Cradle of Filth


Cruelt and the Beast

Once Upon Atrocity (Instrumental)
Thirteen Autumns and a Widow 
Cruelty Brought Thee Orchids
Beneath the Howling Stars
Venus in Fear (Instrumental)
Desire in Violent Overture
The Twisted Nails of Faith
Bathory Aria
Portrait of the Dead Countess (Instrumental)   
Lustmord and Wargasm



1. Once Upon Atrocity


(Instrumental)


2. Thirteen Autumns and a Widow


Spawned wanton like blight on an auspicious night
Her eyes betrayed spells of the moon's eerie light
A disquieting gaze forever ghosting far seas
Bled white and dead, Her true mother was fed
To the ravenous wolves that the elements led
From crag-jagged mountains that seemingly grew in unease

Through the maw of the woods, a black carriage was drawn
Flanked by barbed lightning that hissed of the storm
(Gilded in crests of Carpathian breed)
Bringing slaves to the sodomite for the new-born
On that eve when the Countess' own came deformed
A tragedy crept to the name Bathory

Elizabeth christened, no paler a rose
Grew so dark as this sylph
None more cold in repose
Yet Her beauty spun webs
Round hearts a glance would betroth

She feared the light
So when She fell like a sinner to vice
Under austere, puritanical rule
She sacrificed...
Mandragora like virgins to rats in the wall
But after whipangels licked prisoners, thralled
Never were Her dreams so maniacally cruel
(And possessed of such delights)
For ravens winged Her nightly flights
Of erotica
Half spurned from the pulpit
Torments to occur
Half learnt from the cabal of demons
In Her
Her walk went to voodoo
To see Her own shadow adored
At mass without flaw
Though inwards She abhored
Not Her coven of suitors
But the stare of their Lord

"I must avert mine eyes to hymns
For His gaze brings dogmas to my skin
He knows that I dreamt of carnal rites
With Him undead for three long nights"

Elizabeth listened
No sermons intoned
Dragged such guilt to Her door
Tombed Her soul with such stone
For She swore the Priest sighed
When She knelt down to atone...

She feared the light
So when She fell
Like a sinner to vice
Under austere, puritanical rule
She sacrificed
Her decorum as chaste
To this wolf of the cloth
Pouncing to haunt
Her confessional box
Forgiveness would come
When Her sins were washed off
By rebaptism in white....

The looking glass cast Belladonna wreaths
'Pon the grave of Her innocence
Her hidden face spat murder
>From a whisper to a scream
All sleep seemed cursed
In Faustian verse
But there in orgiastic Hell
No horrors were worse
Than the mirrored revelation
The She kissed the Devil's phallus
By Her own decree...

So with windows flung wide to the menstrual sky
Solstice Eve She fled the castle in secret
A daughter of the storm, astride Her favourite nightmare
On winds without prayer
Stigmata still wept between Her legs
A cold bloodedness which impressed new hatreds
She sought the Sorceress
Through the snow and dank woods to the sodomite's lair

Nine twisted fates threw hewn bone die
For the throat of Elizabeth
Damnation won and urged the moon
In soliloquy to gleam
Twixt the trees in shafts
To ghost a path
Past the howl of buggered nymphs
In the sodomite's grasp
To the forest's vulva
Where the witch scholared Her
In even darker themes

"Amongst philtres and melissas
Midst the grease of strangled men
And eldritch truths, elder ill-omen
Elizabeth came to life again"

And under lacerations of dawn She returned
Like a flame unto a deathshead
With a promise to burn
Secrets brooded as She rode
Through mist and marsh to where they showed
Her castle walls wherein the restless
Counted carrion crows

She awoke from a fable to mourning
Church bells wringing Her madly from sleep
Tolled by a priest, self castrated and hung
Like a crimson bat 'neath the belfry
The biblical prattled their mantras
Hexes six-tripled their fees
But Elizabeth laughed, thirteen Autumns had passed
And She was a widow from god and His wrath, finally...

3. Cruelty Brought Thee Orchids


"Hear me now.
All crimes should be treasured
If they bring thee pleasure somehow."

Maleficent in dusky rose
Gathered satin lapped Her breasts
Like blood upon the snow
A tourniquet of Topaz
Glistened at Her throat
Awakening, pulled from the tomb
Her spirit freed eclipsed the moon
That She outshone as a fallen star
A regal ornament from a far flung nebular

Her likeness hung in the black gallery
Commanding unease
Demanding of Death to breathe...

Midst the whirl and daylight fauna
Of society at court
Elizabeth bedazzled, Her presence sought applause
Though Her torchlit shadow
Thrown upon damp cellar walls
Greeted nothing but despair from slaves Her nights enthralled

Thirteen Winter solstices had shown
Her path, that the dark
Had marked its dominion
Spaying the confessor
Whose caresses she'd known,
As whipcord in the House of Dog
Her cold cunt meat on holy bone

Raped of faith, She now embraced
The narcissistic unrest frozen on the mirror's face
With this disdain, inside these veins
(Highborn wanton that She was)
She sought to keep what age would claim
Her soul was sold and for this toll
Reeking pyres ever smouldered
On the whims of one so in control
Elizabeth, mysterious.
Cruelty brought thee orchids
>From the bowels of the abyss

Once upon atrocity when midwitches stifled cries
And carved abortive runes in reddened wombs
Exhumed by scrying eyes
Madness came upon
Her like an amourous lover's seed
Lifesblood splashed upon Her skin
In gouts torture unleashed

And to Her dead reflection
Twas as if Her pallor gleamed
Like an angel's warmed by candles
Where erotic stains had cleaved
So demons dragged this libertine
Lusts screaming for release
Upon the flesh of maidens preened
As canvas for caprice

Exacting obeisance
Her gaze held a seance
Of spirits too trapped under glass to commune
A sleeter mistress than Luna
Whose threats to consume Her
Met with torments giving vent to Her swoon

Flat on Her back
Pack-prey for the reams
Of verses and curses
That haunted Her dreams
Midnightmare chimed
Thirteen in Her mind
A disciple of scars
Branded years hissed behind
Ridden split-thighed
By the Father of lies
An ovation of wolves
Blushed the skies as they writhed

But Heaven is never forever
She came, a spent storm
>From the clouds...

Leaving serpents in office
Inside every gate
To lick righteous holes
Blinding Lords to the fate
Of virgins forced naked
To defile on rent knees
Hacked and racked backwards
Menses choking their pleas

"More. Whore. More.
Twitching make me wet with thee
Carcass rub me raw"

4. Beneath the Howling Stars



Midwinter wrongs the rites of Spring
Her spinal chill rakes the earth
Whilst pensive souls at zero sing
Woebetidings of rebirth
Under cold stares of Mars maligned
Near-suicides cross their hearts
And unborns writhe in tepid brine
For something wicked this way starts

Beneath the howling stars

Elizabeth, paragon of vice
Watches the sun set pyres alight
As Bane and Tyranny, Her Dobermans sleep
Like spellbound paramours at Her feet

A chatter of bells without
Raise hellhounds, teeth on edge
>From sleighs hastened through snow lit red
Guests espied from the garret ledge

Great gloomy mirror tell Her face
She will outblind them all
That heavenly bodies would fall from grace
To possess such a lustrous pall

For beauty is always Cruel...
For beauty is always...

(Let destiny in chains commence...
Damnation under Gods seeking recompense
Enslaving to the whims of this mistress)

As the dance ensued
Elizabeth's mood
Tempered by the craft of a vitreous moon
In slick black iciness it grew
To consume
The wench Her tower tombed
Tending to Her costume
Bore the brunt of the storm
When the needle askewed
She has Her dogs maul the bitch's wrists through
Restored to jaded bliss
This evisceratrix
Descended to the ball
With painted blood upon Her lips
Passing like a comet so white
As to eclipse
The waltz wound down, transfixed

Devoid of all breath in the air
Even Death paled to compare
To the taint of Her splendour
So rare and engendered
'Pon the awed throng gathered
There...

Beneath the howling stars

She danced so macabre
Men entranced divined from Her gait
That this angel stepped from a pedestal
Had won remission from fate
By alighting to darker spheres
Delighting in held sway
For She was not unlike the Goddess
To whom the wolves bayed

"Whilst envy glanced daggers
>From court maidens, arboured
Who whispered in sects
Of suspicions abroad
That Elizabeth bewitched
See how even now the whore casts
Her spells upon the Black Count
Whom Her reddened lips hold fast"

Tongue unto tongue
Swept on tides without care
For the harpies who rallied
Their maledict glares
A halo of ravens tousled Her hair
Chandeliers a tiara
For passions ensnared

"Phantasies sexed
When their eyes, moonstruck met
Their friction wore a way
Through the sea of foreplay
Lovers at first bite
She an Eve tempted to lay
Gasping at rafters
Flesh pressed in ballet"

But caprice, honours leashed
She absconded the feast
To prowl wonderland
Beasts in hand from the Keep
Of Feudal dilemma
Well mantled in furs
Through cullis to watch
Dogstars howl at the earth

On this violent night
Unholy night
Winds lashed their limbs together
As the ether vent its wintry spite

She wished His kiss on Her frozen landscapes
To excite the bleak advance
From castle bowers
Wherein small hours
The Devil never came by chance
A lone charm tied to Her inner thigh
Sent lusts nova as hooves trod
Cobbled streets where lowlives fleet
Were flung to a wayward god

Midwinter wrongs the rites of Spring
Her spinal chill rakes the earth
Whilst pensive souls at zero sing
Woebetidings of rebirth
Under cold stares of Mars maligned
Near-suicides cross their hearts
And unborns writhe in tepid brine
For something wicked this way starts

Beneath the howling stars

Pounding upon the pauper ridge
Earshot of a hunched beldame
Elizabeth teased, would He dare to please
Such elderly loins enflamed?
To this He feigned a grim disdain
Playing to Her slayful eye
But the hag replied...

"This girl that chides
Will soon be as plagued with age as I"

Her consort laughed a plume of icy breath
For Elizabeth's grace could raise
A flag of truce in burning heaven
Or the dead from early graves
Yet still She seethed
This proud Snow Queen
Embittered with the cursed retort
And because He sought Her loves onslaught
He gutted the crone for sport

Soon in full moon fever they were wed
Lycanthropic in the conjugal bed
Littered with aphrodisiacs
To tease dynastic union
And beget them further maniacs

Elizabeth
Free reigned, now a Countess
Outwielded and outwore
Her title like a favoured dress
Whilst Her errant Lord
Whose seasons savoured war
Stormed black to fell the infidel
Her embers, tempered, roared.


5. Venus inFear



(Instrumental)


6. Desire in Violent Overture



Nights came tralling ghost concertos
Heartstrings a score of skeletal reaper bows
Playing torture chamber music allegretto
Conducting over throes trashed to crescendo

Skinless the dark shall scream
Hoarse Her symphonies

Deathmashed as the moon
That had lifted Her dreams
And frowned on the winding steps down
To where the vulgar strayed,
Taunting sick Her tender prey
She glided in Her bridal gown

How sleep the pure
Desire in Violent Overture

An emanation of phantom madness
The Countess beheld in shroud
By girls bereft of future vows
Soon to wed in white the frosted ground
Burning like a brand on the countenance of god
A yearning took Her hand to His Seraphim, bound

Deep red hissed the cat whips
On the whim of ill-will
Whilst She entranced, nonchalant, abliss
Flayed further songs of overkill

How weep the pure
Desire in Violent overture

In a crescent-whime cellar of crushed roses
Pooled blood and broken dolls
A torchlit shadow theatre souled
With the echoed cries of lives She stole

Killing time
She struck the hours dead
In Her control
Thus menopaused
Her clock of hacked out cunts
Began to toll

"Thirteen chimes of ancient strain
I conjure forth with dirge
That fills the void with timbred pain
To fulfil my sexual urge"

Frights came wailing from the Darkside
Haunting lipless mouths a fugue of arcane diatribes
Velvet, their voices coffined Her in slumber
Bespattered and appeased
As pregnant skies outside bore thunder

How sleep the pure
Desire in violent overture

As when high winds
Attune whipped trees
Her savage nature pitched
Would once again conduct the pleas
Of those She loved to agonies

As if it were
The first time every night
That She carved Her seal
In the flesh of life.


7. The Twisted Nails of Faith



"Mirror, mirror on the wall
Shouldst not grave pleasures be my all?
For if I shall see thy Will be done
Grant Me the Witchcraft of thy tongue"

Three moondials froze in the shadow of six
As another soul passed to the grasping Styx
Clutching their trinket crucifix
Bats blew from caves in a dissonant surge
Omens of corruption from within the church
A fetid, dank oasis still clung to fool rebirth

Alone as a stone cold altar
The castle and its keep
Like faerytale dominion rose
A widow to the snow peaks
Wherein reclined the Countess
Limbs purring from the kill
Bathed in virgin white and like the night
Alive and young and unfulfilled

Was it the cry of a wolf
That broke the silver thread of enchanted thoughts?
Of Her life as a mere reflection
(As the moon's in narrow windows caught)
That opened like dark eyelids on
The sigh of the woods that the wind fell upon

Like a Siren weaving song
From the lilt of choirs choking
Where the vengeful dead
Belong...

To the Sorceress and Her charnel arts
She swept from ebon towers at the hour of Mars
'Neath a star-inwoven sky latticed by scars
To unbind knotted reins that kept in canter, despair
Shod on melancholy, fleet to sanctuary there,
In netherglades tethered where onyx idols stared

Was it the Kiss of the mist
That peopled the air with the prowess of absinthe?
Lost souls begging resurrection
>From Gods upon their forest plinths
Whose epitaphs read of re-ascending to win
Remission from despair through a holocaust of sin

In a tongue hilted in invective rectums
Over signs and seals the sorceress prayed
To Death, to rend the slender veil
That Ancient Ones might rise again

As shadows swelled
The Countess fell
To masturbating with Her dagger
As the Witch gabbled spells
Cumming heavy roses all the way to Hell
As sudden thunder's grue harangue
Announced two pincered worlds

Exuding bane, something came
With the stench of necrophiled graves
To these clandestines
Who shrank from glimpsing horror
That the growls of mating houls inclined...

Resplendent
In pendants
(Natal trophies torn from bellies of desanctified nuns)
A demons, bewinged, bedight
In scum, prowled their circle seeking entry to run
An arctic tongue upon Her vulva
Where rubies smeared to alabaster thighs
Glittered like a contract in the purse of a whore
Receiving sole communion from the body of christ

"If blood is what thou carves, foul fiend
I will yield this witch to thee
If thou wouldst draw a veil for Me
O'er lengthening scars of age and grief"

As the Demon slavered foetid vows
And bore His prey away
In talons itching to perpetrate
The nausea of eternal rape
The Sorceress screaming in His grasp
Spat a final curse to stain
The Countess with the promise
That Her lord at war would be cruelly slain

And She would rot.
Alone
Insane.
On the twisted nails of faith.

8. Bathory Aria



I. Benighted Like Usher

Snuffed tapers sighed
As Death left impressing
His crest of cold tears on the Countess

Benighted like ill-fated Usher
The House of Bathory shrouded
'Neath griefs dark facade

If only I could have wept
In mourning by Her side
I would have clasped Her so tight
Like storm-beached Aphrodite
Drowned on Kytherean tides

And Kissed Her
For from Her alone
My lips would have known
Enigmas of shadowy vistas

Where pleasures took flesh
And pain, remorseless
Came freezing the breath
Of raucous life hushed unto whispers

Benighted.

Inhaling the pale waning moonlight that crept
Through the crypt of Her Lord who so lucidly slept

Benighted.

Exhaling the wail of black widowhood's toll
Waxing eternal night entered Her soul

II. A Murder of Ravens in Fugue

Now haranguing grey skies
With revenge upon life
Gnathic and Sapphic
Needs begged gendercide

Delusions of Grandier denounced the revolt
Of descrying cursed glass, disenchanted in vaults
Encircled by glyphs midst Her sin-sistered cult

With hangman's abandon She plied spiritworlds
To Archangels in bondage
>From light to night hurled
Cast down to the earth where torment would unfurl.......

But soon,
Her tarot proved
Hybrid rumours spread like tumours
Would accrue
And blight Her stars
To better bitter truths
Of cold bloodbaths

As bodies rose
In rigid droves
To haunt Her from their
Shallow burials imposed
When wolves exhumed
Their carthen wombs
Where heavy frosts had laboured long
To bare their wounds

To the depths of Her soul they pursued
Wielding their poison they flew
Like a murder of ravens in fugue

And knowing their raptures
Would shatter Her dreams
She clawed blackened books for damnation's reprieve
Baneful cawed canons on amassed enemies

So Hallow's Eve
As She received
Like Bellona to the ball
Those enemies
Fell-sisters heaved
Her torturies
Cross stained flagstones
To Her carriage reined to flee

But She knew She must brave the night through
Though fear crept a deathshead o'er the moon
Like a murder of ravens in Fugue

For each masked, jewelled gaze held dread purpose
Horror froze painted eyes to cold stares
And even Her dance
In the vast mirrors cast
Looked the ill of Her future
If fate feasted there....

III. Eyes That Witnessed Madness

In an age crucified by the nails of faith
When rank scarecrows of christ blighted lands
An aloof Countess born an obsidian wraith
Dared the abyss knowing well She was damned
Her life whispered grief like a funeral march
Twisted and yearning, obsessed an entranced
With those succumbing to cruelty
Crushed 'neath the gait of Her dance
A whirlwind of fire that swept through the briers
Of sweet rose Her thickets of black thorn had grasped...

She demanded the Heavens and forever to glean
The elixir of Youth from the pure
Whilst Her lesbian fantasies
Reamed to extremes
O'er decades unleashed
Came for blood's silken cure

But Her reign ended swiftly
For Dark Gods dreamt too deep
To heed Her pleas

When Her gaolers were assailed
With condemnations from a priest
Who'd stammered rites
In the dead of night
For maidens staining winding sheets

And She postured proud
When Her crimes were trowelled
And jezebelled to peasant lips
Though She smelt the fires
That licked limbs higher
To the tortured cunts of accomplices

So ends this twisted fable's worth
And though spared the pyre's bite
By dint of nobled bloodlined birth
Her sins [crimes] garnered Her no respite

Forever severed from the thrill of coming night
Where slow Death alone could grant Her flight

"The Spirits have all but fled judgement
I rot, alone, insane,
Where the forest whispers puce laments for me
From amidst the pine and wreathed wolfsbane
Beyond these walls, wherein condemned
To the gloom of an austere tomb
I pace with feral madness sent
Through the pale beams of a guiltless moon
Who, bereft of necrologies, thus
Commands creation over the earth
Whilst I resign my lips to death
A slow cold kiss that chides rebirth
Though one last wish is bequathed by fate
My beauty shalt wilt, unseen
Save for twin black eyes that shalt come to take
My soul to peace or Hell for company"

My soul to Hell for company

9. Portrait of the Dead Countess



(Instrumental)

10. Lustmord and Wargasm
(The Lick of Carnivorous Winds)



An Archangel in bondage
Bediademed, souled
With a murder of ravens
But no less Astarte to behold
Abandoned by Heaven
To the dead, dark and past
Cast Her dispersions
On life's brittle glass

And though Her eyes still held fire
As stonewalls caged the beast
'Gainst the lassitudes of Death
She fought but fell to greet
And midst lies in collusion
She was martyred to teach
That "Divinity and Lust
Are forever forbidden to meet"

But I swore that they would
Before the veil could part our embrace
Twixt Her cold, silent hips I kissed
And promised Christendom in flames

Gravid with madness
Like a feculent dirge
That obsesses the heart
I am covened by words

To avenge Her
Ebon splendour
And surrender
My soul to the dead to achieve
Prophecies of libidinous scourge
Horripilation braying o'er carious herds

Vexing nightmares
And their weak prayers
To a no one there
To hinder Her decree

To weed the world of their disease

As shadows unblind mine eyes to see
The meat that is their congregation

How they plead to the skies
But this is mere foreplay to war

Scar-riddled saffron eves bleed like the conjugal
Vestal daughters giving throat to the priest
A psychophant, the despoiler of faith
Now His skinless crucifixion feeds a winged diocese

For Her interred
I tore a battle banner from His hide
Splashed in red goetia
Hues of Hell and deicide
So came the night
Its obsidian light
Is a master whom disasters
Suck upon like concubines
And under black skirts
That whisper of delight
Darkseeds near fruition
Darked deeds to marry mine

"In Death's bed I have lain
Paying lip-service to shame
But for dreaming of thee I regain
A reason to seek life again"

Then we smite the divine
For our true nature is sin
To strip tender flesh from these swine
Like the lick of carnivorous winds

The breath of the storm that begins
By forcing its Herod tongue in
The womb of the holy virgin
To taste of immaculate sin

>From temptation's peak we will see
The world unfurled at last
Now the wolves of time who stalk Mankind
Shall be as one in grim repast

Commemorating sickle moons
The pack are poised to reap
A scythe of white roses in bloom
Whose twisted thorns will keep
A crown upon a dead man
Daylights crucified in sleep
And lives that hide in scriptured lies
To the memories of a scream

And we shall dance amid the ruin
As Adam and Evil
Dizzy at the falling stars
That burn fiercer in throes of upheaval

If all must we damn for this moment
Then it shall be so
For our souls have crossed oceans of time
To clasp one another more tightly
Than Death could alone...

As Zyklon beats reign to make carrion crawl
The talons of lust rake a clarion call
To the lick of carnivorous winds

The lick of carnivorous winds


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