Perchta and the History of Oliebollen

It's the night before New Year's Eve and Willie Wilde's best friend, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (Tex) comes to call on him at Lady Jane's house. A Dutchman, Tex brings with him a basket full of pastries and, knowing how much Lady Jane loves folktales, a story! This might, or might not, have happened, but is the pretext I'm using to write about olibollen.

Oliebollen are a traditional Dutch food eaten at New Year's. The name literally translates to "oil balls" and they were the inspiration for the American invention of the donut. I was always made to understand that these treats are so fattening that it would be bad for you to eat them more than once a year, but the history of Oliebollen and the story Tex would have told Lady Jane are the real New Year's treat.

Imagine, Willie, Lady Jane, and Tex sit around the fire. Lady Jane's servant, Mrs Faithful brings them a warm plate of oliebollen and three cups of whiskey and eggnog. Willie and Lady Jane get powdered sugar on their faces and clothes, as they take their first bites of this doughy pastry with bits of apple, raisins, and dried cranberries, and Tex tells them about Perchta.

Family portrait: Perchta, Krampus Jr., Krampus, and Angel.
James Mundie (2012).

"Perchta – Derived from an early Germanic word meaning “bright or “glorious”. Perchta is famed for her dual nature. Her grim aspect is known as “Perchta the Belly Slitter”. Perchta is alternately described as kind or violent, as a monstrous hag or a willowy maiden" - source.

Perchta is a pagan witch, or Germanic goddess (depending on your point of view), who plays the role of guardian of the beasts, during the twelve days of Christmas. At Yuletide, Perchta flew around the Netherlands with evil spirits looking for food and would cut open the belly of anyone she came across to steal their food. However, if you had been eating oliebollen, the fat in the dough made it so that her sword would slide of your belly.

Young woman with a cooking pot filled with
oliebollen (Aelbert Cuyp, ca. 1652)

While records indicate that the Dutch have been eating oliebollen since medieval times, the first recipe appears in "De verstandige kock" (1667). At that time, they were still oliekoecken (oily cookies); it wasn't until the 1890s that the word oliebollen became the more popular term, appearing in an 1896 Dutch dictionary.

Everywhere in the world that I have travelled, Dutch people serve oliebollen to their friends on New Year's Eve, so I'm pretty sure that Tex would have had some for the Wildes in London in the 1890s.

Have a safe and Happy New Year!

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What's-her-name: The Most Dangerous Woman of the 1890s

"Editha Jackson"

THE coming and going of Ann O'Delia Diss Debar are mysteries for there is no record of her birth and no trace of her death, but the "in between time" furnished Inaterial enough for an entire book rather than a single chapter, and gave her sufficient opportunity to have it said of her that she was "one of the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known." Some even have classed her among the ten most prominent and dangerous female criminals of the world, and her repertoire is claimed to have run the full gamut from petty confidence games to elaborately con- trived schemes aimed at the magnates of Wall Street. - "A Magician Among the Spirits" by Harry Houdini

Like so many Victorian charlatans, few details are about this woman's life are for certain, least of all the things she said about herself. Her criminal record seems true enough, though she went by so many names it is difficult to be sure. In June 1888, she was sentenced to six months in prison for frauding an elderly lawyer out of his townhouse. She was imprisoned for two years in Illinois for another fraud. She got kicked out of New Orleans in May 1899, then went to jail again for another 30 days. In September 1901 in England, she and her husband were arrested and charged with obtaining property by false pretenses, rape and buggery. For this she went to jail until 1906.

At one point, she managed to convince the gullible Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers that she was the Countess Anna Sprengel of Landsfelt, co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

She wished she was five years younger and born in Italy to King Ludwig I of Bavaria and his beautiful mistress, the dancer Lola Montez, and that her real parents were actually her foster parents. However, she was probably born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky (1849) to Prof. John C.F. Salomon, a Professor of Music at Greenville Female Institute also known as Daughters' College (now the Beaumont Inn).

"Edith Saloman"

The professor called his daughter Ann O'Delia Salomon. She seems to have been married many times, and called herself: Princess Editha Lola Montez, Edith Solomon, Della Ann O'Sullivan, Ann O'Delia Diss Debar (or Dis De Bar), Vera Ava, Madame Messant or McGoon, Swami Laura Horos, and Swami Viva Ananda.

Whatever she was called, she spent some time in Africa, ran a fruitarian colony in Florida, and married Frank Dutton Jackson in Louisiana in 1899.

That's when she started calling herself Princess Editha Lolita. He must have been perfect for her. The newlyweds went to England, calling themselves "Swami Laura Horos" and "Theodore Horos". They established a "Purity League" at the Theocratic Unity Temple, near Regent's Park in London. They worked as fortune tellers and diviners, until they were arrested in Birkenhead in September 1901.

The charges were the result of their sexual practices at the Temple, and included obtaining property by false pretenses, rape and buggery. The couple defended themselves, but the Swami was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment, and her husband to 15 years. She was held in the prison in Aylesbury, and released on licence in July 1906.

In Unsolved Mysteries: Vera Ava’s Final Days, Linda Vaccariello introduces her as a barefoot woman, who is soon arrested while seeking shelter. Vaccariello points out that this wild and dangerous woman's death was as mysterious as her birth. And really, who can lie about death?

She "vanished from history" after returning to the States in 1909, and was last seen, as Vera Ava, in Cincincinnati in 1909. Though she may not have been a genuine medium, using fake seances and mystic painting (is that like automatic writing?) to con people out of their money and property, she managed to pull off a disappearing act in the end.

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The Occult Magic of 1890s Writers: Hermeticism

Writing about Bram Stoker, W.B. Yeats, Maude Gonne, and Constance Wilde’s involvement in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, made it tackling the idea of hermeticism inevitable. Although the term is often used to describe the occult “sciences” in general, hermeticism, as a religious philosophy, is based on the adherence to the body of ideas set forth in hermetic writings.

Hermeticism and its writings date as far back as the first century B.C, and the bulk of its texts were completed before the second century. This corpus hermeticum was uncovered in the Byzantine libraries by by the court of Cosimo de Medici in the late-fifteenth century. If you are especially keen, the Corpus Hermeticum is available online.

These writings were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Many Christian writers of the Renaissance and the Reformation, including Lactantius, Thomas of Aquinas, Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, Campanella and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola saw Trismegistus as a wise pagan prophet, who foresaw the coming of Christianity. They called him ‘Thrice Great' because the writings claimed he understood the secrets of alchemy, astrology, and theurgy. I think hermeticism's connection with those three “sciences” is how it came to be associated with the occult in general.

I call alchemy, astrology, and theurgy “sciences” only to make the link between them and the late-Victorian urge to understand everything by turning into a science. Proponents of ideas like these, and something you might be more familiar with - psychoanalysis - felt they were really getting somewhere in the late-nineteenth century, if they got people to believe they had uncovered a “real” science.

Historically, hermeticism had its greatest influence on the world between 1300-1600 A.D. through the development of the sciences. Hermeticism gave scientists the idea that they could influence or control nature, leading many of these early scientists to experiment with the hermetic arts. So... scientists experimented with magic for three-hundred years. By the nineteenth-century, it had gone on, albeit to a lesser extent, for more than five-hundred years. What changed?

The Victorian pursuit of science changed everything for hermetics. Through the misadventures of people, like Frederic William Henry Myers, some things became unsuitable for scientific research relegating the pursuit of those ideas to the margins and labeling the people, who continued to pursue them, as quacks. That’s why Arthur Conan Doyle’s belief in fairies seems so incomprehensible to us today, and W.B. Yeats’ involvement in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn seems cooky. The writers, who participated in the Order, stopped seeing alchemy, astrology, theurgy, and divination as heretical, checked it out and, for the most part, decided it was a bunch of hookum, or at least, through their experimentation, convinced many of the people around them it was hookum.

I don’t know whether Constance Wilde ever actually gave up her belief in hermeticism, though she eventually stopped participating in the Order, but because Victorians began allowing themselves to look at Christianity differently, developing their own understandings of God’s relationship with the universe, hermetic philosophy blended well with Christian beliefs.

Hermicism uses the concept of God, the All, or the One, as synonymous with reality. It is incredibly monotheistic, while also accepting the existence of things, like angels, in the universe. As we saw with the reputation of Hermes Trismegistus, Christians had been reconciling hermeticism with Christianity for a long time.

The thrice great things, Trismegistus comanded, would fall under the Victorian microscope, by which I mean to say that they looked closely at them. Alchemy easily loaned itself to the Victorian definitive experiments with science. For astrology, they got to look through telescopes and blame the stars for each other’s wacky behaviour. And theurgy became part of the ultimate goal of Christian mysticism, a step on the path to a closer relationship with God, the All, or the One. Isn’t that where AA gets some of it’s language from?

Hermeticism gets weirder when we move on to magic. Arcane laws and limits govern the use of hermetic magic. Many of these have roots in antiquated notions of the human body, such as the balancing of the four humors and twisted ideas of how contagions work, but understanding these laws and limitations was important to being able to perform magic spells.

Magic organizations, like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, were incredibly secretive, leaving lots of room for rumour and speculation. In my search for hermetic spells, I found such speculation that hermetic witches claimed to have ended the First World War, while shamans claimed those witches were using their spells. Is anyone else thinking about American Horror Story here?

So, while I set out to learn about what made writers in the 1890s tick, I wound up learning that the magic of my favourite television witches is rooted in the hermetic tradition. Well, I know nothing about the link between shamanism and voodoo, if there is any such link. It makes sense, though, that the creators of that series would root the Salem witches' magic in these old esoteric European traditions.

Hermetic spells, like some of the spells seen in the popular TV show, involve candles and a circle. These spells require the person performing the magic to imagine certain things and are called meditation spells. Meditation spells are primarily used for contacting the spirits of people in this world and beyond, as well as seeking hidden truths. I’m not sure how they can be used to wreak havoc or end wars, but maybe I just don’t have a good enough imagination.

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The Perplexing Spiritualism of 1890s Writers: Christian Mysticism

Writing a comprehensive post on Christian mysticism might be as challenging as writing my novel. Yet, it feels integral to that process because I’m writing about writers in London in the 1890s, most of whom were Christian, some of whom believed in magic. When I think of all the American churches that banned Harry Potter as heretical, it’s hard to reconcile belief in Jesus with a belief in magic. Still, many people held both beliefs close to their hearts in the 1890s.

The main objective of late-Victorian Christian mysticism was to unify the soul with God. Practitioners hoped to find a way to get closer to God by uncovering and practicing forgotten or secret religious rituals. It was believed that one could be transformed through the unification of their soul with God in clear and obvious ways. The only true test for the authenticity of a mystic then would be to look for evidence of the mystic’s transformation, as well as the mystic’s transformitive effects on other people.

As exciting as it would be, I’m not talking about people being transformed physically. They didn’t start to glow, sprout wings, or walk around with a halo hovering above their heads. All the evidence that a community open to the idea of Christian mysticism needed was to be persuaded that the mystic had had a religious experience.

The American philosopher and psychologist, William James popularized the use of the term “religious experience” in the 1890s. His book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), was his manifesto on the subject. The very concept of a religious experience fostered the idea that the experience of the mystic, the experience of magic, was transformative in the sense that it supplied knowledge. Therefore, your proof of your religious experience rested in your knowledge of what happened and your ability to persuade others that you were telling the truth.

At its core, belief in transformation through a religious ritual does not fall outside of Christianity. Water baptism is one of Christianity’s oldest practices, still practiced today, and it holds deep symbolic meaning. The water cleanses the soul of impurities and we rise from it prepared to lead a new life.

Most of the Christian rituals practiced by the writers in London in the 1890s, who participated in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn [link], only consisted of meditation. One contemporary web page I found on the subject describes the need for Christian mysticism.

When a soul no longer feels realized through the traditional devotional practices, it naturally feels inclined to reach another level of “knowing” the Divine. This is the starting point for an expansion of the relationship with the “father” in heaven: the Soul abandons the old practices and give[s] itself to the Divinity [...]

Among historians, I find a need to explain the Victorian need to reach another spiritual level of knowing through a kind of collective disillusionment with Christianity in the wake of Darwinian sciences. While I accept that explanation, the need certainly hasn’t gone from us today.

What I see happening in the psyches of my writers, who were both Christian and involved in things - like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, is similar to what I see happening among my contemporaries, who are Christian and using tarot cards or participating yoga because it is supposedly good for the body and the soul. (I just think it’s a good way to exercise without sweating too much. I hate sweating!) As with yoga and Christianity, the Order blended elements of different religions, while using Christianity to make participants feel they were uncovering the mystic secrets of the religion of their parents.

That’s how I reconcile Victorian mysticism and Christianity.

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Spiritualist Frauds and the Writers Who Loved Them

 

I suppose now you do not believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in materialisation. No? Nor in astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading of thought. No? Nor in hypnotism——”

Said Van Helsing, in Dracula (1897).

In my writing, I’ve been thinking a lot about that passage. Materialization is, basically, the manifestation of visions, if not actual solid objects, out of unknown matter. In Victorian occult practice, one might materialize spirits, during a seance. Indeed, seances were the conventional method of materializing things, spirits, or whatever they thought was special.

Bram Stoker’s participation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn leaves the impression that Stoker either believed in the paranormal or had a keen interest in those, who did, not just through his writing and research for Dracula, but also in his personal life. Certainly, Jonathan Harker experiences materialization first-hand in Dracula’s castle:

I was becoming hypnotised! Quicker and quicker danced the dust; the moonbeams seemed to quiver as they went by me into the mass of gloom beyond. More and more they gathered till they seemed to take dim phantom shapes. And then I started, broad awake and in full possession of my senses, and ran screaming from the place. The phantom shapes, which were becoming gradually materialised from the moonbeams, were those of the three ghostly women to whom I was doomed. I fled, and felt somewhat safer in my own room, where there was no moonlight and where the lamp was burning brightly.

Belief in materialization rose throughout the Victorian era and I'll venture to say, though it is only an educated guess, that belief in materialization was near its peak in the 1890s because vigourous debunking was beginning to take place and would carry on through the 1900s.

One of the most successful frauds of the 1890s was praised by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even after she had been caught faking it in almost every country she visited. Her name was Eusapia Paladino.

Palandino used illusions and dark rooms to make it appear that she had the power of levitation ; that she could warp her body, by making it longer; and that she could materialize a number of things, including pots of flowers, the dead, spirit hands and wet faces in clay. In Warsaw, she inspired several colourful scenes in Boeslaw Prus’s novel Pharaoh (1894-95).

In 1895, Palandino visited London. The founder of the Society for Physical Research, Frederic William Henry Myers invited her to his home, in Cambridge, for a series of investigations (note: when Victorians use the word “physical” in this context, they mean paranormal). Along with the physicist/writer/inventor Oliver Lodge and other “scientists,” Myers found Palandino to be nothing, but a trickster. Consequently, she was banned, by the Society, from participating in any further experiments (or seances) in Britain.

Unfortunately for Myers, the investigation generated bad press for the Society, when the British Medical Journal published an article (9 November 1895) that called into question the scientific legitimacy of the the Society for having conducted the experiments in the first place.

It would be comic if it were not deplorable to picture this sorry Egeria surrounded by men like Professor Sidgwick, Professor Lodge, Mr. F. H. Myers, Dr. Schiaparelli, and Professor Richet, solemnly receiving her pinches and kicks, her finger skiddings, her sleight of hand with various articles of furniture as phenomena calling for serious study.

Three years later, in Paris, when Myers thought he had seen a real medium, he was reminded of his skepticism about Palandino, but refused to change his mind about her and faced further ridicule.

Palandino practiced for the rest of her life and her fans ignored the fact that people called her a fraud, everywhere she went! In spite of all the hype about what a fraud she was, people, like Doyle and Myer’s friend in Paris, deeply believed in her abilities. It simply did not matter how many times she was photographed holding up a levitating table.

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Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde only wrote one novel and a handful of plays, leaving some of us hungry for more. But wait! There is more! One lucky blogger found a wonderful book, Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde, at a book sale for just twenty-five cents!

After a brief search I found the full-text online. It was written during the height of popularity for mysticism and occult magic. Wilde's messages were transcribed through automatic writing and a ouija board.

The automatic writers were able to access such witticisms as:

Being dead is the most boring experience in life. That is, if one excepts being married or dining with a schoolmaster.

I'll definitely be reading through the rest of them over the weekend!

Talking to the Dead

Do you believe in ghosts? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did! The idea of communicating with the dead fascinated him and leaves me puzzling over how to reconcile a personality of a person that loved logic, held scientific degrees, and still believed in ghosts.

Still married to his first wife, the creator of Sherlock Holmes met and fell in love with a spiritual medium in 1897. Her name was Jean Elizabeth Leckie. The couple married in 1907, after the death of Arthur's first wife.

Doyle had complete faith in Jean's skills as a medium. He really believed she was psychic, could predict future events, and speak with the dead. His faith was evidenced by the fact that he would later offer her services to Harry Houdini to help him contact his deceased mother.

How do I reconcile Doyle's mysticism from the logic based aspects of his personality, that I believed helped him to write Sherlock Holmes, when they seem like an utter abandonment of rational thought?

It's difficult to understand anything when you take it out of context. Many of our respected writers of the 1890s belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This was a decade when the public wanted the assistance of psychic Robert James in solving the case of Jack the Ripper. What interests me about this aspect of Arthur Conan Doyle is that none of his spiritualism worked into the solutions of Sherlock Holmes' cases; instead, Arthur preferred to write about problems that could be solved in this world.

Upon reflection, and after a visit to Wonders & Marvels, I would add that, maybe, Sherlock Holmes does hold the key to understanding his author's belief in the unbelievable.

The character, Sherlock Holmes, was based on a professor that Arthur knew in school, who had amazing powers of deduction. Arthur was captivated by the way that he could see things no one else could see just by looking at what was right in front of him. Maybe Arthur was fascinated by all unbelievable things, but saw that the most unbelievable things are right in front of us!

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Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Interest in alternative spirituality and the occult peaked before the Second World War, but mysticism was already becoming popular in the late-Victorian period, after the Darwinian Revolution.

In the 1890s, Bram Stoker was involved in an occult-like spiritualist organization, called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This mystic order was shrouded in secrecy. Indeed, the order threatened to ruin people's lives, if they revealed its secrets to outsiders. However, its hermetics were based on things people  thought of before, like Freemasonry, the religion of ancient Egypt, alchemy, and tarot cards.

Other members of the Order included W.B. Yeats, Algernon Blackwood, and Oscar Wilde's wife: Constance. A new biography, Constance: the Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde, goes into great detail of Constance's experiences with the Order and how being among the first to join elevated members' positions. Digging Hermetics in the 1890s got you in on the ground floor, so-to-speak, because the movement was young and still under the direction of it's founder William Wynn Westcott.

In October 1887, Westcott wrote to Anna Sprengel, whose name and address he received through the decoding of the Cipher Manuscripts. Westcott claimed to receive a wise reply which conferred honorary grades of Adeptus Exemptus on Westcott, and his fellow Freemasons Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and William Robert Woodman and chartered a Golden Dawn temple consisting of the five grades outlined in the manuscripts. Anna Sprengel died four years after helping to found the order.

Anna Sprengel, countess of Landsfeldt, love-child of Ludwig I of Bavaria and Lola Montez, may never have existed at all, as there is no proof of her existence and it now seems she was invented by Westcott to confer legitimacy on the Golden Dawn (although I'm not sure how the support of imaginary people confers legitimacy on anything). In 1901 Mathers, leader of the Golden Dawn, briefly supported the claim of Swami Laura Horos, who had long campaigned for recognition as that countess, to have written Westcott as Anna Sprengel.

Regardless, I think it could have been the order and organization within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn that provided orderliness to previously unruly creatures, specifically Bram Stoker's vampires. Anna Sprengel was supposedly a countess and Bram's vampires were led by a count. I don't know of any other interpretations of vampires that require devotion and worship, like Renfield has for Dracula:

"I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped you long and afar off. Now that you are near, I await your commands, and you will not pass me by, will you, dear Master, in your distribution of good things?"

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