THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS
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THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS
Gollancz (London), 1931
(Ultimate Edition)
Contains the additional stories
from the 1932, Doubleday edition
(version 4.1)
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THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS
BEING A COLLECTION OF STORIES
of
APPARITIONS, WITCHCRAFT, WEREWOLVES,
DIABOLISM, NECROMANCY, SATANISM,
DIVINATION, SORCERY, GOETY,
VOODOO, POSSESSION, OCCULT,
DOOM AND DESTINY
Edited, with an Introduction, by
MONTAGUE SUMMERS
(Originally published 1931)
Montague Summers
Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880 – 10 August 1948) was an English author and clergyman. He is known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century, as well as for his idiosyncratic studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe. He was responsible for the first English translation, published in 1928, of the notorious 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum.
Early life
Montague Summers was the youngest of the seven children of Augustus William Summers, a rich banker and justice of the peace in Clifton, Bristol. Summers was educated at Clifton College before studying theology at Trinity College, Oxford with the intention of becoming a priest in the Church of England. In 1905 he received a fourth-class Bachelor of Arts degree. He then continued his religious training at the Lichfield Theological College.
Summers was ordained as deacon in 1908 and worked as a curate in Bath and Bitton, in Greater Bristol. He never proceeded to higher orders, however, probably because of rumours of his interest in Satanism and accusations of sexual impropriety with young boys, for which he was tried and acquitted. Summers' first book, Antinous and Other Poems, published in 1907, was dedicated to the subject of pederasty.
Summers also joined the growing ranks of English men of letters interested in medievalism, Catholicism, and the occult. In 1909 he converted to Catholicism and shortly thereafter he began passing himself off as a Catholic priest and styling himself the "Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers", even though he was never a member of any Catholic order or diocese. Whether he was ever actually ordained as a priest is a matter of dispute.
Literary scholarship
Summers worked for several years as an English and Latin teacher at various schools, including Brockley County School in south-east London, before adopting writing as his full-time employment. He was interested in the theater of the seventeenth century, particularly that of the English Restoration, and edited the plays of Aphra Behn, John Dryden, William Congreve, among others. He was one of the founder members of The Phoenix, a society that performed those neglected works, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.
Montague Summers also produced important studies of the Gothic fiction genre and edited two collections of Gothic horror short stories, as well as an incomplete edition of two of the seven obscure Gothic novels, known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, mentioned by Jane Austen in her Gothic parody Northanger Abbey. He was instrumental in rediscovering those lost works, which some had supposed were an invention of Jane Austen herself. He also published biographies of writers Jane Austen and Ann Radcliffe.
The occult
Summers' career as an ostensibly Catholic clergyman was highly unusual. He wrote works of hagiography on Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Anthony Maria Zaccaria, but his primary religious interest was in the subject of the occult. While Aleister Crowley, with whom he was acquainted, adopted the persona of a modern-day witch, Summers played the part of the learned Catholic witch-hunter. In the introduction to his book on The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) he writes:
In the following pages I have endeavoured to show the witch as she really was – an evil liver: a social pest and parasite: the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed: an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes: a member of a powerful secret organisation inimical to Church and State: a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition: a charlatan and a quack sometimes: a bawd: an abortionist: the dark counsellor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants: a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.
In 1928, he published the first English translation of Heinrich Kramer's and James Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of Witches"), a 15th century Latin text on the hunting of witches. In his introduction, Summers insists that the reality of witchcraft is an essential part of Catholic doctrine, and declares the Malleus to be an admirable and correct account of witchcraft and of the methods necessary to combat it. This should be contrasted with the vastly more skeptical and critical attitude of mainstream Catholic scholars, reflected for instance in the Rev. Herbert Thurston's article on "Witchcraft" for the Catholic Encyclopaedia of 1912, which labels the publication of the Malleus a "disastrous episode."
Montague Summers then turned to vampires, producing The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929), and later to werewolves with The Werewolf (1933). Summers' work on the occult is notorious for his unusual and old-fashioned writing style, his display of erudition, and his purported belief in the reality of the subjects he treats.
Other pursuits
Summers cultivated his reputation for eccentricity. The Times of London wrote he was "in every way a 'character' and in some sort a throwback to the Middle Ages." His biographer, Brocard Sewell (writing under the pseudonym "Joseph Jerome"), paints the following portrait of Summers:
During the year 1927, the striking and somber figure of the Reverend Montague Summers in black soutane and cloak, with buckled shoes--a la Louis Quatorze--and shovel hat could often have been seen entering or leaving the reading room of the British Museum, carrying a large black portfolio bearing on its side a white label, showing in blood-red capitals, the legend 'VAMPIRES'.
Despite his conservative religiosity, Summers was an active member of both the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, to which he contributed an essay on the Marquis de Sade, and of the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society which cultivated a pederastic homosexual ethos. Summers' interests also show in his edition of the poems of the sixteenth century poet Richard Barnfield, which partly are openly homosexual.
Death
Montague Summers died at his home in Richmond, Surrey in August 1948. An autobiography The Galanty Show was published posthumously in 1980, though much is left unrevealed about his life.
CONTENTS
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§1 HAUNTINGS AND HORROR
1. MALEFIC HAUNTINGS: MIXED TYPES
J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand
J. Sheridan Le Fanu: An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
Evelyn Nesbit: Man-Size in Marble
Bram Stoker: The Judge's House
Perceval Landon: Thurnley Abbey
2. HAUNTING AND DISEASE
E. and H. Heron: The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith
3. MALEVOLENT MYSTERY
Amelia B. Edwards: The Phantom Coach
Amyas Northcote: Brickett Bottom
4. FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE
Miss Braddon: The Cold Embrace
Amelia B. Edwards: How the Third Floor Knew the Potteries
Rosa Mulholland: Not to be Taken at Bed-time
Charles Dickens: To be Taken with a Grain of Salt
Charles Dickens: The Signalman
Charles Collins: The Compensation
House
Amelia B. Edwards: The Engineer
5. THE UNDEAD DEAD
Vincent O'Sullivan: When I Was Dead
E. and H. Heron: The Story of Yand Manor House
6. THE DEAD RETURN
a) In Retribution
Vincent O'Sullivan: The Business of Madame Jahn
b) In Love or Passion
Vernon Lee: Amour Dure
Vernon Lee: Oke of Okehurst
Miss Braddon: Eveline's Visitant
c) A Vow Fulfilled
Evelyn Nesbit: John Charrington's Wedding
7. A SOUL FROM PURGATORY
Roger Pater: De Profundis
8. SHADOWED DESTINY
Wilkie Collins: The Dream Woman
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§2 DIABOLISM, WITCHCRAFT, AND EVIL LORE
1. BLACK MACIC
Richard Barham: Singular Passage in the Life of the late Henry Harris, Doctor in Divinity
Jasper John: The Spirit of Stonehenge
Jasper John: The Seeker of Souls
2. SATANISM
Roger Pater: The Astrologer's Legacy
3. WITCHCRAFT
Amelia B. Edwards: My Brother's Ghost Story
4. CONTRACTS WITH THE DEMON
J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Sir Dominick's Bargain
Vincent O'Sullivan: The Bargain of Rupert Orange
5. THE VAMPIRE
J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Carmilla
6. THE WEREWOLF
Frederick Marryat: The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains
7. POSSESSION
Roger Pater: A Porta Inferi
8. OBSESSION
Richard Barham: Jerry Jarvis's Wig
John Guinan: The Watcher o' the Dead
9. VOODOO
E. and H. Heron: The Story of Konnor Old House
W.B. Seabrook: Toussel's Pale Bride
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§3 ADDITIONS TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
F. Marion Crawford: The Upper Berth
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: The Hall Bedroom
Max Beerbohm: Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton
Oscar Wilde: The Canterville Ghost
Arthur Machen: The Inmost Light
Ambrose Bierce: The Damned Thing
INTRODUCTION
In the full flush of success during its first London run, Tom Sheridan, who was playing the hero of "wax-work" Brooke's The Earl of Essex, was wont to be loud up and down the Town in his praises of the poetry and exalted sentiments of this truly mediocre tragedy. In his fine stage voice ore rotundo he would declaim some half a dozen wilting lines and demand applause. On one occasion, in some crowded drawing-room, Sheridan spouts the conclusion of the first Act, ending up with a tremendous —
Who rules other freemen should himself be free!
O happy sentiment! Enraptured silence; and then enthusiastic applause. The company vastly commend and admire. After a moment or two, all eyes are turned towards where Dr. Johnson sits. They await a polished panegyric, a swelling eulogy. The great man opens his mouth and looks sternly enough at Sheridan from beneath his frowning brow. "Nay, sir," quoth he, "I cannot agree with you. It might as well be said:
"Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat."
Should the writer of the ghost story himself believe in ghosts? Dr. M.R. James, who is among the greatest — perhaps, indeed, if we except Vernon Lee, the greatest — of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction, tells us that it is all a question of evidence. "Do I believe in ghosts?" he writes. "To which I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me." This leaves us, I venture to think, very much in the same position as we were before the question was asked and the reply returned Can an author "call spirits from the vasty deep" if he is very well satisfied that there are, in fact, no spirits to obey his conjurations? I grant that by some literary tour de force he may succeed in duping his readers, but not for long. Presently his wand will snap short, his charms will lose their potency and mystic worth; he will soon have turned the last page of his grimoire; he steps all involuntarily out of the circle, the glamour dissipates, and the spell is broken! This has been the fate of more than one writer who began zestfully and fair, but whose muttered abracadabras have puled and thinned, who has clean forgot the word of power if, indeed, he ever knew it and not merely guessed at those occult syllables.
Dr. James quite admirably lays down that the reader must be put "into the position of saying to himself, 'If I'm not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!'" Surely to convey this impression the writer is at least bound to admit the possibility of such happenings. He should believe in a phantom world if he is convincingly, at any rate, to draw the denizens of that state, for let it be granted that locality in the sense we understand it may not have. Yet there will be some kind of laws; unknown to us and as yet unknowable, but such as should be in part surmised; such as are reasonable and fitting. A well-reputed writer, whose name I will by your favour omit, gave us some excellent stories at first, but in his eagerness to create horror, to thrill and curdle our blood, latterly he trowels on the paint so thick, he creates such fantastic figures, such outrageous run-riot incidents at noon and in the sunlight, that it is all as topsy-turvy as Munchausen. In contradiction to the postulate of Dr. James we say: "Nothing of this kind could ever happen to anyone!"
There must be preserved a decorum. Even in imagination such wild flights only serve to defeat their own end.
I conceive that in the ghost stories told by one who believes in and is assured of the reality of apparitions and hauntings, such incidents as do and may occur — all other things, by which I imply literary quality and skill, being equal — will be found to have a sap and savour that the narrative of the writer who is using the supernatural as a mere circumstance to garnish his fiction must inevitably lack and cannot attain, although, as I have pointed out, some extraordinary talent in spinning a yarn may go far to mask the deficiency. Thus, and for this very reason, it seems to me that there are few better stories of this kind than those the late Monsignor Benson has given us in The Mirror of Shalott and other of his work. Especially might one instance Father Meuron's Tale, Father Bianchi's Story and Father Madox's Tale. But indeed the whole symposium bears amplest evidence. Very fine tales have, no doubt, been written by authors who regarded the supernatural as just a fantasy and a flam. They topple, however, either on the one side into nightmare indigestion or on the other into vague aridities that are in fine meaningless.
Were I not myself convinced of the sensible reality of apparitions, had I not myself seen a ghost, I could hardly have undertaken to collect and introduce The Supernatural Omnibus.
A further important point is made by Dr. James. "Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story." To this I would allow exceptions: I would add the unhappy ghost seeking rest who manifests itself for some purpose, generally that an old wrong may be righted at last, or else the ghost returns to discover a secret necessary for the happiness of descendants or others; I would include the spectre who is a messenger of calamity, a harbinger of ill. There are also the phantoms who seek a just retribution; and
"There are spirits that are created for vengeance, and in their fury they lay on grievous torments." — Ecclesiasticus xxxix. 33.
In fiction I concede that the good and kindly ghost has little or no place. And this is because in real life, as it seems to me, we should hardly term such appearances ghosts. When I read that the "ghost" of Sir Thomas More appeared at Baynards, in Surrey, I know that there was a vision of the Beato vouchsafed. There is a striking instance in the life of the mystic Teresa Higginson, who died in 1905. When she was living at the little village of Neston, in Cheshire, the local priest was away and the keys of the church were in her charge. Early one morning a strange priest came to her, and, although he did not speak, intimated he
wished to say Mass. She prepared the altar and lighted the candles, noting with some surprise that he seemed strangely familiar with the place. She answered his Mass and received Communion at his hands. When it was finished and she went into the sacristy shortly after him, the vestments were all neatly folded, but the visitant had gone. She made inquiries in the village, yet nobody appeared to have seen him. Upon his return, she reported the matter to the resident priest, who in due course informed the bishop. His Lordship remarked that the description of the stranger was exactly that of a priest who used to serve the church many years before and who lay buried in the graveyard. It is, if I mistake not, on this event that Miss Grace Christmas founded her story Faithful unto Death in What Father Cuthbert Knew.
But this incident is not fiction, and it is with fiction that we are now concerned. I quote such an example to point out that the ghost story should follow upon the same lines as the veridical accounts. Of course, all kinds of trappings and cerements are not merely allowable, but much to be recommended. This sort of thing must not be overdone, however, and I fear that to-day there is a tendency to be too lavish with the pargeting, too curious with the inlay.
The ghost story should be short, simple and direct. Who told the first ghost story? I do not know, but I am sure that it was simple enough and that it sufficiently thrilled the hearers. Some son of Adam, I suppose, far back in dimmest antiquity, housed in a cave, as he looked up at the vast endless spaces of heaven powdered with nightly stars, as he wondered at the mysterious darkness, the depths of shadow, the remoteness of shapes familiar by day but which took on strange forms at the approach of evening: marvelled and told his children how he seemed to see the shadow of their grandsire who had gone from them so short a while, who had lain stark and motionless and cold. The old hunter had returned, yet he brought terror in his train, for now he had something of the night and the wind, of the great untrammelled forces of Nature with which man contended daily for his right to live. And his brood listened with awe; they trembled, they scarce knew why, and were afraid.