The One Holding The Knife

“You’ve always got to be 

The One Holding The Knife.”

Mrs. Kintner : 

Chief Brody?

The Chief : 

Yes?

Mrs. Kintner slaps Brody and sobs

Mrs. Kintner : 

I just found out — a girl 

got killed here last week…. 

and You KNEW it! 

You KNEW there was 

A Shark out there! 

You knew it was DANGEROUS! 

But you let people 

go swimming anyway…!!

You knew ALL those THINGS…!!

But STILL, 

My Boy is DEAD, now. 

And there's nothing 

you can do about it. 

My Boy is Dead. 

I wanted you to know that.

Mrs. Kintner walks away

Mayor Vaughn : 

I'm sorry, Martin. 

She's Wrong.

The Chief : 

No, she's not.

Let Justice Be Done, 

Though The Heavens Fall

“In October 1966, Jim Garrison sat down to read the Warren Commission Report and tried to make sense of the assassination of the President. The Commission had published twenty-six volumes of hearings and evidence. This was a lot of data, but Garrison was an experienced District Attorney and he was used to working with large and complicated sets of information. 

Methodically, he read through every witness statement and examined every photograph. With all the evidence mentally spread in front of him, he began to analyse. 

He saw connections and contradictions emerging from this web of data, and by linking these key facts he began to weave a narrative. This narrative, if he did his job properly, would provide clarity about what really happened. He was attempting to tease out the one story that was True. 

It did not take him long to dismiss the Commission’s findings. Their narrative claimed that President Kennedy had been shot for unknown reasons by an ex-marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, and that Oswald had acted alone, without the assistance of any other individuals or groups, either foreign or domestic. 

Garrison could see how they had pulled this story from the mass of data, but he also saw too many errors in their analysis. Too much contradictory information had been ignored, and too many omissions had not been followed through. 

The Commission’s conclusions did not, to his mind, tell The Story of what really happened. If anything, it told The Story of what people wanted to have happened. It had chosen the most palatable narrative, rather than the True one. 

And it was important to know What Had Happened. 

Murder is serious and Human Life is valuable, but JFK’s murder had another dimension above and beyond the loss of one man’s life. 

His murder hit people on a symbolic level. Kennedy was not then as universally popular as he is now remembered, but he was young, virile and the figurehead of The Nation. 

The Beheading of A King is an ancient and powerful archetype, and when the second bullet removed much of Kennedy’s head, that archetype played out in the psyche of the country. The American People, collectively, went into a kind of shock. 

Like the events of 9/ 11 and the death of Princess Diana, it was a tragedy whose impact on the nation’s subconscious was greater than anything a rational assessment of the death toll would suggest. The killer shot at one man, but millions were hit. 

And whoever was responsible, it appeared to Garrison, was getting away with it....”

"What was that homosexual business? Just buggin' old Bushman?" 

"Entropy. Breaking the straight line into a curve ball." 

“Hagbard," I said, "what the hell is Your Game?" 

“Proving that Government is a hallucination in the minds of Governors," he said crisply. We turned onto Lake Shore Drive and sped North. 

“Thou, Jubela, did he tell you the Word?" asked the goat-headed man. 

The gigantic black said, "I beat him and tortured him, but he would not reveal The Word." 

“Thou, Jubelo, did he tell you the Word?" 

The fishlike creature said, "I tormented and vexed his inner spirit, Master, but he would not reveal The Word." 

“And Thou, Jubelum, did he tell you The Word?" 

The hunchbacked dwarf said, "I cut off his testicles and he was mute. I cut off his penis and he was mute. He did not tell me The Word." 

"A fanatic," the goat-head said. "It is better that he is dead." 

Saul Goodman tried to move. He couldn't twitch a single muscle : That last drug had been a narcotic, 

and a powerful one. Or was it a poison? He tried to assure himself that the reason he was paralysed and laying in a coffin was because they were trying to break down his mind. But he wondered if The Dead might tell themselves similar fables, as they struggled to escape from The Body before it rotted. 

As he wondered, the goat-head leaned over and closed the top of the coffin. Saul was alone in Darkness. 

“Leave first, Jubela." 

"Yes, Master." 

"Leave next, Jubelo." 

"Yes, Master." 

"Leave last, Jubelum." 

"Yes, Master." 

Silence. It was lonely and dark in the coffin, and Saul couldn't move. Let me not go mad, he thought. 

Howard spotted the Lief Erikson ahead and sang: "Oh, groovy, groovy, groovy scene/Once again I'll 

meet Celine." Maldonado's sleek Bentley edged up the drive to the home of "America's best-known  financier-philanthropist," Robert Putney Drake. (Louis marched toward the Red Widow, maintaining his dignity. An old man in a strange robe pushed to the front of the crowd, trembling with exaltation. The blade rose: the mob sucked in its breath. The old man tried to look into Louis's eyes, but The King could not focus them. The blade fell : the crowd exhaled. As the head rolled into the basket, the old man raised his eyes in ecstasy and cried out, "Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged!") Professor Glynn lectured his class on medieval history (Dean Deane was issuing the 

Strawberry Statement on the same campus at the same time) and said, "The real crime of The Templars, however, was probably their association. with The Hashishim." George Dorn, hardly listening, wondered if he should join Mark Rudd and the others who wanted to close down Columbia entirely. 

“Very few readers of The Golden Bough have pierced Sir Prof. Dr. Frazer's veil of euphemism and surmised the exact method used by Isis in restoring life to Osiris, although this is shown quite clearly in extant Egyptian frescoes. 

Those who are acquainted with this simple technique of resurrecting The Dead (which is at least partially successful in all cases and totally successful in most) will have no trouble in skrying the esoteric connotations of the Sacred Chao — or of the Taoist yin-yang or the astrological sign of cancer. 

The method almost completely reverses that of the pentagrams, right or left, and it can even be said that in a certain sense it was not Osiris himself but his brother, Set, symbolically understood, who was the object of Isis's magical workings. 

In every case, without exception, a magical or mystical symbol always refers to one of the very few* variations of the same, very special variety of human sacrifice: the "one eye opening" or the "one hand clapping"; and this sacrifice cannot be partial — it must culminate in death if it is to be efficacious. 

The literal-mindedness of the Saures, in the novel, caused them to become a menace to Life on Earth; the reader should bear this in mind. 

The sacrifice is NOT simple. 

It is a species of cowardice, epidemic in Anglo-Saxon nations for more than three centuries, which causes most who seek success in this field to stop short before the death of the victim. Anything less than death — that is, complete oblivion — simply will NOT work.** 

(One will find more clarity on this crucial point in the poetry of John Donne than in most treatises alleging to explain the secrets of magick.) 

* Fewer than seventy, according to a classical enumeration.

** The magician must always identify fully with the victim, and share every agonized contortion to the utmost. Any attitude of standing aside and watching, as in a theatrical performance, or any intellectualization during the moments when the sword is doing its brutal but necessary work, or any squeamishness or guilt or revulsion, creates the two- mindedness against which Hagbard so vehemently warns in Never Whistle While You're Pissing. 

In a sense, only The Mind dies.