theater of diminished faculties

He had acquired an impressive collection of volumes on perverse religious rituals and social practices, a few containing photographs of wives being burned by their furniture, directions concerning the cutting out of human hearts, the placement of beautifying scars and punctures, the timing of soprano-sustaining castrations, the grooming of sacrificial animals, the strategic placements of impurity huts, the design of corsets and binding of feet, of types of dungeons, and places for the sequestration of monks, nuns, and the general run of women who weren’t thought to be unclean for other reasons.