“Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occultism was…heavily influenced by popular fiction, which often benefited from the generic fluidity that flourished at the chiasma of literary and Egyptological culture.”
-Dr Eleanor Dobson
For ages Egypt was regarded as a land of occult wisdom. In his Timaeus, Plato suggested that the Egyptians–the only people with knowledge of Atlantis and its fall–possessed the oldest historical records on Earth. Egypt, according to ancient Biblical commentators, was also where Moses acquired his esoteric knowledge. In the Italian Renaissance, tropes about Egypt’s secret arts were also incorporated into the concept of prisca theologia.
Proponents of this idea, which included some of Florence’s most famous intellectuals, such as Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, assumed the existence of a primeval theology that united the fundamental beliefs of enlightened pagans and Christians alike. The wisest or most famous figure in this sacred tradition was the legendary Egyptian sage, Hermes Trismegistus. For centuries writings attributed to Hermes, collectively known as the Hermetica, subtly enchanted the literary and artistic world like a garbled dream, altering and inspiring religious and cultural movements on both sides of the Atlantic.
During the Victorian era, which saw the rise of Egyptology as an academic discipline, new audiences were introduced to “Occult Egypt” through works of adventure fiction and romanticised news reports. According to Dr Eleanor Dobson, a lecturer in nineteenth-century English literature at the University of Birmingham, “the history of Egyptology is firmly tethered to explorations of the paranormal, encompassing psychical research, spiritualism, theosophy and contemporaneous occultism more broadly.” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dobson told The Thinker’s Garden, “Egyptology and the paranormal” became “twin interests”.
We caught up with Dobson to learn more about how Victorian “occulture” was influenced by popular conceptions of Egyptian esotericism. Her forthcoming book, Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology, has been described as the “first monograph study to bring literature into conversation with Egyptological culture”.
The Custodian: You’ve described how some Egyptologists, such as Howard Carter, often wove Gothic elements into their academic works. Was this always intentional or do you suspect that it also happened unwittingly?
Dr Eleanor Dobson: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the histories of modern European antiquarianism and Gothic fiction have significant points of overlap. Horace Walpole, who is often credited with writing the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) was (among many other things) an antiquarian. The tropes of the Gothic as the genre became established – eerie ruins and sublime landscapes, translations of archaic texts, patriarchs who hoard vast swathes of treasure, and the horrors of bodily decay – are just a small jump from the world of the antiquarians, who prized the unusual and the rare. Egyptology as it is still imagined – and indeed, marketed – today, relies on the same imagery: tombs carved into cliff-faces, mysterious hieroglyphic texts, pharaohs buried amidst gilded splendour, their remains richly and lavishly embalmed.
By the time Howard Carter wrote of Tutankhamun’s tomb, I think that the Gothic had become so culturally infused with perceptions of Egyptology (in the broadest sense of the word) that writing in a Gothically-inflected style may well have been second nature. Carter had read and admired the work of Giovanni Battista Belzoni, an Italian explorer, and former circus strongman. Belzoni, in his 1820 account, Narratives of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia, related being “surrounded by bodies, by heaps of mummies in all directions; which, previous to my being accustomed to the sight, impressed me with horror. The blackness of the wall, the faint light given by the candles or torches for want of air, the different objects that surrounded me, seeming to converse with each other, and the Arabs with the candles or torches in their hands, naked and covered with dust, themselves resembling living mummies, absolutely formed a scene that cannot be described.” Belzoni was a performer, previously making a living out of entertaining crowds with impressive feats of strength; we can read a bid to thrill an audience, equally, in accounts such as the above.
Carter’s famous account of first peering into Tutankhamun’s tomb through the hole he made “with trembling hands” relies on a very similar sense of atmosphere: “At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment – an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘Yes, wonderful things.’” We might read Egyptological texts, by the first decades of the twentieth century certainly, as a ‘genre’ long-informed by earlier Gothicised examples.
What’s interesting about Carter, though, is that we know he asked one of his friends for help with his accounts. Percy White, a novelist, worked with Carter on making his narratives more appealing to a general audience, and so some of the hyperbole here is certainly not only intentional but self-conscious. We are presented with a version of reality that has been massaged to amp up the Gothic thrills.
C: One of the most enduring tropes in film and literature is the “Egyptian dream” narrative, a point at which a protagonist either falls into a hypnosis-induced trance or embarks on a disembodied journey through Ancient Egypt. Is this something that was first popularised in the nineteenth century?
ED: This is another trope that is borrowed from earlier Gothic fiction, in which dreams prove prescient or offer access to heretofore unknown truths, with its roots stretching back to antiquity when drugs were employed as a means to grant access to seemingly mystical visions. The biblical account of Joseph’s symbolic dreams in Egypt also had a major influence on this device as it appears in fiction. You’re right: despite these precedents this really comes into its own in the nineteenth century.
Intriguingly, one of the earliest examples of the supernatural Egyptian dream trope in modern literature is a comic one: Théophile Gautier’s “Le Pied de Momie” (“The Mummy’s Foot”) of 1840, in which what is thought to be a dream is revealed to be a genuine supernatural vision at the story’s end. The narrator is denied a romantic union with an ancient Egyptian princess (whose mummified foot he has purchased for use as a paperweight), as the age gap between them is deemed by her family to be just too significant for the relationship to work!
A couple of decades later we see a rise in the use of trance rather than straightforward dreaming, as in Jane G. Austin’s “After Three Thousand Years” (1868) and Louisa May Alcott’s “Lost in a Pyramid” (1869), though often this is more sinister than enlightening, and poses a very real threat to the characters’ health (there are sometimes deadly consequences). Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (originally published in 1903 but reissued with a revised ending in 1912) also credits ancient Egyptian forces with the power of invoking catatonic states.
In later nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century texts the Egyptian dream trope is often combined with narratives that reveal that the dreamer was an ancient Egyptian in a previous life. Guy Boothby’s short story “A Professor of Egyptology” (1904) is perhaps one of the best examples in terms of ascertaining how developed the trope was by the earliest years of the twentieth century. In this text, an Egyptologist’s expertise is credited to his previous life in ancient Egypt (he himself has the power to entrance, and illuminates another character’s past life by showing her the mummified body of his former self).
This idea is so familiar to us now; in, for instance, the 1999 film The Mummy, Evelyn Carnahan has an instinctual knowledge about ancient Egyptian matters that surpasses that of the trained Egyptologists – the implication is that a previous incarnation in ancient Egypt contributes to this lived, if mostly subconscious, experience. I have found over the course of my work that so much of the narrativization of ancient Egypt and Egyptology today is rooted very firmly in nineteenth-century storytelling!
C: In your essay “A Tomb with a View: Supernatural Experiences in the Late Nineteenth Century’s Egyptian Hotels” you discuss how Western travellers saw Egypt’s hotels as “fantastical zones”. You also note that some hotels in Egypt and elsewhere actively tried to simulate a kind of magical “otherworldiness”. How were these occult aesthethics manufactured and why were they recreated in other settings?
ED: The entrance hall of the most famous hotel in Cairo, Shepheard’s Hotel, was inspired by ancient Egyptian architecture, boasting lotus columns, and painted in the vivid colour palette that was (and is) still visible on tomb and temple walls. One of the most interesting features of the hotel’s décor, in my opinion, was the installation of twin light-bearing statues on either side of the main staircase. These took the form of female pharaohs holding flaming torches, powered – like many of the hotel’s amenities – by electricity. The result was a space symbolic of cutting-edge technological modernity, and simultaneously a kind of fantastical, re-imagined antiquity, very much a stage-set for the indulgence of Orientalist fantasies. Places like Shepheard’s proved fitting settings for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ghost stories as a result, as authors capitalised on the enchanting effect of stepping over its threshold, suspended between times.
We see this kind of décor elsewhere in various settings in the nineteenth century, some for the purposes of entertainment (as in the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly, a versatile venue that hovered between museum and theatre), but also in Masonic temples, and, later in the nineteenth century, in the ritual spaces of occult groups such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Meeting spaces for London’s Freemasons even included hotels; the Great Eastern Hotel was one such meeting place, boasting an Egyptian temple in the basement. In the Golden Dawn’s rituals, too, pharaonic architecture was central to their symbolism. Black and white columns were painted with Egyptian motifs copied from the Book of the Dead. While the symbolism of ancient Egyptian religion was held to be genuinely magically significant in these contexts, it also served a similar purpose to its use in hotels: to create an enchanted atmosphere, evoking the grandeur and luxuriousness of the ancient Egyptian past.
C: Could you speak to us more about Egyptosophy and its demonstrable impact on Victorian-era occult and spiritualist groups?
ED: Absolutely! “Egyptosophy” is the term given by Erik Hornung to the idea “that the land of the Nile was the fount of all wisdom and the stronghold of hermetic lore”, a “sister” to the discipline of Egyptology. As Hornung relates, “Egyptology is all too hastily inclined to ignore anything having to do with Egyptosophy;” however, the history of Egyptology is itself firmly tethered to explorations of the paranormal, encompassing psychical research, spiritualism, theosophy and contemporaneous occultism more broadly.
Over lives and careers interests in ancient Egypt and the paranormal peaked and waned; often involvement in one seems to have invited engagement in the other. The poet and Spiritualist Gerald Massey developed a passion for ancient Egypt, studying under the tutelage of the British Museum’s then Keeper of Oriental Antiquities Samuel Birch. E. A. Wallis Budge, the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924, was heavily involved in the development of the modern myth of the mummy’s curse and was invited to a Ghost Club meeting in 1904 during which such narratives were discussed. The Egyptologist and anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith was the International Society for Psychical Research’s first President. And Battiscombe Gunn, who would go on to be Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford, with Alan Gardiner, translated an Egyptian stele at the request of the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. Egyptology and the paranormal were thus, for many, twin interests across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In spiritualist contexts, there are several accounts of scarab charms, mummy bandages and flowers supposedly from Egypt appearing in séances; hieroglyphs emerged during automatic writing, and Egyptian names appeared on slates. At times, ancient Egyptian spirits materialised or conveyed messages to the living sitters, and at others, ancient Egyptian relics were brought into the séance space to encourage these encounters. At other times, spiritualists attempted to hold séances in appropriate spaces for calling forth the ancient Egyptian dead. James Burns, who founded the Progressive Library and Spiritualist Institution, led a group to the Egyptian Court of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, a physical representation of ancient Egyptian art and architecture.
A séance in this unique setting unfortunately proved impossible due to the attention that they attracted amongst other members of the public. Burns’ group had loftier ambitions still: they speculated about the possibility of one day holding séances in the hidden chambers inside the pyramids themselves. The journalist W. T. Stead and amateur archaeologist Douglas Murray, both proponents of Spiritualism, also sought out places of scholarly Egyptological interest for paranormal activities. The pair requested to spend a night in the British Museum so that they could hold a séance to contact ancient Egyptian spirits while themselves surrounded by genuine Egyptian artefacts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their entreaty was denied.
As previously mentioned, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was heavily invested in ancient Egyptian symbolism. In fact, fractures in the Golden Dawn in the early twentieth century purportedly emerged as certain members were drawn to Egypt while others preferred Celtic symbolism. Those who favoured Egypt were aligned with Florence Farr who set up a “Sphere Group” in order to pursue their Egyptian interests. Farr produced a short book entitled Egyptian Magic, informed by researches at the British Museum (she even corresponded with the famed Egyptologist Flinders Petrie regarding this title), and wrote two plays with Olivia Shakespear, The Beloved of Hathor (1901) and The Shrine of the Golden Hawk (1902), first performed by Golden Dawn members for the Egyptian Society, a group with significant overlaps between its Egyptologist and occultist memberships.
According to the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, “all good archaeologists are expected to have had at least one occult experience, either personal or somebody that he knows.” While many Egyptologists today are cautious as to sharing these stories, I find that they are more common than you might expect!
C: Anything you’d like to share about your current and forthcoming projects?
ED: With my first book – Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology – now all wrapped up (pun intended!), I’m working on a second monograph, provisionally entitled Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt. I’m having a great time reading and researching for this book, looking at science-fiction stories about ancient Egyptians as space travellers, as well as, for example, the discovery of x-rays and their swift application to the examination of the mummified dead. I’ll be talking about another aspect of this research – into optical illusions, stage magic and imaging technologies – as part of the Edge Hill University Nineteen Seminar Series in March next year. More details are here – all are welcome, and the more the merrier!
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