I am off walking Offa's Dyke for the first 15 days or so in April. I'm going to Gloucester then to Lydney to see the temple there then to Chepstow. Starting off from there. Last time I was in Chepstow was Castell Roc to see Hawkwind and Phil Campbell, who has sadly lately passed. RIP Phil. I hope you and Lemmy are doing well.

I am going to walk up and veer off at Bishop's Castle and then to Shrewsbury and home. I may document it on my Patreon. We shall see. I hope it doesn't rain like it is right now! But of course walking in Wales in April wouldn't be rainy. No. Of course not.

But, I have programmed some episodes in, but I am notoriously bad with dates so there may be a gap. This is a link to one that should come out during that time, but it's a preview for all of you who have signed up to my newsletter.

You should be able to view the link even though it is not public.

Lost Hearts byM R James (1862-1936)

"Lost Hearts" was first published in 1895 in the Pall Mall Magazine, and was collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published by Edward Arnold in 1904. It was one of the earliest stories James wrote in the genre, and the collection as a whole established his reputation as the dominant figure in the English ghost story tradition of the early twentieth century. "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary" went through multiple editions in James's lifetime and has remained in print in various forms ever since, most recently in Penguin Classics editions that gather the complete supernatural fiction.

M. R. James called "Lost Hearts" one of his least satisfactory stories, and the remark tells you something useful about both the story and the man. James's characteristic method is one of indirection: the horror glimpsed at the edge of vision, the document that almost explains things, the antiquarian narrator whose donnish composure barely survives contact with something it cannot catalogue. Think of the dot of ink that moves across the map in "Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance," or the rustling sheets in "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," or the odd figure that appears and disappears on the lawn in "The Mezzotint" — details that James plants without commentary and leaves to work on the reader's nerves in their own time. The effect depends on incompleteness: something is wrong, something is present, and James declines to explain it further. The reader's imagination does the rest, and what the imagination produces is usually worse than anything stated.

"Lost Hearts" abandons that method almost entirely. Where James normally traffics in suggestion and juxtaposition, here he goes straight for the body. Giovanni's chest is not glimpsed or half-seen; it is laid open, the wound explicit, the nails grown to talons. The heart is extracted, burned, dissolved in wine and drunk. These are not the oblique Gothic gestures of the other stories; they belong to a different tradition altogether — the visceral body horror that would become the dominant register of horror fiction and film fifty or more years later, the mode of Clive Barker or the splatter cinema of the 1980s. In writing "Lost Hearts" in 1895, James appears to have leapt clean over the intervening century, producing something that sits oddly in his own canon and would have felt far more at home in a very different cultural moment. That dissonance may be precisely what made him uncomfortable with it afterwards: not that it failed, but that it succeeded by means he did not particularly want to be associated with.

The plot is economical to the point of severity. Stephen Elliott, eleven years old and recently orphaned, is taken in by his distant cousin Mr Abney, a Cambridge classicist of some distinction, at Aswarby Hall in Lincolnshire. Abney notes, with what turns out to be professional interest, that Stephen's twelfth birthday is nearly a year away. The household is comfortable, Mrs Bunch the housekeeper is kind, and the only unsettling details are the ones that accumulate quietly in the background: two other children, a Romani girl and an Italian hurdy-gurdy boy, who came to stay and then "ran away" and were not seen again. Strange things begin to happen to Stephen. A figure appears in a disused bathroom, hands pressed to its chest. His nightgown is found slashed at the breast. There are claw-marks on his bedroom door. And then, on 24 March, Abney invites Stephen to his study at eleven o'clock at night, privately, and the children come for Abney before Stephen arrives.

What James achieves technically in this compressed space is worth examining carefully. The story is constructed on a principle of delayed disclosure: the reader understands what Abney is before Stephen does, and James manages the gap between those two knowledges with considerable skill. The detail about the two previous children is dropped early and apparently casually, through Mrs Bunch's comfortable chatter, which is precisely the register in which such things get buried and forgotten. The servants have already provided the necessary explanation — "ran away," "taken by the gipsies" — and the social world of the story has accepted it. James does not linger on the horror of that acceptance; he simply records it, and lets the reader feel the weight of it without editorial comment.

The supernatural machinery is handled with similar restraint, which is surprising given how often the story is described as one of James's more lurid efforts. The apparitions on the terrace — Phoebe with her hand at her heart, Giovanni with his chest laid open and his nails grown to talons — are given to us briefly and at a distance, through a window, in moonlight. James does not dwell. The image is ferocious but it passes quickly, and that quickness is part of the effect: these children have been made into something monstrous, and James does not invite us to contemplate the transformation at leisure. The real horror is in the backstory, which we read only after Abney is dead, in fragments of his own journal. The journal is the story's most accomplished passage. Abney writes with the dispassion of a man conducting a controlled experiment. He uses the phrase corpora vilia — expendable bodies — and refers to "the psychic portion of the subjects" as though consciousness were a minor chemical byproduct of the main reaction. The horror of the journal is not what it says about the supernatural; it is what it says about how scholarship, wrapped in Latin and the apparatus of learning, can render atrocity invisible to the man committing it.

That is where the craft and the theme become inseparable. James is doing something more precise than writing a revenge narrative. He is examining the rhetoric of the respectable. Abney chooses his victims by a clear social logic: people "who could conveniently be removed without occasioning a sensible gap in society." A Romani girl, an Italian street musician, an orphaned boy with no immediate family. These are the people for whom disappearance is already the culturally available explanation, and Abney knows it. His scholarship does not create this logic; it inherits it, and dresses it in Porphyry and the late Neoplatonists. The distance between the academy and the predator turns out to be shorter than Cambridge would prefer to believe.

James frames all of this within a narrative structure borrowed from the tale of menace to a child — a form with deep roots in Victorian sensation fiction — but he inflects it differently. The child is not menaced by the supernatural; the child is protected by it. The ghosts are not the danger. The ghosts are the only justice available. This is an important reversal. In the standard apparatus of the Jamesian ghost story, the past intrudes on the present and the intrusion is malevolent, or at least indifferent. In "Lost Hearts," the past intrudes in order to correct the present, and the correction is exact and physical. Abney wanted hearts; he dies with his chest opened. The symmetry is almost judicial.

Whether James intended this level of moral architecture or arrived at it by instinct is probably unanswerable, and may not matter. What matters is that the story earns its ending, which is a thing not every ghost story can claim. The coroner attributes Abney's death to a wild animal and the case is closed. The social machinery that permitted Abney to kill twice without scrutiny now smooths over his own death with equal efficiency. Stephen inherits Aswarby Hall, reads the papers, and understands. There is no one to tell. The reckoning happened privately, in a locked study, and left no evidence that any court would accept.

That is a bleak conclusion dressed as a satisfying one, and James is too intelligent a writer to let us have the satisfaction without the bleakness. The ghosts got there first, yes. Two children were still dead. The title is not just about Abney's missing conscience or the literal hearts he extracted; it is about what loss of that kind costs, and how little the world notices the cost. As a piece of craft, "Lost Hearts" is one of James's tightest constructions, and as a moral statement, it is one of his most unsparing.

M R James (1862-1936)and the Western Occult Tradition

The late nineteenth century was, among other things, a period of systematic occult entrepreneurship. Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801) had already assembled Agrippa, angelic hierarchies, talismanic practice, and ceremonial technique into a single English-language handbook available to anyone who could find a copy; Éliphas Lévi then gave the whole tradition a new theoretical coherence, fusing Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, and the Tarot into something that looked, from a distance, like philosophy. By 1888 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was offering graded initiations, temple rituals, and a worked-out system of practical magic to members who included Yeats, Mathers, and eventually Aleister Crowley. The Theosophical Society, meanwhile, was propagating a different but related current — Eastern religion, occult evolutionism, and the doctrine of hidden masters — into a popular alternative spirituality that shaped a great deal of late Victorian and Edwardian intellectual culture. All of this was, in one sense or another, public, programmatic, and aimed at practice.

James moved through none of it. His route into the same underlying tradition was entirely different, that of an impeccably orthodox Anglican churchman and medievalist moving among patristic texts and catalogues: not through lodges and initiations but through Greek manuscripts and patristic scholarship, not through Lévi's codifications but through the primary sources Lévi himself was drawing on at several removes. As a sixteen-year-old at Eton he had already compiled a complete list of apocryphal books belonging to both testaments, lost and extant. By the time the Golden Dawn was consecrating its first temple in London, James was at King's College cataloguing medieval manuscripts and reading the Testament of Solomon in Conybeare's 1898 Greek translation — a text that predates the grimoire tradition by centuries and sits at the root of everything Mathers and Crowley would later repackage for a popular occult audience.

The Testament presents Solomon subduing and cataloguing demons through a magical ring, extracting their names and the formulae that bind them; it includes what amounts to a working demonology, complete with demonic hierarchies, physical descriptions, and the incantatory means of dismissal. James wrote about it in 1899 for the Guardian Church Newspaper, reviewed McCown's critical edition in the Journal of Theological Studies in 1923, and recycled its demonological furniture — named spirits constrained by written and ritual means, the sense of a text as a physical locus of demonic presence — into "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" without, apparently, feeling any need to acknowledge the connection. He had absorbed the material as historical scholarship. That it happened also to be the foundation of Western ceremonial magic was, from his perspective, neither here nor there.

The consequence, for the ghost stories, is a precision and a peculiar authenticity that distinguishes James's occult apparatus from the borrowed ceremonial scenery of writers who came to the same tradition through the Golden Dawn. When Abney in "Lost Hearts" pursues spiritual ascent through the harvested hearts of children, citing late Neoplatonist sources and writing up his results in the clinical Latin of the laboratory notebook, the framework is not invented atmosphere: it belongs to a genuine current of late antique and medieval learned magic that James knew from the manuscripts. He was, in effect, the archivist of the tradition that the Victorian occult orders were simultaneously mythologising into something more dramatic and more modern. He never joined them, almost certainly never wanted to, and probably found the whole enterprise slightly undignified. But the demonology in his fiction is older, and more accurately sourced, than theirs.