Calliope

This post should be shorter than last time, both because I don't need to introduce the text and also the next natural point to stop in the plot came sooner than the last. So now we get to talk about human sacrifice! Yay!

We left Vathek staring into a dark abyss. The Giaour had rolled in there after the entire city had chased him down like a rogue soccer ball.

• Vathek sits for days, maybe weeks, before the abyss, making hundreds of attendants hold up torches to try to illuminate its depths
• Eventually he suddenly sees the Giaour, who speaks to him, telling him the wonderful sabres were but a tiny portion of the amazing treasures in the storehouse the Giaour can take him to.
• It's got Solomon's magic too, naturally
• But before any of that, the Giaour must be slaked. He thirsts for the blood of children. He tells Vathek to bring him 50 children and push them into the cavern
• Vathek cheerfully complies. He goes back home, pretends to not be off his rocker, and naturally everyone celebrates. At this celebration, he innocuously asks about his lords' children. In an attempt to one-up one another, they brag so much about their children that Vathek can slip in and say he'll have a celebratory event of games for youths and the 50 greatest will come with Vathek and the court out for an even bigger celebration.
• Everyone thinks this is great. The narration takes some time to make sure you know these kids are innocent and happy and good at sports.
• Then Vathek has the 50 winners come one at a time to where he has set himself up, sitting next to the entrance to the cavern. As each kid steps up to get his reward, Vathek shoves him into the cave, so quickly, we're told, the next kid couldn't see it happen.
• The cavern snaps shut and Vathek gets pissed off.
• His court comes running at his cries, realizes the kids are gone, and surprisingly, immediately figure out Vathek sacrificed them to the Giaour.
• Vathek is forced to seek shelter in his palace, which is of course staffed by eunuchs who (also of course) didn't have kids to lose and therefore aren't particularly bothered by what happened.
• They throw money into the crowd, which makes them disperse.
• Vathek's mom begins to grow in prominence here. Her name is Carathis, and she's not only an astrologer, she's a necromancer as well (in the sense of performing "black magic," not in the modern sense of enchanting the dead, though she gets up to some similar stuff)
• Carathis drags Vathek up to the top of his big tower and they prepare a sacrifice for the Giaour, who is obviously a devil. Carathis knows just what to do, and retrieves her store of rhino horns, mummies, and assorted other ingredients. They burn all this stuff.
• The resulting blaze makes the populace think the tower is on fire and Vathek is burning to death inside. Being a loyal people, they rush to save him, despite how he just murdered dozens of their children.
• A team make it up the stairs with water buckets, though the narrator points out they have no water left by the time they make it up all those steps. Carathis sees them coming and has her attendants lying in wait. They surprise the fire brigade and strangle them all to death before burning their bodies in the sacrifice as well. The Giaour is delighted and a scroll appears in a pot, telling Vathek where to go and what to do in order to reach the splendid storehouse of magical treasures.
• This is a good point to mention that Vathek gets bored because he's so hungry. Carathis is the driving force of this portion of the plot. She's the brains of this operation, though Vathek was earlier described as being both curious and intelligent.
• Carathis and Vathek prepare for the trip. Carathis is to stay behind, but only when Vathek agrees to use magic to spirit her to the storehouse once he's there.
• Oh, and before we leave off, there's an interlude. While the preparations are happening, Vathek has down time. He reopens all his palaces and goes back to carousing, but now also he blasphemes on purpose. The Giaour forced him to renounce Mahomet which he and his mother do happily. ¹
• The team he had sent long ago to Mecca returns. They have a broom used to sweep the inner temple; this is a real thing some caliphs would receive and cherish, from what I can find. Vathek receives them in his "inner chambers," described circuitously as a room not intended for the receiving of visitors -- he's on the toilet. They think he's sick, but when he demands the broom they give it to him. He uses it to knock down cobwebs in his "closet" and then tosses it back. Two of the party die immediately and the rest are permanently bedridden from being part of this horrifying blasphemy.

I thought "embarking on a quest" was a good spot to stop for now. There are two themes I think we can pick out here and expand on. The first is curiosity and the second is the fickle nature of evil in the gothic villain.

Curiosity

some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (Lovecraft, "Call of Cthulhu")

If you ever find yourself in a gothic novel the best thing to do is to find a nice book and read it and do not investigate anything, do not be curious about fuck all. I quoted Lovecraft because it's a cliche at this point in "Lovecraftian" fiction that the curiosity of a bookish nerd gets them killed or stuck in an asylum. It's a thing he was getting from gothic fiction generally.

The thing is that gothic fiction tends to be about the difference between what we think is true and what is really true. That's either purely fictional -- there are ghosts, and the person in the haunted house didn't believe in ghosts -- or philosophical -- humans are just animals, and the serial killer with the microphone and the puppet will prove this via torture porn (I am not a fan of the Saw franchise but it's contemporary gothic).

Curiosity, then, is the drive that is going to make the gothic victim find out that they were wrong about life. Here, Vathek is insatiable in every sense of the term: he drinks the most, eats the most, pisses the most, sleeps with the most beautiful women, so on, so forth. He also wants to know everything, which I mentioned last time. This is something people are Not Supposed to Do in certain cultural or religious traditions.

I don't want to simplify this down into "religion says be an incurious dullard." It doesn't always. Many of the finest works of literature and science were written not only by religious people but by the clergy in religions. Newton felt that his investigations into physics were simply elucidating the creation of the Christian god. So while you can say this is the psychological exploration of a religious thing, we have to sensitively complicate that as we go.

However, wherever you identify its source, the gothic runs with the idea that curiosity is going to kill the cat. Vathek is trapped into the Bad Stuff that's coming not by his impiety or his lust or his greed, but by his curiosity. The plan of Mahomet [^2] hinges on Vathek being unable to turn away from a mystery -- of course, especially so if it has goodies at the end.

The thing about gothic curiosity is that it's what leads the victim to find that things are not as they believe they are, that the system of meaning and symbol that they assumed was the world is just the reality-tunnel they live in -- and, by extension, that we all live in. Victorian gothic writers would exploit this relentlessly as they grappled with concepts of queerness, evolution, nature, and violence that marked the period.

The fear in the gothic is from finding something awful behind the curtain, beneath the bedsheet, past the closed door... and nobody's going to see what's there unless somebody is curious enough to peek.

Evil

Sacrificing a bunch of kids and then also a bunch of adults just to get more shiny stuff is evil, all right -- there's no question that Vathek does evil things and therefore can safely be labeled as evil. But the point I'm making now is that he's not as bad as his mom. The book comes out and says that she's waited for this opportunity her whole life and that she loves evil things, decay and magic and devils and so on.

Unlike Manfred, Vathek isn't kind of noble and kind of evil. He's kind of a frat bro and kind of a scientist. Carathis pushes Vathek, both insofar as she raised him and also with the tower project and the sacrifices. Vathek is easy enough to seduce with ideas of power and infinite knowledge, but his mom is basically evil for evil's sake. Like Macbeth, right? Macbeth himself does terrible things, but Lady Macbeth is almost preternaturally amped up to kill a motherfucker. And there are of course there's misogyny in here, where men are writing stories about how women are capable of more evil than men are because women are more flawed or whatever. But within the genre, and within the text, women are positioned as able to alter the course of a person, for good or for ill.

So if you're familiar with the old idea that a woman is the person who makes the house safe and beautiful for man to return home to, you know this song and dance. Gothic fiction inverts it, like it inverts everything: the woman is no longer the solace of the hero, she is what guarantees his doom. There's a wide body of criticism now on the domestic milieu of the 18th and 19 century and how it interfaced with and influenced gothic fiction. Just think of how homes are always unsafe in the gothic: Dracula climbs in the window and has sex with Mina while Jonathan watches; the call is coming from inside the house; the ghost appears when you're asleep in bed. Part of the horror of gothic is that it inverts the safety of homes, and so of course it also has to invert the safety and moral uprightness of the homemaker.

[^2] I'm using this archaic spelling of Muhommad because it's what's used in the book, and the historicity of the story and its notes were part of the package when it was released. But I am aware it's spelled Muhammad now.

1. going against the monoculture religion is a means of initiation in a lot of magical traditions. Some medieval Christian traditions had the budding wizard recite the Lord's Prayer backwards, ideally in a graveyard or a church.