THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020: THE SCOURGE

​Most people's preconceptions of angels, in the Abrahamic sense of the term, derive from renaissance assumptions of their forms and natures (that is, they tend to be vaguely humanoid, winged figures that descend from on high on beams of sunlight). 


However, anyone who has actually read the likes of, for example, The Books of Ezekiel and/or Revelations, certain Kabalistic or occult texts or even casually glanced over the poetry of William Blake, will know that angelic entities are far from so mundane or proscribed in traditional mythology. Biblically, they are described as “. . .fiery wheels of passion,” immense, flaming entities that resemble mechanisms of fire and starlight upon which multiple sets of wings flutter and numerous eyes burst with blazing scrutiny. They are far more elemental, ineffable and terrifying beings than present-day proscriptions imply, and it is that original complexity which preoccupies and obsesses the imagination of Clive Barker. 


For a creator so positively identified with the infernal, angelic and semi-divine entities occur quite often in Barker's work. Even the most iconic entities associated with his name, The Cenobites of Hellraiser fame, are self-described obliquely as “. . .demons to some, angels to others,” and are often couched in language that is as reverent and transcendental as it is grotesque and horrifying. As well as Sacrament's Nilotic, a vaguely-defined angel of death occurs in the closing chapters of the novel Coldheart Canyon, whilst entities that entirely defeat parameters of the divine or infernal bestrew The Books of the Art. 


Perhaps the most iconic of Barker's angels is also the most horrifying in its purity; the elemental force of unmaking whose presence pervades the narrative of the seminal Weaveworld, and whose ultimate manifestation is perhaps the closest to biblical descriptions of those most abstruse and elusive of entities. 


From the opening chapters, the over-arching terror of The Scourge is well established; antagonist Immacolata, a creature of semi-divine provenance herself (purportedly descended from none other than Lady Lilith and “. . .the first state of magic”), dreams of the entity as it slumbers, of the terrible, scouring fire it will bring when it awakes.


This is no bringer of peace and miracles, no harbinger of revelation. The creature is an unreasoning, elemental force of utter annihiliation, such that even a creature as genocidal and remarkably lethal as Immacolata fears it. 


In that, it stands as a commentary on the awfulness of certain metaphysical notions of “purity;” The Scourge is apocalyptic fire, that believes itself to be the cleansing hand of God on an unclean and infested Earth. It is the end of all magic, the death of dreams, and the return of the most sterile, monstrous notion of “innocence” imaginable. 


Throughout most of the narrative, it is a speculative entity; one that exists in rumour and myth rather than in actuality. 


That is, until the defeated salesman-turned-prophet-turned-would-be-divinity Shadwell sets out in search of it, having suffered his own, narcissistic form of “revelation” at the hands of the book's miracles and monsters (unable to tame or control them, reduce miracles to commodities, the singularly post-modern antagonist decides that all magic is impure and corrupting, that it must be scoured from creation as a cleansing act for his own tarnished soul). 


Finding it housed in the most sterile environment on Earth, the desert wastelands of The Rub'al Khali, he is granted a vision of the terrible sterility in which it has endured and the consequent madness that has claimed it: 


An image of Eden awaits him there, but a mockingly barren one; its flowers and fecundity made of sand, and therefore lifeless, as The Scourge lacks all capacity to create or bring life, being the elemental end of all things that it presumes of itself. 


Like The Nilotic, The Scourge is not as it is advertised nor what it believes itself to be. Like The Nilotic, it has been poisoned and corrupted by the stories of humanity, believing itself to be the Biblical Uriel, who stands guard at the gates of Eden. It has absorbed the identity proscribed by those stories and thereby lost so much of itself, become a mad and lonely entity in its isolation that now lashes out wildly and destructively in the manner of an abandoned, celestial child. It is a terrifying entity of madness, delusion and unstoppable destructive potential, the lurid descriptions of what it does to its victims, of the unremitting devastation it inflicts wherever it goes, something that Barker takes notable joy in, especially when contrasted to the creative inspirations and Raptures  of The Seerkind, the inhuman entities that are its prey and sole purpose for existing. 


The Scourge is anti-creation, a contrast to all that Weaveworld contains up to the point of its manifestation. Throughout the book, there are lurid examples of both miraculous and horrific creations, phenomena that inspire and arouse and appall, all of them strangely beautiful, even at their most grotesque or violent, but The Scourge comes as the antithesis of them all; a thing that takes no pleasure in anything it does, that is incapable of such, that seeks no satisfaction other than the fulfilment of proscribed purpose, in the manner of an engine (which it is variously described as throughout). 


In terms of manifestation, it is a protean entity of fire and wheels and myriad eyes, sometimes resembling an immense figure, swathed in smoke and storms, another a machine of living light, others a proliferating garden of fiery blooms. 


In that, it is exceedingly close to the traditional portrayal of angelic entities in their parent traditions, much more ineffable and unknowable than the renaissance depictions that come later, and which pervade present-day religious imagery. 


However, Barker's angel doesn't stop there; it is not as it believes or assumes, as the stories of humanity it has assimilated proscribe: 


What it is, exactly, is never explained: only that it is other-worldly, part of a species or race of entities that once inhabited the Earth alongside the Seerkind. Abandoned, left behind by its kin, it went mad in isolation, its desolate qualities born of loneliness, that it expresses in apocalyptic temper tantrums that are capable of charring civilisations to ash and desert, which no magic can withstand. 


But, its ultimate defeat comes from self-realisation: through an act of supreme bravery (and fittingly ironic self-sacrifice), it is shown itself, forced to realise its own lunacy and traumas and thereby transcend them, to become something greater, more beautiful and beyond what the cruel and self-mutilating myths of humanity have made of it. In that, it is another of Barker's more sympathetic monsters, a creature that is as much a victim as anything it mistakenly murders, and as worthy of redemption. 

THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020 PART TWO: THE LIX​
​THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE BODY POLITIC
​ THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE MAGDALENE (AKA “MAMMA PUS”)
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020: THE JAFFE
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: 2020 THE SON OF CELLULOID
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020: THE NILOTIC