The frenzied crowd of Bacchantes seizes you. They tie up your fists and ankles to a long pole and carry you about like vulgar war booty. Clearly, everything leads you to believe that between the pattern of an unassuming, submissive and maternal woman and the one of a bloodthirsty castrating virago, always embittered but nevertheless unsatisfied, there is no likely happy medium.

You are imagining your forthcoming torture and sweat begins to thicken all over your skin. Big drops meet together and their sudden percolation makes a boiling drip run down along your temples. You are not even sure that they will content themselves with depriving you from your virility, if, besides, you can still boast about virility in the situation you have been put.

They might just as well cut you into pieces with an axe and eat your raw flesh, grill your liver and water it with a good blood sauce... your own blood. Terror is so intense that you do not feel the ties penetrating your flesh nor your sinews being cut. They put you down onto a couple of trestles.

Hanging down, looking pitifully at the blood running down your arms and feeling it spawn between your calf hairs, distressed, you shake your head. Why – O why the hell ! – women, rather than being alternatively weak victims and their vindictive amazon opposite side, could they not be men like everyone else ?

But whereas your head falls back down in a movement of resignation, your desperate wish produces immediately its own invalidation. The women have left the room but another one comes towards you.

Strange and stranger for ever to the man that you are, as beautiful and mysterious as you could never be, the Nun of Hell, escorted by two devilish hooded monks, comes to inflict the last humiliation on you herself ! Wordless, she points you out with a firm finger to one of her slaves. He gets closer to you, pulling a knife out of his wide sleeve. As for you, you close your eyes in a grimace that squeezes your whole face. You imagine yourself as a eunuch in the Devil's harem. Your pecs would melt into flabby breasts and your belly would flop out of your belt. Skinhead, wearing dresses, you would become the servant of temptresses with grace revolting shapes. Impotent... Forever impotent !

Yet, at your greatest surprise, you fall down; your back first, then your legs, collapse on the ground. The monk has cut the ties that shackled you and returned to his mistress' right. Flabbergasted but relieved, you look at the Nun.

However, if she saved you from physical castration, she is not sparing you mental humiliation, which your virility can only suffer. She gelds you from all your male illusions.

" Enslavement is the outcome of victory. But no victory is permanent ! And all servitude that lasts is deliberate. "

Yet, she shouts at your face in such a way that you nearly want to take the opposite side. But you begin to doubt. If women can be as barbaric as Frédégonde, as hateful as the Nun and as cold-blooded as Margaret Thatcher are, what would we make them rise up on our side to rule human fate for ? Feminism is surely a fair cause. But is it only worth it ? If in the end, they are as mean, deceitful, cruel and incompetent as men are ?

With a reasoning similar to the Abbess' one, you embrace a reverse profession of faith ! But as you watch her raise her fine hands, as you listen to her deep but nonetheless so feminine a voice, as you see her cheekbones bulging with hatred, you get the strange feeling of an irresistible attraction to that being. The magic works and, passionate, you drink her venom like sweet honey.

" Taking the excuse of a so-called physical vulnerability to argue that women must be protected, claiming that their mental vulnerability demands that they have to be preserved from themselves is just modern mystification ! " 

Baffled and mystified, you understand that you will never comprehend women's secret aspirations. Men are their alter ego. Yet, they will always remain complete strangers to each other.

You can not work out what the Nun's point is, obvious sign that you will never understand her. It does not matter to you. Without inaccessibility, no love ! Without unknown, no fascination ! Yes, without women, we would be condemned never to lose our mind. Without women, our domination fantasies and our wish for power would lose all their spirit.

To be true, they may be as vile and mean, strong and self-willed as men are, still, they will never stop exerting their fascination on male spirit. They are well and truly the closest but most unknown monsters to us !

The Nun, with so beautiful a body and so desirable an intellect, ceases frowning at last. She grabs a torch off a wall, holds it up and throws it at your feet. Then she imperiously shows you the exit. The movement of her arm thrown like an arrow brings about a slight fit of breast.

This will be the last flash of beauty you will see for some time. Head down, you disappear into the underground night. Now, further away, three bottles are lying around on the floor. They are respectively labelled : Vampirae Herbora, Belladonna Malefica, Euphorbus Euphorbus.

You immediately swallow the three bottle contents. As, for once, you are not bound to choose...
And, after a little while, you find yourself at the junction of two passageways. One is hissing an icy wind. The other carries a furnace burning gust.