Gordon Casserly, Tiger Girl

Casserly, Gordon. Tiger Girl (London: Philip Allan, 1934)

Tiger Girl is one of the rarest of the eight novels by Gordon Casserly (1869-1947), four of which can be classified as having fantastical elements. These four novels include The Elephant God (1920), The Jungle Girl (1921), The Monkey God (1933), and the volume under review.

Tiger Girl centers on the Scotsman Alan Stuart, a British Army officer serving in northern India, and his blossoming romance with Margery Webb, the daughter of plantation owner, whose rival plantation owner, Mr. Morton, also surreptitiously seeks the hand of Margery in marriage. The courtship is interrupted by various tiger attacks, including sightings of the legendary Ghost Tiger which shows no wounds when shot with regular bullets. Morton employs gypsies and a yogi to work eastern magic to thwart Stuart's courtship of Margery. There are a number of attacks on Stuart and his friends, and in the end Stuart realizes the supernatural agency of the Ghost Tiger and fashions two handmade silver bullets, each etched with the sign of the cross, which enables him to kill it. Just why a silver bullet, or a bullet etched with the cross, is effective in dispatching the Ghost Tiger, the reader is never told. And there are other similar elements in the book which don't quite add up, like why the book is titled Tiger Girl (the Ghost Tiger turns out to have been male). Towards the end of the book, the character Carter reappears from Casserly's previous novel, The Monkey God, somewhat tying the two books together, but otherwise making little difference. Tiger Girl remains primarily a romance adventure novel, but with some supernatural elements.

NB: Tiger Girl has just been reissued in trade paperback by Bruin Books (Amazon US here; and Amazon UK here)

Thomas Malyn, The Romance of a Demon

Malyn, Thomas. The Romance of a Demon: A Story of the Occult and Superhuman (London: Digby, Long and Company, [September] 1892).
 
This short novel is comprised of an introduction and nine chapters. It concerns a wealthy bachelor, Duncan Derroll, who is visited by an ugly beggar at his rented house in Yorkshire. The beggar gives Duncan a dirty, handwritten book and disappears. Duncan soon meets up with his fiancée, Carrie Rimmon, from whom he learns of bad luck in her family after the disappearance ten years earlier of her older brother. Duncan is visited at night by a ghost who serves the devil, and who insists that Duncan read his manuscript diary. Later Duncan overhears the beggar berating Carrie's clergyman father for his failings and sins. The denouement is basically a Victorian clergyman's fantasy of admonition. The reverend had experimented in the occult in his past. Thus the beggar had brought about the death of the clergyman's wife, and the problems of their son, and now he seeks to ruin the daughter by wedding her. For the devil has a growing foothold in this world “which is as yet hidden from general view by its filthy drapery of Theosophy and Buddhism” (ch. 9). Duncan and the reverend recourse to prayer, whereby the son is saved, but the reverend dies. This is a silly and uninteresting story. The author Thomas Malyn published no other books.

Guest Post: The Balm of Consecration in Machen’s “The Terror” by Dale Nelson

“The Terror” (1917) stands out as Arthur Machen’s longest horror story, but its plot is simple.  During the cataclysm that was the Great War, a series of bizarre killings besets the “Northern District” and “Meirion” in west Wales.  It turns out that the perpetrators are not human beings, but animals, even moths, who attack people without warning, leaving no witnesses alive. 

First-person narrator Machen declines to state definitively why the animals made these dreadful attacks, but he offers as an “opinion” the hypothesis that they rose up against their natural lord, man, because he had denied his own spiritual nature and his sovereignty; for centuries, he has, as it were, been “wiping the balm of consecration from his breast.” 

American readers, and perhaps many British readers now, too, are likely to miss the significance of this phrase.

Start with this: when Elizabeth was crowned queen of Great Britain in 1953, the event was televised – except for a portion of the ceremony that was deemed especially sacred, and therefore not fit for broadcast by the mass media.  This was her anointing by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

This ceremony – the prayers and the anointing – set apart the monarch, not so much for special privileges vis-à-vis her subjects, but for unique responsibilities under God. 

The archbishop’s application of chrism to Elizabeth may have stirred the imaginations and memories of some of the witnesses.  They might have recalled the old story of how the prophet Samuel anointed Saul, Israel’s first king: “Samuel took a vial of oil, and poured it upon his head, and kissed him, and said, Is it not because the Lord hath anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance?” (1 Samuel 10:1). 

They may have recollected that the Hebrew priests were also anointed (Leviticus 21).  They were set apart as intermediaries between God and the Israelites. 

Many of those present in 1953 would have known a lot of Shakespeare.  The occasion being a happy, though solemn one, they probably didn’t think of the Bard’s black magic play.  In it, when Macduff learns that King Duncan has been murdered, he is appalled:

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece:

Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope

The Lord’s anointed temple and stole thence

The life o’ th’ building!”

(Macbeth Act II, Scene 3, lines 65-68)

Like “sacrilege,” that word “confusion” has come down in the world.  In Shakespeare, “confusion” may be the catastrophe that accompanies, or follows as the effect of, “ruin”:

"'Tis much when sceptres are in children’s hands,

But more when envy breed unkind [i.e. “unnatural”] division:

There comes the ruin, there begins confusion."

(Henry VI, Part One, Act IV, Scene 1, lines192-194)

I hope the 1953 coronation wasn’t spoiled for anyone by the thought of such passages in Shakespeare, though their gravity might have been salutary if anyone were inclined to be impatient with, or amused by, the pomp. 

But – a reader may object – how is any of this material relevant to “The Terror”?  There you have nobody killing a king.

The Shakespearean material deals with anointing and the concept of sacrilege.  What Machen’s narrator proposes is that the violence that happened was the result of what amounts to being auto-sacrilege. 

In his theory, the animals did not rise up because (as is often sadly the case) man had abused them.  They attacked him because of his offense against himself as the one consecrated for a unique role in nature.  “The king abdicated” – and he had no right to do that.  He became “self-deposed.”

The theory of man as mediator between God and the brute creation, of man’s viceroyalty, is something that was once familiar but is now hardly part of the cultural imagination.  Our understanding of Machen’s fiction, and our imaginative engagement with it, may be compromised.

Machen’s narrator leaves to the reader whether or not to accept his strange hypothesis about why the animals attacked people – and, since the story, after all, is fiction, the stakes are low.

Or rather, the stakes today are high – if not for us, for the animals.  Shall human beings consider ourselves responsible for the domestic and wild creatures that are, whether we like it or not, our subjects?   

Animals can’t be stewards of us; we can’t not be stewards of them.  We can only be good stewards or bad stewards. 

Notes

I referred to “The Terror” as Machen’s “longest horror story,” since I see The Three Impostors as a collection of linked stories rather than as a novel.

A good book about human sovereignty and stewardship is Matthew Scully’s Dominion: The Power of Man, theSuffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.

Admirers of The Lord of the Rings should read Evans and Dickerson’s Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien, which is a much better book than its cheesy main title would lead one to expect.

The present article is a sequel to my earlier Wormwoodiana posting, “Arthur Machen’s Secret HistoryTale ‘The Terror.’” That article expounded the traditional ontological hierarchy of “levels of being.”

It’s curious to note, by the way, that Machen’s story seems to have been written just before the abdication of the anointed Russian emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, in early 1917. 

Guest Post: Machen and the Dark Specter by Dale Nelson

In three recent articles, I’ve argued that Arthur Machen probably drew upon the writings of Ovid, the historian Josephus, and the Bible to suggest, subtly rather than explicitly, the nature of the horror of violation that occurs in “The Great God Pan” and “The Inmost Light.”

Here, I’ll comment on “Fragments of Paper” (also called “Psychology”), which is a sketch, and “The Novel of the White Powder.”  Where in “Pan” and “Light” the innocent sufferers were women, in these two pieces the sufferer is a man, and he is not innocent.

The “fragments of paper” are scraps that Mr. Dale wrote on during a sunny day at home, which was mostly busy with unspecified work.  “On them he had carefully registered all the secret thoughts of the day” without thinking about them, getting back to work till he jotted the next note and put it aside.  When he reviewed them, he was shocked by “the crazy lusts, the senseless furies, the foul monsters that his heart had borne” that the scraps recorded.

He has learned that “every day we lead two lives. … I say I am a man, but who is the other that hides in me?”

“Powder” is narrated by the sister of Francis Leicester, a diligent student of law.  Miss Leicester became anxious about the toll on her brother’s health of such long, sedentary hours, so he reluctantly consulted the family physician, Dr. Haberden. 

Francis had his prescription filled, despite his sister’s misgivings, at a neighborhood shop kept by an elderly pharmacist.  Francis perked up and exhibited a new taste for London night life, but eventually sequestered himself in his room.  There is a horrified glimpse of a monstrous face and paw at his window, some nasty black fluid drips from his room into the room below, his door is at last broken down, and a vile bubbling black pool of corruption is revealed, which is what Francis has become thanks to the drug.  It turns out to have been identical with the “wine” of the Witches’ Sabbath.

What may lift this shocker above the level of a pulp thriller are its superior generation of suspense, its narrative and descriptive craftsmanship (including a bit of Machen’s famous evocation of Strange London) -- and the final few pages.  A wrap-up that conveniently explains things is a familiar device in popular fiction, but uncommon is writing such as this:

“There [in some forest depth or remote cave], in the blackest hours of night, the Vinum Sabbati was prepared,” and the neophytes “partook of an evil sacrament. … And suddenly, each one that had drunk found himself attended by a companion” of alluring evil, which was, “awful as it is to express, the man himself. … the worm which never dies, that which lies sleeping within us all, was made tangible and an external thing, and clothed with a garment of flesh.  And then, in the hour of midnight, the primal fall was repeated.”

These sonorous lines were written to Dr. Haberden by the friend who analyzed the white powder and detected its real nature.  The friend comments, “for so terrible an act as [the partaking of the “wine”], in which the very inmost place of the temple was broken up and defiled, a terrible vengeance followed.  What began with corruption ended also with corruption.”

We’ve seen that imagery of the violated temple before, when the victims were women.  Exactly how to reconcile that imagery with the imagery of the inmost “worm” and the reference to the Fall is more than I will attempt here.

Mysteries of theology, unlike mysteries of detection, may be contemplated but not exhaustively explained.  Machen’s imagery points to a mystery of theological anthropology.  

To take one authority on it: the Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard – who was hardly likely to minimize sin – taught, on one hand, that “the very essence of the soul” was not lost at the Fall.  Sinful man does not require a new soul in order to be saved, nor does he acquire a new soul at Baptism. 

Yet, on the other hand, Gerhard added, man “from being righteous and holy became impious and unrighteous … Having lost the most beautiful image of God, man put on the dark specter of the devil.”  (That sounds Machenian, doesn’t it?)  Gerhard says, “we bear no longer the image of God and of the heavenly Adam, but the image of the earthly Adam. … we are by nature alienated from God,” although we possess “remnants of that original divine image,” etc.; hence the new birth in Christ is necessary.

Machen drew upon beliefs such as these for the purposes of literary art when he took pen in hand to write weird fiction; he was a poet more than a mystic, theologian, or parson; but he took those beliefs seriously, verbal signs of contradiction though they were in his time as they are in ours.

I think that Machen would have liked this statement:

“Only fools have clear conceptions of everything.  The most cherished ideas of the human mind are found in the depths and in twilight: around these [perplexing] ideas which we cannot [master] revolve clear thoughts, extending, developing, and becoming elevated.  If this deeper mental plane were to be taken away, there would remain but geometricians and intelligent animals; even the exact sciences should lose their present grandeur, which depends upon a hidden correlation with eternal truths, of which we can catch a glimpse only at rare moments.  Mystery is the most precious possession of mankind.  Not in vain did Plato teach that all below is but a weak image of the order reigning above.  It may be, indeed, that the grandest function of the loveliness we see is the awakening of desire for a higher loveliness we see not; and that the enchantment of great poets springs less from the pictures they paint than from the distant echoes they awaken from the invisible world.”

© Dale Nelson

Notes

Johann Gerhard (1582-1637) is quoted from pp. 61 and 63 of The Doctrine of Man in the Writings of Martin Chemnitz and Johann Gerhard, edited by Preus and Smits (Concordia Publishing House, 2005), pp. 61 and 63.

The long unattributed quotation (“Only fools”) is from the Russian reactionary and anti-Semite Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod (1827-1907).  Curiously, it is possible that Machen saw the book, Reflections of a Russian Statesman, in which the quotation appears.  It was issued by Machen’s own eventual publisher, Grant Richards, in 1898, translated by Robert Crozier Long.  I quote from the Ann Arbor Paperback reprint, 1968, p. 188.

Horace B. Samuel, The Quisto Box

Samuel, Horace B. The Quisto-Box (London: A.M. Philpot, [February 1925]).

This is the only novel by Horace Barnett Samuel (1883-1950), a London barrister who translated books (including ones by Nietzsche and Strindberg) and who wrote some of his own, including the critical study Modernities (1913) and Unholy Memories of the Holy Land (1930), the latter published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

In The Quisto-Box, Professor Quist has just achieved his long ambition to create a Telepathoscope, a small aluminium box that allows its bearer to read other people's thoughts. Then the Professor conveniently dies, and his housemaid Lalage Marne, an intelligent young “heiress on a small scale” who had heard rumours of Quist's invention and obtained employment with him in order to investigate, ends up with his invention and the instructions on how to use it. Lalage Marne is pursued by a young journalist from the Daily Blare, Lucien Swope, who tries out the box in an interview with a high-ranking politician. The box reveals secrets about the government's association with an evolving revolution in a few (imaginary) countries in Europe, including Yunkaria. Swope and Marne become involved in the crisis. From this point, the novel shifts to concentrating on the tedious ins-and-outs of the revolution in Yunkaria. Then Lalage Marne and financier Gabriel Zaffrouli find a way to make money off the war. Next they decide to make even more money by producing and selling a thousand Quisto-Boxes designed to function for only six months. Their veiled advertisement attracts the attention of “the worst woman in Europe”, currently operating under the name of Miss Celia Jones, who is described as follows: “The white bloated face and the swollen supple body. The red flabby folds that purported to be lips. The lax sinuosity of what was supposed to be a mouth, The brutal and business-calculation that glared brazenly from out her green eyes. The thick, slimy creaminess of her voice, that would in case of necessity and with the utmost suddenness assume a crisp, businesslike click. Come now, don't you agree that she is the queen of the world sinister?” (p. 167). With the brief appearance of the character of Celia Jones the novel gains some interest.

Soon afterwards, however, cheaper and less-effective Quisto-Boxes are made and sold, and it is not long before everyone has them, and society around the world becomes impossible. Lalage determines to save humanity by becoming its redemptress, destroying the supply of new Quisto-Boxes as well as the instructions for making more. To achieve this end, she murders Zaffrouli, and as the Quisto-Boxes already in use expire, the world returns to normal. Overall, this rather stodgily-written novel is primarily an unsuccessful mix of satire and cynicism.

An advertisement by the publisher at the rear of the book notes that Samuel is “an author well-known as a shrewd critic and writer of trenchant short stories.” Only a few short stories have been located. “Final Solution of the Sphinx” is the longest, and it appeared in The English Review (January 1921). Shorter tales include “On the Intellectual Plane” (The Egoist, February 1918) and the vignette “An Interesting Man” (The New Age, 14 October 1920).

Guest Post: Uncle Silas (1968) Location, by Gavin Selerie

I recently watched the version of Uncle Silas directed by Alan Cooke for TV (Mystery & Imagination series, 1968). I thought I hadn't seen it before but recognized in particular the performance by Patience Collier as Madame de la Rougierre, who conveys a twisted humour within menace. I now think I did see this at the National Film Theatre (BFI) years ago. It's quite an impressive version, though not as detailed as the more famous TV one with Peter O'Toole and Jane Lapotaire. Cooke plays up the melodrama but the central performance by Robert Eddison is superb and the atmosphere is well sustained throughout. Lucy Fleming as Maud displays a convincing innocence and naivety turning into horrified awareness. I note that the IMDB entry lacks any information about the location where it was filmed. I think there can be little doubt that at least the exterior and some of the internal scenes were shot at Horsley Towers in Surrey. This was the home counties residence of Earl and Lady (Ada) Lovelace. The arch which the carriage drives through from the courtyard and the lake in front of the Italian tower (east side) are unmistakeable. The rows of gothic windows seem to be further evidence that the Lovelace dwelling is the base site. I think the main staircase was  also used, although some further decorative detail may have been added. Finally, use is made of the Great Hall, with balcony or gallery. Perhaps some of the architecture was recreated in the studio, although it may well have been cheaper to film the entire thing on location. Interestingly, Horsley Towers was also used as the exterior location for The Stone Tape, a landmark of TV drama with script by Nigel Kneale, although in that case much less of the site is evident.

I visited Horsley Towers earlier this year, so my memory of the building and grounds is fresh. A poem I wrote afterwards, simply called 'Horsley Towers', appears in my recently published Collected Sonnets (Shearsman Books), which also features two outtakes from Le Fanu's Ghost, 'Stalking Grove' and 'Peep into a Whiskey-shop'.

 Gavin Selerie

Guest Post: The Abomination of Desolation in Machen’s “Great God Pan” and “The Inmost Light” by Dale Nelson

In an earlier article, I proposed that part of Clarke’s dream in the first chapter of Machen’s “Great God Pan” recalled the eve of the Jerusalem Temple’s destruction in AD 70, as recounted by the historian Flavius Josephus in The Jewish War, a book formerly well-known in Whiston’s translation.

Machen’s character Clarke dreamed of a voice that cried, “Let us go hence!” and the tome of Josephus reported that the priests heard a multitude of voices calling “Let us remove hence!” before the triumphant forces of Titus overthrew the Temple.  Clarke’s dream foreshadowed the sacrilegious violation of a young girl’s spiritual integrity because of a successful brain experiment.

I will argue that an account of the violation of an earlier Temple illuminates Machen’s theme.  Here again, Machen is (I suspect) drawing on an old book – this time, the Bible – that is much less a part of education, the arts, etc. today than formerly.

“‘When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation (spoken of by Daniel the prophet), stand in the holy place’ – whoso readeth, let him understand – ‘then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains’” (St. Matthew 24).  These words of Christ refer, in context, to the prophesied destruction of the Temple of Jesus’ day, the Second Temple, the taking of which by Roman soldiers about 40 years afterwards was described by Josephus. 

But the words allude also to the Old Testament book of Daniel 9:27 and 11:31, which the interested reader may look up.

However obscure these texts may be now, they were familiar to many when Machen was young.  I won’t attempt to summarize the reasons why the Daniel passages have been taken to have a twofold fulfillment, first at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes IV, who ruled 175-164 BC, and then in AD 70.

Under the Seleucid king, the Temple was defiled: the king’s forces set up in it an idol of a pagan god, prevented the Israelite sacrifices from being offered, and may have polluted the altar with the blood of pigs.  Under the Emperor Vespasian, over 200 years later, the Temple was, again, subject to outrage.  In a war of appalling carnage, Titus ended the Jewish sacrifices and thrust the Roman standards into the sanctuary.

That, basically, is the historical meaning of “the abomination of desolation” or the “abomination that makes desolate.”  The hallowed place, sacred to God, is broken into, something sacred is lost or departs from it, and something unholy takes its place.

Readers of Machen’s horror stories will see the parallel I’m proposing.

The orphan girl Mary is violated; “the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh”; she is left a ruin, an “idiot” who dies before a year has passed.  But something horrible took possession of her body so that nine months later she gave birth to Helen Vaughan, with whose deplorable activities much of “The Great God Pan” is concerned.  When Helen is forced to kill herself, a ghastly corruption is revealed.

Likewise, in “The Inmost Light,” Dr. Black experiments on his innocent, consenting wife.  Black wrote that “from some human being there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme of the world there is no vacant chamber) – in its place would enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death itself.”  Black’s experiment is successful, and a Poesque mass of bubbling black corruption results.

In each story, an “abomination of desolation” follows upon violation.

Please note: I don’t say Machen wrote these stories intending that they would be interpreted as religious allegories, and, so far as I know, by and large they haven’t been.  He wrote more as a poet than as a mystic, much more as a poet than as a theologian, and much, much more as a poet than as a parson; to say which is not to disparage mystic, theologian, or parson.

Machen wanted to write tales of suspense, wonder, awe, and horror, and, so far as I know, for decades many readers have found these stories first rate of their kind.  The literary allusions I’ve expounded – if they are there – are part of the man’s artistry, and have worked mostly as undertones.

Except that, as Ovid, Josephus, and even the Bible have ceased to indwell many readers’ imaginations today, such readers might hardly sense those tones.

Machen may now be faulted by critics who lack the imaginative formation he and many of his readers shared.  For some of these critics, it’s too late to become naturalized to that country, that spacious, and almost lost, realm of the Greek and Latin classics, the Bible and religious tradition, the standard English authors such as Milton and Browne and Wordsworth.  In new Machen reprints, footnotes may identify some of his references and allusions, but few or no associations with personal formative imaginative experiences will be evoked in readers, because that formation didn’t happen.  To be told that the allusions are there is not to feel them as undertones as one reads the stories --.

When Machen treats of the human being positively, as a divine creation, though threatened by evil, the victims are female.  In my next article, I’ll discuss Machen’s variation, in which his emphasis is on the corruption lurking within fallen human nature.  There, the sufferer will be male.

Guest Post: Phyllis Paul: A Few Glimpses of Her Meaning by Dale Nelson

Miss Paul maintains a pervasive sense of mystery, even though much in her books may be mysterious only in the conventional sense, that is, mysterious until more information is gathered, which then resolves some of the questions that have accumulated. 

In her work mystery remains; it is as if, when the earthly mysterious has been cleared up, something of unearthly mystery remains untouched.  Her imagination tends to the quasi-Gnostic.  References to the Cathars (in The Lion of Cooling Bay) and so on suggest Miss Paul may have studied heterodox religious history. 

However, her ideas and her beliefs may have changed over time.  And whatever she believed at a given point, she may have borrowed elements of some system that she herself did not believe for its imaginative, literary possibilities. 

Here are some observations about matters of the spirit in Miss Paul’s fiction.

In the seven novels that I’ve read so far, Miss Paul allows only a weak connection between English religion and the world of the spirit.  She doesn’t seem interested in a thoroughgoing satire of parish religion, but nor does she endorse it. 

Thus, in Twice Lost, Christine’s mother, Mrs. Gray, maintains a spiritual atmosphere with Scripture texts on the wall at home and with feelings of spiritual communion that she cultivates.  And she is no fool; when Keith Antequin intrudes upon this atmosphere, she knows he is a fake.  Unfortunately, when elderly Thomas Antequin brought himself forward as a suitor for Christine’s hand, he seemed to Mrs. Gray a convenient – perhaps, fatally, a providential – protector for her troubled young daughter. 

Rachel in A Cage for the Nightingale is an Anglican happy with the round of parish life, but she doesn’t understand the more spiritual Victoria.

For Roman Catholicism Miss Paul has a strong aversion, which, as I understand, she particularly indulges in Pulled Down, which I haven’t read yet.  In Cage, several of the worst characters are Catholics. In Twice Lost, Thomas Antequin’s historical play concerns the Inquisition and the theme is cruelty. 

Detail from Breugel's Triumph of Death

Ricky in The Lion of Cooling Bay is attracted to Romanism and to sexual perversity. In the same novel, the narrator refers to the “torture-wheels of the Spanish devils” as painted by Bruegel (see his Triumph of Death), and the Catholic boy Francis dreams of a ceremony in which “the crowd was surrounded by a circle of lofty poles, each of which had a wheel fixed horizontally on its summit; objects which he felt he had seen before, perhaps in some old picture, without understanding their significance.”  (There is a curious reference, in Twice Lost, to a “clubbed tree [that] was crowned with a huge wheel” in a Kensington square.) 

Miss Paul worked within the Gothic tradition, where portrayals of Roman Catholic cruelty have a long pedigree.  However, the anti-Catholic curate Treadworthy, in Rox Hall Illuminated, is rather creepy.

Miss Paul evinces some respect for certain 17th-century Protestant authors who had a keen sense of the reality of spiritual evil.  In A Cage for the Nightingale, Victoria’s imagination was “darkly stirred” when, as a child, she read Hall, Baxter, and Browne. 

Richard Baxter, the Puritan, quoted Bishop Joseph Hall about “Satan’s prevalency in this age” being evident from the numbers of witches.  (Hall is better known for his Anglican Neostoicism.)
Baxter may still be remembered for The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, which has a section on ghosts, and was also author of The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits.  And Consequently of the Immortality of Souls.  Of the Malice and Misery of the Devils, and the Damned.  And of the Blessedness of the Justified.  Fully Evinced by the Unquestionable Histories of Apparitions, Operations, Witchcrafts, Voices, &c.  Written as an Addition to Many Other Treatises, for the Conviction of Sadduces [sic] and Infidels (1691). 

Sir Thomas Browne is best known for Urn Burial and especially Religio Medici, wherein the point is made that it is not in the devil’s interest to reveal himself to those who profess disbelief in the devil and in God.

The devil is a dreadful presence – seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8) -- in The Lion of Cooling Bay.  Anne described to William a drawing she saw in Julian’s room, with a great shadow on the landscape, and an inscription naming “The Lion – the King of beasts – God of this world – Ruler of the darkness of this world.”

With particular clarity, A Cage for the Nightingale exhibits a threefold Gnostic-type spirituality.

1.Most of the characters are examples of the sarkikos anthropos, the fleshly person.  They are concerned with this world, its silly or base pleasures, its bogus values.  Herve, Tonine, Janet, Pat, Maurice, and Constantine belong to this category. 

2.Rachel is an example of the psychikos anthropos, the soulish person.  She isn’t worldly like the fleshly characters.  She has some awareness of spiritual reality in sometimes detecting sinister atmosphere, and she is intrigued by Victoria, who is on a higher spiritual level than herself.  Miss Paul makes Rachel an artist who draws without genius.  She would like to go to a Christmas Eve service.  Gnostics would see Christians such as Rachel as satisfied by family life and a conventional religion inadequate for finer spirits.

3.Much-tormented Victoria is the exemplar of the pneumatic or spiritual person.  Though she has felt that she is “all light inside,” she is the imprisoned nightingale, fluttering against the bars of the cage – that is, the trammels of earthly embodiment.  Unlike Rachel’s drawings, Victoria’s artwork has an impressive, real quality.  Paul uses art as a symbol of spiritual life. 

In Gnosticism, God exists but is remote from this world.  As Victoria says, “‘The fall of a sparrow!  God sees it and lets it fall.’”

The phenomenal world hides the realm of spirit, which is associated with light, e.g. in The Lion of Cooling Bay with sunlight burning through leaves.

Christine in Twice Lost thinks of God as absent in one’s time of spiritual anguish – not nonexistent, but not concerned. 

Christine is a superb study, from a classic Lutheran point of view, of a person bowed down under the “curse of the Law.” The two great commandments are to love God with all one’s heart and mind and strength and one’s neighbor as oneself. 

Christine knows that she did fail the unattractive, unwinsome little girl Vivian Lambert, when she didn’t wait to make sure the child got inside her house late one evening, but left her on the doorstep.  She is haunted by part of this passage (St. Matthew 18:6): “whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

Vivian disappeared and was presumed to have been murdered.  Thereafter, Christine suffers, a prisoner of inner condemnation.  She deals with her guilt in two ways, by doing good works (she is a volunteer at a clinic for the poor, as I recall) and by hoping desperately that Vivian didn’t die, but only disappeared; if Vivian didn’t die, then she, Christine, is not guilty of her death.  There is no suggestion in the novel that she could have opened her tormented heart to a pastor and received the comfort of Gospel absolution, the forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake.

A severe spirituality – characterized by Glen Cavaliero as “steely puritanism” -- is integral to the atmosphere and meaning of the novels discussed here.  It deserves further exploration.
Note: I consulted Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief for a discussion of Gnosticism’s threefold anthropology.  Baxter’s Saints’ Everlasting Rest is often issued in abridged form without the section on ghosts – which I know of but haven’t seen.

© 2019 Dale Nelson