History Literature / TheOrderOfMelkizedek

* CoitusEnsues: Between Sid and Sonya Borja more than halfway into the story, when Sid's over at Sonya's house for a Christmas dinner involving just the two of them, and after Sonya lights a bonfire in the yard.

* RippedFromTheHeadlines: As Sid's threading his way through arrivals out of Manila airport, he catches glimpses of a foreign, white, celebrity of some sort being mobbed (and not in a good way) as he crawls ''his'' way to departures—a clear allusion to Music/TheBeatles being thrown out of the country by then-First Lady Imelda Marcos, the hottest piece of current events in the Philippines at the time (the story was written and published in 1966).

* TheSixties: See UnintentionalPeriodPiece.
* {{Suburbia}}: Sonya's house is in a spanking-new Makati planned subdivision, either for the NouveauRiche upper classes or the aspirational middle classes. It's modelled on a very American, midcentury-modernist style, with a wide-open lawn, flat-roofed profile, wide property footprint and low fence. Adela, too, lives with her husband Santiago in a similar suburban-style house.

Inquiring as to the cause of his brutal reception, Sid learns that, quite by accident, he's gotten mixed up in the recruitment process for a shadowy, if charismatic, {{Cult}} calling itself the "[[TitleDrop Order of Melkizedek]]", whose stated purpose is to put a radically modern, but also uniquely native, spin on Christian proselytism by infusing it with indigenous imagery and open festivities in ways still alien or anathema to the Catholic establishment, itself still reeling in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and all its reforms now in the process of implementation. Guia, in fact, has already fallen in with the cult, calling herself ''Sister'' Guia and going on the road with fellow sisters performing their own interpretations of Christian services. But the various investigators into the cult (including, inevitably, Sid) eventually cobble together their observations: it holes up by default in a bombed-out former convent in CitadelCity Intramuros; it has a tendency to vanish to the unworthy, the sceptical and the suspicious; its possible real motive may be to resurrect long-lost indigenous religions to which the modern-Christian spin may just be a front; and it's led by a tall, limping, long-bob-haired minister who may or may not be the latest reincarnation in a long line of cult leaders stretching far into the Philippine past, using the guises of TheThreeWiseMen (the current one calls himself Father Melchor, and he's had a Gaspar and a Baltazar for predecessors, naturally), but who also goes by Melkizedek, after a prophet mentioned early on in Literature/TheBible, and it's in this guise that he lures in his followers, many of whom are women from well-to-do backgrounds (Guia herself being one of them).

In the midst of TheSixties, United Nations functionary Isidro "Sid" Estiva, middle of three children by different mothers, comes down from New York City to the Philippines, and especially to Manila, land of his birth, where at the airport, instructed for some reason to hold up a toothbrush as a sign to his recipients, he's accosted by thugs, bundled into a taxi, beaten and stripped of his clothes and stranded in a cemetery. He's rescued by ''de facto'' divorcée Sonya Borja who later gives him a lift to the new elite suburbs in Makati, where he's reunited with his half-sisters Adela and Guia—the elder former is the sensible matron owner of the house, and the younger latter's identified several times with different cultural crowds in her past short life, seeking always to find a new group where she feels she might really belong.

Inquiring as to the cause of his brutal reception, Sid learns that, quite by accident, he's gotten mixed up in the recruitment process for a shadowy, if charismatic, {{Cult}} calling itself the "[[TitleDrop Order of Melkizedek]]", whose stated purpose is to put a radically modern, but also uniquely native, spin on Christian proselytism by infusing it with indigenous imagery and open festivities in ways still alien or anathema to the Catholic establishment, itself still reeling in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and all its reforms now in the process of implementation. Guia, in fact, has already fallen in with the cult, calling herself ''Sister'' Guia and going on the road with fellow sisters performing their own interpretations of Christian services. But the various investigators into the cult (including, inevitably, Sid) eventually cobble together their observations: it holes up by default in a bombed-out former convent in CitadelCity Intramuros; it has a tendency to vanish to the unworthy, the sceptical and the suspicious; and it's led by a tall, limping, long-bob-haired minister who may or may not be the latest reincarnation in a long line of cult leaders stretching far into the Philippine past, using the guises of TheThreeWiseMen (the current one calls himself Father Melchor, and he's had a Gaspar and a Baltazar for predecessors, naturally), but who also goes by Melkizedek, after a prophet mentioned early on in Literature/TheBible, and it's in this guise that he lures in his followers, many of whom are women from well-to-do backgrounds (Guia herself being one of them).

* DefiniteArticleTitle

* TheTheTitle

* {{Suburbia}}: Sonya's house is in a spanking-new Makati planned subdivision, either for the NouveauRiche upper classes or the aspirational middle classes. It's modelled on a very American, midcentury-modernist style, with a wide-open lawn, flat-roofed profile, wide property footprint and low fence.

* {{Suburbia}}: Sonya's house is in a spanking-new Makati planned subdivision, either for the NoveauRiche upper classes or the aspirational middle classes. It's modelled on a very American, midcentury-modernist style, with a wide-open lawn, flat-roofed profile, wide property footprint and low fence.

* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: The novella is dripping to brimming to bursting with icons of TheSixties, including Music/TheBeatles, bits of period fashion, New Wave cinema and Beat poetry, and—especially relevant to the story—the modernising reforms of Vatican II, which upended a whole lot of staid, [[AltumVidetur Latin-heavy]] Roman Catholic traditions.

** Baltazar, who proclaimed a "New Jerusalem" in the province of Pangasinan in the middle of the Philippine-American War, but who in 1901 saw his cult broken up by American colonial troops, who had several cult leaders imprisoned or hanged;

* TwistedChristmas: It's mostly background detail (odd considering just how central Christmas is to mainstream Catholic-Filipino culture), but the whole story takes place around the couple or so weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year, and [[spoiler:Guia is shot dead in the middle of it]]. The holidays are still hinted to be ongoing outside during the aftermath, when Sid retreats up into his office out of shock.

* TwistedChristmas: It's mostly background detail (odd considering just how central Christmas is to mainstream Catholic-Filipino culture), but the whole story takes place around the couple or so weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year, and [[spoiler:Guia is shot dead in the middle of it]].