A foreign organism had infiltrated his body. It was spreading through his blood, attaching to his nervous system, and trying to take root in its native soil.

Matthew Lowes, Old Growth

Consider also:

  1. “Yea, king and queen of Sheol, terrible Above all fiends and furies, hating more The high Jehovah, loving Baal Peor, Our father and our lover and our god! Yea, though he lift his adamantine rod And pierce us through, how shall his anger tame Fire that glows fiercer for the brand of shame Thrust in it; so, we who are all of fire, One dull red flare of devilish desire, The God of Israel shall not quench with tears, Nor blood of martyrs drawn from myriad spheres, Nor watery blood of Christ; that blood shall boil With all the fury of our hellish toil; His veins shall dry with heat; his bones shall bleach Cold and detested, picked of dogs, on each Dry separate dunghill of burnt Golgotha.”
  2. “we have hitherto written of man as composed of soul and body; but the Initiated Egyptians regarded themselves as being far from simply soul and body. They gave names to several human faculties, and postulated for each a possibility of separate existence.”
  3. “This, our body of mortality, this veil of flesh and blood clothing the inner soul of us, this is the real ‘badge of innocence,’ the common ‘bond of friendship,’ with which the Great Architect has been pleased to invest us all this, the human body, is the badge which is ‘older and nobler than that of any other Order in existence'”
  4. “The blood is the life of the individual: offer then blood!”
  5. “All night no change, no whisper. Scarce a breath But lips closed hard upon the cup of death To drain its sweetest poison. Scarce a sigh Beats the dead hours out; scarce a melody Of measured pulses quickened with the blood Of that desire which pours its deadly flood Through soul and shaken body; scarce a thought But sense through spirit most divinely wrought To perfect feeling; only through the lips Electric ardour kindles, flashes, slips Through all the circle to her lips again And thence, unwavering, flies to mine, to drain All pleasure in one draught.”