As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with
primal emotion, the horror tale is as old as human thought and speech
themselves.
Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all
races, and is crystalized in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and
sacred writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate
ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of demons and
spectres which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached
its highest development in Egypt and the Semetic nations. Fragments
like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate
the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such
things were based enduring systems and traditions, whose echoes extend
obscurely even to the present time. Touches of this transcendental
fear are seen in classic literature and there is evidence of its still
greater emphasis in a balled literature which paralleled the classic
stream, but vanished for lack of a written medium. The Middle Ages,
steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an enormous impulse toward
expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving and
amplifying the dark heritage, both of random folklore and of
academically formulated magic and cabalism, which had descended to
them. Witch, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the
lips of bard and grandam, and needed but little encouragement to take
the final step across the boundary that divides the chanted tale or
song from the formal literary composition. In the Orient, the weird
tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and sprightliness which
almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the West, where the
mystical Teuton had cone down from his black Boreal forests and the
Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a
terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere which
doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted horrors.
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the
hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal
worshipers whose strange customs--descended from pre-Aryan and
pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over
Europe with their flocks and herds--were rooted in the most revolting
fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity. This secret religion,
stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of years despite
the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths
in the regions involved, was marked by wild "Witches' Sabbaths" in
lonely woods and atop distant hills on Walpurgis Night and Hallowe'en,
the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle;
and became the source of vast riches of sorcery legend, besides
provoking extensive witchcraft prosecutions of which the Salem affair
forms the chief American example. Akin to it in essence, and perhaps
connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret system of inverted
theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the famous
"Black Mass"; whilst operating toward the same end we may note the
activities of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or
philosophical--the astrologers, cabbalists, and alchemists of the
Albertus Magnus or Raymond Lully type, with whom such rude ages
invariably abound. The prevalence and depth of the medieval
horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which
waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque
carvings slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic
ecclesiastical work of the time; the demoniac gargoyles of Notre
Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the most famous specimens. And
throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst
educated and uneducated alike, a most unquestioning faith in every
form of the supernatural; from the gentlest of Christian doctrines
to the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic.
It was from no empty background that the Renaissance magicians and
alchemists--Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and
the like--were born.
In this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of somber
myth and legend which persist in weird literature to this day, more or
less disguised or altered by modern technique. Many of then were taken
from the earliest oral sources, and form part of mankind's permanent
heritage. The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones,
the demon lover who comes to bear away his still living bride, the
death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the man-wolf, the
sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer--all those may be found in that
curious body of mediaeval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so
effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood
was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most
intense; for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality
which denies to even their strangest superstitions many of the
overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and
ice-fostered whisperings.
(continued next month)