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The Occult and the Supernatural
We live, according to the famous pronouncement of the sociologist Max Weber, in a disenchanted world—that is, a world without the possibility of magic. In 1917 Weber wrote that ‘the fate of our times is characterized by rationalism and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”’. Writing as he was in the middle of the first distinctively modern ‘total war’, it is easy to see how Weber was responding to the carnage of the machine age: ‘we need no longer rely on magic as a device for mastering spirits or pleading with them’, he wrote elsewhere, since ‘Calculation and technical equipment do the job.’ Since the Enlightenment, Weber believed, the dominant philosophical narrative for understanding the nature of reality was rational materialism, or (as it is sometimes termed) scientific naturalism. For the materialist, anything else was simply hocus-pocus, discredited nonsense.
In the same year, 1917, Arthur Conan Doyle also responded to the Great War by writing the first of a series of books on a subject which was to dominate the last years of his life: spiritualism. The connections between spiritualism and the war were, for Doyle, vividly real. The war, he believed, had been brought about by ‘the organized materialism of Germany’, since ‘when religion is dead, materialism becomes active, and what active materialism may produce has been seen in Germany’. Spiritualism, for Doyle, was ‘[by] far the greatest development of human experience which the world has ever seen…by far the greatest event since the death of Christ…an enormous new development, the greatest in the history of mankind’. Here, for many, was a revealed truth which, through the achievements of psychics and mediums, had convincingly demonstrated the survival of the human personality after death, and the existence of an ‘Other World’. This was the world of spirits, coexisting with our own, separated from our own material world merely by the veil of perception, the limitations of our own senses.
To understand these responses, we need to go back fifty years or so earlier. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species caused an intellectual, emotional, and psychological shock to Victorian society, whose resonances are still felt today. In its immediate aftermath, Darwinism, and the climate of rationalist secular materialism of which it was understood as the pinnacle, brought about a crisis of faith. The bleak implications of scientific naturalism—that humanity was merely an ape adapted with unusual (but inevitably temporary) success to its particular niche; that there was no soul, no afterlife, perhaps no God, and therefore no greater purpose or meaning to existence—were understandably psychologically unbearable for many of the people who came into contact with them.
One response or reaction to this was a re-emphasis in the second half of the nineteenth century on hidden meanings, concealed or rejected knowledge, and other worlds. The ‘new revelation’ of spiritualism, Doyle maintained, was ‘absolutely fatal…to materialism’. It is in ideas such as these that we see the beginnings of a powerful modern counter-Enlightenment tendency, which the theologian Christopher Partridge, drawing on Weber, has termed The Re-Enchantment of the West.
It is no accident, then, that these Victorian decades were also witness to the great modern flowering of the distinct but overlapping practices of spiritualism, occultism, and supernaturalism. The formations of the Society for Psychical Research (1881), the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888), and the Folklore Society (1878) all date from this period—the last-named codifying a renewed interest in folklore studies (often with a distinctively nationalist approach) from scholars, poets, and anthologists such as Andrew Lang, Fiona Macleod, Sir William and Lady Jane Wilde, Joseph Jacobs, or W. B. Yeats. It is also the period which saw the development of the modern ghost story, from Charles Dickens and Sheridan Le Fanu to M. R. James (whose first story, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’, appeared in 1895), and of the supernatural tale (‘Carmilla’, 1871; The Great God Pan, 1894; Dracula, 1897). The scene was set by the publication in 1848 of Catherine Crowe’s bestselling compendium The Night Side of Nature, whose contents offer a representative sampling of the supernatural, including haunted houses, precognition, doppelgängers, and poltergeists.
What is the meaning of magic? For the great Victorian anthropologist and hard-line scientific materialist J. G. Frazer, it was a product of the pre-civilized mind. Primitive societies, he asserts, are characterized by their inability to distinguish magic from science:
The principles of association are excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely essential to the workings of the human mind. Legitimately applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for if it were ever to become true, it would no longer be magic but science.
But not everybody saw it that way. Magic, wrote the Victorian magus Éliphas Lévi, far from being ‘the jugglery of mountebanks’ or ‘the hallucinations of disordered minds’, is a rigorous scientific doctrine, ‘the exact and absolute science of Nature and her laws…the science of the ancient magi’. Is magic outmoded thinking, or even childish nonsense, or is it a means of apprehending concealed or neglected realities? For the distinguished historian of magic Lynn Thorndike, ‘it represented a way of looking at the world’. Magic is antecedent to theology—it is older than the gods. Civilization itself, Thorndike believes, has its origins in magic. Many of our religions, our arts, our sciences, as well as our medicine, mathematics, and law, have their deep origins in magic. Sorcerers were the first professional class.
Of all modern cultural forms, horror is perhaps the most open to the possibilities of magic and the supernatural. Horror tells us that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy—at least, if our philosophy is a materialist one—and that the world contains (or in extreme form, that our lives are governed by) certain inexplicable forces or unaccountable spirits which we can attempt to appease or even control, but which cannot be encompassed within any rational or scientific model of reality. While a major work such as Henry James’s haunted house classic The Turn of the Screw draws much of its uncanny power from its undecidability and ambiguity, the tension in which it holds two competing interpretations (supernatural and psychological) of the events it narrates, this is relatively unusual. Generally, though some of its characters may be sceptics, the genre itself is a true believer.
One of horror’s classic plots involves the re-education of a rational materialist sceptic, often some form of academic or ‘expert’—indeed, part of horror’s appeal for some lies in its repudiation of traditional, hierarchical, or institutional forms of knowledge. In M. R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, for example, Parkins, the rational materialist Professor of Ontography (that is, ‘Professor of Reality’), is taught a comprehensive lesson in metaphysics after unearthing an ancient whistle concealed beneath the altar of a ruined Templar preceptory. At high table in his Oxbridge college, Parkins is dismissive of the supernatural: ‘I freely own that I do not like careless talk about what you call ghosts. A man in my position…cannot be too careful about appearing to sanction the current beliefs on such subjects.…I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all that I hold most sacred.’ At the close of the story, after his encounter with the bed sheet ghost summoned by the ancient whistle he uncovers, ‘the Professor’s views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be.’
In this chapter, then, we will look at a few instances of horror’s serious engagement with the occult, magic, and the supernatural, and of the ideas, beliefs, images, and anxieties that this conjures with or summons up. As a mark of respect, it is only proper that we begin at the top, with the Devil himself.
The Devil
As I suggested in Chapter 1, Stephen King’s novels of the 1970s enact the clash of the traditional ‘Old European’ sensibili
ties of Gothic and horror with the pop-cultural sensibilities of American modernity. In ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), this is in part articulated through the representative figure of a Catholic priest, Father Callahan, who is troubled by the contemporary sociological orientation of his vocation in the wake of the modernizing theology ushered in by the Second Vatican Council (1962–5): ‘he was being forced into the conclusion that there was no EVIL in the world at all but only evil—or perhaps (evil)’. The novel forces Father Callahan into a confrontation with old-school, pre-Vatican II, European EVIL in the person of the vampire Barlow—a confrontation which he loses decisively, as, no longer undergirded by faith, sanctity, or metaphysics, the trappings of his vocation are empty symbols in his hands. Father Callahan closes the novel wandering the earth cursed, the Mark of Cain placed upon his forehead by Barlow, unable to cross the threshold of a church.
What is the nature and the function of evil in a world supposedly governed by divine grace? These are the questions posed by theodicy, that branch of theology which sets out, in the words of John Milton, to ‘justify the ways of God to men’. Is evil merely the absence of good (a lack, a negative, a non-being), or is it a positive, moral force at large in creation? These are issues which have long troubled theologians and religious commentators. In a polytheistic order (a pantheon of many gods), or even in a dualistic religion (one which posits the coexistence of forces of good and evil, light and darkness—such as Zoroastrianism or Jedi), the nature of evil is worrying but readily comprehensible—it is one of a number of forces (two or more) holding sway over creation. But in a monistic religion such as Christianity, which posits one all-powerful creator God, evil is a real categorical problem. If evil exists, then it can only have been created by God, as there can be nothing outside of God’s creation. If so, for what purpose? Can a God of absolute goodness and benevolence have created evil? Conversely, to posit that evil does not exist (it is an absence of goodness, no more) seems intellectually and emotionally unsatisfying in the face of the lived reality of cruelty and atrocity.
As Satan’s biographer Peter Stanford suggests, the Devil is ‘a popular figure, not a dogmatic abstraction, and has come alive not in learned tomes or seminary debates, but in the lives of the faithful, terrifying, omnipresent and grotesque, evil incarnate’. In large part this is because the questions posed by theodicy are so difficult and painful as to prove essentially unanswerable, or answerable only by what can often seem slippery evasions, or through arguments and assertions which are simply inadequate to the task. As the theologian Charles T. Mathewes has observed, in the face of atrocities, ‘to say that “God is love” can seem like handing daisies to a psychopath’. Thus, mainstream, official, or institutionalized theology tends to avoid these questions. It has, in other words, ceded the territory of evil to popular culture: this is the domain of the Devil.
The historian of Satanism Ruben van Luijk notes that ‘Only toward the end of the nineteenth century did the word “Satanism” come to hold the significance that it still has, for historians of religion, B-film directors, and the general public alike, namely, the intentional and explicit worship of Satan.’ This is entirely in keeping with the modern resurgence in the occult and supernatural which we discussed at the beginning of the chapter. But the development of a body of ritual and practice associated with Satanism, and with the occult more generally, has its origins in antiquity. Demons—personifications of specific aspects of evil—seem to have developed out of the attributes of some of the gods as classical thought moved from polytheism towards the direction of dualism. The underworld had traditionally carried associations of fertility because of its connection with the cycle of the seasons, death and rebirth, and thus the location of the Devil and demons in a subterranean hell linked them with sexuality. Many of the rites associated with pagan deities—with Dionysus, Cybele, or Mithras—contained elements which were to become standard in the alleged practices of witches and heretics.
Accounts of the worship of Satan tend to have a lurid and sensationalist element which betray their origins at the schlockier end of popular culture. These can take the form of bogus or embellished exposés of Satanic practices, from The Devil in the XIXth Century by ‘Dr Bataille’, which shocked Paris in the 1890s, to Rollo Ahmed’s The Black Art (1936), a major influence on the thinking of the great mid-century novelist of pulp Satanism, Dennis Wheatley. Accounts of Black Masses tend to suggest inversions of the Roman Catholic mass, as in this description by Rollo Ahmed:
At eleven o’clock precisely the officiating priest began the Mass backwards, ending at the stroke of midnight. The Host used on these occasions was black and three-pointed. No wine was consecrated, but the priest drank filthy water or, according to some accounts, water in which the body of an unbaptised child had been thrown. He used no crucifix, but formed the sign of the cross on the ground with his left foot.
Part of the undeniable appeal of modern Satanic popular culture is the opportunity it affords for representations of transgressive and taboo sexuality. In Matthew Lewis’s enduringly popular Gothic shocker The Monk (1796), the Devil tempts the virtuous holy man Ambrosio into orgies of eroticized Mariolatry, rape, incest, and thinly veiled necrophilia. In Rollo Ahmed’s Black Mass, ‘The ordinary participants, inflamed with drugs and drink, maddened with blood and sadistic excitement, would certainly have had no thought but of expressing their lowest and filthiest impulses, and of wallowing in a mad phantasmagoria of sexual lust.’ As their covers make all too clear, a large part of the appeal of Wheatley’s bestselling series of Satanic thrillers, which sold around fifty million copies in the middle decades of the twentieth century, was their sexual exploitativeness (Figure 4).
Figure 4. A characteristically lurid Dennis Wheatley paperback.
In a manner which will be familiar from the Introduction, part of the transgressive power of these accounts of forbidden Satanic rites lies not only in their violation of taboos, but also in their representation of abjection. In a conscious inversion of deeply held concepts of pollution, unclean bodily matter is put to ritual use. One modern account of these practices notes that ‘the rituals…involve blood, urine, feces and semen’. At their most extreme, they contain accounts of ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism, sometimes involving children:
Most of the sacrificial victims of the Black Mass were women [Ahmed asserts], but young children and even babies were not exempt, and occasionally men were butchered as well. All were slain with ingenious torture and cruelty, their bowels and entrails being literally torn out, while, when women were the victims, the reproductive organs were chosen as the point of torture. Little children were treated in the same way; the Devil, or at least his followers, evidently taking unholy pleasure in the sacrifice of the young.
Given the extreme nature of the images and ideas it produces, it is perhaps not surprising that horror, as we have seen, is often accompanied by moral panics and censorship. Sensational popular culture, whether produced by self-proclaimed ‘experts’ such as Ahmed, or by popular writers and film-makers, can find itself implicated in, and informing, social and political discourse. In what is perhaps the first modern example of the recurring horror-induced moral panic, The Monk was accused of blasphemy, an allegation sufficiently serious for Lewis himself to oversee the publication of a new, bowdlerized edition of his novel in 1798. Writing in the 1930s, Rollo Ahmed was at pains to stress that black magic is an ongoing practice in modern society, and that Satanists remain all around us, often in positions of influence. The ‘Pizzagate’ affair of 2016, alleging a widespread conspiracy of paedophilic Satanic Ritual Abuse, with the participation of high-ranking American political and establishment figures, was not the first and will certainly not be the last moral panic of its kind, and culminated in shots being fired at the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington, DC. However absurd their details may sometimes seem, these scandals can have real human consequences, be it children removed from their parents by social services, or in the case of Pizza
gate a shooting which could easily have ended tragically.
A belief in the existence of the Devil bestows an existential certainty and meaning. Stephen King’s Father Callahan is one of a number of Catholic priests appearing in works of post-Vatican II horror, from The Exorcist to The Amityville Horror, often religious modernists trained in the secular disciplines of psychology, sociology, or anthropology who find themselves completely unequipped to deal with positive, personified EVIL, and are all destroyed by their encounters with Satanic forces. In a way which might be strangely reassuring for many of its audience, horror offers no ambiguity in the face of evil. The word ‘devil’ comes from the Greek diabolos, ‘adversary’ (or ‘slanderer’), which is itself a rendering of the Hebrew satan, ‘opponent’ (originally, a descriptor rather than a proper noun: one’s opponent was ‘a satan’, not ‘the Devil’). Satan, Belial, Azazel, Samyaza, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Asmodeus, Mephistopheles, Keyser Söze. The Devil has many names, and has taken many forms, but he is real, an active agent at large in the world, and he wants your soul.
To ‘the Jesuits, for teaching me to think’. So reads the close of William Peter Blatty’s acknowledgements to The Exorcist (1971). A series of epigraphs, beginning with Luke’s account of the Gadarene swine, through a transcript of an FBI wiretap of a conversation about brutal Mafia torture and murder, to an account of atrocities committed against Catholic priests in Maoist China, and closing with the words ‘Dachau Auschwitz Buchenwald’, makes clear by juxtaposition the novel’s belief in the direct relationship between demonic possession and modern evil. The novel understands modern atrocities and brutalities as a direct manifestation of the Devil, an active force for ‘radical evil’ at large in the world, not a sociological abstraction or a theological sophistry to signify the mere absence of God.
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