Morgan the Life and Afterlife of a Funeral Artist

By Daniel Trevose

Combining rampant sensuality and mystic exaltation, this mordantly hilarious tale recounts the mortal and post-mortal career of Morgan Greber, funeral artist and spiritual pilgrim. From adolescent funeral groupie to mature artist, witchs accomplice, occultist and funeral director, this gorgeously bizarre dans de macabre is the work of a deft verbal choreographer.

By the end Trevose almost convinces one that deathor the
afterlifeis best.

-Paul Newman, editor of Abraxas


I read it through with great interest. From the beginning it grips the attention and, the account of spiritualism and the occult gives it a unique intellectual flavor. This is a very mystical and strange piece of work. The description of a witch coven is excellent and I was
fascinated by the after-death chapter. Few people will want to put this book down once they have started it.

-Colin Wilson

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467885393

Book preview

© 2012 by Donald R. Rawe. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   09/25/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8540-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8539-3 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Chapter   1  Enquiries

Chapter   2  Gillian

Chapter   3  The Saintly Head

Chapter   4  Fallen Virgin

Chapter   5  Emma

Chapter   6  Guides And Apparitions

Chapter   7  Ellen In London

Chapter   8  A Witch Called Gwendoline

Chapter   9  August Rites

Chapter   10  The Raising Of Ephraim

Chapter   11  Arthur Alastair

Chapter   12  The Exhibition

Chapter   13  An Atheist’s Funeral

Chapter   14  Zoë And Others

Chapter   15  An Astral Voyage

Chapter   16  Lychington Again

Chapter   17  The Serpent Of Baphomet

Chapter   18  Clonmachlin

Chapter   19  Morvoren

Chapter   20  New Dimensions Of Love

Chapter   21  The Sacrifice

Chapter   22  Funerals In Limbo

Chapter   23  Family Affairs

Chapter   24  Going Home

Chapter   25  Across The Boundary

To

Jack Ingry.

In loving memory

1

ENQUIRIES

T hat’s how I want to be known, as a Funeral Artist. There haven’t been many of us, all considered, down the ages, discounting people like Heironymus Bosch and Richard Dadd with their visionary hells; and after all, even Hell is another life, not a death, and the next hell may not be any worse than this one. The processes of death, and especially the celebration of it, have always fascinated me, against whatever religious background they occurred. One’s attitude to life is defined by how one regards death.

I could never pass a funeral by, as so many others did, without a thought: I always had to stand and watch it pass, and even follow it, if I had nothing pressing to prevent me. As a young boy I remember seeing those processions go by and asking questions about them: why do we put dead people in boxes and then in holes in the ground, or burn them up? Why do we pile on all those flowers, to rot away on graves? Why dress in black, then sit around and eat plates of sandwiches as if we’re consuming parts of the corpse itself?

No one could satisfactorily answer such enquiries. My mother tried, but as she had a horror of death and illness I could see it upset her, so I didn’t trouble her much with my obsession. My father, a respectable small draper in our little city near the Welsh Marches, and an elder at the Elim Pentecostal chapel, would give me cryptic Biblical replies which only mystified me. ‘This corruptible body shall put on in corruption,’ he’d say. ‘Then my boy, you shall see God in your own flesh.’ How on earth (or in heaven) could that be, I wondered, if one had lain decomposing for a century or two in the ground, or been cremated in the fiery furnace down to fine ashes and tiny bits of bone?

I had only a year or two of this sort of puzzling to do, and being baulked in my enquiries by my parents, for they both died within a year of each other when I was eleven. (That was in 1949.) For a time then I lived with my Aunt Georgina, my mother’s elder sister, a widow who lived on the other side of Lychington, almost out in the country. Aunt Georgina was a Spiritualist, and her answers made much more sense to me. ‘Funerals,’ she said, ‘are vain shows of grief; death is only a curtain we pass through, though hardly knowing it. What happens to the bodies we leave behind is quite unimportant.’ Perhaps. But I was still fascinated by the subject, and never missed an opportunity of following the black hearses and those vainglorious wreaths, or of creeping into churches and chapels, sitting at the back and vicariously enjoying the sorrows (hypocritical or real) of the mourners.

My cousin Ellen would laugh at me for this, and when we were alone together would bait me on the subject. ‘Crazy way to spend your spare time,’ she’d say. ‘There’s something not quite right about you, Morgan. One day they’ll lock you up in some asylum, and I’ll come and make faces at you behind the bars.’ I made her promise not to tell Aunt Georgina about my obsession; and she never did. For Ellen actually loved me, much to my discomfort and embarrassment.

She was a sharp-willed girl of fourteen, with round shoulders, a slight but noticeable hump, narrow chest and breasts developing lower than they ought to have; a long thin hatchet-shaped face, brilliant blue eyes which stared disconcertingly at one, and naturally crimped hair a shade or two lighter than auburn. I suppose I was the only boy she ever knew closely, and as we were together a great deal, especially on wet weekends and in the evenings, we became close in a brotherly and sisterly way—at least that’s how I saw the relationship. Like brother and sister we explored each other’s bodies and even on one occasion when my aunt was away for the day, went to bed naked together. I was about thirteen and conscious of my puberty, but I failed to get an erection with Ellen and so we did not have proper intercourse, but merely spent half an hour kissing and fondling each other. Finally I got bored with it all and said I was hungry; at which she produced from a drawer in her dressing-table chocolate and sweet cakes and fed them to me there in bed. Ellen was always eating, though she never put on weight.

Aunt Georgina took us both to Spiritualist meetings at a hall in the City centre. We would sit well up in front, for my aunt was a much esteemed member of the group and often led them in prayers and introduced the medium or speaker. We would sing hymns redolent of childish ideas of heaven, with many references to ever-blooming flowers and crystal flowing streams and a balmy never-changing climate. It occurred to me after a few meetings that a land without seasons, like an equatorial Pacific Island, must be the most boring and monotonous of places.

‘O Paradise, our Paradise, where we belong,

Where balmy breezes blow the whole day long:

Where banished by all griefs and worldly strife,

There we shall know at last eternal life.’

The speaker would recount various experiences to strengthen the faith of the listeners in that Other World beyond our own, to which our loved ones had gone before, and where we would all in time rejoin them.

Then, if he or she were a clairvoyant, the speaker would give out messages to those of us there privileged to receive them. It always amazed me how, without going into a trance and unaided by any paraphernalia of the occult (no red lights, ectoplasm or trumpets) they could look straight at a person and say, for instance, ‘I have a message for you, the lady in the red hat. Do you know anyone called George? He’s about sixty, grey haired with a moustache, and he sends you his love and wants you to wear your wool underwear.’ And it would turn out that George was the woman’s dead husband and that she suffered from lumbago. Not always, of course; sometimes things got mixed up and the messages were not clear at all. But more often than not they did mean something to those receiving them.

I realise now, having myself passed through the Great Curtain, that the business of sending and receiving messages is a complex and delicate one, that the mediums themselves, however sensitive and honest in their dealings, are too easily distracted, being imperfect vessels; since the human body (despite its marvellous brain engineering and involved neural system) is, and always will be, imperfect. But to return to myself at the age of thirteen or fourteen, sitting in the Masonic Hall we hired for our meetings, this was all a great mystery which beckoned and insisted that I explore it. And from then on the chief purpose and desire of my life was indeed to explore it; everything else became subordinated to that.

Sitting some way across the semi-circle of chairs from us was usually a handsome and striking girl, who, perhaps as a result of my covert glances, seemed to be aware of my presence although she never actually looked in my direction. Tall, slender, with long flowing black hair tied in a ribbon or plaited into a pony-tail, slightly dusky in complexion as if she had been sunbathing, a high cheek-boned intelligent face with soft dark eyes: when she stood up and moved it was with the innate grace of a delicate animal, a gazelle or fallow deer. I was shooting up and was already approaching six feet in height; nothing displeased me more than short girls I had to bend down to, and I knew I had to get to know this one somehow. Sometimes she was with her mother, sometimes alone. Once I got close enough, on our way out at the end of the meeting, to hear her addressed as ‘Gillian’. It was a name I dwelt on, at night idolising it and her, creating private fantasies of eager young love. Gillian: the fact that my goddess had a name that tripped off the tongue like a little peal of bells excited and inspired me. I even tried to draw her on a sketch pad I kept in my bedroom, but without the actual girl before me I could never realise the intensity of her imponderably challenging and darkly burning eyes, the elegant set of her nose (just a trifle too long) and the vivid cascade of hair which smouldered and seethed on her shoulders. I was sure however that one day soon we would meet and come to know each other.

Meanwhile I was haunting the Public Library and bookshops, especially the second-hand variety, reading whatever I could find on the after-life, on death and carnal rites, and the occult in general. Decidedly unhealthy reading, you may think, for a boy of nearly fifteen who should have been thinking of what career he was to follow; and indeed my Aunt Georgina did from time to time anxiously try to concentrate my mind on the future. ‘Maybe I’ll be an undertaker,’ I said facetiously, ‘they seem to make quite a lot of money.’ Mr. Joseph Farbison, of Farbison’s Funeral Parlour, rode about in a new Rover and had an imposing house in the part of Lychington we lived in.

‘Now be serious, Morgan, you’ll be leaving school in a year’s time—unless you intend to go on to do A levels’.

But it was clear that ‘A’ levels were not for me. I was the worst sort of secondary modern pupil, a low-grade ‘write-off’ as far as most teachers were concerned, although several reckoned I had potential. I wouldn’t work at anything; figures baffled me and I went through agonies of failure in the maths subjects; facts in geography and history always eluded me, though I liked the stories of former heroes and despots, and was at times fascinated by the accounts of exotic countries. The fact remains that I was never good at any subject, not even art; which may seem surprising. I had little sense of line or perspective, though I liked strong colours; in the art class I simply doodled and daubed, making desultory attempts to paint apples or a vase of flowers, or the girl sitting boredly in front of us. If they had asked me to paint a death scene or a funeral, now… but of course they never did. To me that was a remarkable omission. How can you treat life in art—any form of art—without also treating death? I knew that the one is necessary to the other, each being merely another side, the obverse of the other.

In the library and bookshops I browsed among Freudian death-wish psychology, the life and works of Madame Blavatsky, Ouspensky and Aleister Crowley. I read the time plays of J.B Priestley, histories of witchcraft, Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond, or Life and Death, the E.S.P. researches of Rhine and others, the egregious life of Edgar Cayce, and much else. I understood less than half of what I read, but was increasingly attracted to and obsessed by it all. I bought what books I could afford; part of the small annuity I had from my father’s will, rather parsimoniously doled out by my aunt (for my own good, of course; she was utterly honest and only wanted to make sure I wouldn’t waste it). It was always spent on books, though sometimes I was tempted to the cinema to see Boris Karloff in some horror film, or Vincent Price as Count Dracula. And of course I had read Bram Stoker’s novel, which caused me several sleepless nights.

Then one day I wandered in to the Palmer Museum, and saw the ghost of Dr. Palmer himself.

2

GILLIAN

I had taken to visiting the Museum dedicated to the work and mementoes of the great Doctor who had lived in that Georgian house, because it had a profound calm 18th century certainty about it. I suppose that our own age, changing violently and swiftly as it does, lacks all the qualities of Palmer’s day. Here were his manuscripts, portraits of himself and his wife, the leather-bound first editions of his works on rag paper with uneven edges and large old-fashioned type, his quill pens and writing desk. He was of course a notable 18th century philosopher, poet, essayist and philologist. I didn’t know then that he had also been one of the earliest researchers into what we now call psychic or supernatural phenomena.

It was a darkly brooding rainy day in November, and the lights in the Museum at four o’ clock inefficiently illuminated the main lobby and sales counter. When I walked in no one was there, not even the lady who attended the counter and issued tickets. I had waited for a few seconds, no more, to pay my shilling entrance fee, when I caught a movement on the stairs leading up to the first floor, where the Doctor’s study and sitting room were; and looking up I saw him descending in his green coat, knee-breeches, long embroidered waistcoat, and powdered wig. Impossible to mistake him, despite the half-light, for we all knew his face and portly form; indeed a statue of him stands in the square outside his house.

It seems to me now that he was looking at me, but that is perhaps an exaggeration of the memory. He took three or four steps down the stairs towards me; the long moments of his descent engraved themselves on my mind from then on. What would have happened, I often since wondered, if he had continued? What confrontation would have taken place—or would he have simply melted away in the fuller circle of light in the lobby? I shall never know, because a prim voice just then said, ‘Do you want a ticket, young man?’

The sales lady had returned to her post. I said, ‘Look… !’ and pointed at the stairs; but he was gone. ‘I thought…’ I said foolishly; and then, ‘Yes, one please.’

She tore off a ticket and took the money. ‘Remember we close at five,’ she said, watching me as if suspecting me of some mischief.

I told Ellen about Dr. Palmer, and she believed me. Ellen was always rather credulous. Having attended Meetings with her mother since she was a small child, I suppose she hardly dared be sceptical about such matters. I was thrilled at the revelation, and swelled with some importance in my own esteem; I had a psychic gift, and now maybe all kinds of manifestations and strange experiences would come to me.

Very soon afterwards, as I was looking along the shelves in the Lychington Central Library, I came face to face, searching among the same row of books on occult subjects, with Gillian.

We looked at each other for what seemed an age before either of us spoke. I was transfixed in the amused and challenging stare of those deep brown eyes. Finally she said, ‘Are you interested in ghosts or E.S.P?’

‘Well, both, really,’ I said.

‘Sssh… ! Whisper,’ she hissed, for strict silence was the rule, and the librarian was a martinet. ‘Have you seen this one?’ She pulled out a small book and thrust it into my hands. It was An Adventure, by Anne Moberley and Eleanor F. Jourdain. It meant nothing to me, and I shook my head. ‘I advise you to read it,’ she said, and turned to the shelves to select a couple of books for herself.

I caught her up as she approached the library desk to hand in her tickets. ‘Wait,’ I whispered, ‘wait for me please. I want…’ The assistant glared at me and said, ‘Silence if you please.’ Gillian smiled at me, and having had her book stamped walked through the door. In my haste to catch her up I barged into a large woman coming in and dropped my book. ‘Sorry,’ I stammered, retrieving the volume, and ran. I needn’t have worried. Gillian was walking very slowly along the pavement outside.

‘Well?’ she said pertly yet not forbiddingly. ‘You were saying?’

‘I just thought… I mean… Look, let’s go and have a cup of coffee and a bun. There’s a tea-shop over there. Will you?’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I have to go home. I have things to do before tea. However…’ She seemed suddenly very grown up. ‘It’s very kind of you. I come here to the library every Wednesday. Next week, if you’re here about four, there might be time… I hope you enjoy that book. It’ll puzzle you.’ And with a brilliant smile she walked off to