Our Gods Wear Spandex Page 7

  Early dime novels fictionalized real-life characters like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Buffalo Bill and real-life cowgirl Calamity Jane. The rise of bandits like Billy the Kid and the James Gang, and the subsequent exploits of the ruthless Pinkerton Detective Agency, raised the prestige of lawmen and detectives in the American imagination and made them regulars in the popular press. One early dime-novel hero was Frank Merriwell, a wholesome schoolboy who moonlighted as a detective. Another was clean-living Nick Carter, who first appeared in New York Weekly in 1886 and later became a major pulp-fiction star.

  The rise of this new mass medium created a new class of writers that specialized in the down-market fiction. The new junk aesthetic—violent, garish, racy, and often racist—found its apotheosis in the 20th century with the rise of comic books. But first, the genre was refined by the hands of master fiction writers—luminaries like Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Bram Stoker, many of whom were fascinated by the occult.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) is perhaps the most important and influential figure in the development of modern genre fiction. Born in Boston to itinerant actor parents, Poe would die young. After being thrown out of the University of Virginia for gambling, he joined the army and was later dishonorably discharged from West Point. Despite this inauspicious beginning, however, Poe displayed a prodigious gift for writing and soon began a career as a literary critic.

  Tragedy haunted Poe throughout his career. His marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin ended in her early death, which critics believe inspired his epic poem The Raven, which was published in 1845. An 1840 short-story collection featured his tale The Fall of the House of Usher, a classic of the gothic horror genre.

  The following year, Poe pioneered the detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which featured the French detective C. Auguste Dupin. His work had a crucial influence on Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who claimed, “Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed…. Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?”47 Poe's work also made a lasting impression on Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and H. P. Lovecraft. Indeed, despite his short and unhappy life, his legacy has had an incalculable influence on almost every writer of genre fiction to follow.

  ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was not only the creator of the most famous fictional detective in the English language, he was also Spiritualism's most prominent advocate. Born in Edinburgh to Irish parents, Doyle was educated at Jesuit-run schools. When he entered university, however, he renounced his parents' faith and became a spiritual tourist, dabbling in Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, and Mormonism. He even became interested in fairies, in 1921 writing a book inspired by the Cottingley fairy photographs called The Coming of the Fairies. Doyle eventually became an opthamologist and was initiated into the Masonic order.

  In 1887, Doyle made his first foray into popular fiction with A Study in Scarlet, which featured the debut of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle eventually wrote sixty stories featuring the aristocratic detective. Intellectually brilliant, a master of disguise, and physically adept in the gentlemanly fighting arts, Holmes was very much a superhero. Such was Holmes' prowess that Doyle felt obliged, in 1893, to create a prototype supervillain named Professor Moriarty who was worthy to act as his nemesis (The Adventure of the Final Problem).

  Following the death of his wife in 1906, and the loss of his son and several other male relatives on the killing fields of the first World War, Doyle turned to Spiritualism for solace. He wrote several books on the subject, including The New Revelation (1918), The Vital Message (1919), and The History of Spiritualism (1926). He became a regular contributor to the Spiritualist magazine, The Light and traveled the world consorting with mediums, contributing money to Spiritualist organizations like the Society for Psychical Research, of which he became a member. He later included Spiritualist themes in his fiction, most notably his 1926 novel The Land of Mists. Such was Doyle's celebrity that he was named Honorary President at the 1925 International Spiritualist Congress in Paris. Upon his death, psychic researcher Harry Price wrote in the Spiritualist magazine Psychic Research: “The passing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle … removes the greatest personality Spiritualism ever possessed—or is ever likely to possess.”48

  JULES VERNE

  The French writer Jules Verne (1828–1905) is a pivotal figure in the history of science fiction. His novels married high adventure and heroic fantasy, and anticipated modern technology and space travel in such detail that some today consider him a prophet. Sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury observes that “we are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.”49

  Verne set out to study law, but found himself fascinated by breakthroughs in science and spent most of his free time reading up on geology, engineering, and astronomy. In 1863, he published his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, which was followed in quick succession by what most consider to be his greatest classics: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1866), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).

  Verne's fictional science is eerily accurate. From the Earth to the Moon tells the story of a group of scientists who devise a cannon capable of sending a capsule to the Moon. The Moon-shots are launched from Florida, not far from Cape Canaveral and, as with the Apollo missions, the returning space craft splashes down in the Pacific Ocean. In 1886, Verne predicted air travel and a militarily imposed new world order in Clipper in the Clouds. His unpublished work, Paris in the 20th Century, written in 1863, foretold steel skyscrapers, bullet trains, automobiles, calculators, and even a precursor to the Internet. Needless to say, the manuscript caused quite a stir when unearthed in 1989. Significantly, Verne is believed to have been a Freemason and to have had contacts with both the Rosicrucians and the Golden Dawn.50

  H. G. WELLS

  A hundred years after they were written, Herbert George Wells' science fiction continues to attract audiences in big-budget Hollywood movies. Born in 1866 in England, Wells grew up poor, but distinguished himself as a brilliant student. At the age of 17, he became a teacher and obtained a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied biology under T. H. Huxley, who was nicknamed “Darwin's Bulldog” for his zealous defense of evolutionary theory. Wells wrote extensively on political and scientific topics before trying his hand at fiction.

  The continuing power and appeal of Wells' fiction lies in its prescience. In 1895, his first novel, The Time Machine, anticipated Einstein's theory of relativity in its portrayal of the breaking of the time barrier. It also offered an inversion of the Vril-ya, presenting a future Earth inhabited by two races: the gentle Eloi who lived above ground, and the bestial cannibalistic Morlocks, who lived beneath it. In 1896, Wells published The Island of Dr. Moreau, which anticipated genetic engineering and recombinant DNA. The following year, he offered a character with a kind of superpower in The Invisible Man. One year later, War of the Worlds became the first popular novel to deal with the theme of interplanetary war, which became a staple topic of superhero comic books.

  The First Men on the Moon (1901) was prophetic in its description of the methodology of space flight and The War in the Air (1908) foresaw the importance of air forces in combat. Wells combined these two themes in his novel The Shape of Things To Come (1933), which was adapted into a remarkably advanced and prophetic film in 1936. Things to Come told of a disastrous world war that plunges Europe into a new Dark Age. Civilization is saved by a cabal of Airmen who go underground during the war and return to impose a new technocratic world order. In the film, the Airman Oswald Cabal (Raymond Massey) proclaims a new order based on the “Freemasonry of Science.” The Airmen are depicted as superheroes and saviors of humanity, and salvation comes in the form of global federalism. “World government had been plain
ly coming for some years,” Wells wrote, “although it had been endlessly feared and murmured against, it found no opposition anywhere.”51 Wells didn't live to see his prediction come true, and was severely disheartened by the Second World War.

  Wells' greatest passion was for the idea of a new world order that offered science as the new religion. He had various contacts with spiritualists like the Theosophists and political radicals like the Fabian Socialists. He soon parted ways with the Fabians, however, and advocated instead an “open conspiracy” of world federalists. In 1928, Wells wrote: “The political world of the Open Conspiracy must weaken, efface, incorporate and supersede existing governments…. It will be a world religion.”52 Science fiction was merely Wells' vehicle for popularizing his radical scientific and political ideas. Although he claimed to be an agnostic throughout whole life, books like Things to Come reveal the gods to whom he bowed.

  BRAM STOKER

  One of the best-known Victorian-era occultists was the Irish-born novelist Bram Stoker (1847–1912). Stoker was raised in Dublin and later attended Trinity College. While working in London managing the Lyceum Theatre, Stoker was initiated into both the Golden Dawn and The Societas Rosicruciana. He may also have been a Mason, although this is undocumented.

  Stoker is best known for his classic 1897 novel Dracula, which popularized the myth of the vampire. The novel has become a metaphor unto itself. Stoker portrayed his Count Dracula as a charming aristocrat with a powerful sexual allure, not as a slobbering ghoul. An entire subculture has sprung up around the vampire myth, fueled by American novelist Anne Rice's hijacking of the theme.

  Several stage plays and film adaptations of the novel have been made, and there was also a popular Marvel Comics series in the 1970s called The Tomb of Dracula.

  Although Dracula is Stoker's best-known occult novel, he also wrote two other highly influential works—The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911). The first concerned the possession of a young English girl by the evil spirit of an ancient Egyptian queen. Its theme of spiritual transmigration and Egyptian sorcery arose from Stoker's involvement with groups like the Golden Dawn. The novel became the basis for several film adaptations, the best of which is the 1971 Blood From the Mummy's Tomb. The second was a novel of pagan revanchism that prefigured Lovecraft, with a cult that worships a giant subterranean worm led by aristocratic Lady March. The book was made into a sexually charged Ken Russell film in 1988.

  The gothic atmospheres of Poe, the detective hero of Doyle, the fanciful technologies of Verne, the prescient science of Wells, and the forthright spiritualism of Stoker would all come together in the middle of the next century to provide a fictional backdrop for the superheroes of the “pulps.”

  47 “Address before the Poe Centennial Celebration Dinner of the Author's Society, March 1909,” taken from Frank S. Frederick, The Poe Encyclopedia (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 103.

  48 Harry Price, “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Obituary,” Psychic Research, August, 1930.

  49 Ray Bradbury's foreword to William Butcher, Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Self: Space and Time in the “Voyages extraordinaires” (New York: Macmillan and St Martin's Press, 1990), p. 8.

  50 Verne's contacts are explored in Michel Lamy's The Secret Message of Jules Verne: Decoding His Masonic, Rosicrucian, and Occult Writings (Rochester, VT: Destiny, 2007).

  51 H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (New York: Corgi, 1979 reprint), p. 327.

  52 W. Warren Wagar, The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p. 122.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE PULPS

  The “pulps,” so named for the cheap grade of paper on which they were printed, were the direct descendants of the penny dreadfuls and dime novels. In fact, the term “pulp fiction” has come to define low-quality genre fiction in general. Comics, B-movies, and genre-driven TV shows all have thematic roots in the pulp magazines.

  Frank Munsey is generally credited with inventing the “pulp-wood magazine” at the end of the 19th century. Munsey came to New York from Maine to enter the rapidly expanding publishing market. His first offering was an adventure-story magazine called The Golden Argosy (later, simply Argosy) that first appeared in December 1882. Dime novels were still the preferred format for adventure stories, but pulps had the advantage of qualifying for less-costly second-class postage. The new format evolved quickly to a standard 128-page magazine, with a stapled or glued binding and a coated-stock cover. The early pulps generally featured Western and detective stories, with a smattering of war or high-adventure offerings.

  Several publishers entered the burgeoning market, among them Street and Smith, Popular Publications, Culture Publications, and the A. A. Wyn Group (later renamed Ace). Two early pulp firms later became important comic publishers—Dell, founded by George Delacorte, and Fawcett, run by Wilford and Roscoe Fawcett. The pulps laid the groundwork for the comic boom by spawning organized “fandom.” Fans formed clubs around favorite titles, genres, and heroes. The Letters pages in the pulps became the de facto clubhouses of these early fans. Later, fans of the sci-fi pulps formed influential groups like the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, which helped forge an alliance between pulp fiction and the occult.

  Pulp publishers compensated for poor paper and printing quality by using colorful, eye-catching cover illustrations. Cover artists like Virgil Finlay, Margaret Brundage, Frank R. Paul, Frank Kelly Freas, and H. J. Ward became stars in their own right, able to sell a magazine solely on the basis of their illustrations. Editors often commissioned a painting first and hired a writer to dream up a story around it.

  The pulps did not emerge in a vacuum. American popular culture had always been at odds with its Puritan heritage. In 1919, the 18th Amendment prohibited the sale of alcohol in an attempt to clamp down on the rapid expansion of social and cultural liberalism that followed the First World War. The Volstead Act, as it came to be known, was answered by an explosive reaction that found expression in jazz, illicit booze, and sexually explicit fiction. By default, the pulps became a medium for all types of forbidden expression, including occult themes. Many pulp writers, like Talbot Mundy, were actively involved in the occult; many others were fascinated by it.53 Pulp heroes all tended to live on the edge of cultural correctness and seemed to delight in testing social norms.

  HARD-BOILED

  One of the earliest pulp heroes was the aristocratic detective Nick Carter, who first appeared in Nick Carter Weekly in 1886. Carter became the top sleuth for Street and Smith. His yarns usually involved rescuing some posh young deb from the depredations of mobsters, sickos, perverts, and cultists. Carter survived in one incarnation or another into the 1960s, when he became a James Bond-type spook. Street and Smith launched Detective Story Magazine in 1915, which was so popular it earned itself a weekly release schedule and spawned a host of clones.

  In 1920, Black Mask, one of the most important detective pulps, debuted—created, strangely enough, by the legendary social critic H. L. Mencken. Black Mask heralded the arrival of the hard-boiled detective—bare-knuckled heroes like Carroll John Daly's Race Williams—and paved the way for the more aggressive superheroes of DC Comics. Dashiell Hammett's classic Sam Spade novella The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler's early Philip Marlowe yarns both appeared in it.54

  TARZAN

  The first true superstar to emerge from the pulps, however, was Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan, who first appeared in the October 1912 issue of All Story. Tarzan was actually young Lord Greystoke, scion of an aristocratic family marooned in the jungle after a mutiny at sea. Tarzan, whose name means “Skin-Boy,” becomes the surrogate son of a gorilla named Kala, whose own baby had died. The Tarzan series was an enormous hit, spawning over eighty-eight film adaptations, starting with a series of silent films in 1918. The definitive Tarzan film series began in 1932 with Tarzan the Ape-Man, featuring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller in the title role.55<
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  Tarzan has also been a major comic character since 1931. Both Marvel and DC have had a crack at him, among several others. Alan Moore has included him (under a different name) in his Victorian-era superhero series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

  Burroughs reportedly based Tarzan on the myth of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. He presented Tarzan as an idealized man, a noble savage free of the corruption of civilization—almost, in fact, Christlike. Burroughs inserted religious and esoteric themes in many of his other characters as well, and occult themes are woven throughout the Tarzan stories. Artist Hal Foster explicitly introduced themes from the ancient mysteries into his Tarzan newspaper strip in the famed “Egyptian Saga” storyline, in which the hero encounters a “lost world” of ancient Egyptian descendants. An injured Tarzan is mystically restored by a priestess of Venus, who believes him to be an incarnation of Thoth, god of the apes. He undergoes an occult initiation in the temple of Isis, passes a series of tests to prove his kinship to the sacred beasts, and is finally greeted by the Egyptians as an avatar of the god.56 Foster's next strip, Prince Valiant, still runs to this day. A knight in the mythical court of King Arthur, Valiant's mentor is Merlin, history's most famous wizard. Of course, the Arthurian mythos was of particular interest to 19th-century occultists.

  GLADIATORS: THE PULP SUPERHEROES

  The Thirties were a miserable time for America. Urban violence, mass immigration, the Depression, and political radicalism at home and abroad kept Americans in a state of fear and anxiety. Prohibition empowered organized crime. Corruption and graft compromised local and state authorities. The tentacles of the syndicates reached deep into labor and municipal unions, social institutions, and even into the Catholic Church. As the worries of the American public grew, so did the need for comforting fantasies of powerful, decisive men who could set things right. Pulp heroes got more powerful and more outlandish as publishers competed for readers. As Les Daniels wrote, “the rise of superheroes like the Shadow, Doc Savage, Spider and the others coincided with the downfall of public figures in the Depression.”57