Time for another instalment in my occasional series about books on real-life subject matter which can be potentially handy for games set in the real world (whether in the modern day or in history). This time around, I’m looking at books which offer interesting insights into historical cultures or subcultures. We’ve got genres of entertainment which are obscure today but were massively popular in their time, slices of occulture which offer a weird take on late Antiquity heresies, Victorian esoterica, or the conspiracy theory subculture of the early internet, some spicy Byzantine gossip, and some more general guides to the England of several different historical periods.
The Fabliaux translated by Nathaniel E. Dubin
Running a game in a medieval (or quasi-medieval) setting? Want some inspiration for the sort of entertainment that might be enjoyed at the more lowbrow end of the scale? The fabliau was a type of Old French narrative poem which was popular from the mid-12th Century until the end of the 14th Century, and involved astonishingly rude and sometimes downright explicit treatments of sexual subject matters and merciless mockery of social mores. Peasants, clergy, nobility – all estates of medieval society get it in the neck in these poems.
Given the nature of the subject matter, it’s no surprise that they fell into obscurity compared to, say, the Arthurian romances (which are a more posh cousin of the form). Nathaniel Dubin’s The Fabliaux presents new translations of about half the fabliaux which are still extant in manuscript form. (There’s exactly 69 of them here, a number I assume was chosen because that’s about the level of a lot of the comedy here.) Dubin allows himself to take some liberties with the translation, both to try and conserve at least the rhyme couplet format of the originals and to get across the irreverent style and penchant for wordplay of the originals, all of which would be possible to convey in a literal translation. Sometimes he struggles – a lot of the rhymes here are a bit of a reach – but for the most part he succeeds at showcasing the lively style of the material.
You wouldn’t want to read directly from this at the gaming table unless you’d already had a conversation with your players about the sort of material you’d be using and you knew your players were fine with hearing sexually charged, highly scatological, frequently kind of misogynistic poetry. (Though in a number of fabliaux, the women end up getting the better of their men, other fabliaux include outright rape jokes.) Nonetheless, if you wanted inspiration for the sort of format the more ribald bards might be performing in inns of ill repute, you could do worse than taking a look of here and getting a dose of authenticity.
For my part, I’m rather interested to see that the sort of highly cynical take on historical societies that games like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay indulge in seems to be mirrored in some ways by the medieval period’s own satires of itself: it’s interesting to see that the idea of a medieval Europe of foppish nobles, ignorant peasants, and greedy, self-serving clergy are not fresh concepts, but are comic motifs and forms of social criticism which were in vogue in the era too.
Lost Scriptures edited by Bart D. Ehrman
A companion piece to Ehrman’s Lost Christianities, this collects various texts which didn’t make it into the New Testament – either because they were wildly out of step with the orthodox consensus, or because they just didn’t seem as significant as the work of the 1st Century apostles. As Ehrman chronicles, the canon wasn’t set in stone for some centuries, and even after it was some of these texts remained in circulation, with some being regarded as being on the verge of full canonicity and worthy of study whilst others were persecuted texts.
The most obvious uses for this is as research either for a game set in the era when these texts would have been in wide circulation, or as imaginative fodder for a game set in later periods if it involves lots of Da Vinci Code-esque delving into forbidden scripture. Gnostic materials have, of course, had a lot of the attention over the years, and you can see why – they’re by far the weirdest and most unorthodox in here – but the book doesn’t focus exclusively on them, instead picking out a range of texts to present the full variance of viewpoints in early Christianity.
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England/Restoration Britain/Regency Britain by Ian Mortimer
I’d previously looked at Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide To Medieval England in an earlier episode of this series, and the sequels are just as useful sources for historical RPGs (tabletop or LARP) set in these eras. Each of them follows roughly the same format as the original; there’s light amendments to the chapter structure here and there to take into account the different priorities at the time, but in general you get a big-picture overview of the cultural landscape at the start and dive into increasingly fine-grain specifics in the latter part of the book. As such. the books not only help give you an idea of how life was lived in the time, but what the people living then thought about life, which is obviously useful.
The Elizabethan England volume will be particularly useful for the original Maelstrom, set as it was in the 16th Century (Elizabeth’s reign covers much of the latter half of it). WFRP, though its Empire is based on a twisted funhouse mirror version of the Holy Roman Empire and not Britain, still takes on enough of a Tudor-era aesthetic in some aspects that this might also provide inspiration for that. Although Meeting of Monarchs was set a few decades before this era, the “here’s what the situation was early in the reign” material might have still been helpful for some of my preparation for that.
The Restoration Britain volume takes a broad-ish view of the term, covering as it does not just the reign of Charles II but also James II and William III. Despite its period starting less than a century after the close of the Elizabethan England volume’s timespan, the intervention of the Civil War and the advance of technology and colonialism means that society has comprehensively transformed by this point. It would be particularly good for games using the Renaissance system; strictly speaking it’s a bit after the time period of Clockwork and Chivalry, but could provide some inspiration for that. It’d also be perfect for Flashing Blades.
The Regency Britain volume, taking as its period 1789 to 1830 (George IV being proposed as regent for his father at the start of that period, and ending his reign as king in his own right at the end) is rather late for the time period covered by Renaissance, but might be good for a campaign using the Reign of Terror campaign for Call of Cthulhu as a springboard. Otherwise, this seems to be a time period that’s a little underserved by RPGs, at least in terms of games I am familiar with.
The Secret History by Procopius
Writing at the time of Emperor Justinian, the Byzantine ruler whose reign saw the recapture (however temporary) of significant portions of the Western Empire, which had fallen nearly a century before, Procopius is a significant source for the era. His Secret History is so called because he kept it under wraps in his lifetime – for it found him venting his spleen at Justinian, the Empress Theodosia, Justinian’s famed general Belisarius, and Belisarius’ wife Antonina, whereas his published works were (as you’d expect) much more deferential to these central political figures of his age.
How much of it we should believe is debatable. It certainly seems to carry with it a bunch of biases; Theodosia and Antonina are slut-shamed to an extreme degree, for instance, and Belisarius is treated as being so spineless in the face of alleged infidelities by Antonina that the chapter dealing with him is essentially a 6th century equivalent of an online troll yelling “cuck” at someone. Justinian is literally demonised – as in Procopius cites bizarre claims about people witnessing him turning into a demon before their very eyes – but if you actually take a step back and compare Justinian’s reign to that of his predecessors he doesn’t seem to be that much malevolent than many of them (and is positively nicer than, say, Caracalla or Commodus or Constantius II); certainly, many of the accusations Procopius makes could be levelled at other emperors. Sometimes Procopius is so keen to hype up how terrible the subjects of his diatribe are that the effect ends up comic; he goes off on one about what a moral sewer Theodosia was, but then his first example is about how she spent too long in the bath, which is hardly worth the build-up.
The Secret History is a vicious document, and at points is a little hard to follow because it’s so dependent on Procopius’ other major work, the History of the Wars. It might, however, provide some inspiration for a Byzantine-based game, especially in the horror genre – after all, what if the claims about Justinian being a demon are actually true?
Everything Is Under Control by Robert Anton Wilson and Miriam Joan Hill
Put out by HarperCollins in the late 1990s, the cover design on this screams “we want to hop on the X-Files bandwagon”, though arguably it’s by one of the architects of that bandwagon anyway since Wilson was the co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, which did the “every conspiracy theory and claimed Fortean phenomenon is real” thing decades before Chris Carter and company came along.
It is presented as an encyclopedia of conspiracy theory – Miriam Joan Hill doing the research legwork, Wilson sprinkling his distinctive sense of humour over the individual entries. This ends up being a winning formula; each entry in the book has bibliographic citations and web links if you’d like to know more (though as a Web 1.0 artifact you’ll probably find yourself resorting to the Internet Archive a lot if you try to follow those up), and each entry is short enough that Wilson is compelled to stick mostly to the point and not to in so heavily on his schtick that it becomes annoying.
In terms of subject matter, there’s an obvious slant towards subject matter that Wilson himself considers interesting. There’s a fair amount about Thelema, along with the comedic religions of Discordianism and the Church of the Subgenius, there’s a fair bit from a libertarian perspective, there’s glowing admiration directed at thinkers like Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller, and Wilhelm Reich is treated as a martyr. There is also a certain scepticism of feminism and a characterisation of the movement on the basis of its most extreme sex-negative proponents. None of this will be surprise to anyone who has read Illuminatus! or its successors like Schrödinger’s Cat or Masks of the Illuminati, since these are all axes that Wilson habitually ground across his bibliography, which was largely constructed as a means of encouraging the reader to get into all of this cool shit Wilson thought was neat.
That said, Wilson’s philosophical outlook has always put a big emphasis on the idea (derived from Leary and others) that everyone has their own “reality tunnel” formed from their preconceptions, which means he is often aware of the rhetorical agendas and unexamined prejudices involved in the conspiracy theories he discusses.
He has no time for antisemitism, and is fairly assiduous about not only pointing out where conspiracy theories directly feed into that, but also the motivations which often underlie conspiracy theories which end up bordering on antisemitism or dogwhistling for it. For instance, he notes that many right-wing conspiracy theories about Freemasonry seem to be motivated by discomfort on Masonry’s explicit support of people of different religions socialising as equals, which invariably annoys people who believe their form of religious belief is tarnished by association with unbelievers.
Likewise, Wilson has his finger on the pulse of many of the concerns of the time. The whole recovered memory thing, for instance, seems much less convincing when Wilson points out that typically hypnotherapists who are big on the Satanic Ritual Abuse angle find patients who recover memories of that, and those working the alien abduction beat tend to find abductees; you don’t get so many cases of alien abductees being discovered by hypnotherapists whose worldview firmly rules out the greys in favour of Satan.
More broadly, Wilson – who after writing Illuminatus! spent much of the rest of his life being pestered by conspiracy theorists eager to post their pet theories to him – is able to draw some interesting deeper conclusions about the appeal of them. He makes an interesting point about “fungibility” – that there’s a point in many conspiracy theories where they slip from making specific accusations about specific people in relation to specific events and go into the territory of treating any member of a particular target group as being inherently suspicious. Think, for example, of the point where someone being radicalised into antisemitism switches the target of their animosity from a set of people who happen to be Jewish to “the Jews” as a whole; they have mentally switched to thinking of Jewish folk as a fungible group, where any individual Jewish person is just as suspect as any other one.
I don’t think this fungibility idea tells the whole story, mind. In particular, I think some bigots package their rhetoric in non-fungible terms, but in ways which amount to the sort of fungibility Wilson talks about; think of the sort of conspiracy theorist who never directly says “It’s the Jews”, but who disproportionately name and direct ire at Jewish people in their theorising. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting intellectual fallacy to identify which perhaps helps illuminate some of the mechanisms of radicalisation.
Everything Is Under Control is a souvenir of a very special time – a much more Geocities-ish era of the Internet, and emerging in that narrow window after the death of Princess Diana and before 9/11. (In that respect it’s a much less toxic contemporary of David Icke’s The Biggest Secret, and whilst it does not waste any page count on Icke you can trace a wide swathe of the ideas Icke plagiarised here.) It’s certainly interesting to look at and contemplate which ideas here have remained regular elements of the cultural conversation (many) and which have fallen into obscurity (surprisingly few).
It is likely to be of special interest to anyone writing X-Files fanfic, running tabletop RPGs based on old-school 1990s-set material for Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Conspiracy X, Unknown Armies or the World of Darkness games, or anyone who is interested in what the lay of the land looked like in conspiracy theory world when the Twin Towers still stood.
Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic by Éliphas Lévi (translated by A.E. Waite)
This is an old-timey occult textbook penned by Éliphas Lévi (born Alphonse Constant), and in its day it was somewhat influential – that famous hermaphrodite goat-deity image you’ve probably seen in a bunch of horror movies comes from there, along with some other neat illustrations, some decidedly fanciful anecdotes, and an awful lot of dry waffle based on Lévi’s personal Grand Unified Theory of Occultism, which held that a special Astral Light exists and is what is manipulated by all forms of occult practice.
In some respects, it’s utter trash – an attempt to reduce diverse cultural practices (including a whole lot of stuff appropriated from Jewish mysticism, especially Kabbalah) into a single common system which, in sanding off all the bits which don’t fit Lévi’s theory of everything, ends up misrepresenting a whole lot of stuff. A.E. Waite, the Golden Dawn member who wrote the most widely-circulated English translation on it, is constantly pointing out in the footnotes where Lévi is simply fucking up his Hebrew, or where he claims he’s going to discuss something later on and then blatantly doesn’t.
In other respects, it’s a weird landmark of occult history – there were reasons Waite bothered to translate this in the first place going above and beyond Waite just being a massive nerd. In taking a whole bunch of archaic occult material and claiming to find a vast new secret hiding behind it all, Lévi had one foot in the older tradition represented by the authors he was quoting and one foot in the future. Every Theosophical, Golden Dawn-inspired, or New Age leader who presents an idiosyncratic new Grand Theory of Everything as part of what they are presenting is to a certain extent following a model originally put together by Lévi. Whilst earlier books on magic emphasised practical results and fairly simple motives (get rich quick, find out secrets, obtain sex, etc.), Lévi discussed magic as a means of personal spiritual evolution. Along with Francis Barrett’s The Magus – which influenced Lévi – his work catalysed the Victorian occult revival.
It’s also tremendously tedious to read for the most part, save for when he’s going off on utterly bizarre Shit That Didn’t Happen anecdotes like the time a rich English noblewoman hired him to do some necromancy. The reason I’m writing about it here isn’t that I think it’s particularly interesting to read or useful to derive an archaic way of looking at magic from – but because it makes a fantastic prop. I spent Goetia toting around a copy of it I found for cheap on EBay – tatty, water-damaged, and very old-looking – and it really helped in getting across an image of being a bookish occult scholar. Maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you can encourage people to judge you by the book you’re carrying.
Refereeing and Reflection 