Borderlands: spiritualism and the occult in fin de siècle and Edwardian Welsh and Irish horror

Abstract

This article sets out to examine the pervasive influence of spiritualist and occultist thinking on a number of Fin-de-siècle writers of popular horror fictions set in Wales or Ireland and published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably in the work of Arthur Machen, but also in that of William Hope Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft. The article also examines the influence of occult Celticism on a pair of landmark early Universal horror films, James Whale's The Old Dark House (1933) and George Waggner's The Wolf Man (1941), both set in Wales. The article examines the significance of the omphalos as a geomantic singularity of spiritual force, a portal between two worlds, and uses this to suggest ways in which many writers around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century saw themselves as straddling a borderland between the worlds of spirit and matter. Furthermore, the theories and rhetoric of Celticism, I suggest, are put to characteristically contradictory ends in these fictions (and elsewhere), simultaneously validating the spiritual identity of the native Welsh and Irish, and subhumanizing or monstering them through their recurring representation as inarticulate beast-men.