Return

I'm back after nearly three months since writing last and nearly two months after my last posting. My situation hasn't changed. In other words, it's still messed up. But I have missed writing and am happy to be back. My program for this year is the same as before. Part of that program includes finishing some entries that have been in draft form for months and years. I would also like to work on some unfinished series and unfinished ideas. I'll begin tomorrow morning with a teller of weird tales named--but not named--Henry Leverage.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Requests

My last entry is a biography of author Clyde Irvine. I wrote it in response to a request from last year. I would like everyone to know that I am available to write about authors, artists, and other types of people, as well as on topics of interest to fans and readers of weird fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and so. I would ask that people not use my work or what I write on my blog as free content for their own projects. I don't do what I do so that others can benefit monetarily from it. I understand that, people being people, some will take what I write here for their own purposes, without permission, credit, attribution, or citation, needless to say without compensation paid to me. I would ask that the best of you show some respect and consideration. I'm not anyone's employee. What I write hasn't just fallen out of the sky. I created it.

Please contact me with requests. Although I write for free on this blog, I would seek compensation for any writing I do outside of it. That seems reasonable enough, even if those who seek content for free might be shocked, offended, or insulted by such a request.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Clyde Irvine (1899-1948)

John Clyde Irvine
Aka Lindsay Nisbet
Author, Playwright, Newspaper Drama Critic/Reviewer and Feature Editor
Born April 15, 1899, Glasgow, Scotland
Died June 21, 1948, Los Angeles, California

John Clyde Irvine was born on April 15, 1899, in Glasgow, Scotland. His name echoes those of geographic features in his native land: the River Clyde flows through Glasgow and into the Firth of Clyde north of Irvine. Knowing something about his life as a Scotsman transplanted to America and Canada makes me wonder whether he could have been the pseudonymous author Abrach in Weird Tales.

Clyde Irvine was the son of John Irvine, an agricultural worker and gamekeeper, and Jessie Easton Evans. Irvine attended school in Glasgow and served in the British army. In the census of 1921, he was counted in Maymyo, Burma, where he was a private in the Second Battalion of the King's Own Royal Regiment. A far more well-known writer was also at Maymyo. His name was Eric Arthur Blair, but we know him as George Orwell (1903-1950). Blair was at Maymyo in about 1923. I can't say whether these two men ever met, but crossed paths and the possibility of crossed paths are always fascinating to consider.

Eric Blair was a police officer in Burma. John C. Irvine seems to have been a police officer in Mashonaland, a region of what was at that time called Rhodesia. I base that supposition on a piece published in Short Stories magazine in its issue of October 25, 1939, credited to Clyde Irvine. Co-written with a Major Desmond, "I Was a Cop in Mashonaland" was Irvine's first known credit in an American pulp magazine, and it seems to establish his connection to Rhodesia. That connection will come into play shortly.

On February 28, 1921, Irvine married Kate Doreen "Scotty" Nisbet (1900-1980) in Glasgow. She was a pianist and, after her husband's death, a musician in a nightclub in Southern California. The couple had four children, Noreen Nisbet Easton Irvine Wilson (1922-2009), Rex John Irvine (1924-1996), Mona Hay Irvine Warren (1928-2001), and Clyde Irvine, Jr. (1933-2003), three of whom lived into the current century. According to The FictionMags Index, Irvine wrote as Lindsay Nisbet in Weird Tales magazine, March 1940. Nisbet was of course his wife's maiden name. There are other Nisbets listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, but I can't say whether any was related to her. Irvine had a short story under his own name in that same issue of Weird Tales.

Irvine was an author, playwright, newspaper drama critic/reviewer, and feature editor of The Daily Record, then and now based in Glasgow. Irvine's plays include "So Free We Seem" (performed at the Arran Drama Festival in 1938), "Scrap" (1938), "Yet They Endure" (1940), "The Last Cavalier," "Death Chair", and "Saltire in Crimson." He was also a member of International P.E.N.

All of that was in his first career in Scotland.

In late 1938 or early 1939, Irvine came to the United States as a representative of the Southern Rhodesia Government in its exhibit of a replica of Victoria Falls, put on display at the World's Fair in New York City. Irvine handled publicity around the exhibit and gave talks to clubs, groups, and organizations in the area of the city. He also returned dispatches to The Daily Record in Glasgow about his stay in New York.

When the enumerator of the U.S. Census came around in 1940, she found Irvine living in Queens Village, Queens, New York. He gave his occupation as freelance writer. I wonder if Irvine encountered pulp magazines for the first time when he came to the United States, for all of his credits in that type of magazine were published in 1939 and after. Here's a list from The FictionMags Index from before and after 1939:

• "Some Kind Letters and Cross Words" (with The Duke), column, in Ziffs Magazine, Nov. 1925
• "I Was a Cop in Mashonaland" (with Major Desmond) in Short Stories, Oct. 25 1939
• "Bush Devil" in Jungle Stories, Spring 1940
• "The Centurion’s Prisoner," in Weird Tales, Mar. 1940, as by Lindsay Nisbet--First installment of "It Happened To Me"
• "The Horror in the Glen," in Weird Tales, Mar. 1940
• "Second Chance Booter," in 12 Sports Aces, Mar. 1940
• "Bride of the Dragon," in Mystery Tales, May 1940
• "Idol of Death," in Jungle Stories, Fall 1940
• "The Eye of Death," in Action Stories, Oct. 1940
• "The Devil’s Bodyguard," in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Dec. 1940
• "Satan on Safari," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1940
• "Code of the Veldt," in Jungle Stories, Summer 1941
• "The Singing Skull, " in Jungle Stories, Fall 1941
• "Bush Gamble," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1941
• "The Crocodile’s Bride," in Jungle Stories, Spring 1942
• "White Man’s Voodoo," in Jungle Stories, Summer 1942
• "Kraal of Blood-Miracles," in Jungle Stories, Fall 1942
• "The Juju of N'Jola," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1942
• "Diamonds of Death," in Jungle Stories, Apr. 1943

There is also a credit for a John Irvine, a poem called "Mairi," published in The Cornhill Magazine in February 1938. There are enough stories there to make a collection. I would like to read them.

Irvine's credits in the list above ended in 1943. I think there's an easy explanation for that, for he relocated to Canada during World War II. There he appears to have served once again in the military, and he continued to write. I have as evidence one credit for him in that part of his career, a feature article called "Two-Time Winner--The Story of a Guy With Courage Plus!," by Sgt. J. Clyde Irvine, in the Canadian military newspaper Khaki, in its issue of February 16, 1944. Irvine's story is about Sgt. George Alfred Hickson (1915-1979) of Kitchener, Ontario, a Canadian war hero.

[Update (Apr. 4, 2026): Tracy Irvine Cracraft, comment below, has let us know that her father's "role in the army while in Canada was to teach soldiers jiu-jitsu." Maybe that was a skill he learned in Burma. Thank you, Tracy.]

After the war, Clyde Irvine moved with his family to Southern California. He died on June 21, 1948, in Los Angeles at age forty-nine and was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, California.

Clyde Irvine's Story in Weird Tales
"The Horror in the Glen," (Mar. 1940)

Lindsay Nisbet's Story in Weird Tales
"The Centurion’s Prisoner" (Mar. 1940)--First installment of "It Happened To Me"

The list from The FictionMags Index is the work of that website and its compilers, and I thank them for it. I also thank them for the image shown below.

Jungle Stories, Summer 1942. "White Man's Voodoo" by Clyde Irvine is inside. His name is on the cover.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

H.P. Lovecraft, Cosmic Horror, & August Derleth-Part Two

August Derleth quoted Harold Farnese on H.P. Lovecraft, putting words at the tip of Lovecraft's pen that were never there.

Derleth also misquoted Lovecraft in a newspaper column called "The New Books," published in the Madison, Wisconsin, Capital Times on August 2, 1942. His subject was Clark Ashton Smith and his new book Out of Space and Time (Arkham House, 1942). Derleth wrote:

"None strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as Clark Ashton Smith," wrote the late great master of the macabre H.P. Lovecraft.

It's nice that Smith was getting some press. Somewhat questionable is the idea that Derleth the reviewer was promoting in his column a book that Derleth the publisher had just made available for sale. Unacceptable is the fact that Derleth misquoted his "late great master," for what Lovecraft actually wrote, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature," is this:

Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic terror so well as the California poet, artist, and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith [. . .].

Emphasis added in both quotes.

So Derleth replaced "terror" with "horror." You might call that a quibble. Someone else might see it differently. After all, terror and horror are not the same thing. More to the point, by 1942, "cosmic horror," perhaps already synonymous with Lovecraftian horror, at least in the fan's imagination, had probably become or was beginning to become a thing.* Clark Ashton Smith may have written Lovecraftian tales of cosmic horror, but Lovecraft didn't say that. Derleth did, thereby putting words into Lovecraft's mouth. Again we have to wonder whether this was a simple mistake or misinterpretation, or something done because it suited Derleth's purposes. Did he seek to make a claim to "cosmic horror" as a concept in the way that he seems to have done to the ideas and works of H.P. Lovecraft? Answering that question would take more research than what I can accomplish right now. I'll just add that in her review of Out of Time and Space, Gail Stackpole of the Oroville (California) Mercury-Register was original in describing Smith's collection as "these tales of cosmic horror" (Nov. 12, 1942).

In misquoting Lovecraft in print, Derleth once again propagated an inaccurate idea about his subject, in this case Clark Ashton Smith. When Robert Elder wrote his obituary of Smith (Auburn [California] Journal, Aug. 17, 1961), he perpetuated that idea, using Derleth's exact words--"cosmic horror"--from 1942. Elder may have used Derleth's previous review as a source for his quote. Again, this might be just so much quibbling, but if "cosmic horror" is a real category, we should use the term describing it with as much precision as possible. A larger principle is that we should be as assiduous in our research and as accurate in our quotations as we can be.

------

*The first use of the modifier Lovecraftian in newspapers that I have found was by William T. Evjue, writing in the Capital Times on November 28, 1945, in regards to an essay ("Tales of the Marvellous and Ridiculous") by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker (Nov. 24, 1945). The first of its opposite, un-Lovecraftian, is in R.S. Devon's review of The Lurker at the Threshold by August Derleth (1945), in the same paper on December 31, 1945. I agree with Devon that Derleth's book is un-Lovecraftian, possibly even anti-Lovecraftian. I have written before on Wilson and The Lurker at the Threshold. Click on the name and title for a link.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

H.P. Lovecraft, Cosmic Horror, & August Derleth-Part One

The phrase "cosmic horror" or "cosmic horrors" was in use as early as 1879, though not in the way scholars, fans, and readers of genre fiction use it today. That kind of meaning came later, perhaps around the turn of the nineteenth century, certainly by the pulp fiction era of the 1920s through the 1940s. I base all of this on an online search of newspaper articles from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The word cosmic is in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" by H.P. Lovecraft (1927; 1933-1935; 1939). The exact phrase "cosmic horror" appears five times in his essay. There are other "cosmic" phrases as well:

• "cosmic mystery"
• "cosmic fear"
• "cosmic terror"
• "cosmic tragedy"
• "cosmic setting"
• "cosmic unreality"
• "cosmic panic"
• "cosmic malignity"
• "cosmic adumbrations"
• "cosmic space"
• "cosmic alienage"
• "cosmic aberration"
• "cosmic fright"
• "the . . . cosmic"

It's clear that Lovecraft took what he thought of as a cosmic view of things and that he did it pretty early on in the history of pulp fiction. I guess that's why cosmic horror is now also called Lovecraftian horror and is so closely associated with him. I'm not sure how much cosmic horror as a sub-genre has changed in the one hundred and one years since Lovecraft first sat down to write. It seems like many authors still compose under a Lovecraftian spell.

"Supernatural Horror in Literature" was first reprinted in book form in The Outsider and Others (1939). Lovecraft's first book, published posthumously, was also the first volume issued by Arkham House, then owned and run by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Derleth was an acolyte of Lovecraft. As I have written before, Derleth seems to have loved what Lovecraft did so much that he wanted to make it his own, even if that meant altering it from its original form. Maybe a wise thing to do is to be suspect of everything that Derleth wrote about his master until you can confirm that his words were indeed Lovecraft's own.

It was August Derleth who coined the phrase "Cthulhu mythos." That phrase does not appear in Lovecraft's oeuvre as far as I know. Derleth, a devout Catholic, also tried to turn Lovecraft's material, amoral, indifferent, and even malignant cosmos (and its opposite, chaos) into a battleground between good and evil. At least that's how I understand it. I don't know the exact location of that idea. Maybe there isn't just one location. In any case, Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi put a torch to that and other ideas by and about Derleth in his review of A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the Cthulhu Mythos by John B. Haeffle (Odense, Denmark: H. Harksen Productions, 2012). You can read what Mr. Joshi wrote on his own website by clicking here.

One of Derleth's ideas came from a supposed quotation of Lovecraft's words in a letter from Lovecraft to Los Angeles-based musician, composer, and teacher Harold Farnese. Farnese had lost track of Lovecraft's letter to him, and so when Derleth wrote to Farnese after Lovecraft's death, Farnese attempted a paraphrase. That paraphrase, the infamous "black magic quotation" or BMQ, originated with Farnese. (The phrase "black magic quotation" and acronym BMQ are in Mr. Haeffle's book and Mr. Joshi's review.) Derleth wasn't responsible for it as far as anyone knows. But he propagated the "black magic quotation" to a point that we still have it today. Some people may even still believe it. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that the "black magic quotation" should never have been put into print unless it had come with a disclaimer. Harold Farnese was after all legitimately a correspondent of Lovecraft, and we should know something about him, including that the BMQ was in his words and not in Lovecraft's. Anyway, if Mr. Joshi is correct in his analysis, then Derleth's propagation of the "black magic quotation" seems to have a been a sin of commission instead of omission, for it would seem to have served his purposes by way of his passing it off as a direct quotation from Lovecraft. It would seem to impute a moral dimension--and to apply Derleth's interpretation--to Lovecraft's cosmic vision.

I have found another misquote of Lovecraft's words, made by Derleth. This one, about Clark Ashton Smith, may be unknown today, but we should know about it now if only because it helps to confirm a pattern. By the way, if you want to read what I wrote previously on Harold Farnese and the "black magic quotation," click here.

To be concluded . . .

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Writers in The Habit of Being

There are lots of writers and books in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (The Noonday Press, 1979; 1988). Most are the usual subjects of American literature: Henry James, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Allen Tate, Eudora Welty. There are British, French, and other authors, too. One of the French authors is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who was an inspiration for the old priest in The Exorcist, written by William Peter Blatty. I won't cover very many authors here. Instead I'll just write about those who are of interest to readers and fans of weird fiction, science fiction, and fantasy--plus one more.

Hugh B. Cave (1910-2004) wrote for Weird Tales. In a letter to Robert Giroux (Sept. 29, 1960; p. 409), Flannery O'Connor mentioned that the Sister Superior of a Dominican congregation of nuns had written to "a man named Hugh Cave," asking him to write about the life a twelve-year-old girl who had died of cancer. He declined, saying that a Catholic author ought to do it, and so the Sister Superior approached Flannery to edit a manuscript that they had developed on their own. Where things went from there, I don't know. But it's interesting that a teller of weird tales is in her letters.

In a letter to Elizabeth McKee, dated July 16, 1952, Flannery O'Connor wrote: "A man named Martin Greenberg from the American Mercury wrote and asked me if I have any stories. I referred him to you." (p. 42) With Gunther Stuhlmann, Martin Greenberg worked as an associate editor at the American Mercury. The editor was William Bradford Huie. In the summer of 1952, the magazine changed hands, selling to a businessman named Russell Maguire. The editorial staff seems to have stayed on for a time. I have gone into this detail because there was a science fiction editor and publisher named Martin Greenberg (1918-2013). However, I haven't found anything to indicate that these two men were one and the same.

In her letters, Flannery O'Connor wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. She was especially influenced by her reading of The Humorous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. (pp. 98-99) The problem for me now is that there doesn't seem to have been a book by that title.

Her opinion of Ayn Rand is too good to pass up. On May 31, 1960, she wrote to Marryat Lee: "I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickie Spillane look like Dostoevsky." (p. 398)

Tennessee Williams is in The Habit of Being. He wrote one story for Weird Tales. So is Philip Wylie. He didn't, not even one. Wylie wrote science fiction, though, including an episode of The Name of the Game entitled "L.A. 2017," about a dystopian future. (The protagonist dreams rather than sleeps his way into the future.) I remember The Name of the Game and would like to see it again. I'm not sure that I ever will. Five hundred channels to look at and no Name of the Game.

The one more is Hollis Summers (1916-1987). As far as I know, he never wrote any works of fantasy, science fiction, or weird fiction. He did, however, write a crime novel called The Case of the Bludgeoned Teacher (originally Teach You a Lesson, 1956) under a pseudonym, Jim Hollis. Summers was a novelist, short story writer, poet, and teacher. He was one of a group of authors who taught at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in the 1960s and afterwards. In addition to Hollis Summers, they included Jack Matthews (1925-2013), Daniel Keyes (1927-2014), Walter Tevis (1928-1984), and Cecil Hemley (1914-1966). I have a friend who lives outside of Athens on the site of an old strip-mine operation. When she was young, her parents would have people over to the house. I asked her about some of the Ohio University authors. She remembers meeting Hollis Summers. "What kind of a person was he?" I asked. "Oh, he was a fantastic person," she said. By the way, Cecil Hemley was the director of the Noonday Press, which published The Habit of Being years after his premature death.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) knew Hollis Summers. In a letter to John Hawkes, dated September 10, 1963, she wrote: "I remember Hollis Summers and his wife very well and always liked them. They usually send me a poem at Christmastime with no return address on it but I think they are somewhere like Kentucky or Ohio." (pp. 537-538) At the time she wrote, Summers was not only "somewhere like . . . Ohio," he was actually in Ohio, teaching at Ohio University.

I received The Habit of Being as a Christmas gift. I backtracked from the index in search of the letter to Betty Hester. But I also looked for other authors, and I was pleased to find mention of Hollis Summers. I read his novel City Limit (1948) last year and enjoyed it. But I was even more pleased to read that he sent Christmas cards to Flannery O'Connor, for I have some of his Christmas cards, too, or at least the verse from his Christmas cards. I found them in copies of his books that I bought at a boutique in Athens. What a strange and wonderful thing it is to find these connections, especially when you can talk to a person who knew an author, or find something in your own life that was once in a book, or something in a book that is part of your own life. (My exact birthdate is in a book by Frederick Forsyth. I have never encountered such a thing before.) I suppose books and reading will one day go by the wayside as we rush into our illiterate and idiotic future. But at least we still have these things now. They of the future will have no idea what they missed.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Old Gods Again

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Ephesians 6:12

I meant to write on this topic in 2023 for the fiftieth anniversary of the release of The Exorcist. Now seems the right time to return to it.

* * *

The Exorcist was released at Christmastime in 1973, even if it was hardly a Christmas movie. I don't remember the winter of 1973-1974, but by accounts it was cold and snowy. That didn't stop people from going to the movie theater to see The Exorcist. I remember there was a lot of talk and some controversy over the film. I think the talk far outweighed the controversy. The Exorcist was a national event in a way that may no longer be possible in America now that we live in atomized cultures. It seemed like everyone wanted to see The Exorcist and to talk about it afterwards.* I remember that my parents went to see The Exorcist. I remember that afterwards they were silent about what they had seen. They must have been very deeply affected by their experience. If you have ever seen The Exorcist, you must know why.

We as children were not allowed to see it, but children hear and listen and seek out knowledge about things forbidden them. It was as if something had happened in another room of the house. It's as if we had heard muffled voices, snippets of sentences, cadences and tones, but never the whole thing. We wanted to know what it was all about. We talked about it ourselves in our very limited knowledge. We listened to every rumor.

I watched The Exorcist years later. One of my first thoughts was this: My parents went to see this movie. They were old-fashioned Catholics, shocked and embarrassed then by things people don't even think twice about now. And yet they went to see The Exorcist, either in late 1973 or early 1974. I'm sure they wanted to see what the talk was all about. But maybe they wanted to see something more.

Despite all of the shocking, disturbing, disgusting, and frightening scenes in The Exorcist, it is, I think, within the worldview of Catholicism, for it says that God is real and powerful and that he intercedes in earthly affairs. It says also that there are demons in the earth and that they wish to do us harm. They wish to turn us from good, to exploit our weaknesses and doubts so as to turn us from belief in God. The Exorcist says that we are engaged in an eternal conflict between good and evil. And it says that the Catholic Church leads in that conflict, with its priests as its foot soldiers. It's no wonder, then, that my parents would have seen The Exorcist. I believe that it would only have affirmed their beliefs, despite--or maybe because of--all that it is. Depictions of the fight against evil cannot be bland. They must be shocking. They must shock us awake and into vigilance, resolve, and greater faith.

The author of the screenplay for The Exorcist was William Peter Blatty (1928-2017). Born ninety-eight years ago almost exactly to today's date, he was a devout Roman Catholic and the son of Lebanese immigrants. In 1971, he wrote the novel The Exorcist, in which he cast (pun partially intended) the ancient, Asiatic, pre-Christian god Pazuzu as the demon that possesses the body of a twelve-year-old American girl. There is much in the novel that is not in the movie adaptation. Some of that involves searching in books for possible answers to the deadly serious problem at hand. That same kind of searching happens in weird fiction, for example in the opening of "The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, Nov. 1931). In reading that part of Blatty's novel, I found that discussions of books can actually be an exciting and interesting part of a work of fiction. That's a good thing to learn for lovers of books and for people who write fiction.

Pazuzu was an actual historical deity, represented by Babylonians and Assyrians in the first millennium before Christ. I don't know when belief in Pazuzu would have faded away, but it's clear that Christianity and later religions would have displaced belief in Pazuzu and other old gods. The Exorcist begins with a sequence in the Iraqi desert: an archaeological dig would seem to have exhumed Pazuzu.** Or maybe that was only a symbolic exhumation, for the way for the return of the old gods would have already been opened by then. By the early '70s, the sea of faith--to mix metaphors--had already long before begun its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar." (There are winds in the original stories of Pazuzu, in that beginning sequence of The Exorcist, and in Matthew Arnold's poem, from which I have drawn my second metaphor.) Significantly or not, the possessed girl's mother in The Exorcist is an atheist. Perhaps by her disbelief she opens the door--to return to my first metaphor--to the entry of an old god, long in exile. Again, despite all of its obscenities and bodily horrors, The Exorcist subscribes, I think, to a Catholic worldview. Again, by watching it, my parents and people like them would have been affirmed in their beliefs.

Blatty's sequel to The Exorcist, entitled Legion, was published in 1983 and again adapted to film. His title of course comes from the biblical account of Jesus' encounter with a man possessed. When Jesus asks the demon's name, it replies: "Legion." In an act of exorcism, Jesus casts the legion of demons into a herd of swine, which rush off a cliff and perish in the sea. That casting of possessing demons into the bodies of others is echoed in the climactic scene in The Exorcist in which the demon Pazuzu is cast into the body of the young priest, who throws himself out of the bedroom window, thereby killing himself, sending away the demon, and leaving the girl once again herself. I'm not sure what to make of the young priest's making of himself one of the Gadarene swine.

Old gods have returned to earth. I have written before on this topic, thus the title of today's entry. You can read what I wrote, dated September 29, 2023, by clicking here. In The Exorcist, the old god Pazuzu is recognized for what he is. He is not welcome and in the end is sent away. That was more than fifty years ago. Now, because we so easily give into depravity and our own worst desires, the old gods are invited back into our midst. My parents and people like them are gone. There is nothing in their place. The good God is gone, or dead according to observations by Friedrich Nietzsche and Flannery O'Connor, leaving the old ones to fill the vacuum left with his withdrawal, more accurately our driving him away. Moloch is perhaps most welcome of all of the old gods: we daily make sacrifices of unborn babies, infants, and children to him. There are others of course. Read on . . .

Murder has approached our family three times in recent years. The man involved in one of those cases is also alleged to be involved in Odinism. Odin was of course a Norse god, in other words, a pagan and pre-Christian god. Christianity did away with the old gods and all of their demands and tolerance for human sacrifice, child sacrifice, animal sacrifice, abortion, infanticide, ritual mutilation, bestiality, cannibalism, and other horrors. Thank God. But in turning away from belief in God, we turn ourselves back to those and other horrors, back to the pre-Christian past. We shouldn't wonder at all that people of today do the things they do. Why would it be otherwise? I wonder when we might turn back again, not to the old gods but to the One God that preceded and banished them.

-----

*Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune loved The Exorcist. Martin Knelman of the Toronto Globe and Mail hated it, describing it, among other things, as "fascist." Some things never change, I guess: in 2026 as in 1973, if you don't like someone or something, or disagree with him or it, just call him or it "fascist" and that disposes of your problem. Nothing is required on your part and you can dismiss opposing ideas and the people who hold them.

**There are similarities between the opening sequences in The Exorcist and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Both take place in silent and arid wildernesses. Both involve encounters with artifacts representing gods or godlike entities. Those gods or entities become influences upon humanity, for better or worse. Remember that Jesus went into a desert wilderness, there to encounter and to be tempted by Satan. Jesus stayed strong, resisted the influence, and sent him away.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley