Mini-Review: Deck the Halls With Boughs of Hellbore!

Maria J. Pérez Cuervo’s Hellebore has previously adopted a twice-yearly publishing schedule, roughly aligned with the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes, but this year they’ve decided to do a special extra release – Yuletide Hauntings, an issue of the periodical focused on ghost stories for Christmas.

As is typically the case with Hellebore, the collection is a mixture of articles I enjoyed but tend to wish were a bit longer, and articles where I don’t entirely see the point. In the former category, Katy Soar provides an intriguing history of sightings of Roman ghosts – as well as considering why stories of such only seem to have caught on in the early 20th Century. Pérez Cuervo herself goes even earlier, offering snapshots of hauntings associated with Britain’s ancient barrows. Verity Holloway offers a quick profile of the efforts by Victorian mediums to report on the fate of the doomed HMS Erebus and Terror, lost on an expedition to seek the Northwest Passage, which perhaps allows the practitioners in question off the hook a little for their exploitation of the desperation of Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the expedition leader Sir John, to hear news of the lost men.

Perhaps the best article is Julia Round’s profile of Misty – a British horror comic from the 1970s aimed at girls, with an eponymous host giving a sort of witchy pagan allure to the whole thing. I’d vaguely heard of Misty but hadn’t read any, but it sounds wonderful – like a feminist folk horror counterpart to 2000 AD. It’s nice enough, but one could wish it included more extract from Misty stories, since I feel the piece gives a rough idea of what the comic was like whilst barely showing any of it – we get some bits of cover art and splash pages, but little idea of what the meat of its stories looked at.

On the less compelling side of the equation, Alice Vernon’s survey of the theme of disturbed sleep in ghost stories feels like it collects examples without reaching any conclusions. I was also unconvinced by John A. Riley’s essay on The Stone Tape (both the original TV drama and the 2015 radio adaptation), since his conclusions about commodity fetishism seem a little tacked on to the end and aren’t the product of an argument developed over the whole article. Edward Parnell’s article about Borley Rectory and how it inspired The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (the basis of The Haunting) which rounds out the collection is one of those rambling collections of personal musings which Hellebore tends to conclude its issues with, and which never quite land for me, tending towards solipsistic musings relevant only to the author.

Yuletide Hauntings, then, is not so much a Christmas annual as it is, well, just another issue of Hellebore. The journal tends to be just about good enough to keep me coming back for more, but I continue to wish that Pérez Cuervo would either see her way to expanding its pages to allow some of the articles to sprawl more or cut some of the more superficial articles to give extra space to those which are constrained by its limitations.

Mini-Review: Hellebore Harvest

It’s been a while since I last dipped into Hellebore, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo’s folk horror occulture periodical. Rather than exhaustively going through everything in the most recent five issues, I’m instead going to do a rapid tour and note which articles I thought were particularly worthwhile.

Each issue of Hellebore is themed, and issue 6 is the Summoning Issue, with a big emphasis on occult subjects. This included some really eye-opening material, introducing me to subjects I hadn’t heard of previously – a good sign that the magazine isn’t just steering to the fairly well-travelled routes of folk horror and high weirdness but getting deep into the weeds. Per Faxneld’s Spinster Satanism offered an absolutely fascinating look at Lolly Willowes, a novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner which mashed up Satanic themes with feminist anger; Victoria Anne Pearson examines the strand of Irish folklore which based on the idea of the deck of playing cards as being “the Devil’s prayer book”; Verity Holloway offers an interesting biography of eccentric farm labourer George Pickingill, who ended up at the centre of a storm of claims that he was the last of a long line of “cunning men” representing an ancient pagan magical tradition.

Issue 7 was the Ritual issue, and coming out around Beltane 2022 it had a big emphasis on rituals to greet the summer. Pérez Cuervo herself offered an analysis of the imagery used in the May Day parade in The Wicker Man, whilst Hannah Armstrong offers an overview of the career of Jane Ellen Harrison, a classical scholar who beat the gender barriers imposed by Victorian society between her and her intended profession and who scandalised the field by focusing on subject matter considered unfashionably grim.

Issue 8 was dedicated to Unveiling, and its best articles were probably an article by Pérez Cuervo about the Lobsang Rampa hoax and the man behind it and an extended look by James Machin at Penda’s Fen. The Old Ways-themed issue 9 includes an interesting pair of articles about the development of particular New Age theories – Katy Soar and Niall Finneran offer interesting insights into how the concept of ley lines turned from a fringe archaeological theory into the underpinnings of the sort of “Earth mysteries” stuff which underpinned the psychic questing movement, whilst Kenneth Brophy discusses the weird mid-1970s trope of stone circles having alien connections, as seen in Children of the Stones, The Stones of Blood, and the fourth Quatermass series. The Darkness issue, number 10, felt to me a little light, but I did enjoy Chris Esson’s look at the alchemical imagery in A Field In England.

Once again, there’s a few too many articles which simply take too shallow a look at their subject matter – issue 8 has a look at psychedelic folk by Rob Young which doesn’t offer much of interest at all, merely outlining an idea about how the British landscape is inherently a psychedelic place without really digging deep enough to illuminate many of its assertions. Hellebore always seems to include a bunch of articles I enjoy but which could do with more meat on their bones, and others which feel like somewhat shallow treatment of their subject matter, and I think the periodical would be a much stronger offering if the latter were trimmed out right to make room to expand the former.

Still, it is heartening to see that the Hellebore team is branching out into chunkier works: Pérez Cuervo has also recently issued The Hellebore Guide To Occult Britain, a nice pocket-sized tour guide of sites of occultural interest across the UK. Here, the somewhat terse summaries of the places in question are beneficial – they leave space for stuffing more material into the book and, in keeping with more conventional guidebooks, are to be expected to provide only a quick introduction to the site in question, not an in-depth discussion.

Yuletide Rides and Fresh Exhumations

Despite the trials and tribulations of the pandemic, folk horror-and-spooky-folklore periodical Hellebore continues to put out issues following up the first three issues with a Yuletide special and an Unearthing-themed issue. Let’s see what treats are in store.

Yuletide first. Katy Soar offers The Lord of Misrule, a roving musing on offbeat traditions which bounces from the titular late medieval tradition to Saturnalia (and some odd ideas that James Frazer of The Golden Bough ended up persuading himself of on a shaky reading of rather spurious evidence) to whether Father Christmas is a sacrificial king. Similarly tenuous is John Reppion’s discussion of the pre-Christian celebration of Modranicht and the three mother goddesses apparently venerated during it – an article which boils down to “eh, we can’t know very much about them because not many sources have survived”.

Somewhat more structured is John Callow’s From Ghoul To Godhead, which develops the development of Herne the Hunter from a legend mentioned in passing in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor to a deity venerated by some neopagans, an ethos reflected in the character’s depiction in Robin of Sherwood. Clearly, it’s possible – though Callow doesn’t consider this possibility – that Shakespeare actually invented Herne, devising him as a broad parody of the sort of folk legend played in the context of the play rather than basing him on an existing ghost story – but it’s still interesting to see how a cultural figure can gone from being all but overlooked outside of that sort of passing reference into being a legend that people believe has much greater antiquity than it actually has (especially in its present form).

Verity Holloway’s The Hauntings of Cold Christmas recount not just the ghostly folklore around Cold Christmas Church (so called because of a probably spurious legend about a harsh winter slaying most of the parish’s children in some nebulous bygone year), but also the more tangible hauntings: the dark tourists, folk horror enthusiasts, rowdy youths, and YouTubers making their very own zero-budget ghost-hunting videos who are attracted to the site by its reputation and whose disrespect for it have left it in a horrible state. Here Holloway is able to examine not just the dark side of British rural legends, but the dark side of the folk horror fad itself.

Folk Horror Harvest: Hellebore On Malefice and Scarfolk’s Map

The nights are drawing in, and whilst Halloween is over it still feels a bit like folk horror season. A good time, then, to take a look at the third issue of Hellebore, the rather good folk horror magazine which I’ve previously reviewed the first and second issues of.

The issue leads off with Lucifer Over Lancashire, a consideration by Catherine Spooner of the Pendle Witches case and its cultural impact. This is a terse introduction to the subject matter which is bigger on the cultural impact aspects than the facts of the case, and plays into the editorial by editor Maria J. Pérez Cuervo about how witches and witchcraft can be icons of resistance – the idea of women with spiritual powers that can have effective, status quo-upsetting powers in everyday life, rather than their spirituality being essentially focused around deferred postmortem rewards, being subversive to the status quo even if those accused in the past were wholly innocent of the accusations against them. (Notably, the issue is dedicated to “the thousands who were tortured, imprisoned, and killed during witch-hunts”, rather than making the less supportable claim that any proportion of those people were actually witches in the sense that the authorities were accusing them of being.)

Fresh Folk Horror For the Darkening Seasons

Autumn, especially that part where it begins turning into winter and the hours of darkness seriously start closing in, feels to me like the natural season for horror, especially folk horror and its neighbours. Even after the festivities of Halloween itself, it feels like the dark powers of the universe haven’t so much been banished as appeased, and that cold night is still on the upswing.

It’s good timing, then, that some interesting new offerings have come out at just the right time to be savoured – whether that’s the full-throated folk horror of Hellebore, or the more retro-suburban twist offered by Scarfolk, as explored on the blog of the same name and the previously-released novelisation.