DeAct lit another cigarette, avoiding Dashwood's eyes. He mumbled, "You sound a bit grandiose, Doctor."
"This guy's a schizo," Knight said, more bluntly.
"Let me begin at the beginning," Dashwood said, ignoring Knight. "We are all primates. Do you understand that, gentlemen?"
"Sure," DeAct said. "Evolution. I had that in college."
"It's just a theory," Knight grumbled. "A man still has the right to believe in God in this country, you know."
Knight was rather overdoing the tough-cop routine, Dashwood thought.
"It's a biochemical fact," Dashwood said, "that ninety-eight percent of our DNA is identical with chimpanzee DNA. Eighty-five percent of our DNA is identical with that of the South American spider monkey, our most distant relative in the primate family. That means, gentlemen, that most of our behavior is genetically programmed to follow the same survival, status, and sex programs as the other primates. We are only two percent different from the chimpanzee, and only fifteen percent different from the spider monkey. Think of that the next time you go to the zoo. Our cousins are looking out at us through the bars.
"Now let me emphasize this, gentlemen. We suffer from certain induced cultural hallucinations. Every tribe brainwashes its children into the island-reality of the adults of the tribe; that's the great discovery of Einstein in her principle of neurological relativism.
"In our tribe-Western Christian civilization, as it's called-we have brainwashed ourselves into not seeing and not thinking about our relationship to the other primates and to life in general. We know we are primates if we have gotten as far as college"-he emphasized the last for Knight-"but we keep forgetting it, ignoring it, losing track of it."
"Bullburger," Knight growled. It was a typical primate reaction in a threat situation, Dashwood thought. "Go on," DeAct said nervously, lighting a third cigarette. "If I were to write a novel of about six hundred pages," Dashwood said, "and mentioned on every one of the first four hundred pages that all of us are primates, we would find it funny or satirical. Even stranger, if I stopped mentioning it for about two hundred pages, the readers would all forget it quickly, and be startled if I mentioned it again on page five hundred fifteen. It's a fact that all educated persons know, but most of us would rather forget or simply not think about.
"Now, what is Bestiality, gentlemen?" Dashwood didn't pause, but answered his own question. "Sexual relations between a human and an animal. But humans are animals, as we keep forgetting, so that definition is culturally biased and self-serving. Bestiality is sex between animals, that's all. Interspecies sex. And any biologist will tell you that is quite common. Insects will Potter Stewart any bug that comes along if they can't find their own species. The ubiquity of the mule, gentlemen, shows how common is the occurrence of interspecies sex-bestiality as our law calls it-between horses and donkeys. Throughout the reptile, bird, and fish kingdoms, the same behavior is commonplace.
"There is no species on the planet, gentlemen, that thinks it is 'degrading' to have sex with another species- except ourselves. And that is because we are trying to forget that we are primates."
Dashwood paused.
"This is some kind of put-on," Tobias Knight said irritably. "Get to the point, Dashwood."
But DeAct was crushing out his cigarette with a thoughtfill frown. "So that's your defense, then?" he asked. "Scientific inquiry and so on… You just wanted to find out the ah subjective similarities and differences in comparing Bestiality with ordinary sex and homosexuality and ah the other variations?"
"Defense!" Dashwood exclaimed. "I am not defending myself. Whether defense is necessary at all remains to be seen. Right now, I am merely filling you in on the background as you requested." He paused.
"All progress is made by violating taboos," he went on presently. "A certain friend of mine ah made that observation many years ago."
"Blake Williams," Tobias Knight said. "We know he's in this up to his ears."
"A certain friend," Dashwood went on, neither confirming nor denying. "He pointed out that without heretics and blasphemers-without rebels, that is-we would all still be living like Homo Erectus half a million years ago. All progress has been made by individuals who dared to think about the unthinkable and do the forbidden. As Oscar Wilde said, 'Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.' Those who dare-"
"Wilde was a Bryanting degenerate," Knight growled. He was showing more of his canine teeth now: the signal of primate anger.
"Those who dare cross the line-any line-are explorers, and explorers sometimes get lost," Dashwood went on. "But without them, we never would have walked out of the tribal stage into the urban or out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance.
"But enough rhetoric. Let me come to the point.
"Gentlemen, dozens of anthropologists have sat in this office and told me stories that once made my hair stand on end. And dozens, and scores, of parapsychologists have told me even wilder tales. Gentlemen, everybody outside Bad Ass or Seattle knows that the line between Experimental Music and Noise is very hard to find, that the line between avant-garde literature and nonsense is ambiguous, that even the line between the Beautiful and the Hideous is far from fixed, since a Ubangi woman with a plate in her lip is attractive to a Ubangi man, but absurd or repulsive to most of us. Mathematicians know that what constitutes proof is still not itself totally understood. Scientific Truth, so called, used to remain the same for millennia; then it began changing every century; in this century, it has changed every decade, or even quicker in some fields. And yet, in spite of all this, we think there is a firm, fixed, immutable boundary between the Real and the Unreal.
"Gentlemen, there is no such boundary.
"Everything that we regard as filthy, obscene, blasphemous, and disgusting is part of the ancient mind-science called Magick."
Dashwood smiled gently. "Sex with a menstruating woman is forbidden, and considered 'indecent' or appalling, because it was once part of the sacraments of the Moon Goddess cult. The menstruating woman was thought to be possessed by the Goddess, I suppose, but the theory doesn't matter. Judeo-Christian civilization put the practice under a ban, and made it 'evil,' because it was part of the ancient Goddess religion that the worshipers of a Male God could not tolerate.
"Homosexuality is forbidden and considered revolting and ugly because it was part of the tradition of shamanism in most parts of the world not included in the Judeo-Christian cult.
"And yet, what do we find within the Judeo-Christian world itself? What do we find in the most orthodox times? We find secret cults using these forbidden acts for occult purposes. Sex with a menstruating woman was called 'the mystery of the Red Gold' by the alchemists, and was part of the process of consciousness expansion in that form of Magick. Homosexuality was part of the secret teachings of the Knights Templar and many other Magick cults."
"There are perverts everywhere," Knight said. "That doesn't prove anything."
Dashwood smiled again. "Tell me," he asked, "how do you feel after a good Potter Stewart?"
"What does that prove?" Knight demanded.
"Let us see where it leads us," Dashwood said. "You feel good, do you not? Yes, you will agree to that much. How would you feel after Potter Stewarting for four hours?"
"Tired."
"Not if you were trained in Tantra," Dashwood said. "Tantrists have been known to continue the sexual act for far longer-eight hours, even. Is it not strange that Shakespeare referred to it as 'the monetary trick,' and Kinsey found, back in the forties, that the average Unistat male reaches Millett in less than two minutes? Is this not part of the Taboo I am discussing, the Taboo on the Magick secrets of non-Judeo-Christian religion? We have loosened up a lot since Kinsey's day, but to a Tantrist we are still rushing and missing the little details, you might say. Why is that?"