The work in question includes a nice little hand-drawn bestiary of assorted “apelings” and “beastmen” at the rear, that on its own provides much hilarity, in the best tradition of mediaeval fantasising.
Liebenfels had quite a vivid imagination, reworking the Crucifixion to include Jesus being rogered in the chocolate starfish by a horde of “apelings”. If you can stomach the contents of this excursion into positively meningococcal cognition, and navigate the waters of what is, at times, a freakishly Chthulic mental ocean without damage to your psyche, it reads as though Michael Palin and Graham Chapman enjoyed some communing via ouija board with the soul of H. P. Lovecraft, and tried to produce a script from the occasion.
Were it not from the fallout arising from Hitler’s absorption of Liebenfels’ various scribblings, this book would be a truly rarefied species of surreal humour, the literary version of one of those bizarre Ediacaran bauplans. Parts of it are tentacle porn without the tentacles, and this man’s obsession with the idea that sexual intercourse is an act of depravity, is of course hideously pathological.
But if you can step aside from the enormities arising from this voyage to the land of wilful encephalitis, instead treating it as if the Dadaists had decided to feed Greek comedy into a blender, then lace it with a heavy spicing of völkisch dick swinging, and stir in a dash of Hieronymus Bosch, then some idea of the resulting concoction wafts its aroma under your nose. With reference to a spoof advertisement series that appeared here on UK TV in the 1990s, the culinary equivalent would be chocolate strawberry cheesy peas, with added kimchi and a hint of deadly nightshade.
Yes, it’s that far out on the ragged edges of altered cognition. Approach with care.