinet with flames: "It is fun to arrange that even this last flutter-piece of Polder should have exquisite and intense response to and appreciation of pain, and of time. . . The pain is real to the flutter-piece, and the pain is eternal." Og Scath asks with contempt: "Did you stick pins into the heads of fluttering moths when you were a boy?" Bogus denies it: "I didn’t begin to do things like that until much later, after other things had failed me."
Doctor Vonk then announces: "Og Scath is dead . . . Quite sudden. He believed he had to go with Polder to shield him. He may have gone an instant early." The Polder-sliver gives its last flutter. Doctor Raphaelson declares: "It was his last jump . . . When can we record zero? Now! That was it. That was the end of Polder Dossman, forever."
For about three seconds, that was the end of Polder Dossman. Then "he was heard in the very deep distance, far under the queasy feet of all of them," needing no amplification and destined to be heard forever. "It couldn't, of course, be an actual soul screaming forever in hell. It had to be some sort of imitation. But it was quite a good imitation."
Key Passages
Oh, he was alive. . . And he was human, or he had been human somewhere along the way. Human remnants are easily discoverable. . . Ah, eidolon fiber, human flesh, regressive or camel flesh all mixed together.
Doctor VonkIt couldn't, of course, be an actual soul screaming forever in hell. It had to be some sort of imitation. But it was quite a good imitation.
Analysis
The final chapter returns to a death-weighing that parallels Chapter 1. Polder believes he is on Prime World, but Bogus disputes the identification. At the end of Chapter 1, the narrator says that the fifteen-year interval between Tisman's execution and the subsequent action may be an illusion. We cannot tell how much time passes between Tisman's death and Polder's.
Polder dies convinced that he is on Prime World and will go to hell. Bogus puts the odds at "billions to one against its being Prime World" and tells Og that "for him, it will be hell, since he dies with his mind set on it." The narrator calls the screaming an "imitation," but Bogus has already said of the heart-sliver, "The pain is real to the flutter-piece, and the pain is eternal."
Characters
The dramatis personae across worlds and names
THE PROTAGONIST'S IDENTITIES
The arrows follow the narrative's changes of focus among related persons. The Legacy aspects continue outside time. Polder fears that his last world is Prime World, but the novel does not confirm it.
World-jumper · Cult Figure · "Artificial Man" · Media Lord Aspirant
Physical Description
"A handsome man with contoured and flowing fair hair. He had a powerful and carrying voice, but at the same time it was intricate and modulated, almost feminine. He had a shimmer, a dazzle about him. He had been called the hypnotic man, the electric man, the magnetic man, the transcendent man. He was the man with the flowing hands that dripped beneficence. There was the curling and pleasant mockery on his mouth, the incredible vulgarity in the set of his fat jaw, the wild-horse look in his face."
Nature
The protagonist is not fully human. The final autopsy reveals him to be composed of three substances mixed together:
- Human flesh: "human remnants are easily discoverable"
- Eidolon fiber: artificial material added by "eidolon-masters" who saw he was "an incurable rogue"
- Regressed flesh: "the primordial flesh, what is sometimes called the humpbacked clay," the flesh of the camel, his totem animal
Noah Zontik offers another interpretation: he is "not merely the projection of one particularly dull person. . . He is the projection of several hundred very bright persons." The cult creates the cult figure: "We project what we want to be. Apparently we want to be crawling evil things."
Philosophy
The protagonist preaches amorality: "Recompense cannot be real; debt and guilt are not real; punishment and death are only illusions." He teaches that existence is infinitely renewable through world-jumping, and he encourages his students to "kill themselves strategically" to escape consequences. His final sermon: "I preach you the declared thing with no opposite to restrict it. The high without the low, the light without the dark"
Manifestations Across Worlds
Pilger Tisman
First incarnation seen in the novel, executed for "shockingly murderous and irresponsible deeds." World-jumps at death, his "person-tone" sounding triumphant and mocking.
Pilgrim Dusmano
Lecturer at Rampart University, import magnate whose commodities arrive through "the slight deplacement of two coincident worlds." Builds the Holy Knacker. Killed by militia with horses.
Pelion Tuscamondo
Incarnation on Cannes World (one of the Nine Lives to La Spezia). Purchases entry into the "Group Unconscious" to become a Media Lord, which lodges his testament in every mind.
Palgrave Tacoman
The focus on Oraioi Polloi in Chapter 11. He rejects Lorica's warning, pays Aurelion to advance his admission among the archetypal devil-angels, and dies in a boar hunt. His Legacy aspects continue forever.
Polder Dossman
Final principal incarnation. Claims the signs of the camel and boar. He moves Shining Mountain, but the exertion breaks him and dissolves his cult. His final apparent extinction is followed by the sound of screaming far below.
The Camel Totem
The camel is his totem animal, "second-best in everything." His power derives partly from this "regressed flesh," the "gamy and humpbacked flesh." The title can be read as pointing to him. On that reading he is the camel added at the end of God's reckoning in Jonah 4:11, a creature that is always nearly the best and never the best.
The Twelve Names: Associations and Continuities
Chapter 11 lists twelve names within the same personal complex, then cautions against treating all such persons as identical. Some names suggest familiar words or figures, but the text does not supply an etymology for each one.
| Name | Association & Role |
|---|---|
| Pilger Tisman | The executed cult figure in Chapter 1. Pilger is German for pilgrim, linking this name to Pilgrim Dusmano. |
| Pilgrim Dusmano | The lecturer and cult figure of Chapters 2–8, followed through the Narrow Corner in Chapter 9. His given name casts an ironic religious light on his travels. |
| Pelion Tuscamondo | The Cannes World aspect in Chapter 10. Pelion recalls the mountain of the giants' assault on Olympus, an association that fits the novel's mountain-moving motif. |
| Palgrave Tacoman | The Oraioi Polloi aspect in Chapter 11. His ritual death associates him with Adonis. |
| Paladin Tajiman | One of the names listed in Chapter 11. Paladin evokes a knight or champion; no separate adventure is narrated under this name. |
| Polycletus Tasman | One of the names listed in Chapter 11, without a separately narrated life. |
| Palmas Thasomen | One of the names listed in Chapter 11, without a separately narrated life. |
| Paulus Theissmand | One of the names listed in Chapter 11, without a separately narrated life. |
| Pilatus Dosmens | One of the names listed in Chapter 11. Pilatus suggests Pilate, though the novel does not explain the association. |
| Philemon Dorsetmoon | One of the names listed in Chapter 11, without a separately narrated life. |
| Philip Dusselmon | One of the names listed in Chapter 11, without a separately narrated life. |
| Polder Dossman | The principal focus of Chapters 12–15. Chapter 12 glosses the name as “sleep-man reclaimed from the ocean” or “toss-like-a-bull-man reclaimed from the ocean.” |
All twelve given names begin with P; the surnames vary through related D and T sounds. The pattern suggests continuity within the complex, without settling the identity of its members.
Protector · "One Powerful Friend" · Primordial Giant · Lord Temporal and Spiritual
Identity
The protagonist's divinely appointed protector appears under several names across worlds. "Zontik" means umbrella in Russian; "Scath" suggests shadow/protection (Irish scáth); "Lorica" is Latin for breastplate. All the names point to his function of shielding and protecting.
He claims to be the biblical giant Og, King of Bashan, one of the last of the Rephaim, who survived the Flood by riding the ridgepole of Noah's Ark, holding an umbrella over a poorly-sealed hatch. On this account he is older than the Flood.
The Divine Commission
God has charged him with protecting Pilgrim even into hell, and he feels bound to honor the commission despite his own disbelief. He wears the Golden Shovel and the Pilgrim Staff and holds the titles of both Lord Temporal and Lord Spiritual. He works professionally as "the Umbrella," providing services in shielding and protection.
I don't believe in him, but I believe even less in myself without him. And I have a commission from beyond to guard him forever, and to share his destruction if I cannot avert it. I believe that I have this commission from beyond, but I do not believe in any beyond.
Noah ZontikParadoxical Relationship
Despite protecting the protagonist, Zontik/Scath is often his harshest critic. He accuses him of being "a derivative projection," warns him of danger, and challenges his philosophy. He belongs to the Dusmano cult but "struggles with its implications." He recognizes the evil but cannot abandon his charge.
Fate
In the final chapter, Og Scath acts as coroner at Polder's execution. He says: "I'm not very friendly to him anymore. . . it is written somewhere that I would go to hell for him, or with him." When Polder dies, Og Scath dies suddenly. Doctor Vonk explains, "He believed he had to go with Polder to shield him. He may have gone an instant early."
"One Powerful Enemy" · Secret Ruler · The Good Man
Identity
Cyrus Evenhand is "accounted a good man," "serious, pleasant, powerful," and the holder of "the office like none other in the country," which requires complete anonymity. His code name "Rut" means rod, scepter, or authority in German. He is revealed to be the Consul, the secret ruler of the world where Pilgrim Dusmano operates.
He is described as "tall and slim" and "unpolished," without the protagonist's suavity. His strength comes from goodness and legitimate authority rather than charisma. He stands for the accountability, consequence, and moral order that the protagonist denies.
The Conflict
Evenhand and his eight henchmen are sworn to destroy the protagonist, recognizing him as a corrupter and murderer. The protagonist declares war by killing Hut: "my declaration of war? Killing Hut was my ante in the game." Evenhand's forces are overwhelmed. He and all eight henchmen are killed, and their fortunes are "knackered" (processed) by the protagonist's gilded statue.
It's easy enough to kill this Pilgrim Dusmano. . . The problem isn't that tall, Evenhand. You make mountains out of middens.
One of the HenchmenThe Eight Henchmen
Evenhand's eight associates have German-derived code names ending in “-ut.” They are wealthy and outwardly secure, but Pilgrim exploits their identities to expose them to violence. The knacker processes eight fortunes, including Evenhand's, while holding Wut's over for payment. The gold used for the Holy Knacker comes from the Mut cult's hoard.
Hector Bogus
Media Lord · Brigadier of Police · "One Powerful Enemy" (Later)
A local Eidolon and Media Lord, technically adept at creating, animating, and torturing small effigies. Polder recognizes him as a counterpart of Trenchant. Bogus kills Polder with the modified Hand from Heaven, then revives him when Og intervenes. Pressured by Moira and Og, he provides cult publicity. At the final death-weighing he acts as brigadier of police and torments a sliver of Polder's heart.
His name suggests falseness and illusion. Bogus works in artificial realities, fake spectacles, and manufactured miracles, and he creates what others believe in.
The Morey Siblings
Cult Devotee · Furnace Operator · The Woman in Sunlight
The most devoted of the cult followers. She appears in the opening chapter as "Maria del Mar, a young and taut-faced girl" mourning at Pilger Tisman's burial. As Mary Morey, she is one of Pilgrim Dusmano's morning students, always found "in the sunlight" while her brother James lurks in shadows.
She operates the furnaces in the All-Effects Hall where the Holy Knacker is cast. She can "flute her tongue in odd ways to form the various shapes in smoke." She recognizes Pilgrim as "an Anti-Christus" but stays loyal. When the militia comes, she volunteers: "We're going with him. Don't let him get too far ahead of us or he'll go into panic."
After death she appears as the ARIEL servitor and continues to follow the protagonist.
Cult Devotee · Shadow Dweller · The Hound
Mary's brother, always found "in the shadows" while she occupies the sunlight, which leads to speculation that "he is her shadow." Although he admits, "I don't understand old Dusmano at all," he stays a leading member of the cult.
He assists in cult operations: filling the crock to drown the statuette with Pilgrim's former eyes, operating the hoist and furnace during the Holy Knacker's creation. After the casting, James's gold lust and blood lust drain away, and he is left sobbing silently in the shadows.
After death he appears as the HOUND servitor in the Narrow Corner sequence and fights Wut and other enemies.
Parallel Figure · Polder's Devotee
The Polder Dossman–world parallel to Mary Morey/Maria del Mar. Her name continues the M-alliteration pattern across incarnations. She serves Polder as Mary serves Pilgrim, as a devoted companion who recognizes his nature.
The Students
Student · Cult Founder · Compelled Devotee
"A large, fair-haired young female person" and student of Pilgrim Dusmano. She proposes founding the cult: "Is anyone here interested in forming a Pilgrim Dusmano cult?" When challenged, she explains: "We’re compelled to. . . . By a compulsion, of course. By a blind compulsion. All cults are started by such compulsions."
She prophesies "the last sunny day ever in this world for us" and encourages the others to call Pilgrim "chaotic" rather than "mixed up": "This gives us more scope. In one of the mythologies, great things were brought out of chaos."
Student · Reluctant Cultist
A student uncertain about joining: "I'm on the edge of joining his cult, but what if there is nothing in him at all?" He mumbles that Pilgrim is "a little unreal when he implies that the worlds are a little unreal." Despite his doubts, he joins and stays. When the militia demand Pilgrim's location, Howard declares flatly, "Nobody here will tell you."
The Professionals
Curator · Daylight Museum · Cult Member
Curator of the Daylight Museum where Pilgrim spends mornings examining artifacts. He observes that Pilgrim "exteriorizes badly or unevenly. . . He is a pleasure seeker in all things, but for balance he pushes it too far. There's a lot of raw bloodiness associated with his pleasures." Despite this clinical assessment, he joins the cult and attends the final gathering.
Media Lord · Cult Member
A "Media Lord" who joins Pilgrim's cult. The Media Lords control eidetic reality: illusions, projections, and manufactured experiences. His membership shows Pilgrim's influence reaching into the institutions that shape public perception.
The Doctors
Judas Raffels
Doctor Medical · Cult Member · Betrayer
One of the "Doctors Medical" in Pilgrim's cult. When militia demand Pilgrim's location, Raffels betrays him: "Dusmano is out by that parkway. . . hiding in the largest thorn thicket there. Come. I'll show you." He whistles "Heads Will Roll" as he goes. He also attends Pilgrim's death to collect his stipend and feels that he has "attended Dusmano at his death at some earlier time."
John Augustine
Doctor Medical · Lord Spiritual
Another Doctor Medical and "Lord Spiritual" in the cult. He and Raffels position themselves to collect death-stipends: "We are two very good medical doctors. Why should we let lesser doctors receive stipends for pronouncing persons dead?" He accompanies Raffels to witness Pilgrim's execution.
Others
Spurgeon
Commerce Assistant
Works for Pilgrim "in his commerces." Takes a monthly inventory of trees in the parkway region, and his records show that Pilgrim's "cursed persimmon tree" never existed at all.
Lord Fairfronter
Media Lord · Cult Devotee
Wears the tiny Pilgrim Staff pin marking his cult membership. Fairfronter questions Pilgrim about his imminent departure and succession, and offers a polished appraisal of his posthuman personality. Noah Zontik, rather than Fairfronter, predicts that the Media Lords will destroy Pilgrim.
Cordcutter
Young Media Lord
Reports on the henchmen's deaths: "Blut has already been killed. . . The people got to him before we had hardly started on our instigation." Brings pieces of Blut's body to the Media Lords.
Trenchant (the Rubber Knife)
Spy · Challenger
A spy who challenges Pilgrim at the Media Club, arguing that he is destroying the world's foundations. When Pilgrim proclaims "I'm no whisper of evil. I'm a shouting of evil!" Trenchant is seized by young Media Lords, left "bloodily unmanned" with an eye dangling, and then dismembered by Pilgrim with his bare hands: "Swift, sure pleasure, vital and mortal." Wears a "Camel's Revenge" badge.
The Pym Family
Employee · Messenger · Sacrifice
Works at Pilgrim's commodity terminal, asks for a raise, and is selected with his family as this week's "messengers" to Supply. The sending requires that the messengers be "apprehensive, nervous, determined, daring, creative in mind." Pilgrim grants him a doubled salary with fringes like the bangles on a carnival girl's jacket before ritually killing the entire family with a stone knife.
His wife Mrs. Pym recalls that the Hemsteds went to "Dongola" earlier that year. The younger Pym child defies Pilgrim: "You can cut my head clear off, but you can't kill me. . . I'll hide in the passages and in the glaciers, and I'll trap you there." This child takes "a lot of killing," and one hate-filled eye survives the people-grinder, "riding the remaining effluvium" and glaring at Pilgrim. The threat may be fulfilled in the Narrow Corner, where the child appears as a fire-drake.
Cannes World
Janie
Elite · Pelion's Couch Companion
A melodious-voiced elite on Cannes World, "frequent couch companion" of Pelion Tuscamondo. She first notices the scandal of the artificial Jezebel: "You are not using live persons! . . . That was a sham Jezebel they used!" Her vigilance triggers the Marshal's exposure and execution.
Albert Fineface
Captain of Elites · Factor
"Captain of the elites for that day" who interrogates the Marshal of Animations. He stabs the Marshal's tongue with a dagger to force speech, then orders the Marshal's daughter dismembered. He later acts as a broker of dubious transactions and offers Pelion entry into the Group Unconscious as a Media Lord.
The Marshal of Animations
Festival Organizer · Victim
Responsible for providing live persons for all roles at the Perpetual Animation Festival. When supplies run low ("You had gone through more than a hundred of them already on the morning of this bloody day"), he uses an artificial body and is then forced to sacrifice his own daughter. Both are dismembered, and his severed head delivers a prophetic riddle before the elites dispose of him.
The Marshal's Daughter
Victim · Prophetess
Unnamed young woman forced to play Jezebel when no other "live person" is left. She is dismembered in earnest, and her severed hand delivers an unscripted riddle: "Who thus forgets, in hell or hot: / No drop of blood will be forgot?" The riddle warns that the blood shed for this world's pleasures will not be forgotten.
Oraioi Polloi
Albrecht Fairbrow
Elite · Encourager
Associate of Palgrave Tacoman on Oraioi Polloi. Encourages Palgrave toward the "great creative ocean," the "underlay pit" that is the source of power and influence. Urges: "Dare to create!" His name suggests a "noble brow," a fair-minded appearance that masks demonic counsel.
Aurelion
Devil-Angel · Recording Spirit
The gold-symbol devil-angel, "seventy-ninth recording spirit," who pushes Palgrave's membership application for "this always exciting and ever new cartel that creates." When Palgrave pays the sum, Aurelion accepts him into the "unstable-hundred company of the archetypical devil-angels." His name suggests aureus (gold), and his number, seventy-nine, is the atomic number of gold.
Putty Dwarf
Tempter
A small creature who encourages Palgrave toward Media Lord status alongside Fairbrow. His name suggests malleability and falseness, a creature that takes whatever form the temptation of the moment requires.
Jeanie
Couch Companion
Palgrave Tacoman's couch companion on Oraioi Polloi. Chapter 11 shifts from Janie to Jeanie and places these names in a larger complex of corresponding companions.
The Opening and Closing Chapters
Dr. Wilcove Funk / Dr. Vonk
Doctor · Compassionate Observer
Doctor Funk attends Tisman's death; the corresponding Doctor Vonk attends Polder's. Both have a huge head, heavy orbital ridges, a protruding muzzle, and a large back-brain. Funk admits to the compassionate sickness and regards Tisman with sympathy and kindred feeling. Their correspondence is part of the novel's pattern of recurring persons.
Dr. Jude Ravel / Dr. Raphaelson
Doctor · Analyst
Another of the three attending doctors. He and Funk complement each other: "We two would never understand the same half of anything." In the final chapter, his counterpart, Dr. Judah Raphaelson, helps analyze Polder's composite nature.
Dr. Austin / Dr. August
Doctor
Doctor Jon Austin attends Tisman's death; Doctor Hans August attends Polder's. Their similar names mark another correspondence between the opening and closing scenes.
The Brigadier of Police
Law Enforcement · Antagonist
The brigadier overseeing Tisman's execution is addressed as Salvatore. He demands that Tisman "expire, evenly, quickly, and forever" with no "echo, or any afterglow or after-sound." When Tisman's tone sounds mockingly after death, he shouts "Heads will roll, I tell you!" He is "firmly under the finger" of Tisman's "one powerful enemy." At Polder's death, Hector Bogus acts as brigadier.
The Coroner
Death Certifier · Observer
Attends Tisman's execution. Detects the delta pattern impulses (about three per second) that indicate Tisman is "getting ready for a leap." Suggests alternative death categories: "Possibly, 'Dead, subject to continuance,' or, 'Not so dead as all that.' Alive and dead surely aren't the only two alternatives." In the final chapter, Og Scath fills the office of coroner.
Longram
Good Man · Proxy Victim
A good man whose influence causes barren land to flourish, "one use to which the influence of good men may be put." At Polder's execution, he is the "light companion in death," butchered by mobs to provide spectacle because Polder is "too empty a person to fulfill" the dramatic requirements. He is "disarmed" (his arms torn out), given torture gas, and mutilated, "dying in the brightness of his own disposition."
Commerce & Industry
The Knacker
Fortune Processor · Corpse Handler
A specialist who deals not in dead animal bodies but in "the fortunes and commerces and affairs that were left derelict by the deaths of those bodies." Pilgrim engages him to process the nine fortunes of Evenhand and his henchmen, extracting their wealth for the Holy Knacker statue. He operates in the All-Effects Hall, converting accumulated wealth into gold ingots. A "fine question whether a knacker can be counted as a Lord Spiritual, though often in his business he runs athwart spirits departing."
Melchisedech Duffy
Art Dealer · Collector
Owner of the "Walk-In Bijou in New Orleans," source of excellent artworks loaned to the Daylight Museum. The curator notes: "Melchisedech puts out trash and keeps the good stuff stored away in a lumber room behind." His name recalls the biblical Melchizedek, priest-king of Salem, traditionally read as a type of Christ.
Eidolon & Media Lords
Creators · Manipulators
Unnamed beings who constructed the protagonist as "an experimental model." They added "eidolon fiber" to his composition after determining he was "an incurable rogue" and could be used for their purposes. They are the "scrivener devils" or "eidetic devils," about one hundred of them, catalogued "like elements," whose "testaments" form the underlying Group Unconscious or "Folk Ocean" connecting all minds.
Epigraph Sources
Lafferty attributes his chapter epigraphs to invented authors and works as well as to real ones:
Glossary
Terms, concepts, and Lafferty's invented vocabulary
Characters (65 entries)
Locations (49 entries)
Cosmology (180 entries)
Objects & Rituals (113 entries)
The Eight Henchmen (9 entries)
Sources & Epigraphs (2 entries)
All Terms (899 entries)
Cosmology
The structure of the novel's worlds
The Three True Theories
Chapter 2 presents three apparently contradictory beliefs about the nature of reality and then declares all of them correct:
Scientific View
Billions of life-supporting worlds scattered throughout space in "apt or green or fortunate spots."
Fringe View
Billions of worlds occupying the same local space, the "tree-worlds or the branch-worlds or the crossroad-worlds," all growing on one tree.
Transmigration View
Only one world with a fixed number of souls (about 3.5 billion), most already embodied, with "three of every four persons" being mere "reflections."
The space of the countless universes—this was Pilgrim's contention—was identical with the familiar local space and was in no way larger than that local space. One space did not contain the other; one space did not go beyond the other; they were of the same measure. A man with a good right arm might throw a stone clear across space, but of course it would be an endless rock that he threw.
A schematic of the novel's worlds. The feared Prime World anchors the cosmological argument, and the Nine Legacy Worlds exist outside time. The arrangement is illustrative; the novel supplies no map.
Select a Legacy World or Prime World for details
The Nature of World-Jumping
World-jumping is the novel's central metaphysical conceit, the ability to escape death by transferring consciousness to a parallel world. At the moment of death the jumper's "person-tone," the audible signature of his identity, passes from one world to another.
Requirements for Jumping
The Commerce Connection
Pilgrim's commerce exploits the slight displacement of coincident worlds. His business and his teaching both depend on crossings between worlds, but the novel does not establish that commercial wealth creates the handholds monitored at Tisman's death.
Failure Modes
Not all deaths lead to successful jumps. The doctors monitoring Tisman's death note: "It’s the sign that a man has been extinguished, or has escaped being extinguished." Failure means true death, in which the person-tone ceases instead of transferring. The brigadier of police threatens: "Stomp on his damned fingers!" The brigadier adds: "Don’t give him a handhold. Don’t give him any hold at all."
The Trap of Prime World
"It would not be possible to world-jump from Prime. Hairy and fetish hands coming out of that earth would grip one about the ankles, and grip with bone-crushing strength." Prime World is the one place from which no jump is possible, and its only exits are oblivion and hell.
The Four Last Things
In Catholic eschatology, the "four last things" are Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, the final realities every soul must face. The novel names them directly: Prime World is "the base and anchor of the four final or eschatological things. Thankfully, there are no final things attached to any of the other worlds."
The protagonist's philosophy is an attempt to escape these finalities. He evades death by jumping worlds and refuses to think about Prime World, the seat of judgment. He offers pleasure-worlds in place of heaven, and by teaching that "punishment and death are only illusions," he believes he has abolished hell.
The Eye of the Needle
The Nine Lives to La Spezia answer Christ's teaching that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. The Legacy Worlds are the concession the rich obtain in exchange: "The rich would not have accepted it without this. The rich have a special Legacy. . . After they die they are permitted to live nine more lives of pleasure almost hysterical in its immediacy and extent before they go to hell."
The arrangement is stranger than a deferral. The Nine Worlds exist outside time and are never used up, so nine aspects can stay in pleasure while a tenth goes to hell. Polder's final fear is that his present, suffering aspect has no share in that comfort.
The Divine Commission
Noah Zontik/Og Scath acts under a divine commission: "I have a commission from beyond to guard him forever, and to share his destruction if I cannot avert it. I believe that I have this commission from beyond, but I do not believe in any beyond." His obedience without belief suggests that a person who denies God may still be bound by God's arrangements.
Accounts Kept
Prime World is defined by its moral bookkeeping: "They keep accounts on Prime World; ultimate accounts, I mean. They keep crabbed, careful, fetishistic accounts." On this account judgment works as record-keeping, in which every debt is entered and every payment required.
Who thus forgets, in hell or hot: / No drop of blood will be forgot?
The Marshal's Daughter, Chapter 10The Nature of Hell
The novel presents hell literally. When Polder dies, Hector Bogus places a sliver of his heart in a torture cabinet: "One can study a soul in hell by this device. . . The pain is real to the flutter-piece, and the pain is eternal." The miniature torture is an image of hell as eternal, conscious suffering.
The ending, however, leaves the matter open: "It couldn't, of course, be an actual soul screaming forever in hell. It had to be some sort of imitation. But it was quite a good imitation." The screaming is heard, but the narrator leaves it uncertain whether an "actual soul" is screaming.
The Good Man Problem
Cyrus Evenhand is "accounted a good man," and the novel presents him as virtuous as well as powerful. Longram's influence makes barren land flourish. These figures show goodness having real effects even in worlds ruled by Media Lords and eidolon-masters. Against them, the protagonist's amorality appears as a personal rebellion against a moral order that still holds.
Themes
The novel's major themes and how they develop
Identity & Self
The protagonist's identity and what makes a person "real"
The protagonist appears under five principal names, and Chapter 11 lists further names. The narrator calls these figures persons of the same complex. He refuses to explain what a person consists of. Noah Zontik suggests he is "not merely the projection of one particularly dull person. . . He is the projection of several hundred very bright persons."
His death-weighing reveals a composite nature: human flesh, eidolon fiber, and regressed or camel flesh. Doctor Vonk describes an experimental model made by several experimenters, while also confirming that he had been human somewhere along the way. The evidence weakens his claim to be an authentic original without proving that he was artificial from birth.
The question extends to the other characters. The cult followers may be real people or "mere eidolons of an eidolon, mere graven images of a graven image," and it is unclear whether Mary/Maria and James/Jacob/Jake keep a continuous identity across deaths. The novel treats identity as performance, projection, and collective construction, but it still attaches consequences to persons.
Good, Evil & Amorality
The moral structure of infinite worlds
The protagonist preaches amorality: "Amorality is implicit as a total thing in my claim. . . Recompense cannot be real; debt and guilt are not real; punishment and death are only illusions." He argues that if one can escape any consequence by jumping worlds, morality has no force.
The novel, however, is organized around moral categories. Cyrus Evenhand is repeatedly called "a good man." Longram's goodness makes barren land flourish. The protagonist is described as "an incurable rogue." In the novel, good and evil are real forces.
Prime World supplies the threat of ultimate accounting. The protagonist's rejection of it reads as flight from judgment. His final scream suggests that the flight has failed. Bogus disputes Polder's belief that this is Prime World.
Media, Cults & Reality
The construction of charismatic authority
The protagonist's power derives from constructed charisma: "shimmer," "dazzle," the "hypnotic man, the electric man, the magnetic man." These qualities are artificial, the products of Media Lords and Eidetic Lords who shape collective perception.
Constructed reality nonetheless has real effects. The cult forms spontaneously: "We’re compelled to. . . . By a compulsion, of course. By a blind compulsion." Followers recognize the artificiality yet cannot resist: "I keep saying there's no way I could ever be attracted to him. And I keep knowing I'm wrong every time I say it."
The Group Unconscious or Folk Ocean underlies minds and creatures, formed from the testaments of eidetic devils. By buying admission among them, the protagonist seeks to place his image in every mind. Prime World represents the feared possibility of a reality that cannot be evaded or reshaped by such transactions.
The Camel Symbolism
"Second-best at everything"
The camel is the novel's central symbol. It appears in the title, in the protagonist's composite flesh, in his totem identity, and in the biblical allusion that opens Chapter 9. The camel is "second-best in everything." It is neither the fastest nor the strongest of beasts, but it adapts and survives where others cannot.
The description fits the protagonist, who is a derivative and a projection and who survives by adaptation. His "humpbacked clay" or "primordial flesh" connects him to the camel at the material level.
The saying about the needle's eye shapes the novel's theology: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven." The Nine Lives to La Spezia are the rich man's way around the saying. The protagonist, who is identified with the camel, finds that world-jumping does not free his present aspect from judgment.
Gnostic Comparisons
The novel permits comparisons with salvation through special knowledge, hostility to material limitation, and counterfeit creation. These are interpretive parallels; its characters and worlds do not form a one-to-one map of a Gnostic system.
| Gnostic Concept | Parallel in Novel | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Saving knowledge | Pilgrim teaches controlled world-jumping (Chapter 2). | His promise makes escape depend on technique and knowledge. The ending exposes the limits of that promise. |
| Material confinement | Prime World is imagined as heavy, material, and inescapable (Chapter 2). | This is chiefly the world-jumper's hostile description of accountability, not proof that material existence is evil. |
| Counterfeit creation | Media and Eidolon Lords manufacture images and alter persons (Chapters 10–15). | Their creative power coexists with cruelty. The novel questions the moral standing of makers as well as their creations. |
| Antinomianism | Pilgrim denies debt, guilt, punishment, and death (Chapter 2). | His rejection of moral law is explicit. It should not be treated as a description of every Gnostic tradition. |
| Image and original | Noah challenges Pilgrim's claim to be a prime person (Chapter 2). | The original-copy problem crosses several philosophical and religious traditions; it is not uniquely Gnostic. |
| Transcendence | Lorica offers free participation in transcendence (Chapter 11). | Palgrave chooses the expensive infernal cartel instead. The distinction is between transformation and predatory self-extension. |
Read in this light, the novel rejects the assumption that escaping a world amounts to salvation, and the last scream discredits the protagonist's account of liberation.
Moral Acts and Responsibility
The following table distinguishes acts, agents, and familiar moral categories. The descriptions summarize the narrative; they are not quotations or an exhaustive theological classification.
| Character | Category | Action | Latin Term | Theological Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pilger Tisman | Murder | Executed for murderous and irresponsible deeds (Chapter 1). | Homicidium | The opening chapter establishes culpability without narrating the earlier crimes in detail. |
| Tisman's executioners | Cruelty | Inflict a sentence of death with discomfort (Chapter 1). | Crudelitas | The victim's guilt does not make the cruelty of his tormentors disappear. |
| Pilgrim Dusmano | Murder | Kills Hut to provoke his enemies (Chapters 2–3). | Homicidium | He makes a human death an opening move in his own game. |
| Pilgrim Dusmano | Murder | Cuts the throats of the four Pyms and sends their bodies through the reduction machine (Chapter 4). | Homicidium | Calling the victims messengers obscures the violence of his method. |
| Pilgrim Dusmano | Sexual violence | Boasts that he has raped one young man and one young woman that day (Chapter 6). | Violentia | His boast treats the violation of others as a measure of pleasure and achievement. |
| Pilgrim Dusmano | Corruption | Shapes students to his purposes and teaches evasion of moral consequence (Chapters 2–3). | Scandalum | His influence recruits others into the practices he celebrates. |
| Pilgrim and the Moreys | Cruelty and greed | Kill the knacker during a dispute over payment and turn his corpse into a golden idol (Chapter 7). | Crudelitas; avaritia | The theft, torture, and cult object emerge from the same transaction. |
| Pilgrim Dusmano | Pride | Compares his force to the wind and sun while anticipating further killings (Chapter 6). | Superbia | He uses his claimed elemental status to place himself beyond restraint. |
| Polder Dossman | Child murder | Kills one child who mocks him; the others respond with hatred (Chapter 12). | Homicidium | The scene exposes the violence beneath his demand to be loved. |
| Polder Dossman | Blasphemy | Asks about adding “This is My Beloved Son” to a paid sky display (Chapter 13). | Blasphemia | He seeks a manufactured sign of divine endorsement. |
| Hector Bogus | Cruelty | Builds an animation capable of experiencing intensified pain and time (Chapter 13). | Crudelitas | He excuses suffering by denying the reality of the sufferer. |
| Hector Bogus | Cruelty | Torments a sliver of Polder's heart during the final death-weighing (Chapter 15). | Crudelitas | The apparent failure of Polder's escape does not vindicate Bogus's pleasure in torture. |
Chronicle of Violence
The novel records its acts of violence in close detail. The following table summarizes the principal violent events:
| Section / Event | Description | Passage and Context |
|---|---|---|
| Hut's murder | Pilgrim kills an arrogant henchman to open hostilities. | Chapters 2–3. Hut's death is Pilgrim's ante in the game with Evenhand. |
| Aubrey Pym and family | Pilgrim cuts the throats of all four family members and reduces their bodies. | Chapter 4. The younger child resists and threatens revenge from the passages. |
| Trenchant's murder | The young Lords mutilate the spy; Pilgrim completes the killing. | Chapter 6. Pilgrim tears at the dismembered man and crushes the vital center. |
| The knacker's murder | Mary eviscerates him; James fills and coats his body with molten gold. | Chapter 7. The resulting gilded corpse is installed as the Holy Knacker. |
| Mut's assault | Mut drains Pilgrim's blood with a ritual knife and collects it in a tankard. | Chapter 4. He drinks the collected blood later, while reporting to Evenhand. |
| Execution by horses | The militia tears Pilgrim apart; companions follow him into death. | Chapter 8. Mary, James, Noah, and Raffels are also killed; Wut is garroted. |
| Tisman's execution | Mustard gas is used to inflict death with discomfort. | Chapter 1. The doctors and officials monitor the process for signs of escape. |
| The Marshal and his daughter | The daughter is forced into the Jezebel drama; the Marshal is also dismembered. | Chapter 10. The elite audience demands live suffering in its entertainment. |
| Combat in the Narrow Corner | The hound fights Wut; the ariel confronts the Pym child; the pan-morph fights the knacker. | Chapter 9. The hound tears Wut's throat; the companions are gravely damaged and fall into the chasm. |
| Palgrave Tacoman's death | The King Boar kills him in the staged hunt. | Chapter 11. The Adonis pattern appears in both Fairbrow's death and Palgrave's. |
| Longram's torture | Mobs mutilate the good man; torture gas adds to his suffering. | Chapter 15. He supplies the spectacle that the depleted Polder cannot provide. |
| Polder's last flutter | Bogus torments the heart sliver, which eventually stops. | Chapter 15. Three seconds after the recorded end, screaming is heard far below. The novel does not say that the cabinet holds a fluttering sliver forever. |
The spectators' appetite for suffering recalls Augustine's account of Alypius at the gladiatorial games (Confessions VI.8.13): watching the violence draws him into the crowd's excitement.
Timeline
Chronology across worlds and the fifteen-year question
PROLOGUE: THE DEATH OF PILGER TISMAN
The cult figure Pilger Tisman is executed by the state with "Yperite or Mustard" gas. Doctors monitor his death with equipment designed to prevent him from taking "anything with him" into the next existence.
Characters: Pilger Tisman, Doctors Wilcove Funk, Jon Austin, Jude Ravel; brigadier of police (Salvatore), coroner
Tisman evades the death-weighers. After death, his centralized memory deposit (the "cerebral juglans") collapses as "its fat content was removed in electrical charge and chemical fix and pattern." This is recorded as an "absolute physical theft from the body." His aura reappears at a distance, and his "person-tone" sounds, triumphant and mocking.
Doctor Funk discovers a "new and compensating thing" left by Tisman's departure, a shining residue. He conceals the discovery on impulse, hiding the fact that the residue "overflowed his hand and occupied the world, in a very thin but complete manner." The episode suggests that a world-jump alters the world it leaves behind.
Pilger Tisman's physical body is buried later the same day. The burial is attended by only two mourners, who observe from a distance: Maria del Mar and Jacob del Mar, whose presence anticipates their return, still devoted to him, as Mary and James Morey in his next incarnation.
INTERVAL OF ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS
PART I: THE RISE OF PILGRIM DUSMANO
Pilgrim Dusmano, a charismatic university lecturer, explains his philosophy of alternate worlds and controlled death ("world-jumping"). He promises endless lives free of consequence, dismissing the "one bad case" of failure as an infinitesimal risk.
Characters: Pilgrim Dusmano, James Morey, Howard Praise, Rhinestone Suderman, Mary Morey
Location: Rampart University
Rhinestone Suderman proposes that she and her fellow students form a cult around the "chaotic" figure of Pilgrim Dusmano, driven by what she terms a "blind compulsion." The proposal founds the Dusmano cult, which becomes Pilgrim's base of power against the established order.
Pilgrim discusses Prime World with Noah Zontik in the Prismatic Room. Noah describes it as grubby, spiritualist, quack, and Fortean, yet real. He presses Pilgrim to acknowledge either a prime reality or his own derivative status.
Location: The Prismatic Room of the Personage Club
Immediately after his conversation with Zontik, Dusmano flies across town and casually murders one of Cyrus Evenhand's henchmen, Hut. The unprovoked killing is Dusmano's declaration of war against his "one powerful enemy," Cyrus Evenhand.
The henchman Mut (Satterfield) ambushes Dusmano in a ritual attack, draining five pints of his blood. The blood loss triggers a physical transformation, giving Dusmano his fractured, "jeweled eyes." Mut's wallet, which Dusmano steals during the attack, contains a notebook revealing the secret identities of Cyrus Evenhand (the Consul) and all his henchmen.
Location: The commodity arrival area
Dusmano ritually kills Aubrey Pym and his family to send them as "messengers" to his mysterious "Supply." The younger child defies him: "You can cut my head clear off, but you can't kill me. . . I'll hide in the passages and in the glaciers, and I'll trap you there." One of the child's eyes survives the people-grinder, and the child returns as a vengeful fire-drake in the Narrow Corner.
PART II: THE UNRAVELING
Using information from Mut's wallet, Dusmano leaks the identity of Consul Evenhand to the reporter Randal Muckman. The news spreads instantly by "tinsel broadcast" and turns the public against Evenhand and his henchmen.
Location: Outside the Daylight Museum
Inside the museum, Dusmano encounters a small wooden statuette that possesses his "old eyes." Taking it for a remnant of his original self, he has it ritually "drowned" by James Morey. The act is a symbolic self-erasure, in which Dusmano, a "projection" seeking to become an artificial "idol," destroys a remnant of his former humanity.
Prompted by media revelations, the public unmasks and violently kills several of Evenhand's associates, including Blut, Flut, and Gut. At the Media Club, Dusmano takes part in a ritual feast, consuming a piece of Blut's roasted flesh: "The burned flesh is pleasant in my mouth."
Location: The Media Club
Dusmano conspires with a knacker to seize the fortunes of his nine enemies. Once the plan is set, Dusmano betrays and murders the knacker, encasing his body in molten gold to create the "Holy Knacker" statue. The knacker's dying threat: "I'll prepare a welcome for you in a new place, man."
Location: The All-Effects Hall behind the Golden Grotto
The Media Lords turn on Dusmano. His location is betrayed by Doctor Raffels. A militia captures Dusmano, Mary Morey, and James Morey and executes them by tearing them apart with horses. They are followed into death by Noah Zontik and Doctor Raffels (by horses), Wut (by garrote), and Doctor Augustine (by "private conveyance").
Location: A knoll above the parkway
PART III: THE AFTERLIFE AND FINAL WORLDS
In the Narrow Corner, the pan-morphous cult figure and his ariel and hound companions meet the knacker, Wut, and the vengeful Pym child. The companions fall after violent encounters; the cult figure defeats the knacker, takes the name Polder, and then falls himself. His descent is interrupted by the Legacy of Nine Lives.
Location: The Narrow Corner / The Camel's Eye
The narrative turns to the timeless Nine Lives to La Spezia. As Pelion Tuscamondo on Cannes World, the protagonist pays to publish his testament in the Group Unconscious. As Palgrave Tacoman on Oraioi Polloi, he pays Aurelion to advance his archetypal status and dies in a ritual boar hunt. These aspects continue forever outside ordinary chronology.
Location: Cannes, Oraioi Polloi, and seven other Legacy Worlds
The protagonist awakens as Polder Dossman on a ragged hillside with two followers, Moira and Jake Mara. He perceives the world as stark, "sharp-lined," and "simple," without depth of color, and its starkness leads him to believe that he may have landed on Prime World.
Location: A hillside near Camel Town
At the height of his cult's power, Polder moves Shining Mountain. The event destroys the Hand from Heaven, kills the main heckler groups, and dissolves his cult through an equal opposing force. Bogus later describes the exertion as an overload that broke the creature. Polder is left convinced that he is trapped on Prime World.
The broken Polder Dossman is subjected to a second execution, attended by officials (Vonk, August, Raphaelson, Og Scath, Hector Bogus) who correspond to those at Tisman's death. This time he does not escape by world-jump. Bogus places a sliver of his heart in a torture cabinet. Three seconds after his recorded end, "he was heard in the very deep distance, far under the queasy feet of all of them." The narrator comments: "It couldn't, of course, be an actual soul screaming forever in hell. It had to be some sort of imitation. But it was quite a good imitation."
The Protagonist's World
The Nine Lives to La Spezia
Metaphysical Locations
Media Violence: 1959–1976
Lafferty's novel appeared in 1976, after two decades in which American media depictions of violence changed markedly. The following timeline places the novel's "Lords of the Media" and constructed spectacle in that context:
The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) established rebellious characters, but media violence stayed restrained under strict enforcement of the Hays Code. Westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza dominated TV with sanitized conflict.
Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) pushed mainstream boundaries. The assassination of President Kennedy (1963) brought real violence into American homes through television.
The Hays Code declined. Directors such as Peckinpah and Penn tested its limits. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) introduced graphic, realistic shootouts. Television coverage of the Vietnam War brought images of distant conflict into American homes.
MPAA ratings (G, M, R, X) replaced the Hays Code and gave filmmakers more latitude. Romero's Night of the Living Dead brought explicit cannibalism and death to the screen.
The Wild Bunch (1969) made prominent use of slow-motion, "balletic" gunfights. A Clockwork Orange (1971) stylized "ultraviolence." The Godfather (1972) made graphic Mafia killings central to its story.
The Exorcist (1973) brought graphic horror to a mass audience. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) helped shape the later slasher genre. Watergate deepened distrust of public authority, while urban unrest exposed political and social conflict.
Jaws (1975) blended suspense with implied violence. Taxi Driver (1976) explored urban violence and vigilantism. Carrie (1976) ended in a telekinetic bloodbath. Lafferty's Not to Mention Camels, in which Noah Zontik calls the Media Lords "the true Lords of Unreason and Darkness," appeared the same year.
Contributing Factors
Technological
Improvements in special effects (blood squibs, prosthetics) enabled realistic violence. Color television made battlefield footage more immediate.
Cultural
The Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, and political assassinations disrupted American public life, and darker, more violent media reflected those anxieties.
Regulatory
The Hays Code's fall and the MPAA system's rise permitted explicit depictions. An industry rating system replaced the industry's earlier content code; both were forms of self-regulation.
Anticipation
Lafferty's "Media Lords" who "can play any realm or any world like a piano" and "compel a world absolutely to any notion" anticipate concerns about media influence that would intensify in subsequent decades.
Allusions & Sources
Biblical, literary, and mythological references
Jonah and the Novel's Title
Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons that know not how to distinguish their right hand from their left, not to mention many camels.
God (Jonah 4:11)Chapter 3 adapts God's final question to Jonah about Nineveh (Jonah 4:11), replacing the biblical cattle with camels. The title thus joins divine concern for the morally undiscerning city to the protagonist's animal motif. The novel's opening epigraph is instead attributed to Tractatus, Lament of the Times.
The Eye of the Needle
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 19:24The Nine Lives to La Spezia complicate the image of the rich man and the needle's eye. Chapter 9 pairs the saying attributed to Matthew with a comic explanation of how a camel performs the trick. The Narrow Corner, also called the Camel's Eye, makes the passage perilous. The later chapters allow nine aspects to stay in pleasure while another suffers damnation.
Og and the Ark
Noah Zontik/Og Scath claims to be the giant Og, King of Bashan, one of the last of the Rephaim (Numbers 21:33, Deuteronomy 3:11). In Jewish midrashic tradition, Og survived the Flood by clinging to the outside of Noah's Ark. In Lafferty's version, Og held an umbrella over the poorly sealed main hatch, which kept the vessel from sinking and earned him God's commission to protect others ever after.
Og therefore predates the Mosaic covenant. He protects the protagonist even into hell and discharges the duty despite his own disbelief.
Jezebel and Jehu
The Perpetual Animation Festival stages Jehu's Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel. In 2 Kings 9:30–37, the dogs leave her skull, feet, and palms; the biblical account does not explain this as a matter of taste. Lafferty's staged body parts ask riddles. The Marshal's daughter adds a warning that no drop of blood will be forgotten, unsettling the spectators' pleasure.
Lazarus
On Cannes World, spectators in The Resurrection of Lazarus use their group mind to move a cup of water out of the thirsty man's reach. The cruelty inverts the compassion of the resurrection story in John 11 and also recalls the thirst of the rich man in the separate parable of Lazarus in Luke 16.
The Four Last Things
The Four Last Things are Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. Pilgrim's teaching denies final consequence, while Prime World represents his fear that an ultimate accounting still awaits him. The Legacy Worlds complicate the pattern, since they endure forever but cannot console Polder's isolated tenth aspect at the end.
Real Authors Quoted
Chapter Epigraphs (Fictional Sources)
Lafferty invents texts and authors for many of his chapter epigraphs:
The Nine Worlds' Names
The Legacy Worlds take their names from places, literature, and legend:
Melchisedech Duffy's Walk-In Bijou
A New Orleans art gallery whose wares appear in the Daylight Museum. "Melchisedech puts out trash and keeps the good stuff stored away in a lumber room behind." The biblical Melchizedek was the priest-king of Salem who blessed Abraham, a figure of mysterious origin, "without father, without mother, without descent" (Hebrews 7:3). The name suggests hidden sacred treasures behind vulgar commerce.
Giants and Primordial Beings
Celtic & Irish Mythology
Classical & Medieval
Archetypes & Eidolons
The novel's "eidolon" terminology draws on Greek eidōlon (image, phantom, apparition). In Homer, eidola are shades of the dead; in Neoplatonism, they are lower reflections of higher realities. The protagonist is partly eidolon, an artificial image rather than a prime reality, yet he produces real effects and real devotion.
The "Group Unconscious" or "Folk Ocean" echoes Jung's collective unconscious, but Lafferty gives it material existence as a literal pervading water made of the "testaments of devils." The hundred or so eidetic archetypes are catalogued "like elements," which suggests a periodic table of demonic influences on human perception.
The Pan-Morph
In the Narrow Corner sequence, a "pan-morph" appears, a composite creature of all shapes that attacks and is attacked. This echoes medieval depictions of demonic aggregates and the classical Proteus (the shape-shifting old man of the sea). The pan-morph represents the formless chaos underlying structured reality, the chaos from which the protagonist, as a "chaotic" figure, claims to derive power.