Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts

by Dennis Wheatley

  In Haiti, too, such abominations still take place. There, the most terrible rite ever conceived is performed—the taking of a man’s soul. The selected victim is bewitched and to all appearances dies. After he has been buried his body is dug up and reanimated. He does not know who he is; his memory has been completely obliterated. He has become a Zombie. The wizard who has stricken him puts him to work in the fields. There he labours automatically and tirelessly, day after day, until he really dies from natural causes.

  Zora Huston, a coloured American journalist of repute, carried out an exhaustive investigation into this subject. In her book, Voodoo Gods, she publishes a photograph of a Zombie.

  Article No. 4

  The Black Mass

  Witches’ Sabbaths, in various forms, are still held by people of every race and religion, but the Black Mass is exclusively a perversion of Christianity. It is a religious ceremony as distinct from a Satanic ‘beanfeast’.

  Each Holy Mass is dedicated to a definite ‘intention’; so are Black Masses. It will be recalled that King Albert I of Belgium died in most mysterious circumstances. He was an exceptionally good man, so his premature end was a tragedy for all Europe. Soon after the publication of my book The Haunting of Toby Jug I received a letter from a woman who stated that she had been present at a Black Mass held in Brighton the day before King Albert died, and that it had been held with the intention of bringing about his death. Her account was highly circumstantial and showed her to have a thorough knowledge of the Black Art.

  Incidentally, it was at Brighton that Aleister Crowley was cremated in 1947, and the Black Magic rites that his disciples performed at his funeral led to an inquiry by the Town Council.

  The mummery indulged in during the celebration of a Black Mass might seem rather childish, were it not so horrible and carried out with intense seriousness by those who participate. It is a complete travesty of the Christian ritual and the supreme act in the worship of the Devil.

  The celebrant and his assistant—who is always a woman—wear their vestments back to front, and hitched up so as to expose their sexual parts. The altar is furnished with a broken crucifix standing upside down, and black candles in which brimstone has been mixed with the tallow. The ceremony opens by the congregation reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards.

  Of this particular blasphemy I was an unconscious witness three years ago in a cellar Night Club in Nice. The compere of the cabaret was a haggard-looking man of about sixty, with a shock of white hair. After a husky rendering of some questionable songs, he began to intone. My French is limited almost to reading a restaurant menu, so I asked the friends who had brought me there what he was saying.

  The Paternoster backwards. they replied, shrugging it off as a memory feat in ill taste. But my own belief is that it was a subtle form of ‘invitation’—an indication to anyone present who was interested in Black Magic that the blasphemer could put them in touch with a Satanic Circle.

  A more usual means of recruiting for the Devil is through Spiritualism. I cannot believe that any good ever comes of trying to get in touch with loved ones who have died, although one cannot blame broken-hearted people who attempt to do so; but others attend seances only in search of excitement. At many seances the Black fraternity have what might be termed ‘talent scouts’. They are on the look-out for widows ‘of a certain age’, for wealthy gentlemen in the fifties who have developed a prostate, and for young women who show signs of being neurotic.

  They tell such people that the medium’s ‘act’ is kindergarten stuff, and that they can show them something really thrilling. The older ones of both sexes who accept such invitations soon find their desires satisfied—at the price of having been photographed by hidden cameras and later blackmailed—-the younger, drugged, dragooned and terrified, become the unpaid prostitues of the Satanic Temples—from which hideous bondage they rarely manage to escape.

  At a Black Mass the whole ritual is recited backwards, then Communion wafers are defiled. These wafers are stolen from churches, and during the past twenty years the Press has reported numerous cases of such thefts. Next the sacrifice is offered up, its throat cut, the blood caught in a chalice and drunk in place of Communion wine. Finally the celebrant has intercourse with his assistant on the altar and the congregation, made frenzied by incense containing drugs, throw themselves upon one another in a general orgy.

  To be of maximum effectiveness the Black Mass should be celebrated by an unfrocked priest, and the sacrifice be an unweaned babe. Madame de Montespan, the beautiful mistress of Louis XIV, ordered many Black Masses with the ‘intention’ of retaining the King’s waning love; and, it is said, both gave herself to the infamous Abbé Guibourg, who celebrated them for her, and bought unwanted babies for sacrifice.

  The case of the warrior-sorcerer Gilles de Rais—upon whom the Blue Beard story was founded—permits of no doubt. After his execution the remains of 140 murdered children were found in the dungeons of his castle.

  From fifteenth-century France to twentieth-century Australia is a far cry, but in the past few years I have had at least half a dozen letters reporting Black Masses there; and many readers will have seen in the Press the allegations made against Sir Eugene Goossens. It was stated that the Australian Customs had found in the well-known composer and conductor’s luggage certain items connected with the practice of Black Magic, which he had been asked by friends to bring out to them.

  In our modern world it is not easy to buy infants, or kidnap them without risk of detection; so the usual sacrifice is a cat. Aleister Crowley, so a disciple of his told me, always used cats at his Abbaye de Theleme in Sicily.

  There was, too, the severed paw of a white kitten left on the altar of the Church of St. John the Baptist at Yar-combe, Somerset, in 1948. The church had been broken into and desecrated in various ways, making it evident that a Black Mass had been celebrated there.

  The parallel Pagan rituals of the Carthaginians, the Aztecs and the Druids, all called for human sacrifice, but not necessarily of a child. And there remains unsolved the murder of Charles Walton at Meon Hill, Warwickshire, in 1945, to which no explanation could be found—other than that it was a ritual killing.

  Article No. 5

  THE DEVIL’S SECRET SOCIETIES

  They draw pentacles on the floor, sir, and late at night the men dress up in silk smocks with the signs of the Zodiac on them. The ladies come down wearing masks and red, high-heeled shoes. I’ve seen black candles, too.

  I hadn’t an idea what it was all about. Just thought they were playing charades, or something, until I read your book To the Devil—a Daughter. Of course, I tumbled to it then. There can be no doubt about it, my employers are Satanists.’

  The above is from a letter written to me by a chauffeur. He was employed by wealthy people who lived in a big house in the Eastern Counties. He went on to say that these parties sometimes numbered as many as twenty people, some of whom came down from London in big cars and drove off in them again before dawn.

  This man wrote to me three times. He gave his address, signed his name and offered to meet me in his nearest town. In view of that, and the fact that his letters showed no signs of hysteria, I see no reason to suppose that he was not telling the truth.

  Such gatherings to practise the Black Art undoubtedly take place. There are, of course, phony imitations, organised only for the purpose of lechery followed by blackmail, but genuine Satan worship is still as prevalent today as—shall we say—the dope traffic.

  Magic is a science. It cannot just be picked up. One would have to have a quite exceptional brain to make, unaided, any practical use of Eliphas Levi’s Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic, or the famous Malleus Maleficarum, or even of Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice; let alone of the rare but great classics such as Le Clavicule de Salomon and Grimoire of Pope Honorius.

  Without a sound understanding of the esoteric doctrine it would be futile—if not actually dangerous—to call up evil for
ces, or to rely for protection on a pentacle the Cabalistic signs of which had been chosen by guesswork.

  It follows that the sorcerer or witch must be taught his or her business, just as the priests of any other religion are taught theirs. Therefore, secret societies to hand down the Devil’s mysteries, and to spread his cult as widely as possible among the ignorant, have always existed.

  Their most successful operations have been to infiltrate themselves into the leadership of movements for reform. Many saintly men have led revolts against the abuses of the Church, but their words have been misinterpreted and their work worse than undone by the disciples of evil a generation later.

  An example is cited in the first volume of Sir Winston Churchill’s book, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The Albigenses, a people who in the thirteenth century inhabited a large part of south-western France, were led to believe that ‘life on this earth in the flesh was the work of Satan’, which meant that ‘they were freed from the menaces of the next’. Like a prairie fire immorality and disorder spread through the whole region. The King of France launched a ‘home Crusade’; they were massacred by the thousand, until none were left.

  Then there were the Knights Templar, an Order of Chivalry founded for the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre. Their main base was Malta. In their decadence, perverted by evil successors to their early Grand Masters, initiates had to spit three times on the Cross and swear allegiance to the Devil in the form of a bearded idol named Baphomet.

  Their headquarters in Paris was a palace-fortress called the Temple. King Phillippe IV had their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and many of his Knights arrested there, and brought to trial for heresy. They were burnt at the stake. But the Order swore to be avenged upon the Monarchy of France.

  Five hundred years later it was. From the tower of the Temple Louis XVI was taken to the guillotine. And that the Temple had been chosen for his prison was not chance. The French Revolution was directed by the Masonic Lodge of the Grand Orient, which had inherited the championship of evil.

  It should be clearly understood that Masonry in the British Commonwealth has no connection whatever with the Grand Orient. Continental Masonry is altogether different. its inner circles are the successors of those of the German Illuminati and the Rosicrucians—two other great secret societies whose leaders started them with good intent, but which later fell into evil hands. Even its rank and file members are avowed atheists.

  In the past two hundred years the Grand Orient has brought about many revolutions and in 1902-4, with the French War Minister, General André, in its toils, it succeeded in so weakening the High Command of the Army that France would have proved incapable of resisting invasion.

  It is the Grand Orient, more than all other factors together, which has reduced France, once the most powerful nation in Europe, to her present pitiful condition. But now its activities are being surpassed by those of its fellow revolutionaries and atheists—the Communists. Their founder, Karl Marx, advocated the destruction of the middle classes by every means including violence, and their efforts are world-wide.

  The dual principle of Good and Evil, which is the basis of every religion, must continue in perpetual conflict until the end of time. On the Right hand we have warmth, light, growth and order; on the Left hand darkness, cold, decay and chaos.

  Do the authorities know of any Satanic societies operating in our midst today? I can only tell you that when discussing this matter in 1938 with one of my oldest friends—a man who has spent most of his life in MI.5—he asked me:

  ‘Does “The Shadow” convey anything to you?’

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  He made a wry grimace and said: ‘Believe me, Dennis, I would rather be up against a combination of the most dangerous German and Russian agents I have ever known, than up against “The Brothers of the Shadow”.’

  Article No. 6

  FORETELLING THE FUTURE

  There is a ‘gap in the curtain’ through which some people can see. Of that I have incontestable proof.

  In the 1920s I used occasionally to visit a seer named Dewhirst. He predicted to me the circumstances in which I should meet my wife and even described the way she did her hair.

  In 1932 I went to see him again. Immediately I entered his room he exclaimed: ‘You’ve written a book!’

  That was pretty staggering as I had not seen him for two years and I had only just sent the manuscript of my first novel to an agent. But he went on:

  ‘You are on your right road at last. Someone whose name begins with H will sell millions of your books. They will be read in every country under the sun.’ Then he named a date, seven weeks ahead, on which I would have good news about my book.

  On that date I learned that Walter Hutchinson had taken The Forbidden Territory for publication.

  He used no cards or crystal. Only lesser soothsayers require such aids for tuning in to the occult. And I have never known anyone else with such powers of supernormal vision.

  Fortune-telling of this kind is not evil. But it becomes so when cruelty to animals and/or Satanic rituals are employed. The Ancients examined the entrails of still living birds and beasts; and necromancy entails raising the dead—as that dark tale in the Bible tells us the Witch of Endor did for Saul.

  Whole life forecasts are obtained by casting horoscopes. That means relating the day and hour of birth to the position of the Heavenly bodies. It is a long and complicated process, as the Sun, Moon and Planets are all credited with contributing to a person’s character and influencing his acts. Each, too, has a number, and every person has a number arrived at by a combination of his birth date and the numerological value of the letters forming his name. The ancient belief is that from these lucky and unlucky days and periods can be foretold.

  This possibility cannot be ruled out. There is good reason to believe that plants thrive better when planted under a waxing Moon. It is possible that each Heavenly body emits something in the nature of what we now term ‘cosmic rays’, to which the human mind is sensitive.

  If so, they are governed by Natural Laws not yet fathomed by science, and we regard predictions of this kind as supernatural only because we have no explanation for them.

  Palmistry is definitely a science, although not yet accepted as such. I learned to read hands while serving as a subaltern on the Western Front. With practice anyone can tell character, talents and health tendencies from the shape of the hands, their resilience, the nails and the lines on the palms. But, when it comes to predicting the future, the latter must be regarded as a means of tuning in.

  Disappointment and warped judgement are the price that nearly everyone pays who seeks guidance by having his fortune told—however innocent the means. Because, even apart from fraud, the tendency is always to interpret predictions in the sense one would like them to mean.

  The most famous oracle of ancient times was at Delphi. In a cellar priestesses threw themselves into a trance by inhaling the smoke of burning herbs, then answered questions put to them through a crack in the ceiling. Their utterances usually contained the germ of truth, but were so cryptic that numerous Greek generals were led by them into doing the wrong thing.

  The extraordinary prophecies of Nostradamus, in the sixteenth century, were so obscure that few people understood them when made; yet many of them have since been fulfilled. Among other things, he predicted that in the year 2000 Paris would finally be destroyed by fire sent down from a flock of giant man-made birds coming from the Far East. That must have sounded sheer nonsense 400 years ago. But, were I likely to live that long, you would not find me drinking a champagne cocktail in the Ritz bar there round about the year 2000.

  Perhaps, though, by then the Russians will be occupying Paris, and the atom-belching missiles have been despatched from an Australia which has become the home base of the British people?

  It is so easy to put a wrong construction on prophecies. The stars may foretell that on Wednesday ‘Something is coming your way’. It may
be an old boot at your head.

  And predictions can lead you into trouble. When Dewhirst foretold big money from my book for me, I might have gone on a spending spree. But it was not till a year later that I received more than an advance of £30, so I would have landed myself in a nasty mess.

  The following shows how futile it is to make plans based on information received by occult means. Hitler employed the best astrologers and soothsayers that could be found in the Nazi empire, and never made a move without consulting them. Churchill on the other hand, had no dealings with such people. All War Cabinet decisions were based upon reasoned assessments submitted by our Chiefs of Staff. Yet the British—for a year, alone—held the whole might of Germany at bay.

  A few more words on Magic. No saying is less true than that ‘The Devil looks after his own’. I have never yet met anyone who practised Black, or even Grey, Magic who was not hard up.

  Finally: should you ever have reason to believe that you or yours have come into the orbit of malignant occult forces, do not hesitate to consult your parson or priest. They will not laugh. And should you ever be confronted with an evil manifestation, have no fear. Pray for help. It will immediately be given to you. Make the Sign of the Cross and ‘thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night’.

  STORY XVIII

  The word ‘Stalingrad’ will remain emblazoned in the annals of Russian military history for all time. It was the Russians’ greatest victory since the destruction of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in the terrible retreat from Moscow one hundred and thirty years earlier. At least, we might say that. But would the Russians? They might count an earlier defeat of their enemies at Stalingrad—then called Tzaritsyn—in 1918, an even greater achievement; for the odds against them were just as great and, but for that victory, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would have been destroyed in its infancy.