The Usefulness of Haunting

From ghoulies and ghosties. 

And long-leggedy beasties. 

And things that go bump in the night, 

Good Lord, deliver us!

—Traditional Scottish Prayer

Although the end of October is a long way away, the first Halloween items have crept into retail stores here in Southern California. Of course, what most Europeans see in Halloween is yet another American importation—and one of ghoulish or even Satanic orientation at that. One could hardly blame such a reaction, especially as this observance is preceded by a long list of other such, including (but not confined to) Black Friday, Santa Claus, KFC, McDonald’s, and on and on. Not being aware of either the slightly-terror-tinged-but-wholesome thing that Halloween was in my childhood, or of its Christian and Celtic roots, one can easily forgive the devout European for this conclusion. But the whole thing is rather more complex. It is not merely a question of Halloween, but of the whole body of weird lore that underlies Europe’s cultures—and in a sense may be a bulwark of tradition in the fight for her future. There is also the question of whether that lore is strictly fictional, or if it contains some unpleasant realities that are ignored only at one’s peril—even if one wields political power.

This might seem a bit far-fetched, to be sure, but let’s take a step back. The ancient mythologies—Classical, Norse, Celtic, and the rest, even extending as far afield as Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania—depicted mankind as essentially adrift in a universe of contending powers: gods, goddesses, angels, demons, elves, fairies, vampires, trolls, all the way down to the spirits of our own dead—whose return to the world of the living was often fraught with horrors. Before the advent of the electric light, half the day was veiled in darkness. Vast stretches of territory across the planet were trackless wastes and wilderness. The wars of men were bad enough, but plague, drought, flood, earthquake, and famine were beyond the control of even the most powerful of human rulers. Mankind trembled in its huts and palaces and prayed to whatever deities it believed in to be spared.

One people alone were spared these horrors: the Jews. They had a benevolent Creator God who had guided them through various misadventures (mostly of their own creation). He was keen on bringing His followers to Himself throughout all eternity, despite their fallen nature. He would, He promised, send them a Messiah to redeem them. In the meantime, however, they must deal not only with their own sinfulness and their exterior enemies, but also with Satan, the fallen angel, and his demonic minions. And there were other preternatural beings about, as the story of the Witch of Endor in the Old Testament showed.

In time, Christians believe, the Second Person of the Divine Trinity, God the Son, assumed flesh as Jesus Christ. In order to rescue His followers from the ruin of man brought about by the Fall, He established the Church as the means whereby—via the seven Sacraments—the merits of His Passion, Crucifixion and death would be applied to each individual member. The mission of that Church would be literally twofold: the Salvation of Souls and the ‘pushing off the dark,’ via Sacramentals like Holy Water, blessings, exorcisms, and the like. 

These were essential, as our European ancestors saw the world they knew as being cheek by jowl with other worlds. As Jacqueline Simpson put it in her 1987 work, European Mythology: 

Often they are described as distant realms, but almost as frequently they are imagined to lie so close alongside normal space that transition from one to the other is only too easy, in both directions. Certain places and times facilitate the transition. Supernatural powers break through into the normal (or can be summoned to it) at turning points of time: midnight, midday, New Year’s Eve, Halloween, May Eve, Midsummer Night. Similarly with space; it is at boundaries, thresholds, crossroads, fords, bridges, and where verticality intersects the horizontal, as on top of mounds, down wells, under trees, that Otherworlds are accessible … One key is ambiguity, the concept both/and and neither/nor. If a man stands exactly on the boundary where three parishes meet, at the stroke of midnight, in which parish is he, and what date is it? He has cut loose from normal space and time. He has also reversed normal human conduct by going outside at night, the time when supernatural beings are active, but humans should be asleep. In such circumstances, he places himself in contact with ‘the other’; he can reach, or be reached by, fairies, ghosts, or demons.

One might dismiss these as mere folk-beliefs, but similar views affected the educated of the Renaissance through alchemy, hermeticism, ceremonial magic, astrology, and the like. These in turn, through the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, ironically contributed to the rise of modern Science—ironically because, in time, the intellectual mood created by that science was inimical to anything spiritual at all, from God to ghosts. This mindset would initially result in the Enlightenment and the horrors of the French Revolution—which latter, however, was seen to have its own superstitions, as the birth and death of the Cult of Reason showed.

One response to this was Romanticism, most of whose major practitioners in all countries dug heavily into theology and folklore to serve up steaming cups of the supernatural as an antidote to the poison of Voltaire and Robespierre. In his History of the Church, the French Father Fernand Mourret, although praising overall German Romanticist Joseph Goerres’ 1836-1842 work on Christian Mysticism, primly cautions,

In Goerres’ four volumes of Christliche Mystik, science abounds and scholarship overflows. But an impression of confusion comes from a reading of this encyclopedia of all the marvels, divine and diabolical, in which ecstatics relate their visions, the stigmatists exhibit the sight of their bleeding dolours, the possessed yell in their contortions, and witches celebrate their infernal sabbaths.

Of course, although himself a man of Faith, the good Fr. Mourret may be excused for his own early 20th century prejudices. In any case, this was certainly an era of the miraculous in the Church at large, from Marian apparitions to the miracles of the Cure d’Ars.

Romanticism’s fascination with the unseen went beyond the circles of Catholic believers, however. Building upon the foundation laid by 18th century gothic literature, the movement gave birth to speculative fiction, which over the course of the 19th century would glow in the three allied genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction—with many crossovers. In English, these developments would span from Robert Burns’ Tam O’ Shanter through Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the ghost stories of M.R. James, and right down to our own time.

At the same period occurred the so-called Occult Revival, from the ceremonial magic of Eliphas Levi and the Magicians of the Golden Dawn to the seances of the Spiritualists to the esoteric revelations of the Theosophists and Anthroposophists. Whether literature softened the resistance to such stuff on the part of the public, or whether the acceptance of weird possibilities sparked the imagination of countless writers, is a conclusion that I leave to others. Figures such as William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Charles Williams had a foot in both camps, so to speak—though the latter two were far more professedly Christian than the first. For those lovers of the literature who wondered at the possible reality behind it, expert ghost story writer and Anglican cleric M.R. James, when asked if he thought that such things as he wrote might really occur, responded, “These things happen, depend upon it; but we do not know the rules!”

All the while, however, technology advanced, and the materialistic religion of Scientificism grew alongside of it, benefitting from its reflected glory while quietly stifling the spirit of true science in favour of an unacknowledged dogmatism of its own. Of course, many of these advances resulted in the horrors of the two World Wars and subsequent conflicts. But many others brought wonderful advances in medicine, communications, and entertainment. The electric light, especially, might be thought able to banish the ancient horrors.

Instead, while perhaps creating a few more atheists, the new technology brought new horrors. For such as Lovecraft, the Scientificist banishing of a benign God simply left mankind open to other entities in a basically uncaring and chaotic universe. The new communications allowed mass collection of accurate or otherwise data about strange events such as frogs raining down from the sky (called Forteana, from Charles Fort, who began the systematic study of such marvels). Bizarre discoveries further opened up the study of such cryptids as Bigfoot, and various UFO enthusiasts—from the curious to the outright believers (some of whom claimed to be in touch in one way or another with the ‘Space Brothers’). The eruption of the Age of Aquarius in the 1960s poured all of this bizarrerie together—even while Catholicism seemed ashamed of itself in the wake of Vatican II. As in the ‘Divine Invasion’ of ancient Rome, disbelief flourished side by side with the most outre faiths. The human products of that time are still dominant to a great degree in church and state. As COVID-19 lockdowns showed us so very clearly, that leadership is quite capable of dominating its subjects in a manner more thoroughly than has ever been seen in recorded history.

So what is the utility of the bizarre and the unseen in the struggle against this tyranny? Well, as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, modern technology has become proof that her children yet dwell in an age of miracles. What the most recent science has shown about things ranging from the Shroud of Turin to various Eucharistic wonders to the never-ending flow of healings from saints and shrines would be enough, one thinks, if publicised, to convince the fair-minded of the veracity of her claims about God, herself, and mankind. Here she is further buttressed by the various advances in Biblical archaeology, which have just about slain the modernist criticism so prevalent in seminaries and universities. Those inside her boundaries have innumerable reasons to feel safe within her walls, regardless of the vagaries of some of her leaders.

But what about outside? What about all the other strange stuff at which we have looked? For the Catholic, some of it is demonic, and some of it is simply unexplained. But whatever of it is true, it correspondingly shows that the materialism of those who manage society is false. I doubt highly that the UFOs of our Space Brothers shall land at the White House and the Kremlin and liberate us from our highly toxic leadership. But this writer is not the first to note that the stories of alien abductions mirror the tales of kidnappings to Faerie that populate our folklore—causing one to wonder if perhaps there is more to them than we know. The authorities may be able to decide where food and water shall be sent—but not if frogs can fall from the sky.

Whatever truth or not there may be to these sorts of things, what is certain is that however powerful in this life our masters may be, their power has a limit: “Counts and princes they may spoil us, but their spoiling ends at death,” as the Medieval song reminds us. If, as appears likely, they continue to cater to the forces of earthly evil, that which is unearthly shall find them—in this world or the next.

Having deprived themselves of the Church’s protection, they are thrown upon their own resources—a frightening prospect, to be sure. The White House in Washington is said to be one of the most haunted houses in America, with various world leaders having claimed to have encountered the shades of such as Washington and Lincoln there. I have no idea how true those stories are, but as our presidential election becomes ever more crazy, I can only hope that the next denizens of the place are scared out of their wits on a nightly basis. It might bring some relief to the rest of us!