The Flight to Lucifer by Harold Bloom

For a while, Perscors was able to watch, focusing with ambivalent fascination upon the group at the center, comprising Ruha, his apparent self, and two attendant women who resembled her, though each was slighter and less glowing than her mistress. While Perscors's double was spontaneous and exuberant in his movements, totally abandoned in both active and passive postures, Ruha and her women were expressionless and seemed rehearsed or ritualistic in every gesture and every act. The three women in turn bent down before the lustful double, each draping her arms about the necks of the other two, and presenting herself for penetration. While these cycles of substitutions went slowly on, they exchanged places in scourging, and being scourged by, him.

Abruptly, Perscors moved back from the balcony to the passageway, unable to sustain more of the scene. From the fire of ignorance he had passed to the air of grief, and he could not order his thoughts or feelings. Whatever was to happen to his double might happen without his observation, though a sense of foreboding lingered in him. Toward Ruha, he did not know what he felt, and he could not be jealous of his own shadow or blame his other self for the setting or nature of the ritual orgy. But what was the cause of the profound sadness that pervaded him? Rather than confront his own double, he would not enter that revel, and only an escape upward seemed a possible release from the sorrow of a spectacle that was more than that, even if it placed him back in the violent activity of the house of Achamoth.