The Ianthe Complex

by
Bobby Derie

In the deep depths of a Boston winter, on a cold and grey afternoon, David Neville gave
blessed thanks to his patron goddesses Isis and Ishtar for owning a used bookstore.
Sagging shelves that groaned with paperback Playboy novels, dog-eared Tantric sex
manuals, and voluminous textbooks on STDs from broke medical students provided
better insulation than a handwidth of asbestos.

A brief blast of winter swept through the racks of used books and magazines, and few
errant December snowflakes settled on the stack of yellowing Penthouse Forums by the
window. A woman kitted out for an arctic expedition struggled through the front door
carrying two document boxes. David eyed the boxes with a professional air, and swept
aside a variety of phylacteries and cards advertising services from “hot massage” to
“astral body stimulation” to clear a space on the counter.

Trade-ins were the lifeblood of his store, had been even back when he was semi-
respectable and A1 Books had been just another cramped bibliophile’s paradise that fed
off of the steady traffic of Boston’s many colleges and universities. Time, circumstance,
and if he was honest with himself a particular bent in his personal beliefs and reading
habits had forced a distinctive change to the kind and type of materials A1 now had to
offer. Some of it was Neville’s own fault: every semester for a decade he’d trek to local
campuses to read aloud from 120 Days of Sodom and The Golden Ass in order to expand
minds and try to shift the apparently unmovable old stock of leatherbound classics he’d
inherited from the death of another bookstore years earlier. The books had sold, finally,
and given Neville and his shop their particular reputation.

Setting the boxes down, the woman doffed her skicap and leather gloves to reveal a
blonde pageboy haircut and well-manicured fingernails painted pink with little white
snowflakes. When she unzipped her coat a little David’s brief erotic fantasy was only
mildly dashed by a sweatshirt advertising the local highschool hockey team and an
upscale kabbalistic amulet.

“Hi.” Hockey Mom said. “I had a—relation pass away recently, and I found these boxes
among their things…”

David listened politely as she’d told a story he’d heard many times before. Winter claims
a lot of old folks, and grandpa hadn’t made it to see New Years. Going through his stuff
she’d finally come across the old boy’s porno stash. Now normally, the kids or grandkids
find this stuff earlier: the dildo at the bottom of mom’s sock drawer, grandpa’s supply of
carefully hoarded 1980s magazines and taped skinflicks off of cable, maybe a small love-
grimoire to rekindle the old fires—these discoveries set the sexual tone of generations.
Half the people that sold their parents’ porn were back next week surreptitiously
repurchasing a few key items that had been the building blocks of their adolescent
masturbation sessions, and thus their entire sexual life. Magical life too, sometimes; more
than one teenager had first become aware of and tapped into their subtle energies by
ritualizing their first sexual experience. David tuned back in as Hockey Mom was
winding down the abbreviated history.

“…and I hate to just throw things out. I know that they must be worth something.”

Neville chewed that one. He’d expected disturbed and a bit scandalized; her natural
instinct to dispose of the material as quickly and quietly as possible before her sons,
husband, or other relatives discovered it. The curb was unthinkable, because anybody
could get at it, and she didn’t want it in the house. Hockey Mom didn’t seem that
uncomfortable hauling around pop’s boxes-o-porn, though. Maybe this wasn’t a matter of
simple disposal—but then, why the hell else would she be here?

David Neville at A1 Books bought porn. It was quietly hinted at there in the little two-
inch ad he’d purchased for the Yellow Pages, and more explicitly on the website which
nowadays drove the bulk of the store’s business.

“So you’d like to sell?”

“Yes, please.”

“Of course. We’re always buying.”

David gritted his teeth. He hated asking this next question, hated that he had to ask it.

“Before we continue, I have to ask: do the boxes contain any obscene materials?”

“I’m sorry? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Child pornography,” David said. “Or pornography depicting bestiality, simulated or

actual rape, urination, defecation, mutilation, or murder in a sexual context, or illustrated
depictions of the same, such as manga, cartoons, etc. Also, any magical writings
containing the same and/or pertaining to a sexual purpose or context, including but not
limited to rites involving cannibalism, murder, necrophilia, nigromancy, and invocations
or conjuring of ghosts, succubi, incubi, orgone elementals, the Black Goat, her young, or
any related spirit or quasi-spiritual entity by name or sign.”

Neville watched her face as he ran through the list. No blushes, just a faint twinge at the
mouth or eye or nostril that suggested recognition, disgust, but not surprise. He didn’t
feel like he’d taken a couple shreds of innocence away from her she hadn’t known she’d
had. Whether on the internet or somewhere else, Hockey Mom had seen and heard a few
things.

“I haven’t gone through it, but I’m sure there’s nothing…she wasn’t like that.”
David blinked. He’d foolishly assumed the collection had been from a father or
grandfather, but a female relation—well, why not? Apparently even a seller of used porn
couldn’t escape sexual stereotyping.

“I’m sure she wasn’t ma’am. The United States government, however, has laws against
certain types of pornography and magic which might be deemed ‘obscene,’ and the
purchase and transmission of such materials is illegal, and there are some local
regulations as well. So if you don’t mind browsing the store for a few minutes, or perhaps
going and getting a cup of coffee, I’m going to take a look through the boxes to get an
idea of what’s in here and how much to offer for it…and to make sure there’s nothing
either of us will get in trouble for.”

Neville keenly remembered the last friendly local vice unit sting last November that had
involved a cop and three folders full of kiddie porn straight from some Boston PD
evidence locker—one of which depicted a Black Mass, the altar of which was a nude 15-
year-old girl. The cops had hidden the pics in a pile of skin mags you could bury a man
in. Neville had been an easy arrest. A warrant was obtained and the store was searched
for more, eventually turning up a stack of sixty year old Tijuana bibles starring the
underage character Little Orphan Annie and an x-rated version of The Testament of
Solomon. David’s lawyer had screamed entrapment and freedom of speech but the cops
had threatened to go federal, which carried a maximum sentence of forty years in
prison…and juries were notoriously unsympathetic to proprietors of small-time used porn
stores. So David had copped a plea, gotten a slap on the wrist, and swore never to buy
lots sight unseen ever again.

“If there is anything…” Hockey Mom half-asked.

“I sometimes make a nice little bonfire in a metal garbage can in the alley out back,
because of the cold. I typically start it with old odds and ends too damaged to sell. You’d
be welcome to join me. There’s no law against burning books.” David said sourly.

“I see. Yes. Thank you.”

“No bother at all ma’am, as you can see we’re not particularly busy at the moment. Just a
quick peek through your material to make sure there’s nothing that will get us in trouble,
and meanwhile I’ll check the prices on any old, scarce, or expensive items.”

He caught her look.

“There’s a market for everything, ma’am. Please rest assured, I’ll give you a fair price,
and if you don’t care for my offer there’s no obligation for you to sell.”

David crossed his toes. He’d sold an early issue of Playboy in mint condition for a couple
hundred of dollars on ebay just the other day. It was a real classic, from back in the days
when girls revealed their age and zodiac signs; when a man with the interest in such
things could cast a real horoscope and glimpse the future of such a beauty. Such sales
were rare and depended on one’s ability to delve into the seedier internet marketspaces to
find out what people were willing to pay for. Neville had by necessity become
knowledgeable on a wide spectrum of erotic media, from early 20th-century slides of
topless women, sold as souvenirs to lonely tourists and overseas soldiers and sailors, to
erotic manga from Japan, China, and Korea and the neotantric scrolls all the rage in
California.

Hockey Mom wandered over to the sex magick aisle to browse through the spellbooks
and fertility rites, and Neville popped the top of the first box to begin sifting the contents.
Initial results were promising; the first few layers of shiny-paged Hustler and Foxx
magazines stuffed with grainy color print-outs from some internet site that specialized in
pantyhose shots and foot fetish material soon gave way to paperbacks from the 70s and
even a few hardbound novels. Stacking the books on the counter, the mental value of the
contents ticked ever upward. The first edition Sleeping Beauty trilogy, near mint
condition, was undoubtedly worth something to Anne Rice fans, and even if no one
bought it David would feel good about keeping the old hardback copies of A Man and a
Maid and Histoire d’O on the shelves. The Man from O.R.G.Y. paperbacks were in
acceptable, though not terrific shape.

The third box, by contrast, was primarily academic and magical texts: Hubbard’s
Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, Cantarella’s Bisexuality in the Ancient World,
Robert Anton Wilson’s Sex, Drugs and Magick—David had been looking for a copy of
that himself—a few dog-eared publications from the Ordo Templi Orientialis with L. Ron
Hubbard’s notes on the Babalon Working, Crowley’s De Nuptis Secretis Deorum Cum
Hominibus and The Book of Lies, and a copy of Sapho’s Hymn to Aphrodite—on virgin
parchment no less!—were among the treasures he pulled forth. It was as David pulled the
last stack of moldering pulp from the third box that he caught sight of the grand prize.

David smelled it before he could see it, the familiar fragrance of old leather and thick,
heavy paper. It sat on the bottom of the box like a brick, the size and shape of the family
bibles of old, dyed black and going slightly brown at the creases and corners. Neville
examined the stern cover, ran his fingers over the impression of the title stamped into the
leather and the board beneath it, gilt filling in the elaborate and arabesque letters. The
Ianthe Complex and Other Cases: A Pornography. Lifting it out of the box, David did a
quick skim. A glimpse of the occasional black and red ink illustration caught David’s
interest; these were not bawdy cartoons or even updates of ancient woodcuts, but etchings
and engravings of a highly explicit sexual nature and executed with the skill of a medical
school cadaver drawing from a textbook.

One picture in particular caught his attention: a four-panel full-page depiction of an

intersex woman displaying and fondling her bizarre genitals, apparently successfully
penetrating herself with her own semi-erect phallus—a genuine hermaphrodite, or so the
caption claimed, in the act of autocopulation, depicted in clinical detail and from different
angles or positions in each panel. A flip to another leaf revealed a daguerreotype
photograph of man and a woman in the act of coitus labeled “John Baptisa dos Santos
and Blanche Dumas, 1865”. The man possessed a stunted third leg or limb of some kind
tied against his left leg, and two penises; the woman also had a third leg, though smaller
and formed, and two vaginas, side-by-side. The woman was holding her extra limb out of
the way to enable the penetration. The awkward position of the penetration and the
confusion of limbs made Neville wince and turn the book for a better angle. David
quickly flipped to the beginning of the book, looking for publishing details. No author or
publisher was given, just a date and a place—October 31st, 1918, Blackfriars, London—
and an elaborate hermetic sigil David didn’t recognize, a double-circle divided by a
nonagon and filled with Enochian characters.

Neville sat the old book down lovingly on the counter, almost afraid now to even touch it.
At first glance this was your actual anonymous scholarly volume describing in explicit
detail the lives and activities of prostitutes. Hidden erotica, the kind of private, elite porn
that had been invented by the Victorians and kept in private libraries and gentlemen’s
clubs—a literal pornography, taken from the Greek pornea (prostitution) and grapho (to
write), a socio-medical text on early sex workers which had branded entire methods of
expression as taboo for the better part of a couple centuries.

Well, not real Victoriana, at least if the date was to be believed. By 1918 Queen Victoria
was long dead, porn was moving out of the secret libraries and back into the streets:
naturist magazines, half-tone photographs, penny gallery peep shows. Neville shifted his
ass uncomfortably in his seat, no idea what to offer for this gem. He needed help.

A quick click of the mouse brought up David’s suite of search engines. Different tabs led
off into databases of rare books, indices of love-spells, underground comix, invitation-
only online auctions and the slightly seedier companies that kept track of what was sold
and how much it went for. Six minutes of rotating icons and clicks through advanced
search options menus later, Neville had a couple dozen failed and empty search pages
loaded. There was absolutely nada on the Ianthe Complex.

David sat back in his chair, stunned.

The internet had failed him.

Neural pathways grown rusty with years of disuse fizzled and snapped in David’s head as
ancient, forgotten skills were called for once more. An unfinished degree in library
science had left its traces on him, and his brain settled on the dusty shelf full of ancient
book catalogues behind him—a special collection, an esoteric armory of illicit titles, lists
of banned books and works censored from the gentle eyes of the porn- and magic-
consuming public. He was about to get off his ass and start looking when Hockey Mom,
done browsing, came back to the counter.

The Ianthe Complex was still on the counter, half-hidden from her view by the teetering
pile of her grandfather’s old skinmags. Neville assumed his best poker face as she walked
toward the counter.

“Any luck?”
“Two hundred cash,” he said. David kept his eyes on hers, almost willing her not to see
the old book. Then, almost as an afterthought: “or two eighty store credit.”

Hockey Mom took another glance at the store, this time with a slightly different interest,
and judged the bulging shelves and occasional nipple peaking out on a glossy cover with
a speculative eye. For a moment, he thought she’d take the store credit. David almost
kicked himself, but it was his usual pitch. Only determined consumers took the store
credit; it required giving a name. Anyone looking for fast cash or to just get rid of
something didn’t want any evidence of the association.

“That much?”

Neville tapped the Sleeping Beauty set.

“First editions.”

“Cash, I think.”

“Of course.” David said. The register clicked open and he counted out the only four
fifties in there. A twinge of guilt made him ask: “Would you like a receipt?”

“No, thank you.”

She took the greenbacks and re-armored herself against the Boston winter. Without
looking back, Hockey Mom turned walked out of his life, her pornography left in David
Neville’s capable hands. Neville gave another little prayer to his goddesses, then reached
for the first forbidden book index.

It took half an hour of thumbing through the indices before David got a hit, working his
way through from the modern lists of censored works back through the decades until he
hit the 1948 edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitum; the last official version of the
Roman Catholic Church’s own list of prohibited books, finally abolished in 1966. The
entry gave little besides the title and date of publication, but the author listed was John
Conan Yeovil.

Turning once more to the internet, armed with this new factoid, David opened up a new
collection of search engines. The results were sparse; a Dr. Jack Yeovil (b.1876, d.1958)
was listed as receiving a doctorate from “The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of
London”—a quick check on the internet confirmed that the Worshipful Society, one of
London’s livery companies, was headquartered at Apothecaries’ Hall in Blackfriars,
London.

Neville leaned back in his chair, stretched to get the kinks out of his back. Part of the
mystery, at least, was solved. The book was likely either a private project commissioned
by the Society for a few of its members, or possibly was Yeovil’s dissertation for his
doctorate, repackaged for the more sensual consumption of rarified tastes. It was
probably worth a mint if—when—David decided to sell it, but there was plenty of time
for that. No matter how mercantile the bookseller, you don’t up running a literotica store
just because that’s where the market is. Neville knew he had his own tastes to cater to as
well, and before he thought about selling the Ianthe Complex, he wanted to read it.
Neville took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt; when he put them back on the
room looked marginally clearer than it had before.

David piled up Hockey Mom’s porn into a little fortress on the counter, behind which he
laid the Ianthe Complex. He opened the cover, flipped past the first blank pages where
the preamble or introduction should have been, the page with the mysterious sigil, past
the sparse and elegant table of contents to the first case in the book—the eponymous
“Case of the Ianthe Complex”—and began to read.

The prose was heavy, formal, but not entirely a dry academic work. David guessed
Yeovil had known precisely what sort of audience the book would find, and written in a
half-anecdotal style, with plenty of lurid details. The section began with a brief overview
of the necessary theory, beginning with a sketch of Sigmund Freud’s psychological
theory that children unconsciously express the desire to eliminate the parent of the same
sex in order to possess the parent of the opposite sex. Typically, this was termed the
Oedipus Complex in boys, who desired their mothers; and the Elektra Complex in girls,
who desired their fathers. Both forms owed their names to Greek literature, which by
chance or expression of some universal human desires had expressed these or sufficiently
similar elements.

Yeovil, it appeared, believed these designations were insufficient to capture the full range
of human sexual attraction in children. In particular, he recounted the tale of Ianthe and
Iphis, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as one such example. Neville tapped away at the
computer for a minute, just to figure out what the hell the good doctor was on about, and
a précis popped up on screen near the top of the search results.

Iphis was born a woman, but by circumstance was raised by her mother as a man, and
while living as a man fell in love with another woman, Ianthe. Iphis prayed to the gods,
but nothing happened; but when her mother prayed to the gods, Iphis became a man and
married Ianthe, and the two lived as husband and wife. David turned back to the book and
read on.

The key theme, Yeovil wrote, of gender identity and the taking on of the masculine role
by the female provided a complement to the standard Oedipal Complex: an Ianthe
Complex, where the child wishes to possess the parent of the same sex, and eliminate the
parent of the opposite sex. While a logical theory, the author claimed that actual evidence
for such a theory was surprisingly scarce. His initial research focused on children who
had been raised as members of the opposite sex, but the “true proof” of the theory had
come to him in the form of a 1722 court case of a prostitute who suffered from an
unusual and acute mental illness, an “unnatural and incestuous carnal affection”, possibly
brought on by her upbringing.
Neville assumed the first part was a bit of formal prologue setting up “the action” so to
speak, much as how Golden Age pornographic movies had worked to provide context
and motivation for the on-screen coupling. With these preliminaries out of the way, the
text broke into a second, longer section, giving the history of the prostitute and her case.
Here, the text was more florid and elaborate, giving way at times to come back to clinical
prose as Yeovil made an authorial comment or took direct quotations from the testimony
of the prostitute.

Maria Saunier was a whore’s daughter, and her mother had been a whore, and her
mother’s mother, and “as far as she knew every generation back to Eve’s nameless
daughters” had spread their legs for a bit of silver. Maria and her mother Anne lived in a
room in Whitechapel, where Anne would ply her trade of prostitution, love-spells,
philters, abortifacients, and French letters. As a young girl, Maria would watch her
mother entertain gentleman callers and was instructed in traditional whore-magic, the
spells and nostrums to attract love; ensure, prevent or destroy pregnancy, and many other
things besides.

Anne enjoyed a “close Sapphic relationship with another doxy,” and together the two
women were the only family that young Maria ever had. Daylight hours of lesbian
languor and nighttime revels of lusty business were all that the young girl knew, until she
herself turned about the age of twelve and was indoctrinated into her mother’s profession.

A wealthy and regular client had brought his son with him that evening, and had through
“money and strong arguments” convinced Anne that it was best his son learned these
important matters under supervision. So her mother had laid young Maria down on the
bed, and took the master’s son in hand, so to speak, and with wise words and warm
caresses had guided them through that first act of love.

That was the first, but not the last such bit of business. Other gentlemen called,
sometimes on Anne, sometimes on her lover. Some of them brought their sons with them,
and it fell on Maria to entertain them in like fashion to how her mother entertained their
fathers. Those first few times, Anne was always there to help her daughter, to hold her
during the first clumsy, painful penetrations and prevent a bruising grope on Maria’s bare
and developing chest, buttocks, and thighs. Seldom after that were her attentions
necessary, and Maria merely aped the motions she had seen so often her mother and
mother’s partner perform. She brought the boys with her to climax as best she could; the
clink of coin and perhaps a kind kiss her reward.

David read on as Maria testified that missed Anne’s kisses, the feel of her “knowing hand
unfolding the petals of her sex.” She began to cast jealous glances at her mother’s lover
as they lay together in bed, or shared a casual kiss or embrace. In a recurrent dream,
Maria was a small girl again who would bury herself in Anne’s skirts, hug her close
about her waist, or else to lie in bed and feel the weight of her mother’s breasts against
her back, or of herself as a man, her mother accepting the proffered coins from her hand,
“pushing her prick in and out of her canal until she spent inside her own origin.” Maria
testified as well that she had attempted to bewitch her mother’s lover with a powder made
of black cat bone, a dried frog, and some of the woman’s menstrual blood, which Maria
rubbed into the lover’s undergarments, in an effort to make her leave.

In time, her mother’s lover grew ill; a canker in the belly, or perhaps a bastard child that
died inside and poisoned her from within, but her waist thickened and heavy blood
poured from her cleft, and quite quickly she died. Anne was desolate at the loss, bereft.
For long days Maria’s mother stayed in bed and wept softly, and at nights Anne worked
to support them both. At times, Maria would lay down next to her mother, where her
mother had been, one hand brushed through her mother’s hair, or settled on her mother’s
hip, to feel the heat in her own body, the fever that she could feel rise within her when
she thought of the mere cloth that separated her from Anne’s flesh.

One day, perhaps a week after her mother’s lover had died; Maria embraced her mother
as she lay on the bed. Her young breasts were pressed into Anne’s back, and her left arm
wrapped around Anne’s breasts. The young woman planted kisses on that familiar neck,
her right hand on her mother’s belly and stole down, even as she had seen many
gentlemen do, under her clothes, until the tips of her fingers tickled the hairs that lead to
her mother’s mound…

David fe1t his ears burn. The biography had by degrees launched into a tale of incest that
equaled or surpassed anything he already had on the shelves. The actual taboo no more
shocked him than the many “incest” stories already tucked away in the pages of books
around him. The brain was the greatest erogenous zone in the body, and the power of
such stories to titillate depended entirely on the ability of the reader to suspend for a
moment their disbelief—to inhabit the carnal world where to fuck your mother was not
only a tantalizing possibility, but an exciting and real possibility. Virtual gratification
leading, if you fingered your prick or your slit, to physical relief.

The seduction of the mother was not unexpected, but the foreshadowed Victorian moral
that David half expected came through. Mother and daughter were picked up for
prostitution, the depths of their crimes revealed, and the dominatrix daughter had gone to
a madhouse while her mother, deemed less complicit, had been relocated to a home for
fallen women. Both were lucky to escape being hanged for witchcraft.

Typical treatment in a madhouse at the time the case was recorded had included
imprisonment, drenching with cold water, enemas, and some more forceful measures, but
had failed to relieve the basic condition. Maria suffered in her imprisonment, and David
was personally glad the author had not spun out another half-chapter in BDSM-style
torture porn, but stated simply that after a few years time a “natural solution” was
provided in that the object of the patient’s affections—her mother—had died. Maria was
declared cured, released, arrested again for some petty magic and imprisoned, where she
seduced a guard, became pregnant, plead her belly to escape being hanged and was
eventually transported to America.
The final leaf of the chapter were two half-prints—one of Anne, Maria, and another
woman that David assumed was Anne’s lover—taken when Maria was about twelve
years old, with mother and daughter holding hands but otherwise decent; the second was
of Anne and Maria, both nude on a bed, with Maria performing oral sex on a sprawled
Anne. Judging by her budding breasts, Maria couldn’t have been more than 17 years old.

Neville had his doubts whether the whole thing was real or not—1722 was the date that
Daniel Defoe had famously published Moll Flanders, another tale that involved incest,
prostitution, and transportation, among many other common themes. Assuming he wasn’t
ripping on a two-hundred year old story, it was a valuable case study in sexual obsession
and prime wank material for somebody.

Outside, the street was dark, the lights from a passing car illuminating the light snowfall.
Nights come early in Massachusetts during the winter, and David decided to pack it in for
the night. Standing up elicited a great series of cracks along his spine, and the tension in
his neck reminded him of how long he’d been sitting hunched over the old book.

Neville wrapped the old book in a newspaper, then threw on his coat, scarf and hat,
stuffed a wand in his pocket and turned off the space heater and the lights. The Ianthe
Complex clutched under one arm, he drew the gate and chain closed and locked the seven
locks, and made the conjuration against thieves. Then, without a glance around for police
or anyone else, he slipped into the side alley that led around back of the building.

He lifted the lid of the trashcan and laid the wrapped book on top of the cold, dry ashes.
From his pocket he took the wand, and with a quiet word a tiny green flame shot out from
the tip, which he directed at one of the book’s corners. The pornographer held the wand
until the newspaper caught, then withdrew it and blew out the flame. Neville spoke the
old ritual as the book was consumed, committing the book to return to the earth from
which came. Green sparks shot out as the fire broke the sigil, and a lover’s sigh escaped
in a puff of smoke as the cover collapsed in on itself.

Neville watched the pages burn down to embers, prodded it occasionally with the wand
to ensure nothing survived. This is what the law had reduced him to. He couldn’t afford
to be arrested again, not over a half-print of an underage prostitute from the last century.
It didn’t matter to the cops and inquisitors if the story was fact or fiction. The thought
was crime enough.

###