The Hidden Masters of Pulp Fantasy

One of the regular series for which this blog was once known is Pulp Fantasy Library, in which I highlighted individual fantasy and science fiction stories I felt had been influential, directly or indirectly, on the development of the hobby of roleplaying. The series eventually grew to more than three hundred entries and taught me a great deal in the process of writing it. However, it also required considerable effort and often received little reader engagement, so I brought it to a quiet close in 2023. I sometimes consider reviving it in a modified form, but I’ve yet to find the right approach. Still, I keep thinking about these early works of fantasy, which is what led to this post.

From the vantage point of the first quarter (!) of the twenty-first century, it’s all too easy to forget just how strange fantasy and science fiction once were – not merely in their imaginative content but in the intellectual and spiritual traditions from which they drew. We tend to think of early speculative fiction as arising primarily from a matrix of adventure tales, scientific romances, and classical mythology. However, another powerful and often overlooked influence is the world of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other esoteric traditions. These weren’t mere fads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they were serious systems of belief for many, including a surprising number of the authors who helped lay the foundations of what we now call genre fiction.

Even more fascinating is how many once-occult concepts have since become commonplaces of fantasy and science fiction, like astral projection, past lives, lost advanced civilizations, invisible planes of existence, and cosmic cycles of spiritual evolution, to name just a few obvious ones. These weren’t originally the products of scientific or rationalist speculation. They were occult doctrines, often articulated with the structure and certainty of any other religion. Early speculative fiction served as a powerful conduit for these ideas, transmitting them into the cultural imagination.

Take, for instance, astral projection, which recurs throughout pulp fantasy and science fiction. In Theosophy, this is the “etheric body” or “etheric double” leaving the physical body to traverse the astral plane. In fiction, this idea becomes John Carter’s unexplained voyage to Barsoom in A Princess of Mars, where his body remains behind on Earth while his spirit is transported to another world by sheer force of will. Burroughs never offers a scientific explanation for the phenomenon nor did he need to do so. His readers would likely have recognized the trope from already extant popular occult literature.

Similarly, reincarnation and karma, central tenets of Theosophy and many forms of Eastern-influenced Spiritualism, appear in the works of authors like Talbot Mundy, whose protagonists sometimes recall past lives in ancient empires. The same is true of many tales penned by Abraham Merritt. In The Star Rover, Jack London tells the story of a prisoner who escapes his unjust physical confinement by entering trance states that allow him to access a series of former incarnations. This isn’t merely a fictional conceit; it reflects a specific metaphysical worldview in which human identity unfolds across many lifetimes, a view that gained traction during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even readers who didn’t share this worldview would nevertheless have been familiar with it.

William Hope Hodgson is another fascinating case. He blends arcane science with mystical speculation in his "Carnacki the Ghost-Finder" stories, which feature protective sigils, vibrational zones, and references to the "Outer Circle," a realm inhabited by malevolent entities existing just beyond human perception. All of these ideas draw heavily on contemporary occultism. His novel The Night Land, a work of science fantasy more than horror, is set on a dying Earth haunted by monstrous spiritual forces and saturated with the oppressive weight of cosmic time. It echoes Theosophical doctrines of vast evolutionary cycles and the occult preoccupation with psychic resistance to spiritual evil.

Marie Corelli (born Mary Mackay), once one of the most popular authors in the English-speaking world, is now rarely read. Her novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, for example, blends Spiritualist belief with melodrama and science fictional concepts, such as portraying electricity as a bridge between the material and spiritual realms. She directly influenced writers like H. Rider Haggard and even Arthur Machen, both of whom in turn shaped the subsequent development of fantasy. Even Edward Bulwer-Lytton, now best known for the infamous incipit “It was a dark and stormy night,” was a serious student of esoteric lore. His novel Zanoni depicts an immortal Chaldean adept who achieves transcendence through secret knowledge, an early example of the “hidden masters” who would later become a staple of Theosophy.

Which, of course, brings us to Theosophy itself, which had perhaps the most lasting and far-reaching impact on the development of both esoteric thought and fantasy. Founded in the 1870s by the Russian-born mystic, Helena Blavatsky, Theosophy combined elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Neoplatonism, and esoteric Christianity into a vast occult cosmology. Through books, journals, and lectures, it promoted a view of the universe in which mankind was but one phase in an immense spiritual drama, involving lost continents, ascended masters, and ancient wisdom. These ideas found fertile ground in genre fiction. The controversial “Shaver Mystery” stories published in Amazing Stories in the mid to late 1940s and purportedly based on true events involve ancient subterranean races like the evil Deros (which itself served as an inspiration to Gary Gygax). Shaver's stories read like Theosophy blended with pulp sensationalism.

Even Clark Ashton Smith, whom regular readers will know is my favorite of the Weird Tales trio, drew on esoteric themes. Ideas like cyclical time, forgotten civilizations, and arcane knowledge recur throughout his work. His Zothique cycle, set on the last continent of a dying Earth, reflects the Theosophical notion of a future “seventh root race” and the eventual exhaustion of history.

Against this background, H.P. Lovecraft stands out, not because he rejected religion in general (though he did), but because he specifically targeted Spiritualism and occultism. He was deeply familiar with the claims of mediums, astrologers, and Theosophists and dismissed them with open contempt. In his correspondence, he regularly mocks the “credulous” who place faith in séances, reincarnation, and similar beliefs. At the behest of Harry Houdini, Lovecraft even collaborated on a book titled The Cancer of Superstition, intended as a wholesale debunking of Spiritualist claims. The book was never completed due to Houdini’s sudden death in 1926.

Despite this, Lovecraft’s stories are filled with forbidden books, lost knowledge, and ancient alien races whose truths are too terrible for the human mind to bear. In this way, Lovecraft doesn’t discard the tropes of occult literature – he inverts them. Where Theosophy promised spiritual enlightenment and cosmic unity, Lovecraft offers only madness, degeneration, and a universe that is not merely indifferent but actively hostile to notions of human significance. His “gods” are not hidden masters but incomprehensible and uncaring forces. Structurally, however, he preserves much of the occult worldview: a hidden reality lurks behind the surface of things, accessible only to initiates – scholars, madmen, and cultists. Lovecraft didn’t reject that structure; he twisted it and filled it with dread.

All of this makes it remarkable just how thoroughly modern fantasy and science fiction still bear the imprint of these early occult influences. Astral travel, alternate planes, soul transference, hidden masters, and cosmic cycles remain staples of the genres. They’re treated today as neutral, even secular, tropes of worldbuilding, even though their origins are anything but secular. They are spiritual, mystical, and often explicitly religious in intent.

My purpose in this post isn't to diminish these genres or to reduce their works to a list of influences. Nor am I offering an invitation to embrace the esoteric as literal truth. Instead, I'm reminding everyone of just how permeable the boundary between belief and imagination has always been and how fantasy, in particular, has long served as a vessel for metaphysical speculation, even when dressed in the garb of swords and sorcery or rocket ships and ray guns. Perhaps this is one of the reasons these genres endure: they don’t merely entertain; they echo the ancient human desire to find meaning in a world that so often seems devoid of it.

Pulp Fantasy Library: She

One might be tempted, when looking at the authors of Appendix N, to notice seeming gaps – writers one would have expected to have inspired Gary Gygax in his personal conception of fantasy. Clark Ashton Smith is probably the most common example of such an author, since so many people, myself included, have mistakenly assumed that the works of CAS appeared in that famed list. Another "missing" author is H. Rider Haggard, the 19th century English writer whose extremely popular adventure fiction contributed greatly to the "lost world" genre and influenced countless writers of the early 20th century, like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Abraham Merritt. 

While both Burroughs and Merritt figure prominently in Appendix N, Haggard is nowhere to be seen. I probably shouldn't be surprised. Like many authors, Haggard looms so large in the imagination of the first half of the 20th century that one sees his presumed presence everywhere. Robert E. Howard, for example, was an admirer of Haggard, and took up his theme of civilizational devolution with gusto. Thus, it's quite possible Gygax never read Haggard (or didn't think him significant enough to mention) and only came into contact with his ideas through intermediaries like Howard or Merritt. 

Among Haggard most well known and influential novels is She, first published in 1887, after being serialized between October 1886 and January 1887 in the pages of the illustrated newspaper, The Graphic. Like so many adventure novels of the time – and those later inspired by it, such as A Princess of Mars, among innumerable others – She is presented as a first-person account that has been edited by a third party for publication. The first-person account is that of Ludwig Horace Holly, a young professor at the University of Cambridge. Early in the novel, he describes himself as follows:

Most men of twenty-two are endowed at any rate with some share of the comeliness of youth, but to me even this was denied. Short, thick-set, and deep-chested almost to deformity, with long sinewy arms, heavy features, deep-set grey eyes, a low brow half overgrown with a mop of thick black hair, like a deserted clearing on which the forest had once more begun to encroach; such was my appearance nearly a quarter of a century ago, and such, with some modification, it is to this day. Like Cain, I was branded—branded by Nature with the stamp of abnormal ugliness, as I was gifted by Nature with iron and abnormal strength and considerable intellectual powers. So ugly was I that the spruce young men of my College, though they were proud enough of my feats of endurance and physical prowess, did not even care to be seen walking with me. Was it wonderful that I was misanthropic and sullen? Was it wonderful that I brooded and worked alone, and had no friends—at least, only one? I was set apart by Nature to live alone, and draw comfort from her breast, and hers only. Women hated the sight of me. 

The full passage goes at some length about Holly's ugliness, isolation, and misanthropy, which sets him apart not just from his fellow man but also from the caricatured expectations of fictional Victorian adventure novel protagonists. Far from being an ideal human specimen, he is, in his own words, a monster. 

One day, a colleague by the name of Vincey calls on Holly. Unlike Holly, Vincey is a very handsome man, but he is also dying and asks Holly to become the legal guardian of his five year-old son, Leo. Vincey has "never been able to bear to look upon," as his birth had cost him that of his wife. Vincey explains that he chosen Holly for this role because, after observing him for two years, has concluded that Holly is "hard and sound at core." He then explains that Leo is the

only representative of one of the most ancient families in the world, that is, so far as families can be traced. You will laugh at me when I say it, but one day it will be proved to you beyond a doubt, that my sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth lineal ancestor was an Egyptian priest of Isis, though he was himself of Grecian extraction, and was called Kallikrates. His father was one of the Greek mercenaries raised by Hak-Hor, a Mendesian Pharaoh of the twenty-ninth dynasty, and his grandfather or great-grandfather, I believe, was that very Kallikrates mentioned by Herodotus.

Holly accepts the task and is given a locked iron box that he is told not to open until Leo has reached the age of 25. Vincey also asks that Holly not send the boy to school but to instruct him at home. A day later, Vncey is found dead and Holly takes Leo into his home. For the next twenty years, Holly raises him and the two develop a fondness for one another akin to uncle and nephew. Leo grows into a handsome man looking like "a statue of the youthful Apollo." 

Upon his twenty-fifth birthday, Holly opens the box for Leo and finds inside a note from Vincey to his son, explaining more about his ancestry and his travels in the Middle East and Africa seeking "the Pillar of Life," a source of immortality. Also included is a series of ancient inscriptions that, when translated, tell the story of a sorceress in Africa who has discovered the Pillar and, thanks to it, has ruled in secret for millennia. Enraptured by what he has read, Leo vows to follow in his father's footsteps, asking Holly and Holly's servant, Job, to join him. Albeit reluctantly, Holly and Job agree to join him and they set off for Africa. 

Needless to say, their adventures are fraught with peril, starting with a shipwreck on the coast of east Africa. The trio survive, along with the Arab who captained their ill-fated vessel, and make their way on foot into the interior of the continent. There, they are captured by people called the Amhagger. whose ruler is a fearsome queen known simply as "She-who-must-be-obeyed." Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a novel filled with coincidence and happenstance, the queen turns out to be the legendary sorceress they were seeking – Ayesha, the titular She and perhaps the most fascinating character in the entire novel.

She is an immense, rambling work, but it benefits enormously from Haggard's energetic prose. The story it tells is preposterous on the face of it, but Haggard tells it with such straight-faced gusto that, like the best tall tales, it nevertheless has a ring of truth to it. More than that, it's one of the fountainheads from which so many later pulp fantasy stories flow. Familiarizing oneself with it and Haggard's other works is important, I think, for anyone who wants to understand the origins of the genre that gave birth to Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying games more broadly. She's influence, though unacknowledged, remains powerful more than a century later.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The People of the Mist

What I've called "pulp fantasy" grew out of the confluence of a number of literary antecedents, one of the most important of which was the Victorian adventure novel. These novels typically presented tales of derring-do against the backdrop of romanticized European colonialism, the degree of romanticization varying with the author -- some such novels were in fact subtle critiques or satires of contemporary geopolitics. Thus, they typically involve a "civilized" European (or American), often from a military or scientific background (or both), who ventures into "the wild" and encounters strange and wondrous things, including threats to his own civilization that he must overcome. Sound familiar?

Among the most influential of the adventure novel writers was Henry Rider Haggard, an Englishman who is generally credited, along Robert Louis Stevenson, of taking adventure novels to new heights of popularity and sophistication. His novels were among the favorites of later authors, such as Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Talbot Mundy, and Abraham Merritt, all of whom went on to be highly influential in their own rights. Consequently, Haggard is an important link in the chain of D&D's literary origins, one who's often overlooked or forgotten, because his novels are comparatively little read nowadays. His most famous novel is probably King Solomon's Mines, written in 1885, and whose protagonist, Allan Quatermain, is probably best known not through Haggard's own writings but through Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics. Quatermain was likely a model for Indiana Jones and indeed is the archetypal Victorian adventurer.

Less well known is Haggard's 1894 novel, The People of the Mist, which the author calls in his dedication an "effort of primeval and troglodyte imagination" and a "record of barefaced and flagrant adventure." The novel focuses on a destitute English aristocrat named Leonard Outram. Outram begins the novel after having lost nearly everything important in his life, including his fiancée, whose social climbing father ends their engagement because of Outram's current circumstances. Embittered, Outram sets off to Africa to escape his ruined life and, perhaps, to find a new fortune. Once in Africa, he acquires a dwarf Zulu companion, called Otter, and rescues a young woman named Juanna, who was being sold into slavery. Outram and Juanna soon develop an affection for one another, but one fraught with quarrels and disagreements -- precisely the sort of tempestuous romance that later became commonplace in tales of this kind.

The People of the Mist are a legendarily wealthy lost race, whom Outram vows to discover so as to gain both fame and fortune. This he does -- how could he not? -- but soon gets more than he bargained for. The People are embroiled in a power struggle between those loyal to the monarch and those loyal to the priesthood of the crocodile god. As an outsider, his situation is both enviable and precarious, as each faction attempts to use him to their advantage. Outram and his companions soon find themselves caught up in danger after danger, escaping through sheer luck as often as their own ingenuity. Haggard does an excellent job of portraying the People's society, with much attention given to their religion. I have little doubt that this portrayal was widely influential; there are certainly echoes of it in Merritt and Burroughs in my opinion.

The People of the Mist is a surprisingly brisk read. Unlike a lot of 19th century novels, it's not slow or ponderous and even Haggard's many anthropological asides make for good fun rather than pedantry. His characters are also well drawn, although, as with reading anything much imitated later, there's often a feeling of déjà vu accompanying them. We have to remember, though, that Haggard's novels are the originators of so many of the tropes associated with pulp fiction, Saturday morning serials, and related entertainments. They're the fountainhead from which so much sprang. As I implied earlier, Haggard's novels do offer a romanticized view of European colonialism but they're not wholly uncritical and his portrayal of non-Europeans is more sympathetic and nuanced than one would probably expect. Otter, the four foot tall Zulu warrior, while clearly The Sidekick, isn't played for laughs, even though his character has a good sense of humor. The People themselves are also portrayed as more than mere cut-outs placed in the narrative to make Outram look heroic.

In short, The People of the Mist is fun and well worth a read. It's in the public domain, so it should be fairly easy to obtain online if you can't find a copy of it in printed form.