A Leak In The Safe

Steven Sidor’s book has moved me to take a quick read through the tacky world of Black Magic/Satanic popular literature. Someday, when I am properly inspired, I’d like to incorporate this material into one of my sex/drug word collages probably under the title Satan Gets High. Until that happy day, I’ll just present these yummy passages from Dennis Wheatley’s 30’s potboiler The Devil Rides Out as is:

Author’s note:

All the characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary but, in the inquiry necessary to the writing of it, I found ample evidence that Black Magic is still practiced in London, and other cities, at the present day. Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject, and thus come in contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel that it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of a very real and concrete nature.

With a sudden access of bitter fury he turned on Simon, and seizing him by his silk lapels, shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. "You fool," he thundered. "I’d rather see you dead than monkeying with Black Magic!"

For Rex had no doubts that, incredible as it might seem, the Duke was right, and Satan worship still a living force in modern cities, just as the infernal Voodoo cult was still secretly practiced by the Negroes in the Southern States of his own country.

After that he could no longer employ modern standards of belief or unbelief to the possibilities which might result from the strange and horrible doings of these people who had given themselves over to ancient cults.

The day before he would have instantly assumed her to be joking, despite her apparent seriousness, but now, he realized with a little shock, he no longer considered it beyond the bounds of possibility that actual results might be procured by doing certain curious things to a little waxen doll, so greatly had his recent experiences altered his outlook.

"No, in ancient Egypt every woman surrendered herself at the temple before she married, in order that she might acquire virtue, and sacred prostitution is still practiced in many parts of the world – for that is what this amounts to. Regarded from the personal point of view, of course, it is loathsome. If I thought of it that way I should never be able to go through with it at all, but I have trained myself not to, and think of it now as a ritual which has to be gone through in order to acquire fresh powers."

"Those things they have lighted are the special black candles made of pitch and sulphur," muttered the Duke. "You will be able to smell them in a minute. But look at the priests: didn’t I tell you that there is little difference between this modern Satanism and Voodoo? We might also be witnessing some heathen ceremony in an African jungle!"

Rex chocked into his hands as the fumes caught his throat then whispered "What is that filth they’re burning?"

"Thorn apple leaves, henbane, dried nightshade, myrtle and other herbs," De Richleau answered. "Some are harmless apart from their stench, but others drug the brain and excite the senses to an animal fury of lust and eroticism you will see soon enough."

"Phew!" Rex choked out, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. "This is a ghastly business. I can’t stand much more of it. They’re mad, stark staring crazy, every mother’s son of them."

"Yes, temporarily," the Duke looked up again. "Some of them are probably epileptics, and nearly all must be abnormal. This revolting spectacle represents a release of all their pent-up emotions and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustices, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success and good fortune. That is the only explanation for this terrible exhibition of human depravity which we are witnessing."

She knew with a sudden appalling clarity that having even been the witness of this blasphemous sacrilege was enough to damn her for all eternity, and that her own wish to attend this devilish saturnalia had been engendered only by a stark madness caught like some terrible contagious disease from her association with these other unnatural beings who were the victims of a ghastly lunacy.

"Half the people in our asylums may be suffering from a physical lesion of the brain but others are unaccountably insane. The real reason is demonic possession brought about by looking upon terrible things they were never meant to see."

"But human sacrifice is more potent for all purposes than any other, and these wretched people are hardly human at the moment. Their brains are diseased and their mentality is that of the hags and warlocks of the Dark Ages."

Their maniacal exaltation died away. The false exhilaration of the alcohol, the pungent herbal incense and the drug-laden ointments which they had smeared upon their bodies, drained from them. They woke as from an intoxicated nightmare to the realization of their nakedness and helplessness.

"You fool!" De Richleau suddenly swung upon him. Germany did not make the Great War. It came out of Russia. The monk rasputin was the Evil Genius behind it all. He was the greatest Black Magician that the world has known for centuries. It was he who found one of the gateways through which to let forth the four horsemen that they may wallow in blood and destruction."

"If we were only dreaming how can you possibly explain it?" Richard insisted.

"I cannot," De Richleau shrugged a little wearily. "Even the greatest seekers after Truth have done little more than lift the corner of the veil which hides the vast unknown, but it is my belief that during the period of our dream journey we have been living in what the moderns call the fourth dimension – divorced from time."

The place where the two currents of my recent reading about Rasputin and the Russian Symbolists converge is a book called The Silver Dove by Andrey Biely. It’s the story of a young Russian intellectual at the turn of the century who falls under the spell of a peasant carpenter and his wife/disciple and becomes a member of a sectarian cult. Harrison Salisbury (selected, I suppose, for his experience as an old Russia hand) points out in his brief introduction that the book, written in 1909, is an astonishing act of clairvoyance, both of the rise in influence of Rasputin and, indeed the Russian revolution itself. Tolstoy’s idea of the peasant as being the "real" soul of Russia and somehow more authentic than other Russians (you know, like the way Ypsilanti is more authentic than Ann Arbor because of the crack whores) is exposed in all its tragic foolishness. Ironically, hindsight allows us to see how the seemingly contrary idea of Westernization through the adoption of foreign ideas like, say, Marxism, led to a barbarism undreamt of by the Tartars, as the intellectual Lenin was superceded by the epitome of the crafty, brutal peasant, Stalin.

But while Salisbury downplays the literary qualities of the book in favor of the prophetic ones, in his introduction the translator George Reavey quite rightly argues for the centrality of Biely not only to Russian modernism but to world literature at large, comparing him to James Joyce in his brilliant wordplay and wide erudition. Biely’s St. Petersburg is one of those widely acknowledged but little read masterpieces and the rest of his work is even less available. The Silver Dove is fairly scarce but not expensive, a real shame because it’s a brilliant work, as you can perhaps see from the following passages:

The pock-marked woman, a hawk with browless eyes, was no tender flower germinating in the depths of his soul, no dream this, no rosy dawn, no honeyed grass, but a storm cloud, a female tiger, and she entered him like a werewolf and called him imperiously; her soft smiling lips intoxicated and confused him with a languorous sense of sadness and joy that banished all shame; and thus, revealed for an instant, the gaping jaws of a millennium now resurrected, the memory of what had never been part of his personal experience, awakening the unknown face which was terrifying familiar only in dreams; and that face was now embodied in the image of an incredible and yet existent childhood.

And I waited always: and out of the dark people defined themselves; and I waited always for the appearance out of the dark of a terrifying, languorous call, summoning me into the distance…

How she stood there, his own, his bride, who only yesterday had flown away from him to return to him today – how she stood there wreathed in green intoxication and in dripping drops of rain! O feast-filled moment!

Greedily their greedy lips opened; hands of steel, molding a slender body, stretched out impulsively, a red hot lava of breathing poured into her breast; already her lips met with lips in a long, lingering voluptuous breath; her blue dress, like her blue sky, was against the red sunset of his clothes: and above this sunset of two lives now mingled, the airy ash, the cloud of expostulations, the pink bunches of rosebay danced all around them.

And she looked him over, and how! From her eyes out of that pock-marked face blue seas began to move; the abyss yawned in her eyes and he was already swept away into a cold whirlpool of passion.

Was it dream or no dream? A body woven of gold detached itself from Matryona and covered Pyotr: their flesh vanished, burnt out: only a gold woven cloud of smoke filled the hollow oak. Was it dream or no dream?

It lasted only a brief instant; but during that instant there was nothing: no world, no space, no time. And then again their bodies defined themselves, it was as though from above, from the opening to the sky, out of the dark heaven, bright purple threads had been poured, sparkling threads, like bright Christmas gold or silver thread to make the children happy.

And out of those bright gold and silver threads a human image formed itself again; dark-woven, floating, dumb, they glowed there, settling down in their places.

The village had become a new earth; it was no longer just air, but a sweet honeyed herb; breathing it, you became intoxicated; but what would it be when it was time to sober up? Or from now on no sobering up; you will drink until you see the green serpent, but what afterwards – death?

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and The Invention of Murder – since I’m a well known Poe freak and afficionado of true crime, Stashower had me at the title, and I’m pleased to report that the rest of the book lived up to my expectations.

In her day Mary Rogers was a well known figure, a humbled member of the upper classes who was reduced to selling cigars in a New York tobacco emporium, the crafty store owner knowing that a fetching face and fine figure would attract male clientele. Her employment was a sign of a changing social environment in which a woman could have a casual social relationship with men without being a member of the demi-monde, and her fame an indication of the novelty of her position.

As a consequence of this notoriety, Mary’s subsequent unsolved murder was front page news , and the same relaxed mores that allowed her to wait on men also permitted the stuffiest newspapers to delve into the morbid details in ways that would have been unthinkable even a few years earlier.

Like Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, this vintage crime is presented alongside another narrative, in the case the short and tragic life of Edgar Allan Poe. The narratives intersect when Poe decides to follow up his seminal detective tale "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" with another in which his protagonist C. Auguste Dupin would use his fantastic powers of ratiocination (and by extension Poe’s own) to solve a lightly fictionalized version of an infamously unsolved crime. Poe called his story "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and in Stashower’s deft reportage, the subsequent collision of truth and fiction makes for unexpected twists and high drama.

Over the years the relative fame and reputations of Mary Rogers and Edgar Allan Poe have waxed and waned, but today it may safely be said that the latter is firmly established in the literary pantheon while the former has slipped into obscurity. With impressive scholarship and analysis Stashower manages to make both his threads strong and compelling, weaving a captivating fabric that highlights the almost forgotten victim and stitching a new perspective around the renowned writer.

Although I enjoyed Steven Sidor’s The Mirror’s Edge, it was almost despite the subject matter – Satanism is one of those subjects, like UFO’s or vast conspiracies, that I prefer to read about in nominal non-fiction. Somehow the paranoiac imagination works best when somewhat constrained by reality, and the mundane, you couldn’t make them up because they’re so stupid details of alien abductions or occult rituals are what bring them to life in print. Even if I don’t believe a word of it, it really adds to the experience when it feels like the author is completely convinced.
 
So when my noble friend and colleague Sheridan showed me Satan’s Underground: The Extraordinary Story of One Woman’s Escape by Lauren Stratford I had to snap it up and dive right it. Of course it does tend to wipe that ironic smirk off even UBU’s mug to think that some small child was perhaps abused in the awful ways described by Stratford, but even before the Satanist part, when her adoptive mother was pimping grade school Lauren to hobos in exchange for odd jobs around the house, her narrative seemed manifestly phoney. Even though anything verifiable was in short supply, I wondered if anyone had done any fact checking on Satan’s Underground, and I turned immediately to our old friend, the internet, and sure enough my b.s. detector once again proved accurate. Wikipedia even has an entry about her with a link to the Cornerstone magazine article that exposed her. Apparently her real name was Laurel Willson, and although she was adopted and her mother was a little high strung, all resemblance to the truth ends there. The real punch line is that after the controversy she dropped out of sight only to reemerge later under the name Lauren Grabowski, claiming to be a Holocaust survivor!
 
I should have waited, as that knowledge colored my reading of the rest of the book, from her forced pornography experiences to her eventual forced participation in Satanic sacrificial rites. None of it seemed remotely believable or even fully imagined, though there were a few good bits like her Satanic boyfriend putting her in a steel drum and then dropping sacrificed baby bodies in with her one by one. The actually bad experiences end about a third of the way when the Satanists inexplicably lose interest in her and she starts her process of evangelical rebirth. Here, entering actual autobiography, her writing becomes more enthusiastic and concrete – clearly having other people pay attention to her and take her seriously is what really turns her on. If Jesus and Satan are waging a relentless war for your soul, you must be important, and once Stratford’s unique suffering has been established her enormous narcissism and self-absorption can have free reign. She bullies people, taking advantage of their better Christian instincts to insinuate herself into their lives, which soon revolve around listening to and consoling poor Lauren. The circle of the sympathetic and duped becomes wider and wider until it includes the reader.
 
The last third of the book is a basically unreadable goulash of self-help bromides and "divine prescriptions" to those tempted by Satan. It’s funny that she has several pieces that include refrains such as her biggest concern Will someone listen to me? and even a hidden confession in a chapter where she repeats over and over again WATCH OUT…YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED! Indeed.
 
In the end the interesting thing to me is how the book struck such a sympathetic chord in the evangelical Christian world, where it was an acclaimed best seller and vaulted Stratford to celebrity. Among the adulatory blurbs is, ironically enough, one from Mike Warnke, author of The Satan Seller, a book about Mike’s experiences as a repentant former coven leader, another tome that was exposed as baloney. (An echo of this is found in Lauren’s next life of deception as a supposed Holocaust survivor when she claimed to remember Binjamin Wikomirski from the camps – and then he too was exposed as a fake, real name Bruno Grosjean. At least Warnke and Stratford never claimed to have met while kissing the devil’s patookie at a black mass.) In fact the two of them are now considered part of a late eighties sociological phenomena known as the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic. The growing evangelical movement needed to validate their own sense of self-worth with an enemy that validated their religious beliefs in much the same way that Communism had validated their political ones. They really, really wanted to believe that a great force was out there opposing their great purpose and so were quite easily taken in by something that confirmed their paranoia. In fact, despite all the evidence that has been marshaled to discredit Satan’s Underground, there are still people out there who believe in its veracity.
 
It is fiction, of course, and almost self-evidently so, but had it been presented as such it would have been condemned as trash and filth. As a cautionary tale however, the righteous can revel in lurid details of porno and orgy while still pretending a higher purpose, believing Stratford when she says "Ultimately the book is not about pornography or Satan. It is about the overwhelming power and victory of the Lord Jesus Christ." Ultimately, maybe, but there’s a whole bunch of semi-scintillating stuff that a good bible thumper can wallow in on the way.
 
Certainly in recent years the general reading public has been bombarded with fake memoirs, if only because confession is the genre of the moment. But the devil’s advocate (so to speak) in me has to give Lauren credit for a work of imagination, an insane paranoiac-critical take on her own life. To pretend as she did can even be seen as a work of performance art, even if she seemed to emphasize the paranoiac over the critical. Unfortunately, the unintentional artlessness that can be somewhat excused in a memoir doesn’t cut it in a fake. Even considered as a work of fiction or even camp, Satan’s Underground is rather clumsy and not very compelling, with only a few savory chunks of ripe cheese. As in every work whose background is more interesting than the foreground, its value is mostly historical.
 
Here’s a few overheated excerpts:
 
However the front of the office was only a facade. Behind that was where the real world began for me and for countless nameless and faceless others who had come looking for fame and fortune. Little did they know that when they signed on the dotted line they were signing themselves into the same world as mine – HELL!
 
Do you listen to heavy-metal music that condones and even encourages suicide, the torture and murder of babies, and Satan worship because that kind of music is "where it’s at"? WATCH OUT…YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED!