Cats -- TS Eliot and the Occult...it's actual history. Episode 19 (Cats 5 of 8)

A young TS Eliot is at Harvard where the field of psychology is just now emerging.  You can read Freud, of course, but there’s nothing like behavioral or analytic psychology that have yet to be developed.  But there are dreams – and what, exactly, are those?  Freud himself starts his book by citing what the Greeks thought that they were, which in many cases were visions of alternate realties, a channeling of the gods, a means of clairvoyance where the future, or at least possible futures, were revealed.

What was science supposed to do with all of that?

Well one answer, and one that TS Eliot studied, was that there was a place between heaven and earth, between the purely spiritual and the definitely physical.  Eliot begins to wonder, as did Hamlet and then Victor Frankenstein, whether there was more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in philosophy – or science.

And so the youthful Eliot, seeking a truth that the world itself was only beginning to come to grips with, would not only experiment with the occult but put it rather directly in the forefront of his literary work, including and especially his defining poem, The Wasteland.

After his fame arrived, he would take up a side project, writing a light book of children’s rhymes.  About cats.  One of those poems he never finished.  That poem talked about the dreamspace, maybe that third space between heaven and earth.  But that poem went nowhere.  It was probably too serious for a children’s book.  He just stuck the poem in the back of his stack of paper – the heavyside layer would not come out in his book about cats, but it would get resurrected after his death to form the central frame for the musical.

How deeply was TS Eliot involved with the occult?  Why did he put that theme in such a central place in his best poem?  How come he kept describing writing poetry like an instance of demon possession?  Grab your rosary beads, let’s all stay safe in this episode of THM. 

Poll about belief in God and the devil

https://assets.realclear.com/files/2024/01/2334_RCORToplineJan92024.pdf

Cursed books

https://bookbindersmuseum.org/you-have-been-warned-book-curses-and-cursed-books/

Transcript

Cats Episode 5 (19 overall): TS Eliot and the occult

A young TS Eliot is at Harvard where the field of psychology is just now emerging.  You can read Freud, of course, but there’s nothing like behavioral or analytic psychology that have yet to be developed.  But there are dreams – and what, exactly, are those?  Freud himself starts his book by citing what the Greeks thought that they were, which in many cases were visions of alternate realties, a channeling of the gods, a means of clairvoyance where the future, or at least possible futures, were revealed.

What was science supposed to do with all of that?

Well one answer, and one that TS Eliot studied, was that there was a place between heaven and earth, between the purely spiritual and the definitely physical.  Eliot begins to wonder, as did Hamlet and then Victor Frankenstein, whether there was more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in philosophy – or science.

And so the youthful Eliot, seeking a truth that the world itself was only beginning to come to grips with, would not only experiment with the occult but put it rather directly in the forefront of his literary work, including and especially his defining poem, The Wasteland.

After his fame arrived, he would take up a side project, writing a light book of children’s rhymes.  About cats.  One of those poems he never finished.  That poem talked about the dreamspace, maybe that third space between heaven and earth.  But that poem went nowhere.  It was probably too serious for a children’s book.  He just stuck the poem in the back of his stack of paper – the heavyside layer would not come out in his book about cats, but it would get resurrected after his death to form the central frame for the musical.

How deeply was TS Eliot involved with the occult?  Why did he put that theme in such a central place in his best poem?  How come he kept describing writing poetry like an instance of demon possession?  Grab your rosary beads, let’s all stay safe in this episode of THM.

[intro]

This is the 5th episode in this series about Cats.  There will be some brief allusions to some things that we developed in more depth in the earlier 4, so go back and give those a listen if a reference to Ezra Pound being criminally insane doesn’t immediately make sense to you.  And, if you are a fan of the Man of La Mancha or Les Miserables, there are two full series about those shows.

There’s a new email, theaterhistorypodcast@gmail.com.  Drop me a line.

As always, the show is clipping along and we are staying healthy but the audience needs to grow for this to stay viable, so anything you can do to help spread the word would be great.  Reviews help, reposting helps, dropping it on social media helps.  Thank you so much for joining me in these astounding tales of random chance and musical theater, I appreciate it more than you can know.

Finally, this show will deal with the occult, mostly as it was experienced historically by TS Eliot, but if that’s an uncomfortable topic for you just know that it’s coming.

Let’s dive right in the question of the moment:

Do you believe in ghosts?  Like, paranormal phenomena?  Well, according to some reporting that recently appeared in the Hill, which I will drop in the show notes, a majority of Americans do.  Maybe 60%.  And if you expand that slightly to ask how many believe in the devil the number goes up to over 70%, and if you ask do you believe in God the number jumps to around 85%.  Now, the Hill cites a poll by a group called Real Clear Politics, which has a decidedly right-wing look at the world, but the question seems nonpartisan enough and the sample was very evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.   

At least one read of these results is that God polls better than Satan, which is reassuring, but the 3rd-party candidate “do you believe in aliens” comes in pretty close to ghosts, but decidedly behind Satan.  That seems to mean that more people believe in a human soul than believe in life on other planets, although one seems like a scientific uncertainty and the other is, I guess, not really a scientific question.

Be all that as it may, the take home point here is that if you believe that there is some spiritual dimension to human existence, you are in the solid majority.  If you believe in the devil and demons you are in a solid, 70% majority.  By itself, that makes it a topic worth pursuing.

The trick, of course, is to figure out what exactly the nature of human spirituality is.  This has occupied more than one thinker.  In past episodes we talked about how Victor Hugo struggled with the question – he very much believed that there was a spiritual element to human life but couldn’t squarely align himself with either mainstream Catholicism or Protestantism.  He is currently a venerated saint of the Cao Dai religion in Vietnam, who’s membership numbers in the millions.  

Scott Carter, a very successful television producer, made the discovery that Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy ALL had made edits to their own bibles, and has based a play on the implications of those facts.  Well worth checking out and crazy, is it not, that such a diverse group of powerful thinkers all thought that the Bible needed editing?

So Hugo was not alone in reading his Bible, being drawn to much of it, and finding something that, something that made it difficult to read as a single, coherent, consistent narrative that all lined up with a comfortable belief system.

If all that makes your head spin a little bit, let’s just focus on the idea that you can believe in human spirituality, and probably that every human has a soul, without being a strict adherent of any particular religion.  It happened to Hugo, it happened to Dickens, it happened to Thomas Jefferson, and it happened Leo Tolstoy.

For a long time, it didn’t happen at all.  At least in what we call the western world Catholicism so dominated what was thought of as spirituality and the existence of the soul that when Martin Luther tacked some fairly tame tweaks to the mainstream ideas it caused a revolution, that we’re still feeling today.

Luther nailed his theses up in 1517, on October 31 no less, and three hundred years later science was going to press the questions in a significant way.  Not so much by challenging the idea that if science was right god must not exist but by making so many massively important discoveries so fast that it seemed like science might just PROVE the existence of…well, maybe God, but maybe one of those other polling candidates, like demons or aliens or, especially, ghosts.

And that’s where this long road leads us back to TS Eliot, who will eventually write a book that will eventually be turned into the massively successful musical.

Right at the turn of the 20th century – which is the year 1900, and I only mention that because I always get confused but it –science is changing everything.  In 1850 the horse was the only practical real means of travel, but between 1880 and 1920 the so-called “golden age of railroad” exploded, massively increasing the opportunity to move quickly, temporarily even, between cities.  Humans had learned to communicate with each other through invisible airwaves, and between 1900 and 1930 wireless use expanded so much so, that 2 in 3 households had radios.  The Wright brothers got airborne in 1903, by 1914 there was the first commercial air flight.  Personal travel by air was established, if uncomfortable, by the 1930s and by 1957 it had replaced ships as the preferred way of crossing the Atlantic ocean.  The automotive fleet went from 8 cars in 1900 to more than 3,000 by 1915 to more than 24,000 by 1936 to 800 million on the 405 freeway alone.  If you live somewhere else you might think I’m exaggerating but if you live in LA you can probably acknowledge that although that figure is roughly twice the population of the entire United States, on any given Friday at 4pm it sounds just about right.

But to our point: right as TS Eliot was coming to grips with his own beliefs, science was making it so that humans could talk to each other through radio waves, could fly through the sky, could travel on the ground by powered motor vehicles, could move between cities quickly by rail.  And nothing, nothing like any of those things had ever been possible at any point in human history, even as recently as 50 years before.  Science, it seemed, could do almost anything.

So what, what if science was capable of proving, once and for all, whether or not ghosts existed?

Victor Hugo – the author of Les Miz -- thought they … might.  His ideas was that psychics would contact the spirits, ask them about important scientific questions, have the answers written down in sealed envelopes and then opened only after science had solved the problems.  If the answers matched, that would prove that spirits were real.

But it wasn’t the only approach to the problem, and some of the answers didn’t even depend on technology.  In our episode on Victor Hugo and the seances, we learned that in 1848 the Fox sisters in New York claimed to be able to communicate with spirits with knocking noises, and eventually by tables rapping out a code, so that the number of raps corresponded to letters.  

They were a sensation, there are retractions, and retractions of the retractions.  The whole movement was called “Spiritualism.”  By 1851 it leaps to the continent and takes Europe by storm.  By 1857 one Allan Kardec became a leading figure and he worked on establishing a system of peer review to separate the fake mediums from the real deal.  One could hold a séance, they could make a transcript, and send those notes up the line and if Kardec likes them he publishes them in a journal called Revue Spirite.  

So the world TS Eliot inhabited had the best students of the day – with apologies to Yale, let’s say “like the ones at Harvard” – grapping with all these questions.  Catholicism was still going strong but had long since lost its grip on the only way to interpret Christian doctrine, maybe science could make some systematic observations that could prove ghosts existed, and maybe there were just other approaches to spirituality that relied less on ancient texts to provide clear answers and relied more on direct conversations with those who were actively in the spirit world.

We are now at the academic study of Eliot, and here I will be relying very heavily on Donald J Childs, of the University of Ottawa, in his article titled TS Eliot and the Occultation of Knowledge and Experience that appeared in the journal Texas Studies in Literature and Language.  It starts with this sentence: “TS Eliot’s early interest in the occult is widely known…”  In 1935 an occultist named AR Orage passed, and an obituary about him was penned by TS Eliot.  That’s because earlier in life Eliot had been in Orage’s orbit, and he turned away from it not because he didn’t believe in a spiritual world but because it was “the wrong kind of spiritual world.”

But, in 1935 Eliot was a big deal, and Childs finds it meaningful that this big-shot literary figure would take the time to write an obituary for a much more obscure occultist, although I should note that Orage was also a literary critics of some note.  But to Childs, it might suggest that Eliot had a pretty passionate interest in the ideas of Orage and other occultists before he finally landed on his own beliefs.

As another clue to how deep Eliot’s interest was, Eliot’s big poem was of course the Wasteland, and it was published more than once and in one influential printing Eliot had appended a bunch of notes to it.  In those notes, he talked about the tarot card reading part of the poem and tried to make it look like he didn’t really understand the way the cards worked all that well, but Childs quotes 3 other authors, including one named Tom Gibbons who wrote that Eliot knew: “considerably more about occult literature than he admitted to in his notes to the WasteLand.”

All this suggests that Eliot didn’t just have a passing interest in the occult, he was pretty deeply into it.  This period, according to Childs, was from 1910-1922.  One Lyndell Gordon reports that in 1910 Eliot walked the streets of Boston and had a vision of people dividing and shrinking, and this vision would eventually show up in a poem called The Silence.  

Earlier in this podcast, when we were tracing the origins of Les Miz, one of the original authors named Bublil reports an eerily similar experience after having watched a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar.  He wandered the streets – also describing it as if in a trance – until inspiration struck him at dawn.  The ultimate result was the musical version of what would eventually be Les Mis.

So if you are looking for some consistency of story to show that maybe there are ghosts in theater, look no farther than the Trances that the author who inspired Cats and the producer who made Les Miz both had.  It would surprise no ancient Greek author that the great poets were struck with supernatural visions.

[pause]

In 1920 and 1921 Eliot was working at a literary journal called The Criterion which was sponsored by Lady Rothermore.  She held seances and Eliot and his then-wife Vivien attended them.  Viven was no fan of Lady Rothermore and accused her operation of being an “asylum for the insane…where she does religious dances naked.”  That’s pretty pejorative, but there was an institute, they did have naked dances, although they were supposed to elevate consciousness.  I might be pretty close to Vivien on this one.

There are, by the way, so-called “ecstatic dance” events, such as the ones held today in Portland, which are definitely designed to enhance consciousness.  And there are some news media reports that these involve nudity, although the current web pages for that event make no mention of it, although there are a bunch of rules: No shoes, no words, no instructions from the facilitators, no judgment.  Nudity aside, dance is definitely one way that people tried to connect to some forms of spirituality, it’s still an active movement, and Eliot’s wife Vivenne didn’t like it, which probably means Eliot did.

Anyway, that was one approach to spirituality in the exploding scientific era of 1900-1930.  There were 3 others.  According to Childs, there were the “spirtiualists,” who believe that the human soul survived physical death, the “psychical researchers,” who believed they were objectively gathering information about a possible spirt world, and a third branch called the “Theosophists,” strong associated with a leader named Madame Blavatsky, who disapproved of seances.  The psychical researchers and theosophists eventually fell out when the psychical researchers exposed some fraudulent claims by Blavatsky.

All these were active contenders for spirtuality, and in fact there were regular reports in the Boston and London papers reporting on issues in the occult.  All this reinforces the perception that it was an era of massive technological and social change, and some new form of spirtuality might emerge to claim the devotion of those looking for spiritual fulfillment, especially if they didn’t find it in traditional Christian churches.

Between 1910 and 1914 Eliot was exposed to and involved with all these movements.  In 1914  he read book by Pierre Janet that had to do with the occult, and demons in particular, and made some notes, like any college student might.  Those notes still survive.  We will get deeper into their content in the next episode where we’ll talk about demons, but for now they show an interest in the occult and especially disassociation  But, the ideas in that book would resurface in Eliot’s later published poems and criticism, which is also evidence that it made an impression.

Childs writes: “Theosophists, psychical researchers, fortune tellers, astrologers, therapeutic spiritualists – Eliot had personally met examples of them all by 1917.”  Among other things, Eliot liked both hearing and tell good ghost stories, according to Childs and some other sources.

While at Harvard, Eliot encountered the writings of William James, who wrote a book called The Varieites of Religoius experience” which was a source book on mysticism.  Later at Oxford he would take a course from a guy named William McDougall who was both a member of the Society for Psychical Research and a champion of James.  During this time, Eliot understood the themes to be roughly akin to “there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your science” and wrote “an unpublished essay on Kant [which] suggests that Eliot was prepared to accept this part of McDougall, James, and the SPR’s message.”

And so the occult was more than a party trick to Eliot; according to Childs “James provided for Eliot was he provided for McDougall, a certain intellectual respectability for a critical (as opposed to a wide-eyed) interest in the occult.”  In 1919 Eliot published a poem with a reference to Madame Blavatsky, and especially her writing about the Seven Sacred Trances linked to Seven Secret Rays, and to Childs this shows that Eliot regarded the occult as something like a midpoint between the mundane and physically actual world and the divine.  This was, again according to Childs, what drew Eliot to the ideas of Orage.

All this exposure also shows up in his most famous poem, the wasteland.  The poem itself, of course, involves a seance and many, many mystical references.  But it might be more than that – the poem itself might have been an expression of the occult.  Let me quote from Childs again:

“Indeed, Eliot implies during an apparently autobiographical digression in "The Pensecs of Pascal" (1931) that his experiences during the composition of The Waste Land might have been an instance of automatic writing:  [quote within a quote; now quoting Eliot directly]

it is a commonplace that some forms of illness are extremely favourable, not only to religious illumination, but to artistic and literary composition. A piece of writing meditated, apparently without progress, for months or years, may suddenly take shape and word,  I have no good word to say for the cultivation of automatic writing as  the model of literary composition; I doubt whether these moments can be cultivated by the writer; but he to whom this happens assuredly has the sensation of being a vehicle rather than a maker.

[end Eliot, back to Childs]

For the Eliot who was suffering a breakdown in 1921 (when he composed "The Metaphysical Poets" and most of The Waste Land), and for the Eliot who was attending Lady Rothermore’s seances at this time, the experiences of Janet's neurotic occultists served as a psychological and literary model.”

OK, so let’s slow that down a bit.  How much is TS Eliot affected by the occult?  Well, at one extreme we might call “not much at all,” Eliot is just trying to puzzle out where the inspiration for his poems comes from, and he’s fully aware that he can’t really articulate where it is other than it feels like he is the vehicle and not the creator of the poems.  That’s something he made clear in the “Three Voices of Poetry” essay and many times throughout his career.  A huge part of his literary criticism – called the “New Criticism” -- is that Eliot did not believe in elevating the author of a poem when trying to figure out the meaning of a poem because the author might not understand where their poems came from any more than anyone else.  In other words, if you want to know what a poem meant, you could ask the author, but their interpretation was no better or worse than anyone else’s.  So that’s the version of things where Eliot has some interest in the occult because he likes ghost stories but they aren’t really influencing his writing, he’s just got a literary theory and one metaphor that helps him explain it is the spiritual world.

In the middle you might say that there’s a version that goes: “it’s more than that, the particular ideas of the occult influenced Eliot.”  Childs makes the excellent point that even though the Wasteland does talk about there being a spiritual world between the solid earth and heaven, it’s not necessarily a good thing.  The visions might be misleading, or dangerous.  But, it’s possible that Eliot isn’t just using Madame Sosostis as a metaphor for something in the wasteland, he might be offering her seeing abilities as a real thing that should be taken seriously, if only as a warning.

And at the opposite end from “not much at all” is a place we might call “ghosts are totally real.”  In these waters, the Wasteland itself is a product of contact with the spirit world.  In fact, the whole poem might have been dictated to Eliot by a spirit via automatic writing.  In fact, Eliot might have been possessed by a demon who just used Eliot’s physical body as a vehicle to move the poem into the world.  The poems of TS Eliot, in this view, might themselves be both demonically inspired or, maybe even themselves, demonic.

As ghost stories go, this one is not without precedent.

IF you go to the American book binders museum website, there is an entire page dedicated to the idea that a book or story might be cursed.    They cite as the “definitive work on book curses” a tome called Anathema – Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses by Marc Drogin.  Their tales include ancient Egpytian clay tablets with curses on them, Medevial books that included curses on those who would defile the books including ravens gouging your eyes out, and HP Lovecraft’s “dreaded volume” the Necronomicron, “a cursed book [that] brings calamity to anyone who dares open it.”  This, of course, is Bruce Campell’s 1992 Horror Classic “Army of Darkness” where the central plot point is that a book called the Necronomicon is opened, unleashing demons (I guess) onto the planet!  If you are into horror camp and haven’t seen this one, treat yourself on Netflix. 

Even Hogwarts of Harry Potter fame has a cursed section of their magical library.  Here’s that quote:

“Dangerous?” said Harry, laughing. “Come off it, how could it be dangerous?”

“You’d be surprised,” said Ron, who was looking apprehensively at the book. “Some of the books the Ministry’s confiscated – Dad’s told me – there was one that burned your eyes out. And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives. And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed.”

So: There is a long a storied tradition of ghost stories involving cursed books and tales.  And one story about TS Eliot is that his work was conveyed through him by some supernatural entity, based on the tone of the Wasteland being not a very happy one, and that those ideas are unleashed into the world with a very nefarious effect.

That might explain why Vivenne, Eliot’s first wife who some scholars have claimed had a large involvement in his writing, was constantly physically and mentally ill and finally deteriorated into pure madness.  It might explain why Ezra Pound, Eliot’s best friend and who was eventually revealed to be a thorough editor of the final version of the Wasteland, descended into antisemitism, Nazism, and fascism, and also died while in confinement, his an institute for the criminally insane.

If Eliot is the poet laureate of modernity, maybe his poem ushered in the supernaturally evil elements of the modern world, including industrial warfare, environmental pollution and destruction, a loss of faith, and all the horrors Edvard Munch captured in the painting that best encapsulates the modern age.  You’ve seen it a hundred times, and it’s called the scream: A half-human, half-ghost wailing in terror at nothing in particular, but maybe about the human condition overall.

Maybe, what Munch did in a painting Eliot did in a poem, and maybe that was not the work of Eliot at all, but a demon speaking through him.

This is a far cry from Cats, but lets remember what ALW stitched together to make a plot for his musical: the heavyside layer.   This appears nowhere in TS Eliot’s book titled Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats, but in fragments of unfinished poems that Eliot’s second wife supplied to Trevor Nunn, the Director of Cats and also the of Royal Shakespeare Company.  Could it be that Eliot knew that there was real evil included in his poem fragments, which is why he never finished them, and their curse was unleashed unwittingly upon the world when his surviving widow naively gave them to ALW and his team, and this unholy presence explains the towering success of a show without a plot?  That the heavyside layer is a supernatural place, but purgatory and not heaven?  Is Grisabella the victim and not the heroine of a larger evil plot?  Something like you see in the movie the Omen or the Vampire Lestat, where ancient evil returns out in the open in the form of a agrobusiness corporation or a rock band formed to feed a vampire conspiracy?

I am now fully off the deep end, and I’ll go even deeper into the woods in the next episode, but if nothing else I am remaining true to my promise of exploring every supernatural angle that comes my way.

Let’s just say that everyone agrees that TS Eliot exposed himself, openly and enthusiastically, to the occult.  And that he likened the construction of poetry, including and especially his own most famous work, to demonic possession.  The only open question is how much of that is metaphor (which it most certainly probably is), and whether it might be literal, which it no doubt probably isn’t.

But that does get us back to the original question that opened this episode.  Do you believe in ghosts?  Are you one of the 70% who believe in the devil?  If so, you don’t have to squint very hard to see a darker side to the occult influence on TS Eliot.

This is not where our friend Donald Childs end up, although he does offer some tidbits.  In Childs’ interpretation, the reader is supposed to be skeptical of Madame Sosostris by the end of the Wasteland…but not quite.   Her tarot reading is largely accurate. As Childs’ writes, “From this point of view, Madame Sosostris is so fra from being undercut as to be affirmed with Tiresias as one of the true seers in the poem.”  In the end, Childs sees in Eliot a dualism.  As a younger person, Eliot was willing to entertain that there might be something to the occult, and he teases it out in the Wasteland.  By his later poems including the Quartets, which won him the Nobel Prize for literature, Eliot is openly scornful of the occult – it’s the wrong kind of spiritualism.  But, concludes Childs, it is an interesting form of spiritualism, one that continues for Eliot to mediate the space between the material and the spiritual.  This is very true to Eliot’s embrace of a way of knowing the world that is always uncertain; the key phrase is that the critic should “find fact nowhere and approximation always.”

If you survived an undergraduate philosophy class and remember the allusion to Plato’s cave wall, this is it, baby.  We never see reality directly; we only see shadows of what it must be and try to guess what it’s like.  By keeping Madame Sosostris in this space, Eliot puts her in an honored place, where all you can say about the spiritual world is “maybe.”

One last tidbit: Madame Sosostris turns over a card and exclaims it is “the drowned Phoenician Sailor,” a line that Eliot puts in his poem but comes straight from Shakespeare.  Let’s just remember that Eliot put Shakespeare in his poem right when he was attending the seances of madame Rothermore.  And flipping back just a few episode, Shakespeare is the same character to appeared to Victor Hugo when he was attending seances on the island of Jersey, and just before he wrote Les Miserables. Is it a coincidence that both the original author of Cats and the original author of Les Miz were both attending seances and both connected their work to Shakespeare while composing their works that – of all the incredible things both men had written over their lifetime – the specific works that would go on to become musicals?  Is it possible – as Dirk Gently repeatedly insists that it is – all connected?  Is this mere coincidence or are there no coincidences?  We will play with that idea – and I do mean play with it – in the next episode.

Let me give Childs the final word on his take-home point: “In the end, occultism - with which Eliot acknowledges that he has in the past aligned himself, and whose effect through Orage upon some of his contemporaries he is rather pragmatically still willing to condone in 1935 - remains for Eliot an ambivalent modern phenomenon. In his considered judgment, occultism is a preoccupation with "the wrong supernatural world" but  nonetheless at least an interest in a supernatural world.”

There are some dangling issues concerning Eliot’s flirtations with the occult.  After dabbling and then rejecting them, he turned to traditional religion in a really hard core way.  And after his disastrous marriage to Vivienne, he ended up by all accounts very happily married to his second wife, Valerie, for his last stretch of years on the planet.  These have been explored in prior issues, so no need to rehash them.  But his life ends happier than it started, which isn’t what you’d expect if he was indeed tormented by demons.  Demons never grow old.

Do you believe in ghosts?  I think TS Eliot, author of Cats, definitely did.  He believed in a literal God, a literal heaven, a literal Satan, and a literal hell, as his very literal traditional religion taught.  And according to Childs, he believed there might be something in between, something you could get to with the occult.  Something you might call neither heaven nor hell, but maybe, I dunno, the heavyside layer.

That will wrap this episode up, and the next episode will take us to unexplored territory for this podcast – a classic demon possession story that is both totally made-up, but entirely historically possible.  Join me at the crypt for the next episode of Theater History and Mysteries…

Show notes

https://assets.realclear.com/files/2024/01/2334_RCORToplineJan92024.pdf

https://bookbindersmuseum.org/you-have-been-warned-book-curses-and-cursed-books/