April 11

"Lord Merlin: The Extraordinary Hidden Life of Dr. Frederick Santee"

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

The gravestone in Old River Church Cemetery in Wapwallopen, Pennsylvania carries an epitaph that most visitors will not recognize as unusual: “I shall return when Spring's first shadow trails.”

It is a line from a poem by the man buried beneath it. It is also, for those who understand the Wiccan tradition, something more: a statement of belief in the cycle of death and return, in the turning of the wheel, in the promise that what the earth receives it will eventually give back.

Frederick LaMotte Santee, FAAR—who was known to his coven as Lord Merlin, and who died on April 11, 1980—was one of the most remarkable and least-known figures in the history of Modern Occultism. He was, in a single lifetime, a child prodigy who entered Harvard at thirteen, an Oxford Classics scholar, a Fellow of the American Academy of Rome, a Latin professor who counted the poet Robert Lowell among his students, a Naval physician who served on Guadalcanal, a small-town doctor who charged fifty cents an office visit and accepted barter from farmers who couldn't pay—and, in the last thirteen years of his life, the High Priest of a Gardnerian Wiccan coven tucked into an outbuilding beside his family mansion in rural Pennsylvania.

Beginnings of a Mage

Frederick Santee was born on September 17, 1906, in the small town of Wapwallopen, Pennsylvania, the only child of a physician whose own father and grandfather had also been physicians. The Santee medical tradition ran four generations deep in Luzerne County. Frederick was expected to continue it—but not before demonstrating an intellectual capacity so extraordinary that newspapers across the country took notice.

He could read English and German at age three, having learned German from his father and family. At eight, he taught himself Latin from his grandfather's old books and produced a translation of Caesar's Gallic War. He entered school in fourth grade at age five and graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia—a college-level institution that granted a Bachelor of Arts—at thirteen. That same year, 1920, he became the youngest person ever accepted to Harvard University, a fact reported in newspapers nationwide including the Scranton Times, which noted simply: He is the youngest ever to enter as a candidate for degree. The boy has been unusual since his first day in school.

At Harvard, he won the Bowdoin Prize for his Greek translations and graduated magna cum laude in 1924 at age seventeen, with a Bachelor of Arts. Oxford invited him to study Classics at Wadham College on a full scholarship. He accepted, completed the full course, earned a second BA in 1926—later upgraded by Oxford to an MA—and was then granted a fellowship at the American Academy of Rome.

It was during these European years—Oxford, Rome, Berlin, extensive travel through Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland—that the seeds of Santee's esoteric life were planted. At Oxford, he encountered W.B. Yeats, who was then still associated with the remnants of the Golden Dawn tradition. He was introduced to the Theosophical Society of England. And in Berlin, he was initiated into a Wiccan lineage by a High Priest of the Black Forest Tradition named Arnold Reinman—an initiation that would lie dormant for decades before flowering in the Pennsylvania hills.

Scholar, Doctor, Soldier…

Back in America, Santee's path was not straightforward. He taught Latin at Lehigh University until the Great Depression took his position. He then enrolled in the medical program at Johns Hopkins—his family's profession calling him back despite his classical training—and earned his MD in 1938. That spring, he was hired as a Latin professor at Kenyon College in Ohio, where his colleagues considered him the greatest living Latin author, on par with the classical Roman writers themselves.

His students at Kenyon included the future novelist Robie Macauley and—in the autumn of 1938—a young poet named Robert Lowell, who wrote to his father that autumn: Frederick Santee, my professor, has offered to teach me Latin composition for a month. I would stay at his house and he insists that all instruction should be free. Next year when I graduate I should know Latin fluently even to the extent of writing verse. Lowell went on to become one of the defining American poets of the twentieth century. Santee's influence on him was real and direct.

In April 1943, Santee was commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Navy. He had hoped for intelligence work; the Navy insisted on deploying his medical training. He served as a physician in the Pacific theater, tended wounded soldiers on Guadalcanal, and picked up a working knowledge of Japanese. By the time he was discharged, he had been offered a position at the Rockefeller Research Foundation, considered tutoring at St. John's College in Annapolis (which he found too aesthetic and communistic for his taste), and eventually returned to where he had always been called: the family mansion on River Street in Wapwallopen, Pennsylvania, where his aging father needed help with his medical practice.

Writer, Occultist…

For the last decades of his life, Frederick Santee was the doctor of Wapwallopen and the surrounding rural communities—a figure of considerable local legend and considerable local affection. He charged fifty cents for an office visit. One dollar for a house call. No office fees; patients were billed only for the cost of medicine. Those who couldn't pay in cash could pay in kind: vegetables, labor, whatever the rural economy could offer. Both he and his father before him operated this way, and local newspapers hailed the Santee medical office approvingly as a form of socialized medicine. He was, in the most literal sense, a physician who considered the health of his community more important than the building of a personal fortune.

He was also, by all accounts, a deeply eccentric man—brilliant and strange in the way that prodigies raised in isolation sometimes are, with a vast interior life and the comfortable certainty of someone who has spent decades being the most learned person in any given room. He wrote newspaper columns on medicine and rural life. He published Latin poetry. He wrote plays, one of which—The Devil's Wager, a Faustian drama in which Satan offers tenure to a university professor—was his only commercially published book, produced in a vanity press edition of fewer than one hundred copies shortly before his death.

He also, beginning in 1967, ran a Wiccan coven in his backyard.

The Coven of the Catta

In 1967, the most famous witch in the English-speaking world came to Wapwallopen. Sybil Leek—the English witch and author who had been the public face of modern Wicca in Britain and America, who wore flowing robes, kept a jackdaw named Mr. Hotfoot Jackson on her shoulder, and had been the subject of international press coverage for years—initiated Frederick Santee and most of the nurses who worked in his medical practice into the New Forest Wicca lineage.

From that initiation, the Coven of the Catta was born. Santee became its High Priest, taking the coven name "Lord Merlin." His High Priestess was the head nurse of his practice, Edna Kishbaugh Williams—known in the coven as "Lady Phoebe." The eight members of the coven performed services on all the major and minor Sabbat days in a temple located in the corner of the outbuilding beside Santee's house on River Street, a building that primarily served as a library for his vast collection of books and grimoires but contained a dedicated ritual space and altar. The High Priest and High Priestess wore red robes; the other coven members wore white. There was also a weekly teaching circle open to anyone in the community. Lord Merlin—Harvard graduate, Oxford scholar, Kenyon Latin professor, Guadalcanal physician, country doctor—taught Wicca to the rural people of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, for thirteen years until his death.

He considered himself always a teacher. It was, he seemed to feel, the truest of his many vocations.

Two Funerals

Santee died peacefully at home after a five-year struggle with bladder cancer in April 1980. He left over a thousand dollars to various cat shelters. The bulk of his two-hundred-thousand-dollar estate went to Edna Williams—Lady Phoebe, his High Priestess of thirteen years.

His graveside service at Old River Church Cemetery was held in two parts. The first was a conventional Christian service for the general public—the neighbors, the patients, the townspeople who knew him as Dr. Santee, the eccentric country physician. When the public mourners had left, the members of the Coven of the Catta gathered around the grave and performed a second service in the Wiccan tradition.

The epitaph he had chosen for his stone—"I shall return when Spring's first shadow trails”—is from one of his own poems, written in English rather than the Latin he loved and wrote with matchless fluency. It is a line about seasonal return, about the turning of the wheel, about the faith that underlies the Wiccan calendar of death and renewal. He had spent his last thirteen years marking the Sabbats, teaching the tradition, performing the rituals in his book-lined outbuilding in rural Pennsylvania, and when he came to choose the words that would stand above his bones in the churchyard, he chose the language of the tradition he had come to last and loved with the particular depth of the late convert.

Why Santee Matters…

The history of American Wicca is disproportionately a history of coasts and cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, the college towns and countercultural centers where the tradition spread most visibly in the 1960s and 70s. The story of Frederick Santee is a reminder that the tradition also took root in places less expected—in rural Pennsylvania, in a small-town doctor's surgery, in the hands of a man who had drunk as deeply from the classical tradition as anyone in his generation and who found, in the earth-centered spirituality that Sybil Leek brought to his door, something that his vast learning had not previously given him.

He was hailed as one of the greatest Latin scholars in the world during the 1930s and 40s. He taught a poet who would win the Pulitzer Prize. He charged fifty cents for office visits and accepted vegetables as payment. He wrote Faustian dramas and Latin verse. He kept a library of grimoires in his outbuilding and led eight people in robes through the turning of the Wiccan year. He was, as a local newspaper editor put it with affectionate understatement, long prominent—albeit somewhat eccentric.

Modern Occultist exists precisely to find and tell stories like his: the hidden practitioners, the undocumented lineages, the figures who worked and studied and taught at the margins of the tradition's visible history and left traces in cemetery epitaphs and vanity press Faustian dramas and the memories of nurses who wore white robes in a Pennsylvania outbuilding and kept faith with a wheel that keeps turning whether anyone records it or not.

Lord Merlin of Wapwallopen. He said he would return when Spring's first shadow trails.

The signs are always given. The knowledge is always available. And sometimes they are found in the most unexpected places—a rural Pennsylvania churchyard, a gravestone, a line of poetry that is also a promise.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist