ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 3
Poe at Ryan's Tavern
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It was Election Day in Baltimore, and
a tavern was doing double duty as a polling place. Somewhere in the noise, a
printer named Joseph Walker found a man who could barely make sense, dressed in
clothes that didn't seem to be his own. The man managed to name an
acquaintance, a Dr. Snodgrass, and Walker dashed off a note. The stranger was
Edgar Allan Poe. It was October 3, 1849, and he had four days left.
The story that's been told from that
day onward has a gutter in it, and a drunk, and a moral. Almost none of it
holds up as well as the mystery underneath…
Poe left Richmond on September 27,
bound for New York, and nothing reliable is known of his movements until
October 3. Walker's note to Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with
some medical training, describes a gentleman “rather the worse for wear” at
Ryan's Fourth Ward polls, in great distress and asking for help. Snodgrass, who
arrived with Poe's uncle Henry Herring, described a man with unkempt hair, an
unwashed face, and vacant eyes, dressed in a faded old coat, worn-out shoes,
and a straw hat. A doctor who saw him remarked that the clothes were not Poe's
and not in his character. He was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he
drifted in and out of consciousness for four days, never explained what had
happened to him, and died on October 7. So “the last time he is seen in public”
is fair enough as far as it goes, but he wasn't unseen afterward. He lay in a
hospital bed while the people around him tried, and failed, to get a straight
account out of him.
Walker's note says nothing about one;
it places Poe at the tavern that served as the Fourth Ward polling place, and
it says nothing about where in or around the building he was lying. Later
tellings put him in the gutter, or in the street outside, or across a bench,
and accounts even disagree about the hour. The author Matthew Pearl has been
blunt about it in a PBS interview: there was no gutter, and the story began
soon after Poe's death and rode along in the prefaces of Poe collections for
generations. It's the drunkard legend's favorite prop, and it survives because
it's vivid, not because anyone documented it.
What is real is the mystery… The
clothing, the missing week, the fact that he was found at a polling place on
Election Day: all of it invited theories, and there have been plenty. One
dating from 1872 holds that he was the victim of cooping, a form of electoral
fraud in which gangs gathered up men and forced them to vote for a particular
candidate, sometimes violently. Others have proposed a beating, rabies,
epilepsy, heart disease, syphilis, cholera, meningeal inflammation, and
delirium tremens. The newspapers of the day reported "congestion of the
brain," which was a common euphemism for deaths considered disreputable.
None of these theories has documentary proof, and the cause of death remains
undetermined.
The “drunk in the gutter” had help getting into the textbooks. On October 9, the New York Tribune ran an obituary signed “Ludwig,” which was soon identified as the work of Rufus Wilmot Griswold, an anthologist who had nursed a grudge against Poe since 1842 and who then became his literary executor. Griswold's “Memoir of the Author,” published in 1850, portrayed Poe as a depraved, drunken, drug-addled madman, and many of its claims were lies or distorted half-truths. It is now known, for example, that Poe was not a drug addict. Snodgrass, meanwhile, was a temperance activist who wrote scathingly of Poe and claimed he had drunk himself to death. None of this proves Poe was abstemious, and testimony from people with axes to grind doesn't settle how much he drank. It means that much of the portrait we inherited came from a rival and a temperance crusader, and deserves to be read that way.
The occult angle is that Poe had
spent his last productive years writing about the borderland between life and
death. Between 1844 and 1845 he published three mesmeric tales: “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in
which a dying man is held between life and death by mesmerism for seven months.
Many readers took the last one for fact. After it appeared in the American
Review in December 1845, it was reprinted widely, and in January 1846 a
London pamphlet called Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis presented it as a
plain recital of facts. Poe, who later wrote that he'd had no idea anyone would
credit it as more than a magazine piece, answered skeptics in print by asking
why a man's death couldn't be postponed by mesmerism. How seriously he took the
subject is honestly debatable; he mocked the mesmerist Andrew Jackson Davis,
and a friend wrote in 1846 that people whispered strange things about his
mesmeric experiences, at the mention of which he always smiled.
The afterlife of his death was, fittingly, a Spiritualist one. Lizzie Doten, a Massachusetts trance speaker, gained fame for verses she said Poe dictated from beyond. At the close of a lecture in Baltimore on January 11, 1863, she delivered “The Streets of Baltimore,” which purports to be Poe's account of his final night, and it appeared in her Poems from the Inner Life. The Banner of Light’s introduction to the poem repeated the familiar story, drunken delirium, the street, dying from exposure, and even has him found the next morning, which doesn't match the documentary record. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore judges the spirit-poems to be, for the most part, poor imitations of “The Raven” and “Ulalume.” But the reception wasn't uniformly skeptical. A Springfield newspaper's reporter conceded in 1860 that if she was honest, her first Poe poem was the most astonishing thing Spiritualism had yet produced, and Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote in a letter that the poems had all the characteristics of Poe's work, adding that Frederic Myers agreed with him.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the man who made the uncanny respectable in American prose, we're recommending a collection that puts his kind of story in its proper occult company...
Edited by Lon Milo DuQuette | Red Wheel/Weiser
The Weiser Book of Horror and the
Occult, edited by
Lon Milo DuQuette and published by Red Wheel/Weiser in 2014, gathers fifteen
stories, selected and introduced by DuQuette, from writers who either shaped
the horror genre or, in several cases, practiced what their fiction describes.
The lineup runs from the expected names, Poe, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft, and
Arthur Conan Doyle, to figures better known for their occult work than their
fiction, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune among them, with Arthur Machen,
Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, Ralph Adams Cram, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
and J. Sheridan Le Fanu filling out a shelf of classics and half-forgotten
gems. Crowley's presence ties the book neatly to yesterday's post, and it's a
small pleasure to meet the man who put A.E. Waite in a novel as a storyteller
in his own right.
DuQuette is a perfect guide for the
territory. A longtime practitioner and the author of Magick of Thelema
and a lifelong Poe fan, he approaches horror as a slow art, one that creeps in,
seeps in, and lingers, and his introduction, by one reviewer's account, recalls
finding refuge in Poe as a boy transplanted to Nebraska. That personal note
sets the tone. These are not gory stories by modern standards, and readers
raised on contemporary horror films may find them tame at first. What they
offer instead is patience, atmosphere, and a subtler, more intellectual kind of
dread, which is precisely the register in which Poe worked.
A few honest cautions. This is an
anthology of reprinted classics, so readers who already know the canon will
find few surprises in the headline names, and the promotional copy's talk of
hidden truths and forbidden pursuits is best taken as marketing rather than a
claim that fiction reveals initiatory secrets. Its real value is as a curated
introduction, and the occasional discovery among the lesser-known authors. And
since today's post has been about Poe's mesmeric tales, it's worth knowing that
“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is in the public domain and freely
available online. Read it alongside the anthology, and you'll see at once why a
London publisher in 1846 could print it as a plain recital of facts.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" 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.)
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