Free Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel Page A

antirational forces. As Austin Osman Spare put it in
The Book of Pleasure
, “The time of exhaustion is the time of fulfillment” (p. 51). Amen.

Tanith
    I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stirs the hearts of then with drunkenness.
    Aleister Crowley, “Liber AL vel Legis”
    “Tanith” is an eerily empty solo piece by Gen, whose filtered bass solo sidles across a descending figure while vibes float serenely in and out of sight, with mysterious bubbles and boings occasionally punctuating the stillness. Filtered violin scrapes run up the scale, gain in intensity and then disappear. There is a slight distortion on the bass at its peak, a few tremoloed Canadian goose honks on the violin and the piece fades out of sight, stately and reticent. The overall feeling is one of enclosure in perfumed warmth.
    The song is named after Gen’s dog, a German Shepherd trained to attack if a specific code word was spoken, but it has a wider resonance. The name Tanith is the North African variant of Ashtoreth, the female consort and subordinate ofBaal. Ashtoreth (also known as Astarte, Ishtar, Athtar and Nana, among other names) is an ancient Semitic mother-goddess whose cult was widespread across Phoenecia and its Mediterranean colonies, eventually spreading into Babylonia, Arabia and Abyssinia (“Ashtoreth,”
The Jewish Encyclopedia
, p. 206—7). Unlike the frigid Greek moon goddess Diana, a virgin huntress who symbolized chastity, the Phoenecian moon goddess was also the goddess of love, fertility and sexuality. Compounding “Tan” (meaning “serpent”) with the feminine ending “it,”
Tan-ith
literally means “Serpent Lady,” and the goddess is often represented symbolically with an image of two serpents coiled around a tree. At once erotic and esoteric, since antiquity the name of Tanith has resonated with pagan suggestion, and its periodic resurgences in popular culture transmit these associations unconsciously even as they undergo Christian revisionist distortion. Tanith represents carnal and spiritual temptation in Dennis Wheatley’s bestselling 1934 novel
The Devil’Rides Out
, with a plot centered on the attempts of upstanding upperclass English gentlemen Simon Aron and Rex van Ryn to rescue the beautiful and damned Tanith Carlisle from the machinations of a satanic communist cult bent on controlling her mind. In the 1968 Hammer Horror film adapation directed by Terence Fisher, Nike Arrighi plays Tanith as a pale-faced, wide-eyed ingénue with a weak spot for beaded gowns, animal sacrifice and ceremonial magic. Like the song, she’s an evasive creature.
    Drew: Is this Gen’s bass?
    Chris: That is. It’s running through a Morley Auto-wah. It’s a wah wah pedal but it had a built-in auto setting on it. . .
    Drew: Where it would cycle like an LFO and you couldcontrol the rate. [skittering batsqueak] What’s that?
    Chris: That’s violin going through a phaser. It was through a distortion pedal and then a phaser.
    Drew: So he’s got a pickup on his violin with a line out that is going through a phaser, and he’s playing a fast run?
    Chris: And he’s going through an echo box.
    Drew: “Tanith” the song is named after the dog, but is the dog named after the sci-fi writer Tanith Lee?
    Cosey: No, the dog is named after the herb used in
Rosemary’s Baby
. Tanith root, the herb around her neck.
    Chris: Tanith is also a demon.
    Cosey: She was a lovely dog; she wasn’t a demon.
    Drew: And the legendary attack word?
    Cosey: I’m not telling you.
    Drew: It wouldn’t be a legend if you did.
    This brings us to a moment of misrecognition, poetically inspired malapropism or willful fudging. The song and the dog and the goddess are called “Tanith” with a “th,” but the root, which Cosey refers to in the 1968 Roman Polanski film
Rosemary’s Baby
, is “Tannis” with an “s.” To my knowledge, none of the members of Throbbing Gristle speak with a lisp, but there may be some