How the Theosophy of Blavatsky borrow from
Rosicrucianism
Coming to fame by Masonic societies and modern
occultism as earlier described the manuscript copies of the Fama Fraternitatis were initially circulating among very few readers, of a circle of friends in Tübingen.
It has long been
assumed that the Great White Lodge of Theosophical lore was a modern redaction
of the Rosicrucian Fraternity, first brought to public attention in 1614/1615
by the publication of the Fama Fraternitatis dess Loeblichen Ordens des Rosenkreutzes and the Confessio
Fraternitatis.1) It can hardly be doubted that Blavatsky, particularly, was
influenced by the mythopoetic potentialities of Rosicrucianism, but care should
be exercised in assessing the means by which such notions were mediated to her.
Although, by Blavatsky's time, Rosicrucianism was the common coin of
esotericism, particularly in Masonic circles, a more direct influence came
through an unlikely source: the tradition of the Rosicrucian novel. An
examination of the various permutations of Rosicrucian fiction is a journey
into Blavatsky's conceptual heartland.
The topos of the immortal human appears to be ubiquitous
in its appeal to authors and philosophers.2) Indeed, the theme of immortality,
or at least prolongevity, has provided particularly
potent grist to whichever philosophical mill an author has chosen to subscribe,
and, being the stuff of legend, the concept has proven malleable and immensely
popular. It would seem that the novelist's mischievous subversion of one of
life's verities satisfies a mysterious communal appetite.
More than in any
other genre, the immortal proved a staple of the Gothic horror novel - to the
point where the two are often, though erroneously, considered synonymous.3)
Tales of the "undead" proliferated throughout the literature of the
nineteenth century and these are the inventions which have helped to inspire
the modern public perception of the era. Infamous among the pantheon of the
immortals is the vampire with his insatiable appetite for human blood; no less
arresting is the Wandering Jew, the eternal vagrant, doomed as only those who
have offended a god can be. Into this unholy company must be admitted both the
Faustian magus, whose immortality is won through the sale of his soul, and also
the animated cadaver of the sort exemplified by Frankenstein's Monster.
Each of these
creations is evidence of what can only be termed the moral imperative of death:
to live beyond the allotted span is to have violated the divine order and to
have succumbed to diabolic influences.4) Thus it follows that the Gothic
immortal was often physically stigmatised as a mark
of having occasioned the displeasure of God.5) Consequently, whether required
to be parasitic or penitential in the activities of their half-life, the
members of the cabal of immortals were inevitably shunned by society and often
vilified or destroyed.
If the moral and
physical necessity of death is established in Gothic fiction by the various
monsters and megalomaniacs represented by the figure of the immortal, then what
of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross? The members of this legendary Brotherhood,
typologically related to the band of immortals through their possession of the elixir
vitae, are said to have viewed prolongevity not
as the bane of their existence but as a God-given boon and, unlike the other
species of Gothic immortal, were reputed to be benevolent healers and mystics,
devoted to "the highest and only truth, the greatest good-will and
brotherly love".6) Paradoxically, then, the presentation of the immortals
of the brethren of the Rosy Cross in the Gothic novel is sometimes as saintly
in nature as that of the undead vampire and the Wandering Jew is diabolic.
Prior to an
investigation into the Rosicrucian novel, it is worthwhile to examine in brief
the genesis of the legend itself. The Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio
Fraternitatis introduced the founder of the
Fraternity, "C. R. C." or "C. Ros. C", understood to be
Christian Rosenkreutz.7) Rosenkreutz, born in 1378 to
an impoverished family of Teutonic nobles, found himself alone en route to Jerusalem after the death of his
monastic fellow pilgrim. From Damascus, Rosenkreutz
journeyed through a number of Middle-Eastern and North-African cities searching
for the esoteric secrets of mathematics and physics, and encountering various
mysterious sages.8) Ultimately, Rosenkreutz returned
to Germany, intent upon engineering social reform through the application of
various radical programs.9) Ridiculed for his attempts, Rosenkreutz
decided instead to continue his efforts in private through the establishment of
a secret fraternity.
Following Rosenkreutz's death in 1484, aged 106 years, his disciples
interred his body in a secret tomb in their headquarters, the House of the Holy
Spirit. One hundred and twenty years passed and the tomb containing the
uncorrupted corpse of Christian Rosenkreutz was
discovered by the descendants of the original Brotherhood. Having interpreted
their find as an omen of peculiar destiny, the event provided the impetus for
the Fraternity to begin its work in the world by issuing the manifestoes.
Scholars have debated
the historical authenticity of the Fraternity since the Fama
Fraternitatis and the Confessio
Fraternitatis first appeared.10) The consensus
view is that the most likely candidate for authorship of the two pamphlets was
Johan Valentin Andreae (1586-1654), a Lutheran pastor
and theologian much given to utopian speculation and membership of small
esoteric societies.11) Andreae, who claimed in his
autobiography to have been the author of the third Rosicrucian pamphlet,
entitled Chymische Hochzeit
Christiani Rosenkreutz
("The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz")
was a member of the circle of German Lutheran intellectuals centred
around Tuebingen University who looked to a great
socio-religious Renovatio.12) Even though Andreae
referred to the manifestoes as his ludibrium,
he nevertheless appears to have intended the Rosicrucian pamphlets to
reinvigorate the ebbing spiritual promise of the Reformation by fusing Joachimism, neo-Paracelsianism,
mediaeval visionary mysticism, and alchemy, with a re-politicised
Lutheranism.13)
It is undeniable that
whatever the intended purpose of the manifestoes, the Fraternity was
immediately seized upon by esotericists and
philosophers of all sorts as an identifiable historical entity. The disparaging
comments of Andreae ("Listen ye mortals, in vain
do you wait for the coming of the Brotherhood, the Comedy is at an end")
did little to discourage those who considered themselves to be potential
recruits.14) Not unexpectedly, the reputation of the Fraternity grew to
encompass not only such figures of renown as Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Dee, but
also the entire plethora of paranormal phenomena associated with theurgy,
alchemy, and Hermeticism. Control of the spirit-world, invisibility, the
ability to heal all sickness and to speak all languages, and possession of the
fabled lapis philosophicus and the elixir
vitae, were all reputed to be the exclusive domain of the hidden
Fraternity.15)
The concept of the
immortal Rosicrucian, although only hinted at in the Confessio
Fraternitatis ("Were it not a precious
thing, that you could always live so, as if you had lived from the beginning of
the world and, moreover, as you should still live to the end thereof"),16)
became a central motif in the iconography of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. It
was this element of the mythos which provided Gothic novelists with a fitting
addition to their menagerie of fictional immortals.
The Rosicrucian
novel, as a discrete literary genre, was first identified by Edith Birkhead in 1921.17) She traced the genesis of the form to
William Godwin (1756-1836), author of St. Leon. A Tale of the Sixteenth
Century of 1799.18) It seems that Godwin's fascination with prolongevity and immortality must have become something of
a family concern given that other permutations of the mythos were provided by
Godwin's son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), in his Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne:
The Rosicrucian (1811), and by Godwin's daughter, Mary Shelley (1797-1851),
in her Frankenstein (1818), The Last Man (1826), and The
Mortal Immortal (1834). A further example of a Gothic immortal presented
within the guise of the Rosicrucian novel is included in Melmoth
the Wanderer of 1820, by Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824). The last
exponent of the Rosicrucian novel was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and it is in his
occult fiction, now largely forgotten, that the concerns of each of the
aforementioned works culminated to produce the definitive Rosicrucian novel.
His Zanoni of 1842 is undoubtedly the apogee
of the genre, and was the most singularly influential fictional work in the later
elaboration of the Theosophical Masters.19) Indeed, Blavatsky noted her debt to
Bulwer-Lytton thus:
No author in the
world of literature ever gave a more truthful or more poetical description of
these beings [the Masters] than Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton, the author of Zanoni.20)
In order to
appreciate the significance of the Rosicrucian novel within the ambit of
nineteenth century occultism generally, and the articulation of the
Theosophical Masters in particular, it is important briefly to examine a selection
of such works. By establishing the aggregate components of the genre, it is
possible to appreciate why the form developed when it did, and, crucially, why
it declined so suddenly in the wake of Zanoni.21)
Some commentators
have expressed surprise that the anarchical political philosopher, William
Godwin, was responsible for the birth of the Rosicrucian novel.22) A number
have suggested that his novels have achieved nothing but to have belittled his
reputation as a reformer.23) The error of this position can be established by
an investigation of the story of St. Leon and of its treatment of a number of
concerns germane to the Aufklaerung.
The story introduces
Count Reginald de St. Leon, a man much given to gambling and a profligate
lifestyle. Unable to choose between his attraction to the wild Parisian streets
and a serene pastoral home with his children and saintly wife, Marguerite, St.
Leon vacillates hopelessly between the two.24) St. Leon believes his troubles
are over after he meets a mysterious elderly man named Zampieri
from whom he receives the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life.
Unfortunately, eternal life and great wealth serve only to alienate him from
his family and friends; Marguerite dies, St. Leon is imprisoned and must face
the Inquisition on charges of being a black magician. In the end St. Leon is
doomed to a life of self-imposed exile from all those whom he holds dear.
Godwin's interest in
esoteric matters was slight; his only other foray into the field was with the
publication of The Lives of the Necromancers (1834), a major reference
text for Blavatsky.25) Rather, Godwin's concerns were those germane to
Enlightenment epistemologies. His interest in the prolongevity
of the human species was established in his An Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice, and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793) and in an essay
of 1831, Of the Duration of Human Life, both of which are evidence of
Godwin's profound belief in human perfectibility.26) He considered that such
perfectibility would act as a bridge between the ideals of the religious temper
and the desire for equitable socioeconomic conditions - and would be achievable
only through the faculty of a reasoned rule of mind:
There is no principle
of reason less liable to question than this, that, if we have in any respect a
little power now, and, if mind be essentially progressive, that power may, and,
barring any extraordinary concussions of nature, infallibly will, extend beyond
any bounds we are able to prescribe to it.27)
For Godwin, the
possibility of immortality relied upon the premise that humanity could eschew
superstition and self-serving ideologies and then, in a kind of apotheosis of
rationalism, ethically altruistic persons would attain perfection through
social reform.28) It follows that the degradation and alienation of St. Leon is
a result of the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's Stone being employed for
personal advancement and not for the advancement (and resultant macrobiosis) of society as a whole. While not
exactly Machiavellian, St. Leon is selfish and, according to Godwin,
immortality is emancipatory only for the selfless. It is significant that
Blavatsky concurred completely - which is hardly surprising since she regarded
Godwin as one of the "first authorities on archaic sciences".29)
Godwin's use of the
Rosicrucian quest for immortality as an allegorical device, which allowed for
comment upon the Enlightenment preoccupation with notions of perfectibility and
progress, established the Rosicrucian novel as an ideal vehicle for reflections
upon the Zeitgeist of its period, particularly with regard to the idea
of prolongevity. This tendency is continued
throughout the nineteenth century, during which the genre flourished, and is
very evident in the Rosicrucian works of its next exponent, Percy Bysshe
Shelley.
Shelley's interest in
the praeternatural had begun in his childhood: in
response to a tutor's enquiry regarding his experiments at Eton, the young
Shelley is said to have replied, "Please sir, I am raising the devil".30)
With age Shelley's goetic endeavours waned, but his
interest in the interchange between science and magic did not. In St. Irvyne: The Rosicrucian, Shelley places the Rosicrucian
immortal within the ethos of the Romantic hero - an individual whose moral
conscience is sorely tested by trial and ordeal, and who is at once prey to the
vicissitudes of human life and yet is forever removed from the companionship
and sympathy of others.
St. Irvyne: The Rosicrucian is a complex, occasionally unconvincing, tale of the
adventures of Wolfstein, his sister Eloise, and a
character named Ginotti (or Nempere).31)
Ginotti possesses the elixir vitae as a result
of having formed a compact with the devil, and desires to pass it on to the
unsuspecting Wolfstein. Wolfstein,
whose lover Megalena has just died, decides to
partake of the elixir at a secret meeting with Ginotti
in the grounds of a church dedicated to St. Irvyne.
At the last moment Wolfstein rejects the elixir
as he cannot make the requisite denial of God. Ginotti,
having failed to secure Wolfstein for the devil, is
"mouldered to a gigantic skeleton" and
forced to endure an eternity in hell; Wolfstein is
also destroyed, but "over him had the power of hell no influence".32)
Shelley has thus grafted the Faustian-Mephistophelian compact onto the legend
of the Rosicrucian Fraternity in order to heighten the tropological reading of Wolfstein's quest for immortality. Unlike St. Leon, Wolfstein has the foreknowledge that in order to possess
unending earthly life, he must first deny eternal spiritual life "from Him
who alone can give an eternity of happiness".33)
Where Shelley's novel
differs from other Gothic works which deal with secret societies (Bavarian
Illuminism, the Assassins, Freemasonry, inter alia) is in its
presentation of the esotericist as a temperamental
Romantic hero and not as a political radical.34) Wolfstein
is tortured by love interests and by an insatiable curiosity for answers to
questions germane to philosophical ontology - the same questions which appear
to be symptomatic of the romantic sensibility.35) So, in Shelley's hands, the
Rosicrucian elixir became the medium through which the author could
deliberate upon the character of Romantic heroism. For her part, Blavatsky
believed the "great young Shelley" to be one of her personal heroes;
indeed, she claimed for him an "immortal name".36)
Mary Shelley's first
foray into the field of Rosicrucian fiction was the publication in 1818 of Frankenstein
or the Modern Prometheus. This novel, perhaps more than any other, has
gained a reputation for its abilities to "curdle the blood, and quicken
the beatings of the heart".37) This aspect of the work has encouraged the
suppression of its Rosicrucian elements: it is pertinent to note that Walter Scott
suggested that "Frankenstein is a novel upon the same plan as
St. Leon".38)
The tale of Frankenstein
documents the successful experiment of Victor Frankenstein to animate a
creature formed from the body members of various cadavers. The creature
ultimately proves to be hideous in all respects and is shunned by polite
society. Victor, in an attempt to alleviate the misery of the
"monster", creates for it a female partner, but eventually destroys
the female as he fears the monsters will breed and create a race of artificial
beings. In revenge, the monster goes on a homicidal rampage, murders Victor's
bride and finally kills its creator, only to flee and (presumably) end its
life.
Marie Roberts (inter
alia) has suggested that the figure upon which Shelley based her doctor was
Johann Konrad Dippel (1673-1734), who inhabited
Castle Frankenstein under the patronage of the Landgrave of Hesse.39) Dippel's necromantic experiments certainly do parallel
those of Victor Frankenstein, and his lifelong interest in the Rosicrucian
quest for immortality has been amply demonstrated.40) Roberts also noted that
Shelley was responding to the experiments of Erasmus Darwin, whose The
Botanic Garden (1791) employed the Rosicrucian mythos in order to document
the creation of a monster.41)
Whatever Mary
Shelley's sources for Frankenstein happen to have been, the themes which
she explored are germane to those of Rosicrucian fiction as established by
Godwin and P. B. Shelley. The Promethean theft of fire is equated with the
Rosicrucian "theft" of immortality - both document the inevitable
punishments for the possession of forbidden knowledge. Mary Shelley, however,
extends the boundaries of the genre by encompassing within the allegorical
schemata the (im)morality of Enlightenment scientific
rationalism.
It is pertinent that
in Frankenstein, Shelley's Rosicrucian scientist, Victor Frankenstein,
is encouraged in his pursuits after having consulted the works of Agrippa.42)
Agrippa, like Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, was championed by Rosicrucian
apologists as an early exponent of the protoscience which the Rosicrucians themselves were said to represent.43) His
experiments in medicine and alchemy, always imbued with generous amounts of
astrology and goetia, were believed to have
placed him in the nexus formed between Renaissance magic and pre-Newtonian
science.44) For Shelley, however, Victor Frankenstein is the new
post-Enlightenment Agrippa, a tragic figure - and thoroughly Romantic. His is
the audacity of genuine solipsism wherein the blasphemies and sacrileges of
self-indulgent science are seen as the inevitable consequence of the desire for
the apotheosis of man: "supremely frightful would be the effect of any
human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of
the Creator of the world".45)
Where Percy Shelley's
Rosicrucian fiction stands at the cusp of Romanticism, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
is wholly immersed in the Romantic ethos while still retaining the form of the
Gothic schauerromantik. The alienation of the
monster is allegorically aligned to the loneliness of genius, and by extension
to the necessary isolation of the artist. The immortality which Victor attempts
to bestow upon mankind through his experiments, no matter how beneficent in
design, is doomed to fail as it is an immortality of the body only, and not of
the mind or spirit. Mary Shelley seems to indicate that the soul is ultimately
of pure stuff and thus unsuited to an eternal corporeal life.46)
The only important
Rosicrucian novel to appear between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and
Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni was Charles Robert
Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer of 1820.
Maturin, a Calvinist preacher from the Established Church of Ireland,
considered the elixir vitae and the lapis philosophicus
to be disastrous temptations which attract the unholy by their promise to
circumvent judgement, redemption, and (Christian) salvation. In Melmoth the Wanderer, the desire for prolongevity is presented as the most egregious heresy, for
"[w]hat enemy has man so deadly as himself?"47)
The story of Melmoth the Wanderer is expressed through a
series of interwoven smaller tales which each document the vain attempts of a
number of immortals to convince various candidates to replace them in their
wanderings. Chief among these is Melmoth, who roams
through convent, asylum, and dungeon in order to appear at the deathbed of the
sad and lonely. After one hundred and fifty years, Melmoth
has still never been able to procure another's soul in exchange for his own:
"I have been on
earth a terror, but not an evil to its inhabitants. None can participate in my
destiny but with his own consent ... No one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer".48)
The price extracted
for Melmoth's failure is his ultimate damnation;
finally, he ages and decays in a matter of minutes, just as Faustus had done.
His last words are an admonition to his young relative, John Melmoth: "remember your lives will be the forfeit of
your desperate curiosity. For the same stake I risked more than life - and lost
it! - Be warned - retire!"49)
There can be little
doubt that Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer proved
to be one of the last great examples of the schauerromantik
phase of Gothic fiction.50) A large proportion of the iconography of Gothic
horror is assembled: "the mysterious portrait, the decaying parchment,
ruins and storms, Inquisition and convent cells, entombed lovers, dead bride
and insane bridegroom, idyllic nature in the Indian islands".51) Yet, for
all of this, Maturin's Rosicrucian novel is in reality little other than a
thinly-disguised theological polemic. The Rosicrucian heresy, as Maturin would
have it, devolves upon the adept who has attempted to obviate the necessity of
redemption through a forbidden knowledge of the Philosopher's Stone and the
Elixir of Life. This alienated figure must wander in search of a surrogate
salvation - achievable only through the vicarious means of bringing another
wanderer into the midst of the immortals: "I have literally worked out my
salvation by your fear and trembling".52)
It is crucial to recognise that in the four novels examined supra,
the figure of the Rosicrucian is employed as a literary trope, valuable in so
far as he can be exploited as a canvas upon which various philosophical and
epistemological themes can be illustrated. His worth lies in the transgressive
nature of his demiurgic power to arrogate unto himself what are held to be divine
prerogatives. This transgressive power availed each of the authors the means by
which to illuminate their particular engagement with the Zeitgeist of
the early nineteenth century: from late Enlightenment to early Victorian
England.53) Crucially, the Rosicrucian was an empathic figure - and even an
inspirational one - and thus unique among the grotesqueries of the Gothic
pantheon. Unsurprisingly, it was the semantic potential of the Rosicrucian that
attracted the attention of Blavatsky, who read such literature voraciously.
The quest for prolongevity and the desire for esoteric arcana (symbolised by the elixir and the lapis philosophicus, respectively) were portrayed by Godwin
as reasonable pursuits for society as a collective to undertake. After
all, Godwin's preoccupation with perfectibility was an extension of both his
own social activism and a predictable by-product of Enlightenment humanistic
progressivism. For Percy Shelley, the Rosicrucian immortal was to become an
embodiment of the Romantic temperament. Consequently, the lure of secret
knowledge involved an inherent moral dilemma: to submit to such a temptation
was to fall prey to moral turpitude, but to reject the Mephistophelian offer
was to remain mortal with all of the fears which such a state state presupposed. Mary Shelley's Rosicrucian, Victor
Frankenstein, was a hybrid of the Romantic hero and the protoscientist
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This combination allowed the author
to portray in miniature the epistemological shift from the concordances of
Paracelsus to the causalities of René Descartes (1596-1650), and to relate the
search for the Philosopher's Stone to the Romantic concept of genius. The
monster incarnates a rampant epistemology, divorced from, and ultimately inimical
to, those concerns deemed appropriate for the human stratum. Maturin's
Rosicrucian wanderer, Melmoth, is typologically
related to the Wandering Jew, in so far as both have rejected a freely-given,
if hard won, redemption. Melmoth's doom is no less
final than that of the Wandering Jew: his heretical desire for forbidden
knowledge is considered a rebuff to his Biblical saviour
- no less scandalous than Malchus' banisshment of Jesus from his door.54) According to
Maturin, such knowledge can only bring a justifiable anathema from the
Christian community as no right-thinking person would accept "all that man
could bestow, or earth afford" if it involved diabolic pacts, the
absolution of conscience, and the loss of the possibility of salvation.55)
The above analyses of
four exponents of the Rosicrucian novel have been included so as to highlight
the depth of interpenetration between philosophical paradigms and esoteric
motifs in the early nineteenth century. That Blavatsky was well aware of such
literature is confirmed by her own writings; significantly, she opined that
"theosophic literature"56) contained much of factual truth:
[T]ruth is often
stranger than fiction, and what is thought fiction is still more often truth.
No wonder then that occult literature is growing with every day. Occultism and
sorcery are in the air, with no true philosophical knowledge to guide the
experimenters and thus check evil results. "Works of fiction",
the various novels and romances are called. "Fiction" in the
arrangement of their characters and the adventures of their heroes and heroines
- admitted. Not so, as to the facts presented ... [T]he tree of
Occultism is now preparing for "fruiting", and the Spirit of the
Occult is awakening ... in novels and works of fiction. Woe to the ignorant and
the unprepared.57)
It is clear that
Blavatsky intended Theosophy, and particularly the idea of the Masters, to
provide the "true philosophical knowledge to guide the
experimenters". In this quest she was aided substantially by her own
Rosicrucian idol, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and his occult novel Zanoni, "a work which will ever be prized by
the occultist".58)
Zanoni
The last exponent of
the Rosicrucian novel proved to be its most adept apologist. Edward
Bulwer-Lytton was able to synthesise the concerns of
his literary forebears into a cohesive pattern and create the paradigmatic
Rosicrucian hero in the character of Zanoni. That the
figure of Zanoni has profoundly influenced the shape
and development of occultism is undeniable, though rarely acknowledged. More
important, perhaps, is the fact that Bulwer-Lytton's ambivalence about his
sources and hints of membership of esoteric Rosicrucian societies encouraged
the belief in those disposed to such interests that the Rosicrucians
did indeed exist - and could be contacted. In this, Bulwer-Lytton had
brought the saga of Rosicrucianism to a full circle, for what had begun as an
almost hysterical search for secret fraternities in the early seventeenth
century, only then to become the province of philosophers, politicians, and
writers of fiction, finally ended in the mid-nineteenth century with a renewed vigour for discovering those presumed to possess the elixir
vitae and the lapis philosophicus. In
reestablishing the links between the literary model of the Rosicrucian and tantalising suggestions of real Rosicrucians,
Bulwer-Lytton unwittingly sounded the death knell for the literary genre and a
rallying cry for fratres manqué, among
them the young Helena Blavatsky.
Edward George Earle
Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton, is a name unknown to the general
literary public, unknown even to many enthusiasts of nineteenth century
fiction.59) That such is the case is hardly surprising since Bulwer-Lytton was
parodied mercilessly by a number of his contemporaries and gained little favour among his successors: Thackeray said of "Sir Edwahd Bulwig"60) that "there are big words which
make me furious, and a pretentious fine writing against which I can't help
rebelling".61) It is certainly true that Bulwer-Lytton's literary style
(dubbed "Bulwerese") and personal demeanour bordered on pomposity.62) Yet to reject
Bulwer-Lytton out of hand is to overlook the influence he exerted over many
other authors whose fame has endured more readily, and to ignore his seminal
position both as a writer of occult fiction and, perhaps unknowingly, as the
progenitor of a number of esoteric sodalities.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
was born in London on 25 May, 1803.63) His literary production was vast: he
published fifty-nine major works which included collections of short stories,
fourteen plays, nine volumes of poetry, a dozen volumes of prose (including
translations, historical studies, and social criticism),64) as well as thirty
novels. These last represent almost every major genre in the available canon:
crime, historical, domestic, and utopian novels, as well as costume,
metaphysical, scientific, and occult romances.65) Many of Bulwer-Lytton's
novels and romances contain elements of the German bildungsroman, as
established by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister of 1796, which has encouraged
some critics to credit Bulwer-Lytton with having imported German romantic
aesthetics, particularly Hegelian Idealism, into English literature.66)
Of all of
Bulwer-Lytton's works, the occult novels were the author's favourite.67)
Exhibiting a profound fascination with all manner of esoteric leitmotifs,
Bulwer-Lytton's first purely occult novel, Zanoni,
appeared in 1842. That the last novel to be published within the author's
lifetime, The Coming Race of 1871, also contained esoteric topoi
is testament to his lifelong interest in the arcana of Hermeticism and
Rosicrucianism. It has been customary for commentators to ignore or demean this
aspect of his œuvre or to classify it as an
aberration in his otherwise sound corpus; at best, Bulwer-Lytton's occultism
has been interpreted as symptomatic of his dandified temperament.68) A detailed
study of the entirety of Bulwer-Lytton's occult fiction remains to be written
but an examination of the Rosicrucian novel, Zanoni,
might help to explain the novel's extraordinary currency in modern occultism
and exactly why it is that the notoriously critical Blavatsky considered
Bulwer-Lytton to be especially authoritative:
[Bulwer-Lytton is]
one whose memory will ever be dear and sacred to the heart of every true
Theosophist ... one who ranked higher than any other in the small number of
genuine mystical writers, for he knew what he was talking about, which is more
than can be said of other writers in this department of literature.69)
The introduction to Zanoni describes the meeting in a Covent Garden book
store between a young man, eager to discover the Rosicrucian secrets, and an
elderly painter who appears to the young narrator to be a member of that
"August Fraternity".70) After a short acquaintance, spent discussing
the "Greek" versus the "Dutch" schools of painting,
the four levels of divine madness outlined in Plato's Phaedrus, and the
philosophies of the Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists, the elderly man dies and
leaves to his young friend the manuscript of a very long book, completely
encoded in a cipher.71) After two years of concerted effort at translation, the
narrator had succeeded only in "the insertion of a few desultory chapters,
in a periodical".72) Soon afterwards, he discovers that the manuscript is
in fact comprised of two separate works, one an expansion of the other, so he
goes to work on transcribing the second, longer work - which ultimately becomes
the text of Zanoni.
In introducing his
novel in this fashion, Bulwer-Lytton has succeeded in establishing his
philosophical framework and in indicating a number of his early objectives. In
the first place, Zanoni is placed squarely
within the tradition of the metaphysical novel for, as Eigner
has suggested, the location of an allegorical (or, in this case, occult) tale
within the parameters of a realistic and temporally-specific story, reconciles
the two and creates a form of literary transcendence.73) Bulwer-Lytton has
allied this literary device with his thematic structure by means of a
discussion of the conceptual interchange between the Real and the Ideal; he
suggests that in art, as well as in literature, a demarcation must be drawn
between "the imitation of actual life [the 'Dutch' school] and the
exaltation of Nature into the Ideal [the 'Greek' school]".74) There can be
little doubt as to which Bulwer-Lytton favours for,
according to his lofty concept of art, the great writer must never descend to
"a passion that is false or a personage who is real".75)
By embedding his occult
tale in the mundane world, Bulwer-Lytton also overcame a number of pragmatic
authorial difficulties. He had originally published a synopsis of Zanoni as a novella entitled Zicci
in the Monthly Chronicle in 1838.76) The existence of two encoded manuscripts
thus explains to the reader the reason for the overlap of characters and
situations within both Zanoni and Zicci. It also encourages the identification of
Bulwer-Lytton with the narrator and, by extension, with the Rosicrucians.
After all, the reader is informed, "[w]ho but a Rosicrucian could explain
the Rosicrucian mysteries!"77) Immediately, then, the novel is transported
into the mesocosmic space between fiction and
non-fiction, and Bulwer-Lytton becomes the sole link between the literary Rosicrucians which fill his tale and the real Rosicrucians which, the reader presumes, suggested them.
Zanoni is divided into four parts, each of which reflects
one of the four stages of Divine Madness (man’a)
as elucidated by Socrates to Plato in the Phaedrus: the musical/poetic (poetiké), the initiatory (telestiké),
the prophetic (mantiké), and the amatory (erotiké).78) The first part of the book (poetiké), called "The Musician",
introduces a violin virtuoso by the name of Pisano, and his daughter
Viola, the diva of the Neapolitan Opera. As Viola sings an aria
from her father's opera, she notices an enchanting Adonian
stranger in the audience who, she subsequently discovers, is a traveller by the name of Zanoni,
recently returned with a vast fortune from India. The reader is then introduced
to a number of Zanoni's attributes, each of which
recalls the traditional powers popularly ascribed to the Rosicrucian (and,
later, to the Theosophical Master): Zanoni appears to
have lived for millennia (vol. 1, p.57); he can cure illness (p.73); he is a
noted herbalist and naturalist (p.111); he dresses simply (p.115); he is
celibate (p.126); he speaks all languages (p.140); he mysteriously raises the
moral standards of those who surround him (p.141); he cannot be poisoned
(p.275); and he can remain invisible to others' eyes (vol.2; p.32).
Zanoni realises that Viola loves him and that to return her love
may involve the loss of his powers: "[a]s a calamity, I shun what to man
seems the fairest fate - the love of the daughters of earth".799) To
resolve his dilemma, Zanoni visits the only other
extant member of his Fraternity, Mejnour. Mejnour differs from Zanoni in
that he achieved his immortality in old age and has become an "austere and
remorseless Hierophant" who cares little for humanity.80) (The two
immortals are hereafter made to represent many polar opposites: Age and Youth,
Science and Art, the Actual and the Ideal). The two immortals discuss the
impending calamity for mankind which is looming in the shape of the French
Revolution, and Mejnour prophesies danger for Zanoni if he involves himself in the affairs of human
society. Zanoni concurs:
Methinks I behold a
ghastly limit to the wondrous existence I have held - methinks that, after ages
of the Ideal Life, I see my course merge into the most stormy whirlpool of the
Real.81)
Zanoni
then travels to Paris in order to attend a soirée at which Condorcet
(1743-1794), Gillaume de Malsherbes,
Chamfort (c.1741-1794), Jean Bailly (1736-1793),
Jacques Cazotte (1719-1792), and Jean de la Harpe (d.1803) are all to be present.82) Cazotte, a pupil of Martinés de Pasqually, recognises Zanoni from past Kabbalistic ceremonies, and is encouraged
by him to divine the futures of the other guests. Cazotte
then prophesies that the majority (including himself) will die on the scaffold
of the French Revolution.83) This episode allows Bulwer-Lytton to comment upon
the failed idealism of the philosophes, an idealism based upon a
misplaced faith in the benevolence of human reason. The presence of Condorcet
among the invited guests is not accidental, for more than any other he
represents for Bulwer-Lytton the dangers of a philosophy based exclusively upon
the Real; the reader is reminded that, "Unpolluted by the Actual, the
Ideal lives only with Art and Beauty".84) In Zanoni,
Condorcet states that, "[l]ife, I grant, cannot
be made eternal; but it may be prolonged almost indefinitely".85) As noted
supra, Condorcet's social program, as outlined in his Esquisse d'un
tableau historique des progrés
de l'esprit humain
("Outline of an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human
Mind") of 1795, entailed the improvement of the natural environment, the
inheritance of improved characteristics, and the advancement of medicine.86)
While beneficent in intention, Bulwer-Lytton is indicating that social
programs, underpinned by little or no emphasis on the improvement of the spirit
of man, can lead only to "murderers [who] will have no word but philosophy
on their lips!"87) Indeed, the author makes clear his position by
employing an esoteric metaphor: the French Revolution is the end product of
"the philosopher [who] will carry about with him, not the elixir, but the
poison".88)
Bulwer-Lytton is also
making a none-too-subtle reference to the prolongevity
theories of his friend William Godwin, the originator of the Rosicrucian
fiction genre. According to Bulwer-Lytton, the two great prolongevity
theorists of the eighteenth century, Condorcet and Godwin, were blinded by their
impatience to alter the physical and social state of humanity without having
first edified the spirit within. Neither the regeneration of individual social
responsibility as advocated by Godwin, nor the fostering of collective
consciousness as suggested by Condorcet, would ever be enough to extend the
lifespan of humankind, as too many had so "prated of equality, and lisped
of enlightenment".89)
The second part of
the story, the initiatory (telestiké), in
which the soul ascends closer to its source by means of an enthusiasm for the
mystical, begins with the introduction of an Englishman, Glyndon. Glyndon's
nationality and his artistic profession indicate that he is in fact the elderly
man the narrator had met in the Covent Garden book store, and that the
enciphered manuscript - which "becomes" the text of Zanoni - is in reality the chronicle of his memmoirs. (There is also good reason to interpret in the
ancestry of Glyndon an implied link with Bulwer-Lytton, thereby compounding the
latter's claims to Rosicrucian initiation).90) Zanoni
attempts to encourage a love to develop between Glyndon and Viola in order that
he may remain aloof from earthly passions, but is thwarted by Glyndon's
eagerness to become a neophyte in Zanoni's
Fraternity:
I renounce love. I
renounce happiness. Welcome solitude - welcome despair; it they are the
entrances to thy dark and sublime secret.91)
As a postulant in the
esoteric Fraternity, Glyndon is apprenticed to Mejnour
and begins his training in a remote Italian castle. Unsurprisingly, the young
novice is too eager for occult power and is ill-prepared to "reduce Being
as far as possible into Mind. The senses must be mortified and subdued - not
the whisper of one passion heard".92) Glyndon rashly enters Mejnour's inner sanctum and imbibes the forbidden elixir.
The punishment for such a transgression is the appearance to Glyndon of the
dreaded "Dweller of the Threshold" (also called "Shadow" or
"Guardian"), a hideous spectre - indeed,
the manifestation of Glyndon's own fear and lust - whose task it is to pursue
the wretched Glyndon all the days of his life.93)
Glyndon is dismissed
from Mejnour's presence and is told by the sage,
"[t]hou pantest for
this Millenium - thou shalt behold it! Thou shalt be
one of the agents of the era of Light and Reason".94) This comment ushers
in the third part of the novel, the prophetic (mantiké),
which deals in major part with the French Revolution and culminates in the
Terror. Zanoni has spent two idyllic years with his
beloved Viola on an unspoiled island during which time the latter gave birth to
their child. Even so, Zanoni, having descended from
the Ideal into the Real, feels his powers ebb: "I feel it - the earth
grows upon my spirit".95) The failed and bitter neophyte, Glyndon,
subsequently encounters Viola in Venice and convinces her to flee with her
child from Zanoni as she would from a sorcerer, and
to escape to Paris. Divining that the lives of his wife and child may well be
ransomed with his own, Zanoni follows.
The fourth phase of
the soul's elevation - and thus of the novel - the amatory (erotiké),
begins with Zanoni's desperate search for Viola.
Encountering Glyndon on the streets of Paris, Zanoni
first rescues him from the mob and then exorcises his "Shadow". In
this, Bulwer-Lytton is indicating that the first stage of selfless love is
forgiveness; the second, it would seem, is sacrifice. Zanoni
soon discovers that Viola has been denounced by the ignorant atheistical artist Nicot (probably
an unfavourable portrait of Jacques Louis David
[1748-1825]),96) and is to go to the guillotine. The night before the scheduled
execution, Zanoni bribes a gaoler
and secretly enters the prison. There he spends a last night with Viola and
their child and, as his lover sleeps, he takes her place in the tumbrel. At the
moment of his execution, Zanoni is granted a
Neoplatonic vision of the hosts of heaven ranked in a celestial hierarchy; the
choir sings: "Welcome! O purified by sacrifice, and immortal only through
the grave - this it is to die".97) Here the reader is reminded of the
injunction of Zanoni's "superior", the
spirit Adon-Ai:
"Thy courage has
restored thy power ... Wiser now, in the moment when thou comprehendest
Death, than when thy unfettered spirit learned the solemn mystery of Life; ...
eternity ... commences from the grave".98)
Death, it seems,
provides the only possible redemption for the Rosicrucian. Zanoni's
real initiation - as opposed to the rites of his earthly Fraternity - comes as
he rises successively through the spheres of inspiration as outlined by Plato.
His ultimate realisation, that the Ideal and the Real
can only be synthesised in heaven, convinces him that
immortality is achievable only on the other side of the grave.
Zanoni's glorious demise is deliberately juxtaposed by
Bulwer-Lytton with that of Robespierre. The latter ("vain seer, who
wouldst make thyself the instrument of the Eternal")99) is symptomatic in
the author's view of the degenerated ideal of the French Revolution:
"knowledge and atheism are incompatible".100) The identification of
the failures of Robespierre and of Glyndon is an unmistakable subtext
throughout; the impatience of Glyndon to partake of the elixir vitae,
which led to his confrontation with the "Dweller of the Threshold",
is a metaphor for the impatience of the philosophes to accelerate
radical social change, which itself bred the Terror. In fact the Reign of
Terror is directly aligned with the horror of the "Dweller on the
Threshold":
Everywhere ... I see
its dim shapelessness going before the men of blood, and marshalling their way
... its loathsome keeper has seized them as its prey.101
The identification of
the failed revolutionary and the thwarted aspirant after occult power is
reinforced in the description of Robespierre's ascension to the Barrière du Tr™ne
on the 10¡ Thermidor:
Around him they
throng - they hoot - they execrate! their faces gleaming in the tossing
torches! He, and not the starry Magian, the real Sorcerer! And
round his last hours gather the Fiends he raised!102)
When Zanoni was published, the critical reaction was
vigorous and polarised. Thomas Carlyle credited the
novel with being a "liberating voice for much that lay dumb imprisoned in
human souls".103) The critic for the Athenaeum considered Zanoni to be filled with "tinselled
truisms [figuring] as new discoveries, and obscurity of meaning [passing] for
elevation of thought".104) By contrast, the reviewer for the Literary
Gazette thought the work to be "an effusion of genius".105)
Bulwer-Lytton believed that there was "nothing like it in the
language"106) and, with characteristic modesty, was to proclaim that Zanoni was "the loftiest conception in English
prose fiction".107) He held no illusions, however, as to its popularity
with the wider literary audience: "Zanoni
will be no favourite with that largest of all asses -
the English public".108)
There can be little
doubt that the responses to Zanoni have polarised over the self-evidently esoteric nature of the
work: Blavatsky considered it "exquisite".109) Certainly, scattered
throughout the text are references to a number of occult luminaries;110)
indeed, it could be argued that Bulwer-Lytton missed no opportunity to exhibit
his erudition in such matters. It is important to remember, however, that he
was writing within an established genre and that he employed the Rosicrucian
ethos, as had the other exponents of the field, to make a much broader series
of comments upon matters of a political, aesthetic, literary, epistemological,
and philosophical nature.111)
The source of much of
Bulwer-Lytton's philosophical idiom surely lies with Hegel. He was fluent in
German (having, significantly, translated the poems of Schiller), and an avid
reader of German visionary literature, philosophy, and aesthetics.112) Hegel
had called art "the sensuous appearance [Scheinen]
of the Idea"113) which is echoed by Zanoni's
suggestion that "painting [is] but the fixing into substance the
Invisible".114) The other aspect of Hegelian metaphysical aesthetics which
appealed to Bulwer-Lytton was the notion of dialectical synthesism.115)
Bulwer-Lytton interpreted the Rosicrucian quest for the Elixir of Life and the
Philosopher's Stone as metaphors for the yearning to fix the Ideal within the
parameters of the Real. Such a Hegelian concentration on integration [Aufhebung], as personified in the "mortal
Immortal" Zanoni, is - as Blavatsky consistently
claimed - a typological prefigurement of her own
Masters.116)
Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni is the culmination of the nineteenth-century
genre of the English Rosicrucian novel in so far as it examines in greatest
detail the semiotics of Rosicrucianism. Nevertheless, for all of its literary
sophistication and esoteric erudition, the novel retains its place of preeminence
in the occult imaginal because of the suspicion - actively fostered by its
author - that the work is not a fictional account of a mythical fraternity, but
an accurate depiction of a real brotherhood of immortals. As Blavatsky
herself noted:
[Bulwer-Lytton's]
words sound more like the faithful echo of memory than the exuberant outflow of
mere imagination ... one whom many with reason believed to know more than he
was prepared to admit in the face of an incredulous public.117)
To appreciate the
extraordinary currency of the notion that Bulwer-Lytton was a genuine
Rosicrucian, it is necessary to examine briefly the depth of the author's
active involvement with nineteenth century occultism. The standard argumentum
e silentio, as proposed by many of his biographers, notably his grandson
Victor, will not suffice:
As this was a secret
society, it is not surprising that among Bulwer's papers there should be no
documents which throw any light on his connection with it, nor any mention of
it in his correspondence.118)
Hargrave Jennings,
the author of The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and
Mysteries (1870), appealed to Bulwer-Lytton for patronage, and received
from the latter a typically elliptical and tantalising
response:119)
There are reasons why
I cannot enter the subject of the "Rosicrucian Brotherhood", a
society still existing, but not under any name by which it can be recognised by those without its pale. But you have with
much learning and much acuteness traced its connection with early and
symbolical religions, and no better book upon such a theme has been written, or
indeed, could be written, unless a member of the Fraternity were to break the
vow which enjoins them to secrecy.120)
It is known that
Bulwer-Lytton was profoundly interested in Spiritualism, Mesmerism, phrenology,
and clairvoyance, though his skepticism about the claims of the great majority
of the proponents of these fields is well documented.121) He wrote: "I
believe that ... whatever they [the 'spirits'] be, they serve no useful purpose
nor will they conduce to any higher knowledge. They may be very injurious to
ordinary understandings and very disappointing to the highest".122) It
appears that Bulwer-Lytton was particularly concerned that the guides of
Spiritualism appeared to cast doubt upon post-mortem progressivism:
They profess to be
spirits of the dead, but I much doubt, supposing they are spirits at all,
whether they are not rather brownies or fairies ... [for] the wonder is that
they go so far and no farther. To judge by them, even the highest departed
spirits discovered seem to have made no visible progress - to be as uncertain
and contradicting as ourselves or more so.123)
Bulwer-Lytton's
misgivings about Spiritualism did not inhibit his amused participation in sèances, however, and a number of such gatherings were
conducted in his house on Park Lane and at Knebworth by the famous medium
Daniel Douglas Home.124)
A survey of the
visitors to Knebworth during Bulwer-Lytton's Baronage, if such records were
available in toto, would include the names of a number of the more
famous occult dignitaries of the mid-nineteenth century. It is known that Eliphas Lévi became acquainted with Bulwer-Lytton during
the former's first visit to England in 1854, and that he was later invited as a
guest to Knebworth in 1861.125) During his first stay in London, described in
his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie of 1856, Lévi was said to have engaged in
necromantic experiments designed to raise the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana at the behest of a young female acquaintance of
"a friend of Sir B--- L---".126) It would appear that the mention of
Bulwer-Lytton's name, in this instance at least, had become something of an
occult calling card. Lévi was accompanied on his second visit to Knebworth by
another of Bulwer-Lytton's friends, the alchemist Count Alexander [Ksawery?] Branicki (1814?-1879?),
who maintained his laboratory in the house of Mme. de Balzac, the Chateau de
Beauregard, at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges.127)
The only Rosicrucian
order of which evidence of Bulwer-Lytton's involvement can be incontrovertibly
established is that of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia. Formed in 1866 by Robert
Wentworth Little (1839-1878), a Freemasonic entrepreneur par excellence,
the "S. R. I. A." was - and remains - predominantly a Rosicrucian
study group open for membership to Master Masons.128) It is true that
Bulwer-Lytton was elected to the position of Grand Patron honoris causa
on 14 July, 1870.129) Unfortunately for the Masonic Rosicrucians,
he seems not to have been informed of his elevation until December, 1872, at
which time he wrote a letter of complaint to a member of the organisation.130)
Bulwer-Lytton died only a month later, on 18 January, 1873, so his tenure was
both brief and involuntary - though this has not eradicated the notion from the
minds of his apologists and biographers.131)
What can be stated
with certainty is that Bulwer-Lytton enjoyed immensely the mythopoeia which he
was able to generate by his occult writings, and the mystique which surrounded
both his erudition in such matters and his acquaintance with some of its
brighter apologists. There can be little doubt that he would have enjoyed
nothing more than to have discovered real ambassadors from the "August
Fraternity" of Rosicrucians, convinced, as he
was, of human perfectibilism. Madame Home said of
Bulwer-Lytton that he "was half persuaded of the possibility of youth
being thus renewed, and had a half-hope that he might one day revive his
own".132)
The claims made by
occultists about Bulwer-Lytton's Rosicrucian initiatory status are legion and
extraordinary. An American twentieth century Rosicrucian, Reuben Swinburne
Clymer (1878-1966), said of Bulwer-Lytton that he was the "Highest
Arcane Initiate; Member of the Great or World Council; Order
of the Rose, L'Ordre du Lis,
Count de L., Hierophant of the World, Fraternitae
Rosae Crucis".133) Another, Pascal Beverly Randolph,
claimed that Bulwer-Lytton had presided over his initiation and that of Eliphas Lévi at the "Supreme Grand Dome" of
Rosicrucianism in Paris.134) It might also be remembered that Emma Hardinge Britten included Bulwer-Lytton among the members
of the mysterious "Orphic Circle".135) The American leaders of the
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor took the names "Zanoni",
"Mejnour", and "Glyndon" as
pseudonyms in their publications.136) It should not be forgotten, of course,
that Leadbeater claimed a personal acquaintance with Bulwer-Lytton (and sought
Lady Emily Lutyens' favour in part because she was
the novelist's granddaughter).137) A complete list of Bulwer-Lytton's putative
occult laurels would fill many pages, but Koot Hoomi's comments bear repeating:
The greatest as well
as most promising of such schools in Europe, the last attempt in this
direction, - failed most signally some 20 years ago in London. It was the
secret school for the practical teaching of magick,
founded under the name of a club, by a dozen enthusiasts under the leadership
of Lord Lytton's father [i.e., Bulwer-Lytton]. He had collected together for
the purpose the most ardent and enterprising as well as some of the most
advanced scholars in mesmerism and "ceremonial magick",
such as Eliphas Levi, Reganozzi,
and the Copt Zergvan Bey. And yet in the pestilent
London atmosphere the "Club" came to an untimely end. I visited it
about half a dozen times.138)
Bulwer-Lytton's literary
inventions have fared no differently. Alice Bailey devoted two chapters of her
posthumously published Glamour: A World Problem (1950) to the occult
nature of "The Dweller on [sic] the Threshold".139) Zanoni, both as novel and character, has provided
the ideational foundation for a number of self-described Rosicrucian
fraternities, the most celebrated being the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The central tenet of the novel - that it is not really a work of fictioon at all, but enciphered memoirs of real events - is
echoed in the putated origins of the Golden Dawn
itself. William Wynn Westcott claimed to have come into possession of an
enciphered manuscript which, when rendered into English, revealed embryonic
notes for five hitherto unknown Rosicrucian rituals.140) Samuel Liddell
Mathers, the gifted occult impresario at the centre
of the Golden Dawn, was himself so enamoured of the
novel that his wife began to call him "Zan".141) Mathers believed
wholeheartedly in the veracity of Lytton's novel, and explained Zanoni's powers in the unmistakable occultist idiom
particular to the Order:
Zanoni
... overcame the effects of the poisoned wine of the Prince di D---- as
follows. In the first place, he changed his breath to the right nostril, and
threw an envelope of Akasa Tattwa
over his antagonist ... In the latter case he brought the Water, Apas, Tattwa into course,
directed it with the full force of his trained will towards the poisoned wine,
and consequently the burning heat of the poison was counteracted.142)
References to Zanoni in the works of the adepti
of the Golden Dawn (who were often also Theosophists) are legion.143) Indeed,
it could be argued that the Order - in reality something akin to a Rosicrucian
academy - was specifically designed to produce Zanonis.
Of all of
Bulwer-Lytton's admirers, none was as closely in concert with the author's
intent as was Blavatsky.144) An avid reader of Bulwer-Lytton's novels from her
youth,145) she understood perfectly well that they both were involved in what can
only be termed a fraternal enterprise: the strategic creation of new
mythologies (from traditional esoteric templates) which might parry with the
materialist philosophies of a Western world committed to the reducibility of
mystery. To this end, Bulwer-Lytton employed the motif of the Rosicrucian
Brotherhood as a semiotically-rich literary device - a lesson he had learned
through a close study of the genre of Rosicrucian fiction. Throughout Zanoni's thousands of years of life, during which he
learned all of the secrets of nature (thus personifying, as the ultimate
Rosicrucian "magico-scientist", the new rationalist epistemologies of
the nineteenth century), he never appreciated the most significant lesson of
all: progress cannot be inhibited. To facilitate the reader's
appreciation of this central theme, Bulwer-Lytton employed an ascensus/descensus framework (so beloved by
Blavatsky); it is only when Zanoni descends
into the Real (by prioritising love over power, and
altruistic self-sacrifice over egocentric immortality) that he may ascend
to the Ideal/divine (through his post-mortem acceptance into a Neoplatonistic celestial hierarchy).146) Unlike the
glorious ascent of Zanoni, Glyndon/Robespierre,
representing the failure of Positivist-materialist rationalism to create
anything other than the idealism-devouring "Dweller of the
Threshold"/Terror, descends to atheistical
anarchy, materialism - and oblivion.147)
Underscoring
Bulwer-Lytton's figurations is an obvious Gnostico-Hermetic
template of emanationism and reintegration.148)
Crucially, he adopted the Hermetic god-man motif as the focal means to
represent the spiritual and physical development of humanity on its path toward
divinisation. Zanoni is
thus Bulwer-Lytton's answer to the postmortem entities of Spiritualism which,
the author noted, "seem to have made no visible progress".149) In
fact, Zanoni is Bulwer-Lytton's archetype of
physical, spiritual, and moral perfectibilism. That
he thus embodies the Ideal is undeniable; more important, still, is that the
author - through myriad hints and suggestions - presented him as being Real as
well. It could be argued, then, that Zanoni is
the ultimate Hegelian synthesis: incarnate Aufhebung.150)
It is precisely this
aspect of Bulwer-Lytton's depiction of Zanoni which
provided Blavatsky with an ideational reference point for the presentation of
her own Masters.151) The perichoresis between the Ideal and the Real,
always a distinguishing feature of the Rosicrucian novel, had reached something
of a culmination in Zanoni where, instead of
the Rosicrucian fraternity operating in "metaphysical space", it had
now moved into ontological territory, and thus cast an entirely new - and
exciting - light on the manifestoes and their continuators. Concomitant with
Bulwer-Lytton's presentation of the Brotherhood as fact was the altered
hermeneutic which such a shift encouraged; namely, that the "real" Rosicrucians could henceforth be brought to bear upon the
specific discourses of nineteenth century modernity. So it was that, in
Blavatsky's hands, her redaction of Bulwer-Lytton's "August
Fraternity" - the trans-Himalayan Brotherhood - could become the agents of
evolutionism and the vocal opponents of Positivism, materialism, and
"scientism".152)
From Bulwer-Lytton,
Blavatsky learned that age-old esoteric motifs could be harnessed quite
comfortably with such mandatory paradigms of her own century as progressivism.
Yet she was also fully aware that the very notion of progressivism was itself
born of the skeptical rationalism of the Enlightenment, and thus if she
intended to portray a class of initiates as possessors of supranormal powers
and wisdom she would likely have to produce them at some
point. To this end she studied Zanoni closely
because Bulwer-Lytton had been the first to have faced this particular dilemma,
and had craftily overcome it by conducting playful Hermesian
games. Zanoni was a Rosicrucian, but also
pre-Rosicrucian; the book is a novel, but also a memoir; the author appears to
have first-hand knowledge of the Rosicrucians, but is
frustratingly vague about details; several real persons are presented as
"fiction" (Condorcet, inter alia), and some fictional
characters are presented as "real" (Zanoni,
Mejnour, and Glyndon). This play of deliberate
ambiguity was Bulwer-Lytton's gift to Blavatsky, and she was to employ it very
confidently indeed.
1)
The Hesse-Kassel Rosicrucian pamphlets appear to have been circulating in
manuscript form from at least as early as 1610. The two most significant
Rosicrucian manifestoes, at least from an historiographical point of view, are
the Fama Fraternitatis
or A Discovery of the Fraternity of the Most Noble Order of the Rosy Cross (1614)
and the Confession Fraternitatis or The Confession
of the Laudable Fraternity of the Most Honourable
Order of the Rosy Cross, Written to All the Learned of Europe (1615). The
literature on Rosicrucianism is vast and uneven. For various translations and
interpretations of the manifestoes see McIntosh, The Rose Cross; id., The
Rosy Cross Unveiled: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Occult Order,
The Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, 1980; Yates, The Rosicrucian
Enlightenment; Ralph White, ed., The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited,
Lindisfarne Books, Hudson, New York, 1999; Anonymous [Johann Valentin Andreae?], The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, trans. Joscelyn
Godwin, Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks #18, Phanes Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 1991; A. E. Waite, The
Real History of the Rosicrucians: Founded on Their
Own Manifestoes, and on Facts and Documents Collected from the Writing of
Initiated Brethren, George Redway, London, 1887;
id., The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross; Paul M. Allen, ed., A
Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, 3rd ed.,
Spiritual Science Library, Blauvelt, New York, 1981.
2)
Cf., e.g., G. J. Gruman, "A History of Ideas
about the Prolongation of Life: The Evolution of Prolongevity
Hypotheses to 1800" in Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, vol. 56:9, 1966, 1-97
3)
Definitions of the Gothic genre are legion. The spectrum ranges from strict
Marxist interpretations (F. Moretti, "The Dialectic of Fear" in
New Left Review, 136, Nov.-Dec., 1982, 67-86) to purely psychological
interpretations (Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame, Arthur Barker,
London, 1957) to feminist revisionism (A. O. Gladwell & J. Havoc, eds., Blood
and Roses: The Vampire in 19th Century Literature, Creation, London, 1992)
with much simplistic reductionism in between. For this research, the present
author has employed a broad definition of Gothic: those novels which followed
Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto of 1764 in employing the elements of
death, the dead, hopelessness, chaos, and murder in order to investigate the
tension and possible contradiction between rationalism and the imagination. See
M. K. Patterson Thornburg, The Monster in the Mirror: Gender and the
Sentimental - Gothic Myth in Frankenstein, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 1987, 1-62.
4)
Job 14:5, "[H]is days are determined, and the number of his months
is with thee, and thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass".
Psalms 90:10, "The years of our life are threescore and ten, or
even by reason of strength fourscore; yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away".
2 Corinthians 5:6-8, "We know that while we are at home in the body
we are away from the Lord ... and we would rather be away from the body and at
home with the Lord".
Quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of 1946/1952.
5)
Just as the transformation from beauty to hideousness is indicative of the
demoniacal nature of Frankenstein's Monster, so too the atavistic elements in
the vampire myth (elongated canine teeth, the ability to summon and control
night animals, and the identification with bats and rodents) coupled with the
inability of the vampire to face daylight, suggests Luciferian devilishness.
The most terrible of the stigma, however, must surely be the burning brand of
the cross which adorns the forehead of the Wandering Jew. The parallels between
the Wandering Jew and its prototype, Cain, are immediately apparent: see George
K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, Brown University Press,
Providence, Rhode Island, 1970, 1-23, 212-290.
6)
Robert Fludd, "The Rosicrucian
Brotherhood", trans. Carlo Pietzner, in Allen, A
Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, 307-308.
7)
For details see McIntosh, The Rose Cross, 24ff.
8)
For an acute analysis of the esoteric substance of the Rosicrucian manifestoes,
see Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition,
171-190.
9)
The social and religious reform movement which gave birth to the Rosicrucian
manifestoes is beyond the scope of the present research. For details see John
Warwick Montgomery, Cross and Crucible: Johan Valentin Andreae
(1586-1654), Phoenix of the Theologians, vol. 1, Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Idées, no. 55, Nijhoff, The
Hague, 1973 (though care must be taken with his anti-esoteric thesis);
McIntosh, The Rose Cross; R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his world: A Study
in Intellectual History, 1576-1612, Thames and Hudson, London, 1997.
10)
Given the anti-papal nature of the manifestoes, it is not surprising that the
majority of Rosicrucian apologists were Lutheran Protestants and their
opponents Roman Catholic. Typical of the latter is WARNUNG fuer die Rosenkreutzen Ungeziefer of 1621, for which see Waite, The
Brotherhood, 342.
11)
McIntosh, The Rose Cross, 26ff; id., The Rosy Cross Unveiled,
43-47.
12)
See Faivre, Access, 64-66.
13)
For details see Edighoffer, "Hermeticism in
Early Rosicrucianism", 197-215; Bamford, "The Meaning of the Rose
Cross", 43-72. Frances Yates (The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 80-81)
has argued that ludibrium in this context does
not mean a joke or farce, but an allegorical "divine comedy". Further
credence is given to the possibility of Andreae's
authorship of all three manifestoes by the fact that Andreae's
family arms, like those of Luther, bore both the rose and the cross. Marie
Roberts has proposed that Andreae employed this
symbolism to emphasise the "Protestant backlash
to Hapsburg hegemony" which preceded the Thirty Years' War: see Marie
Roberts, Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross,
Routledge, London, 1990.
14)
Descartes (1596-1650) searched in vain for the Fraternity, only to conclude it
was fictive. He was, however, required to come out from a self-imposed
seclusion in order to prove to his acquaintances that he had not been taught by
the Brotherhood how to become invisible: see Marie Roberts, "The English
Rosicrucian Novel" in, Cauda Pavonis: Studies in Hermeticism, 8:1,
1989, 7.
15)
The process of accretion, by which the Rosicrucian Fraternity became the
repository of all esoteric knowledge, began as early as 1615 when Julius
Sperber's Echo der von Gott hocherleuchteten Fraternitet purported that Christian Rosenkreutz was the recipient of a secret doctrine that had
been maintained from the time of Adam. The unbroken tradition - a Rosicrucian philosophia
perennis - had been transmitted by Zoroaster, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians,
the Jewish Kabbalists, Cornelius Agrippa, Johannes Reuchlin, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, inter alia. See Christopher McIntosh, The
Rosicrucians, Crucible, Wellingborough,
Northamptonshire, 1987, 53-54.
16)
Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 299.
17)
Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror, Russell
& Russell, New York, 1963, 100-127. It should be noted that the present
work discusses only a small number of works ranging from 1799 (St. Leon)
to 1842 (Zanoni). There are, of course,
Rosicrucian novels in several other languages, and the genre continues to the
present day: cf., eg., David Foster, The
Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross, King Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1986.
Nevertheless, the novels examined infra appear to exhibit the range of
concerns central to the genre, and to have been favourites
of Blavatsky.
18)
Godwin based St. Leon on John Campbell's Hermippus
Redivivus: The Sage's Triumph over Old Age and the Grave (1744): see
Roberts, Gothic Immortals, 25, 49-50.
19)
That Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni is here presented
as the zenith of the Rosicrucian novel does not presuppose its literary or
stylistic talents surpass other contributors to the genre - rather that it
remains the most comprehensive treatment of the themes suggested by
Rosicrucianism.
20)
Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, vol. I, 285.
21)
There were Rosicrucian novels published subsequent to Zanoni,
but for the next several decades the Rosicrucian genre tended to be represented
by writers who could be classified primarily as occultists rather than
novelists. The prime example is that of Pascal Beverly Randolph, whose two
celebrated Rosicrucian novels follow Zanoni in
their pretensions to semi-autobiographical status: P. B. Randolph, The
Rosicrucian's Story: The Wonderful Things That Happened to Mr. Thomas W. and
his Wife. Embracing the Celebrated "Miranda Theory", M. J.
Randolph, Utica, 1863; id., The Wonderful Story of Ravalette.
Also, Tom Clark and his Wife: Their Double Dreams and the Curious Things that Befell
Them Therein; or, The Rosicrucian's Story, S. Tousey,
New York, 1863. That Randolph was well aware of the existence of a Rosicrucian
fiction tradition is evidenced by his use of the nom de plume "Count
de St. Leon" (in his Love and its Hidden History, 1869): see Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph, 344, 354-355.
22)
There is a survey of responses to St. Leon in B. J. Tysdahl,
William Godwin as Novelist, Athlone, London, 1981, 77-96. It is
interesting to note that Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) is generally
regarded as the first detective novel in English; later, the figurative type of
the Master was often incorporated into this genre; see infra Appendix C.
23)
A parody of St. Leon appeared in 1800 under the title St. Godwin: A
Tale of the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, by Count Reginald de St. Leon (alias
Robert Dubois). In it the author suggests the public "burlesqued my
works" and the novels "made me look like a fool"; see Roberts, Gothic
Immortals, 49. A good reading of St. Leon is offered by Juliet Beckett's
"Introduction" to the Arno Press (N.Y.) edition of St. Leon,
1972, i-xxix
24)
It is commonly suggested that Marguerite is a portrait of Godwin's wife, the
feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), who had died only a year prior to the
publication of St. Leon. See Birkhead, The
Tale of Terror, 112.
25)
Tysdahl's comment that Godwin was "a liberal
Tory manqué and a believer manqué (in the Devil more than in
God)" could be extended to his esotericism: see Tysdahl,
WilliamGodwin, 96. For Blavatsky's use of
Godwin, cf., e.g., Blavatsky, Collected Writings, vol. XI, 535-541; vol.
XIV, 298.
26)
An excellent summary of Godwin's theories of perfectibility is offered by
Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, 178-181.
27)
William Godwin, "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence
on Morals and Happiness" in Gruman, "A
History of Ideas about the Prolongation of Life", 84.
28)
This goes far to support Gerald Gruman's reading of
Carl Becker - which is to suggest that much of Enlightenment thinking
represented a secularised version of Christian
eschatology: in ibid., 85.
29)
Blavatsky, Collected Writings, vol. XI, 535.
30)
E. Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
London, 1969, 13.
31)
Shelley's early fictional accounts of the Rosicrucians,
the "Bavarian Illuminati", and the Assassins are not his best work.
Andrew Lang stated that St. Irvyne
"proves that Shelley at Oxford was a donkey": quoted in Marie
Roberts, British Poets and Secret Societies, Crook Helm, London, 1986,
95.
32)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zastrozzi: A Romance
and St. Irvyne or The Rosicrucian, Arno Press,
New York, 1977, 219.
34)
As an example of the latter see the Marquis de Grosse's Horrid Mysteries
of 1796: C. F. A. Grosse, Horrid Mysteries: A Tale from the German of the
Marquis of Grosse, 2 vols., trans. P. Will, Robert Holden, London, 1927.
35)
See Hugh Honour, Romanticism, Penguin,
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1986, 242-244.
36)
Blavatsky, Collected Writings, vol. XI, 199-200.
37)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, ed. J. Rieger, New
York, 1974, 226.
38)
Walter Scott's review of Frankenstein, which first appeared in Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine, vol. XII:II, March, 1818, is reproduced in part in
Roberts, Gothic Immortals, 96.
39)
Ibid., 99-100. An English-language survey of the esoteric interests of the
landowners of Hesse-Kassel remains to be written and would provide valuable
keys in delineating the descent of continental Rosicrucian Freemasonry. It is
not insignificant that the first Rosicrucian manifestoes were published at
Kassel in 1614, nor that Prince Karl of Hesse-Kassel granted a warrant to the Masonic
lodge Aurora zur aufgehendes
Morgenroete in 1807 to operate the Rectified Rite
of Strict Observance. The latter undoubtedly provided a link between English
and German Freemasonry which ultimately encouraged the establishment of such
bodies as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
40)
Sadly for Dippel, his claim in 1733 to having
discovered the means to extend his lifespan to 135 years was disproved due to
his death the following year: in ibid., 100.
41)
Ibid., 102. As noted supra, Erasmus Darwin was the grandfather of the
naturalist, Charles Darwin, and is now being recognised
as one source of the latter's evolutionary idiom: see Hele, Erasmus Darwin.
Shelley may well also have been thinking of a painting, The Rosicrucian
Cavern of 1804 by the artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), a close friend of
her father's.
42)
"I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the
philosopher's stone and the elixir of life": Shelley, Frankenstein,
35.
43)
"Men actually generations ahead of their times in learning and science,
but real children of their age in following truths down those alluring bypaths
which seemed to be royal roads to knowledge and proved to be delusory":
Butler, The Myth of the Magus, 161.
44)
The work of self-avowed Rosicrucians of the German Aufklaerung such as Sincerus
Renatus (Samuel Richter), as well as the parallel existence and memberships of
the (Rosicrucian) Invisible College and the Royal Society in England, has
helped to dispel the notion that the epistemological shift from theurgy and magia naturalis to
Newtonian physics was dramatic, rapid, and final.
45)
Shelley, Frankenstein, 228. Marie Roberts is thus correct in
interpreting Frankenstein as a tale of the second theft from the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil: Roberts, Gothic Immortals, 19.
46)
A similar connotation is made in her The Mortal Immortal of 1834 wherein
the immortal determines to "set at liberty the life imprisoned within, and
so cruelly prevented from soaring from this dim earth to a sphere more
congenial to its immortal existence": Mary Shelley, Collected Tales and
Stories, ed., C. E. Robinson, John Hopkins University Press, London, 1976,
230.
47)
Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the
Wanderer, ed. Alethea Hayter, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, 569.
48)
Ibid., 697. See also Varma, The Gothic Flame,165.
50)
Edith Birkhead has stated that "[w]ith all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the
last of the Goths": Birkhead, The Tale of
Terror, 93.
51)
Varma, The Gothic Flame, 166.
53)
To this degree, the Rosicrucian novel, as a discrete genre, is singularly
valuable as a chronological map of the science-theology interface of the early
nineteenth century. The fact that esotericism was seen as a valuable tertium
quid - capable of hermeneutical manipulation - is further indication of the
continuing engagement of esotericism with modernity.
54)
Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 11-37 et passim.
55)
Maturin, Melmoth, preface.
56)
For a list of works that, in Blavatsky's view, could be deemed
"theosophic" see Blavatsky, Collected Writings, vol. VIII,
98ff.
58)
Blavatsky, Collected Writings, vol. IV, 613.
59)
Bulwer-Lytton's lack of recognition is a little surprising given the
interchange of influence between him and his political and literary colleagues.
Allen Christensen (Allen C. Christensen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction
of New Regions, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1976, 223) has noted
that Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) consciously modelled himself after the
character of Pelham in Bulwer-Lytton's eponymously titled novel of 1828. In
fact, Disraeli attributed his social success to his ability to "Pelhamize" people and found the introductions afforded
him by Bulwer-Lytton (including that of his future wife) furnished the
possibility of a highly successful political life. It is also possible to
detect Bulwer-Lytton's influence in Disraeli's novels starting from the 1830s.
By far the most enduring literary friendship of Bulwer-Lytton's life was that
of Charles Dickens, one of whose children was named for him: see J. Keates,
"Bulwer-Lytton" in J. Wintle, ed., Makers
of Nineteenth Century Culture: 1800-1914, Routledge, London, 1982, 88. Of
Bulwer-Lytton's occult novels, Dickens wrote:
If you were the
Magician's servant instead of the Magician, these potent spirits would get the
better of you; but you are the Magician, and they don't, and you make
them serve your purpose (E. B. Gose, Jr., Imagination
Indulged: The irrational in the nineteenth-century novel, McGill-Queen's
University Press, Montreal, 1972, 82).
The degree to which
Dickens respected Bulwer-Lytton's talents can be gauged by Dickens' decision to
substitute for his own ending for Great Expectations (1861) one devised
by Bulwer-Lytton, after the latter had complained about the original: J. H.
Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974, 60-61. Though it
seems unacknowledged by Dickens scholars (with the notable exception of Jack
Lindsay), it is also almost impossible to believe that the ending of A Tale
Of Two Cities (1859) was not suggested to Dickens by Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni (1842), in which the focal character also
dies by means of the guillotine at the height of the Terror, and whose
substitution for another serves to demonstrate the invincibility of selfless
love: J. L. Campbell, Sr., Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Twayne
Publishers, Boston, 1986, 118. The degree of Bulwer-Lytton's influence on a
host of other writers and artists has never been analysed
in depth but promises to be a fertile enquiry. Suffice to say that his
encouragement of the young Robert Browning, his place as "the most
powerful influence on Poe's early prose writing" (Christensen, Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, 224), and a source for George Bernard Shaw's satire - as
well as his Rienzi (1835) having provided the story for Wagner's first
successful opera, "Rienzi" - indicates that scholars have ignored BBulwer-Lytton to the detriment of analyses of nineteenth
century literature.
60)
See T. H. S. Escott, Edward Bulwer, First Baron Lytton of Knebworth: A
Social, Personal, and Political Monograph, Routledge, London, 1910, 3.
61)
Christensen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 227.
62)
Michael Sadleir, Bulwer and His Wife: A Panorama, 1803-1836, Constable,
London, 1933, 210. It might be noted that since 1982 the English Department of
San Jose State University has sponsored an annual "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction
Contest", designed to "challenge entrants to compose the opening
sentence to the worst of all possible novels". The contest is based upon
the perception that Bulwer-Lytton's first sentence for his Paul Clifford
(1830) is the worst of all time. The famous line begins: "It was a dark
and stormy night...", and was (first?) pilloried by the dog
"Snoopy" in Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" cartoon strip.
63)
An overview of the biographical and bibliographical material available on
Bulwer-Lytton is offered by G. H. Ford, ed., Victorian Fiction: A Second
Guide to Research, Modern Language Association, New York, 1978, 28-33. A
number of biographies are available, though none appears to analyse
his esoteric interests satisfactorily (the best of the latter is Robert Lee
Wolff, Strange Stories and Other Explorations in Victorian Fiction,
Gambit, Boston, 1971). The standard biography, Sadleir's Bulwer and His Wife,
ends in 1836 with its subject aged 33 years! Entirely unreliable is Edward
Robert Lytton, first earl of, The Life, Letters and Literary Remains of
Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton, by His Son, 2 vols., Kegan Paul, London, 1883.
[V. A. Lytton, second earl of], The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord
Lytton, by His Grandson, the Earl of Lytton, 2 vols., Macmillan, London,
1913 is better. The most effective literary criticism of Bulwer-Lytton's œuvre is offered by Christensen, Edward
Bulwer-Lytton. The most useful and detailed modern biographies are: Sybilla Jane Flower, Bulwer-Lytton, Shire
Publications, London, 1973; Campbell, Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Bulwer-Lytton's achievements extended to a parliamentary career which began
with his election for St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, in April, 1831, as a
Whig-Liberal with a dedication to Benthamite reforms. In his first years in
Parliament he spoke in defence of the Reform Bill of
1831 and in favour of the immediate abolition of
"negro apprenticeship" in 1838. Bulwer-Lytton lost his seat in 1841
but returned as the Conservative member for Hertfordshire in 1852 (due,
probably, to his inheritance of property and his growing friendship with
Benjamin Disraeli) and remained moderately active until his elevation to the
peerage in 1866, having served as Colonial Secretary from 1858-1859. He was
elected in 1856 and in 1858 as Lord Rector of Glasgow, the only Englishman to
have been so honoured twice. In 1870 he accepted the
Order of St. Michael and St. George following the death of Lord Derby, and was
awarded an honorary LL.D. from both Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
Bulwer-Lytton died at Torquay on 18 January, 1873, aged 69 years, and was
buried in Westminster Abbey near the Poets' Corner (though he appears,
interestingly, to have desired to be buried in unconsecrated ground).
64)
Bulwer-Lytton's England and the English (2 vols., Richard Bentley,
London, 1833) is, according to Wolff (Strange Stories, 146), "what
we would now call sociology".
65)
The term "metaphysical" is here employed in the same way as defined
by Edwin M. Eigner in The Metaphysical Novel in
England and America; Dickens, Bulwer, Hawthorne, Melville, University of
California Press, London, 1978, 2-7.
67)
Escott, Edward Bulwer, 86.
68)
The critic W. E. Aytoun parodied Bulwer-Lytton's
occult literature thus:
Yes, I am he who on
the Novel shed
Obscure philosophy's enchanting light,
Until the public, 'wildered as they read,
Believed they saw that which was not in sight.
Of course, 'twas not for me to put them right
(Published under the pseudonym "Bon Gaultier" in "Lays of the
would-be Laureates", Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, 19, May, 1843:
quoted in Roberts, Gothic Immortals, 161).
69)
Blavatsky, Collected Writings, vol. II, 141-142.
70)
E. Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, 2 vols., Lippincourt, Philadelphia, 1867: quote in vol. 1, xi. The
identification of the book store's owner as "old D-" is certainly an homage
to John Denley (1764-1842) whose premises were to be
found on Catherine Street, Covent Garden. It is believed that Denley supplied Francis Barrett with many of the materials
which the latter assembled in his The Magus of 1801: see Francis X.
King, The Flying Sorcerer: Being the magical and aeronautical adventures of
Francis Barrett, author of "The Magus", Mandrake, Oxford, 1992,
20; Timothy d'Arch Smith, The Books of the Beast,
Crucible, n.p., 1987, 89-97. See also Francis
Barrett, The Magus, or the Celestial Intelligencer: Being a Complete System
of Occult Philosophy, University Books, New York, 1967.
71)
The topos of the mysterious book, which, when
"opened" promises the secrets of the universe, is a standard of
esotericism. Most notably employed in certain Islamic esotericisms (and thus to
be see in such works as the Emerald Tablet), it became a staple of
Rosicrucianism, with Rosenkreutz himself having been
instructed for a year from a mysterious tome, "M". For a discussion
of the device see Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination,
Tradition, 172, 185. The cipher of Zanoni
is similar in type to those contained within Trithemius'
Polygraphie et universelle
ƒcriture Cabalistique, traduit par Gabriel de Collange
(Paris, 1561) and also to John Dee's Enochian alphabet, examples of both of
which were available to Bulwer-Lytton in the British Library.
72)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 1, xxi.
73)
Eigner, The Metaphysical Novel, 226.
74)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 1, xii.
76)
See Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Falkland and Zicci,
Routledge, London, 1875.
77)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 1, xii.
78)
This order is taken from Thomas Taylor's 1820 translation of, and commentary
upon, Iamblichus' On the Mysteries, which Robert Lee Wolff has
demonstrated was probably that employed by Bulwer-Lytton: see Wolff, Strange
Stories, 161.
79)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 1, 126.
82)
This meeting, and the predictions made therein, is documented in La Harpe's memoirs and is said to have taken place in 1788
(naturally without the presence of the fictional Zanoni).
The prophecies regained popularity with the surge of interest in Magnetism in
the 1820s and 1830s, and Spiritualism in the 1850s and 1860s, for which see
Wolff, Strange Stories, 345n10. Eliphas Lévi
believed that the reason that all present died (with the exception of La Harpe) was that they had "divulged or at least
profaned the mysteries": see McIntosh, Eliphas
Lévi, 34-36.
83)
The society founded by Martinés de Pasqually, the Ordre des Chevaliers ƒlus
Cšens de l'Univers, was
established in the early 1760s and is important for the study of Zanoni for two reasons. First, the
"Order of the Knights Elect Cohens of the Universe" appears to have
been the first major modern non-Masonic Western esoteric fraternity (thus
outside the aegis of Baron Hund's "Strict Observance") to have
propagated the concept of theurgic contact with invisible spirit masters (an
example of whom was to appear in the form of "Adon-Ai"
in Zanoni). It should be added that the
influence of Swedenborg, who was known to Pasqually,
can be detected in the rituals of the group. Second, Pasqualis'
successor, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803), described by Bulwer-Lytton
in Zanoni in saintly terms ("no man more
beneficent, generous, pure and virtuous, that St Martin, adorned the last
century": ibid., p.67) is undoubtedly the historical model for the
Rosicrucian, Zanoni. "Martinism",
as established by Saint-Martin's latter-day disciple "Papus"
(Gerard Encausse, 1865-1916), is both an occult
philosophy and a fraternity which exists in many countries to this day. In
suggesting that the character of Zanoni was based
upon the occult entrepreneur, the Comte de Saint-Germain, E. M. Butler was
certainly mistaken, for Bulwer-Lytton held St. Germain in the same disregard as
he did Cagliostro ("the quack": ibid., p. 57). See Butler, The
Myth of the Magus, 267; J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret
Societies, Paladin (Granada), St. Albans, Hertfordshire, 1974, 118-121.
84)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 1, 83.
85)
Ibid., 66. Bulwer-Lytton, in a footnote, directs his readers to consult
"Condorcet's posthumous work on the Progress of the Human Mind". The
language is very similar to that employed by Condorcet: "Certainly man
will not become immortal, but will not the interval between the first breath
that he draws and the time when in the natural course of events, without
disease or accident, he expires, increase indefinitely?": Condorcet, Sketch
for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 200. For
Condorcet see also supra ch. 27.
86)
See in ibid., 158ff; see also Gruman, "A History
of Ideas about the Prolongation of Life", 85-89.
87)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 1, 69.
90)
Zanoni describes to Glyndon the latter's
"forefather, who, in the revival of science, sought the secrets of
Apollonius and Paracelsus" (vol. 1, p. 198). Bulwer-Lytton's seventeenth
century "forefather" was Dr. John Bulwer who wrote works on
necromancy, the most memorable of which is Anthropo-Metamorphosis or Man
Transformed, or the Artificial Changeling (1653).
91)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 1, 241.
93)
Allen Christensen, in noting that the "Dweller of the Threshold"
refers to Glyndon as "my mortal lover", suspects the former of being
"an outbreak of the collective human unconscious": Christensen, Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, 92-94. Adéle Gladwell suspects
that "Lytton's frequent use of the term "Shadow" prefigures its
use as a psychological signifier for alter-ego or anti-social immoral
self": Gladwell & Havoc, eds., Blood and Roses, 24.
94)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 2, 132.
96)
Wolff, Strange Stories, 178.
97)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 2, 311.
100)
Ibid., 87. The rather cynical contrivance, "L'Etre
Supréme", is included in references in ibid.
183, 269.
101)
Ibid., 207-208. Also: "Saturn hath devoured his children, and lives alone
- in his true name of Moloch": in ibid.,, 176.
103)
In Wolff, StrangeStories, 202.
104)
Campbell, EdwardBulwer-Lytton, 117.
105)
Wolff, StrangeStories, 205.
107)
E. R. Bulwer-Lytton, The Life, Letters and Literary Remains, vol. 2, 35.
109)
Blavatsky, Collected Writings, vol. VI, 229.
110)
The cast is extensive: (in no particular order) Averroes (1026-1098),
Paracelsus, the Chaldeans, the Gymnosophists, the Abbé de Villars (1635-1673?),
the Comte de Gabalis, the Pythagoreans,
Apollonius of Tyana, Martines
de Pasqualis, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin,
Cagliostro, Baptista Porta (Giambattista della Porta, c.1535-1615), Albertus Magnus, Agrippa, and,
of course, Hermes.
111)
It would be a mistake to interpret Zanoni as a
metaphysical romance or bildungsroman with no political agenda;
Bulwer-Lytton, a professional politician himself, exhibits acute political
awareness throughout his œuvre, though not
always in a consistent or entirely attractive way; nb.,
eg., his portrayal of the "parasitic" Jew:
see Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English
Fiction, Peter Owen, London, 1961, 138-161. Marie Roberts has established
intriguing sympathies between the Rosicrucian hero and Marx's four stages of
economic and social alienation. First, the worker is isolated from the
product of his labour, which now exists outside of
him (the "Dweller of the Threshold", the product of Glyndon's
ill-fated magical labours, cowers and controls its
creator). Second, humanity is estranged from nature (Zanoni's
fifty centuries have dissipated any joy he found in nature. He is an example of
"the weary Science that, traversing the secrets of creation, comes at last
to death for their solution": Zanoni,
vol. 2, 305). Third, humans are sundered from their own species (the
austere Prospero-like hierophant, Mejnour, is "a
Human Book, insensate to the precepts it announces" in ibid., 85). Fourth,
the individual becomes alienated from himself (Zanoni's
inability to discover cogent sympathies with others means that he can never
fully appreciate the essence of his own nature). In considering Bulwer-Lytton's
portrayal of the Rosicrucian's predicament, one is reminded of Marx's comment
that "[a] being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural
being, and plays no part in the system of nature": Karl Marx, Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. M. Milligan, Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1974, 64.
112)
Christensen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 113-114. It might be noted that
Bulwer-Lytton quoted from Schiller's Ideal und das Leben in Zanoni, vol. 2, 166. Surely the image of the blue
flower to be found in Zanoni is a reference to
the paradigmatic icon of Romanticism found in the posthumously published Heinrich
von Ofterdingen of 1802 by Novalis (Baron
Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg, 1772-1801).
113)
G. W. F. Hegel, "Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art", trans. T. M.
Knox, in S. Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History:
An Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy, Routledge, London, 1991, 129.
114)
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol. 1, 153.
115)
It is intriguing to consider that Hegel himself used the iconography of the
Rosy Cross to express this dialectic: both the preface to the Philosophy of
Right and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion employ the rose
and the cross as signifiers of the Ideal and the Real. Marie Roberts suggests
that these concepts always retain a fluidity in Hegelian philosophy as
exhibited by his term "Rosenkreuzerei, oder ... Kreuzroserei":
Roberts, Gothic Immortals, 164-166; id., "'Rosicrucianism or Cross-rosism' in Hegel's Phenomenology"in
History of European Ideas 6:1, 1985, 99-100. It is important to note
that Hegel was employed at the Tuebinger Stift in Tuebingen just as Andreae had been; it can be assumed that Rosicrucianism was
still much in discussion in the university town. See also T. Pinkard, Hegel's
Dialectic: The Explanation of a Possibility, Temple University Press,
Philadelphia, 1988, 26-41.
116)
For an interesting argument on the bildungsroman style of Hegel's Phenomenology
of the Spirit see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and
Revolution in Romantic Literature, Norton, New York, 1971, 225-237,
esp.229-230.
117)
Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, vol. I, 285-286.
118)
V. A. Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, vol. 1, 41.
119)
A full transcription of Jennings' letter is included in Godwin, The
Theosophical Enlightenment, 383-385.
120)
Quoted in Roberts, Gothic Immortals, 157-158. If Bulwer-Lytton was
telling the truth about his opinion of Jennings' book, this bodes poorly for the
possibility that Bulwer-Lytton was a frater, for The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries, as noted supra,
is highly mannered and contains little that would relate it to the Fraternity
of the manifestoes.
121)
Robert Lee Wolff documents some of the many mediumistic experiments at which
Bulwer-Lytton was present in his Strange Stories, 233-264. That
supporters of these occultisms were eager to enlist Bulwer-Lytton's support is
obvious: "Nothing in Home's career rankled longer than the elusiveness of
this particular quarry" (see J. Burton, Heyday of a Wizard: Daniel Home
the Medium, George Harrap & Co., London,
1948, 70-71).
122)
E. Bulwer-Lytton to Lady Combermere, 1854, in Wolff, Strange
Stories, 249.
123)
An undated letter of E. Bulwer-Lytton in ibid., 248.
124)
Ibid., 244-260; Burton, Heyday of a Wizard, 70-71. Among those who
attended sèances with Bulwer-Lytton and Home was Sir
William Crookes. Crookes, an active member of the Society for Psychical
Research and a sometime alumnus of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was
in later life an avid Theosophist. It might be remembered that he was very
supportive of Leadbeater's clairvoyant observations and supplied him and Besant
with elements to examine for their "Occult Chemistry" investigations.
125)
McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi, 101-104, 116; Paul Chacornac, Eliphas
Levi: Renovateur de L'Occultisme en France, (1810-1875), privately
published, Paris, 1926, 149-156. Interestingly,
Godwin has concluded that Bulwer-Lytton led Lévi into (practical) magic, and
not vice versa, as is sometimes assumed: Godwin, The Theosophical
Enlightenment, 196. If Godwin is correct - and it seems likely -
Bulwer-Lytton's influence on the historiography of the Lévi-led French occult
revival of the late 1850s would be greatly enhanced. It should also be recalled
that Lévi had himself written a short story based upon the theme of
immortality: Eliphas Lévi, "The Vision of the
Wandering Jew", [trans. A. E. Waite?], in Arthur Edward Waite, ed., The
Mysteries of Magic: A Digest of the Writings of Eliphas
Lévi, George Redway, London, 1886,
271-274.
126)
Lévi, Transcendental Magic, 114. There is a popular tradition in occult
historiography that Lévi repeated his evocation on two subsequent occasions,
accompanied, at one time, by Bulwer-Lytton. The evocation is said to have
occurred in 1861 on the roof of a store, the Pantheon (!),on Regent
Street in London: cf., eg., McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi, 104; Godwin, The
Theosophical Enlightenment, 215; Wolff, Strange Stories, passim.
The present author has been unable to verify this claim.
127)
McIntosh,Eliphas Lévi, 116
(McIntosh refers to Branicki as "Braszynsky"); see also Webb, The Flight, 170; Chacornac, Eliphas Lévi,
192-199. Interestingly, Honoré Balzac (1799-1850) wrote his own version of a Rosicrucian
novel entitled (in translation) Melmoth
Reconciled which he appears to have intended as a sequel to Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer: Roberts, Gothic
Immortals, 144-148.
128)
There is some indication that the S. R. I. A. may have been chartered by a
Scottish Rosicrucian body: see T. M. Greensill, History
of the S. R. I. A. (Societas Rosicruciana
in Anglia), Broad Oak Press, Tunbridge Wells,
Kent, 1987, 61-89; P. T. Thornton, "The History of the SRIA in England and
Victoria" in Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (Rosicrucian Society of Freemasons);
1886 to 1986, privately printed, Melbourne, 1987, 8-13.
129)
The election of a Grand Patron by unanimous vote is provided for under Rule VI
of the Rules and Ordinances, for which see Waite, The Real History of the Rosicrucians, 290. See also Greensill,
History of the S. R. I. A., 284.
130)
See Howe, "Fringe Masonry in England, 1870-1885", 261; also Godwin,
The Theosophical Enlightenment, 218. It is interesting to note that the
member concerned was John Yarker, the Masonic
entrepreneur, who had granted Blavatsky honorary membership of one of his Orientalising Rites: see supra ch.
1. Members of the organisation must have assumed that
Bulwer-Lytton already possessed Rosicrucian initiation, perhaps from the
Continent, as there is no indication that the he was ever a Freemason (which
would have been required for membership). That such a presumption existed is
indicated by William Wynn Westcott (who later became the Supreme Magus of the
S. R. I. A.), who wrote:
The late Lord Lytton
... had been admitted as a Frater of the German Rosicrucian College at Frankfort
on the Main; that College was closed after 1850 (William Wynn Westcott, The Rosicrucians, Past and Present, at Home and Abroad),
Health Research, Mokelumne Hill, California, n. d., 4-5).
Westcott's claim
about Bulwer-Lytton's Rosicrucian initiation entered the folklore of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Westcott was one of the leading
triumvirate. It might also be recalled that Westcott was a corresponding member
of Blavatsky's Inner Group, and assisted in the preparation of her The
Theosophical Glossary (1892): see supra ch.
15.
131)
James Campbell, whose Edward Bulwer-Lytton is considered to be the prime
modern criticism of Bulwer-Lytton's novels (and which is based upon Campbell's
own doctoral dissertation), has stated:
He [Bulwer-Lytton]
especially relished the notoriety of being a member of the revived Rosicrucian
order in which he rose to the high office of grand patron sometime in the early
1850's (Campbell, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 110).
It might be noted
that the Societas Rosicruciana
in Anglia was not established (or chartered) until 1866, and that
Bulwer-Lytton did not "rise" but was elected honoriscausa
and in absentia. Equally, the claim made by Christopher McIntosh
that "Bulwer Lytton for a time was honorary Grand Patron of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia,
and he may have given Lévi some sort of initiation" is patently
impossible: see McIntosh, EliphasLévi, 164.
132)
Quoted in Roberts, Gothic Immortals, 160.
133)
Swinburne Clymer, The Book of Rosicruciae,
vol. 3, Philosophical Publishing Company, Quakertown, Pennsylvania, 1948, 48
(see also 49-50).
134)
See Deveney, Pascal Beverly Randolph, ch. 6; Pascal Beverly Randolph, Sexual Magic, trans.
R. North, Magickal Childe, New York, 1988, xxv;
Clymer, The Book of Rosicruciae, vol. 3, 48.
135)
Hardinge Britten's claims are perhaps more reliable
than most, and may well represent the existence of a magical coterie in London
in which Bulwer-Lytton may have played a part. Godwin has suggested that
"[p]robably a secret magical group did exist ...
and Bulwer-Lytton took part in it": Godwin, The Theosophical
Enlightenment, 212. See also id., "The Hidden hand, Part II: The
Brotherhood of Light", 66-68.
136)
Godwin, Chanel & Deveney, eds., The Hermetic
Brotherhood of Luxor, 308.
137)
Tillett, The Elder Brother, 148, 303.
138)
The Mahatma Letters, 1993 ed., (Letter No. 11: December, 1880) 31.
Interestingly, Koot Hoomi
seems to suggest that Bulwer-Lytton's "Club" was established by the
Masters, which might well be an example of the "provocation theory"
applied beyond Spiritualism: see supra ch. 6.
139)
Alice A. Bailey, Glamour: A World Problem, Lucis
Publishing Co., New York, 1982, 90-93, 152-160. As it happens the "Dweller
of [or on] the Threshold" has inspired a small fictional literature of its
own: cf., eg., R. Hitchens, The Dweller on the
Threshold, Methuen, London, 1911. It might also be noted that its
historical significance to esotericism was understood by the luminary Van
Morrison, who employed it as the title of a song (and has used it in lyrics
elsewhere).
140)
The literature devoted to proving or disproving the traditional history of the
Golden Dawn is large and uneven. For a variety of opinions cf., eg., Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn; Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom; R. A. Gilbert,
"Trail of the Chameleon"; id., The Golden Dawn Companion; id.,
The Golden Dawn; id., "Provenance unknown: A tentative solution to
the riddle of the Cipher Manuscript of the Golden dawn" in A. G. von Olenhusen, ed., Wege
und Abwege: Beitraege zur europaeischen Geistesgeschichte der Neuzit,
HochschulVerlag, Freiburg, 1990, 79-89; Darcy Kuentz, ed., The Golden Dawn Source Book, Holmes
Publishing, Edmonds, WA, 1996. Helpful, too, are the Golden Dawn Source Works
series, edited by Darcy Kuentz: eg.,
Mary Greer & Darcy Kuentz, A Golden Dawn
Chronology: Being a Chronological History of a Magical Order, 1378-1994,
Holmes Publishing, Edmonds, WA, 1999; Darcy Kuentz,
comp., The Golden Dawn Source Works: A Bibliography, Holmes Publishing,
Edmonds, WA, 1996. For the cipher manuscript itself see id., ed. & trans.,
The Complete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript, Holmes Publishing, Edmonds, WA,
1996.
Christopher Bamford, following Rafal Prinke, suggests that Lytton may have authored the Golden
Dawn cipher manuscript himself: see Christopher Bamford,
"Introduction" in C. G. Harrison, The Transcendental Universe,
Lindisfarne, Hudson, New York, 1993, 38. This can probably be discounted due to
the fact that the text, when translated, contains the word "occultism"
which first appeared in something approaching its modern usage in 1842 in
Richard de Radonvillier's Dictionnaire
des mots nouveaux, and seems not to have appeared in English until the
publication of Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled in 1877. It should be noted,
however, that the term was popularised by Lévi as occultisme,and
could have been mediated to Bulwer-Lytton via that source.
141)
Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 51. Mathers also refers to Zanoni in an introduction to his translation of the Abramelin manuscript from the Arsenal: The Book of the
Sacred Magic of Abra=Melin [sic],
the Mage; As Delivered by Abraham the Jew Unto His Son Lamech, trans: S. L.
MacGregor-Mathers, de Laurence, Chicago, 1948, p. xvi. Mina Mathers
(1865-1928), the third highest ranking initiate of the Golden Dawn in 1900, was
the sister of the Nobel laureate, Henri Louis Bergson (1859-1935). Bergson's
notion of "Vitalism" (or "Creative Evolution") has occasional
echoes in esoteric constructs, and deserves further research. Mina Mathers also
employed the model of Zanoni in her teaching
materials: e.g., Flying Roll No. XXI: Know Thyself in Francis King, ed.,
Astral Projection, Ritual Magic and Alchemy, Neville Spearman, London,
1971, 142.
142)
"S'Rhiogail Mo Dhream"
[Samuel Liddell Mathers],The Grade of Philosophus:
Additional Lecture on the Tattwas of the Eastern
School in Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol.
4, 100-101.
143)
Even the Golden Dawn alumnus and self-styled "Mega Therion
666", Aleister Crowley, exhibits direct
borrowings from Bulwer-Lytton in his many works. Crowley included Zanoni at the top of his recommended reading list of
fictional works for initiates of his own Order, the Argenteum Astrum: Aleister Crowley, "Curriculum of A:. A:." in A.
Crowley, ed., The Equinox: The Official Organ of the A:. A:., Weiser,
New York, 1974, 23. It is rather telling that Crowley's diary, which includes a
number of references to Bulwer-Lytton, contains the following entry:
"The word in my Kamma work (in Burma) was Augoeides,
(a subsequent entry implies that the word was 'given' me directly from the
unseen world)" (Aleister Crowley, The
Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, ed. John Symonds & Kenneth Grant,
Jonathan Cape, London, 1969, 526).
The concept of the Augoeides (or "indwelling divine
spirit"), of Pythagorean ancestry, had been reintroduced to Western
esotericism via the works of Cornelius Agrippa and had been brought to
the attention of Blavatsky and others by a reference in Zanoni.
It follows that the Augoeides seems likely to
have been suggested to Crowley by Bulwer-Lytton's novel.
144)
In this context it is valuable to recall Liljegren's
theory that Blavatsky's account of her first meeting with Morya
(in Ramsgate, 1851) might have been, rather, an
encounter with the dashing Bulwer-Lytton, then at the height of his literary
fame. The theory is certainly not impossible, but remains implausible.
Nevertheless, it speaks to the effect which Bulwer-Lytton exerted on the mind
of the impressionable young occultist. See supra ch.
4.
145)
Blavatsky had published her own abbreviated translation of a Bulwer-Lytton
novel, Godolphin (1833) in a Russian magazine, Library for Reading:
Meade, Madame Blavatsky, 28; Cranston, H. P. B., 13.
Interestingly, the success of her early literary efforts encouraged her to
attempt her own novel, entitled (in a deferential "Bulwerese")
"The Ideal", although there is no evidence the novel was ever
completed: Stoddard Martin, Orthodox Heresy: The Rise of "Magic"
as Religion and its Relation to Literature, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1989,
68.
146)
This ascent/descent leitmotif is, of course, made explicit by
Bulwer-Lytton's structural reliance on Plato's quaternary modelling of man’a.
147)
Again, Bulwer-Lytton underscored his theme structurally; the headings of the
book's seven parts reflect Glyndon's descent: (1) The Musician; (2) Art, Love
and Wonder; (3) Theurgia; (4) The Dweller of the
Threshold; (5) The Effects of the Elixir; (6) Superstition Deserting Faith; (7)
The Reign of Terror. See also Martin, Orthodox Heresy, 71.
148) Mejnour describes the race of proto-Masters that he hopes
to produce thus:
a race that may
proceed, in their deathless destinies, from stage to stage of celestial glory,
and rank at last amongst the nearest ministrants and agents gathered round the
Throne of Thrones (Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, vol.
1, 266).
149) See supra
p. 676.
150) Bulwer-Lytton
clearly situates Zanoni (and, to a lesser degree, Mejnour) at the interstice between the human and the
divine, earth and heaven, creature and creator. Zanoni
is part of the "secret and solemn race that fills up the interval in
creation between mankind and the children of the empyreal": Bulwer-Lytton,
Zanoni, vol. 1, 265.
151)
Zanoni is filled with temptations for the mythopoeically-minded, such as Blavatsky:
Every desire in human
hearts is but a glimpse of things that exist, alike distant and divine (in
ibid., 287).
152)
Bulwer-Lytton's employment of esoteric motifs which, when situated on the cusp
of the factual, become useful agents to counter modern discourse is evident
also in the last of his novels published during his lifetime, The Coming
Race (1871). Evidently, the author's desire was to satirise
the Darwinian proposition and to counter the likelihood that "a coming
race is destined to supplant our own" (F. J. H. Darton,
"Introduction" in E. Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race and The
Haunted and the Haunters, Oxford University Press, London, 1928, xii; it is
no coincidence that Bulwer-Lytton dedicated the book to Max Mueller). The novel
centres upon the "Vril-Ya",
a technologically-advanced subterranean super-race, possessed of a powerful
electromagnetic force called "Vril". The "Vril-Ya" intend ultimately to "return to the upper
world, and supplant all the inferior races now existing therein": E.
Bulwer-Lytton, VRIL: The Power of the Coming Race, Rudolf Steiner
Publications, Blauvelt, New York, 1972, 106.
Although a humorous tone can be detected throughout ("Humble yourselves my
descendants; the father of your race was a ... tadpole": ibid., 4), the
work was taken as something approaching a factual treatise by occultists.
Blavatsky considered "Vril" to be "a true definition" of
(Lévi's?) "kabbalistic astral light": Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled,
vol. I, 126. Indeed, Blavatsky incorporated the novel into her macrohistory:
Allow to
ever-progressing nature, to the great law of the "survival of the
fittest", one step beyond Mr. Wallace's deductions, and we have in future
the possibility - nay, the assurance of a race, which, llike
the Vril-ya of Bulwer-Lytton's Coming Race,
will be but one remove from the primitive "Sons of God" (in ibid.,
296).
The value of
"Vril" to the Theosophical idiom can be detected from the fact that
it is mentioned as a synonym for "Akas [Akasha]" in the very first
Mahatma letter: The Mahatma Letters, 1993 ed., (Letter No. 1: 17
October, 1880) 3.
The remarkable currency of Bulwer-Lytton's occult vernacular can be inferred
from the inordinate space given to the putated
existence of a Nazi occult movement, the Wahrheitgesellschaft
(otherwise "The Vril Society"), in mostly unscholarly occult
historiographies. Cf., eg., Gerald Suster, Hitler and the Age of Horus, Sphere, London,
1981 (in which an entire chapter is devoted to the "Triumph of the
Vril"); Toyne Newton, The Demonic Connection:
An Investigation into Satanism in England and the International Black Magic
Conspiracy, Blandford Press, Poole, 1987, 122ff; J. H. Brennan, Occult
Reich, Futura, Aylesbury, Bucks., 1974;
Jean-Michel Angebert [Michel Bertrand & Jean
Angelini], The Occult and the Third Reich, Macmillan, New York, 1974, passim.
Typical is Dusty Sklar, Gods and Beasts: The Nazis
and the Occult, Crowell Co., New York, 1977 in which the author states that
Bulwer-Lytton was a Theosophist (in fact, he died two years prior to the
inception of the Society). See also infra Appendix D. It should be
stressed that such occult speculation, though undoubtedly in evidence in Nazi
Germany, has provided far more fodder for latter-day conspiracy theorists than
it ever did for the hierarchy of the Third Reich. For more intelligent accounts
see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of
Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology, I. B.
Tauris & Co., London, 1992; Ellic Howe, Astrology
and Psychological Warfare during World War II, Rider, London, 1972; Godwin,
Arktos.
As a final comment on the breadth of Bulwer-Lytton's influence, it is
interesting that the popular beef extract "Bovril", invented by John
Lawson Johnston in 1887, was coined from a combination of bovis
(Latin: "oxen") and "Vril": Brewer's Dictionary of
Phrase & Fable, 15th ed., revised by Adrian Room, Cassell, London,
1996, 144-145.
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