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They were devoted to ‘exploring the hidden reserves and dissociated states of consciousness’.

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By Dr. Eleanor Dobson
Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature
University of Birmingham

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Introduction

In Egypt … there was a regular class of dream- interpreters, men who undertook to explain what was prefigured by dreams. No one doubted that the phenomena were supernatural.¹

As this anonymous author observes in an 1861 issue of Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine All the Year Round, popular nineteenth- century views of ancient Egypt attributed the belief in dreams imbued with encoded meanings to this civilisation, along with an understanding that these symbolic visions might be interpreted by magical means. The well- known episode in the Bible’s Book of Genesis in which Joseph predicts the future by interpreting the dreams of the Egyptian pharaoh (and others) was enormously significant in entrenching these long- standing associations not just in Christian culture but across the Abrahamic religions. While elsewhere in the Bible Egypt was depicted as a mysterious country, whose wise men boasted oracular abilities rivalling those of divine origin, Joseph’s remarkable mind powers, in contrast, were temporarily bestowed upon him by God, facilitating his rapid rise to power in Egypt.² These God- given gifts saw Joseph surpass even the mystical might of ‘all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof’ who cannot interpret Pharaoh’s dreams in Genesis.³

On 11 January 1913, a dramatic retelling of the story of Joseph in Egypt – entitled Joseph and His Brethren – opened in New York’s Century Theatre on Broadway. This play is noteworthy for an interesting digression from the scriptural story familiar to the Victorians and Edwardians, however, in its juxtaposition of Joseph’s divine interpretative abilities with the occult mind powers of Potiphar’s wife, the bewitching Zuleika who, in the Bible, is not even given a name, let alone powers akin to Joseph’s. Both her physical attractiveness and keen intellect (specifically, her knowledge of the occult arts) are remarkable enough to inspire ‘strange tales’.⁴ In Zuleika’s room, smoky with incense and decorated with ‘curious instruments of magic’, she sits before ‘a great globe of crystal in which weird changing lights and colours dimly come and go as she speaks’.⁵ Zuleika ‘stares fixedly’ at the crystal ball as if in a trance, a stage direction reproduced by the original actress to assume the role, Pauline Frederick (1883–1938), in a photographic portrait sold as postcards (figure 1).⁶ Far from the nameless seductress renowned only for her bodily temptations, Zuleika is reimagined as a powerful sorceress whose beauty is matched by her cerebral power, and whose occult abilities rival Joseph’s own.

Joseph and His Brethren was written by the prolific British playwright Louis N. Parker (1852–1944). The play enjoyed a successful run in New York – directed by Parker himself – with another production opening in London later that year, premiering on 2 September 1913 at His Majesty’s Theatre.⁷ As Angie Blumberg has shown, the minor biblical figure of Potiphar’s wife was fleshed out by mid-Victorian writers, coming to portend the ‘complex, sexually aware female character[s] ’ imagined as hailing from ancient Egypt at the fin de siècle.⁸ Blumberg reads in earlier examples of this character the ‘mediati[on of] her sensuality through an elevated intellect’.⁹ Parker’s reinterpretation of the wife of Potiphar follows suit, the playwright granting her knowledge in such spheres that associate her with sometimes controversial topics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century psychology. Zuleika attempts to read the present and the future from the crystal ball ‘without moving; speaking as if unconsciously’.¹⁰ It is clear that it is the power of Zuleika herself – her ‘soul’s sight’ – and not that of the orb that reveals the images.¹¹ At one point she declares that ‘the storm in [her] soul’ is making the mystical pictures cloudy and indistinct; it is her own emotional volatility and inability to maintain the calm of the trance that renders the crystal ball nothing more than a ‘useless toy’ on this occasion.¹² Nevertheless, such an instance is presented to us as anomalous; in the photograph of Frederick in role, Zuleika, at her crystal- gazing apparatus, is seated and elevated, indicating tranquillity and a sense of authority. The crystal ball’s positioning atop the head of a decorative serpent recalls the snake’s place in mesmeric and hypnotic writings as an example of an animal that could induce a trance state in its prey.¹³ Zuleika’s outstretched palms and her fixed gaze indicate the calm stillness required for divination, emphasis-ing both the significance of the hand and the eye, the locus of the transferral of power for the mesmerist and the fixed point of concentration for the hypnotist.

Zuleika’s alignment with medical and psychical science is also emphasised in Parker’s script. Her later command to Joseph during her attempted seduction of him parallels the typical instructions of a stage mesmerist or hypnotist, rather than the biblical femme fatale. Instead of ‘[l] ie with me’ – her order in Genesis – she instead directs him to ‘[l]ook into mine eyes’.¹⁴ While this revision is, on the surface, less sexu-ally threatening, Zuleika’s command is still put to the purposes of her attempted seduction of Joseph. The playwright clearly differentiates his version of the story from others through the embellishment of the character of Potiphar’s wife, however, bestowing upon her – as far as I can ascertain, for the first time – parapsychological abilities. Parker’s reimagining of the Egyptian seductress sees her aligned with contemporaneous popular representations of ancient Egyptian characters who wield the kinds of mind powers that were theorised, tested and described by medical doctors, psychologists and occultists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than elaborating as to Joseph’s abilities, or else those of the famed ‘wise men’ of Egypt, Parker transfers a rival power to the ancient Egyptian woman, transforming Zuleika’s character from a two- dimensional, spurned would- be adulteress into an adversary to be reckoned with. The significant role of women in the magical revival along with women’s increasing – if somewhat slower – infiltration into the medical profession makes Zuleika a provocative, and thoroughly modern, choice of hypnotist in Parker’s play; Zuleika can be read as part of a sisterhood of ancient Egyptian sorceresses who populate literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By the fin de siècle, trance, hypnosis, telepathy, along with other forms of potentially troubling mind powers, were common themes in popular literature, with these abilities regularly imagined as being put to immoral ends.¹⁵ Pamela Thurschwell suggests H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886–7), George du Maurier’s (1834–96) Trilby (1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) as prime examples of such narratives.¹⁶ While these novels’ antagonists are all coded as ‘Eastern’ to some extent, it is noteworthy that one of the four – Marsh’s Beetle – is Egyptian, with Haggard’s Ayesha, though of Arab descent, having lived, thousands of years prior to the novel’s events, in ancient Egypt. It is here, according to the novel’s sequel – Ayesha: the return of She (1904– 5) –that she had been trained in the art of clairvoyance (also known as ‘second sight’ in both occult and stage- magical contexts) by ‘a famous magician’ in ‘the court of the Pharaoh’, ‘half charlatan and half seer’.¹⁷ By the final decades of the nineteenth century, ancient Egypt had indeed come to represent matchless cerebral faculties, especially those which trespassed into supernatural territory. As Roger Luckhurst notes, ancient Egyptian characters in Gothic fiction of the fin de siècle tend to be blessed with superior mental abilities which not only grant prophetic dreams, but also the power to access higher planes of being, to induce trance states in themselves and others, and to communicate via telepathy.¹⁸

While it was in the literature of the late nineteenth century that such ideas proliferated, we have already encountered earlier tales such as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845) that made comparisons between the ancient Egyptians and modern notions of remark-able mind powers. In Poe’s burlesque, a reanimated mummy imparts ‘that the manœvres of Mesmerism were really very contemptible tricks when put in collation with the positive miracles of the Theban savans’.¹⁹ Mesmerism – named after German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734– 1815), who theorised that disruptions to the flow of an invisible fluid from one body to another caused all manner of illnesses – dates to the eighteenth century. Mesmer believed that he could transfer electrical or magnetic energy through ‘passes’ (‘long, sweeping movements of the hands’), ‘stares, and pointing with charged wands’, all of which purportedly exerted power to alleviate the subject’s symptoms.²⁰ While Mesmer’s theory was widely rejected by his fellow scientists, ‘it nonetheless was to flourish throughout Europe as a medical treatment and cultural phenomenon’, formalised by a network of societies based on the structure of Freemasonry.²¹ Part of mesmerism’s appeal was its occult flavour: as Nicholas Goodrick- Clarke observes, ‘Mesmer himself enhanced the cul-tic atmosphere of his sessions with an aura of mystery; the rooms were bathed in a soft light, and he wore robes embroidered with occult symbols’, clearly fostering an atmosphere of ancient arcane knowledge at the expense of cutting- edge medical science.²² It followed, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, that individuals put into a trance state through this process were alleged to have demonstrated powers beyond normal human faculties: among them were the ability to ‘read thoughts’, along with ‘prophecy and clairvoyance’.²³

Mesmerism had a wide following at the time of Poe’s text, though it diminished as a popular interest towards the end of the nineteenth century as scepticism regarding its authenticity increased.²⁴ This coincided with the rise of hypnotism, a mid-nineteenth-century ‘medical response to mesmerism’ as Alison Winter puts it, which understood the power to slip into trance states as belonging to the subject themselves, rather than an external mesmerist; ‘[d]ivested of its fluidist explanation … animal magnetism’ (as ‘mesmerism’ was also termed) ‘was ushered … as hypnosis into the realm of modern psychology’.²⁵ It was in ‘the 1880s and 1890s’ – ‘the "golden age" of hypnotism research’ – that ‘hypnotism enjoyed an unprecedented medico-scientific legitimacy’, which necessitated that its practitioners acknowledge the perceived continuation between mesmerism and hypnotism while clearly enforcing the boundaries between the two practices.²⁶ Nevertheless, hypnotism could not entirely escape the ‘supernatural light’ in which fin-de-siècle scientific enquiry was so often ‘cast’.²⁷ According to Martin Willis, ‘[t]he scientist added to this increasing paranormality; professionalisation was creating a scientific culture that was more and more unintelligible for a lay audience’. ‘[W]ith a lack of understanding’, Willis asserts, ‘comes a sense of mystery and occult’.²⁸

Mesmerism’s legacy continued among occult and supernatural enthusiasts too, whose interests were also transferred onto spiritualism and, later, theosophy.²⁹ Spiritualism inherited much from mesmerism: both the mesmeric séance and the spiritualist séance were understood to have relied upon trance states for the manifestation of their desired effects. Both also benefitted from a shared sense of occult lineage; ‘[t] he phenomena of modern spiritualism demonstrate[d] interesting similarities with ancient theurgy (mediums, trance states, altered voices, spirit communication)’ as, of course, did mesmerism before it.³⁰ Retrospective understandings of mesmerism to have originated in antiquity secured its appeal to those invested in occult power, and deterred those with an aversion to notions of pagan magic; the astronomer Frances Rolleston (1781– 1864) claimed to be ‘afraid of mesmerism, for it has been employed in the service of idols and evils; the magicians of Egypt … evidently used it’.³¹ Just as spiritualism built upon the success of mesmerism, so too theosophy and other esoteric groups branched off from the spiritualist movement. This evolution goes some way in explaining the continuation of interest in trance states across the nineteenth century, which was then made all the more tantalising by its investigation, in the century’s closing decades, by a new breed of scientific professional: the psychologist.³² Whether a subject for study by the physicist, psychologist, or psychical researcher, telepathy, trance and hypnosis provoked popu-lar fascination, encouraged by promises made by alternative religious groups that used ancient Egypt as evidence that esoteric mental abilities were within reach.³³ At the end of the nineteenth century, the Golden Dawn adept Florence Farr commented ‘that a great part of Egyptian Magic’, which Golden Dawn initiates and other occult devotees hoped to be able to access, ‘lay in a species of Hypnotism, called by later magicians, Enchantment, Fascination, and so forth’.³⁴

Thus, when we attend to the image of Zuleika at her crystal ball, we read in her outstretched hands – not touching the ball itself but hovering over it as if making ‘passes’ – a cultural echo of mesmerism. Yet we also see, in her fixed gaze, Zuleika bringing about a trance state in herself rather than anyone else, aligning her occult activities also with hypnotism. While distinctions were made between the practices (most vehemently, at the turn of the century, by medical practitioners), it was not uncommon for the two practices and terminologies to be conflated. Of the texts mentioned by Thurschwell as typical fin- de- siècle novels involving mind powers, for instance, The Beetle – with its ancient Egyptian antagonist – uses the terms ‘mesmerism’ and ‘hypnotism’ interchangeably. In Parker’s play, Zuleika likewise appeals to an intermingling of the two; she is equally suggestive of the mystical mesmerist, increasingly denigrated by modern scientists, and of the skilled hypnotist, a champion of medical advancement, albeit one that hinted at (at least in the popular imagination) occult power.

This article uses Zuleika as a springboard for an exploration of extraordinary mind powers attributed to or stimulated by ancient Egyptian characters in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Theosophy and other forms of Eastern-inspired occultism contributed to the imagination of Egyptian characters’ supernormal mental abilities, aligning them with contemporaneous esotericism, but also the modes of modern scientific enquiry that sought to interrogate the powers of the mind that such practices claimed to develop. Haggard’s She and Cleopatra (1889), Marsh’s The Beetle and Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903; 1912) have attracted plentiful scholarly attention, and bringing these well-discussed texts into conversation with lesser- known writings – including Florence Carpenter Dieudonné’s Xartella (1891), Lucy Cleveland’s short story ‘Revelations of a Moorish Mirror’ (1896), and Thomas Jasper Betiero’s Nedoure, Priestess of the Magi: an historical romance of white and black magic (1916) – suggests the prevalence of such themes across a wide range of literature, from novels to short stories, and in publication venues that range from mainstream periodicals to more specialist occult imprints.

In discussing these texts and contexts, this article focuses on the eye as the bodily organ central to depictions of abnormal powers (itself one of the most widely reproduced Egyptian symbols). The eye is both mystical hieroglyph, and site of occult power, but also a vulnerable point of potential psychological penetration exploited by the ancient Egyptian antagonists of fin-de-siècle fiction. I investigate links between snakes, cats and the occult eye in fiction, before examining how mirrors, crystals and flames are used as surfaces that aid in the production of trance states. Beyond the eye, ancient Egyptian bodies are repeatedly imagined across this fiction to be dangerously seductive, inspiring passive, automatic states in their victims. This article culminates in a reading of the British writer Sax Rohmer’s The Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), informed by the theories and practices of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who understood nightmares of ancient Egypt as representative of sexual threat. The sexual depravity that the ancient Egyptian antagonists invite across the fictions considered in this article – from adultery in Joseph and his Brethren to the non-consensual interspecies sexual activity in The Beetle – highlights an unresolved tension that characterises these figures at the fin de siècle: while wielding parapsychological powers far in advance of those of their potential victims, they are also symbolic of sexual and moral degeneracy, afflictions of particular interest to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychology.

Egyptian Mind Powers

As Richard Noakes observes, ‘many of the architects of the academic discipline of psychology – notably Granville Stanley Hall [1846–1924] and William James [1842–1910] – were involved in psychical research’, and ‘in many quarters, mesmerism, spiritualism and psychical research were pur-sued as new forms of psychology or sciences of the mind’.³⁵ Psychological pioneers, including Freud, collected antiquities and employed archaeological metaphors when describing the mind in their publications.³⁶ This was the case, too, in spiritualist contexts; in séances and in fictional representations of spiritualist activity, whether they are understood to be ‘born of the deepest stratum of the psyche’ or the true spirits of the ancient Egyptian dead, in the context of the séance ‘Egypt’s ghosts claim to develop the brain’s supernatural sensitivities’.³⁷ The Egyptian spirit in such contexts is often ‘akin to the modern psychologist, penetrating the depths of the subject’s mind and bringing to light relics hitherto hidden’, meanwhile enhancing the individual’s parapsychological abilities: ‘Egyptian artefacts and spirits encourage clairvoyance and psychometry’.³⁸

Beyond spiritualism, other communities key to the magical revival – the theosophists and the Golden Dawn foremost among them – were devoted to ‘exploring the hidden reserves and dissociated states of consciousness revealed during magical rites’. As with nineteenth-century psychologists, occultists ‘ma[de] sense of such phenomena’ by ‘conceiv[ing] the mind as a series of levels or strata, an analogy legitimated by the scientific prestige of Victorian archaeology [and] geology’.³⁹ By the end of the nineteenth century the word ‘Egyptology’ had come to be synonymous with ‘esotericism’ or ‘occultism’ in some contexts;⁴⁰ Egypt had ‘emerg[ed] as the locus associated with the deepest depths of the mind’ and ‘symboli[sed] the darkest depths of a universal psyche’, something as evident in fiction as in the metaphors employed by psychologists, psychical researchers and occultists.⁴¹

Maria Fleischhack indeed records that ‘Egyptian characters’ in Edwardian fiction, ‘through trance states, possession, and other psychically inflected psychological means’ ‘reveal layers of the cultural and psychological strata of the Western protagonists’.⁴² As she points out of Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, ‘all Western characters in the novel … suffer from symptoms of psychosis – a loss of physical and mental control, hallucinations, delusions, and catatonia’ – ‘reflect[ing] anxieties specific to the context of contemporary psychological and theosophical research’.⁴³ Fleischhack also identifies that in several such stories the act of falling asleep ‘denot[es] a narrative shift into the realm of the unconscious’, a device that predates Edwardian examples, being evident, too, in some of the earliest mummy fiction including Théophile Gautier’s ‘Le Pied de momie’ (1840).⁴⁴

A triad of interests evidently existed in the nineteenth century, and spilling over into the twentieth, that encouraged imaginative leaps from medical study of the mind to studies of the occult and to studies of ancient Egypt. When the British physician T. W. Mitchell (1869– 1944) assumed the position of President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1922, such subjects were evidently so interwoven for him to declare in his presidential address that:

If we try to tell how modern medicine has arisen from the therapeutic practices of primitive peoples, a great gap in our knowledge must be admitted. The scientific medicine of to- day has a more or less uninterrupted history which we can trace back to Greek medicine in the fifth century B.C.; but beyond that all is darkness. The transition from the highest development of thought in savage races to the beginnings of Greek culture forms an almost blank page in the history of mental evolution; but it is probable that progress from the practice of the Magic Age to the practice of scientific medicine has taken place by way of religion, and the priest- physician of early Egyptian and European civilization may be regarded as the connecting link between the medicine man as magician and the physician of today.⁴⁵

We see authors eager to fill this ‘almost blank page in the history of mental evolution’ in a wealth of fictions in the decades prior to Mitchell’s statement, though ancient Egyptians are often depicted as outshining the modern physician in their magical- medical powers rather than simply functioning as a missing link in a narrative of linear progress. Ancient Egyptians in the now little-known author Marie Hutcheson’s novel Taia: a shadow of the Nile (1890) – published under the pseudonym Mallard Herbertson – boast abilities that mark them out as remarkably parapsychologically attuned, for instance. Despite ‘not [being] deeply versed in the lore of the diviners of dreams’, and drawn to ‘the practical’ far ‘more than the mystic’, the priest Phanes experiences preternatural dreams.⁴⁶ One of these dreams, which reveals the scheming Atet sitting on the royal throne, is implied to be a glimpse of current events at a significant geographical distance (a power encompassed in the broader category of ‘second sight’ and which would come to be known as ‘telegnosis’ once this more medically inflected term was coined in 1911). This may seem a subtle shift from biblical understandings of the ancient Egyptians as using dreams to interpret the future that predate this example by millennia, though it is a crucial one: rather than predicting events to come, ancient Egyptians are understood, by the late nineteenth century, to use periods of unconsciousness to enjoy far broader psychical access to other times and places: not just to the future, but also to the past and present. We have already seen ancient Egyptians travel through time and space via scientific and magical means, and fictions such as Hutcheson’s saw ancient Egyptians facilitate such journeys exclusively through the power of their own minds, without need of external apparatus. The unconscious mind, and the potent abilities accessed during dream states, renders the brain (usually of an ancient Egyptian but occasionally the mind of a subject in whom an ancient Egyptian awakens latent powers) occult device par excellence.

To take a better-known example, in Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, dreams appear to enhance characters’ natural telepathic abilities. The novel begins with the protagonist, Ross, dreaming of the day that he and his love interest Margaret first met, reliving the details of the memory only to be awoken by a message from Margaret herself. This may indicate that Margaret – who, unknown to her at the beginning of the novel, has a physical and psychical double in the ancient Egyptian queen Tera – has already had some kind of unusual psychic effect on Ross, awakening in him a previously latent parapsychological power to mirror her own visions ‘beyond mortal sight’.⁴⁷ Margaret’s own dreams, she later reveals, allow her access into Tera’s world, seen through ‘sleeping eyes’.⁴⁸ The present, as well as antiquity, is accessible to Margaret in her sleep. At one point, she awakens ‘suddenly’, sensing that her father is ‘in great and immediate danger’.⁴⁹ Thus, in Stoker’s novel, dreams break down barriers of time and space, allowing Margaret the ability to visualise or at least detect current and past events separate from her immediate surroundings.

Dream- like visions in Stoker’s novel also reveal the normally invisible spiritual world. Although Ross has no recollection of ‘being asleep or waking’, he is aware of the astral body of the tiger that Tera keeps as a pet.⁵⁰ Ross describes thinking that ‘all the real things had become shadows – shadows which moved’.⁵¹ He sees the tiger’s silhouette, and is aware that the creature ‘had sentience’, hearing it ‘mew’.⁵² Although this scene does not appear to be a dream in the traditional sense, to Ross it feels like a ‘nightmare’, having all of ‘the horror of a dream within a dream, with the certainty of reality added’.⁵³ The tiger’s astral body is not evident while Ross or any of the other characters are fully conscious; it is instead only in this semi- conscious state that enhances clairvoyant abilities that the spiritual becomes visible. The conscious sight of the open eye and the dream- visions of the closed eye become indistinct while under a supernatural ancient Egyptian influence.

Conceptions of such powers of the mind during unconsciousness were bolstered by historical evidence provided by a wealth of ancient Egyptian texts, newly translatable since the decipherment of hieroglyphs. After major breakthroughs by scholars including the French philologist Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) in 1822, modern Europeans began to read the ancient Egyptian language for the first time.⁵⁴ Archaeological sources revealed that trance states were used in healing, and in these conditions and others, including sleep and coma, the ka (the part of the soul believed by the ancient Egyptians to depart the body in death) was considered to be liberated.⁵⁵ It is likely that the insights that newly translatable Egyptian texts offered to modern Egyptological enthusiasts, along with the interest taken in mind powers by groups central to the magical revival, and in contemporaneous science, led to individuals reassessing their understandings of the significance of Egyptian- inflected dreams or visions. While key cultural figures such as Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) had recorded their drug-induced visions of ancient Egyptian iconography earlier in the nineteenth century, by its close such experiences were understood to be far more meaningful than symbolically empty hallucinations brought about by intoxication.

After the novelist Marie Corelli’s death, for example, her lifelong companion Bertha Vyver (1854–1941) published Corelli’s memoirs, which included an account of ‘a curious happening’: a mysterious clairvoyant encounter with an ancient Egyptian entity during sleep.56 Corelli had been given a necklace made (in part) of Egyptian beads by Sir John Aird (1833–1911) likely in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and had promised to lend it to the actress Constance Collier (1878–1955), who was to play the part of the Egyptian queen in a 1906 production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.⁵⁷ Vyver recalled that Corelli was contacted by the necklace’s original owner in a dream, warning her against the necklace being used in the production. A document dating to around 1910 held at Kresen Kernow suggests that Corelli interpreted this figure not simply as a ghost of an ancient Egyptian woman, but Corelli’s own former self as she had existed in a past life in ancient Egypt.⁵⁸ Corelli made her excuses, and Collier wore a substitute necklace. Sure enough, ‘Cleopatra, in a passionate scene with Anthony, tore the necklace she then wore from her throat and it fell in fragments on to the stage’.⁵⁹ With the spectral cautioning in this account clearly credited with the survival of Corelli’s necklace, it is that Corelli attached considerable meaning to experiences within dreams, perhaps even believing that those regarding ancient Egypt had more significant truths to impart than others.

Corelli was not the only writer who contemplated their receptiveness to the supernatural – and to communications from past selves – during states of unconsciousness. Vivid dreams with Egyptian elements experienced by H. Rider Haggard led him to consider that he had mental access to scenes from past lives.⁶⁰ Describing the scenes as ‘dream-pictures’ or ‘mind- pictures’, Haggard claimed to have experienced these visions ‘between sleeping and waking’.⁶¹ Although he professed to believe they were the product of ‘subconscious imagination and invention’, he nevertheless considered the possibility that they were in reality ‘memories of some central incident that occurred in a previous incarnation’ or ‘racial memories of events that had happened to forefathers’. Haggard described one of these scenes as set in ancient Egypt, in which he saw himself ‘in quaint and beautiful robes … walking at night up and down some half- enclosed and splendid chamber’ in ‘a great palace’. He was startled to see an attractive young woman who, although frightened (probably at the prospect of the pair being discovered together), embraced him in a moment of passion. Haggard seemed fairly eager to establish his position in this account as sceptical, though he did note that when he related these visualisations to the eminent physicist and ardent spiritualist Oliver Lodge, Lodge seemed to attribute more significance to them (nevertheless, also reminding Haggard of his imaginative gifts as a novelist).⁶² Even without any definitive conclusion as to the significance of these dreams on Haggard’s part, it remains noteworthy that he at least entertained the notion that during sleep he was receptive to images and scenes from the past, inherited from his ancestors or experienced during a previous incarnation.⁶³ With Corelli and Haggard reporting similar dreams, visions of ancient Egyptians (with implications for these individuals’ understandings of potential previous incarnations) were shared by two of the most popular authors of the late nineteenth century.

Theosophy was certainly responsible for the proliferation of narratives in which modern individuals are proposed to be reincarnations of ancient Egyptians (both fictional and purportedly factual as in Corelli’s and Haggard’s cases),⁶⁴ a truth supposedly often realised during trance or dream states. With its emphasis on ancient Egyptian and Indian mysticism, theosophy revitalised concepts of unusual Eastern mind powers in the late nineteenth century. Helena Blavatsky professed that powers of ‘astral travel, mesmerism, or various forms of psychic sensitivity’ perfected by the ancients could be harnessed through specific programmes of study.⁶⁵ It was in a theosophical publication, in fact, where the term ‘parapsychology’ appeared for the first time, coined by Max Dessoir (1867–1947), the German psychologist, amateur magician, and member of the Society for Psychical Research. Dessoir first used the term in 1889, in a German theosophical periodical called Die Sphinx, which ran from 1886 to 1896. Featuring an Egyptian sphinx with luminous eyes on its cover – glowing eyes being a popular visual shorthand for occult powers of the mind around this time – Die Sphinx was published by various theosophical organisations over its decade in print. Nonetheless, for several years it was run by the Munich Psychological Association, rooting it in medicalised understandings of the mind as much as in the occult (its other contributors included the French physician and psychological pioneer Pierre Janet [1859–1947]).

Theosophy has been understood to have made a significant impact on Haggard.⁶⁶ Diana Basham argues that in She – one of the most iconic novels of the late nineteenth century to deal with the possibilities of heightened powers of the mind – Haggard draws upon theosophical doctrine, specifically Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877). Robert Fraser, meanwhile, reads Ayesha as a figure directly inspired by Blavatsky.⁶⁷ Blavatsky herself evidently thought highly of the novel. In The Secret Doctrine (1888) she asks, ‘has the rising novelist Mr. Rider Haggard also had a prophetic, or rather a retrospective, clairvoyant dream before he wrote She?’⁶⁸ Blavatsky clearly felt that Haggard’s novel subscribed to the same fundamental ideologies as theosophy, but she also implies that She was based on historical events, the details of which, lost to all but Haggard, were accessed through his singular clairvoyant abilities. Haggard revealed how he had written the novel in a six-week period, so fast that his process appeared to be a kind of automatic writing, recalling spiritualist techniques endorsed by the eminent spiritualist, member of the Society for Psychical Research, and co-founder of the London Spiritualist Alliance William Stainton Moses (1839–92), who gave this process the name ‘psychography’. Through ‘psychography’, ‘automatic writing’, or ‘spirit writing’ as it was also known, spiritualist mediums would purportedly convey written messages from the other side during séances.⁶⁹ Psychologists countered with the suggestion that such textual productions might be derived from the subconscious, rather than from the spirits;⁷⁰ the novel made a considerable impact upon the thinking of Sigmund Freud in relation his understanding of his dreams, and thus his subconscious.⁷¹ Nevertheless, Haggard’s novel was, according to Blavatsky, a text about telepathy and written via telepathy. It is noteworthy that Blavatsky speculated that Haggard received this secret history in the form of a dream, during a state of unconsciousness. Speculating that ‘[o] ur best modern novelists, although they are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, nevertheless begin to have very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams’, Blavatsky suggested that Haggard’s telegnosis was the result of ancient methods of unconscious clairvoyance.⁷²

Intriguingly, Blavatsky was not alone in suggesting that Haggard received the story via supernatural means. Describing Haggard and himself as ‘only telephone wires’, the author Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) told his friend, ‘you didn’t write "She" you know … something wrote it through you!’⁷³ Kipling, somewhat ambiguously, suggested a higher power channelled the novel through Haggard by means of a telepathic communication. Kipling makes much the same claim as Blavatsky, though his invocation of the mechanics of the telephone cloaks his occult suggestion in the language of science and technology. Kipling’s metaphor was, however, one common to spiritualist and other esoteric contexts. In describing Haggard in mechanical terms, he refers to the modern technologies imagined – both literally and figuratively – in narratives of entranced bodies, and the mind powers that bring about automatic states. This, as we shall see, featured not just in Haggard’s work on Egyptian minds and bodies, but across the writings of his contemporaries.

Bodies and Machines

She was dedicated to Haggard’s friend, Andrew Lang (1844–1912), who would later go on to serve as President of the Society for Psychical Research, and features the term ‘telepathy’ to describe Ayesha’s powers, a word coined by the Society for Psychical Research’s founder Frederic Myers (1843–1901) just four years prior to the publication of the final instalment of She, as it was originally serialised in The Graphic.⁷⁴ Indeed, in the early volumes of the Society for Psychical Research’s Proceedings, articles on clairvoyance, telepathy and trance far exceed those dedicated to other subjects, such as spirit manifestations.⁷⁵ Stories of telepathic communication travelled back from the furthest corners of the British Empire, including Egypt, which had been under British control since 1882. Telepathy was seen as closely related to mesmerism and its more respectable successor, hypnotism, along with trance states entered into by psychic mediums, and was a particularly contentious subject in late nineteenth-century science. Often theorised as akin to communication via radio waves, some considered telepathy a mysterious way of transferring information that would one day be fully understood and put to productive ends, like the technologies that shared its etymology: the telegraph and the telephone. Certainly, scientists as eminent as Lodge, William Crookes and Nikola Tesla entertained this view. The mind powers attributed to Haggard’s ancient and formidable Ayesha are thus expressed with the up-to-date terminology used in scientific investigations of seemingly supernatural powers, and to abilities that were speculated to be conceivably integrated into medical understandings of the mechanics of the mind in future. As She aptly demonstrates, the ancient and modern were being united through Haggard’s use of sources relating to enquiries into parapsychological powers; he contextualises such allusions both in relation to historical details gleaned from Egyptological texts, and new scientific terms to describe paranormal phenomena.

In She, Ayesha can project images that are accessed telepathically from the minds of others, or of places with which she is familiar as they currently exist, onto the surface of water within a ‘font-like vessel’.⁷⁶ Although Haggard’s use of water as a surface for scrying is historically accurate in that it was a genuine ancient Egyptian magical practice, Horace Holly, the novel’s narrator, describes the image on the water’s surface as a ‘photograph’.⁷⁷ Such a descriptor aligns the picture only not with technologies that promised the impartial processes of scientific observation, but which was ripe with occult possibilities, being a technology employed in both spiritualist image- making and in psychical research. The likening of the magical image to a photograph situates it within distinctly mechanical contexts, emphasising the imagery of modernity to align the text – and Ayesha’s supposedly ancient magic – with the contemporary world of Haggard’s readers.⁷⁸ The overall implication is that such practices are by no means supernatural to Ayesha: as telepathy itself might one day be understood in terms of the brain’s mechanics, so are her telepathic powers described, in this instance, in strikingly technological terms.

The British writer C. J. Cutcliffe-Hyne’s (1866– 1944) short story ‘The Mummy of Thompson- Pratt’ (1898) literalises the use of technologies in attempting to access the minds of others. Set at the University of Cambridge – the same university where Holly works in She – with its reputation as a place of cutting- edge scientific innovation, and also the birthplace of the Society for Psychical Research, the variety of occult enquiry it draws upon is gentlemanly and scientifically rigorous. Cutcliffe-Hyne’s narrative centres on the Egyptologist Gargrave, who attempts to learn of ancient Egypt by hypnotically connecting a mummy to its living descendant, the titular Thompson-Pratt. Gargrave’s methods involve the employment of modern technologies including the phonograph, which he uses in tandem with ‘a hypnotic influence’ produced via a technique vaguely described as involving ‘something more’ than ‘the usual way’, in order to manifest – and, crucially, to capture – his results.⁷⁹ Although his method utilises up-to-date equipment and a more reputable variety of trance from a medical perspective – hypnotic rather than mesmeric – there is clearly an element of the ancient to his technique, gleaned, one assumes, from his Egyptological studies: he uses a mysterious green powder that produces a flame when mixed with water to bring an end to Thompson-Pratt’s unconscious state. Along with Thompson-Pratt’s assertion that ‘I’ve a notion those old Egyptians were a lot ahead of us in some branches of chemistry’, and his entreaty that if his ancient Egyptian ancestor ‘let slip something in the natural science line which is strange to us today’ he might be informed after the fact, the overall presentation of the experiment is one in which modern and ancient knowledge are brought to bear on each other.⁸⁰ With the mummy and its hypnotised descendant laid out on the floor, the unconscious face of the living Thompson-Pratt appears ‘dead’, while the mummy’s reveals ‘some flicker of life’.⁸¹ When the mummy begins to speak of his earthly experiences, it is with Thompson-Pratt’s voice, suggesting a psychical borrowing of the mechanics of Thompson-Pratt’s vocal cords, channelled through the mummy’s mouth as if via telephone. The ancestral link between the two individuals is paramount. It is not simply the hypnotic trance that allows the mummy to speak, but a deeper connection, one that is suggested to be more prosaically scientific in nature: hereditary, rather than spiritual. Perhaps drawing upon theories of organic memory which, according to advocates such as Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), allowed ‘past impressions’ to be passed down through families, and calling to mind Haggard’s speculations that his dreams of ancient Egypt had been experiences of a direct ancestor, shared bloodlines appear to be vital to the success of the experiment.⁸² That the telephone is also evoked in Ernest Richard Suffling’s ‘The Strange Discovery of Doctor Nosidy’ (1896), with which I opened Victorian Alchemy, suggests this device as one often imagined as having occult applications in a broader span of Egyptian-themed fiction of the 1890s. While the electrical instrument is unnamed in Suffling’s tale, the illustration by Paul Hardy shows the equipment to resemble a telephone, albeit one that also requires a hypnotic – as well as electrical – connection.

The contemporaneity of ‘The Mummy of Thompson-Pratt’ is emphasised by the employment of a phonograph to capture the mummy’s message; the significance of this piece of equipment is stressed by its positioning in the foreground of an accompanying image by the illustrator T. W. Holmes (1872–1929). Through the phonograph recording, the experiment might theoretically be verified, although as the mummy speaks both in Thompson-Pratt’s voice and in English, such a record would surely be read by anyone not in attendance at the original demonstration as a hoax. The phonograph was associated with both occult and scientific contexts; as Steven Connor records, both ‘the telephone and the phonograph’ ‘quickly entered the language of spiritualism’, as had telegraphy before them.⁸³ Indeed, in this case, the phonograph is used to record a message relayed by the dead, an uncanny task made even more unnatural by the contrast between the antiquity of the mummy and the newness of the apparatus. The tale evokes Thomas Edison’s original speculations as to how his invention would be put to use: to record ‘the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family’.⁸⁴ It also foreshadows Edison’s efforts to create apparatus to converse directly with the deceased in the early 1920s.⁸⁵ Tales such as Cutcliffe-Hyne’s, but also those as early as Poe’s ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, were the precursors to the design, if not the realisation, of electrical machines that would make the dead speak. Like the physical body, which seemed to have been reduced to its mere mechanics by the hypnotist or mesmerist, leaving the entranced brain free for higher – potentially occult – functions, machines become increasingly important in facilitating access to ancient minds in these literary contexts, encouraging a sense of scientific innovation and impartial observation when it comes to measuring and recording occult phenomena.

Crucial to a historical understanding of the parallels drawn between bodies and machines in such contexts is the British physician William Benjamin Carpenter’s (1813–85) criticism of supernatural explanations for ‘a range of abnormal mental phenomena including hysteria, somnambulism, "trance" behaviour, mesmerism … and table turning’.⁸⁶ Carpenter held that such states and their seemingly occult productions were exclusively the result of external suggestion, which rendered the individual who was ‘subjected to such involuntary actions’ little more than an automaton.⁸⁷ The effects of mesmerism and hypnotism were often described in similar terms of ‘automatism’ and mechanics, which were likewise employed by spiritualists and psychical researchers.⁸⁸ Victorian spiritualists ‘sought to defend the conventions of the spirit circle by appealing to analogies between séance bodies and scientific instruments’.⁸⁹ The American spiritualist medium Leonora Piper (1857–1950), to take one striking example, would describe herself, when in a trance state entered into via hypnosis, as ‘the Machine’.⁹⁰ As Noakes has established, such language was used by those who investigated such phenomena; the Society for Psychical Research ‘appropriated physiologists’ and psychologists’ language of mental machinery’, nonetheless ‘le[aving] a place for spiritual agencies’.⁹¹ Thus when we encounter bodies rendered little more than shells by trance states in nineteenth- century fiction, the automaton is a decidedly ambiguous figure, as much suggesting hypnotic suggestibility as conceptualised by modern medicine as it does a genuinely occult state in which the passive brain and body might be entered into by another entity.

This ambiguity is certainly at play in Richard Marsh’s 1897 novel, The Beetle. Marsh’s eponymous villain initially establishes control over its first victim, Robert Holt, with the power of its voice alone. Holt is disgusted by his own ‘passivity’ and ‘impotence’ while under the Beetle’s influence.⁹² He reports that he moves ‘mechanically’ and ‘automatically’, and he and the novel’s other characters consider him to be ‘more like an automaton than a man’.⁹³ The unmanned entranced subject is left powerless to resist when the Beetle enters his body through his mouth in a moment that reads like an act of possession: ‘horror of horrors! – the blubber lips were pressed to mine – the soul of something evil entered into me in the guise of a kiss’.⁹⁴ It is through this forced oral penetration that Holt’s body is controlled when it is outside of the Beetle’s immediate vicinity. In this state, the Beetle can direct Holt through London’s streets without losing its power over him, maintaining constant physical as well as mental dominance. Another male character describes how the Beetle transforms Holt into a ‘fibreless, emasculated creature’, not just under-scoring how the androgynous Beetle itself troubles gender, but equally suggesting that men are transformed by its powers of possession into the passive, receptive bodies of (usually female) spiritualist mediums.⁹⁵The Beetle manipulates its victims by overwhelming their psychological selves, leaving them little more than physical machinery. Likewise, Josephus, who falls under the hypnotic influence of the Horus Stone in George Griffith’s novel The Mummy and Miss Nitocris (1906), moves ‘with the motions of a mechanical doll’.⁹⁶ Such descriptions are common to depictions of the mesmeric or hypnotic trance, though their employment in relation to the mind powers of Isis worshippers and the parapsychological effects of ancient Egyptian relics see modernity and antiquity collide.

It is perhaps unsurprising that at a time when ancient Egyptian mind powers – whether used by ancient Egyptian characters or modern Egyptologists – were imagined as bringing about ‘automatic’ states, reanimated mummies were themselves being conceptualised as simply bodily mechanisms controlled by external powers, at odds with earlier depictions of reanimated ancient Egyptians who retain their identity from when they were alive. The foremost of these texts is Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859– 1930) short story ‘Lot No. 249’ (1892). Crucially, it is ancient Egyptian knowledge and not any more modern scientific discovery, recorded on ‘an old yellow scroll of papyrus’, which ‘contains wisdom … nowhere else to be found’, that allows the tale’s antagonist – Edward Bellingham – to ‘use the creature as an agent’.⁹⁷ ‘[W]ield[ing] a weapon such as no man had ever used in all the grim history of crime’, Bellingham revives the mummy in order to guide it to commit murder on his behalf.⁹⁸ We can read Doyle’s reanimated mummified individual, known only by its auction number – the ‘Lot. 249’ of the story’s title – as a body emptied of its soul, and therefore at risk of being controlled by external forces. As Noakes records, ‘spiritualism’s controversial claims’ included the idea ‘that the spiritual body survived the death of the natural body which was itself a mere "machine" ’.⁹⁹ Doyle had attended séances and participated in telepathic experiments as early as 1887, and was to join the Society for Psychical Research the year after the publication of this short story, having founded the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research in the interim. Doyle’s mummy is all machine. Its ‘blazing eyes’ visible through the dark as it pursues the tale’s protagonist – this luminance pictured as narrow beams of light in an illustration by the American artist William T. Smedley (1858–1920) – marks it out as an occult body, but instead of suggesting the power of this particular individual, the light symbolises the psychical connection between it and Bellingham that transforms it into aggressor.¹⁰⁰ While the method of Bellingham’s control of the mummy is never made clear, the implication is that it is derived from Bellingham’s Egyptological study, rather than any modern scientific knowledge. The light-emitting eye is usually emblematic of mind powers: mesmerism, hypnotism and telepathy, and so might conceivably indicate a telepathic link between Bellingham and the mummy, in a similar vein to the Beetle’s control of its victims. With Doyle’s mummy, however, there is little suggestion that any of its original individuality is retained.

Less well- known, but predating Doyle’s text in its imagination of mummified bodies as automata, is the American writer Florence Carpenter Dieudonné’s Xartella (1891). This short, fantastical text opens with a mysterious ‘old stranger’ asking the narrator whether he believes in the titular Xartella, ‘a deathless creature … who had been seen, for centuries, in the vicinity of [the] pyramid’ that they are visiting.¹⁰¹ The stranger speaks of events that took place 12 years ago, which he believes will convince the narrator that Xartella really existed. In the stranger’s account, the eponymous character is ‘more than human’; ‘[h] e might be a thousand years old; ten thousand years old’, with a face that ‘might have borrowed its repose from the Sphynx’.¹⁰² That Xartella has remarkable mind powers is soon apparent in the stranger’s assertion that ‘[w]hen the gaze of those wondrous deep eyes struck mine I could not move’.¹⁰³ The stranger is only able to breathe again once eye-contact is broken. Xartella uses his powers (speculated by the stranger to be hypnotic in nature) to coerce a young woman, Artossa, into fleeing her home with him; that she is entranced is indicated in the lack ‘of expression in her fixed blue eyes’, and her falling to the floor ‘like an inanimate object’ ‘in a stupor of unnatural slumber’.¹⁰⁴ The stranger recounts how Xartella commands ‘[a] bevy of beautiful slave girls’ to tend to Artossa, and as they approach he ‘notice[s] how singular was their step, their feet click[ing] like machines’.¹⁰⁵ Such descriptions illustrate how those under Xartella’s control are robbed of their individuality, the clicking sound made by the repetitive movements of their bodies suggestive of the telegraph or typewriter. ‘[R]eturned [to] the somnambulistic state’, Artossa walks with ‘the same clicking step’.¹⁰⁶ As in Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 249’, in Xartella mind powers dating back to ancient Egypt are used to exert total control over the bodies of others, which offer little resistance when confronted with such arcane forces.

Xartella’s heinous plan is revealed in the interior of a pyramid, where he conducts experiments on the dead in an attempt to bring them back to life. All that he has been able to achieve, however, is the reanimation of their bodies; without a soul, the bodies are mere biological mechanisms. The stranger recalls the horrifying sights of the experiment: ‘a living mummy’ that ‘moved its eyes and head but did not speak’, and ‘a beautiful youth’ – a former mummy restored to perfect physical health – with ‘great vacant eyes’ that ‘stared’ ‘sightlessly’, who Xartella ‘drop[s] like a limp doll upon an inanimate collection of the same sort of humanity’.¹⁰⁷ Some of these beautiful automata are evidently selected to serve Xartella: we retrospectively recognise the slave girls with their clicking feet to be reanimated mummies, as are Xartella’s dancers who ‘mov[e], in a mechanical accord, with discordant music’ until Xartella releases his control over them and ‘[l]ike dolls they … drop in their places’.¹⁰⁸ The repetition of the doll simile underscores Xartella’s total physical control of these bodies, the sinister way in which he ‘plays’ with them, and their disposability. Artossa’s true purpose is made clear at this point: under Xartella’s hypnotic influence she must sacrifice herself in exchange for souls to inhabit the bodies of the reanimated dead. The scheme is foiled by Xartella’s spurned wife (restored to life by the stranger), who brings about both her and Xartella’s deaths, drawing the tale to a close.

Across these fictions, mechanical bodies and passive minds rendered malleable through mesmeric or hypnotic trance states find counterparts in modern machines – the telegraph, telephone, typewriter and the phonograph – while a figurative precursor is suggested in Haggard’s envisaging of telepathically transferred pictures as photographs, in which thoughts are visualised as mechanically reproduced images. Automatic bodies can be controlled like machines once ancient Egyptian mind powers are used to infiltrate the brains of these experimenters’ subjects: with its wire- like neurons and electrical impulses, the brain suggests itself as yet another piece of technology, at present incomprehensible by modern science in its seemingly supernatural abilities, but fully within the understanding of the ancient priests, whose knowledge is either encoded on scrolls or else still known to ancient Egyptians who have survived for millennia. Across these fictions, and in culture more broadly, as we shall see, it is the eye that is often conceived as the point at which mind and body might be simultaneously penetrated, and the occult site from which occult mind powers are most often imagined as emanating.

Serpents, Cats, and the Occult Eye

In She, Ayesha’s mysterious mind powers are imagined as embodied in her unusual eyes. As in mesmeric demonstrations, which often involved prolonged, continuous eye- contact between the mesmerist and their subject, Ayesha exerts control through the power of her stare, which incapacitates and restrains ‘more strongly than iron bonds’.¹⁰⁹ The mesmeric trance, understood to be the result of electrical or magnetic forces, clearly impacted upon Haggard’s depiction of his ancient character. Her ability to ‘blast’ her opponents is described as being the result of ‘some mysterious electric agency’, one which seems to be expressed corpore-ally when her eyes blaze with ‘an awful light … almost like a flame’.¹¹⁰ Indeed, the physical sensation of meeting her gaze in direct eye- contact is described as if experiencing ‘some magnetic force’ or a kind of electric current.¹¹¹ The unusual way in which Ayesha’s eyes produce light (perhaps itself of an electrical variety) is in keeping with a broader late nineteenth- century literary trend whereby the strange eyes of the ‘criminal hypnotist’ were emphasised as a physical marker of the danger they posed.¹¹² This, however, is a trait common not just to the hypnotist or mesmerist, but to the telepath and the clairvoyant. The literary characters most commonly held aloft as examples of the embodiment of anxieties surrounding psychological forces, but particularly those connected to occultism in the late nineteenth century – Svengali, Dracula, Ayesha, the Beetle – all have eyes that are in some way marked out as abnormal. Living inside her tomb- like cavern, surrounded by mummies, and herself ancient and swathed, Ayesha is mummy- like, with her dark eyes imbued with magical power calling to mind the enlarged eyes painted onto sarcophagi in stylised representations of the dead.

Beyond contemporaneous parapsychology, Haggard drew upon classical and Egyptian mythology concerning the power of the eye, particularly that involving snakes. Ayesha’s gaze is described as ‘more deadly than any Basilisk’s’.¹¹³ Reptilian, and often depicted as a variety of snake, the basilisk is just one of the serpentine creatures to which Ayesha is connected, in a series of references that go well beyond the traditional trope of the snake as symbolic of feminine evil. Lucy Hughes-Hallett notes that the word ‘basilisk’ comes from the Greek meaning ‘little king’, used to refer to the ancient Egyptian uraeus or the cobra, symbolic of royalty, which the Greeks thought could kill with a single glance.¹¹⁴ The Egyptian goddess Wedjat, who was both the cobra worn by royalty and the personification of the symbol more commonly known as the Eye of Horus, was one of two Egyptian snake goddesses who were said to kill with the power of their gaze.¹¹⁵ Both Wedjat and another female snake deity, Renenutet, were often represented in the form of a snake with a woman’s head or a woman with a snake’s head.

Indeed, a snake with a woman’s head appears in Haggard’s later work of fiction The World’s Desire (1890), which he co-authored with Lang, and is perhaps a feature derived from Haggard’s Egyptological reading. In this sequel to Homer’s Odyssey, Haggard and Lang imagine an evil sorceress queen, Meriamun, who awakens an occult embodiment of her own sin to magnify her power. Taking a jewel carved into the shape of a serpent, Meriamun breathes life into the amulet and awakens a creature with a snake’s body and her own face. In this context, while the snake has the appearance akin to that of the goddesses Wedjat and Renenutet, and is described as emitting ‘from its eyes … a light like the light of a flame’, suggestive of her powerful occult gaze, this is by no means a holy light.¹¹⁶ In fact, that the luminance is described as ‘witch- light’, along with various references to evil, establishes that this entity is as much biblical serpent as it is Egyptian deity.¹¹⁷ Meriamun already has impressive psychical powers before invoking the serpent – she has dreams that reveal the past and future, and she claims to ‘know of the magic of … Queen Taia’, a real ancient Egyptian monarch (whose name is now most frequently spelled in English as ‘Tiye’) who is invoked in several texts dealing with the Egyptian occult.¹¹⁸ Haggard and Lang cast Meriamun – and, implicitly, Tiye before her, as a psychic medium; she poisons one of her ladies in waiting who catches the eye of the pharaoh before boasting that she can ‘drag her spirit back ere she be cold, from where she is, and … force knowledge from its lips’, a chilling claim which she goes on to fulfil.¹¹⁹ While the novel was not especially well received – likely due to its archaic style – Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) praised the text in his correspondence with Lang, noting in particular that ‘he is "thrilled and chilled" by Meriamun’.¹²⁰

While the text was first serialised in The New Review between April and December 1890, a single- volume novel edition of the text being published in autumn of the same year, it was not until 1894 that an edition of the text appeared that featured illustrations. This later version of the text captured Meriamun in an image by Maurice Greiffenhagen (1862–1931) that saw Haggard and Lang’s villainess become part of a broader group of Egyptian snake- women in fin-de-siècle visual culture, which included the American artist Charles Allen Winter’s (1869–1942) painting Fantasie Égyptienne (1898). Greiffenhagen’s illustration (figure 2) captures an erotic view of the sorceress, in which she gazes into the eyes of the snake bearing her own face. Meriamun’s and the serpent’s eyes appear white as if lacking pupil and iris, conveying an occult quality to this gaze – a suggestion of the glowing ‘witch- light’ to which Haggard refers. That Meriamun reads as a kind of successor to Ayesha is underlined in this image. Not only are Ayesha and Meriamun both women whose occult power is imagined both in terms of their luminous eyes and in their connection with snake imagery, but the coiling of the snake around Meriamun’s waist evokes the ‘double- headed snake of solid gold’ that secures Ayesha’s diaphanous drapery about her body in She.¹²¹ With her predatory gaze, ‘hissing’ tone and sinuous form partially concealed in white, filmy gauze adorned with serpents, Ayesha’s association with snakes – particularly when contextualised alongside Meriamun – functions in more complex symbolic ways that convey a sense of serpentine eroticism and imply deadly power expressed through unblinking eyes.¹²² As a woman whose eyes can kill, or else render the onlooker powerless to move, she is a Medusa- like figure.¹²³ Medusa herself, sometimes also depicted wearing a belt of two intertwined snakes, seems a likely source of inspiration for Haggard’s semi-divine adversary with a fatal gaze.¹²⁴

Snakes were also of particular interest to understandings of mesmerism across the nineteenth century. The cover of the occult novel, The Hand of Fate; or, a study of destiny (1898) by the Irish palm-reader William John Warner – more commonly known as Cheiro – combines imagery of ancient Egyptian architecture with electrical forces emerging from a giant hand, evocative of the visualisations of mesmeric force (figure 3), which was customarily depicted as emerging in lightning bolts from the practitioner’s fingertips. The snake in one of the lower corners, struck by electricity, reflects the novel’s imagining of a family curse manifesting as a venomous snake growing out of a man’s abdomen, but also, even before the novel is opened, denotes content associated with animal magnetism. Snake charming was often cited as evidence of the veracity of the mesmerist’s ability to induce trance states in non- human animals. Snakes were also credited with their own mesmeric powers, which they supposedly used to entrance their prey.

While snake charming was especially popular with Western tourists travelling to Egypt and India in the nineteenth century, in Britain experiments into the possibility of mesmerism between humans and other animals in medical contexts often made use of domesticated species. The physician John Wilson’s (d.1858 or 1859) Trials of Animal Magnetism on the Brute Creation (1839) outlines how he performed his experiments on cats, all of which (in his account, at least) seemed especially susceptible to his mesmeric techniques. The year prior, on 24 April 1838, the physician John Elliotson (1791–1868) had performed an experiment to see whether a young girl could be mesmerised by a cat. While it transpired that the cat did not have mesmeric powers, the occasion was still historically significant; when the anatomist Herbert Mayo (1796–1852) reported on the afternoon’s experiments in The London Medical Gazette, one of his accounts featured the first use of the word ‘ "trance" to describe the mesmeric sleep’.¹²⁵

The trope of the ‘magnetised’ animal was reversed in the 1890s for comic effect in a cartoon published in Punch (figure 4), imagining the ‘Horrible Result of Using the "Egyptian Fur-tiliser".’ The image illustrates the effects of using ‘180,000 mummified Cats … as Manure’, the ground-up mummified cat bodies having been used to fertilise farmland in Britain.¹²⁶ The feline remains in the Punch cartoon have evidently been worked into the soil, and the ghosts of the mummified cats emerge out of the ground to face the farmers who have employed their sacred bodies for so mundane a purpose. Their spirits maintain the appearance of their mummified bodies, some with pharaonic headdresses to add a further comic element, these being reserved for Egyptian royalty. In fact, their tightly wound bodies and the way in which they rear up gives them a serpentine appearance. Most noteworthy of all are the beams of light that appear to emerge from the eyes of the spectral cats. The light appears to mimic depictions of occult forces working between the bodies of mesmerist or hypnotist and their subjects; here, this is no longer a power exerted by one human over another, or by one human over a non-human animal. Ancient Egyptian animals are imbued with sophisticated psychical powers, which they use to strike terror into the farmers, most of whom fall backwards in fear, while one sprints off into the distance.

The French writer Anatole France’s (1844– 1924) short story ‘M. Pigeonneau’ (1887), rarely discussed in Anglophone scholarship, is one in which, converse to the mesmeric experiments earlier in the century, a cat is used successfully as a hypnotic agent. In this text, an Egyptologist is hypnotised, and again the eye is highlighted as the sight of the transference of power.¹²⁷ Dedicated to his friend Gilbert-Augustin Thierry (1843–1915), who was heavily involved in the Occult Revival in France and who had recently published his own text on the subject of hypnotic suggestion,¹²⁸ France’s tale opens with an Egyptologist – the eponymous Pigeonneau – delivering a lecture on the beauty regime depicted in an ancient image of an Egyptian woman. As he speaks, his view alights upon a man in the audience whose beard lends him an Assyrian appearance, and Pigeonneau is struck by the fixed gaze of the man’s green eyes. He finds that ‘malgré le plus violent effort, je ne parvins pas à arracher mes regards des deux vivantes lumières auxguelles ils étaient’ (‘despite the most violent effort, I did not manage to tear my eyes from the two living lights to which they were mysteriously riveted’), the description of the eyes as lights immediately establishing the man’s occult power.¹²⁹ Pigeonneau finds himself working ‘[s]ous l’influence d’une force étrangère, inconnue, irrésistible’ (‘[u]nder the influence of a strange, unknown, irresistible force’) as he speaks, deviating from his paper and passionately improvising on the subject.¹³⁰ The man – later revealed to be a physician called Diaoud – is introduced as employing ‘le magnétisme, l’hypnotisme et la suggestion’ in order to cure ailments, and accompanies the beautiful Annie Morgan, who also has striking green eyes and to whom Pigeonneau similarly finds himself drawn. Pigeonneau himself seems to be more psychically intuitive after this event and when, after three days of productive work, the bell rings announcing a visitor, his now keen senses pick up that ‘la secousse imprimée au cordon avait quelque chose d’impérieux, de fantasque et d’inconnu’ (‘there was something about the shock imprinted on the cord that was imperious, whimsical, and unknown’).¹³¹ The bell announces Morgan’s arrival, and she relates that she and Pigeonneau were both ancient Egyptians in previous incarnations (a claim that is never verified). She had attended his lecture in the hopes of making an Egyptian costume that she desires to wear at a fancy- dress ball as historically accurate as possible. Inviting him to her home to consult with her on the costume, Morgan’s revelations are so eccentric that Pigeonneau plans not to attend, and when he is surprised to find himself compelled to, Morgan reveals that ‘j’ai des secrets pour me faire obéir’ (‘I have secrets by which I make myself obeyed’).¹³² Having received Pigeonneau’s advice as to the historical authenticity of particular details, Morgan makes one more unexpected request: that Pigeonneau write her a story. This he does, after receiving from her a gift of ‘un petit chat’ (‘a little cat’) whose name is Porou, ‘fort ressemblant … à ceux de ses congénères dont on trouve en si grand nombre, dans les hypogées de Thèbes, les momies enveloppées de bandelettes grossières’ (‘very similar … to those of his species which one finds in such great number, in the burial chambers of Thebes, the mummies wrapped in coarse strips’).¹³³

With Porou in attendance, Pigeonneau finds himself distracted and unable to work, until the deadline for the story approaches when, he relates, suddenly ‘j’écrivis tout le jour, avec une prodigieuse rapidité’ (‘I wrote all day long, with amazing speed’).¹³⁴ The Egyptologist becomes automatic writer, and when he finishes the tale he observes that ‘la chambre n’était éclairée que par les yeux phosphorescents de Porou’ (‘the room was lit only by Porou’s phosphorescent eyes’). The cat’s luminous eyes – all that is visible in the dark once the automatic writing is complete – is a direct link back to the luminous gaze of Diaoud and, indeed, the occult light-giving eye so common to individuals who sport parapsychological abilities in fin-de-siècle fiction were anticipated by the belief, centuries prior, that cats’ eyes emitted light at night that they had captured during daylight hours, an ‘unsettling’ quality that only reinforced their perceived connections to demons at this time.¹³⁵ The revelation, at the story’s end, that Pigeonneau wrote the story for Morgan under Diaoud’s influence, purely so that she could ridicule him, emphasises the remarkability of Diaoud’s powers, as well as the trivial ends to which his abilities are put:

Ni Bernheim, ni Liégeois, ni Charcot lui- même n’ont obtenu les phénomènes qu’il produit à volonté. It produit l’hypnotisme et la sug-gestion … par l’intermédiaire d’un animal … il suggère un acte quelconque a un chat, puis il envoie l’animal … au sujet sur lequel il veut agir. L’animal transmet la suggestion qu’il a reçue, et le patient, soul l’influence de la bête, exécute ce que l’opérateur a commandé … Miss Morgan … fait travailler Daoud àson profit et se sert de l’hypnotisme et de la suggestion pour faire faire des bêtises aux gens, comme si sa beauté n’y suffisait pas.¹³⁶

Neither Bernheim, nor Liégeois, nor Charcot himself have obtained the phenomena that he produces at will. He produces hypnosis and suggestion … through an animal … he suggests some action to a cat, then he sends the animal … to the subject on whom he wants to act. The animal passes on the suggestion it has received, and the patient, under the influence of the beast, does what the operator commanded … Miss Morgan … makes Daoud work for her profit and uses hypnotism and suggestion to make fools of people, as if her beauty was not enough.

France compares Diaoud’s abilities to those of several high- profile medical practitioners: Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919), remembered for his contributions to the understanding of hypnotic suggestion; Jules Liégeois (1833–1908), who worked on hypnotic suggestion and sleep-walking in relation to criminal activity; and Jean- Martin Charcot, who believed that susceptibility to hypnosis went hand in hand with hysteria. That Diaoud’s powers exceed those of the most famous French doctors investigating hypnosis is one thing; for the effects that he produces to be achieved through a suggestive cat renders the scenario ridiculous and provides France’s story with its comic dénouement.

As Kim M. Hajek points out, ‘ "pigeon" in French can denote a gullible person, someone easily swindled’.¹³⁷ That Pigeonneau – whose surname is the term for a baby pigeon – has been mastered by a cat also imbues the tale with a fabular quality and recalls medical hypnotism’s indebtedness to the more spurious animal magnetism. While cats had been used in mesmeric experiments earlier in the century, likely due to their ready availability and tameness, the cat is suitable for introduction into tales of the supernatural because of its longstanding association with witchcraft (Tera’s tiger cat in The Jewel of Seven Stars is even referred to as her ‘familiar’) and its sacred status in ancient Egypt.¹³⁸ In ‘M. Pigeonneau’, the cat’s name, ‘Porou’, suggests the porousness of Pigeonneau’s psyche, and its susceptibility to external suggestion, but equally the cat’s openness to suggestion, which it can then pass on to others. Porou’s eyes glowing in the dark heavily indicate the eye as the site of such porousness.

Through the serpent’s eye to the cat’s eye, these texts imbue the mesmeric or hypnotic gaze with qualities that invoke the powers of Egyptian deities or sacred animals, but which, intriguingly, also replicate something of the materiality of Egyptian statuary. Ancient Egyptian statues and figurines depicting both people and cats often convey a haunting lifelike quality in the materials selected for inlay into the eyes. Rock crystal is used in many cases, behind which is conventionally painted a dark pupil. The translucent crystal iris catches and reflects light in a way that sets these artefacts apart from other ancient statuary in major European collections in the nineteenth century, from the British Museum to the Louvre, along with the teaching collections held at various universities, as Egyptology became formalised as a subject of study. Crystals, and other reflective surfaces – the mirror and the flame – also suggest themselves as enabling hypnotic trance, and themselves proliferate in fictions that imagine Egyptian mind powers.

Crystals, Mirrors, and Flames

The image of the occult ancient Egyptian eye – so powerful in She, The World’s Desire and ‘M. Pigeonneau’ – is also central to The Mummy and Miss Nitocris (1906). In Griffith’s novel, trance is induced through the use of a hypnotic emerald that has the appearance of a light source.¹³⁹ Like the mystical ruby in Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars that, significantly, is likened to ‘that fabled head of the Gordon Medusa’ (another connection between Haggard’s and Stoker’s texts), the emerald has magical properties signified by hieroglyphic ‘characters carved in the stone’.¹⁴⁰ The German chemist and gemologist Karl von Reichenbach’s (1788–1869) 1850 Physikalisch-physiologische Untersuchungen über die Dynamide des Magnetismus, der Elektrizität, der Wärme, des Lichtes, der Krystallisation, des Chemismus in ihren Beziehungen zur Lebenskraft (‘Physico-Physiological Researches on the Dynamics of Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallisation, and Chemism, in their relation to Vital Force’) was promptly translated into English for British and American editions. Von Reichenbach’s early relation of a case of a young woman whom he had mesmerised includes the employment of a crystal ‘which made her very sleepy’, the crystal apparently being the final catalyst for the woman being ‘put … to sleep by the gaze’.¹⁴¹ He refers to his patients whose sensitivity to crystals is useful in attaining such states of unconsciousness as ‘crystallic-sleepers’.¹⁴² The mesmerist’s employment of crystals clearly worked its way into texts that feature the ancient Egyptian supernatural; just as the forces supposedly emanating from the mesmerist’s body during ‘passes’ with the hands gave way to the idea of the particular power of the fixed point central to hypnotism, so too did the crystal or the gemstone become associated with this new locus of hypnotic power.

In Griffith’s text, the jewel has distinctive physiological effects both on the Egyptian magician Phadrig, and his unsuspecting Jewish subject Josephus. Drawing upon the emerald’s power, Phadrig’s voice becomes ‘slow’ and ‘penetrating’, his eyes widen and, like Ayesha’s fiery eyes in She, ‘[glow] with a fire that made them look almost dull red’.¹⁴³ Josephus feels Phadrig’s eyes ‘look into his brain’ and is unable to move, save for ‘trembling’ and shaking.¹⁴⁴ He is only able to speak when asked a direct question, and then his speech is fragmented: ‘I should think not— I should think— I should— oh, beautiful— glor— glorious— splendid— did— splen— oh, what a light— li— light— li— oh— — !’¹⁴⁵ These dramatic effects of bodily shaking and disjointed speech appear to echo the stock tropes of stage hypnotism, although the emission of light from the eyes adds a supernatural element to a passage that otherwise reads as essentially theatrical. Yet, like Haggard and Stoker, Griffith draws upon genuine mythology to combine the symbolism of contemporary mind powers with their ancient antecedents. To Josephus, the emerald, named the Horus Stone, appears ‘like a great green- blazing eye glaring into the utmost depths of his being’. This links it directly to the Eye of Horus as a magical hieroglyphic symbol.

A magical device frequently used for funerary amulets, and thus in Victorian archaeology frequently encountered in close proximity to the dead, the Eye of Horus is also connected to the sun as a divine light-giving eye.¹⁴⁶ With this cluster of connotations, the Eye of Horus was ripe for appropriation by occultists. In a famous photograph of Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) who, incidentally, used the name of Ayesha’s reincarnated lover in She – Leo Vincey – as a nom de plume, the Eye of Horus embellishes Crowley’s pyramid- shaped hat. This situates a mystical third eye in a central position at the top of his head (figure 5). A third eye in the centre of the forehead was theorised by some, including Blavatsky, to be an organ of supernatural sight that the human race had lost over time, an ethereal organ that the influential theosophist Charles Leadbeater would later claim took the form of a snake with an eye at the end.¹⁴⁷ Crowley also chose the Eye of Horus enclosed within a pyramid and emitting light to appear on the cover of The Equinox, the official periodical of a magical order he founded called the A∴A∴ after the fracturing of the Golden Dawn. In The Mummy and Miss Nitocris, the Eye of Horus recalls these varied associations, being both symbolic of the occultist’s power and, through its common use as a funerary amulet, foreshadowing Josephus’s death as he commits suicide under its hypnotic influence.¹⁴⁸

The occult jewel that encourages parapsychological states also features in William Henry Warner’s novel The Bridge of Time (1919). It is when ‘gaz[ing] into [the ring’s] smouldering depths’ that the protagonist’s modern love interest, Iris, first recovers some memories of her past life as the ancient Egyptian Teta: as ‘strange visions of unfamiliar things and places seemed to rise mistily before her, like the half- forgotten memory of a dream’.¹⁴⁹ Other gemstones gifted to her by Rames further connect her to her past: ‘[a] s light seen through the windows of some distant fairy castle, the gems flowed and sparkled with alluring, mystic fire … again those vague, formless pictures half-fancy, half-memory, struggled for expression’. Such descriptions mimic the methodologies of self-hypnosis, Iris focusing on the gems as a fixed point to enter this enlightened state. When she does so, ‘[t]he room about her seemed to fade away and she saw once more those enchanting vistas of palm-shaded gardens and the gleam of that majestic river’.¹⁵⁰ That it is not, in fact, any property innate to the gems themselves – though it is enhanced by them, as in von Reichenbach’s accounts – is suggested by her other moments of clarity concerning her past life, which occur when looking in a mirror or staring into a fire. Nonetheless, that Rames’s ring is specifically marked out as producing magical effects is suggested in the reputation that it garners through the ages. Rames’s ring exists in two states: in its well-preserved form, having passed through ancient Egypt directly to the modern day as Rames himself travels through time, and in its aged form, in which it has been handed down through countless generations, eventually coming into the possession of Richard Lackland (simultaneously Rames’s direct descendant, and reincarnation). Lackland reveals that the ring ‘is supposed to mirror the future’, meaning that as an occult device it is credited with the kinds of powers that ancient Egyptians had long been aligned with in the cultural consciousness.¹⁵¹

Mirrors and flames, in fact, have similar effects in other texts with ancient Egyptian subject matter, in keeping with nineteenth-century understandings of these rituals to encourage clairvoyance in ancient Egypt. George Eliot (1819–1880) began her first novel Adam Bede (1859) with such an image: ‘With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far- reaching visions of the past.’¹⁵² This practice is depicted as still in use by modern Egyptians in the British writer and archaeologist E. F. Benson’s (1867–1940) ‘A Curious Coincidence’ (1899). With references to Frederic Myers and the Society of Psychical Research, the protagonists approach the story’s visions (seen either in ink or black fabric) from a rational, scientific perspective, and thus understand them to be genuine with some authority.¹⁵³ So too, mirrors are used for parapsychological revelation in venues with a readership interested in mental powers, and scientific and occult understandings of such abilities. Lucy Cleveland’s (1850–?) mystical romance story ‘Revelations of a Moorish Mirror’ (1896), published in an American occult periodical, The Metaphysical Magazine, is a beautifully written though little- known example.¹⁵⁴ Cleveland’s narrator falls in love with Neferu Ahsoon, a modern woman who, it transpires, is the reincarnation of the Egyptian queen Taia. Her ‘electric eyes’ and the narrator’s pondering whether she is ‘reading my thoughts’ mark her out as having particular psychical abilities.¹⁵⁵ Together, in an antique shop in New York, the protagonists encounter the mummified head and foot of Taia and, as the narrator spies Taia’s head reflected in the antique mirror of the story’s title, it appears to him as Neferu’s. He resolves to purchase the mirror, interpreting ‘[i]ts sharp, white glance at me across the dim curio shop [as] an omen of some future revelation’.¹⁵⁶ In such a personified description, Cleveland emphasises how the mirror is not merely to be looked at, but looks back, imbuing it with a kind of occult agency. It certainly expands his understandings of his own psychology: ‘What depths of sub-consciousness had tipped my brushes with light- sparkles as of glints from the restless jewel-hearts of crowned Pharaohs?’, he asks. ‘How was it that I had understood her so well, as I painted from this awful, sublime palette of the sub- consciousness …?’¹⁵⁷ As the narrator looks into the mirror he observes that visions of the ancient past ‘swept luminously across my consciousness’ and, when he holds an image of the pharaoh Amenhotep up to the mirror, he realises that he himself was Taia’s husband in a past life.¹⁵⁸ While such narratives’ revelations in the reflective surfaces of jewels and mirrors suggests the practice of scrying in ancient Egypt their repeated emphasis on reincarnation grounds them, also, in modern occultism, specifically in theosophical doctrine. Nonetheless, ancient rituals were of renewed significance to occultists at the fin de siècle: magicians of the Golden Dawn used mirrors for the purposes of perceiving mystical images.

Beyond Cleveland, these tropes appear in other occult publications, which have received less critical attention than mainstream fiction of the time, and which cement the contemporaneous inextricability of psychological enquiry and occult pursuits. Thomas Jasper Betiero’s Nedoure, Priestess of the Magi: an historical romance of white and black magic (1916) promises to be ‘A Story That Reveals Wisdom of the Ancient Past’, and follows its protagonist, Althos, the usurped rightful ruler of Kashmir, initiated into the Egyptian mysteries.

Betiero was a devotee of science and the occult; the Chicago Masonic Temple published his Practical Essays on Hypnotism and Mesmerism in 1897, establishing at this early stage in his career a careful crafting of his professional persona as a man well- versed in scientific subjects of interest to ‘eminent physicians’ but also in ‘the deepest mysticism’.¹⁵⁹ He founded the Society of Oriental Mystics in 1902, placing great emphasis on his knowledge of the Tarot. In the early twentieth century, he ran a ‘School of Oriental Mysticism’ that offered courses in ‘Hypnotism, Magnetism, Practical Occultism, Astrology, Palmistry, Metoposcopy and all branches of Occult Science’. In an advertisement placed in an occult magazine in 1903 Betiero claimed to have been ‘educated in Europe (University of Barcelona)’, and to have been ‘born in Egypt’, the latter presumably included so as to convey some kind of mystical authority.¹⁶⁰ These details also, sadly, suggest an invented personal history for Betiero that would aid him in attempting to sidestep late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial prejudices. Betiero, a mixed race man, wrote to the American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868– 1963) communicating that he had met with violence on account of being assumed to have been African-American;¹⁶¹ his claim to be Spanish and to have been born in Egypt served the purpose of providing him with a backstory more palatable to white occultists, rooted both in European systems of knowledge and in an Eastern mysticism that had been subsumed into Western traditions for millennia.

Betiero’s novel abounds with scenes of trance, the taking of drugs and the inhalation of intoxicating perfumes, references to magic mirrors, prophetic dreams, reincarnation, alchemy, animal magnetism, and characters whose eyes suggest telepathic or hypnotic abilities. Althos’s path to his occult education in Egypt is sparked when his psychical abilities are awoken by the sight of an enormous diamond suspended from the Maharaja’s neck by ‘a unique chain of gold so wrought as to represent a serpent’.¹⁶² As Althos looks at the gemstone, which danced and sparkled … like a ball of fire’, he finds that ‘it held me spellbound’. In this trance state the diamond appears to transform into ‘a huge eye, so large indeed that I could see my own image or reflection therein’, ‘as if gazing into the depths of a placid pool’.¹⁶³ In this series of images, which moves rapidly from snake to jewel, eye to mirror, Betiero bombards his readers not just with occult iconography, but also with the paraphernalia of scientific enquiry into the subconscious: creatures associated with animal magnetism or used in trance experiments, materials speculated to encourage hypnotic states, and the optical organ conceived as a point from which psychical power might both emanate and penetrate.

Once in Egypt, Althos studies in ‘the most perfectly appointed alchemical laboratory in the known world’, ‘[u]nder the tutelage of the world- famed Pheros’, an occult master whose name evokes the lighthouse of Alexandria, and with it a sense of unsurpassed metaphorical illumination.¹⁶⁴ Indeed, the architectural feats of Egypt are crucial to Althos’s development as a magus, and towards the novel’s end he is confronted by a counterpart to the Maharaja’s diamond on a far greater scale, inside Egypt’s largest pyramid. Inside an observatory at the peak of the Pyramid of Cheops is ‘the largest and brightest crystal I had ever beheld’.¹⁶⁵ This precious gem, to which the magi refer as the ‘Glittering Eye’, is a magical apparatus, which calls forth ‘astral image[s]’ fuelled by the psychical powers of the initiated.¹⁶⁶ Like the Maharaja’s diamond before it, the crystal transforms to take on ‘the appearance of a glowing ball of fire’, before fading to a ‘glow’, intriguingly described as ‘ photographic’.¹⁶⁷ Betiero’s use of the term self- consciously evokes modern imaging technologies as much as it recalls the linguistic components of the term: phōtós meaning ‘light’, and graphê meaning drawing. The giant crystal, from within which can be seen realistic images of other times and places, ultimately functions as Ayesha’s pool of water does in She, acting as a surface on which occult images appear, far surpassing the technological achievements of the modern world.

By 1916, when Betiero’s novel was published, Haggard had in fact elaborated on Ayesha’s use of a variety of occult imaging surfaces in his sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She. The eponymous sorceress makes images appear on a ‘curtain of fire’ produced by a volcano, ‘pictures[s] … form[ing] as it forms in the seer’s magic crystal’.¹⁶⁸ These images are of ancient Egypt, and that they come directly from Ayesha’s mind is suggested by Haggard’s description that ‘confused pictures flitted rapidly to and fro across the vast mirror of the flame, such as might be reflected from an intelligence crowded with memories of over two thousand years’.¹⁶⁹ The reliability of these images is undercut, however, by the suggestion that although these scenes were ‘founded on events that had happened in the past’, they were ‘vapours’ of Ayesha’s ‘brain’, twisted versions of the past altered so as to manipulate the protagonists.¹⁷⁰ The collision of images here – the brain, the mirror, the crystal – suggests a wide range of imaging devices ranging from the mind’s eye through to the occultist’s apparatus. Ayesha’s power is later imagined in relation to her eyes, too, a ‘radiance upon her brow’ which illuminates her forehead suggest-ing the pineal gland, linked by Blavatsky to the third eye, which sees what normal sight cannot. Ayesha’s eyes reflect this light, ‘bec[oming] glowing mirrors’.¹⁷¹ That Ayesha is conducting alchemical experiments with a substance ‘fashioned … to the oblong shape of a human eye’, from which ‘poured’ a light more intense than ‘[i]f all the cut diamonds of the world were brought together and set beneath a mighty burning- glass’ emphasises the significance of the eye as occult mechanism but equally the significance of lenses – crystals, jewels and other reflective surfaces – as enhancing parapsychological powers.¹⁷² In The Jewel of Seven Stars, Margaret, the double of the ancient Egyptian queen Tera, is noteworthy for her striking dark eyes, which are also described with religious and alchemical imagery; Ross, the narrator, relates that look-ing into Margaret’s eyes is ‘like gazing at a black mirror such as Doctor Dee used in his wizard rites’ or, as relayed to him by another man – ‘a great oriental traveller’ – ‘as looking at night at the great distant lamps of a mosque through the open door’.¹⁷³ The latter simile evokes Egypt, reinforcing a sense of Margaret’s psychical heritage, while both – as with Ayesha’s luminous eyes – emphasise light or reflection to conjure up an image of occult power.

Already associated with divine power and prophetic dreams, the ancient Egyptian eye had a long history as a symbol of occult potency. To this was added the threat of inescapable hypnotic effects which simultaneously implied connotations of the atavistic, degenerate, reptilian and animalistic, alongside the modern and highly evolved. These contradictory associations, of an ancient degeneracy and psychological modernity, were not limited to the eye, however, but instead can be seen to pervade the entire body. Ancient Egyptian bodies manifested hypnotic potential beyond their enigmatic eyes, seeing the power to entrance migrate from its traditional locus and reveal itself in sensual and nightmarish ways.

Hieroglyphic Nightmares

As I have established elsewhere, ‘in the final decades of the Victorian era … ancient Egyptian artefacts – specifically the bodies of the ancient Egyptian dead – began to be held as objects which might trigger moments of psychological disturbance’.¹⁷⁴ One can read in mummy fiction in particular, in texts ranging from Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 249’ to Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (serialised in 1898 and published in novel form in 1899), how ancient Egyptian antagonists – with their (literally) physically degenerating bodies – trigger a kind of psychological degeneration in modern characters. Their bodies are often either ‘asexual and corpse- like’ or ‘hermaphroditic and alluring’, their ‘sexual indistinctness’ chiming with the pathologisation of gender nonconformity by influential physicians including Havelock Ellis (1859– 1939) and Max Nordau (1849– 1923).¹⁷⁵ I have shown how these troubling bodies are often depicted as inciting hysteria in (usually) white, male, British characters. In some cases, as in Pharos the Egyptian and The Beetle, psychological deterioration comes about not just through the unsettling power of ancient Egyptian bodily remains, but also through such individuals’ ability to dominate the wills of their victims. Across a range of such texts, ancient Egyptian characters repeatedly upset ‘masculine identity and patriarchal norms’.¹⁷⁶

David Trotter notes the startling frequency with which male protagonists fall in love with reanimated ancient Egyptian women in late nineteenth-century fiction.¹⁷⁷ This, I suggest, is not only due to their often idealised beauty – female mummies are often imagined in a much better state of preservation than their male counterparts¹⁷⁸ – but also due to the supernatural and entrancing allure intrinsic to their occult bodies. The romantic gaze becomes the hypnotic stare, as beautiful bodies become the mechanism through which entrancing effects are achieved. The ancient Egyptian female body is often represented as seductive, exerting a particular kind of sexual control. Haggard’s ancient Egyptian queen in Cleopatrais one such example. Initially clad in the robes of Isis in a demonstration of her esoteric authority, her body is partly exposed and partly tantalisingly concealed beneath a transparent ‘garment that [glistens] like the scaly covering of a snake’.¹⁷⁹ Drawing upon the rich tradition of ancient Egyptian women associated with serpents that we have already seen with Haggard’s Ayesha, Cleopatra exhibits both her supernatural sympathies and her destructive allure. Like the biblical character of Joseph, she too has prophetic dreams, and yet it is her body and not her mind that can ‘match’ the magical prowess of sorcerers.¹⁸⁰ Terrence Rodgers perceives something supernatural in her voluptuousness, labelling her ‘a sexual vampire’ and, in doing so, likens her to a typical fin-de-siècle mesmeric monster.¹⁸¹ Her body certainly has an entrancing effect; the protagonist Harmachis is left ‘gazing after her like one asleep’.¹⁸² His body is left as if in a state of unconsciousness, ‘wrapped … closer and yet more close in her magic web, from which there [is] no escape’.¹⁸³ Again, as in the immobility that Haggard’s Ayesha inspires, the language of physical restriction is used to describe the victim of Cleopatra’s mesmeric influence.

In a publicity photograph for Cleopatra (1917), a silent film based on Haggard’s novel of the same name, now lost save for under 20 seconds of footage, the combination of the alluring body and penetrating occult gaze is made clear (figure 6). The American star of stage and screen who played the title role, Theda Bara (1885–1955), raises her flat palms above her eyes in a pose that recalls the use of the straightened hand in mesmerism, and directs attention to her cranium as the seat of her power. Her concentrated frown and direct eye-contact with the camera lens suggests that this is no quick glance but a long, still stare. Her dark, eyes, exaggerated with Egyptian-style makeup, are implied to see more than just the normal faculties of sight can provide, exerting their force on the viewer. Although not visible in this image, a surviving still from the film shows her using a crystal ball, further drawing upon powers of supernatural envisioning.

Dressed in the most famous of the film’s selection of elaborate and erotic costumes, which would later contribute to the film being declared too obscene to be shown according to the standards of the Motion Picture Production Code, there is also a continuation of the snake imagery associated with the mesmerist.¹⁸⁴ The snakes that adorn her breasts adumbrate Cleopatra’s method of suicide while suggesting a hypnotic effect to her body; the positioning of the snakes’ bejewelled heads over her nipples makes the link between entrancement and eroticism explicit. Meanwhile, her snake crown, placed at her third eye, functions as a symbol of Egyptian royalty, as well as evoking the coiled serpents of Medusa’s hair. There is also a suggestion – in this image and beyond, in the emphasis on the reptilian, cold-blooded serpent – that Cleopatra draws upon primitive and atavistic sources of power to control those who meet her gaze. As Suzanne Osmond asserts, towards the end of the late nineteenth century, stage Cleopatras cast aside their distinctly Victorian corsets and began adopting costumes that embraced the exotic and erotic, emphasising their power through their sexual and racial difference.¹⁸⁵ In the early twentieth century, inspired by Haggard’s Cleopatra rather than Shakespeare’s, Bara took this visual ‘otherness’ to the extreme. This Orientalised take on the femme fatale was, however, not just a character cultivated before the cameras, but also off-screen. The Fox publicity department constructed an exotic backstory for Bara (whose real name was Theodosia Goodman, and whose stage name is an anagram of ‘Arab Death’). Claiming that her birth at the foot of the Sphinx had been prophesised on the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, Fox asserted that Bara would lead men to debauchery and ruin. She was, purportedly, reared not on milk but on vipers’ venom.¹⁸⁶ Bara thus assumed the role of Cleopatra, bringing a whole host of dan-gerous, serpentine associations to the character, blurring the boundary between Cleopatra as ancient queen and Bara as modern twentieth-century woman. Like the character of Potiphar’s Wife, Cleopatra is a character not usually granted supernormal mind powers. Yet, as this image suggests, by the early twentieth century, ancient Egypt had become so closely connected to imagery of mesmerism, supernatural eyes, hypnotic snakes and entrancing bodies as they proliferated in the modern cultural imaginary that these historical and mythological characters were being recast in light of these associations.

The power of Cleopatra’s body has particular Freudian resonances, both in the 1917 film adaptation of Haggard’s 1889 novel and in the original text itself. Akin to Ayesha’s and Tera’s paralysing bodies and evoking the myth of Medusa, Cleopatra’s physical form, in Haggard’s text, leaves male onlookers frozen in desire. Freud, a self-proclaimed fan of Haggard’s novels, characterised the terror evoked by Medusa as castration anxiety, a fear of being unmanned or rendered passive.¹⁸⁷ Cleopatra, likewise, renders Harmachis ‘womanish weak’, unable to use the phallic dagger with which he has been entrusted to murder her.¹⁸⁸ It is through this process of emasculation that the subject is reduced to inertness, existing simply as (yet another) uncanny automaton.

It is to a Freudian understanding of the hieroglyphic nightmare and sexual threat that we now turn. Freud’s impact on fiction is especially evident in the works of Sax Rohmer (18831959), in which sensual bodies promise nightmarish sexual experiences and, as in Haggard’s fiction in the decades prior, the potentially dangerous blurring of established gen-der lines. Rohmer’s supernatural novel Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918) is something of a composite of several Egyptian- inflected and sexually troublesome tales by other writers which predated it. The antagonist, Antony Ferrara, physically resembles Dracula, while other clues as to Rohmer’s indebtedness to earlier texts in a similar vein include chapter titles: ‘The Beetles’ evoking Marsh’s 1897 novel and ‘The Ring of Thoth’ echoing a short story by Doyle of the same name (1890). There is a kind of literary invocation at work here, in which Rohmer conjures up something of the works of his predecessors, weaving these earlier texts into a larger nightmarish patchwork. Other elements can be traced to Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and Ziska (1897), Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 249’, and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian. The novel is also an Egyptological composite as well as a fictional one: among the Egyptologists to whom Rohmer refers are François Chabas and his Le Papyrus Magique Harris (1860), Flinders Petrie, Auguste Mariette (1821–81) and Gaston Maspero, while the witch queen herself bears more than a passing resemblance to Hatshepsut, Egypt’s longest reigning female pharaoh, whose tomb was discovered by Howard Carter in 1902.¹⁸⁹

A ‘Prefatory Notice’ preceding the novel proper relates that ‘[t] he strange deeds of Antony Ferrara, as herein related, are intended to illustrate certain phases of Sorcery as it was formerly practised … in Ancient Egypt’.¹⁹⁰ Furthermore, ‘[i]n no case do the powers attributed to him exceed those which are claimed for a fully equipped Adept’. Rohmer immediately establishes that the ‘powers’ within are not only historically accurate, but that such abilities in ancient Egypt were by no means rare. Nevertheless, Ferrara is yet another villain who has magical abilities that recall showmanship rather than arcane rites: his ‘theatrical affectation’ is such that the protagonists claim that he ‘should have been a music-hall illusionist’, while his ability to make his disembodied hands appear in the dark to strangle his victims evoke the spiritualist séance more than they do ancient Egyptian magic as described in historical sources.¹⁹¹

The main threat posed by Ferrara, however, is one intimately bound up in dangerous and perverse sexuality, and its powerful psychological effects: he is so ‘popular with the women’ that ‘there have been complaints’ at his Oxford college.¹⁹² His room, ‘pungent’ with ‘Kyphi – the ancient Egyptian stuff used in the temples’, is described as ‘a kind of nightmare museum’ full of ‘[u]nholy things’.¹⁹³ The protagonist, Robert Cairn, relates that:

There was an unwrapped mummy there, the mummy of a woman – I can’t possibly describe it. He had pictures, too – photographs. I shan’t try to tell you what they represented. I’m not thin- skinned; but there are some subjects that no man is anxious to come into contact with.¹⁹⁴

Cairn refers to these photographs again as ‘monstrosities’ and ‘outrages,’ and notes another distinct collection of pictures ‘which [Ferrara] has taken himself,’ predominantly of ‘girls’, to which Cairn refers as a ‘photographic zenana’.¹⁹⁵ Roger Luckhurst speculates that the undisclosed subject of the photographs is related to ‘some unholy miscegenate sexual interest’, implying paedophilic attraction on Ferrara’s part.¹⁹⁶ And when, as Luckhurst continues, Ferrara ‘establishes himself as a leading medical specialist in women’s nerves in London, where his rooms in Piccadilly … are filled with mummies and Eastern trinkets’, the implication is that his female patients are vulnerable in his care. Not only do the nervous disorders with which they are afflicted suggest that their minds will be threatened (and, in a weakened state, overcome) by Ferrara’s hypnotic abilities, but that – particularly if suffering from a perceived psycho-gynaecological disorder such as hysteria – their reproductive organs are also at risk.¹⁹⁷ The unwrapped mummy of a woman in his room at Oxford stands in for and anticipates the prostrate patient, divested of clothing and passively awaiting treatment whilst surrounded by the collection of antiquities: the patient’s body, under Ferrara’s control, becomes part of this collection. Whatever Ferrara has done to this mummy, subsequent to unwrapping, it is so horrible that the narrator dares not repeat it.

While there is little concrete evidence that Rohmer was actively drawing upon an image of Freud in this moment, the parallels between Ferrara and Freud are striking. Take, for instance, this passage from Hilda Doolittle’s (1886–1961) letter to her partner Bryher (1894–1983) and Kenneth Macpherson (1902–71) describing her first session with Freud:

I shook all over, he said I must take off my coat, I said I was cold, he led me around room [sic] and I admired bits of Pompeii in red, a bit of Egyptian cloth and some authentic coffin paintings. A sphynx faces the bed. I did not want to go to bed, the white ‘napkin for the head’ was the only professional touch, there were dim lights, like an opium dive.¹⁹⁸

Of course, Rohmer would not have had access to this private material, but it is not implausible that details of Freud’s consultations might have created a similar, sinister image in his mind, particularly when considering the availability of Freud’s case study concerning a patient known by the pseudonym Dora, Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905). Freud believed that Dora harboured feelings of sexual desire towards him, and Dora terminated her treatment. Both Freud and Ferrara coax women supposedly suffering from hysteria into consultation rooms crowded with ancient relics; minds and bodies are equally vulnerable under the doctors’ care. Unlike Freud’s analyses, however, Ferrara’s victims end up dead.

While the sexual danger that Ferrara poses is never made explicit (only ever referred to in terms of its unspeakability), one of the victims and the protagonist’s love-interest, Myra Duquesne, is magically endangered in a scene in which the symbolism is unapologetically Freudian. Having acquired some of Duquesne’s hair and somehow introduced these strands into a bulb of ‘a species of the extinct sacred lotus’, Ferrara arranges for the plant to fall into the hands of an orchid enthusiast with ties to the protagonists, under the pretence that it is a rare specimen.¹⁹⁹ A powerful symbol in Egyptian mythology, art and iconography, the lotus grows to produces ‘huge, smooth, egg-shaped buds’ that ‘seem on the point of bursting at any moment’, denoting (rather transparently) powerful sexual fecundity.²⁰⁰ Duquesne, who, unlike most visitors, is allowed among the orchid collection, seems susceptible to the seductive atmosphere created by the orchids and the masquerading lotus, admitting that she has ‘felt their glamour’.²⁰¹ While the protagonists brand orchids ‘parodies of what a flower should be’, ‘products of feverish swamps and deathly jungles’ that look like ‘distorted unholy thing[s] ’, Duquesne is drawn to them, a psychological attraction that is implied to be the result of the presence of material from her own body secreted inside the developing lotus.²⁰² As the plant matures, its magic clearly manifests: Duquesne’s health deteriorates. When the lotus is destroyed, the full extent of its threat becomes apparent: it is ‘severed just above the soil’, its ‘soft tentacles’ and ‘swelling buds’ crushed, resulting in ‘[a] profusion of colourless sap … pouring out upon the floor’ releasing ‘a smell like that of blood’.²⁰³

The danger that Ferrara poses is also evident in his collection of antiquities which includes the mummified corpses of a variety of creatures, including (female) human remains. Among his preserved animal bodies are mummies of ‘snakes and cats and ibises’, which the Egyptians gave as offerings to the gods, as well as a particularly morbid collection of beetles.²⁰⁴ These, Ferrara relates, hatched and grew inside the brain of an Egyptian priestess, whose head is also contained within Ferrara’s cabinets. ‘Those creatures never saw the light’, he reveals, and refers Cairn to a case containing ‘nearly forty’ of ‘these gruesome relics’.²⁰⁵ Cairn ‘[finds] something physically revolting in that group of beetles whose history had begun and ended in the skull of a mummy’.²⁰⁶ They are not only horrors in and of themselves, but emerge and perish within the brain like nightmarish thoughts, physical embodiments of the monstrous images that ancient Egypt could call forth within the mind, anticipating the beetles that would later manifest in the dreams of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961) and his patients.²⁰⁷ These beetles make a psychical appearance later that very day, when Cairn sees ‘darker patches’ ‘in the shadowy parts of [his] room’.²⁰⁸ He attempts to convince himself that the beetles are products of his imagination and, relating the events to his father, declares that ‘either I am mad, or to- night my room was filled with things that crawled’.²⁰⁹ Cairn ‘describ[es] Ferrara’s chambers with a minute exactness which revealed how deep, how indelible an impression their strangeness had made upon his mind’.²¹⁰ The unsettling relics of Ferrara’s rooms affect Cairn’s mental state: as his father identifies, Ferrara is attempting to achieve the ‘destruction of [Cairn’s] mind, and of something more than mind’ through a psychical attack.²¹¹ His father confronts Ferrara, and discovers the cause of Cairn’s torment:

‘[a] square of faded linen lay on the table, figured with all but indecipherable Egyptian characters, and upon it, in rows which formed a definite geometrical design, were arranged a great number of little, black insects.’²¹²

These beetles, positioned on top of Egyptian hieroglyphic script, function as a monstrous form of writing, physically resembling the beetle hieroglyph that existed as part of the ancient Egyptian writing system and, as such, the spell that Ferrara casts is one that is textually layered: ‘beetle shapes’ on top of other Egyptian letters.²¹³ Freud referred to Egyptian hieroglyphs as ‘a way of imagining dream- language’,²¹⁴ and described his The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) as an ‘Egyptian dream book’, casting himself as a modern Joseph upon whom the gift of dream interpretation had been bestowed.²¹⁵ That he continued to use this metaphor is made probable by H.D.’s relation that Freud ‘had first opened the field to the study of’ ‘the hieroglyph of the unconscious’.²¹⁶ Rohmer’s beetles certainly manifest as if emerging from Cairn’s subconscious: they are ‘thought- things’, disembodied, ‘magnified doubles— glamours— of … horrible creatures’ that, when the spell is broken, ‘[fade] like a fevered dream’.²¹⁷ Rohmer’s Gothic employment of the beetles gestures towards Marsh’s The Beetle, which famously features an antagonist who can fluctuate between a variety of forms: male and female, human and insect. Marsh’s Beetle is a sexually complex aggressor; torturing and killing women, and forcibly penetrating men, its bisexual predilections – troubling by main-stream nineteenth- century standards – are entirely typical of fin-de-siècle horror. It even leaves one female victim, Marjorie Lindon, in a prolonged state of psychological disturbance; at The Beetle’s conclusion, we learn that ‘she was for something like three years under medical supervision as a lunatic’, presumably treated for the effects of trauma by Freud-like practitioners.²¹⁸ Freud had studied with Bernheim and Charcot, the physicians devoted to hypnosis and mentioned by name in ‘M. Pigeonneau’, and had used hypnotic techniques early in his career. While Marjorie Lindon recovers, the neurologists’ powers could evidently be put to various ends, whether good or evil.

Correspondingly, Cairn wonders what Harley Street doctors would make of his account, and his father speculates as to the unknowable number of victims that Ferrara has ‘sent to the madhouse’.²¹⁹ When the novel’s action shifts from London to Egypt, Ferrara appears in costume mimicking that of the Egyptian gods and their corresponding hieroglyphs: ‘rising hideously upon his shoulders was a crocodile-mask, which seemed to grin – the mask of Set, Set the Destroyer, god of the underworld’.²²⁰ Ferrara’s donning of a crocodile mask and, at a later point a ‘black robe’ that lends him ‘the appearance of a gigantic bat’, suggests that he too, like Marsh’s Beetle, is a kind of human– animal hybrid, making his inner monstrosity externally visible, and physically mimicking the hieroglyphs that depicted the ancient Egyptian hybrid gods.²²¹ When Ferrara is wearing the crocodile mask, ‘[t]he gruesome mask seemed to fascinate’ Cairn, who ‘could not take his gaze from that weird advancing god’.²²²

Rohmer describes how Cairn ‘felt impelled hypnotically to stare at the gleaming eyes set in the saurian head’, emphasising a kind of dinosaur-like ultra-antiquity to Ferrara in this flamboyant moment.²²³ When not sporting these unsettling costumes, moreover, Ferrara is described as having ‘basilisk eyes’ (evoking Haggard’s Ayesha) and an androgynous appearance: ‘a slim and strangely handsome young man’ with ‘a wom-anish grace expressed in his whole bearing and emphasised by his long white hands’, and in whose gait is ‘something revoltingly effeminate; a sort of cat- like grace which had been noticeable in a woman, but which in a man was unnatural, and for some obscure reason sinister’.²²⁴ Ferrara even admits that ‘in common with all humanity I am compound of man and woman’.²²⁵ Of all of the novel’s characters, Ferrara is the sole individual who really blurs the boundaries between masculine and feminine, very much conforming to psychosexual understandings of androgyny as symbolic of sexual degeneracy.

Evolution versus Degeneration

Ferrara and other androgynous ancient Egyptian villains complicate our understanding of ancient Egypt as representing advanced knowledge in the decades bookending the turn of the twentieth century, with their captivating and unsettling bodies promising decadent sexual experiences, while their superior mental abilities penetrate and dominate the minds of their victims. Paradoxically, towards the end of the nineteenth century, visions including dreams and hallucinations, and supernatural mind powers were seen as a reversion to the savage – Roger Luckhurst claims that ‘the psychology of dreams, hallucinations, hypnotic susceptibility, and supernatural belief still constituted markers of primitive regression to the majority of psychologists’ – and yet also, to eminent scientists such as Myers, were ‘signs of evolutionary modernity’.²²⁶ A fin-de-siècle poster advertising the talents of a hypnotist by the name of George Andre shows ‘The Progress of Hypnotism’ (figure 7). There is something that antici-pates the oft- parodied 1965 illustration ‘The Road to Homo Sapiens’ in the image’s suggestion of a kind of linear inheritance from antiquity.²²⁷ In some regards, it is unusual that the Egyptian Priest is presented as a primitive ancestor of the modern hypnotist; this seems at odds with many of the associations of ancient Egypt with great sophistication and modernity elsewhere. Nonetheless, it does make visual a degenerate quality to ancient Egyptian mind powers, which chimes with the sinister purposes to which these powers are put. The Egyptian Priest, cast in shadows and hunched over, progresses through increasingly erect and illuminated figures – the Witch, Merlin, the Fakir – until we reach mod-ern individuals – first Mesmer, and then George Andre. Andre, who was often billed with the title ‘Dr’, performed shows including one entitled ‘The Dark Continent’.²²⁸ His performances evidently capitalised upon imperialistic views of Africa as primitive. Thus, while hypnotism was understood as a modern scientific marvel, which promised ‘new modes of being’ and the retrieval of forgotten knowledge, whose realisation would impact upon modern medicine and methods of communication, it was nonetheless simultaneously marked out as inherited from a fallen empire emblematic of a kind of cultural decadence.²²⁹

The dual status of these concepts as ancient and modern made them particularly well suited for use in literature that introduced characters from antiquity into the modern world, or to add interest to tales of the ancient world by alluding to subjects of interest to contemporary audiences. When Louis N. Parker utilised trance, hypnosis and clairvoyance to add depth to the character of Potiphar’s wife in his version of the story of Joseph, he was not only adapting the story in a way that responded to modern interests, but also situating her within a tradition of Eastern mind powers that had been an especially popular literary subject for the past few decades. This increased cerebral and occult power does not come at the expense of Zuleika’s eroticism but serves to complement and accentuate it. Her body and mind are made equal weapons of seduction, a threat embodied by several of the Egyptian characters.

There is a genealogy at play here. Nina Auerbach and David Glover both read Stoker’s Tera as indebted to Haggard’s Ayesha.²³⁰ The legacies of both – indeed, of a still broader group of women wielding ancient Egyptian mind powers in media of the fin de siècle – is evident in Parker’s Zuleika, whose clairvoyant abilities during states of trance inspire gossip among the other characters. Zuleika, as with antagonists including Rohmer’s Antony Ferrara, is certainly morally degenerate by fin-de-siècle standards – seeking an extramarital affair with an enslaved man purchased for her husband – and yet, her highly developed (and modern) powers of the mind make her a dangerous and highly evolved adversary. Joseph’s resistance is all the more admirable given the ease with which Ayesha and Tera enchant those who gaze upon them and the bodily passivity that their minds and forms inspire. Of course, Parker was working with an established story, with a fixed end to the narrative. Zuleika’s failure is inevitable, which raises the question, why did Parker elaborate upon this aspect of the story, and in this way? Ultimately, Zuleika is transformed into much more of a psychologically threatening opponent. As with Ayesha and Tera, it is not simply their enticing bodies that ensnare in a physical sense, but the mind powers that lie behind these tempting exteriors. As an antagonist, Zuleika is empowered by her physique, but particularly through her eyes. In the image of Pauline Frederick in role, her eyes are emphasised by heavy black makeup similar to that depicted on ancient Egyptian funerary masks, or the Eye of Horus motif. Zuleika, too, stares unblinking, and it is to her eyes as symbolic of her remarkable power that she directs Joseph in Parker’s retelling because, although the female body still holds its erotic appeal, the eye is the true source of the occultist’s influence.

See endnotes and bibliography at source

Chapter 4 (177-230) from Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt, by Eleanor Dobson (UCL Press, 10.06.2022), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.