Wolfbane

    When I was an undergrad, Twenty-five and more years ago, I met a man of a singular character, who I now call Wolfbane. A professor of English at a small college in a quiet mid-western town, I assumed he was at least seventy years old when I first met him, but to a twenty-year-old, everyone looks more advanced than they perhaps are. He had a shock of white hair that once must have been red. He was the opposite of good looking, but he had a very strong bearing and was remarkably healthy. In fact, his appearance changed not at all from the time I met him until late last year, the last time I ever saw him.
    What his initial interest was in me I can not say. I was his student. He had many who were more serious and more talented than myself.  I think now, that we shared a love of poetry into which most people cannot enter. Even those bright competitive students, my classmates, many of whom have today published their own works, did not apparently receive the joy of poetry in the way that he and I did. In previous centuries, people used to entertain each other with poetry. Poems are not read, they are sung. Many are the times that Wolfbane would beg me to sing from my own poems.  We were to spend many hours reciting verse and singing our favorite poems aloud to each other.  We had much in common. I would sing Poe and Coleridge. He would sing Milton and Blake. We smoked tobacco and cannabis. And sometimes Opium. We would drink port and whiskey.
    It is my particular talent to eat and drink without ceasing. And apparently the last faculty to be encumbered by drink in myself, is the verbal faculty. Even when I am beyond the place of standing or walking, I can still be found jabbering away quite coherently or even brilliantly. Like Socrates himself, I become more wise as I continue to imbibe. Wolfbane too had a moist soul like mine. Although there was never any indication of overindulgence or sloppiness in him. We simply drank and smoked and read poems, or sought other amusements. Always simply for our enjoyment. Our eternal games of poker, chess, and billiards filled those years. I never ceased to be astounded at Wolfbane’s endurance and his zest for competition. When drink gave way to hunger we would eat a huge repast in the wee hours of the morning. And this gave us burst to continue our entertainments until the crack of dawn.  Several times I was late and unprepared for his nine-thirty class. He was never late and he never gave the slightest indication that the previous evening and morning had all been spent in smoke and sport. Perhaps after that morning class he would take a brief respite, but then he was back in the afternoon class on Milton which he taught with fire and zeal.
    One of my great memories of him is when he told me, upon my graduation, that I needn’t become a scholar. I hadn’t the scholarly gifts of patience and discipline. Truly, I felt such relief at that moment. I embraced him. He was the only one who understood me. That was the most freedom I have ever felt. For what I feared most of all was a life of skullduggery or drudgery. The life of a bean counter and the life of a person who reads student writing is to me the same dull round.
    As fate would have it, I came to know him even better after graduation. I lived in Chicago for a few years as a young adult, and he often had business there, at the University of Chicago.  It was at this time that I first noticed his walking with a cane. Not that he depended upon it. It was like jewelry to him. A birch cane stained black, with a silver tip and a carved silver head in the shape of a wolf. He claimed it once was a Hollywood movie prop. It was as much a club as a cane and its heavy silver handle could deal a severe or deadly blow. He showed me once how pulling away the bottom of the cane would reveal a gruesome silver blade some ten inches long, and by tilting the handle on it’s hinge he could expose an old fashioned pistol with a single silver ball.
    This was also when Wolfbane began to expose to me certain Baroque prejudices. Certain attitudes which I thought had gone extinct centuries ago. He was right to keep his true feelings hidden while I was a student, but now that we were both adults living in the real world, he did not hide from me a darker side to his personality. His acrid judgments and incisive tongue were shocking to me. It may also be true that he was actually a heretic. He had an antinomian bent and professed his anticlerical sympathies. He was like an Englishman transported from the seventeenth century.  A ranter. A dissenter and protestor against all orthodoxy. He spoke of the 17th century as if he had been there himself, and he referred to all of his contemporaries in academics as babies or illiterates.
    “Philistines!”  He would shout in reference to the clergy. “A poor show of Christianity indeed,” was his usual retort after sitting through a mandatory mass. “Look at all these illiterates,” he would say in reference to the churchgoers. “They have not read even their Hawthorne.” I knew well enough what he meant by that. He was referencing Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, where the same priests and ministers who run the Christian church on Sunday can be found of a Saturday engaged in their actual black religion. Of course, atheism has perhaps crept into the church in the last century, but surely priests are not engaged in witchcraft at this late date. Nevertheless, this lunatic idea was the central theme to his speech.
    “How do you know,” he said to me during one visit, “That every single priest is not a Satanic witch who has sworn fealty to Satan? How do you know every single one of them has not bled drops of blood for Satan or not committed atrocities with children?” This was the general train of his thoughts. I would try to temper his fury by injecting some reason in the conversation: “We live in a Philistine society,” I would say. “People do things for social position, personal status, or just money motivation. Ninety-nine percent of people in America are Philistines. It’s not religion, it’s just the way we are.”
    “You don’t understand what a Philistine is,” he replied. “At the ancient city of Ekron, 6000 years ago, Philistines began worshiping Baal-Zeebub, Son of Dagon. The most bloodthirsty of all gods, Baal-Zeebub taught his priests to extract blood from the adrenal gland of their humans victims at the base of the skull, and to embibe.” I could tell he was getting worked up now: “You haven’t read the works of King James I of England! If you had, you would know what Mystery Babylon is. You would understand why King James called the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon and why every single Catholic priest is a fucking whore! How long will you go on in your stupid indolence! You fucking cow!”
    I am a person who is habitually slow to anger. I am accustomed to taking flack. It is my personal gift to be able to breath such things away. To clear the air leaving room for reason.  In this case, I told my friend he was showing signs of stress and I encouraged him to take a minute to calm himself. I went to my closet and fetched a bottle of good Mexican brandy. Good for anyone’s constitution. I grabbed two glasses and placed a single cube of ice in each and then I poured a liberal drink for myself, and one for Wolfbane.  When I handed him the glass he looked me straight in the eye and said, “The Power and the Glory.”  “The Power and the Glory,” I repeated, and we both drank.
    “And you don’t understand what religion is either,” he started in again. “Religion is all the little things we do without thinking. The unquestioned allegiance. The pop-corn prayer. The mindless ritual observed in thoughtless obedience. The superstitious fetishism of Rosary beads. The sick belief in the purity of the Bible and the respectability of money.”