The Ancestral Hauntology of Haunted New England
The Horror Stories which the Location Inspired and the Ancestral Memories which Eventually Unleashed them.
Painting by Thomas Sheridan
When the first Europeans—as was the case particularly with HP Lovecraft’s ancestor—arrived in New England, it would have seemed to them that endless natural and spiritual dangers were constant and ever-threatening. Beyond the glow of their oil lamps and candles; the unknowns—which lay among the all-enveloping darkness—were as visceral and tormenting to them as the demons and devils which filled their religious sermons. Unlike the already present Wampanoag, Pequot, and Massachuse tribes within this part of New England, when the Puritans began to arrive in 1629, they were going to have to build their own sacred safe spaces out of the vast and untamed wilderness of the New World.
The Mayflower’s passengers were never going to be able to adapt to the natural environment of the Bay Colony region in the same way their own Pagan pre-Christian ancestors had done so in Europe. A desert religion was as unsuited to the vast forests of North America as it was a thousand years previously to Christian evangelists in Europe. The rule book simply didn’t work, and the King James version even less so. Nor could they adapt to the ways and methods of survival that Native tribes were still undertaking in the Americas at the time when the Puritans had arrived.
Using the Bible of the Middle East as their guide, they would have to hack down every tree, cultivate every hectare of soil, and plant every seed of grain in defiance of the natural order of this newly promised land of their own making. A fertile crescent of their own within the domain of savage heathery.
Even so, beyond the boundaries and demarcations created by dry-stone walls and wood fencing, the ‘devils’ of the wild, animistic landscape lay waiting to consume Poe, Stephen King, and HP Lovecraft’s ancestors. The Puritans were determined to convert this ‘satanic’ ecosystem. By means of axe, plough, and scripture. As the devout Puritans fell into their nightly slumbers, the strange noises coming from beyond the line of trees at the edge of their Christian properties would have drifted—under many a gibbous moon—into their dreams and nightmares. Yet, the God of the Bible was not there to protect them either within their dreams or within that of the wild landscape. The same forbidden places their own God claimed to have created. But these same places he was absent from nonetheless.
Unlike the previous influx of Europeans with the arrival of the Vikings in what is today known as L’Anse aux Meadows near the northern tip of Newfoundland six hundred years previously, these Christian Puritans had no pantheon of archetypal-complaint gods, nature spirits, and magic to guide them across the unfamiliar landscape. There was no Odin or Thor to psychically migrate with them so as to allow a less traumatic and hostile adaptation within their new natural setting.
Such themes were brilliantly conveyed within Robert Eggers’ 2015 movie The Witch. Eggers, a director who was to continue his Lovecraftian-inspired movies with his second film in 2019 entitled The Lighthouse, perfectly captured the psychological state of humans existing far beyond the margins of civilization. Forces that are real or imagined become the central player in the psychology of humans forced to confront them. In many what the Puritans of early New England were attempting was something of a willing schizophrenia. Using their evangelical proselytization as something of a compensatory shamanism. Entering a world of mysterious spirits so as to bring back the means to eventually survive them. Even the Bible-thumping Puritan has no choice in the matter.
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Pagan Anarchist Thomas Sheridan is an Author, Artist, Film Maker, and Satirist who has spent a life from Wall Street to the Jungles of South Asia attempting to discover the emerging—often elusive—mythology of modern humans within the present technology-saturated era. Heavily inspired by the work of Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, and Joseph Campbell, Thomas Sheridan has developed ‘Monomythic’ tool kits—which draw upon all the mythologies of the world. So as to demonstrate that on a personal and collective level; these legends and stories contain within them a subconscious lexicon of wisdom and symbols that can help all of us overcome the personal and greater challenges we encounter in everyday life. By not giving birth and nurturing these timeless archetypes within us all, modern humans are at a loss when it comes to achieving personal and social Individuation. Or a rounding out of one’s purpose in life. Their dharma. Their Monomyth. Inside all of us resides a wizard, a warrior, a bard, and a knight and by tapping into the power of these archetypes one can have a more fulfilling and creative life. Every challenge a quest. Every situation a saga. Every moment is an adventure.
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Thomas, your painting reminds me of Not to touch the earth from The Doors waiting for the sun album. Spooky and surreal. I am drawn to light houses and will watch the lighthouse at some point.