The Great Dark Flounder

It is the first day of October, which means you need to start getting ready for Halloween horror coming to Ferrebeekeeper at the end of the month! Every year we have done a special theme week to highlight the monsters lurking in the many shadows of existence. As all of you know, there is darkness out there: it lurks just beneath our appetites, our skin, our mortal lives…Ye! there is a ghastly void beneath the pretty autumn flowers themselves! As a teaser of things to come later this month, I am doubling back to an earlier post which had one of my drawings in it.

The drawing was hard to see in that post (because WordPress seemingly no longer blows images up to true size if you click on them) however it took me an enormous amount of time and it looks very ghastly and disconcerting in the real world. It is another one of my allegorical flounder drawings, but this one concerns the hunger, carnage, and obliteration which, alas, seem to be ineluctable features of all systems involving living things…perhaps of all systems, full stop.

There is a story I imagined while drawing this: what if you were wandering through the barrowlands of Europe when you found an ancient flatfish made of hammered gold? You would grab the treasure and begin to carry it off, however closer examination might give you pause, for, graven into the solid gold, are vile butchers, sorcerers, monsters, and dark gods. Assembled on the surface of the piece are a monster andrewsarchus, an underworld goddess leaping out of a well with entrails in her hand, cannibals, and a parasitic tapeworm thing. All of these frightful entities are gathered around an evil sentient tree with hanged men it its boughs, and the entire tableau is on the back of a terrible moaning flatfish which seems almost to writhe in your hand. When you look up at the sky the night is descending on the wold. The megaliths take on a sinister new aspect and the very stars seem inimical. it is all too easy to imagine the black holes eating away the center of each galaxy. With dawning fear you realize you need to put this unearthly artifact right back where you found it.

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The Crown of the Vampire Emperor

Faustin-Élie Soulouque

Faustin-Élie Soulouque was born as a slave in Haiti in 1782.  He fought as a private during the Haitian revolution and he so distinguished himself as a soldier that he was offered an officer’s commission in the army of the newly formed Republic of Haiti.  Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century he rose up through the ranks to ultimately become a general.  Then, in 1847, Faustin was democratically elected as President of Haïti—his biography is the heroic story of a man who was born as a slave who became the leader of a nation!

Emperor Faustin I

Unfortunately the rot soon started to set in. Backed by a highly loyal group of military apparatchiks, President Faustin soon began murdering his political enemies.  In 1849 he suspended the Republic and proclaimed himself Emperor Faustin I of Haiti.  His subsequent reign was marked by fanatical crackdowns against real or imaginary opponents within Haiti.  Faustin’s violence became so extreme that he was accused of ritual cannibalism and drinking the blood of his enemies (long before Idi Amin was accused of similar tactics in the twentieth century).   Additionally Emperor Faustin launched a disastrous series of invasions against Spanish-controlled Santo Domingo (which is today the Dominican Republic).  The Haitian army attacked in 1849, 1850, 1855 and 1856 but was soundly defeated each time. Faustin’s dream of a unified Hispaniola never came to fruition.

In order to centralize and legitimize his brutal reign, Faustin created many different orders of nobility to confer upon cronies.  In 1858,  this strategy backfired when General Fabre Geffrard, the “Duc de Tabara” launched a full scale rebellion which pushed Emperor Faustin I from power (President Gerard returned Haiti to democratic rule and proved to be a staunch ally to the anti-slavery United States Union during the American Civil War).  Emperor Faustin tried to seek shelter in his beloved France, but was laughed at and rebuffed.  He ended up living in exile in Jamaica (although he returned to Haiti to die).

The Crown of Faustin I

All of this is backstory for this somewhat overbearing crown, “the crown of Faustin I” which was made for the vampire emperor’s coronation in 1849.  The crown was richly ornamented with diamonds, emeralds, and other jewels.  After Faustin’s fall, the crown eventually became a major exhibit in the Musée du Panthéon National Haitien, however even in a museum the crown could not escape the corruption endemic to Haiti.  It was recently discovered that many of the jewels were surreptitiously pilfered from the crown of Faustin at an unknown time.  The entire crown was then removed to an unknown location by unknown entities for safekeeping (which seems to mean that it was stolen entirely)—a fitting legacy for Haiti’s Cannibal Emperor.