The devilish reputation Ouija boards enjoy in horror films is a relatively new phenomenon. In the Victorian era, they were regarded by “psychical researchers” as something to be embraced in a spirit of calm scientific inquiry, while Spiritualists saw in them a means of reaching out to those who’d passed into the “Summerland,” an anodyne realm of sweetness and light.
While these were the dominant attitudes of the day, the idea of spirit communications has always been fraught with a sense of the uncanny, tainted even by an association with witchcraft and the Devil. We’ll see this element already present in those first communications of the Spiritualist movement, the dialogues the Fox sisters with an unseen presence at first presumed to be a sort of devil.
As we saw in our previous episode, spirit-boards represent a particular danger to those with psychologically fragile constitutions. Beyond the instances of obsessive madness detailed previously, this episode examines a handful of cases from the 1920s and ’30s involving actual bloodshed — murder, suicide, and explicit invocations of the Devil.
Of course these remained isolated incidents, and historical distrust of the Ouija was generally low, and all but non-existent during the spiritual and occult explorations of the 1960s. But all of this would soon change with William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, The Exorcist, and its 1973 cinematic adaptation, both of which famously depict the Ouija board as a channel through which the Devil enters.
Some listeners may know that Blatty’s novel was inspired by actual reports of an exorcism that took place in America of the late 1940s, one involving a teenage boy rather than girl, a change Blatty said he’d made to help preserve the privacy of the boy.
Within the last decade, as individuals involved in these incidents have passed on, more information on this case has made its way to public scrutiny. In the last half of our show, we examine the role spirit-boards and Spiritualist practices played in these events as revealed by a day-to-day log kept by the lead exorcist during the rites . Mrs. Karswell reads for us the passages from the journal.
An element Blatty wove in with this source material was a specific identity of the demon possessing his fictional victim — Pazuzu, an ancient Mesopotamian wind spirit bringing dro ught, famine, storms, and all manner of ill fortune. As this figure was digested into pop culture over the next decades, a version of its name, “Zozo,” would eventually appear in the early 2000s as a destructive entity often channeled by unwary Ouija user. We take a look at this bit of evolving web-lore, showcased in paranormal shows, like Ghost Adventures and at the heart of the 2012 indie horror film I am Zozo.
For centuries, Spain was said to be the home of secret, underground sorcery schools, Toledo being the first city with this reputation and later Salamanca. The notoriety of the latter was more enduring, and when the legend passed to Spanish colonies of the New World, the word, “Salamanca” was embraced as a generic term for any subterranean location said to be the meeting place of witches. We begin the show with a clip from the 1975 Argentine film Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf, which depicts just such a place.
A particularly early reference to this concept can be found in a romanticized 12th-century biography of a particularly interesting character, a French pirate and mercenary Eustace the Monk. Mrs. Karswell reads for us a passage written by an anonymous poet of Picardy, who describes Eustace’s occult schooling in the city of Toledo. Along with this we hear as a passage from a 1335 Tales of Count Lucanor by Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena, which adds another element to the legend, that of its underground location.
Curiously, a number of Spanish cities claim as their founder the Greek demigod Hercules, but in Toledo, he’s also credited with founding this school of magic, excavating a subterranean space in which he imparts his supernatural knowledge, at first in person, and later in the form of a magically animated sculpted likeness. Another Toledan legend, was later blended into this mythology. It’s the story in the Visigoth King Roderick, Spain’s last Christian ruler makes a discovery prophesying his defeat by the Moors in 711 CE. Along with a parchment foretelling this, Roderick exploration of this enchanted palace or tower results in the discovery of the Table of Solomon, a construction of gold, silver, and jewels also attributed with occult powers. Legends detailing this are believed to be of Arabic origin, first recorded in the 9th century and later appearing in One Thousand and One Nights. In later Spanish retellings, the treasure house is conflated with the Cave of Hercules, and the fall of Spain to the Moors is attributed to Roderick breaking of a spell woven by Hercules, to keep North African invaders at bay.
Roderick breaking into the tower of Hercules, 14th c manuscript.
By the 16th century, this site (now identified as an ancient Roman structure underlying Toledo’s church of San Ginés) had inspired such wild tales that Cardinal Juan Martinez Siliceo organizes a 1547 expedition into a subterranean space in hopes of putting the rumors to rest, but it hardly succeeded at that. Mrs. Karswell reads a dramatic 1625 account of that misadventure.
“Cave of Hercules” in Toledo.
While talking bronze heads and magic mirrors were being added to descriptions of the Toledo site, in the late medieval period, similar legends began to be told in Salamanca. Being the site of one of Europe’s most ancient universities in a time when scholars were not infrequently misunderstood as magicians, legends of this sort would naturally be associated with Salamanca. But unlike the universities of Paris, Padua, and Bologna, Salamanca’s location in Spain made it a center of Moorish learning and the study of Arabic texts filled with strange calligraphy, figures and charts readily passing for books of magic.
As Salamanca’s reputation emerged later, in an era after the witch trials had begun, instruction no longer was provided by a figure from classical mythology but from the Devil, one of his demons, or a professor or student in league with the Dark One. A favorite character filling this role was the Marqués de Villena, a scholar who’d written books on alchemy and the evil eye. Villena appears in a number of literary works of the era, both in Europe and the New World. In the 1625 play, The Cave of Salamanca, by Mexican dramatist Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Villena figures into a scenario that became fairly standard in Salamanca stories, one involving the Devil’s payment for the lessons provided. This would be demanded in the form of a human soul, the victim chosen by lot among the seven students instructed at the end of a seven-years period.
In Salamanca, the underground location of this magic school is strangely associated with a Christian site, the Church of San Cyprian, a significant choice, as St. Cyprian of Antioch has strong occult associations throughout the Catholic world but especially in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions. Before Cyprian came to Christianity, this 3rd-century saint is supposed to have been a sorcerer and is sometimes referred to as “Cyprian the Magician”. His story is mirrored in Portugal by that of Giles of Santarém, and both figures appear in Spanish and Portuguese literary works in which the saints play roles parallel to that of the Marqués de Villena, and the magic school becomes “The Cave of Cyprian.”
There are also legends that the magical secrets of the pre-conversion Cyprian were preserved, and on the Iberian Peninsula particularly (but also prominently in Scandinavia) grimoires and spell books attributed to Cyprian began circulating as early as the 16th century. After a brief look at the history of these magic books, we turn our attention to the New World and their legacy there. In particular, the use of such books in Portuguese folk magic brought Cyprian the Magician to Brazil where, where he was absorbed into the syncretic religions of that country. The practice of Macumba, one of these religions synthesizing West and Central African beliefs with those of Catholicism, and 19th-century Spiritism, Cyprian the Magician is transmogrified into São Cipriano dos Pretos Velhos, or Saint Cyprian of the “Old Blacks” an embodiment of the departed African Ancestors. Our show ends with a Macumba chant dedicated to this figure and a Spanish prayer to St. Cyprian for protection against witches, curses, and the evil eye.
During the Satanic Panic, the notion of Halloween as a Satanic High Holy Day came to prominence, but the elements necessary to this mythology were set in place much earlier.
This episode focuses particularly on the early years of Wicca, some missteps in disassociating the movement from Satanism, and early evangelical personalities spinning “ex-Satanist” yarns from this material, which is to say, we focus particularly on the 1960s Occult Revival up to and including 1973. To set the mood for the era’s pop occultism, we hear some audio snippets by records released by witches, Louise Huebner, Gundella the Green Witch, Barbara the Gray Witch, and Babetta, the Sexy Witch.
Back of Barbara the Gray Witch 1970 LP
We first have a quick look at Anton Lavey’s creation of The Church of Satan in 1966. While this sketched out cartoonish tropes of the Panic narrative, Lavey’s carnival-barker style and insistence that there was no actual Satan in his school of Satanism, undermined the influence he might have among all but the most credulous and paranoid.
The real roots of the Panic lay not in Lavey’s publicity stunt, which in the wider historical context was a mere flash in the pan, but in a much older idea conceiving witchcraft and Devil worship or traffic with demons, a notion that held sway for more than seven centuries and therefore not to be quickly rooted out by modern Wiccans.
Some of the sticking points here are rooted in 19th and early 20th century writings on witchcraft by the American folklorist Charles Leland and British Egyptologist Margaret Murray, and their “witch-cult” concept regarding witchcraft as an underground survival of ancient pagan religion. Problematic here too were their identification of the deities of this religion as “Lucifer” (Leland) and “The Horned God” (Murray).
We then turn to Gerald Gardner, the British civil servant, who in his retirement got the whole Wiccan ball rolling, declaring in the early 1950s, that he had been initiated into the ancient mysteries of this witch-cult by members of a surviving Coven in the New Forest region. In particular, we examine the way in which Gardner’s emphasis on UK traditions within Wicca, strengthened an association between Halloween and witches (despite virtually no mention of witch gatherings actually occurring on Halloween in earlier historical writings).
Sibyl Leek and her jackdaw “Mr. Hotfoot”
We then have a brief look at Sybil Leek, first acolyte of Gardnerian Wicca in the US, and darling of 1960s journalists. (Leek was profiled in our 2019 Halloween episode, “All of Them Witches.”) As the United States was the birthplace of the modern Halloween, Leek’s insatiable engagement with the press around that time, did much to strengthen the idea of Halloween as a singularly important time for witch gatherings and ritual. She also provides Halloween recipes!
By the 1960s, Wicca had branched into two paths, Gardnerian and Alexandrian, the latter named for the British witch Alex Sanders, who with his wife Maxine, headed a coven in London. Sanders has much to do with continued confusion between Wicca and Devil-worship thanks to his indiscriminate pursuit of media interest inclined to titillate audiences with the old diabolic model. We discuss his involvement with the British band Black Widow and their Satanic sacrifice stage-show, publicity involvement in the film Eye of the Devil (1966) , and his feature role in the documentary Legend of the Witches (1970) and mondo “documentary” Secret Rites(1971).
Sanders in “Secret Rites”
Just as Wicca originated in the UK, only later to be embraced in the US. fraudulent ex-Satanist testimonies were first told in Britain. In 1970 Bristol-born Doreen Irvine began relating stories of her involvement in the occult, tales that took their final form in her 1973 publication From Witchcraft to Christ. We hear a bit of her tale of teenage street-life, drugs, and prostitution leading to Satanism, her claims to curious supernatural abilities, and her crowning as the “Queen of the Black Witches” on the Dartmoor moor. As well as her warnings about celebrating Halloween.
While the ex-Satanist narrative, never really caught on in the UK, it hit the big time with American Mike Warnke’s 1972 book purporting to document his experiences in Satanism, The Satan Seller.
Mike Warnke in his early days.
While Warnke’s fraudulent stories garnered him celebrity in the early days of the modern evangelical movement, by the late 1970s, he had reinvented himself as a popular Christian comedian. He did, however, revisit the theme once the Satanic Panic got rolling, with the 1979 release of the album “A Christian Perspective on Halloween.”
We hear his Satan Seller narrative of a good Midwestern boy corrupted by drugs in a California college, eventual elevation to High Priest within global Satanic underworld, eventual self-destruction through drugs leading to a stint with the Navy, during which he’s saved. Along the way, are some bizarre details about his fingernails, strange ordinations in real-world sects, and eventual exposure and fall within the evangelical community.
Another evangelical making the rounds with ex-Satanist stories in in Warnke’s day was John Todd, who began spinning his yars tales around 1968 in Phoenix. We only briefly discuss Todd as he really hits his stride outside our timeframe, namely, in the late ‘70s when his story of involvement in a Satanic underworld reached its greatest audience via Jack Chick comics.
We wrap up the show with a look at some early collaborators with Warnke in the the occult fear-mongering business — David Balsiger, Morris Cerrullo, and Hershel Smith (AKA “the Skin Eater) as well as their collaboration on the legendary “Witchmobile,” an “anti-occult mobile unit” that roamed the US and Canada from 1972 to 1974.
The best known of the 18th-century Hellfire Clubs, one founded by Francis Dashwood, is largely remembered today because of the theatrical settings in which they were said to gather, namely a ruined abbey and a network of caves. The latter is represented in the 1961 period drama, The Hellfire Club, from which we hear a brief snippet (although other details and characters of the film are strictly products of the screenwriter’s imagination.)
Francis Dashwood was born into privilege, son of a Baronet, whose title and estate in Wycombe (in Buckinghamshire county, about an hour northeast of London) he inherited at the age of 15. His various social connections saw him appointed to various positions, including Chancellor of the Exchequer and Postmaster General, but his reputation in such roles was generally one of incompetence. This, however, was balanced by his peculiar genius for organizing social clubs.
We discuss two groups he founded before his “Hellfire” days, The Society of Dilettanti, and The Divan Club, both groups dedicated to exploring the culture of lands far from England: the first dedicated to the exploration of the classical heritage of Greece and Rome, and the latter devoted to the lands of the Ottoman Turks.
Dashwood in his Divan Club costuming. By Adrien Carpentiers.
Social groups such as these were referred to as “dining clubs,” though “drinking clubs” would likely be more accurate. The Society of Dilettanti seems to have exhibited a particular devotion to “Venus” and “Bacchus” (polite jargon of the era for erotica and more drinking.) The Dilettanti’s delight in forbidden themes expressed itself in certain “devilish” elements of club ritual prefiguring Dashwood’s “Hellfire” years. In some anecdotes about Dashwood’s travels abroad, told by Horace Walpole, we hear of some likewise impish and irreligious behavior.
In 1752, Dashwood turned his attention to his most famous creation. Actually, he never called it “The Hellfire Club”; instead it was referred to (among other names) as The Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wycombe — a mocking reference to the Catholic saint of Assisi. Dashwood had several portraits painted portraying him as a questionable monk, including this one by William Hogarth:
William Hogarth’s portrait of Dashwood as St. Francis.
(The image in the episode collage likewise represents Dashwood as St. Francis, this one from his Dilettanti years.)
After an abortive start holding meetings on his estate, Dashwood moved the group to the George and Vulture Inn in London, then in 1751, after leasing an old abbey 10 miles south of his estate in Medmenham, he relocated gatherings there, at which point, the group became known as the Monks of Medmenham.
To supervise restoration of the abbey, Dashwood hired Nicholas Revett, a pivotal figure in the revival of classical Greek architecture in England, a movement, Dashwood embraced with uniquely idiosyncratic abandon.
We hear of a number of eccentrically pagan additions Revett added to Dashwood’s estate, and Mrs. Karswell reads a contemporary report on the dedication of a Temple of Bacchus on the grounds, complete with costumed fawns and satyrs. We also hear about the curious interest he took in Wycombe’s Church of St. Lawrence, hiring Revett to complete a restoration modeled on a pagan temple in Syria. He also had an enormous golden ball added to the church steeple, one reputedly large enough to accommodate Dashwood and several Hellfire cronies, who would gather there to drink.
The Golden Ball added by Dashwood to St Lawrence Church.
As for rumors of sexual escapades attached to the club, we explore some clues provided a 1779 volume surveying London’s brothels entitled Nocturnal Revels. While some of this may just be salacious rumor, the libertine law of Dashwood’s “order” was literally set in stone, carved over the entrance: Fais ce que tu voudras, (“Do what you will”.)
The phrase is borrowed from 16th century French satirist François Rabelais, himself a former monk who satirized the Church and society at large, in his series of connected novels Gargantua and Pantagruel. In the former, Rabelais imagined a libertine monastery with the phrase inscribed over its entrance, an idea borrowed by Aleister Crowley in his imagining of an Abbey of Thelema (his religious system built around the concept of the will or thelema in Greek.)
While Dashwood’s primarily playful attitude clearly distinguished him from Crowley and other serious occultists, there were rumors of secret rituals practiced by an inner circle of the monks, as we hear in another description provided by Horace Walpole.
The inner circle of Dashwood’s group, known as “the Superiors,” was restricted to 12 members plus Dashwood, the number being either an irreverent reference to Jesus and his twelve disciples or the number in a witches’ coven. The general membership included a alarming number of elite figures, a half dozen or so Members of Parliament, prominent writers, poets, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Frederick Prince of Wales, the eldest (estranged) son of George II. We also hear of Benjamin Franklin’s involvement with Dashwood.
Two particular members are discussed in a bit more detail: John Wilkes and John Montagu, whose personal feud spelled the end of the club and involved a particularly outrageous stunt said to have been perpetrated by Wilkes.
Wilkes was a radical politician whose published remarks on a speech by George III resulted in charges of libel and him briefly fleeing the country as an outlaw — an incident which endangered the Monks by his association. His nemesis was John Montagu, better known as the Earl of Sandwich (and here we provide the origin story of that particular culinary innovation.)
At some point around 1750, Wilkes published obscene parody of Alexander Pope’s poem, “An Essay on Man,” called “An Essay on Woman,” one which targeted Montagu’s well known mistress Fanny Murray as its subject. In revenge, Sandwich chose to read before Parliament particularly obscene passages from Wilkes’ satire, resulting in further charges against his rival. Wilkes reciprocated by publishing further exposes of the group, generating further controversy ultimately leading Dashwood to close the abbey headquarters in March of 1776.
While there were serious political differences between Sandwich and Wilkes, the real cause of their hostility, so goes the story, lies in an absurd stunt referred to as “The Affair of the Baboon,” a detailed account of which Mrs. Karswell provides from an 18th century source.
Though there are no historical records documenting this, a strong tradition holds that after ending meetings at the abbey, Dashwood moved gatherings into a network of manmade caves on his estate (tunnels excavated for chalk).
This tradition is documented as early as 1796, when a diarist (Mrs. Philip Powys) describes a visit to the caves, noting a hook for a chandelier, likely to have been the “Rosicrucian” chandelier, Dashwood elsewhere described. She also mentions an underground pool supposedly known by the Medmenham monks, as “The River Styx,” a large central chamber that became “The Banqueting Hall” and other small rooms nicknamed “Monks’ Cells.” A gothic facade fronts the caves.
Hellfire Caves Entrance
Throughout the 19th century, local legends of occult doings in the caves grew evermore fantastic, as we hear in a few quotes read by Mrs. Karswell. By 1951, a descendent of Francis Dashwood, Sir Francis John Vernon Hereward Dashwood, who had inherited the family’s West Wycombe properties, struck upon the idea of transforming the caves into a tourist attraction, advertising the tunnels as “The Hellfire Caves.” Though ultimately successful, we hear some contemporary newspaper accounts voicing concerns by local residents and clerics about evil forces awakened from within the caves through these activities.
Our episode ends with a ghost story told of Francis Dashwood’s best friend and fellow Monk, Paul Whitehead, something involving removing Whitehead’s heart.
Folklore of the blacksmith portrays him as a semi-magical figure, a wily opponent of the Devil, a mythic creator in classical and biblical narratives, and an embodiment of occult wisdom within certain secret societies and neopagan groups.
We begin with an audio snippet from the excellent 2017 horror-fantasy Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil, a cinematic elaboration of the Basque folktale, “Patxi the Blacksmith” collected back in the 1960s by the Spanish priest and Basque ethnographer Jose Miguel Barandiaran.
This is one of dozens (perhaps hundreds) of variants of “Blacksmith and Devil” tales found from Russia to Appalachia, all of which involve a smith selling his soul to the Devil in exchange for some reward, then somehow tricking the Devil out of his due. Some variations of the story collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are outlined, and Mrs. Karswell reads passages of an Irish variant from the 1896 volume, The Humor of Ireland, one which also serves as a sort of origin story for a popular seasonal custom.
While most of the blacksmiths in these tales tend to be roguish, England offers a devil-combating smith who is actually quite saintly, namely St. Dunstan, the 10-century Abbot of Glastonbury, who also found time to master the harp and the art of blacksmithing. We hear several variations of his encounter with the Devil.
St. Dunstan and the Devil
We then explore folk customs associated with St. Clement, the first-century bishop of Rome whose particular style of martyrdom led to his being embraced as patron of blacksmiths. A variety of celebrations by ironworkers on St. Clement’s Day (November 23) are discussed; we hear a snippet of a song associated with “clementing” (going door to door to collect donations for the “Old Clem Feast,”) and hear a tale told at these feasts explaining how the blacksmith was declared “King of All Trades” by King Alfred. There’s also a bit about a pyrotechnic festivity known as “anvil firing” associated with these celebrations and a snippet of the traditional blacksmith-toasting song, “Twanky Dillo,” sung by the Wild Colonial Boys.
Moving further back into Anglo-Saxon history, we encounter the figure of Wayland the Smith, one who appears briefly as a swordsmith and armorer in Beowulf and other English narratives but whose story is most thoroughly presented in the Lay of Völund part of the Poetic Edda (“Wayland” being an adaptation of the Old Norse name “Völund.”) We hear a brief summary of this tale, including the particularly gruesome revenge taken by the smith upon the king who takes him captive.
We also hear a bit about Wayland’s Smithy in Oxfordshire, a Neolithic long barrow or stone-chamber tomb supposedly occupied by a ghostly blacksmith.
Wayland escapes from “Myths and legends of all nations” (1914)
We then have a look at the smith god of classical mythology, Vulcan (Roman) or Hephaestus (Greek), his physical traits and fantastic creations, which extend beyond simple smithing into the realm of magic and even the creation of the first human female, Pandora.
Another metalworker associated with mankind’s origins is Tubal-Cain, described in the book of Genesis as the first “forger of all instruments of bronze and iron.”
As a descendent of Cain (who commits mankind’s first murder) and a creator of weapons enabling more deaths, Tubal-Cain’s folkloric reputation tends to be rather black. The apocryphal book of Enoch, presents a truly Luciferian blacksmith seemingly based on Tubal-Cain, the fallen angel Azazel, who utterly corrupts mankind before the flood of Noah.
This flood narrative also figures into the mythology of Freemasonry and the role assigned the figure of Tubal-Cain in its rituals. (I give away a few masonic secrets in this segment and can only hope I will not pay for this with my life.)
Also discussed is the Masonic-inspired Society of the Horseman’s Word whose members were said to exercise supernatural control over horses in rural areas of Scotland and England in the 19th century. The order’s mythological founder was understood to be either Cain or Tubal-Cain, depending on the region.
A blacksmith and son of one of these Horsemen was Robert Cochrane, who in 1966, founded The Clan of Tubal Cain, a coven and spiritual path intended to rival the Gardnerian witchcraft largely defining the neopagan world of the 1960s. We end the show with a particularly strange and tragic tale associated with this group.
The legend of Faust is the archetypal deal with the Devil. This episode looks at the figure as represented in folklore, local legends, plays, puppet shows, literature, films, and opera.
A precedent for the tale seems to be the story of St. Theophilus, a cleric in 6th-century Adana (in modern Turkey) who, as legends have it, summoned the Devil to help elevate him to the status of bishop (and, yes, there is some repentence involved in this one, seeing as how he went down in Church history as a saint). He is the subject of a 13th-century French play, The Miracle of Theophilus, which happens to be the source of a chant to summon Lucifer written in an unknown language — one, which made its way into Wiccan traditions via Gerald Gardner, and which even ended up in the lyrics of the 1969 album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls by the band Coven. The segment starts with a snippet from this cult album.
There does seem to have been an actual magician, astrologer, or alchemist by the name of Faust wandering southern Germany in the late 15th and early 16th century, though very little is known of his life other than passing references in a few letters and some town records noting that individuals by this who were banned for fraudulent or roguish activities. We look at a few of these historic references.
Legends regarding the figure are more plentiful. We hear of a number of supposedly dangerous grimoires attributed to Faust said to be kept at sites in Germany and also discuss a number of legendary feats of magic (including conjuring an entire castle along with a sumptuous, if unsatisfying, banquet for castle guests). We also have a look at a number of towns offering “evidence” that they were the site where the Devil came to claim the doctor, including one town that rents a room in an ancient inn where the grim event was said to have transpired.
Frontispiece “The remarkable life of Dr. Faustus, a German astrologer and enchanter” (1838)
The meat of our show is a look at the earliest written narrative on Faust, a chapbook published anonymously in Frankfurt in 1587, The History of Doctor Johann Faustus. We hear a dramatic, even cinematic, passage describing Faust’s summoning of the Devil in Germany’s Spessart forest (an area rich in folklore and home to the Brother’s Grimm). Also related are Faust’s whirlwind tour of of Hell, a number of comic supernatural pranks he plays, and, of course, the dramatic hour of reckoning and its grisly aftermath.
Richard Burton in his 1967 film, Doctor Faustus
We next hear some snippets from one of the legend’s most prominent film treatments, the 1967 Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor vehicle Doctor Faustus. Though the subject of numerous negative reviews, the film may appeal to horror fans thanks to its visual styling similar to a Hammer film of the period. The wonderful 1926 German silent, Faust, by F.W. Murnau (director of Nosferatu) is also mentioned.
Marlowe’s Faustus
The script for Richard Burton’s film was the classic of Elizabethan stage,TheTragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Though the story presented by Marlowe is rather similar to the chapbook version previously discussed, we hear of a few comic additions made then jump forward a bit in theater history to William Mountfort’s pointedly comic 1697 work, The Life and Death of Dr Faustus, Made into a Farce, with Harlequin and Scaramouche. Wilkinson shares some monologues from the play spoken by two of the Seven Deadly Sins. We also have a look at the legend’s treatment in Faust puppet shows popular in Germany and Bohemia, a tradition that proved influential on the 1994 Czech film, Faust, Jan Švankmajer’s must-watch stop-motion/live-action treatment of the story. We hear bits of the audio from the Švankmajer film as well as a couple more Faust films, the Peter Cooke-Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled (1967) and the nicely dreadful 2000 horror-superhero film, Faust: Love of the Damned.
From Jan Švankmajer’s Faust (1994)
The show closes with a look at Faust at the opera, namely Hector Berlioz’ 1846 work,The Damnation of Faust(with a nod to Charles Gounod’s operatic take on the tale). In particular we look at a famously disastrous staging of the Berlioz work by the Paris National Opera in 2015.
Finishing up with our October theme of “talking to the dead,” we examine necromancy in the ancient world in this episode. While the word has been generalized in its present use to mean cover any form of magic of a sinister bent, in its original meaning, it was simply what the Latinized-Greek etymology suggests: “necro-” for “dead” and “-mancy” for “divination by.” Not that it wasn’t always regarded as a rather sinister activity. It certainly was, and particularly by the Roman era, we’ll see the practice associated with most ghoulish sort of atrocities imaginable. But it’s Halloween, so the more ghoulish, the better.
We begin around 630-540 BC when a necromancer was written into the Biblical book of 1 Samuel (or 1010 BC, if we are to date the figure by the time the events were alleged to have occurred — in any case, this is our oldest tale of a necromancer, known most commonly as the “Witch of Endor.” It’s also our first of several examples of not getting particularly good news when you consult the dead on your future. Much doom and gloom, when King Saul talks to the dead prophet Samuel, who never really liked him anyway.
“The Shade of Samuel Invoked by Saul” Nikiforovich Martynov (1857)
Our next tale of ancient necromancy comes from Homer’s Odyssey, and though there’s no actual necromancer in this story, Odysseus follows instructions for summoning the dead in Hades given him by a pretty legitimate enchantress, namely, Circe. We’ll see an interesting parallel here with the story of the Witch of Endor and learn of the vampiric love of blood attributed to the dead in ancient Greece.
Up next is a lesser known Greek tale of Periander, a tyrannical ruler of Corinth, who sends servants to consult the necromancers to discover the location of some money hidden on his estate, the location of which, only his deceased wife Melissa would know. Some interesting details here as we learn just why the late Melissa finds herself chilly in the afterlife and Periander demonstrates just how tyrannical a tyrant he really is.
A little background is then furnished the rather elaborate pantheon of the underworld and death-related spirits known to the Greeks, much of which was inherited by the Romans and one element even borrowed into a Sam Raimi film. Interesting etymological links to modern curiosities abound! Thanatos, Hypnos, Nyx, The Keres, Manes, Achlys, Lemures, and Lamia are all discussed.
Then there’s the story of Pausanias, King of Sparta, who led the Greeks in victory over the Persians in 479 BC. Troubles begin when he becomes infatuated with a beautiful virgin, Cleonice, in Byzantium. One tragedy and betrayal follows another in this sad tale, and following instructions from a ghost summoned by necromancers only makes things worse.
Then we turn to the Romans for the most gruesome stories.
Detail: “Sextus Pompeius consulting Erichtho” John Hamilton Mortimer (1776)
The necromancer or witch Erichtho appears in the poem Pharsalia, Lucan’s epic on Caesar’s Civil War. Her characterization was so she’s later picked up by other authors, such as Dante, who uses her in his Divine Comedy, the Jacobean writer John Marston, who uses her in a play, and Goethe, who in Faust features her in the Walpurgisnacht scene we talked about in Episode Two. Erichtho hangs around graveyards and her spells and rites involve the most abominable elements you can imagine. Her memorably weird resurrection of a dead soldier in Pharsalia was said to have inspired Mary Shelley in her imaginings of dead things brought to life.
Next we have a look at a necromancer or witch appearing in the works of Horace, who uses her to darkly lampooning those who supported or engaged in the practice of magic in his poetry. He embodies witchcraft in the figure of Canidia, who reappears in several of his works. She’s nearly as ghastly as Erichtho, walking around with “tiny snakes twined in her hair,” perhaps to outdo her witch pal Sagana, whose coiffure Horace describes as “rough” and “standing on end, like a sea-urchin or some bristling wild boar.” After some serious spookery, Horace has some weird fun with the his story of Canidia, providing a particularly vulgar touch, while also taking a jab at a lover who rejected him.
We finish up with some actual cases of Roman necromancy, or at least some purported to have been real, though we can assume there’s probably an element of nasty gossip in some of the accounts. Still, they make for good Halloween listening with spilled blood, entrails, and flayed skin.
“Tiresias appears to Ulysses” Johann Heinrich Füssli (1785)
The devilish appearance of the Greek god Pan has fascinated artists, occultists, and others straying from the path for centuries. This episode begins with some tales of Pan in his natural habitat of Arcadia, how the Greeks, and later Romans, saw him, and some of his central myths — what tragedy resulted in the creation of panpipes and what did that naughty “happy to see me” phallus signify? And his much publicized death during the reign of Tiberius Caesar; what did that mean to the evolving Christian world?
Detail of “Spring Evening” by Arnold Böcklin, 1879.
Like Mark Twain, said of his own demise, reports of Pan’s death seem greatly exaggerated.
The Romantics embraced Pan as a symbol of a lost but harmonious pastoral past, while figures in the 19th-century Occult Revival began to celebrate him in a different way, one based, on similarities between Pan and the iconography of the Christian Devil. Tracing the figure of Satan directly back to Pan, however, presents difficulties — including technical difficulties in this episode. We apologize for any disruptions and are working to ensure that our production process in future offers more robust resistance to demonic influence.
The culture of the Victorian and Edwardian era was particularly obsessed with Pan. A particularly sinister example of this would be found in Aleister Crowley, who declared his “Hymn to Pan” the “most powerful enchantment ever written.” We learn its dark origins, a scandal it caused at the Great Beast’s funeral, and even have a listen to a snippet — a rare and dramatic recording made in 1987 during aThelemic ceremony in which Pan is invoked using Crowley’s text.
Aleister Crowley as Baphomet. 1918
Also discussed is Pan’s role in Wicca and his relationship/rivalry with Cernunnos and Herne the Hunter, as well as the influence individuals like the writer Margaret Murray and Wicca’s grandaddy Gerald Gardner exercised on this.
We lighten up a bit with the story of the eccentric “Priest of Pan” from the town of Millinocket, Maine, and how he made the news in 2016.
Modern “Priest of Pan.” Photo courtesy of Lewis Sun Journal.
On the other side of Edwardian culture there were writers like J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan and Kenneth Grahame (Wind in the Willows) who exhibited a more benign fascination with the the pagan god. But even here, we trace some dark roots.
We’ll also learn something of H.P. Lovecraft’s childhood devotion to Pan and other Greek gods. Somehow Lovecraft seems to hover around the fringes of this episode, and particularly the next.
First edition cover of Wind in the Willows.
Finally we arrive in Neverland with a brief exploration of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, learning something of the troubled life of the author who gave birth to the character.
1911 edition of “Peter and Wendy”1906 edition of “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens”
We end the show with something creepy, some news reporters talking about a haunted bridge in Kentucky. Yes, it has something to do with Pan. A bit.
Haunted bridge near Louisville, KY. Photo: SFGate.
A NOTE ON MUSIC: The music you hear beneath the narration on “Bone and Sickle” consists almost entirely of original compositions. In this and the following episode, however, you may hear a percussion loop sampled from — LVDI SCÆNICI (“Ludi Scaenici” or “stage games”), an interesting Italian group recreating the music of ancient Rome. Listeners may enjoy checking out more of their work, such as this video of one of their performances.
