On to Letter 2 from Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, by Sir Walter Scott.

One of the motivations for writing The Letters was the success of a series of publications called Criminal Trials of Scotland, by Robert Pitcairn. The text covers a selection of criminal proceedings from 1487 to 1624, a period that included many witchcraft trials. Pitcairn actually sent Scott transcripts of trials that were still unpublished, as Scott was writing The Letters; unfortunately, none of them appear in Letter 2, though I’m hoping they might appear in a later letter.

Instead, Letter 2 addresses the Scriptural treatment of witchcraft. Scott’s primary point is that what the Bible calls “witchcraft” and the contemporary understanding of “witchcraft” are two different things. The justification for the execution of witches in Scotland, and in Massachusetts, and elsewhere, was Exodus 22:18 — “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Many learned men have affirmed that in this remarkable passage the Hebrew word CHASAPH means nothing more than poisoner, although, like the word veneficus, by which it is rendered in the Latin version of the Septuagint, other learned men contend that it hath the meaning of a witch also, and may be understood as denoting a person who pretended to hurt his or her neighbours in life, limb, or goods, either by noxious potions, by charms, or similar mystical means. In this particular the witches of Scripture had probably some resemblance to those of ancient Europe, who, although their skill and power might be safely despised, as long as they confined themselves to their charms and spells, were very apt to eke out their capacity of mischief by the use of actual poison, so that the epithet of sorceress and poisoner were almost synonymous.

He goes on to say (with the appropriate citations) that the Old Testament deems witchcraft a capital crime because it is idolatry — worshipping or asking counsel of false deities — not because witches practice magic, per se.

To understand the texts otherwise seems to confound the modern system of witchcraft, with all its unnatural and improbable outrages on common sense, with the crime of the person who, in classical days, consulted the oracle of Apollo — a capital offence in a Jew, but surely a venial sin in an ignorant and deluded pagan.

The emphasis is mine. Clearly, Sir Walter didn’t put much credence in the accounts of witchy behavior that he read in the trial transcripts. He refers to the accusations later as “disgustingly improbable.” And he was very much against applying the biblical law “against a different class of persons, accused of a very different species of crime.”

The Witch of Endor? Basically the equivalent of the charlatan mediums that Harry Houdini loved to expose, almost a century after The Letters were written. The New Testament? To the extent witches are mentioned (and never in the Gospels), the word seems to have the same meaning it had in the Old Testament.

Whatever may be thought of other occasional expressions in the Old Testament, it cannot be said that, in any part of that sacred volume, a text occurs indicating the existence of a system of witchcraft…in any respect similar to that against which the law-books of so many European nations have, till very lately, denounced punishment; …. This latter crime is supposed to infer a compact implying reverence and adoration on the part of the witch who comes under the fatal bond, and patronage, support, and assistance on the part of the diabolical patron. Indeed, in the four Gospels, the word, under any sense, does not occur…

In other words, neither the Old nor the New Testaments mention anything resembling covens, marriages to Satan, orgies with devils, or anything else that we associate with the term “witchcraft” today. Come to think about it, how can you even have a “Black Mass” when the concept of “Mass” (as the Catholic worship ritual) doesn’t even exist?

The letter goes on to point out that conquerors and colonizers have historically conflated witchcraft and demonology with the religious and spiritual practices of the peoples whom they are fighting or trying to pacify. We’ve discussed this point before, when looking at some of the origin stories for the aswang. I got a bit of a shock when he brought up North America, and the Puritans’ encounters with the powah (or powáw, which my dictionary tells me is the Narragansett word for magician; literally “he dreams”), or native shamans. His reference for this information is the Magnalia Christi Americana — by Cotton Mather.

Scott describes Mather as “an honest and devout, but sufficiently credulous man.” Yeesh. I guess maybe he’d never heard the stories of the Salem witch-trials.

One anecdote for you:

Notwithstanding this inferiority on the part of the powahs, it occurred to the settlers that the heathen Indians and Roman Catholic Frenchmen were particularly favoured by the demons, who sometimes adopted their appearance, and showed themselves in their likeness, to the great annoyance of the colonists. Thus, in the year 1692, a party of real or imaginary French and Indians exhibited themselves occasionally to the colonists of the town of Gloucester, in the county of Essex, New England, alarmed the country around very greatly, skirmished repeatedly with the English, and caused the raising of two regiments, and the dispatching a strong reinforcement to the assistance of the settlement. But as these visitants, by whom they were plagued more than a fortnight, though they exchanged fire with the settlers, never killed or scalped any one, the English became convinced that they were not real Indians and Frenchmen, but that the devil and his agents had assumed such an appearance, although seemingly not enabled effectually to support it, for the molestation of the colony.

The next letter promises to discuss the non-Christian belief systems that contributed to the formulation of the Christian system of demonology. Should be interesting.

More Reading

The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft: A project from the University of Edinburgh about accused witches and witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, including a database of all people known to have been accused of witchcraft in Scotland during this period.

The more numerous part of mankind cannot form in their mind the idea of the spirit of the deceased existing, without possessing or having the power to assume the appearance which their acquaintance bore during his life, and do not push their researches beyond this point.

I started Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft the other day. The book was originally published in 1830, as one of the volumes in a series called “Murray’s Family Library”. It’s in the form of letters to Sir Walter’s son-in-law, J.G. Lockhart, who convinced his father-in-law to write a piece on witchcraft for the Family Library. Sir Walter was recovering from a stroke at the time, and his son-in-law wanted to distract him from work that was too strenuous. Also, apparently, Sir Walter needed the money.

The first letter takes a skeptical tone towards supernatural phenomena. Sir Walter lists off a number of naturalistic explanations for ghostly appearances, omens, and the like. He backs up his list of phenomena and explanations for them with anecdotes and stories that he’s heard from friends and colleagues. It’s a bit like reading a nineteenth century Snopes.

It may be remarked also, that Dr. Johnson retained a deep impression that, while he was opening the door of his college chambers, he heard the voice of his mother, then at many miles’ distance, call him by his name; and it appears he was rather disappointed that no event of consequence followed a summons sounding so decidedly supernatural.

He talks about visitations that were probably wishful thinking on the part of someone who has lost their loved one, and supposedly prophetic dreams that are probably just a projection of the dreamer’s waking concerns. If your father is gravely ill, he’s on your mind. Mightn’t you dream about him? And if he dies soon after, you jump to the conclusion that your dream foretold his death.

There’s more: mental illness, nervous breakdowns, bad digestion, hallucinations — aural and tactile as well as visual. Sleepwalking, even. The section on mass hallucinations was interesting, especially the stories of soldiers who believed that a saint, or an army of angels, were fighting with them during some especially fierce battle.

If an artful or enthusiastic individual exclaims, in the heat of action, that he perceives an apparition of the romantic kind which has been intimated, his companions catch at the idea with emulation, and most are willing to sacrifice the conviction of their own senses, rather than allow that they did not witness the same favourable emblem, from which all draw confidence and hope. One warrior catches the idea from another; all are alike eager to acknowledge the present miracle, and the battle is won before the mistake is discovered. In such cases, the number of persons present, which would otherwise lead to detection of the fallacy, becomes the means of strengthening it.

My husband once told me a story about being on a whale-watching boat trip with his mother. Things weren’t going so successfully, so she decided to liven things up by pretending to see a whale. My mother-in-law is like that.

“Look, it’s a whale!” she called out. To be fair, I think she only meant for her family to hear her, but her voice might have been a bit too loud. Soon everyone on the boat was peering over the side, calling out that they could see the whale’s tail, or its back. And look, there’s its spout!

At least they felt they got their money’s worth. And the story proves Sir Walter’s point.

The anecdotes are definitely the best part. Sir Walter has some great anecdotes. Most are too long to retell here, but here’s one of my favorites.

A rich young playboy goes to his doctor, with a complaint. He is constantly being visited by a band of figures dressed in green, who appear in his drawing room and do a little dance. He knows that they are figments of his imagination, but this doesn’t prevent him from being compelled to watch their entire performance — every night.

“Corps de Ballet” by George Cruikshank. Illustration for The Letters

The doctor decides his patient is on the edge of a breakdown from his hard-living and decadent lifestyle. He prescribes a lifestyle change: temperate eating habits, early hours, and preferably life away from the city for a while. The playboy takes the advice, and moves out to his country estate.

After a month he writes his doctor, elated; the green ballet is gone! The young man decides to move permanently to the country; he sells his house in town, and has the furnishings shipped to his country estate. When his old drawing-room furniture arrives at the manor — so do the dancers.

A haunted furniture suite! How fun is that? I can imagine M.R. James writing a creepy antiquarian ghost story on this plot, with a complete and historically accurate description of the tables and chairs. The dancers would be skinny and faceless, and probably hairy. Or maybe a comic ghost story, by Max Beerbohm. Yes, definitely Beerbohm.

In Sir Walter’s version the young man abandons everything and flees to the Continent, forever. Let’s hope he didn’t stumble into any haunted hotels.

Let me admit right off that this post is a shameless crib from a recent post on Acid Free Pulp. I’ve been browsing the website for Rosetta Books, and I came across their Galaxy Series: selected reprints from the venerable GALAXY magazine.

I’m not a huge science fiction reader, but even I was intrigued: Bradbury, Vonnegut, Frederik Pohl… I think I’m going to pick up Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons, just to see if it’s as prescient as everyone claims.

Their Crimescape true crime series might interest some of you, too.

Happy Browsing!

Poger Rock: a “forgotten, moribund collection of buildings tucked into the base of wooded valley” in rural Washington State.

Next to a dumpster, a pair of mongrel dogs were locked in coitus, patiently facing opposite directions, Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu for the twenty-first century.

And about a paragraph later, the protagonist limps into a bar — excuse me, a tavern — where a stuffed black wolf “snarled atop a dias near the entrance.”

Hmmm, I think as I read this. The author is trying a bit too hard, isn’t he? Because this is a horror story, light reading. But I kept reading anyway, because certainly, I am often guilty of trying too hard, myself. I’ve learned the hard way that I have to throw away the first thing I write after having read Nabokov, because I fall so in love with his language — so beautiful, so luminous — that I try to emulate it. It doesn’t work, mostly because I’m not Nabokov, but also because, honestly, the subjects I tend to write about don’t lend themselves to his style. That’s how I felt about the use of language in this piece.

I read far enough to learn that the protagonist was fleeing from her abusive husband, to a remote hunting cabin where she was staying with her lover. I suffered through said lover discovering an old fur cloak in a hunting blind in the woods. Oh, and by the way, did you know the man who built this cabin was driven out of Scandinavia because of rumors that he was responsible for the gory unexplained murders in his village? And that Scandinavian legend says that to wear the skin of the beast is to become the beast? All this information was given to me in a fire hose of exposition, the kind that makes for awkward narrative and really clumsy dialog. I stopped reading and went to the next story.

Last, the bullet blooms agains steel. Still almost pristine until that moment, now its conical head flattens. Its copper jacket splinters into shrapnel needles, wire-fine, scattering. The core splashes, the force of impact so great that cold metal splatters like syrup, droplets blossoming in an elegant chrysanthemum. The butt of the casing flattens against the engine block for a split second before it peels away and falls.

But it’s already exited the girl, and the girl is falling.

That’s the opening of “The Romance”, by Elizabeth Bear. I had to read those lines a few times, because I was still in a bad mood from the last story, and my brain refused to work at parsing the “fancy language”. But in the end it was worth it. The narrative cuts back and forth between the slow-motion shooting above, and a middle-aged children’s librarian who is attending a fiftieth-birthday party that features a haunted carousel. Naturally, I was hyper-vigilant for clumsy exposition, but Ms. Bear managed to inform me of the carousel’s history, and the protagonist’s history, without irritating me. She even used the phrase “the ineffable,” and I didn’t hurl the book across the room. It’s all about having a light touch.

The next story: Sylvia Plath’s “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”, from a different collection. The narrator is an administrative assistant who types up records for the out-patient clinic of a large hospital psychiatric ward.

Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all — it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.

Terrific.

And finally, “The Refugee”, by Jane Rice, the best woman horror writer you’ve never heard of. She’s rather like Shirley Jackson, but somehow never earned the same recognition. There is a collection of her short stories called The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories, published in hardcover by Midnight Press in 2003. 500 copies. As far as I know, never reprinted. I snagged one last year from Borderlands Books for more money than I am willing to admit, and I wish she were more readily available because she’s wonderful.

In “The Refugee,” an American woman stranded in France in the middle of WWII finds a naked young man in her garden.

He was, Milli thought, rather like a young panther, or a half-awakened leopard. He was, Milli admitted, entranced, beautiful. Perfectly beautiful. As an animal is beautiful and, automatically, she raised her chin so that the almost unnoticeable pouch under it became one with the line of her throat.

“She could have written something worth our while and hers,” writes a snotty commenter on the Story of the Week website, after praising Ms. Rice’s “delicious, exact” language. I have to agree that “The Refugee” is not the best of werewolf stories, and not the best of Ms. Rice, either, but her description of Milli is so sharp, so sly that reading the story impelled me to go out and find more of her. Yes, Virginia, you can use “literary writing” in a genre story and get away with it. You just have to know what you’re doing.

Once something is on your mind, you see it everywhere. I came across a feature story in BBC News Magazine today, called “Healing rituals and bad spirits on a Philippine island”. The reporter visited the island of Siquijor, to investigate what she calls “witches”, and the island’s tourism department calls “traditional healers”.

In Visayan, they are called mananambal. If you’ve been following my blog, then you’ll remember that I’ve written a bit about witchcraft and sorcery beliefs in the Central Visayas before, specifically as described in Richard Lieban’s 1965 book, Cebuano Sorcery. Lieban didn’t visit Siquijor, but he did mention it a few times. Apparently, the island is infamous for its witchcraft.

The BBC reporter, Kate McGeown, visited three mananambal, including a woman who is the last living practitioner of bulo-bulo on the island. Here’s Lieban’s description of bulo-bulo:

…the practitioner blows through a bamboo tube into a glass of water held over the patient; if the illness is supernatural, vegetable, animal, or mineral matter appears in the water, “extracted” from the patient.

You can see a video of the mananambal doing bulo-bulo on Ms. McGeown at the BBC link. It took three rounds of the ritual before her water came clear — apparently Ms. McGeown had some bad mojo going on.

Much of what she describes from her visit is familiar to me, from having read Lieban’s book. The mananambal she met with are devout Catholics, and they see no contradiction between their traditional rituals and their official religion. One of the mananambal dowses for spirits. Another one is an herbalist, who makes potions from herbs and roots that she gathers every year, between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

And this was familiar, too: Ms. McGeown asked the healers she visited why their services were still in demand. Because bad witches still exist, and put curses on people, they answered.

Or perhaps it is the more practical reason suggested by Francisco – that because the island did not have its own hospital until recently, traditional beliefs about illness and disease have stood the test of time.

Lieban said that, too — back in 1965. Back then, even in Cebu City, where modern medicine was readily available, people still visited mananambal, so lack of modern resources isn’t the only reason that folk medicine endures. Still, it’s a bit depressing that almost fifty years later, there are still places where people visit folk practitioners primarily because they have no other choice.

More Reading

“Healing rituals and bad spirits on a Philippine island”: The BBC Article

Siquijor Island: Tourist site about Siquijor. It looks like a beautiful place. I may have to grab my snorkeling gear and head out there for some, um, ethnographic research. Yeah, that’s it.

We’ve been moving all week, to a temporary apartment, while our house gets renovated. The extent of the work requires that we move everything out; we’ve at least managed to clear the two rooms that will be completely demolished next week, after the workmen finish digging back part of the hill that takes up most of our backyard. There is still way more to do, and I’m leaving for another business trip next week. Funny how things line up exactly the wrong way.

Most everything goes into storage, of course, including almost all of my books. I’m left with whatever reference books I absolutely need for work, whatever books were scattered around my bedside table (for once reading 50 hojillion books at the same time actually works in my favor), and what’s on my iPad and hard disk. I guess home renovations are another argument in favor of ebooks.

Today we took a break from moving and unpacking, and investigated a new comic book shop that opened up in our neighborhood. We are lucky enough to have several excellent comic book shops in San Francisco, and Two Cats looks like it will fit in just fine. I picked up a trade paperback of Steve Niles’s Cell Block 666. It’s from his series of stories about Cal McDonald, a private detective who specializes in supernatural cases. The supernatural detective genre has been around since at least the days of Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence stories, to varying degrees of quality, but I enjoy it. Niles’s work is up and down, in my opinion — he also wrote the 31 Days of Night comic, which I liked, though the franchise went on waaay too long. The Cal McDonald stories are among my favorites from his work, so it should be a pleasant read.

Supernatural Noir is a collection of prose short stories. It’s published by Dark Horse Press, which is primarily a comic book publisher, hence the book’s presence in the shop next to the Cal McDonald trade paperbacks. The most recognizable author (to me, at least) in the Table of Contents is Joe Lansdale, of Bubba Ho-Tep fame. I’ve read several of his mostly East Texas based short stories, and a couple of his novels (all in a box right now!), so his name on the list of authors struck me as a good sign. And the premise of the collection is promising, don’t you think?

Noir is an attitude, a stance, a way of looking at the world. Paul Duncan, in his concise book Noir Fiction, defines it as a term “used to describe any work, usually involving crime — that is notably dark, brooding, cynical, complex, and pessimistic.”

What I also find interesting about noir is that California is its natural home. Bright, sunny, supposedly superficial Cali. Double Indemnity, The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon. The Big Sleep, The Postman Always Rings Twice, D.O.A., Sunset Boulevard (which I count as noir). Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, The Continental Op. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler. The main exception that comes to my mind right now — though I’m sure I’ve forgotten tons — is John D. MacDonald: Travis McGee was based in Fort Lauderdale. Which is also a bright, sunny, allegedly superficial place.

The observation above is, maybe, obvious; but it was an epiphany to me. I always associate New York or Chicago with crime stories. Those stories, though, are mostly gangster tales, or police procedurals, rather than noir, with its loner, antihero, disenchanted private detective. I suppose the difference is that Chicago and New York have reputations for being tough, crime-ridden cities. Naturally dark, in a sense. Noir — “cynical, complex, pessimistic” — seems to depend on the contrast between the bright, pretty surface and the dark underbelly of human vice.

And the wisecracking. Double Indemnity, anyone? Or the Thin Man? Snappy dialogue and outrageous metaphors delivered at machine gun speed are the stereotypes of noir, along with cheap whiskey and hot dames. We get the whiskey and the wisecracking and the dame in Joe Lansdale’s story, “Dead Sister”. We get some pretty good metaphors, too, though I think that this is inherently Lansdale, not just the noir theme.

In “Dead Sister”, an underemployed private detective in a small East Texas Town is hired by a young woman to investigate why someone keeps desecrating her sister’s grave. The answer turns out to be both supernatural, and icky. I enjoyed the story — but it didn’t really feel like noir, in spite of the trappings.

“Dead Sister” was the only story from the collection that I’ve read today (I am still making my way through American Gothic Tales, among others). Flipping through the authors’ bios in the rest of the book, I wonder if they will feel the same as Lansdale’s did, to me. The authors are primarily horror and weird tale writers, not crime writers, and I suspect that the “elements of noir” that the editor asked them to add to the story will be, like Lansdale’s, mostly trappings.

That’s okay. I like the supernatural crime genre on its own merits, and I knew when I bought the book that it was a fun, commissioned theme collection. I’m not actually expecting Chandler. What I expect is to be able to sit down amongst my yet-unpacked boxes with a tumbler of bourbon — the good stuff, not the cheap kind — and relax with some good quality light reading. Here’s hoping that I’m not disappointed.

Killed half an hour listening to Darkly Lit Podcast’s Christmas Eve ghost story (only a month and four days too late, I know, I know…). It was, to me, a vaguely unsatisfying story, and also vaguely familiar. It turns out that I had the story, in a 1922 collection I found on Project Gutenberg called Masterpieces of Mystery, Volume 1 (Ghost Stories), edited by a Joseph Lewis French. Reading it instead of listening to it did not make it any more satisfying.

But I still didn’t want to pack. So I googled the author, and found nothing (as the Darkly Lit post had already warned that I wouldn’t). Then I googled Joseph Lewis French. Why not? I found this:

Photo: Greenwich Village Bookshop Door Website, Harry Ransom Center, UT Austin

This is the door to Frank Shay’s office, in his bookshop, which was located on 4 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village from 1920 until 1925.

Frank Shay, a friend of Christopher Morley, was in the center of the Greenwich Village literary and artistic scene of that period. Everyone came to his shop, and somehow, the custom began of signing his office door. Eventually, the door collected 242 signatures of Greenwich Village locals and “visiting dignitaries”.

Shay sold the shop in 1924, and the new owner shut it down the following year. She saved the door, though, and eventually sold it to the University of Texas, Austin, in 1960. At the time, only 25 of the signatures had been identified. Twenty-five more signatures were identified by a UT Austin doctoral student in 1972. Then nothing.

In 2010, the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin began compiling a web exhibit to recreate the life and times of The Greenwich Village Bookshop, its denizens, and their work. In the course of their research, they identified 191 more signatures.

Joseph Lewis French signed the door, which is how I found it. Scanning quickly through the list of signatures, I spotted Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and Susan Glaspell (whom I know mainly for her short story, “A Jury of Her Peers”). Many other names that I recognize, several that I don’t.

The exhibit has a page on each of the identified signers, along with an artifact: pages from the draft of Main Street, a letter from Upton Sinclair to a woman who wanted to translate one of his plays to Spanish. It’s fascinating browsing. And a whole list of new things I want to find, and read….

It was, in large part, the web that enabled the exhibit curators to flesh out the story of the door’s signers. The irony of that isn’t lost on them:

The rich resources of the web are, of course, a bittersweet development for those of us who have long loved browsing, talking, and learning from each other in bookstores. While resources on the internet have fostered this project, they have also led directly to the closure of thousands of bookstores over the last decade. We hope that telling the story of this shop and its community will encourage audiences to be mindful of the history of bookstores, bookselling, book buying, and the power of place, as we experience this moment of enormous change.

Definitely worth checking out.

Photo: Leafsfan67, Wikipedia

Sometime between yesterday evening and tonight I passed 1000 views. Hurray for me!

It’s just a little milestone but what the hey.

I had hoped to spend my evenings working on a post for our professional blog — a post on “the rhetoric of data visualization”. The topic idea was inspired by a passing comment that Theophrastus made in the comments section of his post over at BLT about, of all things, HP Calculators. But the workdays have been long, and I’ve been tired. Hopefully tonight, after this post, I’ll get to it.

Henry James. Photo: Wikipedia.

It was a five hour nonstop flight from San Francisco to Boston, so I did a lot of reading. First up: the short story “Maud-Evelyn,” by Henry James. Joyce Carole Oates mentions it in the preface to American Gothic Tales, and though I’d gathered it up into my e-collection of “Supernatural tales by Henry James,” I hadn’t yet read it. It isn’t actually supernatural. It tells the story of a bereaved couple whose daughter died young, before she has “had all they want her to have.” They draw a good hearted-young man, Marmaduke, into their memories/fantasy life, where Maud-Evelyn is still alive. Eventually, they convince him to help them live their daughter’s life forward, “fulfilling all her young happiness” — by courting her, and marrying her. Marmaduke is given emotional support in this project by Lavinia, his erstwhile (and living) fiancée.

It’s an interesting idea — Lavinia calls it “a beautiful idea” — but the framing of James’ narrative through the retold memories of an older woman who knows both Marmaduke and Lavinia gives the story a detached, remote tone that I didn’t find compelling. I can’t help wondering: what would E.T.A. Hoffman have done with this idea? Or Edgar Allan Poe? Though I suspect I would like Hoffman’s version a bit better.

But while looking for an online version of the story to link to, I also found this post on the parallel between Maud-Evelyn and the old Chinese practice of ghost marriages.  The perfect topic for this blog to link to, don’t you think?

Ambrose Bierce. Photo: Wikipedia

Then after “Maud-Evelyn,” I finished The Parenticide Club, by Ambrose Bierce, on a recommendation from Acid Free Pulp. My favorite of the four stories was “Oil of Dog,” which wasn’t strictly a parenticide. Maybe I should call this post “The Adventure of the Misfiled Short Stories.” Bierce’s humor is black and acerbic here, and the satire is almost over the top. It was a fun read, although I prefer his more seriously told stories, both supernatural and otherwise, like “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” or “The Death of Halpin Frayser.”

After that — The Etymologicon, and that’s where I stayed. I found that on a recommendation from BLT, and boy, is it fun! Mark Forsyth (The Inky Fool) gives us a demented tour of the English language as a chain of etymologies. It goes all over the place, and I mean all over the place. Did you know that the word avocado derives from the Aztec word for testicle? Or that an old Dutch word for butterfly is essentially “buttershit”? That being the color of butterfly feces, apparently. I will never look at guacamole or toast points the same way again.

Hmm. My email tells me that I have “homework” for the client tonight, so no rhetoric of data visualization, and no further word etymologies. Ah, well, it was fun while it lasted.

The New England Puritans were an intolerant people whose theology could not have failed to breed paranoia, if not madness, in the sensitive among them. Consider, for instance, the curious Covenant of Grace, which taught that only those men and women upon whom God sheds His grace are saved… those excluded from God’s grace…are not only not saved, but damned.

– Joyce Carol Oates, Introduction to American Gothic Tales

Photo: John Mount

Following on our notion from the last post that gothic horror is the literature of “our awful helplessness” in the face of universal realities, it should come as no surprise that early American Gothic literature shows the strong influence of the Puritan mindset.

The first selection in Oates’ anthology is an excerpt from the 1798 novel Wieland, or The Transformation, by Charles Brockden Brown. Theodore Wieland is a man of obsessional piety: “God is the object of my supreme passion,” he states. In the chapter that Ms. Oates excerpts, he is testifying on his own behalf, while on trial for a terrible crime.

My days have been spent in searching for the revelation of that will; but my days have been mournful, because my search failed…. I turned on every side where glimmerings of light could be discovered. I have not been wholly uninformed; but my knowledge has always stopped short of certainty. Dissatisfaction has insinuated itself into all my thoughts.

Dissatisfaction, because he has not achieved the epiphany, the ultimate knowledge of God that he has been working all his life to gain. All the same, he is apparently prone to fits of mystical ecstacy.

At first every vein beat with raptures known only to the man whose parental and conjugal love is without limits, and the cup of whose desires, immense as it is, overflows with gratification. I know not why emotions that were perpetual visitants should now have recurred with unusual energy….The author of my being was likewise the dispenser of every gift with which that being was embellished. The service to which a benefactor like this was entitled, could not be circumscribed.

Photo: Wikipedia

As it happens, I’ve also been reading St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle. St. Teresa was a mystic. She seems to have suffered from auditory hallucinations, and in her writing she frequently mentions the terrible headaches, the faintness, and the other physical ill effects that befall her during intense periods of prayer and meditation. Yet she seems to have been able to separate these physical effects from the moments of great communion with God that she believed she had experienced. The Interior Castle is her attempt to explain the various levels of union with God to her fellow Carmelite Sisters. Much of the imagery that she uses, and the emotion that she expresses, sound rather like the words of Theodore Wieland. I would quote you some, but St. Teresa is in a storage box for the next week or so. But that’s another story.

St. Teresa also recognizes that some apparently mystical experience could also be “from the devil”, or at least self-delusion. The essence of her reasoning is that God gives the gift of these experiences to whomever He pleases. It has nothing to do with “earning” it, or “deserving” it. To believe that you could possibly earn it is pride, and will only work against you. And to not be granted this gift does not make you a sinner, or a bad person — it just means that God didn’t grant it to you. End of story. Reading The Interior Castle, you notice that St. Teresa actually approaches anecdotes of mystical experience with a surprisingly large dollop of skepticism.

Our good Mr. Wieland, not so much. In a fit of mystical vision — “I opened my eyes and found all about me luminous glowing. It was the element of heaven that flowed around.” — a voice tells him that God wants him to kill his wife, whom he apparently loves, as proof of his faith. And then his children.

And he does.

Portait of Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Charles Osgood
Photo: Wikipedia

Nathaniel Hawthorne, descendant of Puritans, great-great-grandson of a Salem Witch Trial judge, has two entries in the anthology. The first is the well-known “Young Goodman Brown;” the second is the lesser-known “Man of Adamant.” The protagonist of “Man of Adamant” is the misanthropic, self-righteous Richard Digby.

His plan of salvation was so narrow, that like a plank in a tempestuous sea, it could avail no sinner but himself, who bestrode it triumphantly…

Convinced that no one beyond himself deserves God’s blessings, Digby ditches his village, “shaking the dust from his feet,” so as to be well far away before fire and brimstone rain down on his miserable, sinful neighbors.

Alone in the forest, he picks for his hermitage a grim little cave. The cave is full of stalactites and with the petrified fossils of leafs and twigs. From the roof of the cave, liquid drips, so mineral-laded that “it seemed to possess the power of converting what it bathed to stone.”

Oh, and Digby, before he left, was diagnosed with an incurable disease:

It was a deposition of calculous particles within his heart, caused by an obstructed circulation of the blood; and unless a miracle should be wrought for him, there was danger that the malady might act on the entire substance of the organ, and change his fleshy heart to stone.

You can see where this is going. But before it arrives, Hawthorne throws in one more element, turning what started as a straightforward fable into something more like a fairy tale. Still predictable, but charming.