Jax Book Nook

Hey, everyone! S. Jackson has written a review of Beer Run, and since this blog technically exists to promote Beer Run (I mean very technically) I thought I would repost that review here: Beer Run | When Angels Fly. Thank you Ms. Jackson, I really appreciate the visibility.

Now that I’ve done my perfunctory Beer Run promotion, let’s get back to recounting the history of Pandemonium:

Any survey of religion before the Revolution would be incomplete without talking about the Fieldhands and their quest to found their own church despite their unfortunate condition. Practitioners of the peculiar institution throughout the American South attempted to carefully control religious ceremonies on their estates, where pastors would preach the virtue of obedience.  However, despite their best efforts, American blacks would often hold their own religious services where African spirituality mixed with Christian concepts, a practice that southern society attempted to limit.  Pandemonium, however, was a very different town from other places in the American South. When Jacob Freeman, a freeman who had participated in these illicit religious ceremonies while on a plantation on the mainland, came to Pandemonium and preached the Christian faith to the Fieldhands in the first time, the Witch establishment could not care less.  The Witch religion centered on Earthly power, which the Witches wanted the Fieldhands to have no part of, so the Witches never tried to convert the Fieldhands to their own faith.  Furthermore, the Satanic High Priest at that time, Cornelius Blackroot, found the Christian religion to teach a “slave morality,” using that term 150 years before Friedrich Nietzsche, which would be most useful in preventing any revolt, and encouraged Witches to allow the Fieldhands to be evangelized.  Jacob Freeman began the Fieldhand religious tradition without even the benefit of a church building, gathering his congregation together on Sunday mornings in the tobacco fields.      

            After the Revolution, the Bargain was amended again to remove any restrictions for either side to move across the line.  This legal change had little practical impact, as the law was rarely enforced, but it did open up the possibility of the Strangers sending missionaries to the Witches, as legal restrictions of freedom of religion were going out of style.  However, evangelizing and just talking about religion in public was going out of style as well, so custom now forbade what the law now allowed just as custom allowed what the law previously forbade. 

            The most significant events in Pandemonium between the Revolution and the end of the Civil War are the revolt of Calvin Johnson in 1831, which led to the death of 250 people, and the destruction of the First Satanic Temple in 1857, which led to the deaths of 496 people.  As a local historian, the Author writes for the purpose of promoting civic pride.  I acknowledge both of these unfortunate events and wish they had not happened. However, dwelling on the past does not help our community move forward. That was a different time and those events do not represent the town we are now.  Other books have been written on this topic that go into further detail if the reader is interested.[1]

            The Civil War changed Pandemonium just as it changed the rest of America.  Residents of Pandemonium served on both sides of the Civil War, none more prominent than CSA Col. Robert Davis, who served under General Robert E. Lee himself at the battle of Gettysburg.  The Witches supported the confederacy throughout the conflict, as their agricultural economy depended on the existence of the South’s current labor force.  The Pro-Union Strangers, on the other hand, rioted when the Confederacy attempted to impose a draft on the area.  A Stranger militia conducted the Revolt of 1865, hoping to aid the Union by creating an enclave behind enemy lines.  This foolish attempt to imitate the mountaineers of West Virginia was quickly crushed by Col. Davis’s own troops.

After the War of Between the States, the Witch community made the collective decision to establish a sense of Victorian respectability.  The Witches completed the Second Satanic Temple[2] in 1882.  Rather than the underground pit built more than a century earlier, the Second Satanic Temple was a white, rectangular building with Roman columns and a slanted roof with a steeple on top and stained-glass windows.  Any passerby could mistake it for a Baptist Church.  The liturgy changed as well, substituting the sacrifice of a rabbit for the sacrifice of a goat.  America is a great country, and even those outsiders at the furthest reaches want to assimilate.  Unlike a great number in the South, the Witches put up scant resistance to military occupation or Reconstruction, though they were glad to see both come to an end.

            The Fieldhands, it goes without saying, had greatly improved social standing following the war.  The Fieldhands gathered in the Southwest side of the island where Beauregard Davis’s western plantation was and the Witches remained on the Southeast side of the island.  For the first time, the Church of the Tobacco Fields benefitted from having a church building with a roof and four walls, located over the very spot in the tobacco fields where Jacob Freeman began his ministry more than a century before. During Reconstruction, one Fieldhand, Marvin Jackson, served two terms in the South Carolina legislature.

            But by far, the most significant event in Pandemonium to occur in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century was the coming of the Ze’ev.  A fringe Jewish sect from what is now the Czech Republic, the Ze’ev fled persecution in their home country and came to America to make a new life for themselves.  Today, few could imagine our town without the Ze’ev who have produced so many doctors, lawyers, judges, bankers, businessmen, philanthropists, rabbis, professors, and others who have enriched this community so much.  We have learned to tolerate their oddities.  However, when the first members of the Ze’ev arrived on the Northeastern side of the Island on August 12, 1892, the Strangers valued tolerance less than they do now.  Natives of the island looked askance at the haggard refugees wearing rags, carrying all they owned in a sack.  The Ze’ev knew little English, and their religious customs unnerved the Strangers, who had tolerated Witches for more than two and a half centuries and were unlikely to relish the possibility of more unbelievers on the island.  Pastor Peter Whitfield tried to calm down his congregation, concentrating on the Good Book’s passages concerning love and forgiveness.  He told those men that those who live by the sword die by the sword, and if they lived by the sword, they would die by it too.  However, Christianity is a philosophy many identify with but few practice, so the Strangers ignored their Pastor’s pleas to think reasonably and formed a lynch mob of fifty people to go to the Ze’ev one night on a full moon.

            Five of the lynch mob came back alive, covered in large gaping wounds, bleeding profusely from every seam of the body imaginable.  Pastor Whitfield was at a loss for words.  He had hoped that his previous warning would strike a prophetic tone, but in the Christian context prophecy does not equal divination.  However, the Rabbi Eliyahu came to visit a visibly shaken Pastor Whitfield the following morning in order to explain what had happened.  The Rabbi told the Pastor that his people suffered from a blessing and a curse (“For what blessing from the Lord is not also a curse, and what curse from the Lord is not also a blessing?”) that the Lord had bestowed upon them in the old country as a protection from their enemies.  This blessing and curse would come upon all members of the Ze’ev 18 or older who was born to a Ze’ev mother.  Upon every full moon, they would transform into a beast no person would trifle with.  The Ze’ev had immigrated to Pandemonium thinking that the inhabitants would be used to this kind of thing, having lived next to the Witches all these years.

            “It is unfortunate that your men attacked on the full moon,” continued Rabbi Eliyahu. “On any other night they would have taken us defenseless and they would not have died.  But the Lord does protect his chosen people.”

            “I need a stiff drink,” responded Pastor Whitfield.

            You must understand that as far back as the 18^th century, the Witches made no claim to perform magic anymore.  Their faith was in seeking Earthly power, both in that they hoped to exercise it on Earth and that the power was native to Earth.  The Strangers were not “used to this kind of thing” and no group of Strangers had such rude awakening since the original Strangers witnessed the first sacrifice aboard the Charon.  However, Pastor Whitfield could not prevent the Ze’ev from settling on Pandemonium, nor could anyone else.  The council met and discussed the matter the following month, and the decision was made that because the Witches and the Fieldhands already lived on the South side of the island, the Strangers would share the North side of the island with the Ze’ev. [3] The Strangers quickly moved out of the Northeastern side of the island until the Ze’ev had that quadrant of the island all to themselves.

            As Pandemonium moved into the Twentieth Century, its economy changed from a port city dependent on tobacco and fishing to a truly diversified economy, fueled by innovation.  Smokestacks and kilns replaced tobacco fields and shipyards, as the Ze’ev started Kosher butcher shops and tailors.  In the Fieldhand part of town, the famous Cleopatra night club was founded, a mecca for jazz performers in the first half of the century. Gradually, residents of the State of South Carolina became aware of the town’s oddities, and the religious practices of the Witches soon transformed from a well-kept secret to a poorly kept one. The State of South Carolina remembered the Witches’ service during the Civil War, and the white community at least had become accustomed to them.  A well-placed donation from the wealthy elites of Witch society didn’t hurt the Witches’ gradual acceptance either. Over fifty citizens of Pandemonium served during World War I, and another hundred served in World War II, which saw Bunim Greenblatt win the Congressional Medal of Honor after dispatching an entire German company during a full moon in Southern France.[4]  The Great Depression brought out the best in Pandemonians, who gave more to charity on average than any city in South Carolina, founding soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and, of course, missions. Many think the highlight of this period was Ms. Bedelia Ravenwood winning the 1943 Quilting Bee, though others disagree. Intermarriage between Strangers and Witches, once unheard of, became common, as were double ceremonies.[5]  When a Stranger boy brought home a Witch girl, or vice versa, his parents would increasingly say he had made a fine choice.  The Pastor of the Strangers actually encouraged this trend, as whenever a mixed marriage came to be, normally the parties would convert to his church and not to the temple.

     After World War II, the Witches increasingly came to believe that they belonged in America as much as anyone else did, so why hide their identities?  In 1953, the Satanic High Priest, Blaise Jackson, proposed to his congregation that they reveal their identities to the state government of South Carolina and to the wider world.  The congregation agreed.  Jackson met with his counterpart of the Strangers, Pastor Todd Whitfield (grandson of Peter Whitfield) and proposed that the Bargain be changed to allow the Witches to “come out” as it were.  Pastor Whitfield agreed, and at the next meeting, the council amended the Bargain and Jackson called the media. 

        The reaction of the world disappointed the Witch community.  American was in the middle of a religious revival in the mid-1950s, in response to the atheistic tyranny of communism.  All across the United States, people expressed shock and outrage as they learned of a town where Satan was worshipped as regularly as God was.  The residents of South Carolina pretended they had never heard of such a thing, fearing the world would condemn them right along with the Witches.  Televangelists would pray for the island to be eaten up by the sea.  The National Council of Churches voted to denounce the Bargain, as well, a Faustian bargain.  Large crowds of Christian believers arrived in front of the Second Satanic Temple with signs hoping to shut the place down.  Jackson dispersed the crowd by threatening to cast a curse upon them. 

            Of course, when the Pope takes notice, then you know you’ve made it.  Upon hearing the full story of Pandemonium in L’Osservatore Romano, Pope Pius XII dictated a letter to the bishop for the Diocese of Charleston, asking him why he had made no attempt to confront this evil in his own land.  When one receives a letter from the pope, one better look busy, so the bishop instructed that a church be built on the Witch side of the line.[6]  This church would be staffed by a pastor and given whatever resources needed to stay open.  When the bishop’s assistant explained to him that there were no Catholics in Pandemonium, the bishop repeated his instructions and demanded they be carried out to the letter.  For the last sixty years, St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church has stood in the town square, just on the Witches’ side, while other churches in the diocese have been closed for lack of funds or due to a shortage of priests, aid to parochial schools has had to be cut, and mission trips have been canceled.  The Diocese has always found a way to keep it open, if only to prove a point.[7]

            The Witches, shocked by this response, decided another liturgical reform would satiate the modern world. Starting in 1963, the Satanic ceremonies would no longer require the sacrifice of a rabbit.  The crushing of a large bug would suffice.  The Strangers reciprocated with their own liturgical reform, removing the ceremony whereby the congregation would drink the princess’s ashes with water and placing the Bloody Book in the crypt.  The bones from which the ashes were produced have been kept away from the public eye since the mid-1960s.

Over time it became apparent, however, that the Christian world’s disgust ultimately lay not on the Witches but on the Strangers and how at home they appeared to be with their diabolic neighbors.  In 1967, Pastor Whitfield attended an ecumenical meeting of Christian pastors from all across America only to find he would become the main attraction.  Priests and preachers of every stripe demanded how he could tolerate the danger to his congregation’s souls presented by his lackadaisical attitude toward the Devil.  Council meetings, intermarriage, and, more recently, some Strangers had even started attending Cramner University.[8]  Whitfield calmly explained that the Witches’ beliefs had no influence on their day to day behavior.  Blaise Jackson was a gentleman, even if he had some retrograde beliefs concerning segregation, and Whitfield found him to be a reasonable and even thoughtful man over the many conversations they had during Whitfield’s years as Pastor.  Jackson, in fact, had admitted to Whitfield in private that he had no faith in witchcraft or the existence of Satan, but instead thought of himself as a curator of a museum containing the history of his community.  The comment resonated with Whitfield, who often doubted his own God’s existence in the small hours of the night, and similarly thought of himself more as a caretaker than an evangelist.[9]

            Whitfield ended the conversation with a bon mot. As a Lutheran pastor pressed him on the issue, Whitfield asked if his particular sect of Lutheranism still considered the pope to be the anti-Christ.  The Lutheran affirmed that it did, but asked how this was relevant.  “As we are discussing people tolerating ultimate evil, I wonder whether we are really discussing the Witches in my community or the Roman Catholics in yours.”[10]

            Jackson, now in failing health, held his own Ecumenical Council in 1969, when he received a visit from Anton LaVey in June of that year.  While LaVey thought his visit would be enlightening, or at least entertaining, the two men soon found they had little in common.  LaVey found Jackson’s conservative demeanor boring.  Jackson considered LaVey to be merely a provocateur.  When LaVey offered to succeed Jackson, Jackson refused him.  “My church is a museum.  Yours is a circus.  One does not belong in the other.”

            A museum to what we might ask? Jackson would pass away in January 1970, to be succeeded by a new Satanic High Priest, Alastair Grimsley.  Grimsley became the first High Priest to endorse integration and announced that both the Satanic Temple and the town of Pandemonium would have to undergo changes in order thrive in the coming century.  Pastor Whitfield met with Grimsley for lunch one Sunday afternoon to discuss a proposal to amend the Bargain yet again.  The proposal presented to the council would allow for a renovated meeting hall with three doors: one for the Strangers, one for the Witches, and one for the Fieldhands, in recognition of the Fieldhands’ contributions to the history of Pandemonium.  The community made two objections to these plans.  The Fieldhands complained that the very idea of forcing them to go through a different was just Jim Crow under a different name.  The Ze’ev objection was essentially “What are we dog food?  Why don’t we get our own door?”[11]  Whitfield and Grimsley argued that nobody was required to go through any particular door, and that the doors were meant to honor the founding sects of Pandemonium.  Furthermore, if the Ze’ev insisted, a fourth door could be added.  In the end, the meeting hall would be renovated to have four doors, one of each side, unlabeled so as to avoid any association with segregation.  That being said, today, each of the four sects had chosen a door to call its own, and members of the community rarely deviate from custom when entering the hall. The initiative would be Whitfield’s last public accomplishment before his death in 1975.  The Bargain has been amended only once more since then, to create a unitary executive in the 2004. 

---

[1] See The Crimes of Beauregard Davis by Jonathon Coleridge.

[2] Now on the National Register for Historic Places.

[3] In the event that any tourist feels deterred from visiting Pandemonium because of these facts, the Author can assure them that the Ze’ev in their transformed state are normally very docile and only become hostile when provoked unnecessarily. While writing a portion of this brief history, the Author sat on his front porch one warm night in June and observed two transformed Ze’ev roaming his lawn without fear, for the animals barely noticed him.  Normally, they are pinned up on transformation nights.  The Ze’ev are, if nothing else, considerate and thoughtful neighbors.

[4] Greenblatt’s superiors did not understand how this could have occurred, but merely found Greenblatt standing naked one morning in a German camp surrounded by dead bodies.  Giving him the Medal of Honor was the best way to accept the victory without having to explain it to anyone.

[5] Undoubtedly this led to interesting debates as to how the children were to be raised, but those debates have been largely contained to bed chambers and kitchen tables.

[6] This being the part of the town that God was supposedly not allowed on.

[7] This is not speculation.  When the Author asked the current bishop as to why a church with no parishioners has remained open for six decades, the bishop responded “To prove a damn point!”

[8] “It has one Hell of a law school,” Whitfield explained, perhaps not understanding the irony of this statement.

[9] Thanks to the Stranger Church, who for the purposes of this brief history, have given the Author access to Pastor Whitfield’s personal journals as well as other invaluable documents.

[10] I consider this a bon mot, but some visitors to Pandemonium consider this to be an unsettling remark.

[11] The words of the Rabbi Maharam at the time.