Phantasmagoria Archives - Witchery Art: A Gothic Cabinet of Curiosities and Mysteries

Phantasmagoria: On Witches, Fairies, Ghosts and Goblins

ON JUNE 16th, 1816, LORD BYRON OPENED A BOOK he'd picked up in Britain, Phantasmagoriana, (or as translated to English, Tales of the Dead), and he and his house guests took turns reading the short stories within. His house guests were Percy and Mary Shelley, her half sister Claire Clairmont, and Dr. John Polidori. It was an ill summer, Byron and Shelley were in exile, Byron staying at the Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland - the year without a summer.

Click the player below to play the album, or click the titles below to hear the tracks individually.

This led famously to a writing competition to see who could write the best horror story. From that night came Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Polidori's The Vampyre, considered the first English vampire novel, and the precursor to Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Drawing from that idea, herein lies poems from Shakespeare, Yeats, Spenser, Kipling, Ben Johnson and others, set to music. Musical influences range from British folk and Irish traditional, to Black Sabbath, King Crimson and Jethro Tull.

If it seems a bit theatrical at times, we beg your forgiveness, especially as it might seem more like a high school musical production than Broadway. But much like Byron's party, this party took place at home.

The imagination is a wonderful place, but at times frightening and mysterious. The quickening of the pulse, shallowness of breath, that wide eyed stare all tell you the fear is upon you, that enchantment is draping itself around you like a mantle of black cashmere.

From denizens of the underbrush, the fairies who ride wild in the moonlight, to the danse macabre - the dance of death unites us all - it's a look back at a time when people weren't so certain, weren't so brave as to believe that what we see with our eyes is all there is.

The Poems: Click the poem below for the song, video and notes.

The Fairy Pedant by W.B. Yeats, 1895

Phantasmagoria

NEAR THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, Irish poet William Butler Yeats became actively involved in magical circles, joining The Golden Dawn, one of the legendary occult societies of the time. Yeats would say that it was a “chief influence upon his thought.” Yeats believed in fairies, not in the abstract, but as real creatures, […]

Watcher In The Woods by Dora Sigerson Shorter, 1906

Phantasmagoria

Excerpt from from the book “The Story and Song of Black Roderick” AND I BID THEE REMEMBER how the little pale bride was wont to sit upon the mountain and watch the far lights in her father’s home quench themselves one by one. So now of how she died shall I tell thee, and of what […]

Queen of the Haunted Dell, by M.V. Ingram, Authenticated history of the Bell Witch, 1894.

Journal, Phantasmagoria

https://youtu.be/WfdMbOIpGG4 Ingram wasn’t a poet by nature perhaps, but he made a great song lyricist. Colorful, but simple and short, unlike most of the poets of the age. He chose the moment before the Bell Witch first made her appearance to Betsy, when life was sane and magical, in a good sort of way. The […]

Poem 19 (from Epithalamion) by Edmund Spenser, 1594

Journal, Phantasmagoria

https://youtu.be/hqp_g1-zkQA Edmund Spenser wrote Epithalamion for Elizabeth Boyle, his bride to be as wedding gift. It’s an account of their wedding day, from before dawn till late in the night, following the consummation of the marriage. Consisting of 24 stanzas, corresponding to the 24 hours of Midsummer Day, it also contains 364 lines, matching the days in a year. It follows […]

The Sands of Dee (from Alton Locke) By Charles Kingsley, 1849

Journal, Phantasmagoria

The Sands of Dee is a poem within a novel, Alton Locke, written by Charles Kingsley in 1849. Like most great rock and roll, he pens the lines to impress a girl, to give words to an air she’s played on the piano. An air without words. What is an air? To the Irish, an air […]

The Eggshell by Rudyard Kipling, 1904

Journal, Phantasmagoria

https://youtu.be/oH1GjIKZV_Q Kipling included this little poem in his book Traffics & Discoveries in 1904. Some say it’s a children’t poem, an allegory. The Kipling society folks seem to think it’s about naval warfare. A political tale. I love the imagery, the tone. In a few short lines, Kipling creates an impossible world, where witches and little blue devils […]