How old is the "child of Satan" trope? Surely it must be older than stuff like Rosemary's Baby. There's children of devils in some of our oldest literature—Merlin is said to have been the child of an incubus, for example—but I'm talking about something much grander here, the idea of a full-on reverse Incarnation. The notion of the biblical "antichrist", which is used rather vaguely and generally to refer to false prophets, has fused with notions of Satan and devil children, producing the popular fictional idea of Satan's Child, or sometimes Satan's Incarnation in human form. This isn't "Biblical", strictly speaking, but it's great for horror movies.

Anyway I feel like this idea is pretty modern and probably roughly cognate with the first popularization of actual Satanism, prompting fears of a Satanic Incarnation. It seems like a vaguely significant evolution of occult belief. The earlier generation of ceremonial occultists might have boasted of dealing with dark powers such as Goetian demons, and stories of people doing deals with Satan (usually in some guise like Black Philip or Old Scratch) are centuries old, but there's something new and different about just...openly worshipping Satan. None of this midnight-at-the-crossroads stuff, just...going to a building, probably rather a dull building in fact, to give homage to the Prince of Darkness.

Hm, I thought I saw someone for a second there. Anyway, I find myself curiously taken with the idea of Satan working out some trick for achieving an approximate Incarnation, and therefore getting to experience something that the Christian God had reserved for His own use—direct knowledge of what it was like to be a human being. What's more, the Christian God is restricted by his own rules to a single Incarnation, or maybe a double one, depending upon how you interpret the rules. But Satan wouldn't be restricted, and therefore Satan could have as many pseudo-Incarnations as they liked, learning a bit more every time.

Heck...isn't there a chance that Satan might end up outdoing the original, if they worked at it hard enough? Wouldn't THAT be wild!?

~Chara of Pnictogen

I have been afflicted with a high degree of horror of transformation, which I control as best I can because it's not in step with my circle of friends or, indeed, many of my own headmates. "Body horror" has always squicked me more than other types of horror, and it's been getting in the way of my cinematic interests. I suspect that this is a common problem in U.S. culture, which is suffused with Christian-tinged ideas about the body as a temple and the God-ordained fixity of all creation. Evolution horrified the Christian hardliners with its suggestion of fluid changes between forms, and they rejected it; physical transformation of the body terrifies them even more.

In order to understand my own horrors better, I have turned to one of the writers who has best evoked it, the Welsh weird-fiction writer Arthur Machen. Machen dabbled in occultism but, somewhat like H. P. Lovecraft (who drew from Machen's work) he was horrified by what he saw beyond the veil. Unlike Lovecraft, unfortunately, Machen tended to sexualize his horrors and thus weakens his fiction. His most famous work, The Great God Pan, superbly evocative in many passages, frequently sinks into mere hand-wringing about unspeakable obscenities. Machen rather suggests that Helen Vaughan's greatest problem is that she's horny and kinky.

Thus my favorite Machen story is The Novel of the White Powder, a self-contained excerpt from a larger work called The Three Impostors. The style of this book is highly discursive, with shady characters frequently stopping to tell short tales that are thematically pertinent but otherwise apparently irrelevant to the main narrative. This framing-device gives an odd quality to The Novel of the White Powder, which is related in a tone of extreme urgency and sincerity. Its horrific power comes partly from this mood of utmost seriousness—and yet there's an excellent chance the story is complete bullshit, told by an unreliable narrator playing games with her audience.

cw: extensive discourse on Machen's The Novel of the White Powder, with copious spoilers

At some point I feel like Kris and I have to work out our bistability problems, which I guess is one of those integration things, but...I guess we're still not sure how we'd like to present that. One curious point is that Kris would prefer to go by my name in public. I was wondering if they were being excessively deferential or something on this point, but...no, Kris seems to like having their real name being a bit...private. An open secret, I guess. ~Chara

I like grouping concepts into loose trinities, and I'm talking about two forms of power, hence I also present...Power! She's from Chainsaw Man and she's...visiting the Pnictogen Wing for a while. In fact she's been tearing stuff up here pretty well and uh we're working on it.

At some point I realized that political power and physical power, power in the sense of "physical work over time", were roughly equivalent. One can estimate the power of a human being by gauging how much physical power they can cause to be exerted on their behalf at a command. Consider for example how one can estimate, in fairly straightforward physical terms, how powerful two military leaders are in comparison to each other: how big an army could they order around, and how quickly? How much military stuff could they command to be heaped at a given point within a given interval of time? Clearly this principle can be applied to any human being. How much power do YOU have to get what you want on command? Could you even get sandwiches delivered, much less a tank or a nuclear warhead?

It seems like such an absurdly obvious connection to make—political power with physical power—that I can't imagine I'm on new ground here. I've never read much political theory or economic theory or anything of that sort, so I've no idea how scholars and experts, both genuine and fraudulent, have been talking about power in the political sense, or whether there have been attempts to quantify it. What's clear enough is that the public political discourse on power has been kept deliberately vague. This is true especially from right-wing authoritarians who have been restlessly trawling through every U.S. legal document, from the Constitution on down, attempting to find pretexts for exercising the broadest possible powers. They have a vested interest in keeping political power obscure and mystified, just as capitalists have an interest in keeping money in a permanent fog of nonsense and crackpot theories.

Perhaps the Cohost readership can assist me here? This is very much not my field. Have there been attempts to quantify political power in physical terms, such as I'm suggesting here?

~Chara of Pnictogen