A British member of the Talamasca, he makes the study of witch families his specialty and receives the Mayfair files as his assignment.
Born in 1921, Aaron goes to the Amsterdam Motherhouse at the age of fifteen, although he does not become a member until 1943. His paranormal powers include moving objects by telepathy, veiling his thoughts from mind readers, and reading minds. Throughout the novels he is described as an “old world gentleman,” with white hair and hazel eyes. Exhibiting a priestlike bearing that exudes comfort and invites confession, he is “a man with a sharp melodious inflections of a British stage actor.”
In the Mayfair occurences he emerges as a heroic figure. After coming to New Orleans in 1958 at the age of thirty-six to see the Mayfair house for himself, he investigates Riverbend plantation and meets with Beatrice Mayfair and Richard Llewellyn, Julien’s former lover. He also goes to Denton, Texas, to contact Deirdre Mayfair, who is attending college at Texas Woman’s University. She begs him not to talk with her about Lasher, because she does not want to feed this evil spirit by giving him attention. She offers him the Mayfair emerald, but he fears that Lasher may kill him if he takes it. Deirdre then throws it into a pond and asks Aaron not to contact her again. Later, when she desperately needs help in keeping her baby, she gives Aaron’s card to her friend Rita Mae Dwyer. However, the card is ruined, and Rita can do nothing for Deirdre.
Aaron then returns to New Orleans and contacts Carlotta and Cortland Mayfair; he tells them the history of the Mayfair family. This prompts Carlotta to issue a restraining order on the Talamasca’s investigators, but Cortland meets with Aaron at a restaurant and attempts to poison him. Aaron successfully deflects this attempt on his life, but nearly succumbs to it later when Cortland hires someone in New York to do away with him. However, by alerting the Talamasca to the possibility that he has been poisoned, it saves his life.
He continues to monitor the Mayfair family, learning of Deirdre’s pregnancy and Rowan’s birth, but still not knowing that Deirdre wanted to contact him when Rowan was taken from her. He only discovers this many years later, when he meets Rita Mae Dwyer at the funeral of Nancy Mayfair. She tells him what she knows about Deirdre and the Mayfairs, and he records it all for the File. Plagued with guilt about Deirdre’s comatose condition, for he believes he might have been able to help her if he had known, he takes a piece of her clothing to a psychometric seer, who reassures him that Deirdre is existing is a state of bliss.
Aaron is ambivalent about contacting Rowan Mayfair. He realizes that, since she knows nothing about her origins, she may not know that she has the power to kill people, and may not want to discover it. However, he accidentally encounters Rowan when he visits Ellie Mayfair’s grave. He offers to tell her the Mayfair history and gives her his card. She refuses to speak with him, then grows annoyed when she sees him again outside Michael Curry’s house. He is there to try to talk with Michael about possibly joining the Order. Aaron then follows Michael to New Orleans.
Aaron asks Michael to go with him to the Talamasca house outside New Orleans and read the Files on the Mayfair Witches. While Michael is reading, Aaron attends Deirdre Mayfair’s funeral. On his way back to Michael, Aaron barely avoids a serious car accident when Lasher, who does not want Aaron to obstruct his plans for Michael and Rowan, appears to him on the road.
Although Aaron attempts to follow the Talamasca credo about watching and not being actively involved in a case, he gets drawn in. When Rowan and Michael clean up the First Street house, Rowan, who is grateful to him for giving her access to the Mayfair file, asks him to go through Julien’s books. She also gives him Marguerite’s jars and the witch dolls to send to the Talamasca. While attending Rowan’s engagement party, Aaron overhears tales told by the elderly Mayfairs who have seen “the Man.”
When Rowan argues with Aaron about Lasher’s nature, he is well aware that she is in danger of being completely seduced. “Don’t let him assume human from,” he insists. He offers moral arguments to Rowan, for he believes that Lasher would be an unnatural creature, “as alien from us as is a giant insect.” He warns Rowan that if she lets Lasher be born into a body, “the world will pay for it. You will be the mother of a disaster.” However, his arguments fail to convince her.
After Aaron dispatches Michael to confront Rowan and Lasher with only a medal of St. Michael to help him, Michael meets with defeat and Aaron feels guilty over his own passivity. He has had doubts before about the Talamasca’s passive stance, which he has told to Yuri Stefano, but now he seriously questions it. Soon he finds reason to be suspicious about the entire Order.
After Michael nearly drowns at First Street, Aaron takes a more active role in the Mayfair family. He grows attached to Beatrice, whom he soon marries. The Talamasca replace him on the case and order him to leave New Orleans. But the new investigators they send raise genuine alarm because of rough treatment and thievery on their part. When the Elders excommunicate them, Aaron tells Yuri that, although he is on of the oldest members of the Order, he is not an Elder and neither is anyone he knows. He wonders if her is being used for some occult purpose. Aaron warns the Mayfair family that the Talamasca may not be the scholars they seem and may have a dark motive for what they do. He feels the Mayfairs should no longer cooperate with them.
Aaron is ambivalent with regard to Lasher as well. Although he had not wanted Lasher to be born into physical from, when it happens, he is curious. He wants to talk with this creature. When Lasher shows up, Aaron restrains Michael from killing him, and sides with the Talamasca agents Erik Stolov and Clement Norgen, against whom he had previously warned the Mayfairs. When Michael kills them and Lasher, Aaron apologizes for his lack of aid. He admits that he believes that the Talamasca is not actually evil, but that Norgen and Satolov were defectors who took a mission into their own hands. He believes that someone will soon kill him, just as the doctors involved in this case were killed, and his premonition soon comes true; he is run over by a car near the Pontchartrain. The driver who killed him was a drifter hired for $5, 000 to do the deed.
Aaron’s death wakes Rowan from a remote depression; she had been mute for three weeks after giving birth to Lasher, then Emaleth. She goes to the morgue to look at his body and ascertains that he died instantly. (Rice actually visited the morgue in New Orleans to record the details or Rowan’s experience there.) Then she and Michael travel to London to meet Yuri and avenge Aaron’s murder. They discover the source in the romantic visions of one of Aaron’s closest Talamasca friends, Stuart Gordon, who had urged his protégés to help him obtain the Taltos Lasher. Aaron Lightner needed to be eliminated for what he knew about Lasher and their henchmen, Stolov and Norgen.
Back to Index of Talamasca Member Involved with the Mayfairs
Back to the Vaults
Talamasca Main Page
Home Page
