“Power of the Druid” (Strange Stories, June 1940)

​Bloch, Robert. “Power of the Druid.” Strange Stories, June 1940, pp. 103-112.
archive.org/details/StrangeStoriesV03n03194006/page/103/mode/2up

The Emperor Tiberius, retired and bored, spends his time in island exile as he feels the increasing effects of aging. One day, a man appears holding a knife. Tiberius, terrified, calls for his guards and servants. They grab the man who explains that he caught a beautiful fish and he wants to give it to Caesar in tribute. Tiberius gleefully orders the fish to be raked over the man’s body and that the accompanying lobster be ground into the man’s face. Eyeless and terrified, the man stumbles off a cliff to his death. Tiberius is amused for a moment and then falls back into boredom. A second man appears, this one looking haggard but resplendent in white and with blazing red eyes. Tiberius orders him likewise tossed off the cliff. Later that day, the man returns, telling Tiberius that he cannot be killed, that he is King of the Druids come to Capri form Britain in a stone boat. He has grown tired of the way of the druids and wants more excitement. Despite his immense power over life, death, and nature, he is only a man, after all. Tiberius agrees to allow the Druid to serve him.

He demands to be young again. The Druid agrees, saying he will transfer the soul of Tiberius into a young body. His nephew, Caligula, destined to be the next Emperor, is the only option. The transfer complete, the Drud advises Tiberius to act in unexpected and extreme ways so that the public does not suspect the switch. He urges Tiberius to pretend to be mentally ill so that no one could question his actions. No matter what Tiberius does, the Druid urges him to act “madder still” (110). Both of them lose interest in their partnership and decide to murder the other. Tiberius plans to poison the Druid while the Druid plans an assassination of the Emperor. Tiberius acts first, knocking the Druid out and placing him in the arena with wild bulls and lions. The Druid comes to just in time to cast a spell that switches his soul with that of Tiberius. Inside the arena, Tiberius screams for mercy before being torn apart by the wild beasts. Meanwhile, the Druid, in Caligula’s body that he stole from Tiberius, slips past the would-be assassins unscathed. Some say his accustomed dark eyes had turned bright red!
There is a lot to unpack here! Let’s start with this quote from the opening of the story:

“But he tired quickly enough of island exile, and so had come to him the loathsome Spintrians, the abominable practitioners of the arts alluded to in the book of Elephantis. And Tiberius built torture chambers in the villas, to amuse himself in still more curious ways. But now, even these strong diversions no longer titillated his aging senses” (103).

Some terms I did not know but needed to look up in Wikipedia: 

Spintria were bronze or brass Roman coin-sized tokens that were produced during the time of Tiberius and Caligula. On one side they showed a number from I to XVI. The other side depicted a sexual act, both male-female and male-male. No one knows their purpose. Some speculate that they were a home-made currency used to pay prostitutes. Other assert they were pieces to a game that has been lost to history. The bath houses in Pompeii have depictions of similar scenes along with the Roman numerals; some speculate that the tokens allowed access to these and similar bath houses.

Elephantis, whose book is mentioned by Bloch in the quote above, was a late first-century BC physician and poet whose sex manual was famous across the Roman Empire. The whole book has not survived, but plentiful mentions elsewhere provide a sense of the content. Hey, here’s an ideal Christmas gift: the Priapeia is a collection of eighty short poems, all in tribute to the phallic god, Priapus. The poems tell the story of a man’s lifelong relationship with his—ahem—sexual apparatus, from youthful enthusiasm to the disappointments of old age. There are translations out there, including one from 1890 that was fairly well known and also one from 1999. I read a few—they are outrageous fun. I’ll leave those for you to find. The connections to this Bloch story is that Tiberius is reported by Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars (published in 121 AD) to have taken with him to his island exile all twelve books by Elephantis, including those that informed the author of the Priapeia. I am betting that Bloch had a copy of The Twelve Caesars in his library. The 1796 English translation is available here.

Finally, see the exchange of letters in a previous blog entry that helps to illuminate Bloch’s understanding of druids.