This week we move on to Issue #2.
Coven 13, Issue #2, Nov. 1969
Our second issue is dated November 1969 and still has the 60-cent cover price. Once again we are promised WITCHCRAFT, HORROR, and THE SUPERNATURAL, along with Part Two of James R. Keaveny's Let There Be Magick! The lineup this time includes werewolves, witchcraft, ghosts, old gods, transformations, and more of the occult in modern life. Or pretty much my Christmas list.
Arthur H. Landis' editorial is worth revisiting because he further defines what he wants Coven 13 to be. He talks about contemporary witchcraft, including the very real occult revival going on around him in 1969, and argues that religions and occult beliefs exist within and influence the modern world. For Landis, the closer supernatural fiction gets to both the phenomena themselves and the actual world people live in, the better and more meaningful it becomes. He even uses Ray Bradbury's "The Foghorn" as an example of how a fantastic creature can be treated as something more than just a monster smashing things.
Honestly, this editorial might explain why I am enjoying Coven 13 so much. His experiences also track with my own. Well, not at the time. When Coven 13 #2 came out, I was just about five months old. But it tracks with my writings here about the 1970s Occult Rival.
Landis isn't interested in just putting a werewolf in a story because werewolves are scary. He wants to know why the werewolf is there and what it means that it exists in the same world we do. That is something I have been doing in my own games for years, especially recently with Jackson and Sunny Valley.
Up first is Once Upon a Werewolf by Robert L. Davis, with art again by William Stout. This is a comedic werewolf story set firmly in contemporary Los Angeles. Henry Thorndyke has managed to turn himself into a werewolf, and his friend Ed has to deal with the consequences. We get Laurel Canyon, bars, cars, Hollywood, and all the other trappings of late-1960s California right alongside lycanthropy and occultism.
This is exactly the sort of story Landis was talking about. The werewolf doesn't live in some remote European village. He's hanging around Los Angeles drinking rye and causing trouble. Exactly the sort of things I am looking for in my games and the overall theme of my current 1980s Horror Movie Marathon.
A Message for Brother by John Lipford takes us back toward the macabre. Our narrator awakens confused and slowly remembers his life, particularly his rather unpleasant relationship with his brother. It becomes increasingly obvious that there has been a long history of the two attempting to do kill each other, culminating in a dinner involving some very dangerous mushrooms. The narrator has one final message to deliver to his brother.
Not really witchcraft, but it fits the old Weird Tales tradition of the gruesome story with a supernatural twist.
Then we get Double Hex by Samuel M. Clawson, and this one is much more interesting for what I am doing here.
The story takes place in Pennsylvania and concerns Amanda Spiegell and her brother Reuben, who are engaged in what amounts to a magical feud. The introduction describes Pennsylvania as rivaling New England in spells, enchantments, and what it calls "garden witchcraft." Amanda uses folk magic, charms, timing, animals, and sympathetic magic against her brother, who knows enough magic to protect himself and strike back.
This is the kind of witchcraft I love seeing in stories.
It isn't flashy fantasy magic. Nobody is tossing fireballs around. This is household magic, inherited practices, signs, charms, bits of animal and plant lore, and the constant question of whether the magic caused something or whether events just happened that way.
There is a lot here I can use for Sunny Valley in particular. Pennsylvania isn't Appalachia (exactly, but you can see it from there), of course, but there is enough overlap in American folk-magic traditions and rural supernatural storytelling to make this feel familiar. It also fits Jackson, where magic can be happening in someone's house while the neighbors are completely unaware.
The new Bell, Book and Tarot feature by Jean Cirrito is especially important. It promises to explore witchcraft, sorcery, lycanthropy, Druidic lore, spells, enchantments, the Evil Eye, and whatever other bits of occult lore the editors can uncover. They even invite real covens to send in contact information.
The first installment, About Witches and Such: An Objective Peek, is a very 1969 look at the history and practices of witchcraft. There is a lot here that stems from the Margaret Murray/Gerald Gardner understanding of witchcraft that was common at the time, so I wouldn't treat all of it as reliable history. Ok, actually not much of it at all. But as a snapshot of what people interested in witchcraft were reading and thinking about at the end of the 1960s, it is fascinating. Plus, as I have said many times about Murray, it makes for a great element in a game.
We get covens, sabbats, the athame, circle, chalice, wand, cauldron, pentacle, cords, scourge, elemental correspondences, nature worship, and the idea of modern witchcraft as the survival or revival of an older religion.
I have been writing witches for RPGs for a very long time, so quite a lot of this is familiar territory.
Next is The Transmogrification of Ridgely P. Winters by Joseph Harris, another bit of supernatural satire. Ridgely's trip into the infernal becomes a mixture of Hell, mythology, psychology, sex, psychiatry, and bureaucracy. Like Potlatch in the previous issue, it shows that Coven 13 wasn't above having some fun with all of this. Horror and the occult don't always have to be deadly serious.
The Shadow Trader by Wylly Folk St. John is another one that really caught my attention. A modern newspaper is constructing a new multimillion-dollar building and creating a "Crypt of Culture" as its cornerstone. That leads us to the much older belief that buildings require a sacrifice for their their foundations, and to a man who claims his shadow has been stolen by a professional Shadow Trader.
This one is pure Jackson to me.
A new office building is going up. There are architects, newspapers, publicity stunts, and all the things you expect in a modern American city. But underneath all of that is a very old magical idea that never went away. That is exactly how I like the supernatural to work. The modern world didn't replace the old one. It was built right on top of it.
Then we get the best-known writer in this particular issue, Harlan Ellison, with Rock God. Here we have an ancient stone or earth deity, Dis, associated with Stonehenge and an older world that modern people have largely forgotten. Unlike some of the more conventional supernatural creatures in these issues, this feels genuinely ancient. The point isn't that Dis fits neatly into some mythology. The point is that something very old is still there.
That works extremely well for Sunny Valley.
Some things in the world are older than the names people have given them. Calling something a god, demon, spirit, or monster might say more about us than it does about the thing itself.
That is also one of the lessons I keep coming back to in my games. D&D, by necessity, likes categories. This is a demon. That is a devil. This is an undead. That is a fey. Those categories are useful at the game table, but older weird fiction is often much less interested in telling us exactly what something is.
There is a Letters section, which is kind of fun.
Next is Part Two of Let There Be Magick! by James R. Keaveny. We are back on the planet Camelot, where magic and dark sorcery really work. We have castles, knights, strange creatures, kingdoms, magic, and more of the Science Fantasy/Sword & Planet mixture from the first issue. One particularly fun detail is the Collegium in Glagmaron, where students can study Minstralism, medicine, philosophy, law, theology, and, because this is Camelot, introductory magick, sorcery, and astrology.
Again, this is 1969, almost five years before Dungeons & Dragons, and nearly 30 years before Harry Potter.
I am not claiming any influence here. I have no evidence of that. Indeed, I feel Coven 13 was largely ignored by many at the time. But this is exactly the sort of literary environment that makes the arrival of D&D a few years later seem much less like something that sprang fully formed out of nowhere. Fantasy, science fiction, sword & sorcery, occultism, and weird fiction were already happily stealing from each other.
Finally, we have Pia by John Donaldson, which gives us another werewolf story. Unlike the comedy Once Upon a Werewolf, this one takes the idea seriously and turns lycanthropy into a story of paranoia and suspicion. Same supernatural creature, completely different effect.
That might be the best demonstration of Landis' point in the entire issue.
A werewolf isn't a story.
It is something you can build a story around.
We end with a great ad for the Unverse Book Club.
It feels very much like the Science Fiction book club, and many of my searches brought up both.
With Issue #2 done, I think Coven 13 is beginning to show its real strength. Issue #1 established the sort of magazine Landis wanted to publish. Issue #2 starts showing us the rules of that world. Magic exists in modern America. Old gods might still be around. Folk traditions didn't necessarily stop working just because people got televisions and automobiles. Werewolves don't have to behave like movie werewolves, and witches don't have to live in fairy tales.
And perhaps most importantly, the supernatural needs a context.
If there is a troll under the bridge, I want to know why it is there.
That is something I can absolutely use.
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