THE READING RHEUM: THE SLEEPING SORCERESS (1972)

 

SLEEPING SORCERESS was the second of the Lancer paperbacks to spotlight novel-length adventures of Elric. It's not nearly as well-composed as the first novel and is more transparently a fix-up of separate stories. All the stories here are, like the tale "The Singing Citadel" in the collection of the same name, are prequels to 1962's "The Stealer of Souls," in that they all concern Elric's conflicts with his first major enemy, the sorcerer Theleb K'aarna. The stories written from the 1960s and 1970s set the foundation of Moorcock's multiverse, but as he himself has commented, he was often making up things as he went along.   

Book One of SORCERESS, entitled "The Torment of the Last Lord," is the source of the image of a sleeping enchantress whom, one presumes, the hero will rescue-- though in the whole of the book, this is only true up to a point. Elric and his sidekick Moonglum have just left behind Queen Yishana in "Citadel" in order to pursue Ka'arna, and they encounter a castle inhabited only by the sleeping body of Empress Myshella, an ally of the Powers of Law, just as Elric is aligned to the powers of Chaos. Myshella instantly reminds Elric of his lost love Cymoril, whom he tried to rescue but slew instead, but despite those bad memories, he finds a magical means to revive her. Myshella wakes up just as Theleb K'aarna, allied to an army of Mongol-like warriors, marches on the castle to eliminate its potential threat to Chaos. Myshella summons forces that destroy the horde but K'aarna escapes. Not surprisingly, Myshella is instantly drawn to the brooding albino, and she soon becomes the newest in Elric's "Bond Girl" collection.

Book Two, "To Snare the Pale Prince," is a needlessly confusing sequel to the story "To Rescue Tanelorn" from CITADEL.  "Tanelorn" seems to take place after Elric meets Rackhir the Red Archer in the 1972 ELRIC novel before the latter has visited the mystical city of Tanelorn, while in the short story Rackhir resides in the city and protects it from a Chaos-inspired invasion by an army of beggars from the corrupt realm Nadsokor. Elric is referenced in "Tanelorn" but he does not appear-- and yet, "Prince" tells readers that Elric has visited Tanelorn at some previous time, and thus the albino and his buddy become allies with Rackhir's forces as they defend themselves from a new invasion. This time K'aarna allies himself with Urish, King of Nadsokor, who also has a previous grudge against Elric. The two villains conspire to steal a magic ring from Elric, knowing that he and Moonglum will come to Nadsokor to retrieve it. The evildoers also unleash a new invading force upon Tanelorn, a gaggle of demons who look like women and who therefore prove difficult for Tanelorn's defenders to strike down. Elric summons a troop of male demons, described as "ape-like," who destroy the female creatures and then die as well. ("Beauty and the Beast," anyone?) Elric recovers his ring and there's a rather pointless exchange with the hero's demon patron Arioch. K'aarna gets away again but kills Myshella in the process. His next foray against Tanelorn transpires not much longer afterward.

Book Three, "Three Heroes with a Single Aim," takes place during a period when Rackhir has invited Elric and Moonglum to abide in Tanelorn. The peace of the eternal city does nothing to dispel Elric's anomie, so he rides out into the wilderness, possibly hoping to die. Instead, he stumbles across K'aarna utilizing a mystic device to transport alien reptiles from another cosmos in order to attack Tanelorn. When Elric seeks to destroy the device, it hurls him into another dimension, which is the hero's first real encounter with the Moorcockian multiverse. He meets both Prince Corum of the "Swords trilogy," conceived around the same time, and Erekose, a character whom Moorcock loosely formulated in 1957 and then updated for a stand-alone novel in 1962, and they all realize, in some vague metaphysical manner, that they're all aspects of the same "eternal champion." I wrote up my impressions of "Heroes" in a previous post and my re-reading now does not alter my verdict:

Trouble is, while such heroes are interesting individually, they're not quite as interesting when they meet each other.  In the 1972 "novel" THE SLEEPING SORCERESS-- actually a collection of three separate novellas featuring Moorcock's most popular character, Elric of Melnibone-- the albino-skinned protagonist encounters two other heroes. Both are, like Elric, aspects of the "Eternal Champion," a sort of archetype that remains constant in many multiversal domains.  One is "Prince Corum," who had his own series of adventures around the same time as Elric. The other calls himself "Erekose," though he's not entirely identical with the character from the one-shot 1970 novel THE ETERNAL CHAMPION. For one thing, the Erekose-warrior in this story is explicitly black-skinned. I have not recently reread ETERNAL CHAMPION, but as I recall no reference is made to the race of the original Erekose. I assume Moorcock was having a bit of fun playing around with the racial identities of his heroes in different incarnations.

The crossover-novel brings the three heroes together in the equally eternal city Tanelorn, where they battle the magic of an evil sorcerer. It's a decent enough story but loses some punch given that all three heroes sound and act pretty much the same. Further, this sequence of SLEEPING SORCERESS was originally derived from a similar section in the 1971 Corum novel THE KING OF THE SWORDS. Since they're pretty much the same story, I decided to count the Elric version as "best crossover," simply because it stands upon its own better as a crossover-tale.  Further, it's a good basic representation of Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" concept, though perhaps not its most complex manifestation.

After Elric helps the other two heroes overcome an adversary in the other dimension-- a singularly underwhelming threat-- Elric returns to his own world and uses magic derived from the other dimension to thwart K'aarna's plot. Again, K'aarna gets away, as he must to satisfy the continuity. But the threat of Myshella is arguably greater. She has to perish because, if she's allowed to survive, she might tempt the hero away from his dolorous quest to slay lots of sorcerers and monsters before he dies. In the final analysis, there is enough symbolic discourse in all three chapters to justify my saying that its mythicity is high. But SORCERESS is not even close to being as aesthetically pleasing as ELRIC OF MELNIBONE.    

          

THE READING RHEUM: THE SINGING CITADEL (1970)

 

I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Michael Moorcock's Elric saga, since I often find the results uneven. I may just finish up with SLEEPING SORCERESS and then conclude with STORMBRINGER, the collection of stories in which Moorcock killed off his hero-- thus engendering dozens of prequels and interstitial tales. After that, maybe I'll explore his other two serials of the 1960-70s, Corum and Dorian Hawkmoon.

SINGING CITADEL was a Berkely paperback edition of four stories Moorcock had previously published in British magazines, only one of which is an Elric story, while two others were brought into the "Elric universe." Instead of reviewing them in order of collection, I'll go with the order of publication.

TO RESCUE TANELORN (G)-- This story, published in 1962 (the year after Elric's debut), is tangentially connected with the albino hero, thanks to a brief mention of Elric's rumored adventures. I don't know if Moorcock contemplated bringing this story's hero, Rackhir the Red Archer, into the Elric-verse that early, since the two character would not meet until 1972's ELRIC OF MELNIBONE. In any case, "Tanelorn" is easily the best story in the collection. Rackhir is a "warrior-priest" who served the same Lords of Chaos seen in the Elric tales. However, he and many similar warriors became weary of fighting their Lords' pointless battles, and so retired to a vaguely mystical city, Tanelorn. A Chaos Lord takes offense at these defections and summons an army of mindless beggars to destroy the city. Rackhir consults an aged magician to learn to reach a group of entities, the Grey Lords, for help, and the two of them venture into several alternate dimensions in search of Tanelorn's salvation. The conclusion seems rushed, but "Tanelorn" serves to put forth one of the author's best sketches of his nihilistic universe.

THE GREATER CONQUEROR (F)-- Published in 1963, "Conqueror" takes place in the historical domain of Alexander the Great, shortly after he made his foray into India. However, in Moorcock's version, Alexander's reign is the center of a struggle between the opposed powers of Good and Evil, represented respectively by the Persian deities Ormuzd and Ahriman (who may be a big influence on the athor's conceptions of Law and Chaos), Alexander's mother Olympias, a worshipper of Ahriman, consecrated her son's body and soul to Evil, and in some vague way Alexander's path of conquest is supposed to aid Ahriman's mastery of the world. The possessed Alexander is not the story's eminent hero: rather, a skeptical mercenary, Simon of Byzantium, is drafted by the powers of Good to take out the Macedonian monarch. Simon is quickly converted to the reality of the Good-Evil struggle by his encounter with real demons, and yet the conflict proves underwhelming, even up to a final sword duel between the hero and the possessed ruler. The characters are all flatly conceived and "Conqueror" feels like a concept that might've been interesting in a full novel, something along the lines of the Haggard-Lang fantasy THE WORLD'S DESIRE.

MASTER OF CHAOS (P)-- According to this vital Moorcock site, this story was composed in 1964, shortly after Moorcock published the 1963-64 Elric tales that became the fix-up novel STORMBRINGER, the one in which Elric dies. The hero is a valiant knight, Earl Aubec, who seeks to extend the dominion of his queen/lover, only to find that he's encroached upon the terrain of Chaos, and he never returns. The aforementioned site includes the information that Moorcock considered doing a series of stories with Aubec, but when the proposed series didn't pan out, Moorcock may have channeled some of these ideas into another character. Aubec is name-checked in ELRIC OF MELNIBONE in that the hero acquires the knight's fabled sword. Most if not all Moorcock contains strong elements of irony, but "Chaos" comes closest to being purely ironic in tone.

THE SINGING CITADEL (F)-- This short tale appears to be the first of the "prequel stories," as well as being written to clarify events in "The Stealer of Souls," (reviewed here) an Elric tale published in 1962. In "Citadel," Queen Yishana hires Elric and his Melnibonean magic-mastery to investigate a mysterious citadel into which Yishana's knights have disappeared. However, Yishana sweetens the pot by sleeping with the hero, and this pisses off her former lover, the court wizard Theleb Ka'arna. Thus Elric has to deal with sorcerous assaults from both the wizard and the master of the citadel, a minor Chaos-Lord named Balo. The tale is just okay, with the best part coming at the end. Yishana tells Elric not to bother seeking vengeance on Ka'arna, that he should just remain in her domain as her consort. But Elric is hot to pursue the wizard, and it's evident that the hero's accumulated guilt and regrets make it impossible for him to "settle down," arguably contributing to his doom.

In my crossover-system, "Tanelorn" is a null-crossover for having name-checked Elric.                    

THE READING RHEUM: ELRIC OF MELNIBONE (1972)

 

Apparently Michael Moorcock so liked the title for his first Elric tale, one of novelette length, that he re-used it for the first full Elric novel, the first one written for the paperback market rather than for magazines. Later printings were re-dubbed ELRIC OF MELNIBONE to minimize confusion between the novel and the novelette. I'm reprinting the original Lancer paperback cover, partly because Charles Moll's illustration is the best of the pack, to say nothing of how Moll captures the surrealistic spirit of the 1970s.

My other reason for at least for referencing the original title here is that, though I will henceforth call the novel MELNIBONE for short, "Dreaming City" is much more appropriate for this prequel work than it was for the introductory novelette. From the first story, one barely gets a sense of what the city Melnibone is like, and how it influenced the formation of the doleful champion Elric. MELNIBONE was entirely devoted to providing a substantial background for Moorcock's increasingly popular hero.

As I mentioned in my review of Moorcock' s STEALER OF SOULS collection, the denizens of the decadent city Melnibone are humanoids, but despite having the same constitutions as humans, they're somehow distinct in terms of their origins. In the distant past, Melniboneans ruled a vast empire, and human beings were a young race kept under their dominion. But for whatever reasons, the empire has now contracted to one well-defended metropolis, Imryyr the Dreaming City. Moorcock never provides an explicit reason for the empire's decline, but he implies that the Melniboneans became preoccupied with abstruse aesthetic pursuits-- including the art of torture-- and so they lost their drive to conquest, much like decadent Rome.

As the novel opens, Elric is the hereditary emperor of his people, though he's set apart from them in having been born an albino. This means that in order to bolster his strength to normal levels he must take special drugs even to lift his sword. But with the drugs he's a good fighter, and it's not the color of his skin but the content of Elric's character that makes his people despise him. In short, Elric possesses a conscience, something most Melniboneans lack. He's capable of taking expedient actions, to be sure. When the city is threatened by spies from human armies planning an attack, the albino ruler does not have a problem allowing a court torturer to wring information from the captured agents.

However, Elric won't eliminate potential enemies gratuitously, and tolerates the disrespect of his cousin Yyrkoon, who clearly covets Elric's throne. Yyrkoon's sister Cymoril, the lover of Elric, advises him to do away with her brother, but noble Elric forfends. Possibly, because he was born so physically different from his people, Elric became alienated from their ways, though Moorcock doesn't say so. In any case, Yyrkoon rewards his cousin's generosity by trying to drown him at sea. For good measure, Yyrkoon mocks his sister's anger by telling her that once he sits the throne, he plans to revive the old custom of consanguineous marriages-- though there's no indication that Yyrkoon would do so out of real desire for anything but to further torment his sister.  

Only a beneficent sea-god allows the albino to return to Imryrr, where Elric condemns Yyrkoon to death. However, the villain escapes, taking his sister prisoner and using sorcery to conceal his whereabouts. Elric makes a devil's bargain with Arioch, Lord of Chaos, and thereby learns Yyrkoon's whereabouts. In the company of a faithful retainer, Elric journeys to the evildoer's sanctum, and finds that Yyrkoon has an almost impenetrable defensive weapon. Elric finally manages to liberate Cymoril-- though she's been drugged into a coma. 

Yyrkoon flees to another dimension, and once more Elric might put himself in debt to Arioch to follow his enemy. In the otherworld, Elric meets an exiled human warrior, Rackhir the Archer, and the two men team up. In a sacred cavern Elric catches up with his cousin, and they both behold two magical swords. The enemies each take one of the blades-- Elric taking one called Stormbringer, Yyrkoon possessing Mournblade-- and they fight. Elric wins, and Yyrkoon loses his sword, while Elric calls again upon his chaotic patron to get back to Imryrr, along with his new ally and his prisoner. However, instead of sentencing his captive to death, Elric seems to think that he's cowed Yyrkoon into submission, and he decides to depart Imryrr to explore the younger domains of the humans. Elric also decides to allow Yyrkoon to be his regent, which only makes sense in terms of solving a narrative problem for Moorcock, because he has to find some way of putting Yyrkoon into power again as he is in "The Dreaming City."

This dodgy conclusion, though, is MELNIBONE's only major flaw. Moorcock is not usually what I'd call a "poetic" writer. However, in his soaring descriptions of Imryrr and the doomed love of Elric and Cymoril, the author taps into a lyrical power I've rarely seen elsewhere in his other works, one that compares with the best "poetic prose" of Tanith Lee and Clark Ashton Smith. The next and last of Moorcock's works for Lancer, THE SLEEPING SORCERESS, is according to one online source less of a unified novel and more an assemblage of three separate novelettes.       

ADDENDUM: Until I read the SINGING CITADEL collection, I didn't realize that this novel is both a crossover, in that Elric meets Rackhir, hero of the short story "To Rescue Tanelorn" (which takes place after ELRIC), and a null-crossover in that the albino acquires the sword of Earl Aubec, the hero of "Master of Chaos."  

    

       

THE READING RHEUM: THE STEALER OF SOULS (1967)

 

The earliest stories of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone appeared during the years 1961-62 in a British magazine, SCIENCE FANTASY, and five of those stories were reprinted in an American paperback in 1967 under the title THE STEALER OF SOULS. 

By 1967 I had become a Fantasy-Zombie of the First Order, having splurged my disposable income into both superhero comics and science fiction paperbacks. I don't remember seeing any of the sword-and-sorcery books of the time, though I'm sure was aware of the comparable "science fantasy" books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. So I bought almost exclusively SF because that's what I found on the secondhand shelves, including an obscure Moorcock title, THE FIRECLOWN. (I may have bought that one because the figure on the cover reminded me of The Joker.)

But by the early seventies I became much more invested in the magical fantasy genre, partly because of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy books, designed to piggyback on the success of Tolkien, and partly because of Marvel's 1970 adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. And two years into that epochal period, Roy Thomas collaborated with Michael Moorcock on a two-part story in CONAN #14-15, in which Howard's burly barbarian crossed paths, and swords, with Moorcock's spindly albino. Not long after, I purchased a fair number of Moorcock's Elric books, as well as his related fantasies.

Though I greatly liked the Elric I'd first seen in CONAN, I'm not sure I was ever quite as enthralled by the original prose version. The original set of short stories and novellas concluded with the hero's death by his own cursed blade, and after that, for the remainder of Moorcock's life he kept returning to the character to write prequels and interstitial stories about the doomed swordsman. Obviously, countless fans became invested enough in Elric to sort out all the stories in their proper time-frames, but I can't say that I was ever moved to  do so. I think I enjoyed the stories I did read well enough, but few of them really stood out. Similarly, I find now that the five stories in STEALER are at best uneven, and even the best ones don't grab me the way Elric did guest-starring with Conan.

"The Dreaming City"-- a title Moorcock later used for a prequel book-- describes how Elric begins his spiral into darkness. He's the king of the empire of Melnibone, which is peopled by a race of humanoids who are somehow not related to actual humans, a younger race that shares the same planet with them. Melnibone once ruled the world with an effete sort of cruelty, but their empire has fallen into decline. Elric starts his first story as a dethroned monarch, cast out from the capital city Imryrr by the usurper Yyrkoon. Complicating Elric's situation is that he's in love with Cymoril, sister of said usurper, and that Yyrkoon has consigned Cymoril to a mystic sleep. Elric makes alliances with human generals to mount an attack on Imryrr, but before the attack begins, Elric infiltrates the city alone, as if a part of him wants to play Douglas Fairbanks and spirit the damsel away. Yet Yyrkoon's defenses are too good, and Elric must resort to betraying his own people to human beings. And it's all for nothing, because during the hero's duel with his enemy, his beloved is slain as well.

The story is effective melodrama, but reading it this time out, I found it a little too stage-managed. Not does Elric betray his people and lose his lover, he and the humans are later attacked by avengers from the sacked city-- and sure enough, Elric betrays his human allies for his own survival. And not only is he mystically bound to a sword that eats the souls of those it slays, he calls upon dark gods to empower him by promising them "blood and souls." I can understand why an author writing in the 1960s might want to get away from the simon-pure archetype of many fantasy-heroes, But Moorcock saddles his hero with so much adversity that all the hero's torments begin to feel contrived. Elric is a lot like Shelley's Victor Frankenstein. No matter what good he tries to do, it always turns out badly, and most of his life is spent wallowing in misery while being unable to save anyone.

The second story, "While the Gods Laugh," is the only other one I would rate with high mythicity. Elric, roving from place to place, is hired as a bodyguard by a beautiful woman, Sharilla, who wants to find a magical book owned by the dead gods of their world. Elric agrees to the mission, stating that he wants to know if there exists any divine forgiveness for a sinner such as he. On the way to collect the book, the two are joined by a sardonic fellow named Moonglum, who in many stories will become Elric's sidekick, providing a degree of humor impossible for the gloomy albino. I'll skip past the various perils the trio encounter, though it's worth mentioning that Elric and Sharilla sleep together on the way. The denouement is almost identical to that of "City," in that Elric feels utterly alienated at being unable to discover some "surcease of sorrow." The solipsistic hero will win no prizes for the way he ignores Sharilla's possible feelings for him, though she sees his lack of reciprocation and remains silent.

The other three stories are more like standard sword-and-sorcery perils, with various incidents of moping and grousing. In "Stealer of Souls," Elric accepts a commission from avaricious merchants seeking to destroy a noble enemy, but only because the latter is in league with a wizard with whom Elric shares an enmity. All of the characters are depressingly paper-thin here. In "Kings of Darkness," Elric and Moonglum accept the job of escorting beauteous Queen Zarozina to her kingdom, but the trio gets waylaid in another realm, whose rulers struggle with sibling rivalry and a "curse of the undead." In "The Flame Bringers," Elric's totally gotten over the loss of Cymoril and is shacked up with Zarozina, but her kingdom is threatened by a barbarian tribe with command over an enslaved wizard and his fire demons.

The lesser stories are about on the level of your average D&D scenario. Given Moorcock's reputation, I'm rather depressed to see so few characters with even enough depth for good melodrama. Though Robert E Howard wrote his share of bad stories, even the crummy tales show a passion for vivid if simple characterizations. Moorcock's attitude toward heroic fiction seems like that of Alan Moore. Both creators became emotionally invested in heroic characters in their younger years, but later became intellectually embarrassed by the bad repute of adventure-fiction. Thus both wrote many tales in which traditional heroic figures were downgraded in some way, whether for satire or in the name of a vague "anti-heroism." While admitting Moorcock's breakthrough achievement, I feel like he never tapped the full potential of his own concept, and thus I'm not sure I'll read any more soul-stealing stories in the near future. 

WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 2

One of the most famous tropes of the superhero idiom is that of "strength concealed by weakness," or, alternately, "strength evolving from weakness." -- DJINN WITH SUMMONER, PT. 1.

The two  DJINN essays focused largely on characters who make use of "genie-like" entities to do their fighting for them. In some cases, like that of Ahmad from the 1924 THIEF OF BAGDAD and the eponymous star of Disney's ALADDIN, the main character demonstrates high dynamicity, at least for an ordinary human with no special powers. This dynamicity does not depend primarily on having a great weapon, like the aforementioned Richard Mayhew, but on a mastery of otherwise ordinary weapons.

There are a handful of exceptions. One is Michael Moorcock's sword-and-sorcery hero Elric. Born an albino, Elric is only able to fight normal human opponents thanks to sorcery. As  the panels from CONAN #13 show, Elric can only match Conan's formidable strength by the use of his sword Stormbringer, which gives him  both physical power and fighting-skill.

Despite his dependence on his sword, Elric is still a megadynamic hero in a way that, say, Hubert Hawkins of THE COURT JESTER is not. Elric may not be able to fight without his sword,  but he must exert his own will to battle his enemies. Hubert's talents are thrust upon him by an outside manipulator, and so he remains at base a weakling even with a weapon. Stormbringer qualifies as a method of *interiorization,* which I defined as a situation in which "the hero's true, powerful self is concealed within him, and must be summoned from within." Magic potions are far more often used than magical weapons, ranging from the lotion that makes the classical Jason temporarily invulnerable to Popeye's spinach and Hourman's Miraclo pills.

Charms are even dicier than weapons. I've stated on other occasions that I consider Bram Stoker's DRACULA to be a combative novel, which implies that the starring vampire is opposed by other megadynamic forces, the vampire-hunters organized by Van Helsing-- or more specifically, the more physically prepossessing members of the coterie, mainly Jonathan Harker and Quincy Morris. Van Helsing, though not an active figure in the battles with Dracula, is the only member of the group who understands the undead's true nature, and so he's able to marshal such weapons as crosses and holy water against the Count. However, the power of these charms-- implicitly stemming from the power of Stoker's Catholic deity-- are not powers inherent in Van Helsing or any of his aides. The charms cannot be used without human hands guiding them, but the charms' power is not tied to the *will* of Dracula's antagonists. The megadynamicity of Stoker's vampire-hunters inheres not in their weapons, but in the personal fighting-skills of Harker and Morris in particular.

Thus, when the Van Helsing of the 1931 DRACULA wields a cross against his opponent, Dracula must yield, but he yields to the power of God, not to the power of Van Helsing.

Nevertheless, a vampire-hunter's *amplitude* may get boosted quite a bit by his daring or unconventional use of charms or similar devices, just as I demonstrated in WEAKLINGS Pt. 1 with respect to the Jack Burton character. In the 1958 HORROR OF DRACULA, As played by Peter Cushing, Van Helsing becomes a younger, more active man, who first stuns the Count by running along a table in spectacular swashbuckler-style in order to escape the vampire and expose him to the sun.

Moments later, Cushing uses a mundane object to make a cross. I'm fairly certain that Stoker never shows anyone stymie Dracula with a near approximation of a cross; I've always believed that the original Count was affected only by genuine religious icons. So Van Helsing is perhaps inventing an "allergy theory;" that vampries aren't affected by Christian supernatural forces but by their (the vampires') own allergic reaction to anything that even looks like a cross. Thus, even though Van Helsing neither receives power from a cross, nor channels any of his own through it, he does gain megadynamic status from his inventive handling of an otherwise mundane weapon.

Throughout the various works of supernatural horror, there are many other situations where a potential victim repels a monster with the help of supernatural forces that they summon through some charm or other medium, and once again, one can only determine megadynamicity on a case by case basis. For instance, at the conclusion of the 1932 MUMMY, the evil sorcerer Imhotep is foiled when a bolt of fire from the statue of Isis burns up the Scroll of Thoth and returns the mummy to the dust of his origins.

Isis, or whatever force is left of the once-popular deity,only intervenes in answer to the call of her former priestess Anck-es-en-Amon, currently occupying the body of a modern woman, whom Imhotep plans to kill. But there's no implication that either the priestess or her modern descendant have any power of their own; they only call up greater power that is not intimately associated with them, summoners who have no real contact with their djinns.

However, on occasion charms may be used as channels for inner power, rather than for external force. The obscure 1981 film JAWS OF SATAN looks, from this VHS art, much like the first image of Van Helsing seen above: a priest wielding the power of God through the instrument of the cross.

However, the script is more ambivalent about where the main character, Father Tom Farrow, gets his ability to fight demons. In this review I wrote:

Farrow certainly doesn't believe he's worthy of a visit from the Dark Lord himself, but in time, he finds out that he shares a special heritage. Back in the days when St. Patrick allegedly cast all serpents out of Ireland, one of Patrick's followers-- not the saint himself-- attracted the ire of the local druids. They cursed him and all his progeny to be slain by snakes, which were to be commanded by Satan himself in the form of a cobra-- or something like that.  

Though it's a ridiculous premise, I have to give the filmmakers props for the audacity of invoking ancient Irish curses to explain a bunch of hostile snakes. In the end, Farrow gets his Catholic moxie together, confronts the King Cobra with his cross, and exorcises it in a flash of flame. It's a poverty-row version of the EXORCIST exorcism, but I found that it does imply a greater conflict of supernatural forces, so that this cheapjack horror-film does become a combative drama. It helps that Farrow also isn't just any old priest, but someone with a special destiny and ancestors to avenge.

That "special destiny" is suggested in the climactic scene, where in my view Farrow seems to be pulling power out of himself, rather than down from heaven, in order to set his Satanic opponent on fire. So, like the Peter Cushing Van Helsing, Father Tom joins the company of the megadynamic elite for the way he combines his own strength with the charms of his faith.