Une Geographie Infernale - Gedsbry Abbey, Northumberland, England

From its rough perch on The Giant’s Hill, the tumbledown ruin of Gedsbry Abbey frowns down over the River Coquet, a reminder of old days and ancient practices long forgotten. The Poor Brothers of St. Christopher settled in the rough hill country of Northumberland sometime in the late 1090’s or early 1100’s, though the specific c date of their arrival is uncertain. We do see their Monastery included in the accounting of Sheri ff Odard for the Great Roll of the Exchequer in 1131, allowing us to place them roughly in the early 12th Century.  The land, including the famously haunted hill upon which the Brothers built their monastery, was granted them by the King.  Perhaps the Norman conquerors hoped that the famously rebellious people of Northumber country would be calmed by the presence of God-fearing monks? Unasked at the time, however, was the question of which “God”, exactly, the Poor Brothers feared?

The Brothers venerated Saint Christopher who, among other things, was the patron saint of epilepsy, a malady long associated with prophecy and occult vision. Apparently they got something out of the deal, since the Brothers soon gained a reputation for divining the future with unusual accuracy. One Brother Oswulf, noted for his prognosticatory abilities, was said to have prophesized the calamitous storm of 1192 that collapsed the roof of a local lord’s hall, killing everyone within. The unfortunate Lord’s land was quickly
bought up by the Abbey. Similarly, an Abbot Martin accurately foretold of the catastrophic fl ooding of the Tyne in the spring of 1215. This warning was ignored by the people of adjacent villages, who subsequently suffered great loss of life and property while the Brothers, having moved their fl ocks to higher ground, enjoyed something of a monopoly on wool and mutton for many years after. Soon, commoners and potentates alike would travel to the Abbey, seeking an audience with its mystical Monks that saw the future in strange trances. Thus, while bereft of the relics normally associated with a wealthy abbey, the Brothers of Gedsbry did a brisk enough trade in fortune-telling to buy up numerous properties up and down the valley.

Rumors of the source of these visions all seemed to point to a distinctly non-Chrisitian origin, however. The Giant’s Hill, upon which the abbey is built, has had a long history of haunting and mysterious events. These began with the first Roman chronicles from the area, who noticed that the site was of particular abhorrence to the native Celts known as the Votadini. One Severus Magnus, a Legionnaire of equestrian rank, wrote of the mysterious rites of the Picts who, slipping across the border on moonless nights, would hold unholy sacrifices atop a place he termed the “domum gigantes”. Here, he wrote, their wild chants would be answered by terrible voices coming up from the ground that, in exchange for blood, instructed pictish shamans in all the secrets of the earth.

The retreat of Rome and the advent of the Dark Ages did little to lessen the weirdness of the locale. The Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria, dominant in the 7th and 8th Centuries, left many chilling tales that found their way into the libraries of many monasteries. The most famous tells of the hellish vision of a young man named Oswiu. Lost and wandering in the dark, he came upon a hill lit with unholy flame and circled round by a horned serpent that whispered blasphemies to the stars. Tending the fire atop the hill was a giant man blue with woad and girt with wolfskin, while naked celebrants danced and writhed in the relight. Among the more human celebrants, Oswiu is said to have recognized neighbors and prominent land-owners. He fled the scene, and reported all to the King. In the subsequent weeks, many people were rounded up by King Ceolwulf and drowned in the North Sea for the “grievous sins” of sorcery, necromancy, false prophecy, and paganism. Shortly thereafter Ceolwulf himself, perhaps hounded by the horrors he had heard and witnessed at the trials, abdicated the throne and retired to a monastery for the rest of his days.

By the time the Poor Brothers of Saint Christopher came on the scene then, we see that the Giant’s Hill had already become a grisly haunt of ghosts and goblins. Why then did these strange Monks from the continent settle there? Some scholars believe that their choice was not in spite of these rumors, but rather because of them.  Although the record is muddled, it appears that the Brothers were not entirely naïve about occult topics, for in all the pertinent records we fi nd the Poor Brothers wrapped in a cloak of mysticism and
rumored diabolism. For starters, whence came the Poor Brothers?  By their own accounts, they had fled persecution “in the east”, and that their order was originally from the first missions sent to Egypt, perhaps making them Coptic. What secrets had they learned in that ancient land?

This Egyptian connection is important, and it may be that the Brothers had already tipped their hand. As noted above, the Brothers of Gedsbry Abbey had a special enthusiasm for Saint Christopher. In some traditions, St. Christopher was said to have been one of the cynocephali, strange creatures mentioned by Herotodus and Ctesias in the Ancient World, and by Paul the Deacon in his “Historia gentis Langobardorum” in the Middle Ages.  Specifically, St. Christopher was believed by some to have had the head of a dog. A dog-headed figure associated with holy death and mystic visions? A similarly figure is found among the Egyptians in the form of the most occult Anubis, the ancient dog-headed God of the Dead.

It is recorded that, when the Poor Brothers of St. Christopher traveled up the River Coquet to their new home, they carried with them an icon or statue of their Saint in the form of a robed, dog-headed man. Beyond this similar iconography, there is an additional piece of evidence linking the Poor Brothers of St. Christopher to Egyptian mysticism and the Cult of Anubis: mummies.

Anubis, in his role as the God of Death, was often portrayed by the Egyptians as an embalmer. It was Anubis who gave the Egyptians the art of preserving and protecting the bodies of the dead, a central component Egyptian religion. Northumberland is, of course, far to damp a place for traditional mummi fication. However, though it lacks the dry wind and sand of the African deserts, the north of England is rich in peat bogs, which are just as capable of working the magic of mummification on the remains of mortal men and women. Buried deep in the acidic muck of the bogs, the bodies of the dead are cured and the soft tissues preserved with an excellence that would arouse the envy of a Pharaoh. Skin, hair, cloth, all well preserved, though of course the bones of the dead quickly dissolve away, leaving a distorted and disturbingly sack-like bog mummy behind.

These mummies are common in Northumberland, associated with both the Celtic and Norse settlements of Late Antiquity and the early Dark Ages. Internment in the bogs was of a clearly ceremonial nature, the individuals having been fed a final meal of bread baked with ash before being ritualistically killed via strangulation or, less commonly, bludgeoning. The mummies are also often found in association with offerings of iron weapons or tools, an extravagant waste of rare metal that speaks to the importance of these bog burials. Christianization of the North resulted in a marked change in burial practices, of course; after the sixth or seventh century C.E., one does not find bog mummies.

Except…there is a period where bog mummies become common again, temporally and spatially coinciding precisely with activity at Gedsby Abbey. Beginning in the mid 1100s, and continuing on until approximately the late 1300s, bodies were being inhumed in the swamps five miles north of The Giant’s Hill. These remains, their bellies stuff ed with ash-laden bread, limbs bound, and throats slashed, are often found with small iron statues of a dog-headed man. It is a remarkably consistent return to form after many hundreds of years without, apparently, any intervening continuity.

In 1244 C.E., a combined secular and ecclesiastical enclave was convened to address the concerns expressed by locals regarding the unnaturalness of the Brothers of St. Christopher. Fortune telling was bad enough, but it seems that people were disappearing with alarming regularity, never to be heard from again. Additionally, witnesses remarked on the strange, midnight processions to the northern swamps the Brother’s seemed so fond of taking, particularly around Walpurgisnacht and Samhain. Finally, the cemetery around the church, sacrosanct land that was the special charter of the Brothers, was being disgracefully neglected. The conclave went even further, citing the Brothers for heresy and “un-christian” burial practices. The Abbot, along with key Brothers, were “removed” (and almost certainly burned as wizards), while a new hierarchy of Dominican Brothers were brought in to “correct” the unorthodox members of the community.

It would appear, however, that these overseers met with little success, and indeed may even have become converts to the particular practices of the Brothers, as the rumors, disappearances, and bog mummifications continued until 1388. Indeed, stories from the period immediately after the Censuring Conclave become markedly grisly, as the Brothers apparently reasserted their control over the area. The vanishings continued, and local shepherds learned to travel always in well-armed gangs, choosing to combine their fl ocks rather than make themselves vulnerable among the lonely hills. Strange, inhuman figures would appear and disappear along the banks of the river, while blood curdling screams and moans seemed to echo up from the Earth. This lead to the belief, common even today, that the area around The Giant’s Hill is riddled with caves and passages through which evil things stalk.

The horrors eventually came to a head in the spring of 1388, with a particularly gruesome discovery. A peat cutter, draining some of the bogs in search of fuel, uncovered a whole cache of mummies, carefully arranged in a circle around a central body that had been tied to a heavy iron chair. This central mummy was a particularly horrific jumble of remains, and only partly human. According to the tale, the head of this poor victim had been removed, replaced by the skull of large hound or wolf, strapped in place on the stump of the corpse’s neck and surmounted with an iron crown. On this unusual piece of headwear was stamped the following phrase, recorded in the annals of the village priest, Father Osric: “Fraternitatem presertim leges Mors Canisque”, Latin for “Brotherhood of the Sainted Dog of Death. Furthermore, around the neck of this composite mummy was found an amulet bearing the insignia of St. Christopher.

Imagine the furor such a discovery must have wrought! All the tales of hellish idolatry, black magic, and demoniacal evil confirmed in an instant! What happened next is difficult to piece together, for those involved seemed to have made an effort to efface their subsequent actions from the historical record. However, this much is known. It seems that, having summoned Father Osric and some of the more important local land-owners, it was decided that the Poor Brothers must be apprehended or driven from the area. To this end, they summoned the local Undersheri ff and his men and, under cover of darkness, they came upon the Abbey unawares in the night.

It is not clear whether they had planned to confront the Brothers with this evidence, or if they had simply decided to attack. Regardless it seems that, despite being surprised by the sudden assault, the Brothers attempted some violence in their defense. A melee soon developed in which many on both sides were killed, some in a particularly horrible and “indescribable” way, at least according to a letter sent by the Undersheri ff after the fact. Some Brothers seemed to have fled into the swamps, while the Abbot and many of the Brothers seemed to have died in a fire that consumed the main church, screaming defiance and blasphemies to the end. I write “seemed to have died” since, apparently, no remains were ever found, not even a charred bit of bone. Also, one must remember the tales of the tunnels rumored to have turned the bedrock into Swiss cheese. Did these “Brothers of the Sainted Dog of Death” escape into the subterranean world?

The ruins remain to this day, a Historical Heritage Site registered with the U.K., though visited only rarely by tourists of the Occult. Strange lights are sometimes seen, illuminating windows briefly as they flit through the Abbey. People have told tales of a huge black dog that stalks through the ruins silently on moonless nights, and at least one man, a poet of unusual sensitivity, went mad after spending the night there in the early 1930s. None have found the tunnels and chambers rumored to lie beneath the hulk of the Abbey, though in truth few have tried. I myself visited it in the mid 1980s, and can attest that there is something unearthly about the place, a brooding watchfulness that seems to resent the clumsy footfall of intruders from the wider world. Still, it is a lovely bit of ruins in a landscape noted for its rugged beauty, and should not be missed by my fellow travelers. Go in the daytime, however, and make sure you leave yourself plenty of time to get back to the village before twilight.
 

From Samizdat, V.1 n.1

Gates to Hell

Gateways to Hell are common features on the mythic landscape, mapped out in fiction and folklore.  It's telling that while there's only one way to get to Heaven, Hell appears to be well served by numerous access points easily accessible to the day hiker or sight-seer.  The countryside is pockmarked with them, whereas it's much harder to pin the location of the Pearly Gates to the map.

Rodin's Gate to Hell

This fascination with the underworld predates Christianity, of course, and much of the modern iconography of the Christian Hell is borrowed wholesale from older religions and myths.  However, the fact remains that humans have always had a deep interest in passages to terrible, otherworldly subterranean realms.  Famous ancient entrances to hell are commonly associated with unusual or spectacular geology, primarily of volcanic origin. Sicily's Mount Etna, for instance, or Mount Hekla on Iceland, both fiery conical stratovolcanoes noted for spectacular displays of pyrotechnics and telluric rumblings.  Similarly, the recently discovered and wonderfully named "Plutonium" of Hierapolis (in modern day Turkey) is closely associated with travertine deposits of an active hydrothermal system, as well as murderously toxic fumes.  This location, complete with temples and state-of-the-art (for the Roman world) tourist facilities was believed to be a conduit directly into Hades.  Animals were sacrificed by driving them into the caves, where they would be asphyxiated by poisonous vapors.  Apparently, they even sold birds to visitors, so pilgrims could chuck them into the caves as see the lethal results of this door to hell for themselves.  One is, of course, also reminded of the Delphic oracle, who was said to breathe subterranean fumes in order to achieve her prophetic visions.

Other Gates to Hell described by ancient traditions are less spectacularly visual than erupting volcanoes or fuming hydrothermal vents, though often equally geological in nature.  As a brief example, to the Romans, Lake Avernus (in the modern day Campania region of Southern Italy) was believed to be the Gate to Hell used by Aeneas, the mythic founder of the Latin people.  Interestingly, Lake Avernus is a crater lake, located in an apparently extinct volcanic cone, although ancient tradition claims that poisonous vapors emitted from the lake killed birds that tried to fly over it.  Today, of course, it is posses no hazard to anybody, though such may not always have been the case.  Active volcanism or the sudden release of built-up carbon dioxide due to lake overturning could be the source of these stories.  Volcanoes, lakes, caves, yawning fissures; all openings into the earth, yonic gates linking two worlds.

Aside from the common linkages of geological and geochemical processes, there is a relationship between these ancient sites of egress into the Underworld and mystical experiences.  Whether these experiences are the biological effects of exposure to vapors or come in the form of more subtle but no less important cultural and social factors, subterranean portals represent liminal spaces between the sunlit "real" world and a shadowy "other place" that is either physically or metaphorically hidden beneath the surface of everyday experience.  Often, this interaction with the otherworld is dangerous or potentially dangerous; toxic fumes, either evident or rumored, serving to remind us that knowledge can be destructive.

A famous medieval Hell's Gate can be found in County Donegal, Ireland, at St. Patrick's Purgatory.  Here, St. Patrick opened a gate to the underworld, using it as concrete proof of Hell's existence in order to convert the Irish to Christianity.  Again, we see how mystical revaluation becomes a major theme of the subterranean gateway, linking our dull and uncertain world to the technicolor marvels of supernormal realms normally hidden from view.  Too, St. Patrick's Purgatory, much like the Plutonium, is a pilgrimage/tourist site, commodifying these spaces of occult knowledge and reveltory gnosis to the masses.

Approaching more modern times, we see an interesting entanglement of Hell Gates with ideas about the Hollow Earth.  Setting aside paradisaical visions of the mundus subterranean, strange gateways into various underworlds were still being mapped out.  For instance, Iceland's Mount Hekla, discussed above, was still described as a gateway to hell in the 1600s, with tales of Eastertime gatherings of witches.  The divergence of stories and ideas about the subterranean world into distinct utopian and distopian threads is interesting, as it maintains the mystical aspects while changing their moral components.  These include the theosophical reimaging of Agartha as an interior "super-terrestrial" command-and-control center inhabited by benevolent Ascended Masters, and can be contrasted with the physically and morally stunted Deros, sadistic mole men with unearthly powers from the the Shaver Mystery mythos.   Detailed discussions of these and other Hollow Earth ideas, however, will have to wait for another article.

Sticking to Hell, we can find plenty of modern gateways in the landscape of urban legend.  These, while common, are noticeably different from previous incarnations of Infernal passages.  First, gone are the erupting volcanoes and smoking fumaroles from the lists, having been replaced almost uniformly by (most commonly) ruined or abandoned buildings and infrastructure or (more rarely) caves and pits.  This is an interesting development, situating these Gateways to Hell in concepts of wilderness, either reclaimed (abandoned landscapes) or "natural" (unexploited caves).  In this way, the mystical associations come to represent Nature, perhaps reflecting the fact that "nature" is now considered as much a part of "otherness" as the underworld.  

A second difference, though still related to the first, is found in the origins of these Hellholes.  Older gateways to hell were, though marvelous, still a part of the "natural" world.  This is partly ascribable to demonstrably real physical and geological phenomena, but must also represent the cultural and religious milieu in which these locales were constructed.  Far from having a secular/sacred dichotomy, the natural world instead represented a cosmic creation where the mundane and the magical intermingled freely as part of the natural order of things.  In such a world, of course there are physical loci for these cosmically important forces. However, in a secular world dominated by a materialist and rationalist worldview, physical access points to "otherplaces" simply become less likely.  More pragmatically, it becomes difficult to accept that a volcano is a door to Hell after hundreds of years of vulcanology and geology have reclaimed these features for the "real" world.

To exist in a world of magma chambers and degassing regimes, modern Gateways to Hell must be situated in modern "mystical" locales.  Almost uniformly, these modern places of mystery and power are found in institutional ruins, particularly in hospitals, asylums, schools, or prisons.  In some cases, the ruins are simply assumed to have been one of these, without any historical evidence; in particular, a perusal of Gateway lists suggests that there was a time when everybody and their brother ran an asylum.  Regardless of the history of a site, the important commonality between these modern Hellholes is their placement in abandoned landscapes of institutional complexes, mysterious places with unclear (or occult?) hierarchies of power and strange practices.  Other than the origin of the location, this is actually fairly similar to volcanic or geological features of the past.  All represent liminal sites dominated by cthonic mystery.

The "Seven Gates of Hell" in Hellam Township, PA is one of the more famous Gateways to Hell situated in the modern landscape, so famous in fact that it is addressed by the Hellam Township's website.  Briefly, the story goes that the director of a suitably rural insane asylum built a series of seven gates to control access to the institution.  Eventually, the asylum burned down, with many of the patients killed in the conflagration or in the immediate aftermath.  As the tale goes, walking through all seven of the gates will result in the stroller getting whisked away to Hell.  As the Hellam Township's website points out, there is much embellishment in this story, including the number of gates (one versus the fictive seven), the presence of an insane asylum (it was actually just a small hospital), and even the name of the road leading to the institution (a suitable romantic but sadly made-up "Toad Road").

However, it is interesting to note that, in this case, the Gateway to Hell in PA is a perfect little microcosm of the whole concept of Gateways to Hell.  A central, uncanny realm sequestered away from the rest of the world, access to which is controlled through mysterious gates, fire and wilderness symbols, and a single mad overseer that built the original gates.  A modern twist is added, however, in the form of a man-made hell, alluded to in the form of barbaric medical practices of the past century and the general "freakiness" of insane asylums as houses of radical transgression.

This man-made aspect is an important attribute of the modern Gateway to Hell, a feature largely absent from their ancient and medieval precursors.  A particularly telling example of this is the "Well to Hell Hoax", which made its rounds in the late 80s and the early days of the internet.  Here, the theme of human and scientific hubris is neatly interwoven with a hidden, supernatural realm below the Earth.  Briefly, Russian geologists were supposed to have drilled a nine mile deep hole into the Earth's crust, as which point they encountered a hollow space with anomalously high temperatures.  They then lowered a microphone down, recording sounds of screaming and torment (later proved to have been cribbed form a horror movie), the idea being that these scientists had literally transgressed into Hell.  Christian broadcast television, particularly TBN, used this story as a modern day St. Patrick's Purgatory, citing it as evidence of the literal existence of Hell and therefore a call to conversion and worship.

Interestingly, and this is pure speculation on my part, this story may have been influenced by the actual, historical occurrence of a natural gas fire at Derweze, Turkmenistan, from the 70s.  Here, a Russian gas drilling operation resulted in a collapse and exposure of an enormous, gaping hole.  Hoping to avoid a release of poisonous gaseous hydrocarbons, they decided to set it on fire, believing it would burn off in a matter of days.  The fire, of course, still burns to this day.

Derweze's Door to Hell, a natural gas fire in a collapsed well

Gateways to Hell are a part of the cultural landscape, though our relationship to them has changed over the years.  Initially they were components of cosmic architecture, accessible through spectacular natural wonders like volcanoes of caverns.  They played a role in linking the actual, physical presence of the gods or God to discrete landscape elements and, therefore, to everyday human existence.  Modern day Hellholes, largely a subset of urban legends and paranormal lore, reflect our changing sensibilities.  Rather than finding them in fire mountains or unplumbed caverns, infernal explorers have situated them in abandoned institutions or ruined architectures, man-made places that are being reclaimed by the natural world.  And, along with the trees and wildlife, story-tellers have brought supernatural elements of a subterranean otherworld, a heterotopia of skewed perspectives and alien morality, perhaps reflecting a return of the Judeo-Christian concept of Satan or Lucifer to his pagan roots as a Horned God of the Wilderness.  Like all myths, there real existence and power lies in exploring how humans view themselves in relation to their surroundings, and how they contextualize concepts of "otherworldlyness" on the landscapes they inhabit.