To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Return of the Spirits

From PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge and in Fleming. Suppose, just suppose for a moment, that all those things that go bump in the night came to life, and your world was full of ghosts, zombies, even vampires. Novelest Laurel Hamilton can picture this world vividly. In most worlds where the dear old vampires, vampires are kind of secret and they're hidden. In my world, everyone knows they exist. But if you have a vampire that goes rogue and starts killing people, normal police procedures do not always work in time. You get to kill them if you find them. Today, tales of the supernatural. It's our special Halloween edition. We'll explore the cultural history of demons, monsters, and other scary creatures. And we'll talk to a witch, a real witch. She doesn't write a broomstick, but she does practice magic. When you cast a spell, a spell is very much an aesthetic experience. It's kind of religious art. It's a form of offering to the divine and a way of giving it shape and form in the world. Okay, here's a pop

quiz about Halloween. What's the origin of the jack -a -later? Where does the whole business of dressing up in masks and costumes come from? Ancient pagan rites or Christian rituals? And how much do Americans spend on Halloween costumes and party accessories? Well, the answer to that last question is nearly five billion dollars a year. And the other questions? Well, you can read Nick Rogers' cultural history. It's called Halloween from pagan ritual to party night. Rogers told Steve Paulson that Halloween draws on different traditions. It's an amalgam of pre -Christian pagan festival, one called So One, Summer's End, about which we know very little, actually. And the Christian festival of hallomass, which is really the festival of all saints and all souls, Halloween actually means the eve of all saints. And I think most of the ritual practices, in fact, go back in so far as you can trace them back to really the Christian

festivals rather than perhaps to the pagan ones. The pagan ones have a sense of the supernatural and the idea that there's an other world. But really, in many ways, costuming, masking, even cross -dressing, festive begging, if you like, because in a sense, trickle -treating is festive begging. People go into the door asking for treats. Go back, in fact, to the Christian festivals. That's fascinating. So dressing up even cross -dressing was an ancient Christian right? Yep, it was. John Strip in the Survey of London actually says that Halloween begins the period of Miss Rule, which ends actually on on 12th night, a period of sort of topsy -turvy change when servants would use certain masters, would become mock mares or mock sheriffs or mock kings for perhaps a day or so, and would actually try to put their masters in their place. The idea of actually cross -dressing and masking comes in fact from

the liturgy of all souls, in which actually there is a prayer that virgins would wait for their bridegrooms, and the young choristers who were part of the service on all souls often used to dress up as women. And so that's the really original sort of cross -dressing. But on the other hand, Halloween evokes images of black magic and ghouls and demons and all of that, and is there actual historical precedent in thinking that way in terms of what the, I don't know, the ancient Druids practiced? Well, the answer is actually yes and no. I mean, in a sense, some of the things the Druids did and the idea that they sacrifice people and divine the future from their death throes is something that the Romans and other classical horses charge them with. The problem is we don't know whether actually the Romans were giving the Celts a bad press, or whether in fact this is true. I mean, it was at a point in which actually the Romans were forsaking sacrifices themselves and obviously wanted to see themselves as

in some ways superior or more civilized than the Celts. Now, I think the idea of devil worship of darkness is to some degree a Gothic invention, an agothic appropriation of Halloween that comes in in the 19th century and really begins to take off in the 20th. So what we've really got is a reinvention of Halloween as a horror story as a fright knight. And I think that's come in really in the last 40 years or so. What about the whole business of trick -or -treating? Where does that come from? Well, trick -or -treating can go back to this festive begging where people used to knock on people's doors, rich people's doors generally and ask for arms or ask for cakes or even ale in order to pray for their souls in purgatory. That's where originally souling comes from and there were souling rights that look rather like trick -or -treating. And the idea was that if the rich people didn't give something to these working

folks, then something bad was going to happen to those rich people. And often, I think, in the early modern period, it did carry that kind of threat of retribution of some kind and certainly that might have been carried out on unpopular people. And I certainly think that's the case. Trick -or -treating was an attempt really to try and control Halloween by making it neighborly and turning it into something for kids and turning it into something for kids and making it a rather more consumerist than it actually had been before. I mean, before it had been a bit of a devilish knight, a knight of pranks. And I think the pranks in the early 20th century were a lot rougher actually than the ones that have carried out. No, there aren't many pranks actually. And what we have now with trick -or -treating is really treating. I mean, if you ask a child for a trick, some of them will be dumbfounded. They won't exactly know what to do. But they certainly got their shopping bags open for the treats. And in many

ways, it has become a big consumerist, candy -loving holiday. And that's really, since, I think, the 1950s that it's become like that. In the 1950s, there was a Senate inquiry actually into Halloween, as it getting rough. And some people suggested that it should be called youth on a day. And that in fact, people should pledge young adults in particular and high school children to sort of behave themselves on Halloween. And that didn't take off. But I think what did take off was this trick -or -treating which tried in many ways to make the holiday a little less rowdy, more childlike, more consumerist. What about the jackalenton? Where does that come from? The jackalenton can be seen to go back to selling to the idea of the soul in purgatory. Originally, the candle was in a carved -up turnip. But when it came across to North America, the pumpkin was more ideal. It's also associated though with the story of jackalenton who is a person who tries to trick the

devil and succeeds to some degree but is left sort of wandering the earth for eternity. It's the kind of folkloric take in many ways on the soul in purgatory. And that's where we get the name jackalenton. And that's where we get the light in the candle, which is supposed to be the light of the wandering soul. Now today, we tend to think of Halloween as a children's holiday. But actually, there are an enormous number of adults who dress up and spend money on Halloween celebrations. Yes, that's absolutely right. I think that something like 65 or 70 % of adults actually observe Halloween beyond handing out candles and it has become a remarkable adult night. I think you could make the case that it's always been a young adult's night and that the idea that it's a children's night is really a product of making trick or treating central to the holiday. But it's clear that it became an adult night

again. There was a revival of it as an adult night in the 1970s. I think what happened was that retailers recognized the potential of Halloween. They'd seen actually how much money might be spent on costumes, how much money might be spent in bars. Largely, I think, when actually the gay subcultures made Halloween into a drag night. And from that, you got a more generalized adult party night that really came to the fore in the 1980s. So that in Washington or in Georgetown, for example, you have as many as 150 ,000 people on the streets in 1987, which is a remarkable number of people. Well, you can see why many gay people would gravitate to a holiday like Halloween. I mean, it's the one time of the year when it's okay to dress up and be as outrageous as you want to be out in public. Yes, yes, I think that's absolutely right. And I think there's always been

this element of cross dressing, of outrage, of transgression. I mean, one of the things I like to emphasize about Halloween is that, and what I think is fun about it, actually, I don't think we should be scared of it, is that it is a night of transgression, momentary transgression, a kind of framed play when you can do things that you wouldn't normally do. And certainly gay people have exploited that dimension of Halloween. Nicholas Rogers is a historian at York University in Canada. His book is called Halloween from pagan ritual to party night. He talked to Steve Paulson. I can

see the lights in our distance coming in the dark of light. I can see the lights in our distance coming in the dark of light. If you want to see a witch, and don't bother looking for broomsticks or pointy black hats, you might want to ask around your own neighborhood. There is a thriving culture of contemporary witches or wikens. Oh, look like just everyone else. But they really do cast spells. Phyllis Karat is a wick and high priestess as well as a lawyer. She talked with Anne Strange -Champs about her book Witch Crafting. Making magic to me is what happens when we've learned to take the blindfold off and discover that the world that we live in is holy, that it's divine and that it's alive, that it's conscious.

And making magic is it's a co -creative process with the divine. So how does that translate practically into what you do as a wick and as a witch? How do you practice your magic? There are a variety of ways of practicing. I have recently sort of been coining a new definition of what a witch is. The word witch is an old Anglo -Saxon word which it meant wise one or a shaman. And that's what it is. The shaman is now of modern America and Europe. The way that I think of a witch now is as somebody who's paying attention. It's somebody who's able to see the sacred in the world around them and to make contact with it. And so what you do is a witch is basically you use a system of practices. They are simple, they're accessible. A lot of what witches do involves learning from nature because for us nature is the embodiment of the divine. And so a lot of our practices like the invocation of the four directions with a circle involve working in nature. Things like there's a wonderful

practice called grounding and centering which can be done indoors but which is best on outside which is an amazing technique for running the energy of the earth up through your body. How do you do it? You sit on the ground. I always recommend at the beginning when people are first working that they sit with their back against a tree because that intensifies the experience. And you relax. You use simple relaxation techniques. You relax the muscles in your face and throughout your entire body. You breathe deeply begin by using simple meditation which can be as simple as deep breaths drawn in and held and then exhaled. And as you feel yourself growing quiet and still you feel, you visualize, you imagine and as you become more skilled at it you literally experience the sending down of roots from the bottom of your spine into the earth beneath you. And you root yourself like a tree into the earth. And then as you inhale you begin to draw the energy of the earth up through those roots. And at the beginning it may feel like you're

imagining it. But as you practice the physical sensations become increasingly clear and powerful. And it's a remarkable experience. You can literally feel the energy of the earth, the energy that makes all things grow. That makes trees grows and plants grow and us grow entering your body and you can move it literally up your spine and through your body, through the organs of your body, through the bloodstream. You can see there is each of the energy centers in the body can be used for healing. You can direct the energy into parts of your body that need healing. You can store it in your heart. It's very energizing. And it places you in immediate contact with the innate divinity of the earth. And that energy then can be used to power your entire day. You've written in the book that sometimes you get frustrated when you give a whole talk on WCA. And I imagine you say some of what you've just been saying, only to have somebody raise their hand and say, can I just have a love spell?

What bothers you about that? Well, it's very characteristic of the give it to be quick generation, the generation of instant gratification, which is certainly what we are. One of the problems with that is that it actually comes out of an old mindset that we've all grown up with. The idea that the world is a machine. And that a spell is sort of the secret of how to make that machine operate with maximum efficiency. The idea you, instead of pressing buttons, you say exactly these words and grind up these herbs and move these in these directions and bingo, you'll get what you want. Precisely pull the lever and down comes the candy bar. That's exactly how a lot of people think of spells. And some people at the beginning of their practice actually approach it that way. But as you begin to do this work, you realize that the world is most definitely not a machine. There are laws of nature that operate, but the world is alive. And so the real way to cast a spell is, as we were talking about earlier, that idea of a co -creative process. When you cast a spell, a spell is

very much an aesthetic experience. It's kind of religious art. It's a form of offering to the divine, and it's a drawing up of your own divine creativity and a way of giving it shape and form in the world. So, do you use spells mostly for kind of high -minded sorts of things, healing or sending good wishes to somebody else or improving kind of the flow of energy in your life? Or do you ever do them for really mundane practical things? Like, I don't know, getting the mice out of your house or getting the concert tickets you really want. Oh yeah, you read that story in the book. The fact is that Charminism, which is what contemporary wicked primarily is, has always been used for practical purposes. It was used as a means of communing with the divine, of opening oneself up to the sacred reality in which we live, and that lives within us. And it was also used for very immediate, personal, and pragmatic ends

where to find the herd when you need to go hunting, which hill to go over, which direction to walk, and where the cave is where you're going to go. Most significantly for the diagnosis of illness and for finding a cure, particularly in nature, finding herbs. They didn't have labs to determine which herbs could kill you and which could cure you. And if you asked a Charmin, they would tell you that they knew because the plants talked to them. And yes, people do use spells for getting a job, getting an apartment in New York, which is like the quest for the Holy Grail. It's a very serious, very serious quest. It's definitely used for healing practices. It's used for communing with the divine, but it is also used for very sort of simple direct and daily matters. I cast a spell to get concert tickets, and not only did I end up getting concert tickets, but the tickets were at the absolute back of the theater up in the nosebleed region and got there early, sat down with

my friends, and within five minutes of sitting down, one of the fellows who were part of the concert team came over and brought us down to the front row of this enormous vast auditorium, so we had front row seats. Just out of the blue. There was no reason for them to do that? No, no, I cast a spell. It was a really good spell. I was just kind of surprised that it was that effective. Spells don't always work. Spells are really very much like prayers, the differences that instead of praying to a divinity that is transcendent or removed or outside of yourself and principally male, although you do invoke the aid of this greater divinity in which we all live. You're going to the well of your own divine gifts, and you're bringing it out and bringing that energy forth and giving it shape in the world. A spell's never used to control anyone else, so if you were to do a love spell, for example, you wouldn't try to make the fellow down the hall fall in love with you. I always tell people be careful what you ask for because you're quite likely to get it. Phyllis Karat,

talking with Anne Strange Shemps. Karat is a wicked high priestess, and she's written a book called Witchcrafting. Kamar Goye before, Kamar Goye, F you well, Naggo before, Kamar let me ring, ring, ring, a weather shins, well and scarlin' weather shins, deal tak the hind most what air she be, Kamar Goye before, Kamar Goye, F you well, Naggo before, Kamar let me ring, ring, ring, a weather shins, link in lightly weather shins, Kamar Karat and Karat and Queen Rungoey, Kamar Goye before, Kamar Goye, F you well, Naggo before, Kamar let me ring, ring, ring, a weather shins, lop in lightly weather shins, count to coats and flee in hair three times three, Kamar Goye before, Kamar Goye. The Witch's Real is a song from 1591 in the Witch Trials of Scotland when any woman could be accused of being a witch. Coming up, what monsters

and cyborgs have in common with puppets, and novelist Will Self reflects on karma and the afterlife. Karma's got a too good a name in our culture, it's a chain of kind of shops that sell incense and slipper socks and kind of, you know, that's not what karma really means in the context of Eastern religion. I'm Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International. Will Self may be the weirdest novelist in England, at least he writes some very strange books, and he has a particular fascination with a spirit world. It takes his latest

novel How the Dead Live, it's the story of Lily Bloom, who dies of cancer and then finds herself living in a London suburb for dead people. She has a death guide and aboriginal wizard. She even attends a 12 -step program to learn how to be dead. Here's Will Self as his narrator Lily Bloom reflecting back on her life. The 70s were my fattest decade. Overall I think the 70s were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky. Typefaces were rounded, writing implements, penile. I like to think I was maintaining an aesthetic unity as my weight shot up to 200 pounds and I became Mrs. Pepper Pot of a woman. Sheer bravado, I hated it, I hated my fatt. I'd sit sobbing on the side of my bed, things never change and grab folds of myself up in order to present them individually with my derision. The effortlessly skinny girls would gather whispering on the landing. Was it safe to approach the

obese old dragon? That's quite an introduction to Lily Bloom. I guess the thing that we have to point out is that at this point she's not just looking back at her 70s, she's looking back past the grave. Yes, as the title of the novel suggests How the Dead Live, it's the story of a woman dying, then being dead, and then being dead are all told in the first person. Were you thinking a lot about death at the time that you wrote this book? No more so than usual in some senses. It seems to me that death adembrates life completely. What I was thinking more about was the religious temperament and it seems to me that in our culture though it's perhaps much neglected. Particularly I think Protestantism has a keen awareness of the existence of death in life and life in death. You've kind of slid around from talking about a woman looking back on the

70s when she was gaining and losing 700 pounds to looking at spirituality and religion and attitudes toward death. You've expanded your scope substantially there, haven't you? Perhaps. I mean it isn't a philosophical novel. It's a satire. It's about what our attitudes are towards death in kind of Western secular societies. Really I like to think of Lily Bloom as a kind of every woman. She's meant to represent a kind of typical death in a way. She dies of cancer in hospital. The pain removed with heroin, the anxiety sedated with valium, essentially unconscious of her fate and it seemed to me that that kind of death, that kind of medicalized death, that kind of secular death was highly representative of how our culture views death as an annihilation. It's the death that for many people is the wish for death. If you're going to have to die, not dying of cancer, she dies

of a particularly virulent form of breast cancer, which nobody wants, but if you're going to have to go, then you want to be eased out. Unfortunately she's eased out, not into a white light with angelic forms around her, but into a suburb of London. What she's eased out into, though, she doesn't really know that it's happening, is really the people who turn out to be right about the afterlife for the Tibetan Buddhists. What happens to her after death is that she enters the bardo, the in -between life plane. What the Tibetan Book of the Dead says about this period is that if an individual is unable to reach towards enlightenment at that point, if they're too attached to their own ego, they will experience the disintegration of that ego. So this kind of bizarre suburb of London, she ends up in, is a kind of projection of her own psyche, really, indeed. But that and many other events that occur in her personal hidees through this, she

also glimpses still the land of living. So it's quite a complex little cosmology. Yeah, well, it's a kind of a purgatory that she is unable to move either forward or back, and it's a frightening one, too. I mean, she has some guidance from her death counselor, far -lap. It's unfortunate that on radio you can't see far -lap, written out as far with a pH. It's the name of a very famous Australian racehorse, and he is an Australian Aboriginal. It wasn't really essential that he be an Australian Aboriginal. What was important, I think, for the philosophic context of the book, was that he be from a traditional people, because I think that the traditional people have a profoundly different view of the relationship between life and death. They view them as essentially determinists, rather than being in opposition to one another. He is the one who is encouraging her not to look back at the life that she has lived, but toward what other kinds of existence there might be, and she is completely and utterly either unwilling or unable to do that. She

just doesn't see it. I mean, he really the schema, well, I mean, it wouldn't make it sound off -putting to the reader because it sounds terribly involved, but the schema of the book really follows the Tibetan book of the dead. What happens if you're a Tibetan when you die is that during the Bado period, you're read these sacred texts to try and get you to address the clear light, to address enlightenment, and that's the role far -lap takes for Lily. But she just doesn't really know what he's going on about at all. She is so admired in her own reflect of self -consciousness, her own ego, much in the way that I would argue much of Western society is that she just can't see it. Well, it's pretty clear. I mean, you have a lot of fun playing with the languages you're going through and using, letting your flights of fancy carry you, but some of them are pretty obvious. There is a point at which far -lap says, I've forgotten exactly what it is, but it's the opposite of the phrase that is so well -known in Western literature, those who failed to learn from the pastor, going to have to relive it. And he's essentially saying, that's bunk. Those who

failed to understand their history are condemned to repeat it. Yeah, well, I mean, of course, you know, karma's got a too good a name in our culture. It's a chain of kind of shops that sell incense and, you know, slip of socks and kind of, you know, that's not what karma really means in the context of Eastern religion. It's not really what karma means in the context of a residential religion either. And what far -lap is alluding to there is the real weight of karma, the real way in which, you know, the bad things you do and the bad attitudes you have will follow you on, you know, wherever you go. We'll self, his novel is called How the Dead Live. Have you seen the ghost of John? Long white stories and the rest of them? And he'll surely relive John, wouldn't it be true he will surely relive John? And

he'll soon relive the ghost of John? Long white stories and the rest of them? Long white stories and the rest of them? Long white stories and the rest of them? It's a great paradox of modern life. Many people believe in ghosts and spirits, but official American culture is thoroughly secular. If you're a mainstream journalist, a politician, a scientist, a professor, or you simply don't talk about spirits, you'll be branded a nutcase. So where does that leave the simmering belief in the supernatural? That's the question Steve Paulson had for cultural historian Victorian Nelson. She's written a book called The Secret Life of Puppets. Nelson says, our anxieties about the spirit world come bubbling out in popular culture, in pulp fiction and horror movies, in stories about androids and cyborgs. That's where you find the supernatural most excessively in our culture,

and why is it that it is always in this very grotesque and horrific and negative form? Why is it almost always monsters and demons and things that are going to hurt you and harm you? Why is it that the other side of supernaturalism, which is what we more associate with religion, that is angels and goodness and divine mercy and so on? And that was my interest in that question, is really what got me down the very long path on this book. Give me some examples of these monstrous characters who embody the supernatural. We can start with Frankenstein's monster. He's not inherently evil, of course. That's one of the subtleties of Mary Shelley's book, but he does go bad because of bad encounters with people who are repelled by his physical appearance. And indeed, there's also the suggestion that Dr. Frankenstein has really overstepped

his role. God is so jealous of the form of life. Think of the power. He creates a man. And I did. I did it. I created a man. And who knows, in time, I could have trained him to do my will. And we don't say those things. Don't think them. It's blasphemous and wicked. We are not meant to know those things. It may be that I'm intended to know the secret of life. It may be part of the divine plan. This is really the kind of the beginning of the mad scientist character who becomes so pervasive in popular culture. There's usually a mad scientist in the science fiction realm who creates something that comes back and stops the earth in some form or

another. And you make the point in your book that the mad scientist really reflects a fear of sorcery or worry that the mad scientist is fundamentally tampering with the laws of nature. That goes way back to what people thought about witches. Very much so. And one of the big discoveries for me when I was thinking about this was that we really have displaced onto science a great deal of the supernaturalism that we have disallowed officially. And of course the other thing that you really can't talk about in secular society with a straight face at least is good and evil personified. I mean the devil is you know maybe that cussed in some religious circles but not an official culture but where you do see the devil is in the horror movie and the exorcist in the omen in the Halloween movies. It's kind of a recurring character. Yes he's either the devil or if the screenwriters are shrinking a little from something so

blatantly religious he's the next best thing which is the serial killer. But if it's the devil then the the laws of that genre demand that it be a Catholic framework and there have to be priests and there have to have to be this secret agency at the Vatican that no one has ever heard of and strange rituals and you know things dug up in the desert somewhere and it's it's a complete Protestant fantasy. Well that's not totally true though. I mean like in reading about real exorcists who are out there and trying to combat demons. I mean it's it's actually happening. It is but the way that it gets translated onto the screen and a big budget Hollywood movie believe me is quite quite removed from from that particular reality. I'm here because you said my wife is in danger. She is pregnant. Her mistake has no sense. He will not allow

the child to be born. He will kill it while it slumbers in the womb of him. God's name where you're talking about. Yes, kill the unborn child. Then he will kill your wife. And when he is certain to inherit all that is yours then Mr. Thorn he will kill you. That's enough. And with your wealth and power he will establish his counterfeit kingdom here on earth receiving his power directly from Satan. Say he must die Mr. Thorn. But then this but I think the serial killer really has you know movie by movie you're going to get more serial killers than you are outright devils. And usually in these movies they don't have supernatural powers although they certainly embody a kind of evil except for the Chuckie series. The child's play where there is a Chuckie doll the smiling I think he's called a good guy doll who is

inhabited by the soul of this serial killer who happens to be shot by a police detective while he's in a toy store. And because there's a bolt of lightning that comes down at the same moment this serial killer's soul jumps into this Chuckie doll. The Chuckie doll then becomes this sort of demonic murderous figure throughout the movie and it's this wonderful contrast of this completely innocent looking smiling cherubic doll doing these terrible things. But that's an old theme that horror writers keep coming back to is take the most innocent image whether it's the child or

the puppet and making it evil. Yes exactly and it's the idea of somehow an alien or outside evil soul that's sort of injected like you would inject a serum or something into this into either the the child or the doll and of course I mean one of the the themes of my book really is the way in which puppets and their very upgraded 20th century counterparts the robots the cyborgs the androids in popular literature and film have this almost supernatural soul quality that was formerly the convenience of graven idols graven images people in a way are so anxious to invest these imaginary creatures with all kinds of powers that we forget that there are no cyborgs you know out there there are no androids there is not a terminator.

But that's fascinating the connection you're making you're really saying the terminator that cyborg that that ultimate killer in the movies is a direct descendant of the puppet. He's one of Pinocchio's offspring absolutely and Pinocchio himself of course is not a real puppet he was really the first literary puppet he was the first puppet to be written about as a character. Oh Pinocchio how did you get down here oh you did oh you do talk yes the blue fairy tape the blue fairy uh -huh and I got a conscious and someday I'm gonna be a real boy the real boy it's my way it's come true it's these imaginary puppets these ones we find in in literature and then in film and then they morph into these other things

and what I think you begin to see when cyber theory came along is again this complete idealization and you get people like Ray Kurzweil making statements like in one century we will see a species called robo sapiens that will be a combination of machine and human but that's not going to happen you know there's not going to be something that mutates and has offspring and this sort of thing it's an idea but it's part I think of our longing for this sort of transcendental realm and for realms of existence that aren't immediately available to us. Now earlier you asked the question why do these supernatural figures materialize in these demonic forms these scary creatures these devils that why don't we have the more angelic figures what's the answer? Well it's an answer that really can only be answered historically with the Protestant

Reformation one of the first things that happened was they decreed that miracles do not happen anymore. God is more distant from our material world than was previously believed and the supernatural really does not intrude into daily life. This belief bolstered the scientific revolution and a strictly materialist worldview so what happens if you think something has happened that is not of this world? Well the Puritan answer at least in the 17th century was what is not of this world is of the devil. So this began this interesting process of the demonization of the supernatural you know the ghost stories and horror stories in the late 18th century and the 19th century really became quite popular. Now I mentioned this interesting transition from the idea of the encounter with the higher

reality is something that fills you with awe into the notion of the other reality as awful you know a very negative connotation. Victoria Nelson Tartre Steve Paulson her book is called The Secret Life of Puppets. One of my themes is what makes you a monster? I have you know vampires zombies and ghoul running around my stories but most of the most frightening people in my books are usually human. Novelist Laurel Hamilton coming up. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI

Public Radio International. If you want a taste of a very strange world you might want to sample the novels of Laurel Hamilton. Her recurring character is the vampire hunter Anita Blake. Anita's world is as if we all went to bed tonight and we got up in the morning and suddenly everything that went bump in the night was real. All the folklore, all the fairy tales, all mythology we just woke up in the morning and it was all real and our world had to deal with it. And Anita's world vampires are legal

citizens. If you kill one it's murder. You have to be a legal vampire executioner and they have to have a certain number of murders to their credit before they can be hunted down. There is a move in Congress to give them back full rights which means if you are a widow but your dead spouse is a vampire if they become alive again are you a bigamist? Do you have to give back the money from the will? They're still fighting those out in court. If a zombie is shambling down your street in Anita's world and you call the cops they aren't going to say oh he's crazy. They're going to send down an extermination team with flame throwers. And what is Anita's role in all of this? Anita raises the dead for a living. That's her supposed day job though actually most of it takes place at night. If you have someone who passes away and has two separate wills that are very contradictory you can raise them from the dead briefly and ask which wills correct. If you have a therapist that says if you could confront this deceased relative and it would help your therapy you can raise them from the

dead and you can do the confrontation. She only raises the dead for good purposes. There are people in her world that raise them just for like Halloween parties. Is it worth asking how she raises them from the dead? Well I actually did research into voodoo. Vaughton and she uses a mix that's based on all right it's based on actual voodoo practices but it's really movie voodoo. I did the research I know the difference but shambling zombies with flesh falling from their bones that's really a movie invention. That does not exist in actual voodoo. It really doesn't. That is totally a creation of fiction. And I actually had a gentleman at one of the talks that I gave he was a practitioner of voodoo. He stood up in the back and said that the second book in the series laughing corpse was the best research on voodoo that he'd ever read and I said well thank you very much and I said except for the shambling movie zombies and then he grinned and he says but they're such fun. Well now they may be fun but I want to talk about the voodoo. I guess you'd call

them the zombies in Anita's world. When they're raised they are they look like you were me. She's very very good at her job so her zombies look much more like a human being. They often don't know they're dead when they're first raised which is actually kind of disturbing. Other people who aren't as powerful sometimes they do come out like the shambling dead and Anita's powers have improved her job skills have gotten better is the books have progressed. So at the beginning of the books her zombies were more like everyone else's as the books have progressed they come out more and more. You almost could pass them on the street but they do not last. Let me just say that. Zombies rot and in this world you can keep them around they've been trying to use them and heavily pesticide laden fields so that humans won't be exposed to it but they just can't keep them healthy quote -unquote enough long enough. And Anita is also a vampire executioner. What does that mean? In most worlds where the deal with vampires vampires are kind of secret and are hidden in my world everyone knows they exist but if

you have a vampire that goes rogue and starts killing people normal police procedures do not always work in time and you have people who are legal vampire executioners who are able to hunt them over a series of states. She has a certain number of states which she is the vampire executioner for and she hunts them sort of like a bounty hunter or federal marshal accept when she finds them she doesn't try to take them alive no pun intended. She wants the order of execution is in hand you get to kill them if you find them. Now vampires in Anita's world therefore have bodies in a sense they're not dead the way we understand dead to be dead. No we actually in the books talk about the fact that at dawn she can feel almost feel the passing of a soul because one of Anita's abilities is that she can feel ghosts she walks into a room and it's haunted she knows that a ghost is there and she has been with Jean -Claude who is the master of the vampires isn't it? In St. Louis a territory is only so big and you have a master of the city of that

territory because you need a territory large enough to feed off of without voluntarily though you cannot take blood by force it's illegal you have people but people are willing to feed people are willing to line up and donate blood because think about it think about it people would be willing one of the fastest growing churches in Anita's world is the church of eternal life and it is a vampire church and you have humans that are members and they have like little id bracelets and if they die are taken to if they're taken to an emergency room you call that number and the vampire that is there like surrogate are there partner are there the one who's been feeding on them their counselor their counselor for the afterlife will come and bring them over bring that third bite bring them over and they don't die they well depends on who you're talking to actually they become vampires anyway some people see that is a worse than death and you have very much you have the right wing people like humans against vampires and

you know the only good vampires it really dead vampire now you've written ten of these books so you've had plenty of time to develop much more of the detail of the world in which Anita lives haven't you yes has a needed changed over ten books oh heavens yes but at the beginning Anita was very clear on what was black and white good and evil when we start out the book she thinks vampires are evil and she has every right to kill them they aren't people and she kills them without a pang of conscience as the series continues the world becomes more gray is it does for most of us and she becomes more unsure of are they alive and what she's found is since vampires in my world look very human she finds that by having killed so many vampires killing humans now she only kills and self -defense but it doesn't bother her to kill humans so much either and she finds that she is given up a part of herself to be able to do this that's one of the things in fact that she's dealing with is trying to assess just how

far down the path of killing she's gone and whether it's possible to step back from it ever isn't it yes one of the themes that comes up again and again in my writing we all have themes and every writer does sometimes you become very painfully aware of it and you go through a period where yourself conscious and then you embrace it and I'm to the embracing part so one of my themes is what makes you a monster I have you know vampires zombies and ghouls running around in my stories but most of the most frightening people in my books are usually human so what makes you a monster and Anita is to that point where she's wondering am I one of the monsters she's wondering to herself have I gone so far that I can't recover she's not a sociopath not in the traditional sense because she worries about other people's feelings but she has become cold and she's lost parts of herself and she's beginning to think she wants them back and the question is can you recover them I need to play appears in Narcissus in chains and other novels by laurel

hamilton gather around for a minute or two and I'll admit something to you I get in tree when women look sinister call me superficial but I stare at them vampire girls it's not the mascara it's not the tight dress it's a look in the eyes gonna scare you to death vampire girl vampire girl I get so in tree when they look like a vampire girl because she could be she could rise and she do ritual sacrifice vampire girl vampire girl or I get so in tree when they look like a vampire girl oh little vampire

girl oh little vampire girl Jonathan Richmond with vampire girl it's to the best of our knowledge I'm Jim Fleming you can buy a tape of this program by calling the radio store at one eight hundred seven four seven seven four four four ask for return of the spirits number ten twenty seven eight if you'd like to comment on what you've heard you can write to us at to the best of our knowledge eight twenty one university avenue Madison Wisconsin five three seven zero six or send us email through our website at wpr dot oh rg slash book we'd love to hear from you pr i public radio international Dan jensen is one of the world's leading tropical biologists he spent 40 years working in the Costa Rican jungle and there's one creature that fascinates him above all others jensen has found nine thousand different species of moth in Costa Rica next week on to the best of our knowledge

science in the tropics also a look at the world's scariest animals it's to the best of our knowledge from pr i public radio international