Christian Explanations of Vampires, Werewolves, and Witches

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

When Christianity became the dominant religion of the Western world in 313, beginning with Emperor Constantine's proclamation of the Edict of Milan, new explanations were provided as to the origins and natures of various monsters for whom their origins and natures had differed during per-Christian days. This post traces these developments with regard to a few of the monsters that are staples, as it were, of horror fiction.

 

The Dunwich Horror by Tatsuya Morino. Source: pinktentacle.com

For example, the Russian Orthodox Church regarded vampires as once been witches or who had rebelled against the faith (Reader's Digest Association's “Vampires Galore!” However, an account of vampires was included in the second edition (1749) of Pope Benedict XIV's De servorum Dei beatificatione et sanctorum canonizatione suggested that vampires existed only in the imagination.

 

Portret van de theoloog Augustin Calmet by Nicholas Pitau. Source: Wikipedia

On the other hand, French theologian Dom Augustine Calmet was of the opinion that vampires, in fact, did exist, his research suggesting that “one can hardly refuse to credit the belief which is held in those countries, that these revenants come out of their tombs and produce those effects which are proclaimed of them.”

The opinion of the Pope and of Calmet seems to represent, in general, the beliefs of the populace: either vampires were imaginary or they were revenants (animated corpses returned from the grave).

 

 

A German woodcut of werewolf from 1722. Source: Wikipedia

The Church's stance, as expressed in the fourth-century Capitulatum Episcopi was that belief in werewolves marked one as an “infidel,” since God alone had the power to transform one species, such as human beings, into another, such as wolves.

During the Middle Ages, however, theologians took their cue from Augustine, who seemed to believe in the possibility of werewolves.

Illustration of werewolves from Werewolves of Ossory by Gervase of Tilbury. Source: Wikipedia 

In Werewolves of Ossory (c. 1200), Gervase of Tilbury suggests that such human-animal transformations, including of men and women into wolves, having actually been witnessed a number of times, should not be lightly discounted as having occurred.

Source: ebay.com

Other medieval works contended that God punished sinful men and women by transforming them into werewolves and assured readers that anyone that the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated would become werewolves (Ian Woodward, The Werewolf Delusion). Both God and saints had the power to effect the transformations of humans into werewolves, as St. Patrick was alleged to have done in regard to the Welsh King Vereticus.

 

 Witches Sabbath by Francisco Goya. Source: reddit.com

According to Protestant Christianity, the witch, another monstrous figure, known to both the ancients and the people of the Middle Ages, gains her power—and most witches are female—by entering a contract with a demon (M. M. Drymon, Disguised as the Devil: How Lyme Disease Created Witches and Changed History).

Although Christian explanations of vampires, werewolves, and witches developed over many years, changing or emphasizing certain various features over others at times, it is clear that, in general, such creatures were products of dark magic or of sinful behavior, such as rebelling against God, blasphemy or heresy, entering contracts with demons, or practicing pagan faiths.

Religious and Scientific Accounts of Sex Demons

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Eros and Evil, R. E. L. Masters theorizes that the accounts of sex with demons that women often provided during medieval witchcraft trials, frequently while they were undergoing torture, included sexual practices that, until fairly recently, were considered unnatural and perverse. Indeed, Masters further suggests, contemporary pornography provides a release by which many of today's sexually repressed readers find release for their own pent-up passions.

For writers who enjoy offering their readers a choice as to whether the supposedly supernatural events in their stories actually are supernatural or are really nothing more than unusual natural events, science offers some ideas as to how some apparently supernatural events may be explained in rational, natural, or scientific terms; at the same time, however, readers who believe that there may be a supernatural order of existence transcendent to this world (or universe) also have recourse to the supernatural explanation of the same events.

For example, sex demons appear in several films and in a few written works (poems, short stories, and novels) as well. Incubi (singular “incubus”) are male demons who have sex with human females (or who could do so, at least); succubi or succubae (singular “succubus”) are female demons who have sex with human males (or who could do so, at least).

In The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, Barbara G. Walker traces the origin of incubi to the feminization of the demonic among ancient Greeks, suggesting that incubi represent “men's fears of sexual inadequacy, since the demons were said to give [women] more pleasure than their husbands did” (241). Originally, incubi were “priests” who presided over the “womb chamber” with which each temple was equipped. By spending the night in this chamber, “people in search of enlightenment or healing could 'incubate' . . . in anticipation of a spiritual rebirth or vision.” When Christianity became the dominant religion in the Middle East and elsewhere, these priests were transformed into “incubi,” or “demons who seduced women” (260).

A well-known example of an incubus is the entity, who appears in The Entity.

A familiar instance of a succubus is the woman whom Jack Torrance (The Shining) sees in a suite of the Overlook Hotel. However, many other films and books include sex demons, especially those of the succubus type. (Hollie Horror lists many movies featuring sex demons of both varieties, complete with posters, plot summaries, and trailers.)

Mark Blanton's art often depicts incubi, in the form known to ancient Greeks as satyrs, engaged in activities with mortal women of a nature that, in today's parlance, would definitely be considered not safe for work (NSFW).

Lilith

The Greek myths of satyrs, he said, were examples of incubi. Such sex demons can be considered to be fallen angels who mate with mortal women. This view might have developed from an account of such a creature in The Epic of Gilgamesh and from the Biblical reference to “giants in the earth,” who were thought, by St. Augustine, to have been the offspring of incubi (the fallen “sons of God”) and mortal women (“the daughters of men”). Also, in Jewish folklore, Adam's first wife, Lilith, became a succubus after leaving Adam, and then had intercourse with the archangel Samael. “The daughters of Lilith,” Walker says, were “interpreted as demonic succubae.”

Thomas Aquinas and Augustine

St. Thomas Aquinas, however, disagrees with Augustine on this point, holding that such sex demons merely “assumed” bodies and used sperm that they had collected from men with whom they'd previously had intercourse as incubi to fertilize women to whom they appeared as succubi. (Yes, demon sex is complicated!)

Science offers a different explanation for such sex demons. Both the incubi and the succubi, according to the scientific view, might be caused by sleep paralysis, and, in men, nocturnal emissions may suggest the sexual component of the delusion.

The Skeptic's Dictionary offers a summary of sleep paralysis and how the condition might inspire a belief in one's having been visited by a sex demon (or, for that matter, extraterrestrials):

The condition is characterized by being unable to move or speak. It is often associated with a feeling that there is some sort of presence, a feeling which often arouses fear but is also accompanied by an inability to cry out. The paralysis may last only a few seconds. The experience may involve visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations. The description of the symptoms of sleep paralysis is similar to the description many alien abductees give in recounting their abduction experiences. Sleep paralysis is thought by some to account for not only many alien abduction delusions, but also ghost sightings and delusions involving paranormal or supernatural experiences (e. g., incubus and succubus).

By allowing the possibility of a natural and a supernatural explanation for the same bizarre phenomenon and leaving it to their readers to decide on the explanation they prefer, horror writers can let their readers have their sex demon or their hallucination, as they see fit, and, at the same time, enrich the possibilities for their stories, resting assured that the sex demons (and their behavior) are both strange and horrific, whatever the explanation a reader adopts.

(By the way, Tzvetan Todorov offers an insightful discussion of these alternative sources of explanation, the scientific, or natural, and the supernatural, but uses the terms “uncanny” for phenomena that are explained scientifically and the term “marvelous for phenomena that are explained with recourse to the supernatural. Phenomena that cannot be resolved as either uncanny or marvelous, he says, remain “fantastic.”)

Women Writers: Greater than the Sum of Their Parts

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneer Horror & Speculative Fiction, Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson contend that women writers' horror fiction was (and is) often of a "transgressive" nature, a reaction against women's "marginalization," as a form of "noncompliance" with the rules that a patriarchal society imposes upon women (9-10).

  

While it may be fallacious and simplistic to paint the lady writers of early horror fiction with so broad a brush, it may be true, in some cases, at least, that the impulse to write this particular type of horror fiction is, at times, at least, inspired by the motivation to rebel, if only in print.

Elizabeth Gaskell

Certainly, women writers were early practitioners of domestic horror, and, as the authors of Murder, She Wrote observe, "women in the nineteenth century were expected to be good homemakers, both as wives and mothers" (53). Stories of ghosts provided a means of catharsis for Elizabeth Gaskell, allowing her to explore and criticize such themes as spousal abuse and patriarchal oppression.

Charlotte Dacre 

Vernon Lee

Sarah Waters

Jewelle Gomez

Kroger and Anderson's own glosses on the backgrounds of the women they feature in their review of women writers of horror fiction actually reveal a variety of inspirations for their writing, including an interest in erotica (Charlotte Dacre), a love of travel (Amelia Edwards), the repudiation of racism (Pauline E. Hopkins), lesbian leanings (Vernon Lee, Sarah Waters, and Jewelle Gomez), psychological instability (Edith Wharton), spiritualism (Margery Lawrence), the desire to live more imaginative lives, even if only in through the lives of the protagonists they themselves created (Everil Worrell), and a "personal struggle with . . . religious faith" (Anne Rice). 

Lisa Kroeger

Melanie R. Anderson

The authors of Monster, She Wrote, in writing about women writers of horror fiction, tend to characterize the authors the way that writers of fiction sometimes characterize the minor figures they create. As a result, Kroger and Anderson tend to reduce the authors to a single personality trait and their motivation to one or, at most, a few, impulses.

What works in genre fiction doesn't work in biography. A person is much more than a personality trait, and it is her whole life that motivates him or her, not just one or a few passionate interests. By reducing women writers to flat, mostly static characters, Kroger and Anderson do their literary "pioneers" (and their readers) a disservice.

However, the authors are ambitious, and their book provides a lot of other information besides the authors' biographical sketches of the women writers whom Kroger and Anderson profile. Though not without its flaws, Monster, She Wrote has enough good material to recommend itself highly to fans of the genre.

Sex and Horror, Part 9

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Having provided both Freudian and Christian definitions and examples of erotic horror, I would now, in the final installment of my “Sex and Horror” series, like to offer my own thoughts concerning this subgenre of horror fiction (or, depending upon one’s point of view, this subgenre of erotic fiction). Although I fervently disbelieve in psychoanalysis, I also believe that Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality does provide some insights that may be, in some sense and to some extent, valid and applicable to the horror genre in general and to the erotic horror subgenre in particular. I likewise believe that the Christian criticism of such fiction, both Catholic and Protestant, offers valid insights concerning sex and horror.

Freud’s emphasis upon unconscious drives and impulses as wellsprings of human behavior is certainly valid, as is the Christian insistence that non-reproductive sex necessarily involves one in human relationships and possibly human-divine relationships as well and may constitute “sinful” conduct. Unless masturbatory, sex must involve at least two individuals, after all, and even masturbatory sex doesn’t occur in a vacuum--a whole web of social and cultural values, taboos, and inducements, including religious ones, apply--even in the commission of solitary sexual activities.

For me, however, sex and horror merge mostly in the duality of human beings as, on the one hand, material-animal beings and, on the other hand, as spiritual-human beings. As ghosts inhabiting machines, men and women are both part and parcel of the natural world and, at the same time, transcend the natural world. As minds, or spirits, people are able to freeze experience in thought and to react or respond to it emotionally and imaginatively; they can project themselves forward in time and imagine a variety of sexual pathways, alternatives, and futures, both for themselves as individuals, for others as individuals, and for society.

In addition, one may find that he or she does not measure up to the expectations of others, whether the “other” involved is one’s partner or one’s society. Perhaps a man may discover that he is impotent, that he cannot perform, or please his lover; a woman may find that she is more highly sexually charged than society deems correct or that she prefers one of her own, to the opposite, sex. Men and women may have trouble relating to anyone else, male or female, on intimate emotional, physical, and sexual levels. They may fear not sex itself but what it will reveal concerning innermost secrets of the self which they would conceal at all costs.

Moreover, social mores shift from time to time, and what is permissible in one era may be impermissible in another; what was once “right” may now be “wrong”--or what was impermissible or wrong in an earlier time may be acceptable or right today. The recognition of the relative and ethnocentric nature of morality is usually disturbing, whether it occurs through reflection upon one’s sexual behavior (or sexuality) or upon human experience in general, and erotic horror is often a product of a character’s discovery of such limitations.

Sex is a physical act in which the heart rate increases as muscles flex and contract, blood flows more copiously, the lungs pant, and body fluids, ultimately, are exchanged. In short, sex reveals human beings’ animality, an aspect of themselves that, in polite society men and women generally take pains to obscure, preferring to think of themselves as “a little lower than the angels” rather than as “higher animals.” Paradoxically, sex, which can generate life, is also a reminder of death. People are animals. They are meat. They will die. Sex brings men and women close to the physical--and, indeed, the visceral--components of themselves and, in doing so, with their own imminent mortality.

But sex is also about power, too. It is about conquest. It is about seduction. Men sometimes regard themselves as conquerors, sex as a means of conquest, and women as the conquered. Sex is, such men suggest, a "war" in which, sooner or later, women are likely to become "casualties." Sex is a series of ongoing "battles" in which the strongest will survive, and men are stronger than women.

Some women, on the other hand, consider sex a means of seduction. In nature, the male animal is bright, beautiful, and alluring, but, among human beings, women adorn themselves, attract and lure, seduce, and claim as their own the suitors who fight among themselves for the exclusive claim to women’s charms. In either vision, the male or the female, sex itself is about power, especially the taking of it from one person--and from one sex--and the conferring of the taken power upon oneself--and one’s own sex.

Many of the icons of horror fiction are used to suggest the multivalent nature of erotic horror: the demon, its amoral quality; the ghost, the repressive social and cultural limitations associated with it and the personal and psychological responses to such restrictions and taboos; the vampire, its predatory aspects; the werewolf, its animality; and the witch, its seductive character. Often, scenes of so-called bondage and discipline highlight the sexual, the social, and the sadomasochistic qualities of sex, suggesting that it is emotionally, physically, and sexually painful and that there is a dynamic of power and powerlessness, of dominance and submission, involved in every expression, of whatever variety, of the sex drive.

Sex is primal and instinctive; sex is personal and secret; sex is social and cultural; sex is revelatory and fearsome--it is a complex set of behaviors, including thoughts and emotions, because humans are themselves complex dualities which are neither exclusively physical or material nor completely incorporeal or spiritual. Men and women live in a number of twofold worlds, but they are defined by none of them: the material and the spiritual, the animal and the human, the temporal and the eternal, the private and the public, the barbaric and the civilized, the natural and the cultural (and, indeed, it may be, the natural and the supernatural). These crossroads of being come together, as it were, as many intersections, the centers of which are often sexual.

Sex unifies us, both as individual persons and as societies and cultures, just as, at the same time, it separates us, both from ourselves and one another. At the heart of erotic horror is our duality as material-spiritual beings who have a foot in both the world of nature and the world of the supernatural, ghosts in machines for whom neither oneness with God or the universe nor oneness with our own fleshly existence is completely comfortable or sufficient. Therefore, sex will always be both a delight and a horror, the center and the fulcrum of erotic horror.

Sex and Horror, Part 6

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Freudian psychoanalysis is all about sex. Christianity concerns, among other important issues, human relationships: relationships between human beings and God, between one human being and another, and between human beings and nature. In psychoanalysis, the superego replaces God, heaven, and moral righteousness; the ego, human will, the earth, and corrupted virtue; and the id, the devil, hell, and sin. Therefore, literary analysis and criticism that is based upon Freudian theory will offer an interpretation of fiction as representing sexual concerns, whereas literary analysis and criticism from a Christian perspective will offer an interpretation of fiction as representing human relationships with God, humanity, or nature.

In much horror fiction, when sex is depicted, it is often perverted sex: incest; non-procreative sex, both hetero- and homosexual; group sex; and the like. A psychoanalyst would explain such deviations as expressions of the tendency of human beings toward “polymorphous perversity,” wherein any body part is capable of providing its owner a form of erotic pleasure. A man, a woman, or even an infant, Freud argues, can find sexual pleasure in almost anything.

Christianity explains sexual perversions and deviations as expressions of human beings’ innate depravity, or inborn tendency to sin. Most theologians would define sin as disobedience to the divine will; an action is sinful if it defies or is at odds with God’s will, whether communicated directly or through institutions he has established. For example, God instituted marriage between a man and a woman, not between two men and two women; therefore, homosexual unions would be considered sinful. Likewise, he orders men and women to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Therefore, non-procreative sex is sinful, whether it takes the form of masturbation, oral or anal copulation, bestiality, or some other activity. Moreover, whatever sexual unions that God has forbidden, such as those between parents and siblings, between two men, between two women, and otherwise, is, by definition, sinful.

It is important to understand these distinctions if one is to understand the differences between the sexual perversions and deviations that are fairly commonly depicted in horror films, which is the subject of this post.

In the 1960s and 1970s, horror films began to heat up--with sex as well as violence, and the sex, more often than not, tended toward the perverse and the deviant. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) explores the link between art and sex as voyeuristic filmmaker Mark Lewis skewers his female models on a customized tripod leg as he photographs them looking at their deaths by impalement as the look into a mirror mounted atop the camera’s stand.

The Freudian critic sees the film as a visual exposition of the Oedipal complex in which a son comes to terms with his burgeoning masculinity by seeking to mate with his mother but, frustrated by his stronger father, seeks, instead, to marry--or at least to mate with--a woman just like dear old mom.

A Christian interpretation would view this film as an example of the sexual perversions that result from human beings’ rejection of God’s commands for moral and sexual purity in favor of a sinful pursuit of forbidden fruit in the form of beautiful, helpless women over whom they may exercise a seemingly omnipotent and sadomasochistic power of life and death. In short, for Christians, the film exemplifies a sexual expression of idolatry; the idol is the self of the sinner whih, separated from God, employs lust instead of love in failed relationships with women.

A ham-fisted approach to filming Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, The Nightcomers (1971) makes explicit one interpretation of James' story, thereby ruining the ambiguity that makes James’ work psychologically complex and artistically sophisticated: the children, Miles and Flora, imitate the tawdry sex they witness their uncle’s perverted servants, Quint and Jessel, perform, killing the couple when they try to leave, just before the arrival of the children’s governess, who, presumably, will see Quint and Jessel when they return as ghosts to haunt the estate.

Freudians would no doubt interpret this movie as an exemplum of the harm that can be done to children who witness the primal scene. Usually, the primal scene is enacted by the child’s parents, but, lacking a father and a mother, Miles and Flora must settle for witnessing the sex that occurs between their uncle’s servants. As children, however, they are unable to assimilate the sex they see and, as a result, they themselves become hypersexual. In the novella, Miles is expelled from school for what the governess seems to believe was an incident involving precocious sexual behavior. According to Freud, a child who witnesses sex between his parents (or other adults) is apt to regard their lovemaking as a sadistic act, so it might be that Miles’ own behavior at his boarding school involved some sort of homosexual act of sadism. James merely hints at such things and even suggests that the sex may be in the governess’ own mind, like her encounter with the ghosts of Quint and Jessel, but the film’s director, Michael Winner, makes his own interpretation of the story’s psychosexual dynamics clearer than most fans and critics like.

As we saw in Part 3 of this series, a Christian interpretation of the story has been offered by Robert Heilman, who argues, in “The Turn of the Screw as Poem,” that--

The story is virtually a morality play, involving the typical conflict of divine and demonic agents fighting for the soul of Everyman. The garden at Bly is the Garden of Eden; Miles and Flora are Adam and Eve in a state of prelapsarian innocence; Quint corresponds to folklore descriptions of the Devil; the governess is both an angel sent from God and a Christ-like mediator. By the end of the story, the Fall has occurred, but at the last minute the governess exorcises the demon from Miles’s soul and thereby saves him. Other apparitionist critics have expanded and rounded out this interpretation; the only character left unaccounted for is Miss Jessel, who too often is seen as merely the artistic counterpart to Quint. Miss Jessel, as cohort of Satan, is probably the Lilith in the Judaeo-Kabbalistic tradition who united with Adam and brought forth the race of demons, imps, and fairies (Rictor Norton, “Henry James's The Turn of the Screw,” Gay History and Literature, 1971, 1999, updated 20 June 2008).

In William A. Fraker’s A Reflection of Fear (1971), an adolescent falls in love with her father when he returns home after a fifteen-year absence, seeking to divorce his wife so he can remarry. She also develops a strong hatred of both her mother, who has reared her in isolation, and her grandmother. A boy kills the women and later seeks to harm the girl’s fiancée. Her father pursues the male attacker, only to discover that he is really his own daughter, who was raised by her mother (his late wife) as a girl, because her mother hated men.

Freudians would attribute the transvestite adolescent’s dilemma to an emasculating mother who herself suffers from penis envy. Apparently having driven her husband off, perhaps because of her emotional castration of him, she now avenges herself upon men by denying her son his own masculinity, feminizing him in a symbolic and, indeed, socialized castration through feminization.

From a Christian point of view, the film is another instance of sexual perversion such as results when human beings substitute their own will for the will of their Creator. God created men and women in His own image, and, for Christians, God does not make mistakes, intending males to become men and females to become women. The Bible, in fact, forbids the wearing of clothing of the opposite sex, judging such behavior to be abominable: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God” (Deuteronomy 22:5). The mother is guilty, not the son, however, for he is in her charge and subject to her authority.

The Bible commands children to “honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (Exodus 20:12), but the mother has denied her son the opportunity to honor his father and she has made it difficult, if not impossible, to honor her, for her emasculation and feminization of him is abusive in the extreme.

The son’s love for his father, although it may involve a homoerotic aspect, since the boy has been reared as a girl and is clearly jealous of his father’s fiancée, seeing her as a rival for her father’s affections (in what Freudians would characterize as a twisted Oedipal situation of sorts), nevertheless shows his desire to embrace masculinity and to be himself a man. For Christians, the movie is the story of child abuse, not gender dysphoria, resulting from another instance of an individual's (the boy’s mother) defying God’s will in favor of her own.

Examples could be multiplied, for many horror films depict all manner of sexual perversions and deviations, including adultery, homosexuality, incest, masturbation, sadomasochism, sodomy, voyeurism, and other activities that modern psychologists define as paraphilias or sexual deviations. Indeed, the 2009 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual lists 547 paraphilias! To Christians, however such sexual deviations are sinful acts, usually considered instances of sodomy, a term which includes any sort of unnatural or non-genital sex act, and result from the sinner’s idolatrous placing of his or her own will above that of God’s will that human beings be either and exclusively male or female, in accordance with their sex, adopting the roles, manners, and modes of behavior that are consistent with their respective genders. The Bible insists that the only legitimate form of sex is heterosexual, marital, and, in principle, reproductive. Anything else is sinful, hellish, and demonic. Horror movies show that the sexual gateway to hell, so to speak, is wide, indeed, but the way to heaven is narrow.


Note:  In the next installment of "Sex and Horror," I consider the haunted house and the sex and horror that are sometimes associated with this horror fiction icon.

Sex and Horror, Part 5

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

For Sigmund Freud and his followers, a witch is basically a hysterical woman. Of course, for Freud, witches were also associated with a sexual element: “The broomstick they ride,” Freud declared, “is the great Lord Penis” (A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, 171). During interrogations by members of the Inquisition, women accused of witchcraft were invariably asked about their demonic paramours’ genitals, and their reports varied, suggesting that demons are able to grow their penises almost anywhere they wish on their anatomies. The organ itself varied as well, being sometimes the size of a mule’s member, other times black and covered in scales, and other times non-existent. Most of the women did agree in one particular: the devil’s penis, like his semen, was apt to be ice cold (A Mind of Its Own, 3) Freud had an answer to the polymorphous perversity, as it were, of the demonic penis: women were affected not by the fleshly organ itself, but by the idea of the penis; it was the mental image, the envisioned phallus, that caused neurosis in women (A Mind of Its Own, 172). Moreover, since witches could steal men’s penises, women could emasculate, or symbolically and emotionally castrate, men, whose penises they envied.

For Christians, the witch is a woman who has entered into a pact with Satan or a lesser demon. Christians also see an element of sexuality in the witch: in return for serving the demon, both sexually and otherwise, she receives supernatural powers or is empowered by the demon to perform supernatural acts through magical incantations and spells. The Bible forbids the practice of witchcraft, condemning it as abominable: “Neither let there be found among you any one that shall expiate his son or daughter, making them to pass through the fire: or that consults soothsayers, or observes dreams and omens, neither let there be any wizard, / nor charmer, nor any one that consults pythonic spirits, or fortune tellers, or that seeks the truth from the dead./ For the Lord abhors all these things, and for these abominations he will destroy them at your coming.(Deuteronomy 18:10-12). Indeed, the Bible goes so far as even to declare that “Wizards you shall not allow to live” (Exodus 22:18), a text which doubtlessly authorized the persecution and execution of women accused of practicing witchcraft during the trials of the Inquisition. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s article, “Witchcraft,” has much more to say about the topic, including these rather curious and chilling words:

The question of the reality of witchcraft is one upon which it is not easy to pass a confident judgment. In the face of Holy Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers and theologians the abstract possibility of a pact with the Devil and of a diabolical interference in human affairs can hardly be denied, but no one can read the literature of the subject without realizing the awful cruelties to which this belief and without being convinced that in 99 cases out of 100 the allegations rest upon nothing better than pure delusion. The most bewildering circumstance is the fact that in a large number of witch prosecutions the confessions of the victims, often involving all kinds of satanist horrors, have been made spontaneously and apparently without threat or fear of torture. Also the full admission of guilt seems constantly to have been confirmed on the scaffold when the poor suffered had nothing to gain or lose by the confession. One can only record the fact as a psychological problem, and point out that the same tendency seems to manifest itself in other similar cases. The most remarkable instance, perhaps, is one mentioned by St. Agobard in the ninth century (P.L., CIV, 158). A certain Grimaldus, Duke of Beneventum, was accused, in the panic engendered by a plague that was destroying all the cattle, of sending men out with poisoned dust to spread infection among the flocks and herds. These men, when arrested and questioned, persisted, says Agobard, in affirming their guilt, though the absurdity was patent.

Whether regarded as penis-envying hysterics or women empowered by demons, witches have been a mainstay of horror fiction, both in its printed and filmed versions. Although, in recent years, in novels, witches have more often populated works for teens and young adults, they continue to appear with some regularity in movies aimed at older audiences, such as Black Sunday (1960), Horror Hotel (1960), Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), Witchfinder General (1968), The Witchmaker (1969), Mark of the Devil (1970), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), The Devils (1971), Virgin Witch (1971), Baba Yaga (also known as Kiss Me, Kill Me (1973), The Wicker Man (1973), Suspiria (1977), Warlock (1989), The Craft (1996), and--well, a coven of others.


Note: The next installment of “Sex and Horror” will take a brief look at a few movies that depict perverse sexuality and have more generalized sexual themes, rather than characters per se.

Social Protest vs. (a) Religious Tolerance or (b) Hellfire Under the Dome

Copyrigjt 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Two forces which conflict with the authoritarian regime that arises in Chester’s Mill, Maine, in the wake of the descent of the dome, a transparent barrier that cuts the town off from outer, surrounding world in Stephen King’s latest novel Under the Dome, are the band of social protesters whom the town’s boy genius, 13-year-old “Scarecrow” Joe McClatchey, organizes and the congregations of Christ the Holy Redeemer Church, pastured by the Reverend Lester Coggins, and the Congo Church, pastured by the Reverend Piper Libby.

None of these organizations, the reader is apt to think, seems likely to stand up to Second Selectman Big Jim Rennie; Police Chief Randolph; Jim’s sadistic son, Special Deputy Junior Rennie; or the U. S. military forces that guard the perimeter of the town.

McClatchey’s Committee to Free Chester’s Mill offers outdated political platitudes such as “FIGHT THE POWER!” and “STICK IT TO THE MAN!” Coggins preaches that the town’s isolation under the dome is the consequence of unconfessed sin. Libby encourages her congregation to “love one another,” characterizing the descent of the dome as a mystery like the affliction to which Job was subjected.

“In times of crisis,” King’s omniscient narrator informs the reader, “folks are apt to fall back on the familiar for comfort”; consequently, “there were no surprises for the faithful in Chester’s Mill that morning; Piper Libby preached hope at the Congo, and Lester Coggins preached hellfire at Christ the Holy Redeemer. Both churches were packed” (192). Of course, McClatchey’s message--“STICK IT TO THE MAN!”--is familiar, too, in quite another way, recalling similar sentiments from the 1960s, when political protest was all the rage.

Against these traditional, or “familial,” approaches to crisis, that of social protest (“STICK IT TO THE MAN!“) and religious tolerance (“love one another”) or “hellfire,” King suggests a third alternative--the one that most of his fiction also implicitly endorses: the banding together of the community--or whatever part of it will band together--against a common foe. So far, at page 192, this is a small band, indeed: former Army captain and current short-order cook Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara; Julie Shumway, the Republican owner and editor of the local newspaper, Democrat; and, possibly, Brenda, the widow of slain police chief Howard (“Duke”) Perkins, who has not yet been enlisted in the community’s cause.

In times past (for example, in Insomnia), King seems to have been more liberal in his ideology than he appears to be today. ‘Salem’s Lot takes issue with disbelief and hypocrisy among the clergy. Since Firestarter, he has been leery of government authority; in Insomnia, he all but champions abortion as a fundamental feminist human right. In Needful Things and, to a lesser extent, Christine, he offers some rather obvious critiques of capitalism. (Needful Things is also highly critical of Christianity’s get-rich-quick prosperity brand of preaching, and was, in fact, according to King himself, inspired by the excesses of Jim Bakker).

In Desperation, though, which is perhaps King’s most religious novel to date, he seems to have reached a turning point and, indeed, a maturation in his thinking about religious faith. On an individual, personal level, such faith, as exercised on the part of Desperation’s David Carver and John Marinville, trust in God can, indeed, move mountains, King suggests, although, in the process, the faithful themselves are apt to be among those hurt the most, both physically and emotionally. If God promises his followers a garden, it’s no longer the Garden of Eden, it appears, but the Garden of Gethsemane.

With nearly 900 pages left to go, I’m not clear yet as to whether Under the Dome will separate the wheat (Piper Libby’s brand of the faith) from the chaff (Lester Coggin’s brand of Christianity), showing the reader what’s fake faith and what’s the real deal (or, perhaps, why both versions of the gospel message offered by these churches is only partially complete and sustainable). Regardless of the outcome of this line of thought, one form of resistance to tyranny that seems likely to stand is the one that is suggested again and again by King’s fiction: it takes a village to stick it to the monster, whether the monster is a nightmarish fiend or a disturbed fellow human being.

Capitalism doesn‘t escape implied censure, either, because, sure enough, in the next scene, which follows hard upon the heels of the papering of Chester’s Mill with posters announcing the Committee to Free Chester’s Mill’s upcoming protest, King introduces Romeo Burpee, who, as the owner of “the largest and most profitable indie department store in the entire state,” hopes to profit from the protest and the churches’ meetings by selling his overstock at “the biggest damn cookout and field day this town has ever seen” (197).

For Burpee, who is always on the lookout for “the main chance,” entrepreneurial capitalism is synonymous, at times, at least, with opportunism, and, when the opportunity presents itself, he is quick to capitalize upon it, as “ruthlessly” as possible. It seems that opportunistic capitalism can save the day no more easily than social protest for the sake of social protest or the preaching of organized religion, either in its gentle-as-a-dove or its serpents-of-hell formulation.

And, now, back to the marathon that is Under the Dome. . . .

Modern Monsters

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

“We have seen the enemy, and he is us.” -- Pogo

Before Christianity, paganism supplied humanity’s monsters. Initially, many were hybrids of wild animals and humans, among which were the centaur, the harpy, the lamia, the mermaid, the minotaur, the satyr, and the Sphinx. Most of them represented natural forces.
Christianity contributed the devil and his legions of lesser evil spirits, the demons.

Now that Christianity and other worldwide religions are in eclipse--in agricultural and progressive nations, at least--writers of horror fiction have had to find their monsters elsewhere.

Science has been a major source of modern horror fiction’s nightmarish creatures. Other worlds have supplied writers with menacing demons, extraterrestrial diseases, and a variety of paranormal threats including clairvoyants, telekinetic travelers, time travelers, homicidal cyborgs, and rampaging robots.

Psychology has also been a source for many of the inner demons that haunt the world of the self. Sigmund Freud contends that modern monsters are aspects of ourselves which we have, as it were, cut off and cast out. They are embodiments, in other words, of those elements of ourselves that we repress.

As a species, we have gone from the Other as a duality of the bestial and the human to the Other as a supernatural seducer, tempter, and deceiver to the Other as the rejected elements of a would-be self--from natural to supernatural to psychological. In the process, the monster has gone from the general to the specific.


Edgar Allan Poe showed us the way, substituting the madman for the demon, ghost, vampire, werewolf, or other paranormal or supernatural threat. However, there is another source for the modern monster: the Self--or, rather--the wannabe Self which we repress. At first, such a source might seem too finite for the task we have set it, which is nothing less than that of being the maker of all things destructive, menacing, destructive, evil, and lethal. We need not worry, however, about whether our supply of monsters will peter out. There are as many inner demons as there are individual men, women, and children.

Just the list of inner demons which have found expression as objective Others in the work of Stephen King suggests the breadth of the range of possibilities for such embodiments of iniquity. His novels have depicted demons of child abuse and religious fanaticism (Carrie), narcissistic self-indulgence and hypocrisy (Needful Things), alcoholism and psychosis (The Shining), spousal abuse (Rose Madder), adultery (Cujo), government abuse of its citizenry (Firestarter), and a host of other Others.

To develop the modern monster, one must become adept at seeing the repressed Other in oneself and in other people, for, today, the repressed is the monstrous.

Two clues are rationalization and hypocrisy. We want to be perfect, even though we know that we are not, and cannot be, without fault. Therefore, we tend to deny what is obviously true to others about behaviors which we may do but certainly not want to admit that we do them.

Instead, we lie to ourselves about our behavior, make excuses for our conduct, and deny that we have acted in anything but an admirable and proper manner. What we would condemn in others, we accept, or even celebrate, in ourselves. By identifying behaviors which we rationalize or would condemn in others but approve in ourselves, we can identify the inner demons both of ourselves and others.

Revisiting the Numinous

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Through images and emblems associated with a vanished craft or practice, a writer of fantasy or horror fiction can, as it were, visit another, mystical and magical world. Such a trip can help him or her to envision, and, therefore, to create an otherworldly setting in which to place historical, fantastic, or horrific characters who, as the mad scientists of their day, ply secret trades.There are several sources of such images and symbols, including alchemy, demonology, Gnosticism, heraldry, Masonry, Rosicrucianism, and various Tarot decks. Links to some of these sources are included at the end of this post, for those who are inclined to step, as it were, into a different time, when a vastly different, pre-scientific mindset held sway.

This article discusses alchemy’s imagery in general. However, much of what is said could apply to any other occult enterprise.

Images of alchemy capture the romance of a medieval enterprise, wherein adepts sought to transmute base metals into gold. Quaint laboratories, equipped with preposterous apparatuses of all kinds, including furnaces and forges, kilns and fireplaces, both with and without chimneys; stocked with flasks and beakers, bottles and vials; and operated by men in rich capes and robes, recreate a world--and a worldview--that is now long gone.

Woodcuts carved with figures and symbols similar to those of the Masons or those on Tarot decks also romanticize the practice: the hermaphrodite, the dragon, the bare-breasted Gorgon, the demon, the angel, the caduceus, the serpent, the lion, the microcosm and the macrocosm, Artemis with her tiers of supernumerary breasts, personified suns and moons, and hundreds of other images as bizarre and wonderful are catalogued in groups as fanciful as they are fascinating, suggesting secrets long forgotten if, indeed, they were ever really known. These emblems, like the fully equipped and functional laboratories, suggest the popularity of the craft and the devotion to which its practitioners practiced it.

Viewing such images, it is almost impossible not to see the appeal that alchemy had, promising gold, promising moral and spiritual perfection, promising the otherworldliness of both fabulous wealth and spiritual wellbeing, and promising a wonderful and magical, if laborious, time of it along the way. Alchemy promised a better world, both internally and externally, if one persevered, worked hard, and stayed dedicated to the task at hand. It did deliver, of course, on both its pledges, but not the way alchemists believed it would; it gave us chemistry, instead of lead’s magically becoming gold.

It also influenced literature, along the way. According to David Meakin’s Hermetic Fictions: Alchemy and Irony in the Novel, alchemy is featured in such novels as those by Emile Zola, Jules Verne, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Gustav Meyrink, Lindsay Clarke, Marguerite Yourcenar, Umberto Eco, and Michel Butor. Some believe that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz might also be predicated upon alchemy.

Familiarizing oneself with such an outmoded and, indeed, long abandoned, view of the world, both physical and metaphysical, renews one’s appreciation of the modern world, reminding us that our own systems of knowledge and belief have not been the only ones people have embraced and that, indeed, ours may, one day, seem quite as quaint as those we’ve left behind. If one can recreate a sense of the reality in which alchemists (or any other esoteric group) believed in his or her story, when it is appropriate to do so, he or she will, in doing so, have already escorted the reader into another, enchanted world.

But becoming acquainted with alchemy--or demonology, Gnosticism, heraldry, Masonry, Rosicrucianism, or various Tarot decks--also pays other dividends to writers of historical romances, fantasy, or horror. Mostly, these benefits are intangible, but they are no less genuine for that. Revisiting the past, to see the world as it was seen in a time antecedent to our own, helps us to get a sense of what Meakin calls “the sacredness of the living Mother-Earth, in whose womb minerals grow and mature like embryos” (15).

What’s more, according to Carl Jung, steeping oneself in the images and ideas, the attitudes and beliefs, the symbols and concerns of such an enterprise can help to generate a sense of the mysterious, or even the eerie and the sublime. “Any prolonged preoccupation with an unknown object,” Jung says, “acts as an almost irresistible bait for the unconscious to project itself into the unknown nature of the object” (quoted in Hermetic Fictions, 19). Meakin adds, “The alchemical penchant for contradictory images serves to intensify this sense of amazement” (19).

Surely, this is similar to what little girls do in investing their dolls with their own thoughts and emotions in order to give to these inanimate objects, as it were, a bit of personality and life. As children, we are adept at such projections of the self onto external objects, but, as adults, many of us tend to become less adept at doing so, or to forget altogether how to do so (unless, perhaps, we are alone on a dark road or in a cemetery at night). Moreover, such projection recreates the intent of the alchemist himself, for, as Meakin observes, “to project life into things is to invest them with magic” (19).

None of us is intelligible in and of ourselves, but we must seek to explain ourselves in terms of external things, by projecting ourselves onto the objects of the environment, and thereby incarnating the world, as it were, a process which would seem to be have been the origin of pantheism. We spiritualize the world, making it a fellow to ourselves. Then, we use it to explain our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. In doing so, the horror writer, seeing the monster within, projects his or her own, inner demons upon cloud, mountain, forest, plain, desert, or sea. These phantasms then, in turn, return, as it were, to haunt us. The horrors that haunt the dark roadway or the nighttime cemetery haunt these places only because they haunt us.

According to Meakin, alchemy is especially adept as a means by which we can project ourselves onto the cosmos, because it is open not only to the objective world, but it is also open to other “symbolic systems” of thought and belief; its “archetypal centrality,” he says, “is reflected in the breadth of diffusion, the adaptability of alchemical doctrine, and its power to annex other doctrines and symbolic systems: its essential syncretism, in short” (21).

Christianity has proven at least equally adaptable, if less syncretistic, as many have observed, including Camille Paglia, who writes, in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson: “Christianity has made adjustment after adjustment, ingeniously absorbing its opposition. . . and diluting its dogma to change with changing times” (25). Any great system, past or present, must have this capability, if it is to not only survive but also thrive. Paglia believes that Christianity is in peril, due to “the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture,” so much so that it is “facing its most serious challenge since Europe’s confrontation with Islam in the Middle Ages” (25). Christianity seems likely to survive this “challenge,” as it survived that of its encounter with Islam (a “confrontation” that has arisen anew in our own time), in which case it will continue to inspire art, including horror fiction.

However, Christianity lacks the dynamic, numinous character that it had for the Swedes, Danes, Anglo-Saxons, and other Germanic and European worshipers of the Norse deities who were, in their time, as Beowulf suggests to us, themselves confronting the church’s faith during the early Middle Ages. To them, Christianity must have seemed as awesome and strange as alchemy might to modern men and women who acquaint themselves with alchemists’ strange and, indeed, astonishing beliefs, thoughts, hopes, fears, and feelings.

In other words, alchemy (or, again, any other esoteric tradition, especially if it is distanced by time as well as by doctrine) can help the writer of historical romances, fantasy, or horror regain a sense of the numinous, of the uncanny, of the eerie, of the sublime, thereby enriching his or her own bizarre, perhaps supernatural, fictional worlds, much as C. S. Lewis, in his coming to the Christian faith, like Beowulf’s readers, from the pagan world, saw, in the cold Northern wastes of Teutonic mythology, the shadow of joy he was to experience more fully in “mere Christianity,” enriched the world of Narnia or J. R. R. Tolkien enriched the world of Middle-earth.

For those who’d like to visit such a world, here are a few links that will take you there:

The Alchemy Web Site

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction
Gallery of Alchemy and Magic

History of Art: From Paleolithic Age to Contemporary Art
The Vessel of God

Bon voyage!

Sources

Meakin, David. Hermetic Fictions: Alchemy and Irony in the Novel. Bodmin, England: Keele University Press, 1995.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.

Motivation as Explanation

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In earlier posts, we have considered the nature of evil as various horror writers have defined it. Some have seen evil as sinful; others as indifference on a cosmic, worldly, or local level; and still others as destructive of one’s local community.

These considerations of evil can be considered as being metaphysical. They deal with the very nature, or character, of evil. They delve into the heart and the soul, as it were, of wickedness, seeking to penetrate the depths of the mystery of iniquity.

More than many genres, horror cries out--one might say, given the nature of the genre, screams--for an explanation of evil on such a level. Moreover, horror fiction, to work at all, must also offer an explanation for the particular evil--the specific monster or other adversary--that threatens the protagonist of a particular tale. The very mechanics of the horror story demand this of its authors, and those who fail to supply such an explanation or whose explanation is not all that explanatory or plausible within the context of the story in which it is offered tend to perturb their readers.

Elsewhere, we laid bare the bones of the horror story’s skeleton, or formula:

1. A series of bizarre incidents occurs.
2. The protagonist discovers the cause of these incidents.
3. The protagonist uses his or her newfound knowledge to put an end to these incidents.

The second stage of the narrative is our topic in this post, for the cause of the bizarre incidents in a particular story is the antagonist’s motivation, and this motivation is the explanation, on the immediate and narrative, if not the metaphysical and universal, level, for the evil that occurs, although, often, the former is a consequence or, at least, a parallel, of the latter. An example of these two levels? In Christianity, the nature of evil is pride (“pride goeth before a fall,” as Satan learns), whereas Satan’s individual and personal motive in corrupting humanity is his blasphemous attempt “to be like the most high God”:

How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit (Isaiah 14: 12-15).

Likewise, the apostle Peter, although he protests that he would never betray Jesus, even if his loyalty to the Messiah should cost him his own life, betrays Jesus, an act which stems from the greater love that he had for himself than that which he had for God (a sort of pride), but is, more immediately, directed at the saving of his own life, in the here and now.

This chart shows some of the explanations that are provided for the series of bizarre incidents that unfold in several well-known horror stories; again, as the motives of specific antagonists within particular narratives, they are causes in the immediate sense and within the contexts of the stories themselves, not in a universal and cosmic sense, as definitions of the very nature of evil itself:

These example could be multiplied ad infinitum, but the point is that, in the horror story that accommodates itself to the formula we identified, the antagonist’s motive is the explanation for the horror--the series of bizarre incidents that unfold in the first part of the tale, whatever the ultimate, metaphysical nature of evil itself may be.

Therefore, the horror writer’s first task is to determine what the antagonist’s motive shall be, to identify, in other words, what the antagonist wants and hopes to accomplish. Having done so, the author withholds this explanation for the bizarre incidents that occur in the story until the middle of the tale, wherein, discerning or learning the antagonist’s motivation (i. e., the cause of the evil events that are taking place), the protagonist is equipped to put an end to these incidents (and, possibly, the monster that is causing them). It’s extremely doubtful that the protagonist will ever but an end to the nature of evil, to sin, or pride, or indifference, or threats to the local community, or whatever this nature may be.

Despite the chaos, there must be order. Despite the madness, there must be a method. Despite the bizarre series of incidents, there must be a motive to the monster’s behavior which causes these incidents. Writers who do not provide a plausible motive for the bizarre series of incidents that result from their antagonists’ actions do not fare well with readers and critics, and otherwise good, or even superior, novels suffer as a result of such failures as well. Although Stephen King’s motives usually suffice to make his villains’ actions believable, he drops the ball in a big way with It, and Bentley Little, despite having written nearly a dozen novels and many short stories, has yet to pick up the ball or, perhaps, even to notice that it exists. The effect, upon It, is to all but ruin a potential masterpiece of the genre. The effect, upon Little’s reputation, of not yet his career, is sustained disappointment and, most likely, eventual oblivion.

Some motives that horror writers have used to explain the bizarre incidents that unfold in the first parts of their stories include:

• Demonic possession in an attempt to bring about a person’s damnation
• An alien’s mission (for example, conquest or mating with a man or a woman)
• Vengeance upon a wrongdoer
• Eruptions of a past or future events into the present
• Pollution
• Humans’ encroachment upon a monster’s habitat
• An effort to steal or control dwindling food or other resources
• Behavioral control or modification
• Recruitment or testing
• Eugenics
• Efforts to survive a plague or the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust
• Genocide
• Punishment, individual or wholesale
• Colonization
• Commerce
• War

The Appeal of the Esoteric

Copyright 2008 by Gray L. Pullman

Your fingers weave quick minarets,
Speaking secret alphabets

--Doors, “Ship of Fools”

Everyone likes secrets. We all want to know them, harbor them, divulge them. Secrets make us powerful. They put us, and not others, “in the know.” They generate curiosity, envy, fear, and a host of other, not always subtle or decent, emotions. They also make us holy, in the literal sense of the word, which is “set apart.” Secrets set us apart from others. Secrets make us stand out. They make us special, in our own minds if not in the minds of others. This is the appeal of the esoteric--or part of it.

But in horror fiction, the esoteric takes on another dimension as well. In horror fiction, the esoteric is dangerous. It threatens. It could harm or even kill. It is, therefore, in some sense, evil. The esoteric is blasphemous or heretical or treasonous, and it--and its devotees--must be put down, must be put to the stake, if necessary; they must be crushed that we may stand; they must be slain that we may live. The esoteric separates those who know, the initiates and the masters or adepts, from those who want to know, the uninitiated, the ignorant, the unenlightened.

The esoteric has been with us always. In Judaism, the Cabbalists claimed secret knowledge. They alone, they said, understood the true, the mystical, the actual meanings of the Hebrew scriptures. In Christianity, mystics and others also claimed to know what others of the faith did not know. The Gnostics crippled, and nearly killed, the early church by insisting that only they knew the secrets of the Gospels and, therefore, how to be saved from death and damnation. Even Jesus, in the Gospels, says that the knowledge of some scriptures are hidden and may be revealed only to those he elects to know and understand them. Some have ears, but they may not hear, and some have eyes but they may not see.

Throughout the Middle Ages, secret societies organized around esoteric doctrines and texts; many, perhaps in altered forms, are with us still: the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Although many may laugh at the absurdity of such secret orders, others are curious about them, or envy their members, or are afraid of them. They fear their secret alphabets, their hidden texts, their clandestine meetings, their strange symbols and rites and rituals. In many cases, outsiders, peering in, see Satan in their midst and conclude that these cults are composed of devil worshipers.

When one examines many of the esoteric texts of secret societies, one finds not so much doctrines to fear as teachings that amuse. It is difficult to read many of these sects’ secret writings without smiling or even laughing out loud. For example, “The Esoteric Philosophy Homepage” offers its visitors a perplexing welter of strange ideas, half-baked notions, and assorted trivia, perhaps with a few lotions and potions thrown into the pot--or cauldron--for good measure, offering tips on such seemingly profound matters as:

• “Esotericism: Energy in the Universe” (something conventional physicists will want to read, no doubt)
• “The Nature of Consciousness” (answers to age-old questions about which psychologists admit continued confusion)
• “Education in the New Age” (for staid professors, perhaps, who still labor under the influences of Benjamin Bloom, John Dewey, and their ilk)
• “Esoteric Healing” (for physicians who’ve yet to heal themselves)
• “Esoteric Laws” (for lawyers to argue about)
• “The Process of Evolution” (for neo-Darwinists)
• “The Nature of Illusion” (for the David Copperfields among us)
• “Reincarnation, Karma, and Past Lives” (written, perhaps, by Shirley McLaine)
• “The Christ and the Buddha” (for two-thirds or so of the planet’s faithful)--

and dozens of more articles concerning claptrap and nonsense. The site truly offers something for everyone--and that, it seems, is another appeal of the esoteric. It’s all things to all people. As the Freemasons say, one’s faith doesn’t really matter among lodge members; anyone of any religious background, or none, may be a member of the Craft. The esoteric is something like the child (or puppet) in the Pinocchio song:

When you wish upon a star,
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you

If your heart is in your dream
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do

Fate is kind
She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of
Their secret longing

Like a bolt out of the blue
Fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true

However, such fulfillment is available only to the members of the cult, the sect, the inner circle, the secret society. To others--namely, the world at large--the opposite conditions apply: ignorance, disappointment, failure, despair, death, and destruction.

As one might suspect, horror fiction makes good use of secret societies.

A hooded figure scurrying about dark, subterranean chambers among shifting shadows in pursuit of God-only-knows-what are frightening because, well, they’re nameless, they’re faceless, and theyre hip to God-only-knows-what dark secrets and may, who knows?, be hell-bent on taking over the world. Often, their haunts are the dungeons of medieval castles, catacombs, caverns by the sea, or mountaintop retreats, protected and remote, situated, at times, upon unhallowed ground whereupon even angels fear to tread.

In most cases, cults, sects, and secret societies don’t really threaten society (as far as we know, anyway) (although Germany has outlawed Scientology), but, occasionally, as in the cases of the Jim Jones mass suicide at Jonestown, Ghana, the FBI’s murder of the Branch Davidians in the massacre at Waco, Texas, and the Heaven’s Gate members’ mass suicide in San Diego, California, such secret orders do do harm, albeit mostly to themselves--to date, at least. They have proven that they can be dangerous, even deadly. By not being open about who they are, what they believe, and what they are about, secret societies perpetuate the mystique that makes them feel special and unique, a self-appointed elect.

As long as the devotees of such organizations skulk about among rats and bats and cats, or whatever it is that they do skulk about among (the imagination is one’s only limit when one considers secret societies and their doings), they will appeal to outsiders and to horror fiction, which, more often than not, is concerned with the plight or the perspective, or both, of the outsider. Their mystery is their appeal, and their secrecy makes them mysterious. They have a secret, and they won’t tell. We want to know what they know, to know their secrets. It’s as simple, and complex, as that.