We are back with a Brief History of the Island and Town of Pandemonium, Part II, just as we have finalized the draft and cover of the novel.

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Benjamin Franklin, one of our country’s illustrious founders, is known to have said “We shall all hang together, or we shall all hang separately.” The sentiment did not originate with him, but with anyone in a similar desperate situation, which the Witches and the Strangers now found themselves in.  In this moment, Miller forgot his newly discovered piety and turned to Cramner, who was apparently thinking the same thing.  As enemies, they were outnumbered and likely to die, but as allies they stood a chance.  Miller spoke first, stating that his earlier words concerning the passage “thou shall not allow a witch to live” may have been overly hasty.  Cramner apologized for the sacrifice on the Charon, chalking it up to too much enthusiasm in his congregation to begin their new lives in America.  Cramner offered to let the Strangers remain in Pandemonium, provided they assisted with the defense of the island.  Miller found that offer most attractive as both he and his crew were wanted by the law elsewhere but insisted that Cramner would have to agree to cease and desist any more acts of human sacrifice.  Cramner did not like the condition but did not see an alternative.  Recognizing their common plight, the Old Heretic and the Drunkard “shook on it” a second time and proceeded to form an alliance for their own survival. Captain Miller had within the last 24 hours founded a religion and then made a bargain with the Devil.

            Working together, the Strangers and the Witches successfully rebuffed the Stono attack and then pursued the Stono to the mainland where the chief and the remainder of his forces were slaughtered.  The settlers then moved onto the Indian village on the mainland and proceeded to do unto the Stono as the Stono had threatened to do unto them.  Having killed all the men (including all boys over the age of 10), the Strangers and Witches carried off the women and burned the village to the ground.[1]  Back at Pandemonium, Cramner agreed that because the Strangers, unlike the Witches, had not brought women with them on the journey, the Stono women would be given to the Strangers as wives.[2]

            It is one thing to make a deal in haste, quite another to fully negotiate the terms from a position of relative ease.  Two months after the alliance was made, the Old Heretic and the Drunkard “shook on it” a third time, but this time they had the foresight to write the terms of the deal down in greater detail.  First, the island would be bisected in two by a line agreed to by both parties with the Strangers receiving the North end of the island and the Witches receiving the south end. Both the Witches and the Strangers agreed to stay on their side of the line. That being said, if they were to live together like this, they would have to form a common government, or at least a place to meet in order to deal with future issues.  A common meeting hall was established on the exact center of the island with two entrances, one on the Stranger side of the line and the other on the Witch side of the line. A council of six people would be elected, three from each side, and the town would be governed by two different mayors, each one responsible for governing the town on their respective side of the line.  The Strangers promised not to report the Witches to any Christian Kingdom or Empire, and the Witches in return agreed reluctantly to give up any practice of human sacrifice.[3] The Strangers also wanted it written down that not only were the Witches not allowed on the Stranger part of the island, but neither was Satan himself allowed.  Cranmer, a fallen Anglican priest who had been educated in theology, was amused by this request and stated that perhaps the Witches should ask that God be disallowed from coming onto the Witches’ side of the island.  The Strangers discussed it among themselves and to Cranmer’s amazement responded that they found those terms acceptable.  Those famous provisions were incorporated into the Bargain of Pandemonium, and though it has been amended over time, that charter remains the basis of our town’s government.[4]

            Both parties took this social contract seriously and held up their end of it.  When the Crown established the royal colony of South Carolina a few years later, the Strangers did not go running to the local governor to turn the Witches in.  This might partly be to do with the price on their own heads, as Miller and his crew had been wanted on smuggling charges for several years.  Covered in fog, the island of Pandemonium often went unnoticed by English settlers.  When it was necessary to do business with the royal governor, the governing council would vote to appoint a representative who would represent both communities, swearing to reveal none of the secrets about the religious practices in Pandemonium or its founding. 

            The Witches voluntarily gave up the practice of human sacrifice.  Cramner began a religious reform movement within the cult whereby the sacrifice of a human being was replaced by the ritual sacrifice of a goat.  Many Witches voiced their concern that without a truly diabolic sacrifice of human life, that their connection to the Evil One would fade, and with it their powers.[5]  However, this reform was necessary to protect the deal in place making the town a possibility, and the prohibition on human sacrifice has been honored by Witches to this day, with one notable exception. [6]

            The Strangers had their own religious reforms to attend to, as a church can rarely survive with a liturgy depending on a single verse read by a barely literate seaman with no theological training heavily influenced by alcohol.  The Strangers disassembled the Charon and used the hull to build their original church on the very ground where they had killed the Stono princess.  The Stranger Church[7] also had a cave underneath it, where the bones of the Stono princess were kept. It eventually became a stone crypt once one of the Strangers learned stone masonry.  Guilt marked the church’s foundation from the beginning.  Miller placed the Bloody Book at the back of the Church’s nave, where it remains today, now under glass.  The Drunkard appointed himself as both pastor and mayor, the concept of separation of church and state and that time just developing and proceeded to start leading a service made up mostly of songs and sermons centered on how disgusting and devious the Witches were, despite just having made a permanent alliance with them.  Far from repenting, Miller carved the verse “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” on the arch above the church’s entrance.  However, Miller also warned the Strangers to keep the peace, a point he made in a ceremony whereby he took the as ashes of the Stono princess’s cremated body and forced his congregation to drink said ashes with water “so the sin would remain with them.”[8]  This contradiction lies at the heart of the Strangers’ faith, and like most mysteries at the heart of religion, the question is not so much unanswered but answered a thousand times over in a way that is unsatisfactory to all involved.

            After the Drunkard’s death in the 1656, the Strangers decided they needed an actual pastor, someone who knew what the Christian faith was, and this required an education in the Christian faith.  The Witches, much like other religious minorities seeking shelter in America, had founded Cramner University[9] in memory of their founder after his death, but a school run by Witches would not serve to educate a Christian pastor.  Also, it was located on the other side of the line, and crossing the line was an offense punishable by execution.  However, an inquisitive young man named Robert Winthrop, the son of one of the original Strangers and a 13-year old Stono Indian, having learned to read at the age of six at a rate faster than the Drunkard himself, so impressed the community that they charged him with leaving Pandemonium and returning upon having educated himself in Christian theology.

            Winthrop soon found there was no “Christian faith” in the same sense that there was no such thing as “language” or “government.” There were Christian faiths.  Winthrop attended Anglican Churches in Virginia, Catholic Churches in Maryland, Quaker Meetings in Pennsylvania, Puritan Churches in Massachusetts, and held a very lively conversation with an Arminian as both of them were being chased out of Boston by an angry crowd wielding torches and pitchforks. We know from his journal that Winthrop came to the conclusion that none of these churches actually had an accurate picture of God, and he decided not to look for one.  Winthrop instead decided to create his own faith based on the needs of his community.  Winthrop rejected the Catholic faith outright because of the overwhelming hostility it faced in the English colonies, hostility that the Strangers would like to avoid when interacting with the local government.  On the other hand, if the Catholic faith caused hostility, the Anglican faith would tempt the Strangers to assimilate too far into South Carolinian society, and may lead them to break the Bargain, which could cause the Witches to retaliate.  Stranger worship would be decidedly low-church, so Winthrop adopted Reform methods of worship but assimilated the Quakers’ belief in religious liberty, as would be necessary for any Christian society working hand to hand with Satanists. Winthrop agonized over whether to adopt the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination or the Arminian objection to it.  Theoretically, if the Witches were damned to Hell before they were even born, the Strangers would not be tempted to proselytize them as they would be if their souls could be saved, and this would keep the peace. However, Winthrop’s personal experience with straight Calvinism was an angry Puritan mob while his conversation with the Arminian left Winthrop with the impression that even if the doctrine were not logical, it at least created a logical man.  As was usual with Winthrop, his experience triumphed over any search for a theoretical truth existing in a vacuum.[10]

            Winthrop returned to Pandemonium having formed the doctrines of his new church and announced to the community that he would take over the position of pastor, leading the community in worship for the first time the first Sunday of January 1665.  Winthrop built a pulpit similar to the ones he had seen in Boston, and in a sermon delivered on that pulpit expounded the doctrines of the “Christian faith” he had put together in his journal while traveling back from Massachusetts. Unlike other religions in America founded by a charismatic figure, the Strangers today do not maintain that Winthrop was some kind of messianic prophet.  Winthrop borrowed liturgy and doctrines from other religions and adopted them based on the needs of his congregation.  He never claimed to find a secret code in the Bible or to discover sacred plates in the forest.  Winthrop’s attitude toward faith was practical.  Religion existed to serve the community, not to represent some metaphysical reality.  Winthrop may not have been a prophet, but to use a phrase the Strangers had adopted “he did us proud.”  When Winthrop died in 1711, the Strangers decided to memorialize him by founding their own university.[11] 

            Of course, there is more to life than religion and government.  In America, commerce dominates a large part of our existence, and Pandemonium soon became a thriving port due to the industriousness of its inhabitants.  When drawing the line dividing the island, Cramner made sure the Witches received the south end of the island, where all the arable farm land was, and the Strangers received the north end of the island, mostly forests.  Once they realized this, the Strangers determined it had been for the best.  They were sailors after all, and with access to the forests on the north side of the island the Strangers soon had a thriving shipbuilding industry which in turn begat fishing and trade. 

            The Witches found the south side of the island to be exceedingly fertile, good for growing tobacco, which would become the island’s main cash crop.  However, much like the rest of colonial America, they suffered a labor shortage.  As luck would have it,[12] a Spanish ship blown off the coast of Florida drifted into Pandemonium harbor in the year 1640, bringing with it the “Migration or Importation of such Persons”[13] that would be a great help to harvesting of tobacco. The passengers on that boat would never have guessed that their descendants would form the third great spiritual community of Pandemonium, the Fieldhands. 

            Witch tobacco had to be carried on Stranger ships, requiring cooperation between the two disparate groups, as capitalism often does.  This led to a softening of certain restrictions in the 1700s.  While crossing the line was still technically forbidden, soon housewives from one community to the other were crossing the line for no other reason than to borrow a cup of flower. An informal rule developed that as long as neither side was attempting to convert the other, presence on the other side of town would be tolerated.  Winthrop had warned the Strangers against trying to convert the Witches and stressed keeping the peace.  His prudence may have saved this young community.

            On the other hand, the Witches and the Strangers rarely met an issue they could not disagree on, a good example being the building of the First Satanic Temple in 1752.  As South Carolina grew in population and Pandemonium’s economy grew in size, the town, though remote, was getting more and more visitors and the Witches’ great secret became more difficult to hide.  The Strangers had hoped that this might cause the Witches to convert, but the Witches had their own preferred solution.  The Witches proposed that rather than perform their ceremonies out in the open as they had done previously, they would build a Satanic Temple underground, connected with a series of tunnels which would attach to each home on the Witches’ side of the line.  If all that was what they wanted to do, the Strangers would have been fine with it, but the Witches also wanted to use tax money, collected from both sides of the community to pay for it.  The Strangers would have none of it.  The idea of tax dollars paying for Satanic ceremony was outrageous.  Also, many Strangers believed that the entire idea of placing the temple underground was designed to allow the Witches to start conducting human sacrifice again without the supervision of the Strangers.[14]  The Witches felt this attitude to be hypocritical.  After all, in those days the Strangers’ pastor was paid a salary with tax dollars.  However, after a long session of yelling, screaming, threatening to beat each other, and questioning each other’s parentage, the Strangers and Witches came together as only they could.  The Satanic Temple would be built without tax dollars, the Strangers’ pastor would be shorn of his salary, and the Bargain would be amended to prohibit tax dollars from going to any religious institution.[15]  Democracy had done what it does best: create an outcome everyone could live with but no one was happy about. 

            The Churches of the Hatfields and the McCoys, as they would later come to be known, would soon find themselves opposed on every issue facing America as it became a country, starting with Independence.  Namely, the Witches were fer’ it and the Strangers agin’ it.  The Witches believed that on balance they were more likely to be accepted by an independent America than a British Empire that was formally Protestant, and the Strangers believed anything the Witches wanted must be bad.  Many a Witch marched with the minutemen, while Stranger names filled the rolls of loyalist militias.  When America won its independence, the Witches considered themselves one up on the Strangers, though the pro-Union Strangers would even the score against the pro-Confederacy Witches during Reconstruction.  These same dynamics would play out during Prohibition, where the bootlegging Witches would dodge the prohibitionist Strangers using a combination of finely tuned cars and well concealed speakeasies, and the Civil Rights Era, where U.S. District Judge Robert Mapplethorpe, born to two Stranger parents, would strike down and frustrate every Witch attempt to maintain Separate but Equal.

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[1] Stories such as these offend modern sensibilities, but they are common in the founding of America, and it would be difficult to tell the story of Pandemonium without them. Captain Miller justified this massacre much like he did his first one, by quoting scripture, namely Numbers 31:17.

[2] The Stranger’s church has a museum of their history which contains several portraits of these marriages based on the famous portrait of the Marriage of Pocahontas.  Nothing could be further from the truth as the Strangers’ wives were carried back to Pandemonium tied and bound.  The Strangers’ wedding nights would often leave the bride weeping and rolled into a ball attempting to stop their new husband’s advances.

[3] Cramner initially attempted to move Miller on this issue, promising never to use the Strangers as sacrificial victims and appealing to “freedom of conscience.”  The Strangers insisted on abolishing the practice, however, as it offended their newfound piety.  The fact that they had just finished fighting off an invasion that was caused by Cranmer’s need for a victim may also have been a factor.

[4] The exact terms of the Bargain state: “the fallen angel shall have no hold of the island north of the line” and that “the Christian God’s dominion does not extend south of the line.”

[5] The Author of this book remains skeptical of such powers, but the Witches at that time truly believed Satan had granted them the ability to manipulate the natural world through the invocation of demons. This much is clear from the documents they left behind.    

[6]For more information on this subject, be sure to buy The Crimes of Beauregard Davis, written by Jonathon Coleridge and available at the Pandemonium History Center for $19.99. 

[7] Now on the National Register of Historic Places.

[8] Exodus 32:20

[9] Go fighting Red Devils!

[10] While being a Witch himself, the Author must admit a certain admiration for Winthrop’s pragmatism, based in his concern for the genuine good of his community, a sentiment sadly lacking in this day and age.

[11] Winthrop University is most famous for having lost 34-28 to Cramner University in last year’s Blood Bowl, though others might disagree. 

[12] I should note before certain readers become offended that the luck was entirely on the part of the Witches.

[13] Art. I Sec. 9, Cl. 1 U.S. Const. 

[14] The great irony here is that only a few generations beforehand, the Old Heretic mourned the loss of the old sacrifice, whereas his successor, Tiberius Johnson, was indignant at the very suggestion he would lead such a ceremony, calling it a “calumny” against the Witch community to even suggest they would commit human sacrifice.

[15] The Pastor of the Stranger Church, as one might imagine, was not happy with this outcome.