Fantastic Metropolis

So we have a disgraced churchman, wandering about Europe telling beautiful and sacrilegious tales of elementals who are all friendly to man, who seek nothing but to serve and aid them, yet concealing in his stories a brief mention of their desire for union with man in order to gain for themselves immortal souls… much like a salesman who conceals the fine print of the deal yet dares not discard it. We have Dee, a century earlier, making contact through Ed Kelly (a notorious liar and thief, yet undoubtedly possessing the scrying talent Dee himself lacked) with supposed angels who teach not divine secrets, but elemental lore and who order Dee to engage in wife-swapping with his dubious compatriot, and both point back to the biblical tales of Adam and Enoch and their dealings with spirits who sought flesh and blood offspring through union with mortal men and women. It seems our elemental brothers and sisters are not always what they appear to us as. It’s easy to see in Villars’ tale a harbinger of the mysterious black-garbed Comte de Saint Germain, of course… who claimed, furthermore, to have been thousands of years old and to have met the patriarchs of the Bible. The Saint Germain connection becomes still more interesting when we realize that among the Comte’s associates was one Horace Walpole, who wrote dreary Gothic romances (indeed, he founded the genre with his Castle of Otranto) and who owned, among other interesting artifacts, Dee’s shewstone itself, which he kept at his dreary Gothic manor, Strawberry Hill, in the Twickhenam area. Furthermore, Dee himself, during his travels in Europe, deliberately spent time in the Louvain region of France in order to complete his researches on the extra-natural mathematical ideas of Cornelius Agrippa, and supposedly gained his personal copy of De occulta philosophia at this time. (I won’t mention that Lovecraft argued that it was at this time that Dee translated the Necronomicon into English, tempting though it is.)

Imagine, then, the following. Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole (former Prime Minister of England) goes on a tour of Europe with his friend Thomas Gray in 1739. On their travels they make the acquaintance of the strange magus calling himself, the Comte de Saint Germaine, who reveals to them occult secrets. Gray, finding the entire subject distasteful, cuts Walpole and leaves his company. Walpole, being of a morbid turn of mind, finds the whole thing fascinating and decides, upon his return to England, to make use of the information he gains. He gets hold of Dee’s shewstone and contacts the elemental intelligences lurking in the Enochian Aethers, and makes them a deal. They need union with grand human spirits to gain immortality; he desires power and influence, being dissatisfied with his lot as the youngest son of a great peer. The deal is struck… he soon reconciles with Gray, who has no choice, having been somehow lured into a situation where an elemental spirit could bond with him. (Remember, the having of offspring is not what gives the spirit immortality, merely the union with a mortal. Offspring are more like happy side effects rather than direct consequences.) Over the course of the next sixty years, Walpole and his contacts in the British Aristocracy (men like John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty and notoriously debauched member of the Hellfire Club, who Walpole would have known through his family) maintain a kind of quid pro quo with the elemental spirits, making alliances and offering human partners to bond with in defiance of the law of God in exchange for a subtle expansion of Britain’s power over the four elements… and thus, over the whole of the world. There are some missteps, of course… for one thing, allowing Benjamin Franklin access to the Hellfire rites allows his brilliant mind to devise countermeasures which create weakness and confusion in the British ranks during the Revolutionary War… but overall, the alliance is a sound one. Men like Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington are the results of such an alliance, half-elementals with strange powers of reason and perception and control over their various elements. (Nelson would obviously be a water hybrid.) All goes well until the Gordon Riots.

The Gordon Riots were the result of Lord George Gordon (no relation to Byron), an unrepentant anti-Catholic bigot and, I believe, a puppet of the magical counter-measures squad devised by Benjamin Franklin. On June 2, 1780, he began a riot that lasted for a week, caused 500 casualties… and, I believe, disrupted the web of elementals around the Admiralty for long enough for many of the bound spirits to escape, as well as preventing the Hellfire cabal from engaging in the mystical rites to draw replacements. Gordon was suitably chastened with prison, but by then the momentum was lost, and would not be regained until 1805, when Lord Horatio Nelson died at Trafalgar. Nelson (who admitted to seeing globes of light that gave him spiritual instruction and a sense of destiny) dying over water was enough to create a significant sense of grief in the water elementals who created him, thus allowing for a reforging of the bonds Gordon snapped with his arrogance and violence. However, by then, the freed elementals had found union with new hosts… and one of them was a London man who kept a stable near the houses of Parliament, a man named Thomas Keats.