Witchcraft Wednesday: Coven 13, Issue #4

In many ways, this last issue is unlike the first three.  It is still recognizably Coven 13, but it has a transitional air about it. The witchcraft is there, to be sure, but fantasy and sword-and-sorcery have encroached on the center. That makes sense in hindsight because this is the final issue published as Coven 13. Afterward, Fantasy Publishing Company acquired the magazine, and it continued as Witchcraft & Sorcery.

The March 1970 issue contains Buddy Saunders' "The Bidderfrost Dragon," "I, Vampire!" by Pronzini/Wallman, S. M. Clawson's "The Convert," Lee Chater's "The Thing on the Stairs," Sidney Harriet's "Eats!", the poltergeist installment of Bell, Book and Tarot, a Robert E. Howard poem, and the enormous (85-page) conclusion to "Let There Be Magick!" 

The editorial is particularly poignant now. Landis says the distributor wants the magazine to remain bimonthly for another three issues, so they have decided to finish Let There Be Magick! early and clear the decks for the "new COVEN 13 of 1970." The proposed new format would have featured two long novelettes, several short stories, an article, and the regular departments. He clearly expects the magazine to continue.  

Of course, that version of Coven 13 never happens.

That gives this issue a strange quality. Landis thinks he is reorganizing the magazine. We know we are reading his final issue.

"The Bidderfrost Dragon" is probably the most overtly game-like piece we've encountered in the entire four-issue run. Aerma is an inexperienced sorceress trying to conjure a dragon to defend her castle. Instead, she summons a Sheridan tank and its four-man crew from an Army exercise in Arizona. She initially assumes the armored vehicle is simply a very strange dragon. 

From there we get language spells, spellbooks, demons, magical bargains, an actual dragon, armies, castles, and modern military technology. Aerma bargains with demons for fuel, but a translation problem results in twenty-four cases of high-proof whiskey. Fortunately, the Sheridan can run on it. Eventually the tank fights a genuine fire-breathing dragon.

This isn't especially useful for witchcraft, but it is fascinating for the D&D side of what we've been discussing. This is March 1970, and here we already have the sort of gleeful collision of fantasy and modern technology that old-school gaming will later embrace. Again, I would not suggest influence. It simply demonstrates that this kind of genre mixing was already part of fantasy's vocabulary. Plus this sounds EXACTLY like something you could have read in an early issue of Dragon magazine. 

Aerma herself is also interesting. Her magic is procedural. She has books, languages, pentagrams, demons with whom she negotiates, and spells that can go wrong. Magic is fantastic, but not arbitrary. That remains consistent with much of what Coven 13 has been doing.

"I, Vampire!" by Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey M. Wallmann has put forth the purest version of Landis’ concept for the supernatural in a modern setting. The whole piece is put together from letters, editorial replies, telegrams, newspaper pieces, and official memoranda. Peter Lewis, a vampire, has written his autobiography and regularly sends it to an editor who takes it for a dreadful work of fiction. The vampire makes it known more than once that he is not making it up. But when the editor puts out one too many rejections, he is found dead in his office not long after, his neck punctured and blood gone, with bat guano on the carpet.

After that, Peter Lewis puts "I, Vampire" in front of Arthur H. Landis at Coven 13.

It is entertaining. What is best is how the vampire fits into 1969 America. He is forced to deal with editors, Western Union, postal delivery, and the indignity of having his memoirs dismissed as poor fiction. You will not find any Transylvanian castles here.ignity of having his memoirs dismissed as poor fiction. 

And there is no Transylvanian castle anywhere in sight.

Bell, Book and Tarot deals with poltergeists this time. The article surveys their recurring characteristics, including knocking, objects moving in defiance of gravity, fires, children or adolescents serving as apparent centers of activity, and cases where fraud explains some events but not everything. It stresses how difficult it is to fit poltergeists neatly into a single explanation.    

The line I would keep for your own purposes is essentially this: poltergeist may describe what is happening without explaining what is causing it.

That is an excellent Jackson principle.

Calling something a ghost, demon, faerie, psychic event, or poltergeist gives the characters a vocabulary. It does not necessarily mean they understand the underlying phenomenon.

Then we get "The Convert" by S. M. Clawson, which is easily the most important witchcraft story in the issue.

Benjie Stone is a biochemist who returns to his old family home after his father's death. He plans to clear the old "witching junk" out of the tower and turn the space into a laboratory. The Stone family, however, is one of the old witch families of the region. Benjie's mother had the talent. His father apparently did not. Benjie has rejected the entire tradition as superstition and replaced it with modern science.     

The neighboring Bowman family has its own magical tradition, and Benjie becomes involved in an escalating conflict with Hiram Bowman. What I like here is that the story never really asks us to choose between science and magic. Benjie's biochemistry works. His manipulation of hormones works. The laboratory is real knowledge.

But the witchcraft is real too.

Benjie's mistake isn't believing in science. His mistake is assuming that one system of knowledge invalidates the other.

By the climax, he is being pursued by something science alone cannot explain. Faced with death, he finally cries out that he believes, and the inherited supernatural world he has rejected responds. 

That is excellent material for Witchcraft Wednesday, and probably the centerpiece of this post. I am thinking of ways to adapt this to the magical families of Jackson (the Vales, Vosses, Thornes, and Cricklows) or better yet, to Sunny Valley.

Right after "The Convert" comes another Robert E. Howard contribution, the poem "Feach Air Muir Lionadhi Gealach Buidhe Mar Or." (Scottish Gaelic translation: "Look at the rising tide-a moon yellow as gold.") It invokes Mananan Mac Lir, the sea, ghostly ships, ancient shores, and the pull of an older Celtic world.

So Howard appears in both Coven 13 #3 and #4. That gives the final half of the original Coven 13 run a direct Appendix N connection. Unlike "The Little People," however, I wouldn't call this a newly discovered first publication without qualification. Bibliographies disagree about an earlier appearance in Howard's amateur-journal circle, The Junto.

"The Thing on the Stairs" by Lee Chater goes back to werewolves, but once again Coven 13 refuses to give us the standard cursed-man-under-the-full-moon version. It also features some of the cheesecakeist art we have seen from William Stout so far.

The Weres, yes, that is their name, are an ancient family who have lived alongside humanity for centuries. They can assume human form so completely that they consider themselves the genuine humans and ordinary Homo sapiens a rather underdeveloped species. 

That is much more interesting to me than another werewolf curse.

The Weres have their own family history, reproduction, attitudes toward humanity, supernatural enemies, and traditions. One ancestor even made a deal with the Devil for a creature called the Watchet, only for the Devil to discover the Weres had no soul to bargain away. 

This is another useful example of supernatural people rather than supernatural monsters. Humans aren't the default viewpoint. The Weres think they are normal.

There is something here for Jackson; I have spent some time these last two weeks trying to figure out how I want to do werewolves and other lycanthropes. I am not 100% there yet. Ok. I am not even 30% there yet, to be honest.

It is not terribly different in concept from last night's Teen Wolf.

"Eats!" by Sidney Harriet may be the strongest Sunny Valley story in the issue.

Gerald Johnson stops at an isolated roadside place during a rainstorm. The locals feed him an enormous meal while everyone else watches. Eventually he learns that they do this once every spring. They feed, fatten, kill, roast, and divide a traveler among the townspeople because the ritual keeps bad luck away and helps the crops. 

That is straight-up American folk horror. It's "Motel Hell" meets "Alice."

And this is March 1970, three years before The Wicker Man. The original, not the Nic Cage "Bees!" version. I'm certainly not suggesting a connection between them, but the similarities in the broad folk-horror machinery are striking: an isolated community, agricultural fertility, seasonal ritual, and an outsider who becomes the sacrifice. The Wicker Man would not appear until 1973. 

For Sunny Valley, this is almost immediately usable.

Then we get the conclusion to "Let There Be Magick!", and it is enormous because Landis compressed what was originally planned as a five-part serial so it could end here.

By the finale, we're deep into armies, sorcerers, undead creatures, magical attacks, alien forces, telepathy, science-fiction technology, kingdoms, and enormous fantasy battles. At the climax, the Pug-Boos summon something like a quarter-million dottles into the battle, turning what should have been an apocalyptic confrontation into something almost absurdly gentle.

And then we finally learn more about the Pug-Boos. The protagonist is a Galactic Adjuster. The Pug-Boos reveal that they are something greater: Universal Adjusters.

So the apparent fantasy world has been sitting inside a science-fictional cosmology all along.

That ending really completes the point we've been making throughout these four issues. Coven 13 doesn't care very much about keeping fantasy, horror, science fiction, sorcery, occultism, folklore, and weird fiction in separate boxes.

The readers noticed this too.

One letter in this issue asks for more ceremonial magic. Another reader calls "The Little People" the best story in #3, asks for more Howard, and praises Let There Be Magick! as sword-and-sorcery. 

But another reader takes exactly the opposite position, arguing that if Coven 13 is supposed to be about "WITCHCRAFT-HORROR-THE SUPERNATURAL," then Let There Be Magick! has no place in it because it is simply fantasy.

Reminds me of the letters to Dragon a bit.

That disagreement may be one of the most interesting things in the whole issue. We've just spent four issues watching Coven 13 show that Landis doesn't really accept that distinction.

And that may be the best angle for the final post.

The first issue asks what modern supernatural fiction should look like. The second argues that supernatural things need context. The third really brings witchcraft, folklore, weird fiction, and fantasy together. And the fourth ends with the readers themselves arguing over whether fantasy belongs in a magazine about witchcraft and the supernatural.

Then Coven 13 disappears, and Witchcraft & Sorcery takes its place. But we won't see it for another year.

More than any previous issue, #4 feels like a crossroads. That seems entirely appropriate for the end of Coven 13.

I don't have all the issues of Witchcraft & Sorcery, but when I do, I'll have to do a retrospective.