In the Middle Ages if one were assailed by the forces of the supernatural, help was as close as the nearest priest. In the 16th Century the witch-finder cleansed the land of evil. It is only with the coming of the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution, that characters in ghost stories and novels were forced to choose. If they had faith, the Church still offered some assistance. Or, for the rational Man of Science, some plausible explanation could be found and a technological device or principle devised to deal with the problem. The two options were distinct and separate.
Then in 1872, and an obscure Irish writer created a shadowy character who brought both spheres together. The horror field has not been the same since.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu created the first psychic investigator by accident, or at least, without intending to do so. Dr. Martin Hesselius, the German Doctor, is the template that would influence the genre of horror fiction to the present day, in television, comics and movies. More importantly, his influence can be directly recorded on writers like Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood.
The grand-nephew of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, famous author of A School for Scandal, Le Fanu was to take a very different path than his mother’s famous relative. Born in 1814, Joseph went on to be educated in Trinity College to become a lawyer, but abandoned the Bar for journalism.
He became editor and owner of the important Dublin University Magazine. In 1869, he sold the magazine and devoted himself full-time to writing. Within his lifetime, he would publish dozens of novels, essays and short stories, the best known being The House by the Churchyard (1861), Uncle Silas (1864), and In a Glass Darkly (1872). The reclusive writer became known as the “Invisible Prince”, influential but unknown.
Le Fanu died in 1873, at the age of fifty-eight. Within ten years most of his works were forgotten. It was only when Le Fanu’s greatest imitator, M. R. James, reprinted several of his best stories, that readers were once again discovering his magic. James’ efforts were not permanent either, and by the turn of the century Le Fanu was out of print and known by name only. It is only within recent years that Le Fanu’s work and his reputation have been cemented, as the father of the English Ghost Story.
Martin Hesselius is a vague character, seen only briefly in the framing devise of Le Fanu’s most famous book In a Glass Darkly (1872) comprised of the five short stories “Green Tea”, “The Familiar”, “Mr. Justice Harbottle”, “The Room In the Dragon Volant” and “Carmilla”. Hesselius is observer in only one tale and the protagonist in none, but serves as the element which ties the narratives together.
From the opening prolog, given by Hesselius’ secretary (who confesses “Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practiced either…” due to an accident with a scalpel) we learn that after the incredible doctor’s death, his papers have been edited and presented to us. With an admiration for Hesselius, that would later inspire Stoker’s relationship between Seward and Van Helsing, the narrator tells us of the German Doctor:
In Dr. Martin Hesselius, I found my master. His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight. My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it was well-founded.
Early in “Green Tea”, Hesselius is described as a “medical philosopher”, indicating his learning in both the realm of the physician and the priest. ” … I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organized substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption …” Hesselius is always vague, leaving the envisioning of his immense knowledge to the reader. “… my Essays on metaphysical Medicine … suggest more than they actually say.”
Such philosophizing makes up the majority of his erudition, as does the reading of arcane and philosophical books, the precursor to Carnacki’s Sigsand Manuscript and Lovecraft’s Necronomicon: “While awaiting Mr. Jennings’ arrival, I amused myself by looking into some of the books with which his shelves were laden … I lighted upon a complete set of Swedenborg’s Arcana Caelestia, in the original Latin …” Hesselius then quotes for ten paragraphs on “interior sight” and the wickedness of such spirits that torment men like the Reverend Jennings who has committed no crime greater than drinking large amounts of tea, as le Fanu himself was fond of doing.
Unlike the four stories following “Green Tea”, Hesselius actually takes part in the story as narrator, though in the capacity as observer he does few things of interest except the discovery the body of the dead priest, in a scene worthy of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The plot concerns a Reverend Jennings who seeks Hesselius’ help to rid him of a phantasm which haunts him. The monster takes form as a horrible black monkey with burning red eyes. Jennings knows the creature to be immaterial but its torments, sitting on his Bible during service, and finally spoken abuse, are too much. The man kills himself to escape. Hesselius accepts no blame, as the man was not yet his patient.
“The Familiar” (an earlier tale, “The Watcher” renamed and revised) is one of two hundred and thirty similar cases that the editor tells us Hesselius had investigated or collected during his career. In plot it is largely identical to “Green Tea” except this time, Captain Barton is plagued by a grotesque drab, rather than a monkey. Hesselius is not involved personally, but relating a narrative written by an Irish clergyman, Rev. Thomas Herbert.
“The Familiar” is helpful in that it gives us a small idea of how Hesselius attempts his work. He complains in the prologue that all the preparations he usually makes when attempting a case are not present: “… I should have been acquainted with Mr. Barton’s probable hereditary pre-disposition; I should have known, possibly, by very early indications, something of a remoter origin of the disease than can now be ascertained.” From these remarks we can see how Hesselius is as interested in the medical possibilities as the supernatural.
“Mr. Justice Harbottle” is a tale of spectral revenge. The “hanging judge”, Elijah Harbottle, uses his position to obtain a man’s wife as well as terrorize the poor souls who enter his court. Harbottle is served a notice from the “High Court of Appeal” — what Harbottle believes to be a Jacobite plot — for his sins. Later the judge is abducted, tried by the specters of the men he has wronged, and sentenced by Judge Twofold, a grotesque caricature of himself. The verdict is guilty and Harbottle is to die in a month’s time. When March 10th arrives Harbottle is found dead.
Hesselius’ editor begins the tale by referring us to one of Hesselius’ famous works, “The Interior Sense, and the Conditions of the Opening thereof”:
… It was one of the best declared cases of an opening of the interior sense, which I have met with. It was affected too, by the phenomenon, which occurs so frequently as to indicate a law of these eccentric conditions; that is to say, it exhibited what I term, the contagious character of this sort of intrusion of the spirit world upon the proper domain of matter. So soon as the spirit action has established itself in the case of one patient, its developed energy begins to radiate, more or less effectually, upon others …
“A Room in the Dragon Volant” is an unusual entry in In a Glass Darkly, and may have been included simply as filler. Though a violent story it contains no supernatural element. Le Fanu ties the tale in by having Hesselius write a lengthy document on Medieval and Dark Age poisons:
This Essay he entitles “Mortis Imago”, and he, therein, discusses the Vinum letiferum, the Beatifica, the Somnus Angelorum, the Hypmus Sagarum, the Aqua Thessalliae, and about twenty other infusions and distillations, well known to the sages of eight hundred years ago, and two of which are still, he alleges, known to the fraternity of thieves, and, among them, police-office inquiries sometimes disclose to this day, in practical use.
The last story in In a Glass Darkly is perhaps the one story which will guarantee Le Fanu his fame. “Carmilla” was acknowledged by Bram Stoker as one of his inspirations for Dracula. Not only is Dr. Van Helsing a similar German doctor of the supernatural with an avid student in Seward, but Stoker places a little hint in the excised first chapter of the novel, known today as “Dracula’s Guest”. Harker on his way to Dracula’s castle wanders into a graveyard inhabited by the undead. On one tomb is written: “Countess Dolingen of Gratz/In Styria/Sought and Found Death/1801”. “Carmilla” is also set in Styria, near Gratz.
The plot of “Carmilla” is concerned with the lesbian relationship (clothed in Victorian metaphor) between a young nobleman’s daughter and an unexpected guest, Millarca (an obvious anagram). The family is warned against a terrible creature named Carmilla by Baron Vordenberg whose own daughter died from vampirism, and Millarca/Carmilla is killed when the Baron shows up. The daughter is saved from immediate peril, but perhaps not completely. Carmilla’s shadow hangs over the daughter like a veil.
With “Carmilla” we see for a last time how the editor only hints at Hesselius’ profound understanding by presenting none of it.
… after due consideration, I have determined, therefore, to abstain from presenting any precis of the learned Doctor’s reasoning, or extract from his statement on a subject which he describes as ‘involving, not improbably, some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence, and its intermediates.’
The editor tries to contact the woman who narrates the tale, but she has died in the interim, perhaps confirming our worst suspicions, that she too, is doomed to become like Carmilla.
In 1895, Welsh writer, Arthur Machen, used a framing character similar to Hesselius, a physician named Dr. Raymond in his classic horror story, “The Great God Pan”. Dr. Raymond is also a creature of the Prologue, as he appears nowhere else in the story. His purpose is to introduce Machen’s concept of extra-perception and the narrator Mr. Clarke.
The tale opens with Dr. Raymond (“… a middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion …” and Clarke, about to perform an experiment on Mary, a willing seventeen year old gutter-rat. The doctor’s attitude towards her gives a first impression of the almost Frankensteinian drive of the man: “‘… As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit …”
Where Raymond shares the Hesselian mold is in his work which transcends both science and mysticism: “… I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the right path …” His discovery: our world is obscured. “‘… the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career’ beyond them all as beyond a veil …'”
Like Hesselius, Raymond is far ahead of his peers:
… But I suppose you have read … that immense strides have been made recently in physiology of the brain. I saw a paragraph the other day about Digby’s theory, and Browne Faber’s discoveries. Theories and discoveries! Where they are standing now, I stood fifteen years ago, and I need not tell you that I have not been standing still for the last fifteen years …
Also like Hesselius, Raymond finds his answers in obscure texts. “‘You see that Parchment Oswald Crollius? He was one of the first to show me the way, though I don’t think he ever found it himself. That is a strange saying of his: ‘In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.'”
Raymond prepares to use his new knowledge. The result of “… a slight lesion in the grey matter .. a trifling rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred …” is that Mary’s eyes loses the veil which all human mind’s need and “… hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot … fell shrieking on the floor”. Her fate is sad: “Three days later Raymond took Clarke to Mary’s bedside. She was lying wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side, and grinning vacantly.” Clarke goes onto his telling of the story of Helen Vaughan and Raymond is forgotten all together.
Dr. Raymond’s experiments would inspire later writers like Colin Wilson, who used a similar idea (even borrowed the operation scene) in his Cthulhu Mythos novel, The Philosopher’s Stone (1969). Wilson uses Machen’s idea of a small surgical operation altering human consciousness (“seeing the Great God Pan”) and Wilson’s own ideas on “Faculty X”. Another Mythos alumnus, Ramsey Campbell, had used the concept earlier in one of his tales, “The Render of Veils”(1964). In Campbell’s story the deity Daoloth allows two men to see beyond the veil, where they promptly kill each other for being hideous monstrosities.
Certainly the most famous occult doctor ever has been Dracula’s nemesis, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing of Amsterdam. Played by Edward Van Sloan, Peter Cushing, Sir Laurence Olivier and Anthony Hopkins, he holds the record for most portrayals of any ghost-buster on film. Teacher and friend to Dr. Seward, Stoker borrowed heavily from the Hesselius-narrator relationship in creating these two characters. Just as “Carmilla” helped inspire Dracula’s homeland, the Hesselius frame gives us this foreign doctor. Seward writes about his arrival in his diary: “… I have written to my old friend and master, Professor Van Helsing, of Amsterdam, who knows as much about obscure diseases as any one in the world …” Later he begs: “Professor, let me be your pet student again.” when the Englishman can not fathom Van Helsing’s bizarre actions.
Seward’s descriptions of Van Helsing smacks of Hesselius:
… Van Helsing would, I know, do anything for me for a personal reason, so, no matter on what ground he comes, we must accept his wishes. He is a seemingly arbitrary man, but this is because he knows what he is talking about better than any one else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind. This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, an indomitable resolution, self-command, and toleration exalted from virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that beats — for mankind — work both in theory and practice, for his views are as wide as his all-embracing sympathy …
Van Helsing’s amazingly open mind is mentioned several times, by Seward, Mina and the Professor himself. His long experience helps to widen his views:
“Dr. Van Helsing, what I have to tell you is so queer that you must not laugh at me or at my husband …”
“Oh my dear, if you only know how strange is the matter regarding which I am here, it is you who would laugh. I have learned not to think little of any one’s belief, no matter how strange it be. I have tried to keep an open mind; and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.”
Van Helsing’s endless energy is also evident in everything he does. “Van Helsing stepped from the carriage with the eager nimbleness of a boy.” Though the oldest of the party of vampire hunters he is by no means an ancient brain. “… Van Helsing seemed to throw his whole soul into the effort …” Even in the thick of the hunt for the Count, Van Helsing retains his exuberance: “… We resumed our places, and Dr. Van Helsing went on with a sort of cheerfulness which showed that the serious work had begun. It was to be taken as gravely, and in as businesslike a way, as any other transaction of life –“
Like all “Hesselians”, Van Helsing is steeped in the ancient lore and arcane texts. He places a great trust in these volumes, when he says:
There are such beings as vampires; some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples. I admit that at first I was sceptic. Were it not that through long years I have train myself to keep an open mind …
Later, the Professor will seek help in London: “… Van Helsing is off to the British Museum looking up some authorities on ancient medicine. The old physicians took account of things which their followers do not accept, and the Professor is searching for witch and demon cures which may be useful to us later.” The knowledge of cross, garlic, home soil, and supernatural powers helps Van Helsing through the novel to destroy Dracula’s refuge at Carfax castle, dispatch his evil Transylvanian brides and win back Mina from the power of the Undead.
A well-known physic, the Dutch Doctor is also a student of psychology, making him an excellent leader for the hunting of Dracula. He occupies Harker’s mind while his fair Mina grows more and more vampiritic:
… The professor tried to keep our minds active by using them all the time. I could see his beneficent purpose, by the side glances which he threw from time to time at Harker. The poor fellow is overwhelmed in a misery that is appalling to see … His energy is still intact; in fact, he is like a living flame. This may be his salvation, for if all go well, it will tide him over the despairing period …
The Professor has his work cut out for him. But he is equal to the task. Jonathon Harker says:”… Van Helsing is the man to unmask him and hunt him out, if he is anything like what Mina says …” “Van Helsing’s iron nerves” are commented on several times. Seward is ever-impressed by his mentor: “… he is true grit, and he improves under strain that would kill a weaker nature …” ” But it isn’t until the bloody work begins that we see Van Helsing in action: ” … I want to operate, but not as you think. Let me tell you now but not a word to another. I want to cut off her head and take out her heart. Ah! you a surgeon and so shocked! Oh, but I must not forget, my dear friend John, that you loved her …”
What drives such a man? Before the infamous staking scene, in which Lucy is dispatched, Arthur refuses to allow any mutilation of her body. Van Helsing counters: “My Lord Godalming. I, too, have a duty to do, a duty to others, a duty to you, a duty to the dead; and, by God, I shall do it!”
In recent novels such as the excellent revisionist Dracula tales of Fred Saberhagen (The Dracula Tapes, The Holmes-Dracula Files, etc.) Van Helsing has been attacked for his blind use of blood transfusions, draining any healthy body into the dying. Granted, today we know not all humans share the same blood, but Stoker had only the tools of his time with which to write (Karl Landsteiner would discover blood types three years after the publication of Dracula in 1900) and can be forgiven this lapse, for it is his power as a defender of Mankind from the forces of Evil that we remember him, the most famous occult doctor of them all.
By the end of these tales the reader knows very little about Hesselius, Raymond or Van Helsing except their professional expertise, their logical and scientific manner. Each is often not a full-blown character but a mere mechanism in the frame — with Van Helsing being the exception perhaps — where he deservedly belongs. The stories in these books belong to other more prominent characters.
As Jack Sullivan explains in his excellent study Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story From Le Fanu to Blackwood (1977) Hesselius and all the ghost-busters after him encapsulate an idea: “… The impulse … to transcend the “homespun ‘ghost story'” by subjecting the supernatural to the rigors of a quasi-scientific discipline. The desire to have it both ways — to be both mystical and scientific — is characteristic of much of the supernatural fiction of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods …”(Pg 118-9)
Perhaps the clearest version of this idea in fiction appeared recently in Mark Frost’s debut novel, The List of 7 (1993), which uses a historical person, a young Arthur Conan Doyle (much as Marc Olden did with Edgar Allan Poe in Poe Must Die (1976) as an occult investigator, combining Holmes’ methods with Doyle’s beliefs. Doyle’s conversion to spiritualism over many years is well documented. Frost describes Doyle’s Hesselian blend of philosophies in the opening of the book:
As his studies deepened, the wrestling within him between science and spirit, these two irreconcilable polarities, grew increasingly clangorous and divisive. He pressed on nonetheless. He knew too well what could happen to men who surrendered that fight: To one side stood the self-appointed pillars of morality, manning the ramparts of Church and State, worn enemies of change, dead inside but lacking the good sense to lie down; at the other extreme lay a host of wretches chained to asylum walls, wearing their own filth, eyes burning with ectasy as they communed with an illusory perfection. He drew no judgmental distinction between these extremes: he knew that the path of human perfectibility — the path he aspired to walk — lay exactly on the midpoint between them. It remained his hope that if science was unable to lead him down that middle path, perhaps he could help science find its footing there. (Pg. 13)
It is this mind, (fictionalized here) which would create the next important character in the development of the sub-genre, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
This article originally appeared in Black October Magazine, 2003. Copyright G. W. Thomas
