by Matt Cardin
The more modern attempts to speak of the history of the world as having been influenced by magicians and occult forces beyond our control have a rich history, involving the “Illuminati,” Rosicrucianism, and freemasonry; a recent flowering of this attitude is seen in the popularity of works by Dan Brown and his many imitators. But in the nineteenth century, there was a particularly strong crossover between notions of the occult and the practice of Gothic and horror fiction in the hands of such writers as Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), Annie Besant (1847–1933), and Marie Corelli (1855–1924).
Probably the best-known “occult association” is still the Order of the Golden Dawn, which counted among its members Aleister Crowley and W. B. Yeats, and which still flourishes today across many continents, as does its darker brother, Ordo Draconis. Six crucial works that display the development of occult fiction as a genre are Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894); Crowley’s Moonchild (1917); Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1934); M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart (1992); Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee (1993); and F. G. Cottam’s The House of Lost Souls (2007).
Occult Fiction since the Nineteenth Century:
A Selective Chronology
1842
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni
1889
Marie Corelli, Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self
1892
Helena Blavatsky, Nightmare Tales
1894
Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan
1903
Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars
1917
Aleister Crowley, Moonchild
1926
Dion Fortune, The Secrets of Dr Taverner
1934
Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out
1941
H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
1992
M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart
1993
Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee
1993
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas
1995
Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic
2003
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
2007
F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls
2013
Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate
“The Great God Pan” was described by the Westminster Gazette on its first publication as “an incoherent nightmare of sex” (Spender 2016, 101) but it is actually a work of the occult, in which one Dr. Raymond proposes to use magical means to open up human perception in order to see the spiritual world. His “patient,” Mary, is exposed to this operation and becomes reduced to idiocy. Later, various characters encounter a woman known as Helen, and terrible results ensue. It is then revealed that Helen is in fact the daughter of Mary and the Great God Pan, who has been allowed into the human world through Dr. Raymond’s occult practices. Helen is eventually cornered and confronted, and dies an extraordinary death, in which she appears to return to various states between beast and human before finally dying.
The concern with the occult here is, as so often, with transgression: Raymond has breached the gap between ordinary human operation and a different, amoral, and finally destructive world which reveals humanity as a thin skin stretched between different realms. In the search for knowledge, he has gone beyond that which is permitted, and what is then revealed is a state where we find our place in a wider swathe of being, but one in which humanity as such can no longer continue.
Aleister Crowley is probably the most famous magician in the Western tradition, a man who was proud to boast of himself as the Great Beast and as the “wickedest man in Europe.” It may be that a certain irony is needed when dealing with Crowley; he was widely regarded as a charlatan, but in the world of the occult it is difficult to know what this means, since such a judgment in fact reflects unwittingly the possibility that there may indeed be such a thing as “true magic” even if it is not that which is ritualistically practiced by the Order of the Golden Dawn. With Crowley, magic becomes inextricably confused with drugs and addiction, as he says in his Diary of a Drug Fiend (1970).
Moonchild centers on a battle between white (benevolent and selfless) and black (malevolent and self-serving) magicians. Various magicians of the day figure in the novel, including MacGregor Mathers, A. E. Waite, the theosophist Annie Besant, Mary D’Este, the companion of Isadora Duncan, and others; and intriguingly, the conclusion of the book bends occult practice back toward the dread actualities of history, with the white magicians appearing to support the Allies in the First World War, while the black magicians are on the side of the enemy, thus asserting that the occult is not without practical effects. The heart of the book is also quite similar to that of “The Great God Pan,” since the essence of magical practice is claimed to be the ritual birth of a “savior,” thus justifying “sexual magic” as being the essential ingredient in the search for superhuman powers.
In Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, the Duc de Richleau and Rex van Ryn find that their friend Simon Aaron has become involved with a group of devil-worshippers, whose leader is the highly ambiguous Mr. Mocata. Aaron is rescued from a Sabbath ritual held in one of the most magical of sites, Stonehenge, but although until this point the reader may well believe that the scenario is one of fake magic, what happens next as unearthly forces begin to appear and gain strength suggests that occult powers are not so easily disposed of.
This suggests one of the principal aspects of occult fiction, which is that of belief. Is the reader encouraged to believe that, as with so much late nineteenth-century spiritualism and fortune-telling, magic is mere illusion, a set of conjuring tricks designed to impose on minds weakened by drugs and promises of eternal life? Or is the reader instead encouraged to believe that, on the contrary, magical practices can genuinely cleanse the doors of perception and lead into a wider, fuller view of life where the human is merely one aspect of a set of universal truths, wider than history, deeper than reason? The best of occult fiction remains ambiguous about this: obviously the reader might say that there is no such thing as “genuine” magic at all, but the occultist will riposte that there are, indeed, more things in heaven and earth—and in hell—than we customarily imagine, and it is clear that there is a cultural appetite for belief, even if this involves the thought that to discover new worlds might involve the death of the soul as we usually know it.
M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart follows the lives of three Cambridge students who meet a man named Yaxley, who may—or may not—be a magician. In any case, under his direction they perform a series of magical experiments, and although the processes and results of these experiments are entirely unclear, it appears that this subsequently puts an occult curse on their lives. In order to help his friends—who have married, but whose relationships are bedeviled by depression, recurring hallucination, and worse—the third of the students, who is the narrator, invents a mythical country, the “Coeur,” and much of the novel is spent in a fruitless search for this unreal land. Across twenty years, it is supposed that failed magic—if indeed it has failed—is directing the friends’ lives and condemning them to various kinds of misery; meanwhile Yaxley himself continues with his attempts to enter forbidden realms, which results in his extremely ugly death.
It is suggested at several points in the book that what is happening is only doing so in a realm of dream; but the question thrown up is whether magic can in fact operate to counter a recurring sense of drudgery and tedium, or whether it is merely that our more depressive encounters with the repetitions of quotidian life are what feeds our constant desire to believe in and engage with the paranormal, even in its seediest aspects.
The Course of Heart is resolutely set in an inescapable present; Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee takes us back to one of the heartlands of the occult tradition, the sixteenth century, and to perhaps the most celebrat
ed of all Renaissance magicians, John Dee. Dee himself was an impressive intellectual, an astronomer and mathematician, an adviser to Queen Elizabeth, as well as being an astrologer and occultist; he spent a great deal of time trying to converse with angels. He became a feared figure as well as a respected one, and in his novel Ackroyd develops this view of Dee by counterpointing his life and intellectual struggles with those of a contemporary character, Matthew Palmer, who has inherited his house.
The brilliance of the book consists in the way Ackroyd uses magic to illustrate the complexities of history and time. Although Dee and Palmer are separated by four centuries, it appears that something in the house—or in the spells that Dee wrought, which may by now be unshakeable—prevents history from moving forward and ties the characters into an entirely different chronology in which everything is repeated and they are bound into an interminable, and perhaps impossible, search for a realm beyond the human. The power of magic here is frightening, although whether there is any objective basis for this power remains a hovering thought, unsusceptible of final proof; perhaps, again, it is simply a desire for escape and transcendence that motivates our fascination with the occult, although clearly Dee, at his peculiar juncture of history, saw magic as an essential extension, or deepening, of the developing sciences.
F. G. Cottam’s The House of Lost Souls is a fair representation of contemporary engagements with magic and the occult. Four students visit a derelict house, known as the Fischer House, which has been the scene of a number of magical experiments involving well-known figures from the occult tradition including Wheatley, but also tying this in with a different account of “secret history” involving ghosts, Nazis, and the history of the Second World War. Klaus Fischer has hosted a Crowley-esque gathering devoted to magic, and its reverberations continue to roll down through the decades. The mystery remains whether a real disruption of conventionally imagined historical processes has taken place, or if the protagonists are the victims of a series of hallucinations.
None of this becomes entirely clear, but the themes are evident: the conflict between a malevolent use of magic and the possibility that a version of “enlightenment” might dispel the haunting effects of a previously laid and entrenched magical plot; the relations between dark magic and the recurrence of “evil” throughout history; the question of whether impressionable minds can ever serve as reliable witnesses to events that never fully emerge into clarity; and other questions as to whether the effects of magic are simply produced by drink, drugs, and fear.
Reading on through the history of occult fiction could take us to the other secret histories embodied in the work of authors such as Dan Brown and Donna Tartt, although here the emphasis is not so much on magic as on conspiracy, two themes that are perhaps not so far apart since magic involves the idea that history can be, and perhaps always has been, manipulated by powers operating in the shadows, outside the rational consensus. At its best, as in Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2012), magic (here in what is perhaps its alternative guise as witchcraft) may be regarded as a kind of empowerment; at its worst, as in historical assumptions and prejudices about the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati, it may be seen as an occult means by which those already in positions of authority preserve, spread, and strengthen their influence over society. Either way, the occult is intrinsically connected with the exercise of power. It is for the writer to persuade the reader that these beliefs are tenable or that they are the very substance of delusion, and here occult fiction has, through the ages, patrolled or hovered over the boundary between the real and the imagined, desire and the defeat of desire, the will toward the superhuman and the draw back toward the bestial.
David Punter
See also: Part Three, Reference Entries: Blackwood, Algernon; Bulwer-Lytton, Edward; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; “Casting the Runes”; The Devil Rides Out; Devils and Demons; “The Dunwich Horror”; Ewers, Hanns Heinz; The Golem; “The Great God Pan”; “Green Tea”; Haggard, H. Rider; John Silence: Physician Extraordinary; Machen, Arthur; Meyrink, Gustav; The Monk; Occult Detectives; Vathek; Wheatley, Dennis; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Bloom, Clive. 2007. “Introduction: Death’s Own Backyard.” In Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers, edited by Clive Bloom, 1–24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cowan, Douglas E. 2015. “The Occult and Modern Horror Fiction.” In The Occult World, edited by Christopher Partridge, 469–477. New York: Routledge.
Geary, Robert F. 1992. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Killeen, Jarlath. 2009. “Ghosting the Gothic and the New Occult.” In Gothic Literature 1824–1914, 124–159. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Messent, Peter B., ed. 1981. Literature of the Occult. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Spender, J. A. [1895] 2016. The New Fiction: (A Protest against Sex-Mania) and Other Papers. Routledge Revivals. New York: Routledge.
Willard, Thomas. 1998. “Occultism.” In The Handbook to Gothic Literature, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 165–167. New York: New York University Press.
PAGE TO SCREEN: THE INFLUENCE OF LITERARY
HORROR ON FILM AND TELEVISION
Modern horror grew out of Gothic literature but was transformed by film and television, which added sights and sounds to the guilty pleasures of dark stories. In the early twentieth century, as film grew from a curiosity that recorded spectacle to a narrative art form, filmmakers turned to written fiction to provide plots and characters for their movies, and horror writers provided moviemakers with dramatic narratives that quickly became a staple of the new industry. Although early screenwriters of horror drew on folklore and mythology for some films, popular horror fiction provided the filmmakers with their richest source of ideas.
Horror Fiction and Horror Films
Prior to the development of the cinema, novelists often secured the dramatic rights to their work because in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many popular novels were turned into plays. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) was one of the earliest works of horror adapted to the screen, remains one of the most popular and often adapted, and provides a textbook example of the problems and possibilities of adaptation. Stoker secured the dramatic rights to Dracula with a public reading on the day the novel was published. Two early film adaptations, the Russian Drakula and the Hungarian Drakula halala (Dracula’s Death), are now lost. F. W. Murnau’s classic German Expressionist film Nosferatu: eine Simphonie des Grauens (1922), starring Max Schreck, was both successful and influential. Murnau did not secure permission to use the novel, and Stoker’s widow sued to have the film destroyed. Fortunately, some copies remained, and the film was successfully restored in 2005. Despite Murnau’s changes in character and location, many critics today consider Nosferatu the most successful adaptation of Dracula, with Schreck’s portrayal of the vampire as a disease-like predator being especially horrific. The first authorized adaptation of Stoker’s novel was Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula for Universal Pictures, starring Bela Lugosi as a caped, romantic, seductive Dracula. The film was Universal’s most successful picture of 1931 and spawned a host of other Universal monster movies, including Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Wolfman (1941), and The Invisible Man (1933), all based at least in part on earlier works of fiction. In addition, Universal released numerous sequels based on the original adaptations.
In the 1950s Britain’s Hammer Films remade many of the Universal features, including Dracula (1958), starring Christopher Lee as a powerful and attractive Dracula and Peter Cushing as an intelligent and aggressive Abraham Van Helsing. Over the next decade and a half, Hammer Films released eight sequels of the popular film, with Christopher Lee starring in six of them. Dracula continued to be adapted throughout the twentieth century. Many of these are forgettable, but some are of continued interest, such as Philip Saville’s 1978 Dracula, made for BBC television and starring Louis
Jourdan as a tragically romantic vampire; and John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, based on the Deane/Balderston play commissioned by Stoker’s widow, which served as the screenplay for Universal’s 1931 adaptation. In 1992 Francis Ford Coppola released Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, Wynona Ryder as Mina Harker, and Gary Oldman as Dracula. As much a love story as a horror narrative, Bram Stoker’s Dracula remains the most expensive and financially successful Dracula adaptation to date. A telling indicator of the significance of Stoker’s Dracula among horror adaptations is that Dracula has been adapted more times than any other character; Sherlock Holmes is second (Guiley 2005, 108; Melton 2011, 210).
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) was first adapted to film by Edison Studios in 1910, and later as Life Without Soul in 1915. The most famous and influential adaptation was James Whale’s for Universal Studios in 1931. Starring Boris Karloff as the monster, Whale’s Frankenstein shifts the focus from Dr. Frankenstein’s ethical dilemma to the pathos of the creature he created, and in the process foregrounds the sympathetic monster. Karloff’s performance here, and in the Universal sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935), created the iconic image of the monster that remains embedded in popular culture. Frankenstein has been adapted more than seventy times, including seven adaptations by Hammer Films, the best of which is The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), directed by Terence Fisher and starring Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as the monster. Other notable adaptations include Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), starring Robert De Niro as the monster, and Mel Brooks’s comic masterpiece Young Frankenstein (1974), starring Gene Wilder as Victor Frankenstein’s grandson and Peter Boyle as the monster.