part 2

[A Brief History of Dour, Maine, Alver Sanders, 1921]

	The city of Dour sits proudly upon a history of intellectualism, sophistication, and eminence. It is a bastion of art and industry: one to rival even the great cities of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. It is not hyperbole to therefore count Dour as a ‘great city’ in and of itself, equal to those mighty American metropolises.
	Yet, even the most illustrious cities of the world carry secret, unseen blemishes: hidden from view to preserve an outward image of excellence. Fittingly, old Dour is, like the rest, a pretender city. Its façade of enlightened prosperity belies a poverty of morality, and an overlooked, forbidden history. Concealed behind dark corners, beneath crumbling flagstone streets, and within smoky, silk-lined parlours, lie bygone tokens of deceitfulness, inhumanity, and elitism.
	Few are able to understand Dour’s sinister half-world. Nevertheless, rumors are beginning to purvey, being shared in hastily whispered conversations in cafés and jazz clubs, inspiring unease and curiosity. They arrogantly speak of things that ought best be left alone, lest they pollute and torment the misfortuned few who seek to solve their quandaries. Therefore, it is necessary to behave proactively and honestly, dispelling the murky mystique of this great city’s history forthwith. By doing so, perhaps one can lessen the damage done to the curious, and lock the door to the city’s most darkly shrouded enigmas, leaving them well and safely hidden.
	Despite its modern nobility, its grandiosity, or its unseen mysteries, the city of Dour rose from the humility of a small coastal labor-town, when it was established by the British Empire in the colony of Massachusetts in approximately 1642. It was initially inhabited by English and French protestants, who built the settlement upon the quarrying of granite, the mining of silver, and most significantly, a lucrative fishing trade.
	Though Dour had begun to flounder by the end of the 17th century, due to economic constraints and a declining population, the Seven Years’ War of the mid 18th century served to uplift it somewhat, when it would become a partial shipbuilding town, constructing and repairing warships for the British Navy. Its mixed English and French population would even contribute briefly to the conflict, serving opposite sides in the French and Indian War taking place in New York in 1754.
	Following the wars, the burgeoning industrial revolution of the late 18th century reached the new world. It breathed fresh life into the otherwise stagnating town of Dour. In the following decades, multitudes of factories began springing forth, like poppies after rainfall. The demand for unskilled labor attracted the downtrodden, who traveled far and wide to claim the city as their home, and build a life filled with honest work, and mayhaps, the safety of a modest, well-earned fortune.
	After Maine was divided as a separate state from Massachusetts in 1820, and over the following decades leading up to the mid-19th century, workers and freed slaves began arriving in staggering quantities from rural parts of Maine and other surrounding states. Dour’s citizenry grew, and the town evolved. Old roads and streets were paved and cobbled, churches were refurbished, and the demand for ample housing lured in a large quantity of architects from New York City, who brought with them its iconic architectural tastes. Within a few short years, Dour received a multiplicity of brownstone apartments throughout its eastern and southern districts, which summoned styles of Greek and Gothic revivalism, federalism, and the romanesque.
	However, Dour’s otherwise abundant supply of brownstone row houses and apartments could scarcely accommodate the impending glut of immigrants just beginning to be ferried in from across the Atlantic, for throughout the 1840s, many were leaving Europe, drawn to the thriving American way of life. Taxes were rising, and land and work had grown sparse in the old world. Revolutions in Sicily, France, Germany, and others had roused upheaval, and drove many to flee the widespread strife. Furthermore, many Irish immigrants escaped to the land across the sea following the Irish potato famine of 1845, which claimed uncountable numbers of lives and plunged the country into turmoil.
	Dour’s prime position upon the northeast coast of the United States naturally made it a common destination. Between 1840 and 1850, so many immigrants had arrived in Dour that tens of thousands of tenements had to be erected throughout the city’s outskirts in order to house the great surplus of people.
	As time marched forward, however, America was descending into its own depression and turmoil as well. Discussion amongst the northern states regarding the country’s growing political, social, and economic issues raged on, serving as an ominous preamble to the eventual outbreak of the American Civil War. During the mid-to-late 1850s, one conservative sociologist and economist, whose legacy would become intricately tied with the city's, began his literary career under the pen-name Julian Lanswich.
	Decades before becoming the political face of old Dour, and 19th century Maine’s most paramount and controversial literary personality, Lanswich had developed from humble beginnings, being raised in a family of cattle farmers on the outlying parcels of Dour’s domain. According to Lanswich’s later autobiography, due to poor health, the lad was ill-suited for hard labor, and thus took up reading and writing to fill his time, thus establishing the foundation of his future profession. In his early adult life, he took to publishing caustic authorial works, attacking the anti-slavery values of the free state of Maine, and lambasting increasing trends toward economic irresponsibility occurring throughout the northern United States.
	Julian Lanswich quickly became an esteemed political author, garnering popularity across Maine, and especially his hometown of Dour, throughout the 1850s and 60s for his biting political commentaries. Thanks to his success, he became recognized as a member of the “Stalwarts,” an unofficial coterie of thirteen Maine-dwelling political writers unified under their shared publisher, Langston & Silas LLC. The Stalwarts were best characterized by a common subscription to the belief that the country’s slave population possessed certain qualities that were indicative of an inherent racial inferiority, a belief that Julian Lanswich adopted whole-heartedly. The Stalwarts became both renowned and reviled in their time for their pieces defending the values of the southern slave states, and they would eventually go on to unanimously sympathize with and support the Confederacy in the coming decade.
	Julian Lanswich especially was an outspoken advocate for the confederacy. In several of his works penned during the American Civil War, he repeatedly lamented his personal failure to enlist and serve, which he attributed to physical conditions leftover from boyhood, which impaired his circulation, and cursed him with frequent fainting spells. Motivated by a self-admitted growing restlessness over his inability to fight, his works adopted more vehement and inflammatory language directed toward the Union, and his home state of Maine.
	Following the end of the American Civil War, during the Reconstruction, the city of old Dour faced significant financial challenges related to the newly granted civil legitimacy of former slaves. As the freedman and foreigner populations grew in old Dour, the city quickly became bitterly divided along racial, economic, and cultural lines.
	The coastal and suburban districts of the city, called “shoretown” by many, was home to the diversely multiracial paupers of the city. Co-existing communities of negroes, orientals, and caucasians alike maintained the ideal vision of Dour as a place of golden opportunity. Yet, to the oldest, wealthiest inhabitants of the central city’s conservative sector, a demographic from which many of the Stalwarts hailed from, old Dour had become sullied; a bloated, grotesque, corpse-like mockery, dirtied with indigents and undesirables.
	In July of 1870, Julian Lanswich published Silver, a book of social critique in which he notably coined a new nickname for the city, inspired by these recent happenings.

	“Degenerates drain our city of its vitality, like leeches stuck upon the belly of the majestic whale. There are some who say this city is ailing. To think the city lies dying in hospice is sorely mistaken. It is already dead. Great old Dour is dead; it’s lying in its grave! The once silver city is now a tarnished grey. The City of Grey, it should be called, where the dregs of its society pick clean its bones.”
		— Julian Lanswich, Silver, 1870.

	This quote would become well-known amongst the political spheres of Dour. The nickname “the City of Grey,” being a corruption of an older, short-lived nickname, “the City of Silver,” which itself refers to the city’s distant mining history, became expeditiously adopted by Lanswich’s loyal audience. Many of them were middle-and-upper-class members of society, and avid readers of Stalwart literature. The name stood as a sign of devotion to the city’s older, prosperous, more insular state of existence prior to the American Civil War, and its use was a dead giveaway when trying to identify followers of the group. Many historians consider Silver as the informal beginning of the Northern Traditionalist movements of late 19th century Maine.
	From 1877 to 1900, the United States entered a period of economic prosperity. One that humorist Mark Twain named the “Gilded Age”: a fitting satire concisely summarizing the contrasting trends of poverty and political corruption beneath the surface. During this time, Dour saw a jump in population resulting from poverty throughout Maine, as many nonwhite arrivals fled destitution, and sought employment in the city. Simultaneously, fanaticism also spiked throughout the city’s racially-concerned conservative factions, contributing to the formation of the later-named Northern Traditionalists leagues, and aiding in the rise of racial violence against negro citizens.
	Sorrowfully, Dour would be claimed as the territory of those white-masked marauders who call themselves the Ku Klux Klan, who experienced a brief pseudo-revival throughout Maine in the dawning years of the era. A large number of lynchings and missing persons cases arose during this time, inciting terror and outrage. Many assumed these acts were solely motivated by prejudice and vigilantism, but an underlying commonality would be later found between the acts of this group and others, suggesting roots far more insidious than those mere causes.
	As the turn of the century approached, another phenomenon was simultaneously purveying throughout old Dour. Away from the eyes of the simple folk, shadowy cliques of upper-class occultists and witchcraft-doers had begun to silently appear in diminutive pockets, beginning within old Dour and emanating outward throughout the northeastern United States. General occultism had existed in small pockets in the old world, primarily in the form of  heretical scholars, theologians, and paganists existing between the 15th and 17th centuries. However, this so-called “American Occultism”, as it would later be known, is largely removed from these occurrences, being attributed as having begun with early-founders of the late 1870s, namely Julian Lanswich, and a number of his fellow Stalwarts. The former of this set, whose prominent, locally popular works became increasingly engendered in occultic rhetoric, canon, and terminology as he approached his twilight years, would be formative to the occultic underground.
	Julian Lanswich’s occultic works, though niche, maintained a strong minority following, carried on the back of his earlier political commentaries. While his notoriety only served to discredit him in the eyes of the masses, especially as these works trended toward conspiratorial and esoteric commentary, his most loyal followers were not dissuaded. Many of his readers accepted much of what he was conveying as this period continued, likely due to Lanswich’s simple approach of subtly intertwining his political and occultic views together gradually, not forcefully. For this reason, Lanswich enjoys the luster of being considered the first ‘mainstream’ occultist by occult historians, as well as the likeliest nexus from which early American Occultism spread. Even after his murder in 1883 at the hands of an unknown assailant, and the subsequent banning of the sale of his works by the American government, his influence propagated in the form of his peers, who cite Lanswich amongst their primary inspirations.
	Though still largely unknown in the grand scheme of things, the most influential of these contemporary authors was Peter Bath, second cousin of Julian Lanswich, and the creator of several series of obscure works of allegorical fiction. Particularly, his magnum opus The Dark Corners, Vol. I-IV is considered one of the founding texts contributing to the growth of American Occultism, despite predating it by over thirty years.
	The audience of these occultic works were northern upper-class nobles and members of the markedly tight-knit Northern Traditionalist leagues, who had come to perceive themselves as disenfranchised by the US Government’s actions of the prior half-century, and were mostly influenced by the efforts of the Stalwarts of the 1850s, 60s, and 70s. The often iconoclastic, contrarian thoughts espoused in these early occultic works were embraced and welcomed by these individuals, who believed that the forbidden information within could assist in a supposed return to form for the American way of life.
	Though some events would shed light on the activity of these occult groups, such as the Cowder Killings of 1878, the exact strength and scope of this early occultic renaissance remains hard to gauge, due to the secrecy of its adherents, the obscurity of its internal history, and the exclusivity of its culture. As a result, it wouldn’t be until after the end of the Great War in 1918 that occult knowledge began to disseminate into more common spheres, due in large part to the social patterns of the age.
	Despite the recent exposure, this subject is still largely unexplored in traditional academia. Pertinent information regarding the occultic community and canon is actively suppressed by not only anti-occult groups, but even its own members, and that which is available is remarkably outdated or nonsubstantive. Consequently, common scholars are left with mere speculation.
	Given the air of concern pervading the informed minority, it is clear that awareness of this subject is poised to grow. Already, in the past few years since its reemergence, the odd newspaper articles or radio broadcasts covering topics relating to American Occultism have appeared. Therefore, two critical questions remain: Whether or not these clandestine pursuits are still happening; and whether or not they will increase in their extent.
	These questions demand answers, and while greater knowledge of this phenomenon is vital to ensuring its containment, unfortunately it is difficult to answer them with certainty. Most concerningly, it is also inordinately clear that education of this subject is a dangerous path in and of itself, as by the crux of man’s very nature, he is attracted to the strange and otherworldly, and thus risks exposure and captivation in ways that are beyond innocent, academic interest. Regardless, the general consensus amongst occult historians, myself included, is that occultism is alive and well, being merely hidden from view within the ever-complexifying substrata of metropolitan society. Whether or not the growth of American Occultism will continue to escalate, however, remains to be seen. For the sake of ourselves and our children, and all those who come after, I for one, hope that we have seen the last of it.