And the Whore is This Temple – The Nameless (Mount Abraxas)

Description

“The chapel has no charm. The altar is in darkness.”
– Gabriele D’Annunzio, Notturno

And the Whore is This Temple is the largest Ex Occidente Press book to date and also one of the biggest books released in recent memory.

This is an offering of holy oil to New Jerusalem and Hyperborea, to libraries and archives, and to the temples of the bureaucrats, those holy ministers of great efficiency and expertise. It is a monument to the halls of bedlam and an attempt to chart the sources of the winds, an oblation to the Minotaur in his labyrinth and to the house of ill-repute found in the center of the earth. It is a celebration of the company of ribald soldiers, drunken and inglorious, that raise Kirschwasser-filled glasses to the cardinal directions and to the violated chambers of their once innocent and lofty hearts. It is a tribute to the house of Balzac and to the mansions of the Kabbalists of Castile, a salutation to the night watchmen of the city of the damned and to the pious souls who ring the bells of innumerable churches, their palms stained red with blood from the abrasions of the ropes while their hearts flame like pyres in the blackened night. It is a sacred oath to fires that cannot be extinguished, and to the ever-burning lamps that flame unseen in buried chambers, those immortal beacons ignited by the dying breath of patriarchs and prophets, may their bright sepulchres survive the final sunset! It is a token of esteem to the temples of the aristocracy, and a pittance to those who drink the noble wine of principal from the cracked and venerable vessels of fallen monarchies. It is a toast to the temples of Le Corbusier and to the revelations of Vitruvius, and to the insidious conspiracies of cartographers and architects. Let us raise a glass as well to the lamentations of the stonemason who abandons his work in despair, too broken by the rigors of the empire to put the final stone in place upon his monument to the impossible. It is an adoration of the civil servant stricken by insatiable wanderlust, abandoning his monthly wage for unknown splendors beneath a canopy of foreign stars. It is an appeal to the impenetrable ocean, a benediction to the hopeless souls of shipwrecked sailors driven off course by the irresistible wail of the sirens, an elegy to the drowned and to the lost at sea, and to the navigator betrayed by the positions of the stars. But to worship in the temple is an act divine, whether desolate or paved with gold, immaculate or crumbling into dust, adorned with malachite and lapis lazuli or constructed from the bones of fallen enemies. Our fervid prayers shall irritate the vessels of the earth that they distill strange wine. Let the priest be drunk upon the kisses of abomination! Let the aspirant be shameless in the embrace of the Beloved! Blessed is the blood that stains the fiery feet of foreign Gods!
The bells have shattered in the innermost temple!
The annunciation is upon us!

Don’t dally, you lucky scamp!
The Doors of the Temple are opening as we speak!
Doubt me not, sweet compeer.
Take the plunge! Throw yourself to the wolves!
Step into that blinding dreaming darkness!
The Godhead awaits its pilgrim!