A History of Terror

Paul Newman

Introduced by Colin Wilson

Sutton Publishing

Gloucestershire

United Kingdom

ISBN: 0 7509 2008 4

Tel: 01453 - 731114

Outline of Contents

What is the motive force behind civilisation? As this important, stimulating book demonstrates, it is fear which begins in the nursery and oppresses youth, middle age and the yellow leaf. Traditional lord of nightmare was Pan, the goatfoot god, whose spirit haunts this enthralling narrative - sometimes as a sacrifical victim or ‘scapegoat’ and other times as an orgiastic avenger.

The Middle Ages

Fear was active from the dawn of prehistory – fear of ghosts, revenants and hate-dealing spirits like the Grendel who dwelt in a swamp and was slain by the Anglo Saxon warrior, Beowulf. Throughout the Middle Ages the spectre of Satan and vengeful Jehovah filled the lives of ordinary men and women with a dread of hellfire and damnation. It was a time of irrational hatreds when religious sects like the Cathars were consigned sadistically to the flames. There was a fear of shape-changing witches and werewolves, neither of whom were shown a jot of mercy. Then there was imminent panic at the thought of End of the World, the appearance of the Anti-Christ followed by the Second Coming. Cowed by such a vision and by waves of famine and Black Death, men and women processed from town to town, stripped near-naked in churches and public squares, and scourged themselves until the blood poured from their skins – all to forestall the wrath to come.

The Elizabethans

In the Age of Elizabeth, nobles feared disorder in the kingdom and being the butt of Machiavillian conspiracies. The French Revolution saw the savage fantasies of the Marquis de Sade (who himself was shaken by the barbarities he witnessed) made real as thousands of innocents were butchered and drowned.

The Romantics

With the dawn of Romanticism, the great poets – Byron, Keats and Shelley – started to delve into the Gothic groves of horror where they confronted the primal dread or ‘ministry of fear’: the sense of the sublime that some kneel before as ‘God’ or shrink away from as ‘Nothing’. The Victorian Age brought with it a plethora of mechanical inventions, yet also, ironically, the return of the same restless spirits who oppressed the tombs of Bronze Age peoples – now they materialised in the curtained closeness of the séance room. Furthermore, in Britain and Europe, there was a growth of diabolism, exemplified in figures like Aleister Crowley, described as “one of the most depraved, vicious and revolting humbugs who ever escaped from a nightmare or lunatic asylum.”

The Twentieth Century

The twentieth century ushered in the birth of atomic physics and the ‘godless’ universe of relativity. It also saw the development of techonolgies of horror such as the atom bomb to which may be added Hitler’s gas chambers and the bloody purges of Stalin. Beside the ever-present spectre of War, floods of smaller panics were provoked by millenial fantasies, visions of angel, devils and spacemen and the thought of Satan stalking the world and inciting horrible acts on children and animals.

The Future

Recently, in the domain of medicine, brain-imaging techniques have enabled the physiological seat of fear, the amygdala, to be located and linked up with the alternative strategies of flight, violence and appeasement. In the near future, with the aid of sophisticated drugs, doctors think fear may be eliminated from daily life – but would this really be an improvement? How can one nullify a primal emotion? Using unique psychological perspectives, plus an exciting variety of sources and documents, this fascinating study plumbs the depths of our most intimate fears and yearnings and culminates in an uplifting moment of vision as the nightmare journey is eclipsed by a vast ‘aerial river’ of birds flying across a sky lit up by the lambent white flame of eternity. This enthralling study surveys the primitive emotion of fear, from the intimate lonely experience down through Bosch’s fork-tailed visions of hellfire and damnation to millenial or ‘end of the world’ panics, Gothic groves of horror, the ferocities of the French Revolution, the spiritualist movement of the 19^th century and finally the holocausts and atrocities of recent times.

The Romantics