Patrick Bernauw

Three magical writers mysteries

April 16, 2009 |  0 comments
Image Credit: Midjourney Patrick Bernauw: Gustav Meyrinck and the Golem - Assumption Eve, August 1892, in Prague. Student Gustav Meyrinck, 24 years old, was standing at his table with a gun in his hand. He was determined to shoot himself. But then, he heard the scratch of someone putting a tiny booklet under his door. The book was called “Afterlife”. Gustav Meyrinck was shocked by this weird en dramatic “synchronicity” and started to study “all things occult” - theosophy, Kabbala, Eastern mysticism. He lived to be a fascinating fantasy author and member of the famous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Arthur Machen, who created the Angels of Mons, was a member of this order too!).

His masterpiece was the novel Der Golem (1915), in which Gustav Meyrinck has left it to the reader to decide whether Athanasius Pernath, an artist from Prague, is writing down his hallucinations or gradually turning into a golem: an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter.

Fact or fiction, that's the question… Creating “animate beings” from “inanimate matter” was what the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were doing… Read all about the Golem of Prague here.

Do you have a copy of The Necronomicon for me?
The Necromomicon, or “The Book of Dead Names”, was originally called “Al Azif”, an Arabic word meaning “nocturnal sound, howling of demons”. The book was written by the half-crazed Arab Abdul Alhazred, who visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis, and who worshipped demons like Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. He died suddenly and in a mysterious way in 738. In 950, “The Book of Dead Names” was translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas. This version impelled some experimenters to terrible invocations, before being suppressed and burnt in 1050 by the patriarch Michael, who died in 1059. The Necronomicon was translated into Latin by Olaus Wormius and into English by the magician John Dee (1527-1609).

In the 20th century, the Necronomicon was often listed for sale in book store newsletters or entries in library card catalogues. Horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft stated that The Widener Library at Harvard had a copy, and the catalog entry indeed asked potential readers “to inquire at desk”. The university library of Tromsø, Norway, also has a copy, published in 1994, but this document is listed as “unavailable”.Now, the truth is that the Necronomicon is an entirely fictional book, invented by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, first mentioned in a short story written in 1922, and inspiring a lot of colleague horror and fantasy writers. But until today, many readers believe it to be a real work. Booksellers and librarians still receive many requests for it, also because pranksters have listed the Necronomicon in rare book catalogues, or smuggled a card for it into, for example, the Yale University Library. The thin line between fact and fiction got totally blurred in the late 1970s when a book that was supposed to be a new translation of the real Necronomicon was published and sold 800,000 copies. According to the blurb, it was “the most dangerous Black Book known to the Western World”.

Listen here to a horror soundscape, inspired by Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. And Burn the Witch, Elizabeth Selwyn is an audio drama, based upon a horror movie again inspired by a story of H.P. Lovecraft.

Was Marie Rogêt murdered by E.A. Poe?
In July 1841, in Castle Point, Hoboken, the dead body of a beautiful brunette was found. The name of the 21 year old girl was Mary Cecilia Rogers. She had been horribly outraged and brutally violated. In the following year, Edgar Allan Poe's “Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was published in Snowden's Ladies Companion. “The extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public,” he wrote, “will be recognized by all readers in the late murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, at New York.” After his “article” about “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, Poe wrote again a true crime story, with his “friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin” solving the mystery.

Poe situated his story in Paris and changed the Hudson in the Seine and Mary Rogers in Marie Rogêt, but he indeed followed the facts of the murder of Mary Rogers and argued that the girl was murdered by an individual, not by a gang, and that this person was well-dressed, had a “dark complexion” and was “a young naval officer, notorious for its excesses”. At this point, the author who was known for his brilliant pointes, ended his “article” with a cheap trick: the publisher found it inappropriate to reveal the identity of the man with the dark complexion, who was once admitted to the military academy of West Point and got fired because of his excesses, and who could only be Edgar Allan Poe himself. Poe had probably met Mary Cecilia Rogers in a bookseller shop on Broadway, near the tobacco-store where she worked. In 1837, Edgar Poe rented a few rooms in Manhattan, in a house that belonged to the famous bookseller William Gowans. His shop on Broadway, near the tobacco-store of Anderson, became Poe's office and meeting place.

In his famous poem The Raven, Poe dealt with his obsession with death and destruction. In his “spirit of the perverse”, the death of a beautiful and beloved woman gave him “poetic chills”. And some years after the murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, he was looking for a “Mary” on the scene of the crime… Full story here.

More Magical Writers Mysteries!
Copyright by Patrick Bernauw, A Haunted World

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