by Roger Dobson
In what anatomy had he ever found a soul, Ernest Dowson’s doomed physician wonders in the tale ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’. Yet if ultramundane souls exist how can they be revealed by mere knives and X-rays? Why shouldn’t phenomena exist that elude our five senses? If we possessed more than a limited number of senses perhaps the universe would appear a very different place.
The antediluvian occult theories of Montague Summers may appear ridiculous to modern eyes, and he was certainly a psychic dustbin ready to swallow all the whispered inglenook lore relating to vampires, devils and werewolves, but who is to say that no core of truth underlies such myths? Perhaps the watchword should be: ‘The Devil is unlikely to exist, but don’t be too surprised if he does.’
In Witchcraft and Black Magic Summers quotes St Albertus Magnus on the question of succubi: ‘The accounts of evil entities, both incubi and succubae, are most exactly true and beyond all dispute. We ourselves know persons who have had actual experience of this, and there are loathly haunted places in which it were perilous for a man to sleep, so molested are they by the visits of the demon succubus.’ Summers believed that children had been born from the union of witches and incubi. He states: ‘There are innumerable records of, and references to, these foul incubus lusts, which occur in almost every witch trial. The question involved centres round the problem of materialisation, and it is obvious that to perform the essentially carnal acts of coition and generation there must be a very complete and spissated [thickened] materialisation.’ He quotes Thomas Malvenda in his work Antichrist (Rome, 1604) that ‘the children begotten by Incubi are tall, very hard and bloodily bold, arrogant beyond words, and desperately wicked.’ Summers adds: ‘This description so exactly fits certain of the prominent figures in the world today that it seems to me the real explanation of much appalling wickedness and of their infinite capacity for evil.’ To whom was Summers referring? He was writing during wartime, yet Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin—those modern-day Antichrists—were all rather short.
After studying the paranormal Colin Wilson has reached similar conclusions to Summers: the spirit world, with its benign and diabolic entities, is, he says, a reality. Perhaps the most sensible approach is to cultivate an open mind on these subjects. For all this can be summed up in seven devastating words from Arthur Machen: ‘Not one of us understands the universe.’ A line that deserves to be memorialised in letters of gold above the entrance to every laboratory on the planet.
We realise ancient and medieval man was mistaken about many aspects of life: clearly the world isn’t flat, the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, witches can’t turn people into toads and somnambulists aren’t possessed by evil spirits. Yet our ancestors, closer to the earth and to nature, possessed knowledge that we have lost. Twentieth-first-century scientists can send probes to Mars but modern man might have problems constructing a Gothic cathedral because certain arts and crafts have vanished. If the universe truly possesses a spiritual dimension, then for all our science and technology the ancients saw what we rational and sophisticated folk are blind to. Some scientists arrogantly give the impression that the cosmos is a box of tricks to which they now hold the key and its contents are open for inspection; but see what H.G. Wells said on the matter in 1891. It is still applicable today:
Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room—and in moments of devotion, a temple—and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible and around him, in the place of all that human comfort and beauty he had anticipated—darkness still.
Darkness still indeed. And now Old Hag has followed me to East Oxford. Perhaps she feels more at home here among the local characters with their shaven heads, remarkable beer-bellies and startling tattoos (and that’s just the ladies). The hag’s 2003 visit did have one unusual and spinechilling, or spinecrushing, aspect. I am almost resigned to finding the old dear crouching on my ribcage, so part of me now realises, though groggily, that it is purely my imagination (I trust). Orwell again: ‘Your worst enemy, [Winston] reflected, was your own nervous system.’ So this latest time I mentally addressed Madame Darkness along these lines: ‘It’s OK. You don’t frighten me any more. I know you can’t possibly harm me.’ And the entity responded by pressing down even harder as though in impotent fury!
Freud argued that all dreams and nightmares are wish-fulfilments: you dream of horrors and disasters in order to have the relief of escaping them. Yes, Sigmund, and black is really just a darker shade of white! If you can believe that, you can believe anything, as C.S. Lewis would say.
There are no atheists in foxholes, and I freely admit to having resorted, when under nocturnal attack, to what the iconoclastic Lovecraft termed ‘the Syrian superstition imposed upon us by Constantinus’. Like the troubled Prudence Sarn in Mary Webb’s novel Precious Bane, ‘I lay there, mazed, saying “Our Father” as fast as I could, and wishing I’d been more regular at church.’ At least twice, and possibly more often, the hag has retreated and the burden lifted when I’ve managed to trace the sign of the cross on my pillow, head or chest. Do I really do this or do I merely dream I do? Another mystery. Atheists among us may sneer at this—I would classify myself as an agnostic—but if you’re fortunate never to have undergone the sensation of the hag you can’t imagine what it feels like: it does seem terrifyingly real. After all, when one is having a nightmare the mind doesn’t reassure one to say, ‘It’s all right, don’t be alarmed. This is just a bad dream.’ Old Hag’s visitation is akin to a virtual-reality performance.
In any case I am not claiming supernatural or divine intervention. The hag never stays with me very long—less than a minute usually—and in that time the sleep paralysis dissipates, my muscles relax and she fades away. On one occasion, as the paralysis was vanishing bit by bit in patches about my torso, I was convinced that the feeling of weight was purely a muscular affliction and that no entity was involved. It may be that the Christian symbol merely acts as a psychological weapon in the armoury of the imagination. As Dennis Wheatley writes touchingly in his short-story collection Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts: ‘. . . should you ever be confronted with an evil manifestation, have no fear. Pray for help. It will immediately be given to you. Make the Sign of the Cross and “thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night”.’ If one believes, even subconsciously, that the powers of light are stronger than those of darkness, then night terrors must flee when spiritual aid is summoned: these are the rules from time immemorial.
Like doubtless everyone reading this, I was once kept awake into the early hours by a raging toothache. In desperation—drowning men, straws, etc.—I prayed that the pain might pass. The agony that had lasted for hours vanished within seconds and I fell asleep immediately. Do I think this was due to divine intervention? Of course not: it’s the weird power of the human mind that’s operating, the depths of which science has barely begun to explore. The Almighty has surely more urgent tasks to attend to than curing my toothache; though if He did I’m sorry for my ingratitude.
Thomas Burke’s 1783 engraving of Henry Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’.
The rational explanation is the Old Hag myths have developed from the scientifically recognised condition of sleep paralysis. Science says that in normal REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep the body’s muscles are neutralised, preventing us thrashing about and acting out our dreams. Sometimes when we are awaking the restoration process is delayed, causing a sensation of paralysis, and giving the illusion that a demon is crouching on one’s chest, as immortalised in Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare and its variants. But what if more than one explanation exists? If one sees lights in the sky they could be stars, fireworks, aircraft, UFOs, the aurora borealis, meteors, comets, or if one is blind
drunk, purely illusory. Isn’t it unwise to reduce any mysterious phenomena to one single explanation? To take a parallel case: only a fool would dispute the existence of ghosts, but the question remains: what is a ghost? Not necessarily someone returned from the grave. Some instances of ghosts can be attributed to recordings—where spirits pay no attention to earthly witnesses but mechanically continue to act out deeds from past lives. Some are perhaps the results of time-slips when the past elides into the present. Some may be caused by fluctuations in the magnetic field affecting people’s minds or psychic projections. But does this mean that all sightings of ghosts must be so categorised? It would be akin to arguing that all human beings are automatically English, Welsh or Scottish. Doesn’t nature show that life teems in all its varieties? There may be as many categories of ghosts as there are of human racial variations. Similarly, there may be more than one explanation of pavor nocturnus (night terrors) than sleep paralysis.
I have said that the hag always remains silent, but in February 2004 a new development occurred. One Sunday morning, in the early hours, I had a short macabre dream involving a predatory murderer. The nightmare-vignette was clearly triggered by a cheese omelette eaten at lunchtime. Cheese, because of its profound hallucinogenic properties, is a profound dream-enhancer. The inspiration for the dream had come from reading the climactic chapters of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon exactly a week earlier. (All this serves me right for devouring sensationalistic literature. What a pity one can’t choose the subject matter of one’s dreams. Who wants to tangle with serial killers when one could be dallying with Ursula Andress in her She or Dr No mode?) To resume: suddenly the roaring, guttural voice of a woman, shrieking malevolently cut into the dream and took it in a new direction. Then, moments later, I ‘awoke’ to what seemed to be the hypnagogic level—that mysterious state between sleep and waking—to find Old Hag on my chest. The voice ceased with the manifestation: presumably both a bodily and a vocal materialisation proved beyond her. Even in a sleepy befuddled state I realised that the voice had preceded any cognisance of sleep paralysis. So what an uncanny coincidence: the voice is heard as a prelude to a visitation by the hag; but how could sleep paralysis have descended in a few seconds? The hag is supposedly imaginary, but sleep paralysis is a genuine condition. Did my dream consciousness realise that paralysis had crept in, unbeknown to another compartment of the brain? It could, of course, be that the hate-filled voice issued from some spitfire reveller passing outside my flat. Anyone who has drifted off to sleep listening to the radio will know that elements from the waking world can intrude and be incorporated into one’s dreams.
One of a number of variations of ‘The Nightmare’ by Henry Fuseli, c. 1790-91.
THE BOOK IN YELLOW: HOW DORIAN INSPIRED LUCIAN
Faunus 16, Summer 2007
It is irresistible to speculate on how Machen’s literary history might have developed had not Oscar Wilde’s fatal attraction to youth—his ‘feasting with panthers’—landed him in the dock of the Old Bailey in 1895. For in the backlash that erupted against the ‘artists in sin’ and aesthetic perversity Wilde’s fall undoubtedly blighted Machen’s career. As Machen wrote of the commercial failure of The Three Impostors in Things Near & Far, ‘some ugly scandals in the summer of ’95’ made people impatient with unhealthy reading material. Rejected by London publishers, the manuscripts of The Hill of Dreams and Ornaments in Jade languished for years in his Japanese bureau. Had they been published during the period in which they were written Machen’s literary career may not have suffered the break it did around the turn of the century, when he temporarily abandoned literature to take to the stage, and then entered journalism. Had the Wilde scandal never occurred perhaps he would have had his works printed in the era in which they were written, and managed to embed himself more firmly in the public consciousness. He might have persevered with that ‘broken fragment’ (some fragment!) ‘The White People’, mourned by him as ‘a single stone instead of a whole house’. The story may have been the ‘Great Romance’ he always dreamed of writing, and it is possible we may have had more masterpieces from him. Perhaps The Secret Glory would have been a greater work, with its disparate elements more integrated.
Even a slight degree of recognition might have saved Machen from throwing in his lot with the Evening News; and so a subsidiary question arises. Had ‘The Bowmen’ never been written would the Angels of Mons mythology have arisen? Who can say with certainty? All such questions are imponderables. What happened, happened, and presumably it was fated so. Amy’s death in 1899 may have discouraged Machen from continuing with literature even had the Wilde scandal never occurred. He told P.-J. Toulet at this period that he had ‘given up writing and probably will never write again’.
One of the ironic aspects of The Hill of Dreams is that Machen began it, or began planning it, in the autumn of 1895, only months after Wilde’s fall. To launch on such a sensuous, overtly decadent work in such a climate could be regarded as foolhardy but Machen always walked his own lonely road. He wrote what he felt compelled to write, without thought of commercial markets.
Regarded from the perspective of the events of 1895 Wilde, the ‘High Priest of the Decadents’, can be viewed as Machen’s bête noire, but, other than the passage in Things Near & Far, did Machen ever refer to the effect the scandal had on his career elsewhere in print? One can imagine other authors never letting their readers forget that such a tragedy had occurred. Yet had it not been for Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde we might never have had The Hill of Dreams, or at least the book may have been radically different, and who would have it so?
The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, July 1890 (left). The first book publication was by Ward Lock & Co 1891, with decorative lettering, designed by Charles Ricketts (right).
Machen admitted that The Picture of Dorian Gray influenced The Hill of Dreams. He wrote to Munson Havens on New Year’s Day 1925, ‘I read the tale & was a good deal impressed by it; though I did not think then & do not think now that it was a masterpiece.’ Machen saw the story when it appeared in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. The book edition followed in April 1891. An unspecified reference in the novel prompted Machen to send Wilde a copy of his recently issued Fantastic Tales (1890), his translation of Béroalde de Verville’s Moyen de Parvenir, and the two met and dined at The Florence, the Italian restaurant alluded to in Dorian Gray (Chapter Six). Dyson and Salisbury dine here at the beginning of ‘The Inmost Light’. The Florence also appears in The Great God Pan and is referred to as ‘Azario’s’, after the proprietor, in ‘The Lost Club’. The second time they met Wilde showed Machen the famous Preface written for the book edition of Dorian Gray, the series of aphorisms, ‘half serious, half jocular’, which included ‘All art is quite useless’ and ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’. Critics have pointed out that Dorian is corrupted by a book, but Wilde argued that in art every truth had its antithesis. As Blake wrote, ‘There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True’.
Illustration by Sidney Sime for the ‘Roman Chapter’ of The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen.
In Oliver Stonor’s ‘The Table-Talk of Arthur Machen’, Machen wrote of the influences on the Roman episodes in The Hill of Dreams: ‘Suppose you put down amongst its origins a certain chapter in Dorian Gray—which derived, by the way, from Huysmans.’ So which part of Dorian Gray contains the seed of inspiration for Chapter Four of The Hill of Dreams? In Chapter Ten of Dorian Gray the untitled ‘yellow book’ sent to him by Lord Henry Wotton, which exerts such an evil influence on Dorian, is described:
It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in him- self the various moods through which the world-spirit had e
ver passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterises the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes.
In one sense this plotless novel is Joris-Karl Huysmans’ bible of decadence À Rebours (1884), and in another sense it isn’t À Rebours at all, but an imaginary work inspired by Huysmans’ book. Huysmans died, aged fifty-nine, in May 1907, a few months after The Hill of Dreams was published. His book proved to be a huge influence on the decadent movement. Matthew Sturgis in his biography Aubrey Beardsley (1998) speculates on whether the Beardsley drawing room/studio at Cambridge Street, Pimlico, was painted orange in Francophile homage to the colour scheme preferred by Huysmans’ protagonist.