For Edgardo Emilio Tassone, life on earth could have been no worse than that in purgatory. It was for that reason that he, as so many others, had joined the coven in Rome. He was Portuguese by birth, the son of a fisherman who died off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland while fishing for cod. His memory of childhood was the smell of fish. It clung to his mother like a cloak of sickness, and in fact she had died of a parasite ingested from eating fish raw when she became too weak to forage for firewood. Orphaned at the age of eight, Tassone was taken to a monastery; there, beaten by monks until he confessed his sins, he was saved. He had embraced Christ by the time he was ten, but by then his back was scarred from the penance it took to make the Holy One finally appear.

With the fear of God literally beaten into him, he devoted his life to the Church, remaining eight years in the seminary, studying the Bible day and night. He read of God's love and God's anger, and at the age of twenty-five ventured forth into the world to save others from the fires of Hell. He became a missionary, going first to Spain, then to Morocco, preaching the word of the Lord. From Morocco he traveled into the southeast corner of Africa, there finding heathens to convert, and he converted them in the way he himself was. He beat them as he was beaten and came to realize that in the heat of religious ecstasy he took sexual pleasure in their pain. Among the young African converts, one came to worship him, and they shared carnal pleasure, defiling the primitive laws of Man and God. The boy's name was Tobu, of the Kikuyu tribe. When he and Tassone were found together, the boy was ceremonially mutilated, his scrotum opened and his testicles removed; the boy was forced to eat them while his warrior brothers looked on. Tassone himself barely escaped, word reaching him in Somalia that the Kikuyu had seized a Franciscan monk and skinned him alive in Tassone's stead. After skinning him, they made him walk until he finally fell dead.