The Curse of Macbeth

Don’t mention Shakespeare’s “Unmentionable Play”, it will bring bad luck to the cast!… On the opening night in 1606, the actor who would play Lady Macbeth became mysteriously ill and Shakespeare had to take over the part. King James I, who had ordered the play, wasn’t very amused with the performance. In fact, it was a disaster. Fifty year had to pass before “that play” was performed again! 

In 1849, more than 30 people were killed in a riot at the Astor Place Opera House, where “The Unmentionable” was playing. In a 1937 productionof the Old Vic in London, Lady Macbeth got nearly killed in a car crash and her husband, Laurence Olivier, almost died when a weight from the stage lights came down. The founder of the theatre had a heart attack during the opening night and when a member of the audience was hit by Olivier’s sword, he also got a fatal heart attack. But a wartime production with John Gielgud may has the record of heart attacks. After the war, in an open-air production, Charlton Heston got badly injured while his castle came down, burning as planned. But then the wind blew flames and smoke into the audience, causing a stampede… And these are just a few examples.

The curse seems caused by the three witches in “that play”. In his desire for authenticity, Shakespeare used genuine black magic recipes and incantations. The whole story is here.

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… The whole story is 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.

The Angels of Mons, created by Arthur Machen

One of the greatest legends of the Great War was created in August 1914, on the second day of the British retreat from the Belgian city of Mons. The British Expeditionary Force soldiers were being heavily pressed by a German army that outnumbered them twice. It seemed impossible to survive, but then, suddenly, Saint George and his mysterious 15th century band of bowmen appeared, and they held back the advancing Germans.

A Fleet Street reporter, the horror writer Arthur Machen, published this report of an eye witness. The article was written so graphically that readers took it literally and a few weeks later,  British soldiers found themselves fighting side by side with an army of angels, “clad in white with flaming swords”.  The legend of the Angels of Mons was born. Only, Saint George was never seen in Mons, and there never had been 15th century band of bowmen on the battlefield. It was a story, a piece of metaphorical imagery, Arthur Machen had invented.

But then, in 1930, there was this former member of the Imperial German Intelligence Services, who declared that British troops in 1914 really might have seen some Angels of Mons… Read the whole story here.

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.

The Disappearance of François Villon

In June 1545, poet and vagabond François Villon was sitting on a bench in the Rue Saint Jacques, Paris. His girlfriend Isabeau was with him. François was terribly in love with her, but so was this priest… who suddenly appeared, drew a dagger and tried to stab François. The poet threw a stone to the head of his jealous rival and the priest died of his injuries.  Villon was banned from Paris, he could not continue his life as a teacher and he was forced to sing his ballads in taverns to survive.

In 1456, in trouble again, he wrote what is now known as   the Petit Testament or the Legacy. That year, on Christmas, 500 gold crowns got stolen out of the chapel of the Collège de Navarre.  The police suspected a gang of student-robbers and one of them accused Villon, who was absent, of being the leader of the gang. For four years, Villon was a wandering vagabond and maybe even a member of a gang of thieves. Nevertheless, he was the friend of the duke of Orleans and of a prince of the blood, Jean of Bourbon. In the summer of 1461, Villon was in prison again, accused of a church-robbery. He got released (a general jail-delivery at the accession of King Louis XI) and only 30 years old, he wrote his masterpiece: the Grand Testament. In the autumn of the following year however, he once more was imprisoned. Bail was accepted, but Villon fell into a new street quarrel. This time the sentence – being hangend – was commuted to banishment on January 5, 1463. And what has become of François Villon since that day, nobody knows…

I wrote his story, and translated some of his poems, together with a part of the story and some poems written by Bonnie Parker – yes, the Bonnie from Bonnie & Clyde.

William Shakespeare’s Ghostwriter: Christopher Marlowe

We started our Magical Mystery Writer’s Mystery Tour with William Shakespeare and we are going to end it with the Bard too… or with Christopher Marlowe, the “father of English tragedy” and the “inventor of dramatic blank verse”.  Marlowe received his education at the King’s School in Canterbury and Corpus Christi College of Cambridge. The mystic Francis Kett, burnt in 1589 for heresy, was a fellow and tutor of his college.

London, 1587. As one of the Lord Admiral’s Company of Players, Marlowe started writing for the stage. He was befriended with the famous dramatist Thomas Kyd, who shared his unorthodox religious opinions. His atheism and homosexuality brought him in great danger, but fortunately, Marlowe had some mighty friends, like Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Walter Raleigh, mathematicians as Walter Warner and Robert Hughes and the astronomer Thomas Harriott. However, as the result of some declarations of Thomas Kyd (who was tortured), the Privy Council was investigating a number of serious charges against Marlowe. But then, in a tavern fight in Deptford, in May 1593, Marlowe got slain by a man named Archer or Ingram. Curious enough, the following September he was referred to as “dead of the plague”.

We don’t really know for sure the circumstances of Marlowe’s death. There is some evidence he worked as a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham, and it is possible his death was a set-up. A few months before, Marlowe got in touch with Lord Strange’s Company, and may have been brought in contact with Shakespeare, who clearly wrote plays as Richard II and Richard III under the influence of his predecessor.

Marlowe has written four great plays: “Tamburlaine the Great” (1587), “Dr. Faustus” (1588), “The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta” (1589?) and “Edward II” (printed in 1594). Some say Shakespeare could not have written all those magnificent plays, he hadn’t the education to do that… Christopher Marlowe had and he could have survived his “death”, starting a new career… as William Shakespeare.

The story of his life and work, together with some famous poetry of Christopher Marlowe, are here.

More Historical Mysteries here!

More SuperNatural ParaNormalities here!

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