Joseph and His Brothers, page 127
One can imagine the festive feminine excitement this revelation aroused among the chorus of her friends. They behaved very much as Tabubu and Meh-en-wesekht before them had responded upon hearing the great news that Mut found herself in the throes of love, and they reacted to her affliction on a grand scale, just as those two had: encircling her, stroking her, and speaking together in a babble of many thrilled voices, congratulating her and sympathizing with her. The glances they secretly exchanged, however, the words they whispered to one another, told of something very different from tender compassion: malicious disappointment that it was nothing more than this, that her entire ostentatious distress came simply from common infatuation with a servant; plus silent envy and general jeal-
ousy on account of the male involved; but above all self-satisfied schadenfreude that it was Mut, proud and pure Mut, bride of Amun, chaste as the moon, who had been so smitten at her advanced age, was afflicted in the most common way, was left languishing for a pretty servant, and did not even understand that she should keep this to herself, but had helplessly betrayed to everyone an abasement common to all women, wailing: "Where shall I flee?" This flattered her friends, though they did not fail to notice that her public announcement and betrayal of herself revealed the same old arrogance, which desired to make an unprecedented event, a world-shaking affair out of something so common, simply because it was Mut's affair—and that added to her friends' anger as well.
But even while all this was being expressed in the ladies' exchanged glances, the festive delight they took in this sensational, lovely social scandal was great enough to arouse their feminine solidarity and heartfelt compassion for their sister's affliction, so that they crowded around her, took her in their arms, celebrated her in a comforting, babbling rush of words, and exclaimed how fortunate the young man was to have the honor of awakening such feelings in the bosom of his mistress.
"Yes, sweet Eni," they cried, "you have instructed us, and we understand perfectly that it is no bagatelle for a woman's heart to have to behold such a divine scamp every day—no wonder that you, too, finally lost your heart! What a lucky fellow! What no man has succeeded in doing all these many years, he in his youth has managed, and, saint though you are, he has stirred your senses. It was hardly foretold him at his birth, but that only shows how unbiased is the human heart, for it inquires not after rank or status. He is certainly not the son of a prince of a nome, neither officer nor state councilor, but merely your husband's steward; yet he has softened your senses, that is his rank and title. And that he is a foreigner, a lad from Asia, a so-called Habiru, only adds spice to the affair, lends it a certain cachet. My dear, how glad we are and how relieved to the depths of our souls that your sorrow and exhaustion are nothing more than your having set your mind on this lovely lad. Forgive us for ceasing to fear for you and beginning instead to fear for him; slirely the only real reason for concern now is that he may go mad at the honor of it all—otherwise the matter seems very simple to us."
"Ah," Mut sobbed, "if you only knew. But you know nothing.
and I knew that you could not begin to know or understand, even after I had opened your eyes to it. For you have no idea what he is Kke or what the jealousy of his god is like, the god to whom he belongs and whose wreath he wears, so that his soul has no ear for all my cries and he considers himself far too good to stanch the blood of an Egyptian woman. Ah, how much better it would be, my sisters, for you not to worry about him and his sense of being too greatly honored, but to summon all your worries for me, for I am doomed by his stubborn godliness."
And her friends besieged her now in their wish to learn the details and circumstances of this stubbornness, for they could not believe their ears that the servant had not burst with pride at the honor of it all, but had refused his mistress. The glances they exchanged also suggested some malice based on the conjecture that their Eni really was too old for the beautiful lad and that he had told her pious fibs because he felt no desire for her—with one or another flattering herself that he would surely feel more desire for her; but honest indignation at this foreign slave's recalcitrance prevailed in their responses, particular that of Nes-ba-met, the head of the order, who now interposed in her bass voice to declare the affair, seen from this angle, to be scandalous and intolerable.
"As a woman," she said, "I am on your side, my dear, and shall make your sorrow my own. But in my opinion the matter is also political, a concern of both temple and state, for beyond a doubt the rebuttal of this snot-nosed boy—forgive me, but though you love him, I call him that out of honest anger, not as an insult to your feelings— his unwillingness to pay you the tribute of his youth represents outright insubordination, an endangerment to the realm that is tantamount to some local Baal of Retenu or Phoenicia deciding to oppose Amun and to deny him the payment owed him, against whom then a punitive expedition would of course be marshaled to uphold Amun's honor, even if its costs should exceed the value of the tribute. I see your sorrow in that light, my love, and no sooner shall I have returned home than I shall discuss this gross instance of Ke-nanite insurrection with my consort, the head priest of all the gods of Upper and Lower Egypt, and ask him what measures he considers appropriate for dealing with this disturbance."
This then, amidst heated chitchat, was the outcome of this now famous gathering of ladies—the true and actual course of its events
having finally been presented here—and it now broke up. It served as the principal means by which Mut-em-enet managed to make her unhappy passion the talk of the town—and occasionally, in clearer moments, she might well have suddenly been horrified at her success, even though, as her condition continued to worsen, it was also a source of elated satisfaction; for most people in love are reluctant to believe that their feelings have been adequately honored until the whole world—even if it is only in mockery and scorn—concerns itself with them: the news must be blazoned abroad. And her friends continued, singly or in small groups, to pay frequent visits to her sickbed, to inquire after the state of her anguish, to comfort her and offer advice that foolishly missed the point of her very special circumstances, so that the suffering woman could only shrug and reply: "Ah, children, you babble away giving me advice and yet do not understand a thing about my particular case." This only rekindled the anger of Wase's ladies, who would say to one another: "If she thinks the matter is too lofty for us and has about it something so special that it is beyond our counsel, then let her hold her tongue and not involve us in her affair."
The other person who visited her personally and had his chair carried to Potiphar's house of women, with footmen running before and after, was the great Beknechons, Amun's high priest, who had been informed of the story by his wife and was unwilling simply to shrug it off, but rather was determined to see it in the light of far larger interests. Dressed in his usurped leopard skin, the powerful, shiny-headed statesman of his god paced back and forth before her lion-footed couch, taking long strides, ribs thrust forward and chin held high, while he explained to her that every personal and even moral aspect was to be set aside when judging this incident, which, to be sure, was lamentable both in terms of moral principle and social order, but once begun must now be brought to its conclusion with a view to more important considerations. As priest, counselor, and guardian of pious discipline, and not least also as a friend and peer of the good Petepre at court, he could only censure the attention Mut paid to this young man and protest the feelings that he aroused in her. But the recalcitrance this foreigner had showed in regard to them and his refusal to pay tribute were intolerable to the temple, which could only insist the matter be settled as quickly as possible to the glory of Amun. Therefore, irrespective of what was
personally desirable or damnable, he, Beknechons, had to reprimand Mut, his daughter, and peremptorily demand that she do everything, indeed her utmost, to bring this willful man to submission, not only for her own satisfaction, were she—very much without his approval—to derive such from it, but for the satisfaction of the temple; and if need be the dawdler should be brought to compliance by means of public coercion.
That Mut's soul was gladdened by this spiritual instruction, that she was capable of seeing this higher authorization to commit a moral offense as a strengthening of her position over against her beloved, is a sad but clear indication of just how far Mut had come— the same woman who only shortly before had, in accord with her civiHzed status, declared her happiness and misery dependent on the freedom of Joseph's living soul, but whose sense of helplessness had now sunk to such depths that she took a certain desperate and twisted delight in the thought of the object of her hot desire being publicly coerced by temple police. Yes, she was ripe for joining Tabubu in her magic.
Nor did Joseph remain ignorant of the position Amun's temple had taken in the matter; for no curtain flap or door crack was too narrow for his faithful Bes-em-heb not to find a sequestered spot for being secretly present at the visit the great Beknechons had paid to Mut-em-enet, for catching with his refined dwarfish ear the instructions the priest gave her, so that he might bring them piping hot to his protege. Joseph hstened and found this an extraordinary reinforcement of his own view that what was at issue here was a test of strength between the power of Amun and the Lord his God, and that in no case, and at no price, and no matter how poorly this imperative might accord with the desires of Adam, did the Lord his God dare come off second-best.
The Bitch
And so it came to pass that, in the course of her degeneration, proud Mut-em-enet was so distraught by the anguish of love that she stooped to taking an action for which only recently she had proved far too refined; she sank to the level of civilization of Tabubu the Kushite and agreed to join her in squalid mysteries—that is, to bait
her love with magic by sacrificing to some ghastly deity of the netherworld, whose name she did not know and did not wish to know. Tabubu simply called it "The Bitch," and that sufficed.
This nocturnal spook was, so it appeared, a wicked ghoul and fury, and the black woman promised to use her charms to dispose it to serve the wishes of Mut her mistress; and in the end Mut was satisfied with that, a sign that she had renounced her lover's soul and would be happy simply to hold his body, or better, his warm corpse, in her arms—or if it did not make her happy, it would at least leave her sad but sated. For, of course, magic charms and sorcery can lure only the body, the corpse, and deliver only it into someone's arms, but not the soul as well, and one must be highly disconsolate to be consoled by that, by the thought that it is primarily the body that is needed to satisfy love and that, for heaven's sake, one can always do more easily without the soul than vice versa, though the satisfaction provided by a corpse may be of a rather sad sort.
That Mut finally agreed to the "rubber-eater's" degraded proposals and was prepared to practice witchcraft with her, was, by the way, bound up with the state of her body and its witchlike nature, of which, as we have seen, she was well aware—those striking hallmarks that, so she felt, sufficed to make her part of the coven and more or less enjoined her to act in accordance with her physique. One dare not forget that her new body was love's creation, love's product, which is to say: a painfully yearning accentuation of Mut's femininity—just as in general a witch's nature is nothing more than exaggerated femininity carried to illicitly stimulating extremes. From which it follows that not only has witchcraft always primarily, indeed almost exclusively been the concern and business of women, with male warlocks playing hardly any role, but also its nature is such that love has always played a significant part, has at all times stood at the center of witchcraft, and that magic in the service of love is quite rightly considered the epitome of magic, its naturally preferred object.
The slightly haglike element in Mut's physical nature, which we have likewise been forced to remark upon with all due delicacy, might have contributed to a feeling that inclined, indeed more or less ordained, her to engage in witchcraft and to allow Tabubu to set in motion certain dubious rituals of magical sacrifice; for the divinity at
which they were aimed was, according to the black woman, the personification of the hag, a divine hag, a hag goddess, in whom one had to envision a higher, more concentrated reaUzation of all the repulsive ideas that can possibly be associated with the word "hag," a monster of the most sordid habits: the arch-hag. There are, there must be such divinities, for the world has sides that, though they are covered in loathsome and bloody filth and seemingly hardly fit to be deified, nevertheless require, just as do the world's more engaging sides, eternal representation and preeminence, spiritual embodiment, so to speak, or personal spiritualization. And so it can happen that the name and nature of the divine are merged in the monstrous, with bitch and mistress becoming one, for we are dealing after all with the arch-bitch, to which all the characteristics of the mistress inherently belong—just as Tabubu, when invoking the assistance of this epitome of all filthy debauchery, would speak of her as "Our Gracious Lady Bitch."
The black woman thought that she should prepare Mut for the proceedings she had planned, for their unusual style would be a radical departure from social customs with which the grand lady was familiar. Tabubu apologized ahead of time for any offense to her refinement and begged her, for the sake of the issue and purpose at hand, to reconcile herself just this once with the vulgar tone that simply had to prevail because Our Gracious Lady Bitch knew and understood no other and without certain shameless words there was no dealing with her. It was not a very tidy ritual, she announced by way of precaution, for some of its ingredients were very unappetizing, and it also had to include considerable bombast and imprecation; the mistress should be prepared for that and not be offended when the time came, or, if she was, at least not let it be noticed. It was in its violence, insolence, and hideousness that a rite of coercion differed from the normal worship to which she was accustomed. It was conducted not primarily for man and according to man's taste, but instead simply revealed the shameless nature of the deity whom they invoked and whose presence was conjured up—that is, of the mistress bitch, worship of whom could only be indecent and whose nature as the arch-hag necessarily determined the crude level of decorum. But in the end, Tabubu suggested, an especially refined tone was hardly appropriate for a ritual whose purpose was to
lOOO JOSEPH IN EGYPT
coerce a young man into complying purely physically with the act of love.
Upon hearing these words, Mut turned pale and bit her lips, partly out of shock as a civilized woman, partly out of loathing for this slattern, who had urged and forced the coercion of the lad upon her and now that she, Mut, had agreed to participate was insultingly informing her what a contemptible decision it was. It is an ancient human experience that once seducers—especially those that lead people to depths below their rank—have successfully dragged a person down, they terrify and mock him by the vile words with which they suddenly begin to describe these new, still unfamiliar environs. Pride demands that one not allow one's fear and confusion to be noticed, but that one reply: "Let whatever happens here happen just as usual—I knew what I was doing when I decided to follow you." And that is more or less what Mut said in defiantly standing by her original decision—foreign as it was to her nature—to bait her lover with magic.
She had to be patient for several days: first, because the black priestess had to make preparations and not all the ingredients were on hand—not only weird things that could not be supplied from one day to the next, such as the rudder of a wrecked ship, lumber from a gallows, rotting meat, and various body parts from an executed criminal, but also, and above all, some hair from Joseph's head, which Tabubu first had to procure from the house's barbershop by cunning and bribery; second, however, because one had to wait for the moon to grow round in order to operate with more certain hope of success by using the full potency of that ambiguous heavenly body, which is female in relation to the sun, but male in relation to the earth, a double nature that conceals within it a certain unity of the universe, thus making it efficacious as an intermediary between the mortal and the immortal. Besides Tabubu as sacrificing priestess, the participants in this act of coercion were to be her client, Mut the mistress, another Moorish girl as her attendant, and the concubine Meh-en-wesekht as witness. The flat roof atop the women's house had been chosen as the site for the sacrifice.
Whether feared or longed for, or fearfully longed for with impatient shame, each day arrives at last and becomes a day of life, bringing with it what was once only a prospect. And so it was with this
day filled with hope and abasement for Mut-em-enet, when out of bitter anguish she betrayed her own rank and consented to actions unworthy of her. She had waited through the hours of the day, just as she had grappled with each previous day, one after the other. But when the sun had vanished and its glory had slowly faded and the earth was wrapped in darkness and an incredibly large moon had risen above the desert, its borrowed luster taking the place of the proud true light that had departed and supplanting glaring day with the wavering gossamer web of its pale and painful magic; when, slowly growing smaller, it had floated to the top of the world; when life had gone to rest and everyone in Potiphar's house lay with drawn-up knees and tranquil faces as they suckled at the breasts of sleep—the hour had come for the four women, who alone were still awake and whose plans for the night were mysterious and feminine, to gather upon the roof, where Tabubu and her helper had prepared everything for the sacrifice.
