THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS

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THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS

 Gollancz (London), 1931

(Ultimate Edition)

Contains the additional stories

from the 1932, Doubleday edition
 

(version 4.1)

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THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS

BEING A COLLECTION OF STORIES

of

APPARITIONS, WITCHCRAFT, WEREWOLVES,

DIABOLISM, NECROMANCY, SATANISM,

DIVINATION, SORCERY, GOETY,

VOODOO, POSSESSION, OCCULT,

DOOM AND DESTINY

Edited, with an Introduction, by

MONTAGUE SUMMERS

(Originally published 1931)

Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880 – 10 August 1948) was an English author and clergyman. He is known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century, as well as for his idiosyncratic studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe. He was responsible for the first English translation, published in 1928, of the notorious 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the
Malleus Maleficarum
.

Early life

Montague Summers was the youngest of the seven children of Augustus William Summers, a rich banker and justice of the peace in Clifton, Bristol. Summers was educated at Clifton College before studying theology at Trinity College, Oxford with the intention of becoming a priest in the Church of England. In 1905 he received a fourth-class Bachelor of Arts degree. He then continued his religious training at the Lichfield Theological College.

Summers was ordained as deacon in 1908 and worked as a curate in Bath and Bitton, in Greater Bristol. He never proceeded to higher orders, however, probably because of rumours of his interest in Satanism and accusations of sexual impropriety with young boys, for which he was tried and acquitted. Summers' first book,
Antinous and Other Poems
, published in 1907, was dedicated to the subject of pederasty.

Summers also joined the growing ranks of English men of letters interested in medievalism, Catholicism, and the occult. In 1909 he converted to Catholicism and shortly thereafter he began passing himself off as a Catholic priest and styling himself the "Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers", even though he was never a member of any Catholic order or diocese. Whether he was ever actually ordained as a priest is a matter of dispute.

Literary scholarship

Summers worked for several years as an English and Latin teacher at various schools, including Brockley County School in south-east London, before adopting writing as his full-time employment. He was interested in the theater of the seventeenth century, particularly that of the English Restoration, and edited the plays of Aphra Behn, John Dryden, William Congreve, among others. He was one of the founder members of The Phoenix, a society that performed those neglected works, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.

Montague Summers also produced important studies of the Gothic fiction genre and edited two collections of Gothic horror short stories, as well as an incomplete edition of two of the seven obscure Gothic novels, known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, mentioned by Jane Austen in her Gothic parody
Northanger Abbey
. He was instrumental in rediscovering those lost works, which some had supposed were an invention of Jane Austen herself. He also published biographies of writers Jane Austen and Ann Radcliffe.

The occult

Summers' career as an ostensibly Catholic clergyman was highly unusual. He wrote works of hagiography on Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Anthony Maria Zaccaria, but his primary religious interest was in the subject of the occult. While Aleister Crowley, with whom he was acquainted, adopted the persona of a modern-day witch, Summers played the part of the learned Catholic witch-hunter. In the introduction to his book on
The History of Witchcraft and Demonology
(1926) he writes:

In the following pages I have endeavoured to show the witch as she really was – an evil liver: a social pest and parasite: the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed: an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes: a member of a powerful secret organisation inimical to Church and State: a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition: a charlatan and a quack sometimes: a bawd: an abortionist: the dark counsellor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants: a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.

In 1928, he published the first English translation of Heinrich Kramer's and James Sprenger's
Malleus Maleficarum
("The Hammer of Witches"), a 15th century Latin text on the hunting of witches. In his introduction, Summers insists that the reality of witchcraft is an essential part of Catholic doctrine, and declares the Malleus to be an admirable and correct account of witchcraft and of the methods necessary to combat it. This should be contrasted with the vastly more skeptical and critical attitude of mainstream Catholic scholars, reflected for instance in the Rev. Herbert Thurston's article on "Witchcraft" for the Catholic Encyclopaedia of 1912, which labels the publication of the Malleus a "disastrous episode."

Montague Summers then turned to vampires, producing
The Vampire: His Kith and Kin
(1928) and
The Vampire in Europe
(1929), and later to werewolves with
The Werewolf
(1933). Summers' work on the occult is notorious for his unusual and old-fashioned writing style, his display of erudition, and his purported belief in the reality of the subjects he treats.

Other pursuits

Summers cultivated his reputation for eccentricity. The Times of London wrote he was "in every way a 'character' and in some sort a throwback to the Middle Ages." His biographer, Brocard Sewell (writing under the pseudonym "Joseph Jerome"), paints the following portrait of Summers:

During the year 1927, the striking and somber figure of the Reverend Montague Summers in black soutane and cloak, with buckled shoes--a la Louis Quatorze--and shovel hat could often have been seen entering or leaving the reading room of the British Museum, carrying a large black portfolio bearing on its side a white label, showing in blood-red capitals, the legend 'VAMPIRES'.

Despite his conservative religiosity, Summers was an active member of both the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, to which he contributed an essay on the Marquis de Sade, and of the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society which cultivated a pederastic homosexual ethos. Summers' interests also show in his edition of the poems of the sixteenth century poet Richard Barnfield, which partly are openly homosexual.

Death

Montague Summers died at his home in Richmond, Surrey in August 1948. An autobiography
The Galanty Show
was published posthumously in 1980, though much is left unrevealed about his life.

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§1 HAUNTINGS AND HORROR

 
1. MALEFIC HAUNTINGS: MIXED TYPES

 J. Sheridan Le Fanu:
Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand 

 J. Sheridan Le Fanu:
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street 

Evelyn Nesbit:
Man-Size in Marble 

Bram Stoker:
The Judge's House 

Perceval Landon:
Thurnley Abbey 

 
2. HAUNTING AND DISEASE

 E. and H. Heron:
The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith 

 3. MALEVOLENT MYSTERY

 Amelia B. Edwards: The Phantom Coach 

 Amyas Northcote: Brickett Bottom 

4. FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Miss Braddon:
The Cold Embrace 

Amelia B. Edwards:
How the Third Floor Knew the Potteries 

Rosa Mulholland:
Not to be Taken at Bed-time 

Charles Dickens:
To be Taken with a Grain of Salt 

Charles Dickens:
The Signalman 

Charles Collins:
The Compensation House
 

Amelia B. Edwards:
The Engineer 

5. THE UNDEAD DEAD

Vincent O'Sullivan:
When I Was Dead 

E. and H. Heron:
The Story of Yand Manor House
 

6. THE DEAD RETURN

a) In Retribution 

Vincent O'Sullivan:
The Business of Madame Jahn 

b) In Love or Passion
 

Vernon Lee:
Amour Dure 

Vernon Lee:
Oke of Okehurst 

Miss Braddon:
Eveline's Visitant 

c) A Vow Fulfilled 

Evelyn Nesbit:
John Charrington's Wedding 

7. A SOUL FROM PURGATORY

Roger Pater:
De Profundis 

8. SHADOWED DESTINY

Wilkie Collins:
The Dream Woman

*****

 
§2 DIABOLISM, WITCHCRAFT, AND EVIL LORE

1. BLACK MACIC

Richard Barham:
Singular Passage in the Life of the late Henry Harris, Doctor in Divinity 

Jasper John:
The Spirit of Stonehenge 

Jasper John:
The Seeker of Souls 

2. SATANISM

Roger Pater:
The Astrologer's Legacy 

3. WITCHCRAFT

Amelia B. Edwards:
My Brother's Ghost Story

4. CONTRACTS WITH THE DEMON

J. Sheridan Le Fanu:
Sir Dominick's Bargain 

Vincent O'Sullivan:
The Bargain of Rupert Orange 

5. THE VAMPIRE

J. Sheridan Le Fanu:
Carmilla 

6. THE WEREWOLF

Frederick Marryat:
The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains

7. POSSESSION

Roger Pater:
A Porta Inferi
 

8. OBSESSION

Richard Barham:
Jerry Jarvis's Wig 

John Guinan:
The Watcher o' the Dead 

9. VOODOO

E. and H. Heron:
The Story of Konnor Old House 

W.B. Seabrook:
Toussel's Pale Bride 

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In the full flush of success during its first London run, Tom Sheridan, who was playing the hero of "wax-work" Brooke's The Earl of Essex, was wont to be loud up and down the Town in his praises of the poetry and exalted sentiments of this truly mediocre tragedy. In his fine stage voice ore rotundo he would declaim some half a dozen wilting lines and demand applause. On one occasion, in some crowded drawing-room, Sheridan spouts the conclusion of the first Act, ending up with a tremendous —

Who rules other freemen should himself be free!