Something had been worked through in the darkness, freeing them from the nether world where the Renaissance and the Middle Ages had first encountered them, and they had taken their places in the hearts, desires and imagination of men, and instead of signalling an abrupt eruption of insanity, they served instead to indicate the strange contradictions of the human appetite, the complicity of murder and desire, cruelty and the thirst for suffering, sovereignty and slavery, insult and humiliation.