Taylor Caldwell’s gods and Terry Pratchett’s elves

Taylor Caldwell and Terry Pratchett wrote very different types of books, but they both touched on the subject of humans as playthings of evil and sadistic supernatural beings.

They describe one aspect of this phenomenon in much the same way, although they use different words and blame different paranormal entities.

From Taylor Caldwell’s Romance of Atlantis:

“...the gods amuse themselves by tormenting us. They fire us with thirst, then give us stagnant water with which to quench that thirst. They endow the sensitive with majestic desires, with yearnings for beauty, with radiant spirits with which they might enjoy glorious things, and then let these unhappy wretches eat out their hearts in unsatisfied longings.“

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Lords and Ladies contains some warnings about elves. I quoted him in an article about energy vampires. Here is a relevant extract:  

“All they can give is gold that melts away in the morning. They make us want what we can't have, and what they give us is worth nothing and what they take is everything and all that is left for us is the cold hillside and emptiness and the laughter of the elves.”

Being tormented by unsatisfied longings, being made to want what they can’t have and being left empty and desolate happens to people in this world too. What the two authors say above will seem spot on to them, a perfect description of what happened to them and how they feel about it.

Taylor Caldwell’s Atlantean gods, who sound more like demons to me, can’t be blamed for this misery in our world, nor can Terry Pratchet’s malevolent Discworld elves.

Is this suffering just a part of life for certain types of people, divine discontent and all that, or are sinister unseen influences at work in our world too?

103 years of John Buchan’s Greenmantle

Last year was the 103rd anniversary of the publication of John Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps; 2019 is the 103rd anniversary of the first appearance of the sequel, the classic spy thriller Greenmantle.

This book was written partly as propaganda and in the hope that it would help to bring America into the First World War.

The first instalment of this exciting adventure story with a wonderful title and a ‘man with a mission on the run in enemy territory’ scenario appeared in the magazine Land and Water in July 1916, and the entire story was published in book form later that year.

Greenmantle was a great success. It is still very popular, all the more because of current events in the Middle East. However, a radio dramatisation was dropped from the BBC’s schedule in 2005 for containing ‘unsuitable and sensitive material’.

Greenmantle is my favourite John Buchan book. It is an old friend. I have already mentioned it briefly in an article about Robert. A. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, and I covered the spying aspect in articles about energy vampires and John Buchan's fellow author of exciting adventure stories, Rafael Sabatini.

The best of Greenmantle

It is difficult to think of anything more or something new and original to say about this enthralling story with its excitement, adventure, danger and double dealing.

Greenmantle has much to offer its readers. It has educational background information; it has moving scenes and amusing scenes, and there is some material that has a wider application.

L. M. Montgomery and the compulsion to read and write

I have found some more significant quotations from Lucy Maud Montgomery. What she has to say about reading and writing, both as herself and through her characters, is of particular interest. She could be speaking for many people of her kind.

Compulsive reading

 “I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.” 

From L.M. Montgomery’s personal journals 1899

“We have sent for a lot of new books for our Literary Society library here and when they come I’m simply going on a spree. I shall read all night and all day. I’m a book-drunkard, sad to say, and though I earnestly try to curb my appetite for reading I never met with much success.”

From L.M. Montgomery’s letter of March 1905

Me too. All my life I have been unable to resist this temptation.

‘Book addict’ or ‘reading addict’ is another way of putting it, although there is nothing of the need to take more and more to achieve less and less.

“I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.”

From The Selected Journals Of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 3: 1921-1929

This is all spot on.

Not only are there not enough hours in the day to do all the reading some of us would like, there are not enough years in our lives. We are even more spoiled for choice now than L. M. Montgomery was then.

The two worlds of L. M. Montgomery

Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, best known for her Anne of Green Gables series, has recently become a person of interest.

She will eventually be the subject of a longer article. In the meantime, here are two quotations from her that describe the two worlds that some people live in. It was these quotations that made me decide to investigate L. M. Montgomery, her life and her works: 

“I grew up out of that strange, dreamy childhood of mine and went into the world of reality. I met with experiences that bruised my spirit - but they never harmed my ideal world. That was always mine to retreat into at will. I learned that that world and the real world clashed hopelessly and irreconcilably; and I learned to keep them apart so that the former might remain for me unspoiled.

I learned to meet other people on their own ground since there seemed to be no meeting place on mine. I learned to hide the thoughts and dreams and fancies that had no place in the strife and clash of the market place.

I found that it was useless to look for kindred souls in the multitude; one might stumble on such here and there, but as a rule it seemed to me that the majority of people lived for the things of time and sense alone and could not understand my other life. So I piped and danced to other people's piping - and held fast to my own soul as best I could.” 

From My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. Macmillan from L.M. Montgomery

So she too was faced with an unaccommodating, often incomprehensible and sometimes unbearable real world, and she too was able to escape to the inner world of the imagination.

Some afterthoughts about August Strindberg’s occult battles

I have had a few afterthoughts about the previously mentioned occult battles involving August Strindberg and his ‘friends’.

As described in the second article in the secret friend series, the theosophist made many threats when Strindberg refused to obey orders. In return, Strindberg threatened to use occult powers of his own. He warned his friend that what happened to someone who had tried to interfere with Strindberg’s destiny back in Sweden some years earlier could happen to him too.

Strindberg gives some details of his earlier encounter with this other man who, just as the secret friend would later do, tried to impose his will on Strindberg from a position of superiority.

I can see some common elements in his dealings with these two men. Some of my comments on Strindberg’s relationships with his mystery man and other people are relevant here too.

First approaches and negative responses

It was the other man who made the first move. Strindberg tells us:

“I received a letter from a friend of my youth inviting me and my children to stop with him for a year, he made no mention of my wife. This letter, with its affected style, its corrections and omissions, seemed to betray some hesitation on the part of the writer in the choice of the reasons which he alleged for his invitation. As I suspected some trap, I declined the offer in a few non-committal polite phrases.”

This reminds me of what happened years later when Strindberg received the first letter from his secret friend. He took offence at its tone and sent a discouraging reply.

A few words about some fictional elves and ghosts

There are a few similarities between the elves in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books and the ghosts in fantasy writer Jonathan Stroud’s wonderful Lockwood & Co. series.

Terry Pratchett’s elves have no redeeming qualities; they are vicious, cruel, malevolent and dangerous to humans. I have quoted some of the things that he says about them in an article featuring energy vampires .

Jonathan Stroud says similar things about his ghosts. They are malevolent and dangerous to the living. There is nothing good to say about them.

Terry Pratchett’s elves enter the world through gaps in the defences, through what could be described as weak points in the barrier between Fairyland and the Discworld; the ghosts too enter via windows or portals, spots where the barrier between this world and the next has grown thin.

Both the elves and the ghosts cause their victims to experience terrible feelings; they may even lose the will to live.

It takes the Discworld witches to deal successfully with the elves; in the alternative London of the Lockwood series, only children and teenagers with certain psychic talents are able to detect, deal with and destroy the ghosts.

While his stories are very amusing, Terry Pratchett gets serious from time to time and gives some warnings about his elves; it is the same with Jonathan Stroud and his ghosts; the Lockwood books are very funny, but some of the ghost material is very alarming.

Just as Terry Pratchett’s words about elves really resonate, so do some of the chilling things that Jonathan Stroud says about his ghosts.

August Strindberg and some suspicious deaths

August Strindberg’s autobiographical novel Inferno is inspiring post after post. It is full of material relevant to this blog.

It took three articles to cover the story of the relationship between August Strindberg and his secret friend, the man who was determined to make Strindberg admire the works of Madame Blavatsky and become a theosophist.

The relationship operated on three levels: it can be looked at in terms of two men quarrelling and falling out, a cult member attacking a target who refused to be recruited and two black magicians having an occult battle.

There is something more to say the black magic aspect. This article will cover some suspicious deaths that Strindberg mentions in connection with the battle and its aftermath, the battle that took place only in their letters and on other dimensions as they never met in real life.

The first two deaths

Two prominent men just happened to die shortly after something relevant by Strindberg had been published, and the secret friend believed that Strindberg had caused the deaths.

In Strindberg’s own words:

“By a diabolical chance during our paper war, the following incident takes place: L'Initiation publishes an article by me which criticises the current astronomical system. A few days after its appearance Tisserand, the head of the Paris observatory, dies. In an access of mischievous humour I trace a connection between these two things, and mention also that Pasteur died the day after I published Sylva Sylvarum.

My friend, the theosophist, does not know how to take a joke, and being superstitious above the average, and perhaps, more deeply initiated in black magic than I, gives me clearly to understand that he regards me as a wizard.”

So Strindberg thought that the two deaths were just coincidences, but his secret friend blamed him for them. When it comes to the attribution of sinister occult powers, it is a case of the pots calling the kettles black. The two men really did deserve each other!