Binding spell

A **binding spell** (also called a **binder spell** or **container spell**) is a spell that can be used to hold an individual in a particular place. Rick Nash used one on Cerebus upon his departure from the Wallis Pub.

## Dave Sim on the Binding Spell

* 03/04: 3. What is meant by the container spell, and why is there a miniature Infinitie Serpent slithering around the Sancvarie as Rick recites it?

**DAVE:** Wow. Some questions can't be answered in this confined a format. We're twenty minutes in and I'm only on question #3. Let me put it this way, I got to that point in the story and the Infinitie Serpent slithered away and I suddenly thought. Hey,wait a minute. Where do you think YOU'RE going? That is, the Infinitie Serpent had actually incarnated in the story that Rick was telling. Rick put him there, but what was I, as the writer writing the writer going to do with him? To get any more elaborate, it's probably a FOLLOWING CEREBUS topic. I think FOLLOWING CEREBUS will probably evolve in the same kind of democratic fashion as this format you guys have put together: they'll deal with the subjects of the greatest interest. Like, "Something fell," which you said was high on the list of topics so Craig will be doing his essay on it much earlier than he intended (and is sweating bullets) and I'll write my side of it in "About Last Issue" in FC #2. Let Craig know what you're the most interested in and I'm sure that will figure in the "batting order" of subjects.
* **Question:** In Rick's Story/Issue 229, Rick recites words that Cerebus recognizes as a "binding spell:"

```
Lies wound the truth/truth will bind lies,
The truth said but once/the lie thrice denies,
I bind 'he' by listen/twice bind 'she' by look
'it' thrice binds 'its' selves. with. in.
branch breaks branch/the one branch/is now 2/1 branch is me/1 branch is __
branch breaks branch/once/twice more/
for the 3 at the table/for the 1/at the door

```

Please explain the dynamics of the binding spell and its effects (i.e. what does it do, what did Rick intend for it to do) (assuming you actually had those worked out in your mind - writers don't always invent meanings or backstories for things, sometimes they just focus on what serves their story (or, if you believe artists channel their ideas from elsewhere, what serves those outside forces)). Additionally, if possible, can you tell us, line by line, how it relates to the plot and any larger thematic meaning?
**DAVE:** I suspect you’re going to be sorry you asked about this one. Well, here again, I’m still dealing with the same levels of dichotomy that I have been dealing with all along, only now I’ve read the Bible, so I now I have a much clearer idea of who the actual players are. The idea behind Rick’s Story—which I evaded discussing in the introduction to that volume—is the idea behind Rick himself. I had to come up with a super-nice character to be Jaka’s husband. It was the only way Jaka’s Story would work. The more I thought of someone who Cerebus wouldn’t just kill on sight and someone who Jaka would stay with longer than a few weeks, I realized that I was talking about someone on the Jesus level of the niceness scale—in the bland, secular-humanist, feminized sense that the historical Jesus is understood (or, rather, misunderstood): that he was this really, really nice feminized guy—so that was what I went with.
(This tied in nicely with what I saw as Oscar Wilde’s secular humanist messianic pretensions: when he would entertain his enraptured host and hostess and their guests at upper crust dinners, he sincerely thought that he was imparting the equivalent of Jesus’ parables, that Jesus was a Poet and a Storyteller just like himself—a forerunner of John Lennon’s blasphemous notion that “The Beatles were more popular than Jesus”. Much of De Profundis and Wilde’s fairy tales are composed of exactly that kind of pretentious blasphemous twaddle. I thought Oscar Wilde attempting to seduce “Jesus” would be a good metaphor for how I saw that part of the historical Wilde’s story).
So, I was still a secular humanist when I started thinking about what Jesus would be like after his marriage broke up the way it did (this was a little funnier than I knew it to be at the time. I wasn’t aware that there exist vast numbers of Christians, or, rather, “Christians” who believe that Jesus was secretly married to Magdalene or someone else, that he had had children, that someone else had died on the Cross and that en famille Mr. and Mrs. The Christ and the kids all moved to France—of all places—which, it seems to me, explains a great deal about the French and why they, you know, “ are” that way). And that was when I came up with the idea of a one-on-one story between Rick and Cerebus where the magnifier inside of Cerebus would, essentially (having been starved for any other object for any kind of interaction for so long) take partial possession of Rick and magnify Rick’s dormant Jesus nature up to the next level where, combined with his alcoholism, he would write an Aardvarkian Age bible, where Rick would see himself as a Jesus-like figure and would see Cerebus as alternately an Angel sent to Rick from God and as Satan sent to torment Rick.
Purely comedic interest on the part of a secular humanist.
A story that would get funnier and funnier as Rick’s new religion engulfed Cerebus and forced Cerebus to become the Cerebus Rick saw him as being.
To understand the container spell, it’s important to understand that Rick “snapped” when Joanne told him that Cerebus had told her that Cerebus had been married to Jaka. “Snapped” on a number of levels that went all the way up to the peak of his Jesus nature because he knew he should’ve been “beyond that” now that all these truths were being revealed to him and he was writing this miraculous book. It shouldn’t have bothered him, but of course—given who he was—it did. What was set in motion by Joanne’s (she thought, anyway) harmless remark produced a completely internalized chain reaction. The more he tried to suppress it bothering him, the more it would bother him and the more if would bother him, the more it would bother him that it bothered him. See, although he could never have Jaka again, the fact that he had been Jaka’s only husband was, unbeknownst to him, critically important to his perception of himself and the way he needed to see himself in order to function. The first reaction would be to get rid of Joanne by blowing up at her—shooting the messenger—and thereby eliminating one of the three key components of The Book of Rick (Rick, he, Joanne, she, Cerebus, it) and one of the two reasons he had to stick around the “Sanctuary”. The only way to survive Joanne believing that Cerebus had been married to Jaka was to eliminate Joanne and Cerebus from his life which was very much in contravention of Rick’s own really, really nice Jesus-like nature which recognized when Cerebus was “persecuting” him but would just accept it as good-naturedly as possible. This internalized attainment of a spiritual critical mass then set up a series of magnifying echoes between Rick, Rick’s nature, the part of Cerebus’ magnifier that had taken possession of Rick and Cerebus himself, magnifying echoes which called into question the nature of the magnifier itself (or, rather, his/her/itself) for itself and centering to a large extent on where the magnifier “left off” in Cerebus and “began” in Rick. i.e. there’s certainly no precedent for Rick having any knowledge of magic spells, right? which is an indication that Rick has proven to be something of a tar baby for the magnifier absorbing some of Cerebus’ limited, but potent magical training and nature. The magnifying echoes bouncing between them become so strong that they start manifesting in the physical world, chipping paint off of the Seat of Truth and manifesting in super-reality as the big (actually little) round glowing white strange thing over the Seat of the Right Hand page 170 panel 1 and the Infinity Serpent on the Seat of the Left Hand page 170 panel 3 (issue 208, p. 12) —who then beats a hasty retreat. I got partway through laying out page 170 with the Infinity Serpent basically slipping out through a mouse-hole in the baseboards after passing through the chair leg (doosh). Just a funny visual: “feets don’t fail me now!” And then as I was tightening it up, I thought, Hang on. Where do you think you’re going? I mean, it’s all fiction, right?
Unless it isn’t. “ That old serpent,” as he/she/it is called in Revelation whether it’s Chauah’s fictitious snake in the Garden of Eden, Satan, Leviathan, Alan Moore’s sock puppet, the question became an obvious one: which team am I on? And to me, there was only one answer: I’ve got to catch the snake. So I basically did the cartoony little drawing you see here, with the snake making a break for it out of the heavenly Sanctuary (as Rick saw it), getting trapped in a cartoon book and dropped into hell. And then I thought, this really resonates with some comic-book history and with my own history: because the little cartoon snake was so small, he looked like a worm, instead of a snake, and I flashed on the first extended comic-book serial—Cerebus’ first ancestor in a very real sense—the Mr. Mind serial in Captain Marvel Adventures (issues 22 to 46) where Otto Binder (interesting name, eh?) and C.C. Beck had built up this suspense about this thoroughly evil character who wasn’t seen on-panel for several months (an unheard of length of time in the age of the self-contained comic book story) and who turned out to be this super-intelligent…worm.
I had already figured out the “he/she/it” construct of YHWH and I figured this would be kind of appropriate that the imaginary snake from the Garden of Eden that had grown to Leviathan size turned out to be actually nothing more than a worm, just like Mr. Mind.
So, in order of each line’s appearance:
“Lies wound the truth”

is my best assessment of what Genesis chapters 2, 3 and 4 do to Genesis chapter 1. On the cosmetic level, it’s a) the best distillation of Rick’s profoundly hurt feelings that Cerebus has, in a real way, stolen his wife from him and at a slightly less cosmetic level it’s b) the culmination of Rick’s pretty firmly developed “Rick is of the Seat of Truth and Cerebus is of the Sanctuary” construct and what I see as the underpinning of any two-person construct: Which one of us is sane here?
“Truth will bind lies.”

I think I might be able to “bag me some snake” here, pardner.
“The truth said but once,”

is, again, a reference to the first chapter of Genesis, which is still my best assessment. Like all of God’s truths, it seems to me very simple and very direct.
“The lie thrice denies”

YHWH in his/her/its he/she/it manifestation and also my best assessment of chapters 2,3 and 4 of Genesis that end with “Then did men begin to call vpon the name of the YHWH.” “You told Joanne that you were once married to Jaka” is also “The truth said but once.” Rick and his Jesus nature at war with each other. He doesn’t want or see the need for a discussion, he just wants to state the charge and then contend on a very esoteric level knowing that it’s an open-and-shut case. Rick=Truth, Cerebus=Lie. Of course he also just wants to get away from Cerebus who is a reminder of his conflicted nature: that he actually still cares enough about Jaka to have it bother him that someone claimed to have been married to her. He can’t be the Rick he wants to be—God’s Rick— anymore, if either Joanne or Cerebus is around. On page 171, Cerebus’ size diminishes relative to Rick: he’s literally subsiding into his own inescapable context (I echoed this sudden disproportion in relative sizes in 299 when Shep-Shep asks if Cerebus recognizes the “baby”). Remember that what Cerebus had told Joanne—before Rick showed up—was that he and Joanne and everyone else were in this book being written by someone named Dave, so now we have Cerebus looking up “through” Rick and “at” me, not consciously aware of the levels involved but certainly his magnifier aspect is. See, there’s also three levels of book here: the book that I’m writing, the book Rick is writing and the little cartoon book that the snake just got trapped in: depending on your point of view, Book/“book”/book OR book/“book”/Book respectively/respectively. So to start page 172, what I’m indicating to Cerebus is, no, it goes much higher than that. You were only looking at Rick. You’re actually at a 90 degree angle to the chessboard I’m playing on. You’re right on the edge of a descent into hell. If you tilted your head way, way back and changed your thinking so you could understand where the chessboard is and what it’s doing, you would see that Rick and I are both knights on this chessboard. One of us has your queen in jeopardy and the other has just put your king in check. “Look” becomes, “Look you’re toast.” You have to move your king out of check and then you lose your queen. Which one of us is which knight? That’s no longer pertinent. All that’s pertinent is that one of us has got your queen. So this hits Cerebus and the magnifier inside of him simultaneously and moves them from the first layer of Book or book, down to the third layer of book or Book—the little cartoon book (page 172)—as Cerebus/magnifier now manifest as the he/she/it snake (remember that Cerebus is an hermaphrodite rendered infertile by the knife attack he sustained as a child) making a break for it, a break that can’t succeed because it has already failed by the time Cerebus is consciously aware of participating in it. The word “Look” gets said twice, binding the female part of Cerebus and his internal magnifier—I intentionally reversed the birth order of Reuben and Simeon (whose names translate as “SEE a son” and “HEARING”—see Latter Days page 384 for my fuller speculations on this) the first two of the twelve Jewish tribes. If YHWH wants to get everything backwards, fine let’s try backwards. LISTEN first, then LOOK. The word “Wrong” gets said three times, the judgement that’s being passed on Cerebus—which can be read as being said both by Rick and by the internal magnifier who suddenly sees the super-reality of his/her/its situation: my, that is Dave’s, book or Book, Rick’s “book” and the little cartoon book or Book.
“Cerebus didn’t do anything…”

(Cerebus told Joanne that they were all in Dave’s book. Cerebus definitely, inescapably did something by telling Joanne so that Joanne could then tell Rick. The magnifier in Cerebus and in Rick judges Cerebus’ defence: “…WRONG.”)
“Cerebus did nothing”

(No, that’s not true. Cerebus told Joanne that they were all in Dave’s book. That’s not nothing. The magnifier in Cerebus and in Rick judges Cerebus’ defence: “…WRONG.”)
“Cerebus isn’t”

(Well, that’s not true in any available contextual sense either. In the three available contexts of “book,” book or Book, Dave’s book or Book is called Cerebus. It has been a major “is” in Dave’s life for around twenty years. Twenty years constitutes an irrefutable “is”. Cerebus is also the pre-eminent figure in Rick’s “book”. No question. Cerebus IS. Cerebus is AT LEAST as real…as the little cartoon snake that just got trapped in a book or a Book on page 170. Note that the “n’t” are faded as Cerebus’ argument collapses, overridden by the magnifier’s now inescapable awareness of the super-reality so that the bottom panel actually reads “Cerebus is…WRONG.”)
“It thrice binds ‘its’ selves”.

(Three defences have been mounted endeavouring to establish that it is Cerebus who is telling the truth and all three have been declared wrong by the magnifier itself. The It magnifier has literally bound its selves in the three contextual levels by the admission: in this case, the thrice-used term, ALL qualifies the previous WRONG, the acknowledgement that the defences have collapsed on all three contextual levels. Wrong. All. All. Wrong. Backwards or forwards there’s no room to manoeuvre, which is why Cerebus is just swept along. This is the last conscious attempt to assert his own perception of reality. Obviously what he is trying to do is to explain, to say to Rick, “All Cerebus said [to Joanne] is We’re all in a book written by someone named Dave.” So there’s a bit of commentary there on moralistic absolutism of the kind Rick has retreated to because of the level at which he has been offended by these two key individuals daring to think that Cerebus was once married to Jaka. It would certainly take a lot of explaining to get across the context in which that had happened—that Dave showed him, pretty vividly, what being married to Jaka would have been like. That it wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a hoax and it wasn’t an imaginary story. The problem would be describing what it was. Even Cerebus isn’t sure what it was, let alone how he would explain it. But there is a level of truth to it even though it certainly isn’t as true as Rick thinking that it was a lie. And then in the first panel of page 173, Rick and the magnifier quality both declare “WITH” at the exact point where Cerebus and the magnifier quality—now seen as what it is, a puny little snake—part company. The “WITH” doesn’t follow sequentially if you refer back to what Cerebus is trying to say, so Rick has sort of overpowered him with his own moral absolutism. “ALL WRONG. ALL CEREBUS. We’re ALL.” It would be an interesting speculation as to what the re-channelled thought was leading to. “We’re all with…” would appear to be the magnifier quality/snake trying to retain the connection to Cerebus which is severed at that point. Like the poet in Barry Windsor-Smith’s “The Beguiling” Cerebus can’t pass through the final impediment. He gets most of the way through and the magnifier quality/snake detaches from him. And, now that the magnifier quality/snake has been detached from Cerebus he/she/it on its own is no match for Rick, who turns the second syllable of “within” into an instruction, as if he was talking to the cat who’s been scratching at the door. “In.” And all the magnifier quality/snake can do is respond “in. in. in.” and become imprisoned in Rick’s “book”. The largest accomplishment for Rick is that it is now a two-man parade, the religion that is getting started: Rick and Cerebus, not Cerebus and the snake. His motives are suspect, but Rick has cleansed Cerebus of what is basically a demonic possession. And then Cerebus, having lost his magnifier, makes the only assessment that he can “coming to”.
It’s Rick’s book.
See the actual spell is: Lies wound the truth/the truth will bind lies/the truth said but once/the lie thrice denies./I bind ‘he’ by ‘listen’/twice bind ‘she’ by ‘look’/It thrice binds ‘its’ selves/within MY book. But it would only work if Cerebus said it because the magnifier/snake was binding its selves. It could only do that by acknowledging that it was Rick’s book. What I suspect is that I got YHWH as well. It depends on how much he/she/it identified with the misspelled three-headed dog that guarded Hades and how far up and down the metaphorical ladder the “reality”/reality/Reality model holds true. By having Cerebus say “your book” I suspect that I was identifying a YHWHist reality at a number of levels. I’m saying to YHWH, here, here’s your book that you identified yourself with back when you had no idea where I was getting my ideas from but that I certainly seemed to be on your team. Here’s the metaphorical you binding yourself into a little cartoon book that I dropped into the fires of hell. It’s all just extrapolation and speculation, but it certainly started with the Infinity Serpent making a break for it and my thinking, Where do you think you’re going?
Now there is a large potential for blasphemy here. On a metaphorical level, I’m enacting the part in Revelation where an angel comes down from heaven and “binds that old serpent” for a thousand years, which is one of the Davidic messiah prophecies in Christianity. I’m not willing to go anywhere near that far. I just backed into the situation because I drew this ghost image of a snake retreating from an accounting and I figured I better close it off much tighter than that to be on the safe side. The Davidic messiah is also called “the Branch,” the branch of the House of Jesse, one of King David’s progenitors, so I hide behind the old “I didn’t say it, the puppet said it” routine, much beloved by ventriloquists. It’s Rick’s book, Rick’s “spell,” so I double up the branch. Let’s let fictional Rick be the Branch and let’s give him a real branch. So “Branch breaks branch”. Rick saying that he might be the Davidic messiah but the branch served its purpose, it bound the Infinity Serpent, now he’ll break it in two.
“The One Branch is now two” and effectively negated. There is, from what I understand, only one Davidic messiah. First the branch of the House of Joseph and then the branch of the House of David is supposed to come.

(For all I know, it might not even be blasphemous. What little I know about it I got from a book on Sabbatai Svi, the 17th century Jew who declared himself to be the Davidic messiah and was pretty widely believed among Jews since his declaration coincided with the proliferation of commercial printing and moveable type so his message swept through the Hebrew underground like wildfire. He was actually imprisoned in a Muslim country (Turkey?) and entertained pretty lavishly in his cell which was adorned with a lot of overstated materialism by his legions of followers. The Muslims were wary because this could be the guy and they didn’t want to have a Jesus situation on their hands by possibly martyring the guy. Literally most of Europe started emptying of Jews, all headed for the Holy Land because the Davidic Messiah was here. Finally, one day a guy showed up in his cell and told him that he was the Branch of the House of Joseph, so Sabbatai couldn’t be the meschiach because the Branch of the House of Joseph had to declare himself first. They, evidently, debated this for days on end and the new arrival wouldn’t budge an inch, so the whole thing collapsed and virtually everyone abandoned him. At the point the Muslims gave him a choice between some gruesome fate like being forced to swallow molten lead or something or converting to Islam. Sabbatai chose to convert to Islam.
Now, as with so much that I find about post-Scriptural Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I don’t know where they get this stuff from. I’ve read the Torah at least a dozen times and there is nothing about a Davidic messiah unless you are reading an awful lot into the text, which is what I think happens. I mean, a lot of people can accuse me of that, but at least what I’m trying to do is to figure out what the story is, not building this precarious house of cards that the Rabbis have built over the centuries in the Talmud.)
Anyway, if the metaphorical branch is broken, that, to me, negates any potential charge of blasphemy. But, just to be sure:
“One branch is me, One branch is…”

And here I won’t let him finish. Just to be really sure, I create a whirlpool so he’s looking out of the page and seeing me and seeing that I won’t accept him saying “One branch is you.” You know: don’t drag ME into this. And at that point he understands that there are two different levels of reality going on here. Breaking the branch once isn’t enough, that still allows for each of us to have a branch.
“Branch breaks branch, once, twice more”.

Four pieces, that’s safe enough, I think (I really wanted to be sure that there was no mistaking my intention)…
This also had its own strange comic-book resonance with the only Carl Barks Donald Duck comic book I own, a coverless copy of “The Golden Helmet” (Four Color #408, 1952) which concerned itself with the eponymous helmet which, whoever discovered it, became the owner of North America (hey, it’s a Donald Duck comic, folks). Anyway there’s a part at the end where everyone is getting tempted to keep it when the best thing is just to throw it in the sea so no one owns North America. Like the $100,000 cheque for Spawn 10. Don’t think about it, just sign the back and send it to the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund. Anything else will just be asking for trouble. I do tend to think that way
…which causes Rick to basically go back to the story as it’s unfolding and to use the branch fragments just as a basic plot point, fortune-telling being way, way down on the scale that the previous sequence was skirting around: The Amazing Kreskin Rick predicts! There are going to be three guys at the table and someone is coming in through the door! Of course the residual magnifier/snake just about jumps out of its skin. Not paying close enough attention it could be that what Rick is saying is that the Davidic messiah is at the door right now! YIKES!
And then Cerebus panics when Rick says goodbye, because there is a residual magnifier/snake inhabiting Cerebus who is obviously thinking about how to reunite with the separated part of his/her/itself now trapped in Rick’s book. So, on page 179, Cerebus is going through magnifier/snake residual trauma, because most of the magnifier/snake quality is leaving and a part of him is terrified because he doesn’t know what life is like without the magnifier/snake (or even how long he’s “had it,” a plot point I never addressed formally—whether Cerebus had just been born that way or if he “caught” something while he was an apprentice to Magus Doran). Consciously, as Rick’s walking out the door, Cerebus is trying to say, “You take good care of yourself,” (the same line Bear used on Cerebus when Bear left—translated from “guyese” it means “I’m abandoning ship, so you’re on your own and I don’t really care what happens to you”) which is almost coming out right at first, but—as the magnifier/snake residue goes into “override” mode— then first changes into “Take Cerebus with you.” (Take…Cerebus) and secondly changes into “you ‘re taking us with you” (You. Take. With. You.) and finally “you take good care of us” (You. Good. Care. Of.) combined with the original “You take good care of yourself”. The residue doesn’t have a choice, it has to abandon ship and rejoin the part that’s leaving. So, basically Rick cleanses Cerebus, thinking that he is completely conscious of what he is doing—he sure looks like he knows what he’s doing—but clearly he isn’t. All he knows is that he’s been hurt, he hurt Joanne because she hurt him, and now he’s hurt Cerebus because Cerebus “made him” hurt Joanne. My assumption is that he would “come to” some miles away, vaguely dissatisfied, but now determined to preach his message as a solo act until it’s time for he and Cerebus to have their final meeting.
So Cerebus is finally just Cerebus again, probably for the first time since he was a kid and he just runs around bumping into himself for a few pages. The part of him that has been making most of his major decisions is gone, so all he can do is second-guess himself. “Stay” and “leave” sound equivalently plausible and implausible because he hasn’t made a completely autonomous decision in so long, he doesn’t know how to make one. Cerebus’ medallions—of magical origin—have shrunk through the sequence of events showing the extent to which he is now Cerebus only and how much “residue of residue” there is left: some, but not a lot (he would never have been able to stick with Jaka for any length of time while the magnifier was in the driver’s seat—the magnifier wouldn’t have allowed it) as in the instance with the F. Stop sequence I described last time. There is a patterned response “aura” around Cerebus at this point where the magnifier residue responds to familiar environments (“Cerebus killed a guy over there once”) and can resonate with those people who are having their own problems with levels of demonic possession (like F. Stop who, unbeknownst to himself or Cerebus, “resonated” with Cerebus’ memory of Weisshaupt). I really wish that this was easier to describe, but it isn’t and since I got eight more letters today and I still haven’t answered the five from yesterday, I’m going to have to cut my explanation short (relatively speaking at ten pages).