Kingsport 1844: Byram Theological Seminary

33) Byram Theological Seminary
Division Street & Plum Street, West Side. Est. 1807

A) History
Occupying three buildings in the shadow of Central Hill, the Byram Theological Seminary was founded by Calvinists who fled Harvard College when the Hollis Chair of Divinity was awarded to liberal theologian Henry Ware. Originally espousing a more Puritanical streak of Congregationalism, the school was named after Enoch Byram, the seventeenth-century theologian born in Kingsport and widely considered the “right hand” of Increase Mather. Enoch’s son Price Byram gained notoriety as the magistrate who prosecuted the Kingsport Witch Trials of 1692. This confusion of Byrams remains a sore spot among the modern seminarians, who’ve become used to explaining—somewhat disingenuously—“No, Enoch Byram, the theologian.”

After a generation of strict Calvinism, the Byram Theological Seminary became embroiled in controversy when three of its founding members committed suicide the night of December 22, 1838. Soon after this tragedy, the school’s most celebrated missionary, Seneca Brattle, encouraged his Hawaiian congregation to fling themselves into a volcanic rift. Reverend Brattle, his white assistant, and eleven native converts were killed in the ritual suicide. For obvious reasons, the Seminary fell under intense public scrutiny. The press ran excoriating articles on Enoch Byram’s connection to the “bad old days” of witchcraft hysteria, the decreasing popularity of New Divinity theology, and the questionable moral character of Brattle himself, who had been accused of “barbarity” by a recent English visitor to his ministry. A series of internal debates known as the “Battle of Division and Plum” divided the faculty into traditionalists and progressives. The most vocal of the remaining Old Calvinists was the Professor of Rhetoric, Eliphalet Griffin; but he resigned in a huff after being lampooned by the Kingsport Chronicle. The younger voices prevailed, and the Seminary joined the Unitarian movement, rejecting the doctrine of predestination and supporting an Arian view of the Trinity (i.e., that Christ is subordinate to God the Father.)

Over the last few years, the Seminary has markedly distanced itself from its Puritan roots, embracing a more philosophical approach to Christianity and establishing a radical program of comparative religion. In an ironic recapitulation of its founding, the Seminary has come full circle, appointing a liberal theologian to the Harker Chair of Divinity—Reverend Robert Carter Pryce, a man whose humanist interpretations of the Bible are considered controversial even for Unitarians!

B) The Paxton Llanfer Library
The Seminary’s library is closed to the public, but anyone making a Regular Credit Rating or a Hard Religion roll may successfully petition to gain access. A donation of $10 or more also opens the doors. Named for a Byram professor who was killed during a mission among the Cherokee, the library has a commendable collection of religious works, including many sacred texts and commentaries pertaining to non-Christian faiths. The seminary’s dedication to missionary work may be seen in its many prominent translations of the Bible, including versions in Bengali, Hindi, Burmese, Hawaiian, and Cherokee. It also holds all twenty-one volumes of Robert Morrison’s impressive Chinese translation. There are no Mythos tomes—well, there was one, but it was burned after the suicides—but the library does possess Enoch Byram’s Of Eville Sorceries Done in New-England of Daemons in no Humane Shape (1695) and Ward Phillip’s Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-England Canaan (1801). The librarian is Thomas Drowne, a nervous academic who specializes in Oriental Languages. Drowne is friendly and inquisitive, but regards any requests for Mythos books with a raised, vigilant eyebrow—he’s had an earful of dark intimations about Miskatonic Valley from his cousin William Drowne, the minister of 4^th Baptist Church in Providence.

Research at the Paxton Llanfer Library

If a player character requests either Eville Sorceries or Thaumaturgical Prodigies, they are provided with fac-simile copies—the real manuscripts are too rare, and require a Hard Credit Rating roll and a Hard Religion roll to access. Fortunately, the copies are accurate and complete. Both books contain material on the Kingsport Cult.

Eville Sorceries
It takes an hour to skim through Enoch Byram’s abstruse, seventeenth-century prose and glean information on the “Kingsport Witch Culte.” A successful Library Use roll is rewarded with 1D4+1 percentiles in Kingsport Cult and obtains the following outline of the cult’s early days in Kingsport. Byram correctly claims the “witches” originated on the Channel Islands with Denys de Quetivel and Perotine Cauchés, however he mistakenly calls them Les bons pécheurs, or “The Good Sinners.” (The name “Covenant” is never mentioned.) Byram claims they built the Fishermen’s Chapel to worship Satan and practiced unspeakable orgies at the pagan stones on Kingsport Head—they reached these “inaccessible” heights by flying on the backs of black goats! In 1692 the witches were “smoked out” and condemned by the righteous people of Kingsport. Byram briefly describes the trial and subsequent hangings, brazenly justifying the accusations and showing no sympathy for the thirteen people executed by his notorious son, Price-of-Redemption Byram.

Thaumaturgical Prodigies
It takes thirty minutes to read the relevant material in Ward Phillip’s book. A successful Library Use roll is rewarded with 1D3 percentiles in Kingsport Cult. It’s immediately clear that Phillips relied on Eville Sorceries as his primary resource on the cult’s origins, as he repeats Byram’s material nearly verbatim. He then explains that the “children and disciples” of the hanged witches reformed the cult, inspired by the “diabolical” Father Rufus Cheever. After infesting St. Michael’s with their necromancy, they became increasingly brazen, raising the dead and calling forth “familiars” of great evil. After “communing with a green worm that bestowed the curse of everlasting life,” they were apprehended by Mayor Eben Hall and condemned to the Gravesend, which “put an end to this dreadful cult once and for all.”

Other Research
Because the Paxton Llanfer Library specializes in religious works, research on Dagon is easier to conduct here than at the Kingsport Public Library (Encounter 15). There’s also no obstreperous librarian to contend with, and Drowne is blissfully unaware of the Kingsport Cult’s connections to Dagon. Both Handout: Research on Dagon and Handout: Research on the Philistines may be obtained through a half-hour of research and a Library Use roll for each subject. To reflect the improved circumstances, each roll is awarded a +1D10 bonus die.

White Leviathan > Chapter 1—Kingsport 1844
[Back to “West Side” | White Leviathan TOC | Forward to Encounter 34, The New Railway Station]

Author: A. Buell Ruch
Last Modified: 26 November 2021
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
White Leviathan PDF: [TBD]