This blog is not really about absinthe. But because the drink was a favorite of a number of (mainly French) artists and visionaries of the Symbolist movement, it seemed a fitting emblem for an art blog.

Supposedly these old masters would down the brew, get visited by a green fairy or some other hallucination, and then create art– often distorted visions which conveyed truth more clearly than realism was able to…

Not many songs sum up these creepy and cool themes, but then I ran across the kick-ass track Absinthe With Faust on Cradle of Filth’s 6th album Nymphetamine (whose title track unfortunately lost out on a Grammy…).

The song deals with the Faustian legend most famously immortalized by Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust.

The rough story tells of a doctor named Faust who makes a pact with the devil Mephistopheles, and in return for knowledge and years of excess, pledges his soul to the fiend. In Goethe’s version Faustus’s soul is saved through divine intervention while Marlowe’s ends with the doctor being violently killed.

Luckily, CofF doesn’t wimp out with Goethe’s Disney ending. The band instead presents a darker version, complete with the sound of the good doctor being dragged away to hell at the song’s end. The lyrics are typical Cradle i.e. melodramatic, intellectual, and poetic:

Pour the emerald wine
Into crystal glasses
We will touch the divine
Through kisses catharsis

Let us pitch to the seven-year itch
Of the ultra-decadent
To a tainted world and the painted girls
That our fantasies spent

Tripping through boudoirs laced with opiate themes
Sipping the bizarre, tasting copious dreams
A toast to those most sacrilegious of days
Where for every whim won
One soon repays

We touched the stars
That now laugh from afar
At we, the damned
The damned
The damned
The damned

We have spent our time
Drenched in opulent splendor
But when midnight chimes
Will gilded souls surrender?

Let us drink on the giddying brink
Of pools of excrement
All manner of shit for the glamor and glitz
Mephistopheles lent

I remember the night as if it were engraved
A bright marble bridge stretched across the dark waves
To the shore from the moon and by her grace
Came that erudite stranger
That fucker

He was a predator, creditor cold
Our blood was shed on the yellowing scroll
And all that glittered was not gold
But we wanted everything
And for it all, lost our souls

Come my friend, to fate let’s raise
Two finger shots at this our last soiree
For tomorrow I fear
Swoops all too deadly near
This precipitous weir to Hell’s high gate

We touched the stars
That now laugh from afar
At we, the damned
The damned
The damned
The damned

He was a preditor, creditor, cold.
Our blood was shed on the yellowing scroll.
And all that glittered, was not gold.
But we wanted everything,
And for it all, lost our souls.

Our souls
For it all lost our souls
Our souls…

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