The people that were small shall be great. The time-riding Dragon-peoples who navigate the Well of the Wise Race are gathering and remembering goals left sleeping for centuries.
In the first half of this century she was held in great respect. So much so that she was engaged by Encyclopedia Britannica to write an entry on "Witchcraft" during the forties. Lately, this critical esteem has suffered. A recent Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on Witchcraft blatantly held Murray up as a sort of laughing-stock figure, chuckling at her views and at the stupidity of any who still entertain them. This critical disrepute is the outgrowth of a few of Murray's traits which, over the course of her long life, became exaggerated and ultimately subject to scrutiny and derision. It is claimed that she became a fanatic orevangelist for her "invented" religion and that she saw Witchcraft affiliations lurking behind every important historical figure. In all fairness , examination of her work does reveal certain idiosyncracies. For instance, she would lapse for pages at a time into glorifications of the Sabbat -- daring the world to deny that kissing a mask on the rump of a Black Man was any less edifying than the symbols of Christianity. Another of her pet themes (and the one which most concerns us here) was that the ancient Picts of northern Britain were somehow intrinsic to the history of Witchcraft and that they were the cause of the legends about the Little People, Fairies or Gentry(2). On a scholarly level, these claims are supported by little or no hard evidence. Yet neither can they be disproven.
Robert E. Howard, a writer of pulp fiction during the 1930s, is most famous as the creator of Conan the barbarian and the fantastic "Hyborian Age." He created several other recurring characters including Bran Mak Morn, King of the Picts.
In an often-published letter to a friend that has served as introduction
to published collections of his Pict-related tales, Howard spoke about
his "inexplicable" fascination with this most mysterious of British peoples:
There is one hobby of mine which puzzles me to this day. I am not attempting to lend it an esoteric or mysterious significance, but the fact remains that I can neither explain nor understand it. That is my interest in the people which, for the sake of brevity, I have always designated as Picts. Bran Mak Morn Dell 1969In the letter, he proceeds to confide to his correspondent that throughout his life he has experienced vivid dreams wherein he participated as a Pict in desperate, savage warfare against the forces of Rome in a war that came to represent the the pure conflict of Freedom against Slavery. He describes dreams showing maps of old Europe wherein a single oppressive color spread out from Rome in all directions like some plague until it covered everything but a few distant unconquerable bastions of brightness in the northwest, and across these would be written the words PICTS. This was the attitude that he saw as the central motivation of his recurring character Bran Mak Morn, a character which he says sprang into his mind complete and mature in all details, like the memory of a real person rather than an idea for fictional character.
But Howard's most startling statements, from the point of view of our
present discussion, regarding this obsession occur in the rarely published
tale "The Children of the Night." Howard has the modern character "Clements"
make these statements:
"This is in the strictest confidence you understand. But my roommate talked in his sleep. I began to listen and put his disjointed mutterings together. And in his mutterings I first heard of the ancient cult hinted at by Von Junzt ; of the king who ruled the Dark Empire, which was a revival of an older darker empire dating back into the Stone Age; and of the great, nameless cavern where stands the Dark Man - the image of Bran Mak Morn, carved in his image by a master hand while the great king yet lived, and to which each worshiper of Bran makes a pilgrimage once in his or her lifetime. Yes, that cult lives on today in the descendants of Bran's people - a silent unknown current it flows on in the great ocean of life waiting for the stone image of the great Bran to breathe and move with sudden life, and come from the great cavern to rebuild their lost empire."(3) -Spawn of Cthulhu Ballantine 1971On the scale of world literature as art, Howard's work is almost insignificant. Yet what can be said regarding the total contribution of Howard to literature? Mainly, that he invented the "Sword and Sorcery" genre of fiction, and more specifically, the Hyborian Age and the fantastic continent on which the Hyborian Kingdoms are placed. He implied that this continent was an unremembered precursor of modern Europe, knowledge of which was lost in a series of cataclysms, but rumors of which survive in the most archaic and obscure corners ofmythology. He also dealt repeatedly with mystico-physical race-memory/tribe-consciousness which overlapped our more common theories of reincarnation and past-life memory.
Though usually never lumped with the "trivial" Sword & Sorcery authors, we find that J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, duplicated Howard's innovations quite closely, albeit on a more profound level. Both were compelled to write tale after tale concerning the epic events and legends of a proto-Europe that did not intersect with recorded history. They sought a "North-Western" sort of mystical history or tradition that physical history and extant literature could not supply. Both authors had favorite fantasy races or tribes that came to the proto-Europe from a sunken continent in the west. As strange as it seems, this is a theme common to many contemporary European occult societies.
Just as Tolkien's writing was grander than that of Howard or his followers, so also was his obsession. He himself admitted that the prongs of his obsession were twofold: his drive to perfect two fantasy languages (later called High Elven and Grey Elven or Quenya and Sindarin), and what he called his "Atlantis Complex" (a recurrent deluge nightmare shared by his son Christopher). For fifty years he teased his obsession to reveal the details of the epic legends and histories of the Elves of the First Age of Middle-Earth and the downfall of the Kings of men on the island continent of Numenor in the Second Age -- epochs that he treated as "real" and researched with all the weight of his considerable scholarly powers (he was the youngest person ever to achieve the Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford). The result was The Silmarillion, the work of a lifetime, published after his death.
Obsession with one's work is quite common in the arts and, although the common man may not quite understand it, artists are widely understood to be eccentric and obsessive.
What makes these writers noteworthy is that they shared (without knowledge of each other's work) basically the same rare obsession . The comparisons between the two can make for a fairly long list, though space permits only a few points be be summarized here: Howard's theory of time travel through genetic memories/atavisms of characters rendered unconscious by great psychic stress and reincarnation-based agendas easily compares with Tolkien's Olórë Mallë, the Path of Dreams that could allow the modern mind to travel to the dwellings of Elves in The Book of Lost Tales. Howard makes it central to the Picts' religion that they have been promised by "the Moon God" that even as they had been the first of humankind to walk the world, so should they likewise be the last surviving at the end of ages, a complement to Tolkien's prophesied grand reunion of the Elves at the end of the world that was toasted with every shared drink in Book of Lost Tales with the words, "To the Faring Forth and the Rekindling of the Magic Sun."
Both authors went so astonishingly far as to choose the same name — Thû — for a malicious, two-faced royal counsellor/vizier plotting the destruction of the kings of BOTH Tolkien's and Howard's deluge-fated island continents in the sea west of BOTH author's proto-Europes, ie., Tolkien's Numenor (Thû's name eventually being changed to Sauron) and Howard's Valusia (during the reign of Kull).
Amazingly, the very name of Howard's eternal king of the Picts, the Dark Man Bran Mak Morn, only makes sense if translated by Tolkien's Elven language! There being no point whatsoever by which Tolkien's unpublished works could have been available to Howard in Texas in the 1930's, this is a coincidence so unlikely it's uncanny. As Howard explains in his Pictish Introduction letter (see above), if Bran's name were Celtic it would signify 'Raven Son of Morn' but, as it is in the lost tongue of the Picts, its true meaning is unknown to us. The only further hints for the reader are in the stories: occassionally a friend directly addresses the king as "Bran Mak" and occassionally he is indirectly referred to by Picts as "the Morn. The first example merely underscores the non-Celtic etymology and no more, ie., addressing a friend as 'Bran Son Of...' is awkward and unlikely. Turning to 'the Morn' as a Celtic word is also unproductive. Although Howard would have been familiar with the Morna clan from Irish legend (there was even a Conan mac Morna), the name has no linguistic significance. The results are very different when we allow Tolkien's Elvish as a search parameter! 'Morn' is a common element in Elvish words, signifying 'dark, dark colored, black.' Therefore, to call the king 'the Morn' is to call him 'the Dark/the Dark One' or as Howard has his latter-day statue worshippers phrase it, the Dark Man.
Somewhere between 1932 and the mid-60's there surfaces into historical view an initiatory mystery cult called by some the Fairy (or Feri) Tradition and, esoterically, the Pictish Tradition.
These people not only believe that they wield and teach supernatural abilities, but also that they know each other from past lives spent in the pursuit of sorcery--some claiming to remember that they are indeed the ancient magickal Pictish people.
Precisely, The Fairy Tradition is a rare sect of modern Eurocentric
Witchcraft (that cultus of people who worship the Great Goddess and her
consort "The Horned God"), presently known to exist only (at least if confined
to the 'Victorian' lineages traceable to Mr. Anderson) on the west coast
of North America, that exhibits most or all of these non-Gardnerian distinctions
— that is, doctrines or practices not native to Gardnerian (traceable to
the teachings of Gerald Gardner) popular Wicca:
The Elven Tradition, pioneered by your author and his associates, is an experimental successor to the Pictish mother-cult. It retains the previously mentioned resources while constantly expanding to accommodate the discoveries of the greatest of the modern investigative sorcerers and oracular sources--such as Crowley, Tolkien, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Kenneth Grant, Gerald Massey, Bertiaux, etc.
Distinctions of this tradition include:
Fragment of statue of
Pharaoh Nectanebus I
END NOTES
1. Though by no means the first chronologically to propose the theory. French writers had done so for at least two centuries and Charles Godfrey Leland published copious quantities of Italian Strege/Witch literature in the 1890's. But, however many the forerunners, it was Murray who was the first to be widely read and discussed. Clearly, her ability to produce supportive material from an unprecedented number of actual trial records was critical to her popularity.
2. She supported the theory that some sizable remnant of the Pictish population adamantly refused to be absorbed into the new "Kingdom of Scots" following the accession of Kenneth mac Alpin to the throne in 847 as the first official king of Scotland. She envisions them becoming a non-nation of small nomadic groups that avoided contact with the dominant Scots and early English in order to protect their culture from further adulteration/destruction, comparable to the Gypsies and the Shelta-speaking "Travelers" (Shelta is believed by several modern linguists to contain Pictish elements) but more secretive and hostile in that they were becoming outcast and impoverished curiosities in the very land that they had successfully held for at least four centuries against all invasion. This theory now would explain the folk belief that if you left some bath water ready and accessible upon retiring to bed (or some milk in an available pitcher), the fairies would repay your generosity by performing all kinds of maintenance chores around the house or farm, no matter how daunting. As many city people have learned after a few holidays of camping in the wild, children and everyone can become very dirty very quickly when deprived of running water; hence the appreciation of an indoor bath. Folklore says that the most common error that a mortal makes that invariably drives away all fairy "helpers" is to directly acknowledge their presence and their help, the worst possible case being to offer them some normal clean clothes as a gift for their labor. Such a gift is always greeted with fury and the permanent loss of fairy society. Such behavior becomes easily understandable if we look at the fairies according to the above theory. For a people who faces dire poverty, the harsh elements, constant hunger, and a historically hostile or deadly population of conquerors on every side all for the sake of pride in one's cultural heritage, any interaction, especially a reliant or "begging for charity" interaction, with the dominant population must be extremely humiliating; hence the insult of having the charity openly acknowledged. And then, to be expected to put away one's own clothing, however shabby, to dress in the clothes of the conquerors would truly be adding insult to injury -- comparable, perhaps, to asking a Jew to wear swastika clothes.
3. I have recently come upon a strikingly odd bit of information regarding a similar supernatural black statue of an ancient king. For, it is told in the Middle English Life of Alexander how the gods had made a black statue of Alexander the Great's "real father" that would magically preserve him and eventually bring him back to his homeland to return to his throne, no matter how long that might take to be accomplished. But, in this text and all the medieval legendary "Lifes" of Alexander, the "real father" was not Phillip of Macedon but instead Nectanebus, last native pharoah of Egypt and reputedly the greatest sorcerer of all the pharoahs who ever lived. The story tells that he unexpectedly fled Egypt in disguise with three ships of entourage when he saw that the gods had revoked his ability to defend Egypt by magic. This would correspond to the pharoah Nectanebo II. These things are even more startling when we note that Nectan was the second most common name to occur among the lists of Pictish kings! Further, the Irish legends tell that it was the pharoah Nectanebus (or his ancestor Cingris) who gave his daughter Scota in marriage to an ancestor of the Gaels, and that from her is derived the name of Scotland.
4. Especially the incantation that
finalizaes the casting the circle, ie., "TO SEAL THE CIRCLE":
and the incantation that finalizes or ends the entire session of ceremony, ie., "TO BREAK THE CIRCLE":My knife has drawn the Circle round,
My feet have touched the holy ground,
Let those within the airy wheel
Bear witness to my magic seal,
And those without be turned about
And never hear my fatal shout:
"By which eye?"
Robin Hood, Robin Good,
Son of the Art, Heart of the Art,
All from air, into air,
Let the misty curtain part.
All is over, all is done,
What has been must now be gone,
What was wrought by ancient art
Must merry meet and merry part.