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. 

Witchcraft Wednesday: Coven 13, Issue #3

We are back with my October exploration of Coven 13. The first issue established Arthur H. Landis' vision of a modern successor to Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, while the second made his editorial philosophy even clearer. The supernatural should not simply be dropped into a story because the author needs a monster. It should be part of the world around it, with its own history, rules, and consequences.

Now we get to Issue #3, dated January 1970, and are now into the decade that would see the 70's Occult Revival, "The Exorcist" and "The Wicker Man", not to mention "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" and Dungeons & Dragons, and all the other material I return to in these pages.

Coven 13, Issue #3, January 1970

The contents page actually labels this "Vol. 1, No. 2," even though the November issue was already #2 and the following March issue is #4. I am going to chalk that up to a simple production error. More importantly, this issue gives us Alan Caillou, Ron Goulart, Robert E. Howard, Dennis Quinn, Pauline Smith, James Benton Carr, and Part Three of James R. Keaveny's "Let There Be Magick!" We also get another installment of Bell, Book and Tarot, two poems by Wade Wellman (son of Manly Wade Wellman), and an essay on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.

Landis' editorial is once again worth reading because he continues to define what he thinks Coven 13 should be. This time he complains about the number of manuscripts arriving that simply recycle vampires, werewolves, pacts with the Devil, and familiar monsters. He isn't rejecting those subjects. What he wants is originality. He again insists that writers should look at the world around them rather than simply copying the "mouldering pages" of earlier writers, pointing specifically to Rosemary's Baby, Bell, Book and Candle, and Psycho as examples of stories that combine the strange with contemporary life.  

The rest of the editorial concerns the less glamorous problem of magazine distribution. Landis explains how printing tens of thousands of copies means little if large numbers never make it onto newsstands, and how long publishers can wait before actually getting paid. His declaration that "COVEN 13 WILL MAKE IT!" reads a little sadly in hindsight. There is only one more issue of Coven 13 in this form before the magazine changes hands and eventually becomes Witchcraft & Sorcery.

It is a supply-and-demand issue we still see today in the RPG publishing industry. 

Let's get to the stories that did make his cut.

The lead novelette is "Leona!" by Alan Caillou, again illustrated by William Stout. Christian Althing has lost his daughter Leona and refuses to accept her death. He has an old magical book, an altar, ritual tools, sacrifices, a cauldron, and a growing belief that he can use all of this to bring her back. His grief gradually consumes every other moral consideration.  

This one gets at something I have been thinking about quite a bit in my own games. Death should matter. Witches can speak with ghosts, summon spirits, learn secrets from the dead, and get into all sorts of trouble with necromancy, but actually restoring the dead to life is another matter entirely. "Leona!" is essentially about what happens when someone refuses to accept that boundary. Christian does not want to understand death. He wants to force death to return something it has taken from him, and the results are appropriately (and predictably) horrific.

In my Advanced Witches & Warlocks book, I specifically keep spells like Raise Dead and Resurrection out of witches' hands. It violates their moral and ethical systems. If a witch gets to the point where she wants to bring someone back from the dead like that, she either needs to get a cleric or be satisfied with necromancy.

We also get two poems, "Song of the Undead" and "Nightmare," by Wade Wellman. An important distinction here is that this is Wade Wellman, the son of Appendix N author Manly Wade Wellman. The poems themselves fit comfortably into Coven 13: graves, undead things, banshees, haunted houses, moonlight, and the dead walking where they shouldn't.    

The latest "Bell, Book and Tarot" by Jean Cirrito turns to the Evil Eye, and this is probably my favorite nonfiction installment so far. We get the Italian mal'occhio, protective gestures, amulets, serpents, horns, crescent moons, horseshoes, rue, animal charms, and other ways people have tried to protect themselves against an envious or dangerous gaze. The piece ranges from classical mythology to European folk practice and customs still familiar to the writer in the twentieth century.

This is exactly the kind of material I want for Sunny Valley. Folk magic works best for me when it consists of small things people have always done: a sprig of rue, a hand gesture, a charm over a doorway, something your grandmother insists you carry even though she also insists she does not believe in such nonsense. That feels much more convincing than everybody knowing elaborate ceremonial magic.

"The Strawhouse Pavilion" by Ron Goulart brings us back to Landis' idea of the contemporary supernatural. A modern couple is being haunted by Wendy's dead father, but he does not simply appear as a transparent ghost. He was a bandleader, so he brings an entire 1940s dance pavilion with him, complete with music, cars, dancers, and the atmosphere of another era. Eventually Wendy realizes that her father has essentially brought back the whole ballroom because merely appearing as a ghost would not have been impressive enough.   

I love this idea! It feels like something that could happen in Jackson without changing the setting at all. A haunting does not have to be a figure walking down a hallway. Maybe an entire building comes back. Maybe music plays from a ballroom demolished thirty years ago. Maybe a street looks exactly as it did in 1947 for ten minutes and then snaps back to normal. That is a much more interesting supernatural event than another chain-rattling ghost.

In fact. Jacksonville has a rather famous band stand/gazebo. It was supposed to have been dismantled and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution. I can't recall if it was or not. BUT I have very distinct memories of it, especially sitting on it and reading "The Best of Dragon vol 2." Also, when the infamous "I attack the Gazebo" rumor was floating around in the early days of the internet, that was the image I had. So thank you, Ron Goulart. Jackson now has a ghost gazebo. 

Next comes the biggest literary name in the issue, Robert E. Howard, with "The Little People." Howard died in 1936, making this a very posthumous publication, and this January 1970 appearance was the story's first publication. The story explicitly invokes Arthur Machen's "The Shining Pyramid" and plays with the idea that stories of elves, trolls, fairies, and other "little people" might preserve distorted memories of an older population driven into caves and remote places by later peoples.     

There is plenty here that has not aged well, particularly Howard's racial and pseudo-anthropological assumptions, and I have no interest in importing those into my games. But there are some very solid ideas as well. What does interest me is the underlying weird-fiction idea that folklore may remember something real without remembering it correctly. That comes close to ideas I have been developing for Jackson and Sunny Valley, where an old legend might describe something genuine while completely misunderstanding what that thing actually was.

That does not make Howard's Little People my Ur-humans, nor do I want to collapse either of them into Faerie or the Sidhe or even the Sr. Wellman's Shonokins. What interests me is the older literary tradition of asking what might exist behind the folklore. Howard also gives us the direct Appendix N connection in this issue. I am still not suggesting that Coven 13 influenced D&D, but once again we can see these literary circles overlapping just a few years before D&D appears. It would have certainly influenced me had I been in Gygax's shoes. In January 1970, at just six months of age, I am not even sure I owned shoes yet. ETA: Asked my mom, I had a little pair I wore in an "Olan Mills" photo portrait. I was a chunky monkey back then, and my little fat fingers weren't well suited for typing.

This issue does solidify the connection to the earlier pulps that Landis loved so much. Securing the first run rights to this tale must have been a wonderful feeling for him. 

There is a reader's letters column that is a fun read. 

The issue also includes Arthur Jean Cox's essay on Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." Cox digs into the famous question of whether the ghosts are actually present or whether everything is being generated by the governess herself. The essay is valuable less because I need another interpretation of James and more because it demonstrates what Coven 13 wanted to be. This was not simply a magazine printing spooky stories. It wanted readers to think and argue about supernatural fiction as well.

Then we get "Witch Fish" by Dennis Quinn, which may be my favorite story in this issue. Abat is a witch who transforms himself into an enormous brook trout as part of a revenge scheme against the warlock Marag. That is strange enough, but the real fun for me is the background Quinn casually establishes.

The New England countryside has places known by one set of names to ordinary people and another set known only to witches and warlocks. There is a Federation, a Grand Council, magical territories, familiars, regulations on the use of magic, and punishments for breaking those rules. Abat has only recently finished serving a twenty-year ban on practicing witchcraft.      

That immediately gives me ideas for Jackson and West Haven. There is the map everyone sees, and then there is the map witches know. Same roads, same rivers, same cemetery, but with completely different meanings and boundaries. The mundane map tells you where a place is. The witches' map tells you what happened there and why you should not cross a particular boundary after dark.

"Last Rites" by Pauline Smith is another very 1969/1970 occult story. It even comments on witchcraft, necromancy, divination, parapsychology, and "Cosmic Consciousness" entering colleges and universities. From there we get young people experimenting with the Key of Solomon, the Atharva Veda, ritual circles, lunar timing, a photograph, and a cat. Really captures what I feel was going on in the early 1970s.  

One little detail really captures the entire Coven 13 approach. The old magical texts recommend isolated crossroads, forests, caves, abandoned houses, and other secluded places for ritual work. The characters note that in the age of automobiles and subdivisions, finding such places has become increasingly difficult.

Ancient magic has to deal with modern zoning.

That may be the most Coven 13 idea in the entire issue! 

"Don't Open 'til Xmas!" by James Benton Carr takes us into contemporary urban occult horror. Paul Benton is planning to spend Christmas with his younger girlfriend when a mysterious package arrives. He initially thinks it is from her, but it actually comes from his estranged wife Helen, who has recently been to Haiti. Inside is a doll, and Paul eventually realizes that Helen has used magic to transfer him into it.    

Some of the treatment of Haiti as shorthand for sinister magic is very much of its period, but the basic concept fits perfectly with Landis' editorial philosophy. The occult doesn't require a ruined castle. It can arrive by special delivery at a modern apartment. Sometimes the witch just needs your mailing address.

It also fits well with the themes I have been exploring all month of "Horror comes Home."

Finally, we return to Part Three of "Let There Be Magick!" by James R. Keaveny. By now the story has become increasingly recognizable as the sort of fantasy environment an RPG player could enter without much explanation. We have knights, sorcerers, strange animals, magical wards, hostile creatures, reanimated dead, castles, wilderness travel, and a wizard's stronghold.

What continues to interest me is how the protagonist approaches magic. He sees something everyone else accepts as supernatural folklore and immediately starts asking how it actually works. The "dead-alives," for example, are terrifying to the inhabitants of Camelot, but he begins testing assumptions about them, separating what they actually do from what people believe they do. That is exactly the sort of thing players do in an RPG.

Again, this is not evidence that Coven 13 influenced D&D. What it shows is how many of the ingredients were already circulating together before 1974. Sword & Sorcery, Science Fantasy, occultism, weird fiction, ghosts, witches, monsters, magical societies, necromancy, and ancient forgotten peoples were all part of the same imaginative landscape.

Final Thoughts

Of the three issues I have covered so far, I think this one brings the various pieces together the best. We have a warlock trying to defeat death, a ghost who brings an entire ballroom with him, folk protections against the Evil Eye, a hidden society of witches, young people experimenting with grimoires, Robert E. Howard reaching back into the older Weird tradition, and a Science Fantasy serial becoming increasingly recognizable as the sort of world fantasy gamers will soon inhabit.

Coven 13 still doesn't seem particularly concerned about whether something belongs to horror, fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, folk horror, occult fiction, or Science Fantasy. It is all part of the same supernatural landscape. And frankly, that is fine with me. 

In fact, that is probably what I like most about it.

Sadly, only one more issue to go.

Witchcraft Wednesday: Coven 13, Issue #2

Last week I started my October look at the short-lived occult horror magazine Coven 13. Issue #1 came out in September of 1969 and established what editor Arthur H. Landis wanted the magazine to be: a modern successor to magazines like Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, but one firmly grounded in the contemporary world with modern takes on horror and the occult. 

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.

Witchcraft Wednesday: Coven 13, Issue #1

 It is October! It's Witchcraft Wednesday. I have been spending a lot of time discussing various topics like the Witches of Appendix N, my upcoming Advanced Witches & Warlocks, and my various campaigns of Jackson, Carbon Vale, and Sunny Valley. All of these share a very interesting point of intersection: 1970s occult horror. And 1970s occult horror is detailed rather nicely by the magazine Coven 13.

Coven 13

Published by Camelot Publishing Company out of LA and under the editorship of Arthur H. Landis, Coven 13 was an American fantasy and horror magazine that did not have a long run, only 4 issues. In its original incarnation, it was a digest-sized affair, four bimonthly issues in all between September 1969 and March 1970, with a focus on “Witchcraft, Horror, [and] The Supernatural.” William Stout, the staff artist, was responsible for much of the publication's look. For his part, Landis had no qualms about stating he intended for Coven 13 to fill a void left by the likes of Weird Tales or Unknown Worlds, though with a more modern slant on the occult and supernatural. Kinda makes it perfect for what I am doing here really. 

That is not to say the magazine vanished after March 1970. It was picked up by William L. Crawford’s Fantasy Publishing Company, with Gerald W. Page as the new editor. Come early 1971 and issue #5, it was renamed Witchcraft & Sorcery: The Modern Magazine of Weird Tales. Leaving no doubt on which legacy it wanted to embrace. Six further issues were put out in an irregular fashion until 1974, making ten in all across the two names. But the first four from the Coven Daysays are something of a unit unto themselves, and they are what I propose to examine this October.

The tonal shift from Coven 13 to Witchcraft & Sorcery is enough to consider them two different magazines. Coven 13 was more about modern horror and the supernatural. Witchcraft & Sorcery was closer to the pulps of old, with more fantasy. Both titles have their fair share of Appendix N authors, so exploring these two should be interesting.

Coven 13, Issue #1, Sept. 1969

Our first issue dates back to September 1969. Our cover price is 60 cents.

The magazine promises all-new stories of WITCHCRAFT, THE SUPERNATURAL, and HORROR! 

The editorial by Arthur H. Landis pretty much tells what he wants out of this, something akin to Weird Tales. The feel of this magazine is certainly right. He wants to honor the old writers, who he thinks deserve much more credit in the literary landscape than they do (or rather did then, they do now), and invite new authors to contribute stories of the same sort. 

So already I get a solid Appendix N feel out of this magazine. Hard to say what D&D could have become if this had been in the mix. Spoiler, I know what it would have become and I have been writting that material for years.

Up first, we have Odile by Alan Caillou with art by William Stout. Caillou became a prolific script writer and actor. Stout has art everywhere.  The women of the small villiage of Petit Gruet do not like Odile Lautrec, not one bit. She is accused of stealing men and dancing naked under the moon, so she must be a witch. Then the trouble begins and doesn't end even after Odile is dead. Set in 1936 (and told from the perspective of much later on) it is a great modern witch tale.

Joseph Harris's Potlach is next, also illustrated by William Stout. Here, the devil takes up in Country Club. In Markham Town! by Jack G. Levine is a tale of gothic horror in the post-atomic age and how the monsters are still out there. 

The Postman Always... is a quick little tale of the Devil in modern times by Richard P. Flanagan. And followed by a Faustian tale Of Brides & Brimstone by Lenore Betcker and more art by William Stout.

Spell of Desperation by G. Kissinger brings Black and White Magic to the modern age and is a great example of what Coven 13 was really trying to do: mixing magic, modern times, horror, and the gritty feel of the pulps of the 1970s. Though the tale is still rough by 21st-century standards. 

James H. Keaveny's is an odd one out. Let There Be Magick! is not a modern tale, but set on a planet named Camelot. So both fantasy and futuristic. It's a bit of Sword & Planet with magic. It is also explicitly Part 1 of 5. 

With Issue #1 done, I admire the direction Coven 13 was going in. Either it was on the cusp of the prevailing Zeitgeist of the Occult Revival of the 1970s (which I have typically placed at its peak in 1973 with the release of "The Exorcist") or just a little bit before it. Likely before it. 

I think the reason that Coven 13 didn't become more prominant during this time was due to the rise of cheap paperback novels. Something I have detailed before. 

We still have a few more issues to go, so plenty still to talk about.