While re-reading her biography recently, I saw something that prompted me to take another look at her novel The Shadow of a Sorcerer. I noticed a lot more relevant material this time around and made some new connections, so there is something to add to what I have previously written about this book.
First, what I saw that gave rise to this
article:
Stella Gibbons and Aleister Crowley
When I first read Out of the Woodshed by
Reggie Oliver, I was mainly interested in the details of Stella Gibbons’s early
life. Much of the other information didn’t register, and I overlooked two references
to infamous people. This time around, their names jumped out at me. One was Adolf Hitler - his connection with Stella Gibbons has been described elsewhere - and the other was the occultist Aleister Crowley.
Her nephew tells us that Stella Gibbons once saw Crowley outside the Café Royal in central London. I don’t know the date, but guess that it was in the 1930s.
Her impression was unfavourable. When her
nephew asked hopefully if this was because of Crowley’s air of supernatural
malignancy, she said no, what repelled her was that he had the look of a man
who was desperately trying to attract attention.
This is spot on. Such people have forfeited their inner sources of sustenance and are often disconnected and empty, so they need to live off others to fill the void. They may be prisoners and hostages too, desperate for someone or something to save them.
After reading about this encounter, I
remembered Esmé Scarron, the evil occultist in The Shadow of a Sorcerer, and
wondered whether Stella Gibbons had used Crowley as the inspiration for this
character. Her book was published in 1955, so there were many years after the
sighting in which she could have talked to people and done some
research.
Whatever the source, Esmé Scarron is a person of great interest.
A first look at the sorcerer
Esmé Scarron is around 60 years old, but could pass for 20 years younger. He is tanned with a shock of silver hair; he wears expensive clothes. He often looks warm and vital; he can appear charming and sympathetic.
He is a very rich man. He owns several houses including a palazzo in Venice; he has an impressive motor launch called Lorelei and a huge Cadillac. He associates mainly with his own kind: immensely wealthy grand people. His social circle contains some high-born people, Italian royalty for example.
Scarron is also extremely clever and very
learned. His houses are full of books. He devotes several hours each day to his
magnum opus The Life of Paracelsus. This
is to be his life’s work; he has spent seven years on it so far and hopes that
it will become the standard reference book.
Paracelsus is Scarron’s guiding star. He has
a house by the lake in the little Austrian town of Villach where Paracelsus
lived as a boy, and he shares his idol’s ardent interest in herbs and alchemy.
A closer look at the sorcerer
The impressive attributes listed above make Esmé Scarron seem like someone to be respected and admired. After all, his fortune, his possessions and his intellectual achievements are real and not pretended or exaggerated. He is one of the elite, a top person, a great scholar, far above the human herd in many ways.
Some of his other qualities put him at a very
low level though.
He is a liar - sometimes by omission - and a
hypocrite. He conceals information and misleads people.
For example, when asked whether he has any children he says that he had a son who died on the Russian front. This elicits much sympathy, which is completely undeserved as he drove his son into running away to the war by his ill treatment. He does not tell them that he also has a daughter. She is a mess of a person; she is in a terrible state, mentally and physically, because of the way he treats her.
He is divorced, something very serious in the 1950s, and says it was all ex-his wife’s fault that his marriage ended in hatred. She is an awful person, but he is even worse. The way he treated their children affected her badly too. One of his other victims later says that no woman could bear him or live with him.
Scarron is selfish and unscrupulous. He pays
a lot of attention to a girl of eighteen because he thinks that she will fill a
void in his life. He plans to get her under his spell before she discovers how
old he is. He doesn’t think about whether marriage with him is in her best interests, or of the corrupting effect that he and his circle will have on her.
He is good at manipulation. He cleverly
appeals to her vanity; he can see that her secret ambition is to be thought
interesting rather than be admired for her looks, so he engages her in long
discussions about poetry. He assumes the role of master and treats her as his
pupil, educating her about Paracelsus and alchemy and showing her book after
book about magic, witches & demons and other associated topics from his
extensive library. She is very impressed, but she listens to it all with a
respectful lack of comprehension. Scarron is not a very good judge of
character, at least in this case.
Wishful thinking, getting the wrong
impression of her level of maturity and mistaking her short spell of
introspection for profundity all cause him to see this girl as a suitable disciple
and someone who will assist him in his work.
He reads too much into the fact that she takes an interest in Paracelsus. While Paracelsus and his works appeal to her romantic imagination - for a while - she is no scholar. She is lacking in the necessary intellectual curiosity and single-minded dedication.
She is actually rather an ordinary young
woman.
The sorcerer’s occult powers
So far, Scarron has done little that can be
attributed to sorcery; it is all in within the capability of most people, and
many men who lack integrity and an ethical sense have said and done similar
things. However, Scarron also makes use of a
universal force that he is able to channel.
When Meg Lambert, the girl he is pursuing,
goes out to read her lesson books under the trees by the lake, she has the
feeling that she is being watched. She is: Scarron is using his powers to
remotely stalk and spy on her. He influences her from a distance before she has
even met him: she becomes obsessed with seeing inside his house, which is
visible from across the lake.
He reads her mind on a few occasions; he
knows from this that she would love to see inside a palazzo and offers to show
her his one.
Meg and her mother are staying at a guest
house/language school in Paracelsus’s town of Villach. Because of the currency
regulations of the time, they have been able to bring only a little money with
them. They even have to think twice before buying themselves some coffee. This
means that Meg appreciates the luxuries and good times that Scarron is able to
give her. He takes her and her fellow students to a very expensive restaurant
and gives her rides in his boat and his car. This reminds me of Zachary Grey and
the way he uses his money and lifestyle to influence girls.
Meg is flattered by Scarron’s attention and enjoys the taste of the high life that he gives her. She is grateful for this and the enrichment of her social and intellectual life - for a while.
There is nothing unusual about men using their money and possessions to influence girls, but when he senses that Meg is no longer tempted by the romantic, exciting lifestyle that she might enjoy if she married him Scarron changes tactics. He uses his powers to invade her mind and bombard her with waves of sorrow and sadness. If status and money and great scholarship won’t do the trick, pity might.
Powers to harm
Some black magicians are said to be able to strike their enemies down remotely, causing them to become ill, have accidents or even die.
Esme Scarron is cruel and malevolent. He uses the force to get back at people he sees as enemies. As mentioned in the previous article about magic in Stella Gibbons’s books, when some young soldiers make fun of him, he gives them a quick look and one of them soon becomes very ill.
He gives it out but hates it when he gets it back. Meg Lambert’s mother often senses that he is mocking her, but he is enraged when someone laughs at him because of his rather strange appearance. He causes the man to have very bad back pain then gets him sent to a concentration camp, where he becomes very ill.
Scarron abuses his herbal knowledge too. He
doses his wife and daughter with his distillations. He prescribes for his friends and one or two
go crazy or die. He says he gives them
the concoctions to cure them, but he really does it for experimental purposes.
He adds insult to injury in the case of his daughter by giving her medicine to
cure the problems caused by his previous prescriptions.
Esmé Scarron is a very nasty piece of work
indeed.
Much more to come
Still to come are more connections and some material about cults and energy vampires. There is also the story of how his daughter and ex-wife sabotage Esmé Scarron’s plans. They betray him out of revenge for what he has done to them in the past.
