I find Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood & Co. series well worth reading for the stories alone. Material that inspires commentary is a bonus!
The article about Stroud's predatory ghosts does not cover everything of interest and relevance in the Lockwood books. There is some material that makes me think of cults, and there are people and other entities who use supernatural powers to make themselves appear to be angels when they are really demons.
This article has something to say about a sinister doctor called Edmund Bickerstaff, who is of particular interest because he has some of the characteristics that are often found in cult leaders.
Dr. Edmund Bickerstaff is a character in The Whispering Skull, the second book in the Lockwood series. He was involved with occult research and experimentation; he pursued forbidden knowledge. After years of unwholesome activities such as grave robbing and necromancy, he was believed to have come to a horrible end in 1877. The fate of his remains was unknown until the present day, when his gravestone was unexpectedly found in London's Kensal Green Cemetery.
Dr. Bickerstaff's ghost is likely to be very dangerous, so Anthony Lockwood and his fellow psychical investigation agents George Cubbins and Lucy Carlyle are retained to supervise the excavation of the grave and deal with the remains.
Their discoveries and adventures while on the case make fascinating reading, but it is the effect that Dr. Bickerstaff has on people that is most relevant here.
Cult leaders often promise everything and deliver little or nothing. They can be pied pipers who lead their sleep-walking, spellbound followers to disaster; they can be sirens who lure people to their doom. Dr. Bickerstaff is one such leader. He operated on a relatively small scale when alive, but had a lethal effect on his followers.
One of Dr. Bickerstaff's followers, someone who was reduced to a terrible state, wrote this about him in her Confessions:
“Still I hear that terrible voice, that soothing, persuasive instrument that made us all puppets of his will. Ah! Fools that we were to follow him! He promised us the world, promised us enlightenment! Yet he led us to ruin and the brink of madness. Because of him I have lost everything!...
Yes, we hated and feared him. Yet his voice was honey. He mesmerized us all with talk of his great Project, of the wondrous Device that might be made if we had the stomach for the work.“
These words apply not just to Dr. Bickerstaff and his occult activities but also to any number of cult leaders of various types with very different affiliations, goals and projects. They do have some kind of hypnotic power over their followers and their followers do indeed often lose everything, sometimes even their lives. The Maharishi Yogi is just one example of such leaders.
This follower also wrote:
“His darkness was in him always...in that savage rage he unleashed at the merest slight.“
I found something similar in a very good online article that lists the qualities of dangerous cult leaders:
“When criticized he tends to lash out not just with anger but with rage.“
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/spycatcher/201208/dangerous-cult-leaders
The ghost of another of Dr. Bickerstaff's followers describes his leader as a great man, a visionary; he also says something that has a wider application:
“That’s what the master does. He takes the weak and feeble-minded and bends them to his will.”
This is very similar to something else that I found online:
“As...portrayed in the media, religious cults do nothing more than persuade weak, feeble-minded individuals to give up all of their wealth and worldly possessions.”
Lucy Carlyle says this about Bickerstaff:
“A stupid, obsessive man who, to make himself feel important, had liked to dress in eerie robes. Who had sought answers to things he shouldn’t know, but had been too scared to look himself. Who had used others – both in life, and now in death. Was his voice hypnotic? Yeah – perhaps to some, but not to me.”
Obsessiveness and robe wearing are often found in cult leaders. Using other as tools to achieve their goals is common too. Robin Jarvis's witchmaster Nathaniel Crozier is another example of this:
“He has always worked through others and rarely risked himself.”
Lucy Carlyle says this about the beguiling voice of Bickerstaff's ghost:
“And all the while we fought, the voice of Edmund Bickerstaff was calling, calling in my mind – urging me to look, promising me my heart’s desire. It was the same old message. He had no other.”
Lucy sees Bickerstaff as he is and finds the strength to resist his call where others do not.
Dr. Bickerstaff's ghost is just one of the many that Anthony Lockwood and his colleagues are hired to deal with.
Just as Robin Jarvis's Alice Boston sees through and resists the witch Roselyn Crosier but not the hypnotic powers of her husband Nathaniel, Lucy Carlyle resists the malign hypnotic influence of the dead Dr. Bickerstaff but not that of the glamorous ghost she encounters while on another case. This was covered in the previous article, but there is still more to come about Lucy's experiences in The Empty Grave.
