There was a couching of modern scientific discoveries and exciting physical effects in magical terms.
By Dr. Eleanor Dobson
Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature
University of Birmingham
Introduction
Electricity, the marvelous force that turned the wheels of this new world and seemed to be the means by which all its wonders were accomplished, could this be the same power the priests had harnessed for their mystic uses? He remembered their foreknowledge of victory or defeat for the Pharaoh’s hosts, the instant transmission of messages from one temple to another, the tales of the magic lighting of certain places within the sanctuaries. Had the sages of ancient Kampt understood many of the wonders of this age and kept them secret, so as to strengthen their hold on the people?1
When the ancient Egyptian time traveller, Rames, in William Henry Warner’s romance novel The Bridge of Time (1919) first sees electric lighting, he understands what he witnesses to be ‘magic’: ‘a cluster of transparent balls … suddenly burst into brilliance as he watched and when he looked closer he saw no flame, only a tiny glowing thread of quivering fire in their centre’.2 Rames later encounters ‘the skeletons of living men’ captured ‘by the magic of the X-ray’.3 While these technologies at first seem supernatural to Rames, his encounters with the science of 1914 (when the action of the novel takes place) in fact cast light onto the supposed mystical powers of the priests of his own time. As the quotation that opens this article reveals, Rames’s experiences of the future directly lead him to question the technologies of ancient Egypt, causing him to speculate as to the possibility that the priesthood had not only developed electric lights but also telegraphic communications. Moreover, when he hears of the discoveries of the Polish physicist and chemist Marie Curie that compel ‘modern sages … to admit that there may have been something in those laughed- at ideas’ involving the transmutation of one metal into another held by the ‘old alchemists’, he makes the connection between radium’s chemical symbol – Ra – and the ancient Egyptian solar god of the same name (from whom Rames’s own name is derived).4 Rames realises that radium is in fact a substance dreamed about by his friend and mentor, the priest Hotep, and so even the scientific discoveries of the modern age had been conceived of or predicted by ancient Egyptian savants. Warner’s text, while little known today, revolves around a plot that combines time travel with reincarnation, and which blends the scientific with the magical. Its ideas – about the knowledge and technologies it imagines as available to the ancient Egyptians – are by no means unique, however. As I go on to outline, the attribution of knowledge of electricity and its applications to the ancient Egyptians is very much a nineteenth- century concept. With the discovery of radioactivity and X-rays in the late nineteenth century, and the identification of new elements in the early twentieth century, an equivalent process took place, whereby this knowledge was imagined at the fingertips of the ancients.
The purpose of this article is twofold. I seek first to establish the myriad connections between ancient Egypt, electricity and the electromagnetic spectrum across the nineteenth century, emphasising how this ancient civilisation was imagined in tandem with the imagery and language intrinsic to scientific modernity. I probe works that use ancient Egypt as an imaginative springboard for an array of genre fiction that conveys the ‘hidden wisdom’ of ancient Egypt as simultaneously scientific and magical, from satire to science fiction, the Gothic to the detective novel: across these works, ancient Egypt and the most modern scientific discoveries pertaining to the electromagnetic spectrum sit comfortably alongside one another. Through engagements with art, literature and scientific publications, I show that this relationship was far from uncommon; from media dating to before Victoria’s reign and continuing into the years after her death, ancient Egypt and electricity (and, later, X- rays and radiation) are brought into close alignment. These associations have various ends, put to uses that range from suggesting the magical potential of modern scientific discoveries to implying the scientific and magical supremacy of ancient Egyptian civilisation, an idea that dovetails rather neatly with fin-de-siècle fears of Western cultural decline. These sources speak to an appetite for imaginative narratives of the Egyptian past that explicitly bring this distant time and place into a close alignment with the present, suggestive of a desire to understand a civilisation that felt simultaneously familiar yet alien.5 We might read in such instances a broader trend that saw the modern defined by its relationship to antiquity and vice versa – as I have suggested elsewhere, often a means to claiming the modern West’s place as the rightful ‘inheritors’ of ancient Egypt’s legacy, serving to strengthen Occidental imperial claims on Egypt and its antiquities.6 Equally, though, several of these narratives imagine the modern West to occupy a rather more shaky position, in which ancient Egyptian forces refuse to be dominated or outdone, ultimately underlining ancient Egyptian supremacy.
The second claim that I make in this article relates to an innovative textual strand epitomised in works by Bram Stoker and H. Rider Haggard, which hammered home ancient Egyptian scientific advancement and (often) superiority. Growing out of an unshakeable association between ancient Egypt and electricity in the nineteenth century (through the illumination of monuments and artefacts, a fashion for Egyptianate lighting designs, and a fictional trend that saw mummies revived by electrical stimulation – examples central to this article), Stoker and Haggard both imagine worlds in which previously unknown parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are exploited by ancient Egyptians. These works – Haggard’s Ayesha: the return of She (1904–5) and ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (1912–13), and Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903; 1912) – differ from the corpus that forms the foundation of this article in their explicit alignment of alchemy with cutting-edge science: by the late nineteenth century, investigations into X-rays and radioactivity and the eerie glowing effects that such experiments produced in laboratories were consistently described in alchemical terms. The two are so inextricably linked, in fact, that across the final texts to which this article turns, we witness a peculiar exchange between the concepts of modern scientist and ancient god.
Ultimately, I suggest that the couching of modern scientific discoveries and exciting physical effects in magical terms led to their employment by popular authors for the conception or visualisation of ancient Egyptian supernaturalism. Thus, was see novel electrical phenomena, X-rays and radioactivity inserted into Egyptian scenarios. This is, more often than not, specific to Egypt. Fred Nadis records that towards the end of the nineteenth century ‘imagining medieval times, exotic locales, or golden pasts’ provided ‘escapes from [technological] modernity’; when antiquity was evoked in relation to physical discoveries, it was in order ‘to remind readers of how different the “modern” world was from the “ancient” world’.7 Yet, as this article demonstrates, representations of Egypt did not always harmonise with these views of antiquity as scientifically or technologically distant. While narratives of mummy reanimation via electrical means had their roots in the early decades of the nineteenth century – Jane Webb’s futuristic triple- decker The Mummy!: a tale of the twenty-second century (1827) features the galvanic resuscitation of the Egyptian pharaoh Cheops, heavily influenced by Mary Shelley’s (1797–1851) Frankenstein (1818) – it was at the fin de siècle that ancient Egyptian characters seized electricity for themselves, usurping the Western scientist and asserting their own superior intellectual power. In a movement away from the reassuring Darwinian notion of progress over time, it was the fiction of the late Victorian era that saw modern electrical phenomena mastered by ancient hands: it was for modern science to rediscover these advanced ancient techniques. Resultantly, perceptions of fin-de-siècle degeneration are challenged; rather than singling out the criminal, the vampire, the dandy, the New Woman or the foreigner as emblematic of cultural decline, these narratives reveal a broader notion of societal degeneration that does not typecast or scapegoat a particular demographic. As Virginia Zimmerman states, ‘[f]ears of degeneration arose out of racist anxieties about contamination from already degenerate people (at home and abroad)’.8 Yet the narratives I address, particularly those towards the end of the article, reveal a counterpoint to this fear that degeneration might occur or, indeed, had already occurred. They imagine that intellectual degeneration on a societal level had already transpired since a cultural and intellectual peak in antiquity, leaving modern science endeavouring to duplicate the technologies of the past, and the most ancient of civilisations, casting representatives of a foreign time and place as paragons of enlightenment. Most significantly of all, this belief was not confined to the pages of fiction – we have already seen some of the fictional forms in which such a scenario is presented, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Grant Allen and Arthur Conan Doyle – but was entertained by some of the great scientific minds, and most influential cultural actors, of the age.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, suggestions were indeed made, with varying degrees of sincerity, that the ancient Egyptians had not only known of electricity but had succeeded in harnessing its power. The eminent British astronomer Norman Lockyer (1836–1920) wrote about his experiences examining ancient Egyptian sites in The Dawn of Astronomy: a study of the temple- worship and mythology of the ancient Egyptians (1894). Looking for evidence that ancient Egyptian labourers had worked by torchlight, he notes that ‘in all freshly- opened tombs there are no traces whatever of any kind of combustion having taken place, even in the innermost recesses’.9 Unable to explain the lack of evidence of more elementary light sources, Lockyer recounts how he and his companion joked of ‘the possibility that the electric light was known to the ancient Egyptians’, noting that the delicate paintwork on the walls of the tombs could not have been completed using natural light reflected from systems of mirrors, as others had previously proposed.10
The Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, matriarch of the Theosophical Society, entertained the belief more seriously, writing of the accomplishments of ancient civilisations in her first major work Isis Unveiled (1877). Blavatsky claims that each new modern scientific revelation is overshadowed by the inevitable ‘possibility, if not certainty, that the alleged discovery was not totally unknown to the ancients’.11 The specific example she gives laments that abundant ‘proofs to the contrary’ had not altered the erroneous view that in ancient Egypt electricity was undiscovered and unharnessed.12 Other notable figures who credited ancient civilisations with knowledge of electricity include the bestselling novelist Marie Corelli. Though outwardly contemptuous of modern occultism (or so she avowed), Corelli’s views as to the mastery of electricity in antiquity echo Blavatsky’s. ‘[T]he “Masters of the Stars” … in Memphis’, she claimed, in her non- fictional work Free Opinions, Freely Expressed (1905), used ‘the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, and many other modern conveniences’ to produce ‘ “miraculous” effects’; knowledge of electrical forces, she emphasised, was readily available to the ancients, and was only just being rediscovered by modern science.13 Electricity, the ‘epitome of the scientific and technological revolution during her life-time’, proved to be an effective symbol of the harmony between the spiritual and the scientific in her writing and her personal beliefs.14 Corelli united a combination of concepts from Christian Science, spiritualism and Rosicrucianism that itself drew upon medieval alchemical traditions and ancient Egyptian theology, creating her own unique belief system that exalted electricity’s occult possibilities; ‘God’, the Eastern magician Heliobas claims in Corelli’s first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), ‘is a Shape of pure electric Radiance’.15
The role that fiction played in encouraging this cultural association is key. We encountered Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril-ya in The Coming Race (1871), with their monumental architecture featuring ‘huge heavy Egyptian-like columns’, ‘lighted from within’ by a kind of energy termed ‘Vril’.16 Vril is evidently meant to suggest electricity: Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator mentions several times experiencing this power source as akin to the sensation of an electric shock, compares its strength to lightning, and likens its healing powers to contemporaneous electrical medical therapies.17 In their written language, the Vril-ya denote ‘the Supreme Being’ with ‘the hieroglyphic of a pyramid’; Vril, meanwhile, is denoted by ‘[t]he letter V, symbolical of the inverted pyramid’.18 ‘V’, of course, has its own electrical meaning, being an abbreviation of ‘volt’, the unit of electrical resistance, named as such in 1861 in recognition of the work of the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745–1827). It requires just a small imaginative leap from the electrically adept fictional race of Bulwer-Lytton’s text to envision ancient Egyptians wielding electrical power for themselves and, indeed, such a leap appears to have been made by some of the aforementioned personages of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Blavatsky has been found to have derived much of her material from the fiction of Bulwer-Lytton, through which he channelled information he had gleaned from various esoteric traditions.19 Corelli’s own familiarity with his œuvre is suggested in the plentiful contemporaneous reviews of her work that compared the two authors; one scathing review declared her fictional output ‘erotic mysticism, clad in Lord Lytton’s most gorgeous and falsely oracular colours’.20
With various luminaries of contemporary science and occultism suggesting, however teasingly, that ancient Egypt had access to electricity, the emergence and continuation of this theme in literature might be altogether expected, aligning antiquity with cutting-edge developments in physics. Novels such as Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars see ancient Egyptians making use of electrical devices for their own purposes. In Stoker’s novel, as we shall see, magnetism, electricity and radiation all contribute to a complex science developed by Queen Tera, who intends to use it to facilitate her own resurrection in the modern world. H. Rider Haggard, too, in his ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, imbues his short story with concrete references to the application of X-rays to the mummified bodies of the ancient Egyptian dead, and his metaphorical reattribution of such power to the ancient Egyptians themselves further upsets notions of Western scientific superiority. In his Ayesha, similarly, the extreme forces that confer life or death controlled by the titular character are understood in terms of radioactivity and X-rays, positing Ayesha as both scientific pioneer and gifted alchemist. Stoker’s and Haggard’s allusions to groundbreaking research into radiation go far beyond any acknowledgements of such developments in the works of their contemporaries, and for this reason warrant a more detailed analysis later in this article. In fact, their raising aloft of ancient Egyptian scientific and magical power as supreme establishes, across their works, a rendering of the modern scientist as ancient god, and vice versa. With this, crucially, comes the inference that modern science is only just ‘catching up’ with a superior past, challenging narratives of linear progress, and reflecting fin-de-siècle fears of degeneration back onto their readers.
Egypt, Illumination and Electricity
The electric light played a crucial role in Britain’s and France’s imperial designs on modern Egypt. To illuminate Egypt was to dominate it: arc lights were used so that ships could navigate the Suez Canal by night, revolutionising international trade and facilitating increasing European colonisation of Africa. Bright arc lights had clear military applications: electricity lit up spaces that European powers sought to colonise. When the British invaded Egypt in 1882, for instance, electric lights were employed before the bombardment of Alexandria. We also see such devices used in imperialist propaganda of the late nineteenth century. In a trading card for Woodhouse and Rawson, to take one example, an electricity and engineering company based in London, produced in the early 1890s by the engraver Arthur Bartram Snell (1861–1942), the caption reads ‘What is wanted in Darkest Africa is the Electric Light’.21 The majority of the trading card is taken up with an image of a jungle scene, in which white European explorers are illuminated by a large hanging bulb; several Africans consigned to the peripheries look on, one shielding his eyes from the dazzling electric glare. The trading card’s message is clear: electricity is emblematic of progress and civilisation, and it is this that white explorers are tasked with bringing to the depths of ‘dark-est Africa’ and its ‘unenlightened’ inhabitants. That the trading card also sports a portrait of the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904), famous after the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1886– 9), cements its imperialistic thrust: Stanley’s search for the source of the Nile on behalf of Belgium’s King Leopold II (1835–1909) led directly to the Belgian occupation of the Congo. Egypt is present in this image, albeit in small vignettes tucked away in the top right corner. In the largest, a man sits astride a camel in front of a couple of pyramids. The smaller image is altogether more intriguing. A sphinx – presumably the Great Sphinx of Giza – is illuminated by an electric light that sits atop its headdress. Its facial expression is serene and haughty. On the one hand, it constitutes an example of imagery of the electric light specifically colliding with ancient Egyptian iconography – the focus of the first section of this article – in which symbols of ancient Egypt are aligned with electricity’s power. On the other, the trading card’s celebration of white imperial forces colours this vignette to suggest European domination of this particular monument as much as of the indigenous people in the jungle scene.
I open this section with this example to ascertain something of the heterodox imperialist thinking of the era, and as a useful starting place by which we might see various other cultural forms as working – to a greater or lesser degree – in contrast. In this section I take stock of the ways in which ancient Egyptian artefacts, spaces made up to look Egyptian, and even homewares drawing upon an Egyptian aesthetic, featured a more ambiguous collision between ancient Egypt and illumination as symbolic of technological modernity. In several of these examples, the electric light is not used as a point of contrast to suggest the ‘savageness’ of ancient Egypt, but instead – to use an appropriate metaphor – shines a new light on Egypt, and in the case of the statues and lamps to which I turn towards the end of this section, puts this light directly into ancient Egyptian hands. As this article progresses, we will see that this visual seizure of electrical power by ancient Egyptians infiltrates late nineteenth-century literature. The close alignment between ancient Egypt and electricity that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century might seem at first an unlikely one, but its prevalence – as detailed in this section and the next – may well have paved the way for understandings of ancient Egypt as an electrically advanced society in occultist and countercultural thought, and cemented the idea of modern scientific developments as being indivisible from alchemy and antiquity.
Throughout the nineteenth century, cities increasingly harboured fantasy spaces in which both accurate reconstructions and imaginative retellings of ancient Egypt could be engaged with and experienced, encouraged by technological developments that produced striking optical effects. It was also in these metropolises where electricity was well and truly making its mark. The West End, as London’s central recreational hub, was a prior-ity when it came to electrical embellishment. Its brightly lit entertainment venues dominated a landscape that facilitated night-time leisure like never before, and this dramatic electric light that had been used in theatres since the late 1840s appeared to be spilling out into the streets.22 Thomas Edison’s electric light bulbs, illuminated by carbon filaments, which had been invented in 1879, were displayed at the Paris Electricity Exposition in 1881.23 The next year saw the first central electricity generation stations in London and New York, which were in turn replaced by more convenient power stations in the coming decades.24 In London, major public buildings where gas lighting had been considered too dangerous – such as the British Museum – were being artificially illuminated for the first time. Meanwhile, in California, San José boasted an ‘electric tower’ in the shape of ‘a four-sided pyramid’ that cast a glow on the streets like ‘the light of the moon on a very clear night’.25 Scientists exploited new techniques to make electricity visible. Instead of being confined to the laboratory, electricity was firmly established as a spectacular crowd-pleaser in lecture halls. Electric light flooded all manner of recreational spaces.
This new variety of light revolutionised the methods by which ancient Egyptian relics and simulacra could be viewed and examined. If ancient Egypt was one of a variety of geographically and temporally exotic metropolitan fantasies, encouraged by the glitziness of spaces such as the West End, then the electric lustre that bathed such scenes must have permeated and disrupted this imaginary Egypt. As I detail in this section, the technological opulence of modernity and the antiquated glamour of a bygone era were fused in such spaces, which ranged from outdoor settings to museums, hotels to the home.
In Britain, France, the United States, and in Egypt itself, pioneering electric lighting effects were often demonstrated in spaces typified by their ancient Egyptian presences. For Britain and France, this was likely as a result of these spaces’ perceived grandeur; open public spaces provided both the room required for large- scale demonstrations in the development of lighting technologies and, also, incidentally, were often the kinds of locale where Egyptian obelisks – typically erected as symbols of imperial might – were installed. In Paris in 1844, for instance, the French physicist Léon Foucault (1819–66) demonstrated a carbon arc lamp in Paris’s Place de la Concorde. In an engraving depicting this event (figure 1), an intense beam of electric light can be seen emerging from the apparatus, falling at the base of the Luxor Obelisk. The obelisk, rather than the lamp itself (noteworthy for its obscurity in the surrounding darkness and its presumed positioning almost entirely outside of the illustration), is the focal point of the image, an imposing murky shape that looms in both the dark and illuminated sections of the picture, its face angled towards the lamp picked out in a streak of brilliant white. The ancient and the ultra- modern square up to each other in a composition in which they occupy opposing sides of the image. And yet, there is a coherence to the engraving, in which the angular shape of the Luxor Obelisk is echoed in that of the beam of light from the lamp. We might read in this scene the interrogation of an ancient Egyptian presence under the harsh arc lamp, or else we might see a kind of balance, in which two symbols of light – the obelisk representing the petrified solar ray, the light of the arc lamp itself often likened to the power of the sun – are united.
In London, too, we witness the cultural collision of antiquity and technological modernity. The ancient Egyptian obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle was erected on the Victoria Embankment in 1878. The Embankment proved an ambiguous location for the Needle, whose situation was, for many years, the subject of extended debate. On its installation, the Needle was paradoxically both the oldest and newest monument in London (as the Luxor Obelisk had been in Paris when it was transported to the city earlier in the century). Having been completed eight years before the Needle’s arrival, the Victoria Embankment provided the city with a modern sewerage system and, although gas lighting was restored in 1884 for financial reasons, within three months after the obelisk’s installation it had become the first British street to feature permanent electric lighting. The sheet music of the composer Alphonse Cary’s (1848–1922) ‘The Electric Polka’ (c.1879) features on its colour- printed cover a devil shining an electric light down on the Embankment, the luminous orb appearing directly above the Needle and casting a wide beam of brightness onto the scene below. The Embankment is itself studded with smaller versions of the devil’s light in the lamps that line the street. The devil recalls the folkloric Lucifer, the ‘light- bringer’, aligned with the planet Venus, the morning star, and son of Aurora, the Greek goddess of the dawn; Lucifer’s name was subsequently co-opted as a Christian epithet for Satan. The devil in this image thus brings with it connotations of antiquity but also of the Christian tempter, parading electricity’s might, associations between electricity and occult sciences stretching back at least to the Renaissance.26 The Needle was, therefore, a symbol of supreme antiquity in an area of London closely associated with cutting- edge modernity, but also – in sources such as Cary’s printed image – one in which it is conceived of as magical in this electrically lit space.
Images of obelisks standing stark in otherwise electrically lit city-scapes proliferated. As electric lighting transformed outdoor spaces, obelisks (both genuine ancient Egyptian monuments and later reproductions) took on a more sinister appearance. Surrounded by bright electric streetlights or advertisements, they loom ominously as bold, dark reminders of the ancient world’s endurance in an ever- changing landscape. To take one more example from the visual culture of the end of the long nineteenth century, the American journalist and urban planning theorist Charles Mulford Robinson (1869–1917) lamented ‘the evil of black smoke and glaring advertisements’ of British and North American cities in an article in Harper’s Magazine of 1902, which featured obelisks in two of the article’s eight illustrations.27 In one of these images produced by the American illustrator Henry Sumner Watson (1868–1933), a rendering of one of the two obelisks that then stood at the centre of Ludgate Circus, the ‘otherness’ of the obelisk in the modern city is emphasised by its unparalleled darkness when set against the ‘glaring advertisements’ bemoaned by Robinson. The obelisk occupies the image’s central space, severe and static, surrounded by the shimmering lights of advertisements that promote the ephemeral: ‘potpie’, ‘American meals’ and ‘biscuits’. The obelisk is even partially obscured by the glow of the powerful electric light behind it, and its reflection in the fallen rain warps and mixes with those of the lights, the ancient merging with the modern.28
While in illustration, obelisks are usually conspicuous because of their lack of electrical illumination in otherwise brightly lit settings, the obelisk itself was symbolically connected to light. Almost all commemorating ancient Egypt’s solar gods, obelisks were often topped with pyramid- shaped capstones called pyramidions, coated either in gold or the gold-silver alloy electrum.29 Before the sun rose over the horizon, the polished metal of the pyramidion would reflect its rays, creating the appearance of a light source at the top of the obelisk. That ancient Egyptian obelisks and pyramids were often topped with materials that are effective at conducting electricity and, in the case of electrum, evoking linguistic connections to electricity, appears to have been a coincidence; gold and electrum seem to have been selected exclusively for their aesthetic qualities. Nevertheless, when nineteenth- and twentieth-century obelisks duplicated this feature, electrical conductivity was often taken into account when materials were selected for the tops of obelisks. The Washington Monument, a modern obelisk completed in 1884, was fashioned in the ancient Egyptian style including the metallic pyramidion at the apex. Rather than gold or electrum, the Washington Monument’s pyramidion was fashioned from a distinctly modern metal, aluminium – an element only discovered earlier that century and whose potential functions were ill understood for some time – so cutting-edge that many Americans had not heard of it prior to the obelisk’s completion.30 The aluminium pyramidion served a dual function: first, to emulate the ancient Egyptian style; and, second, to act as a lightning rod in order to protect the obelisk from damage. Lightning struck the pyramidion just over six months later, and modifications had to be made; further lightning strikes did less damage but their regularity secured an association between the obelisk and the lightning rod that paralleled the popular literary device of the reanimation of mummies via the power of electricity, to which we shall later turn.31
On a larger scale, electric lighting enabled different – and later – encounters with cities’ Egyptian traces. In 1879 the British Museum Library was electrically lit for the first time, making it one of the first buildings in London to install electricity. The Reading Room was described in The Times as being ‘suddenly illumined as by a magic ray of sunshine’.32 The likening of the light to the magical suggests optical trickery, stage effects and self-conscious drama. The readers’ reaction to the illumination further emphasises the theatricality of the moment and the pervasive idea that electricity equalled spectacle; the light was met with ‘a murmur of applause’.33 With the Reading Room’s reputation for attracting those with occult tastes in literature, from spiritualists to theosophists and members of the Golden Dawn, the ‘magic ray of sunshine’ becomes something more, a kind of literal enlightenment.34
A decade later, the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery – notorious for being particularly gloomy – was newly lit.35 An engraving from the Illustrated London News depicts a private evening viewing (figure 2). A reporter for Nature makes clear the delicate balance that was struck between lighting the Museum’s artefacts adequately and not overwhelming the eye: ‘The light from glow lamps is more agreeable to the eyes than the more powerful light of arc illuminants; but these have been regulated with the utmost care.’36 In the Illustrated London News image the electric light, more intense than the natural light previously relied upon to illuminate the museum’s galleries, creates an increased contrast between light and dark, casting heavier shadows across the colossal artefacts, while causing the ‘faces’ of the sculptures to appear bathed in light. With the crowd contemplating the dramatically lit spectacle, the museum experience appears to shift sharply towards the theatrical. Before their electrical illumination, the ‘dark color and block- like quality’ of colossal Egyptian statues made them difficult to accommodate within the museum space, ‘making them appear awkward and uneasy’, at times even ‘difficult to see properly’. This, as Stephanie Moser points out, served the Museum’s purpose in suggesting the cultural superiority of Greece and Rome.37 That the illustrator chose to focus on the Egyptian statuary as the focal point of the image, rather than Greek or Roman examples, suggests a significant shift towards the end of the century, whereby Museum visitors saw the Egyptian artefacts anew, no longer lesser than their Classical counterparts; the colossi foregrounded in the illustration meet the electric light as a symbol of technological advancement unflinchingly eye to eye.
The installation of electric lighting in the British Museum’s galleries as well as the library marks a transition from illuminated encounters with scholarly material to those with the remnants of an ancient civilisation itself, and the opening up of the Museum at night to a broader public. The electric light, inherently theatrical and simultaneously symbolic of magical power and scientific advancement, proved an appropriate medium via which to view the relics of a civilisation that was renowned for its employment of the spectacular in order to glorify the divine. With new lighting methods in place, some parts of the museum were being kept open as late as 10 o’clock in the evening in the 1890s, transforming it from a daytime to a twilight venue and putting it in direct competition with London’s theatres.38
Across the Atlantic, electric lighting was transforming engagements with Egyptianised spaces, too. The Western Electric Company’s exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 included a mock Egyptian temple, featuring ‘between 1,100 and 1,200 incandescent lamps … 700 of which [were] constantly burning’.39 The first issue of Electrical Industries – the ‘Weekly World’s Fair Supplement’ ‘devoted to the electrical and allied interests of the World’s Fair, its visitors and exhibitors’ – show-cased a view of the Western Electric Company’s Egyptian temple on the front page, from which some delightfully creative details can be gleaned. The temple was created in a traditional pylon shape, its top edged with electric lamps, integrated into what appear to be stylistic sprays of lotus flowers. There is a degree of historical sensitivity here: the lotus flower opening its petals in daylight and closing them at night makes it a fitting solar symbol. As described in a contemporary guidebook, also gracing the outside of the temple were ‘Egyptian figures and groups associated with electricity’, including ‘a group of Egyptian maidens, of the time of Rameses the Second, operating a telephone board, and another group of men of the same period laying telegraph lines’.40 The anonymous author of the article in Electrical Industries reporting on the spectacle notes that ‘the interior and exterior frescoing of the temple show’ ‘[t]he lineman and wireman … at work’.41 Elsewhere, several ancient Egyptian men appear to be working enormous dynamos; another Egyptian man is illuminated by an electric light bulb, bathed in a strong beam of light emerging from above him. ‘The conceit’ was, according to the guidebook, ‘very popular’.42 The article in Electric Industries, too, recorded that ‘[a]mong the large number of exhibits in the Electricity building none has attracted more attention from all classes of visitors than that of the Western Electric Company’.43
Inside the temple, the effect was even more dramatic. A couple of photographs held at Chicago History Museum show different views of the temple’s interior (figure 3).44 In this darkened space the lights appear all the more striking. Doorways are decorated with pylon-shaped surrounds topped with illuminated winged solar discs, and set into the temple walls are alcoves ‘for the display of telegraph, test-ing, and other small instruments and brass work’.45 Crowded together behind clear glass, these instruments produce a similar effect to quantities of small antiquities grouped in museum display cases.46 The photographs capture imposing columns ‘of heavy green glass illuminated by incandescent lamps placed within them’, topped with elaborate capitals.47 While the photographs only show these details in greyscale, sources record that the lights within the temple are all ‘concealed behind translucent glass of many colors’; the intricate designs (which include more lotus motifs) suggest that the effect might have been akin to stained glass windows.48
The writer of the Electrical Industries article states that ‘[t]he combination of the ancient figures with the various applications of electricity, the most modern force, is certainly unique’.49 This is surely true in the context of the world’s fairs. In fact, the Western Electric Company’s exhibit was not the only Egyptian temple constructed in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition that year. As was the case with previous world’s fairs, a simulacrum of an Orientalist Cairene street had been constructed; ‘the world’s fairs’ were intended to be, among other things,‘ “living” museums’ whereby ‘the visitor was meant to have an interactive experience that created the illusion that [they] had in some sense actually been transported to the culture in question’.50 At the World’s Columbian Exposition, as in events in previous years, representations of modern Egyptian life were juxtaposed with exhibits that served to enforce a contrast between Egypt’s present and ancient civilisations. The Cairene street was home not only to various stalls, structures made out to look like mosques, the celebrated dancer ‘Little Egypt’, a conjuror, and camels and donkeys that visitors could ride, but also a replica of part of the Temple of Luxor that housed artificial mummies (so convincingly executed that some visitors assumed that they were real).51 That Cairo and Luxor are separated by around 300 miles was of no importance, ‘highlights’ of Egyptian culture cherry- picked and condensed into a space that presented the hustle and bustle of modern Egypt sitting side- by- side with remnants of its ancient civilisation. As Eric Davis points out, in the case of Egypt, the country’s ‘glories were portrayed as relics of the past’.52 That entry to the temple required an additional admission fee signified in and of itself the greater ‘value’ of what lay within compared to the immersive take on modern Egyptian life available outside. The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 thus presented two Egyptian temples to its visitors: one that sought to represent a composite ancient Egypt whose constituent parts were, to greater or lesser extents, rooted in Egypt as it had actually existed, and one a more starkly alternative Egypt, with its multicoloured lights and array of electric devices. Encountering both must only have served to heighten the experience – and difference – of the other.
The juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern was palpable, too, in Egypt itself. Even in places that might otherwise look like ‘a land unexplored’, the British novelist Amelia B. Edwards (1831–92) observed in her landmark travelogue A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), one could discern ‘the telegraphic wires stalking, ghost- like, across the desert’.53 Cairo was, naturally, Egypt’s most technologically advanced hub, its grand hotels capitalising on European and North American tourists’ appetite for the glamour of antiquity and their expectations to be met with the most modern conveniences. Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, for instance, was decorated in a style that mimicked restored ancient Egyptian tombs and temples, and was furnished with all of the gadgets associated with the luxury hotel experience, including electric lifts, lights and bells.54 We have already encountered Shepheard’s as referred to in Marie Corelli’s Ziska (1897), in which Corelli lists its modern amenities, including a darkroom for photography enthusiasts; beyond Corelli, Shepheard’s, as Cairo’s oldest and best-known accommodation, with its technological luxuries cloaked in pharaonic splendour, is often invoked in literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a space in which the real world and the fantastical blur.55 Although the trappings of modernity suffused this space, it was disguised as a pharaonic fantasy, its entrance hall boasting lotus columns painted in vivid colours. The combination of ancient style – whose popularity among Westerners, ironically, also made it decidedly modern – and up-to-date functionality resulted in the hotel being described as ‘Eighteenth Dynasty Edwardian’ after the turn of the century.56 As Britain’s military presence in Egypt grew, Cairo became increasingly Westernised, and so the popular pharaonic style became more widely used. This style fused with cosmopolitan, European elements, such as public gardens, theatres, boulevards, museums and an opera house, creating a curious landscape where what looked to be ancient at first glance often turned out to be the most new.57 The French novelist Pierre Loti (1850–1923) complained in L’Égypte (1909) of ‘the blinding glare of the electric light’ and the ‘monstrous hotels [that] parade the sham splendour of their painted facades … a medley of all styles, rockwork, Roman, Gothic, New Art, Pharaonic’.58
Of particular interest for the purposes of this article is ‘a pair of life- size bronze statues of bare- breasted women in pharaonic headdress’ that stood in the hotel’s entrance hall, at the bottom of the staircase (figure 4).59 In a magic- lantern slide that reproduces this view, both statues hold aloft an electric light made to look like the flame of a torch, a prime example of the hotel’s cutting-edge modern technological installations decked out to represent antiquity. That these twin pharaohs are light bearers suggests an association between enlightenment and ancient Egyptian civilisation, enlightenment having connotations ranging from the occult to the scientific. Their position flanking the staircase creates a sense of aesthetic grandeur whilst also extending this metaphor for the hotel guest: as one penetrates deeper into this temple-like space, granted entrance by the light bearers, one literally ascends into an atrium that, as the lantern slide reveals, appears flooded with natural light.
Similar lamps were installed outside Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel in 1867. Having been designed by the French sculptor Mathurin Moreau (1822–1912), advertised in the 1850s and subsequently mass produced, his ‘Candélabre Égyptienne’ is often accompanied by a ‘Candélabre Négresse’, representatives of North- East Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa respectively. While these torchbearers would have originally held aloft a gas flame, eventually the light sources were replaced with electrical mechanisms. Indeed, before the widespread introduction of electric light, gas light (or similar) was attributed to ancient Egyptians in imaginative narratives such as Grant Allen’s burlesque, ‘My New Year’s Eve Among the Mummies’ (1878), in which ‘brilliant gas-lamps’ illuminate the interior of a pyramid, or indeed in Bulwer- Lytton’s The Coming Race where the Vril-ya’s subterranean city with its Egyptianate features is lit by ‘what seemed artificial gas- lamps placed at regular intervals’.60 As gas gave way to electric lighting, so too did the lighting methods attributed to ancient Egyptians (or ancient Egyptian-esque civilisations) in speculative fiction evolve from one to the other.
There are several places where Moreau’s ‘Candélabre Égyptienne’ can still be seen, besides the Shelbourne Hotel: in France, in the entrance to the town hall in Remiremont, and at one corner of the Place Louis Comte in Saint-Étienne (in the latter case, the ancient Egyptian light bearer is accompanied by a statue of a sphinx in a pharaonic headdress); examples can be found elsewhere in Europe in the Jardins do Palácio de Cristal in Porto, Portugal. In North America, a ‘Candélabre Égyptienne’ and a ‘Candélabre Négresse’ done out in gold flank the mausoleum of the architect Temple Hoyne Buell (1895–1990) in Denver, Colorado, in a rare instance of their incorporation into a modern design. The torch-bearers also seem to have been especially popular in South American mansions of the nineteenth century: they can be found in Chile’s capital, Santiago, as well as at the Palacio la Alhambra and in the garden of the Museu do Estado do Pernambuco in Brazil.
From the 1860s to the 1890s, Britain’s Coalbrookdale Company produced statues holding aloft lamps to represent ‘Europe’, ‘America’, ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’. ‘Africa’ is an ancient Egyptian woman, believed to have been designed by John Bell (1818–96). Full- size and miniature versions of this design were available, the latter being more suited to domestic spaces. Other nineteenth- century designs of ancient Egyptian-themed lamps produced for the home show a child (again, in pharaonic headdress) holding aloft the light, while further specimens incorporated obelisks (one example made in Manchester was directly inspired by Cleopatra’s Needle, replicating its hieroglyphic inscriptions).61 By 1923 the American inventor Louis Vincent Aronson (1869–1940) had brought out an electric light for the home whose electric bulb rested atop a hinged Egyptian sarcophagus. Opening the sarcophagus would reveal a nude ancient Egyptian woman luminous with gold, the electric light reflecting off her metallic body (contrasted against the dark interior of the sarcophagus) giving her the appearance of an entity composed of light. That this latest example appeared at a time when the electrical reanimation of Egyptian mummies had existed as a trope for nearly a century, and the decade before the ‘light-bulb moment’ first appeared in visual form in a Betty Boop cartoon,62 suggests that we should read this example as a kind of opulent kitsch item, visually luxurious (and likely originally somewhat expensive) yet founded upon (often lurid, and often cheap) popular culture narratives. Speculative fiction and material culture was united in imagining ancient Egypt and electricity as often erotically combined; as we shall go on to see by the end of this article, it is often beautiful women who are imagined as electromagnetic alchemists. On the one hand, they are familiar subjects of Orientalist fantasy; on the other, they reflect the increasing opportunities available to women afforded by spiritualism, theosophy and the Golden Dawn, as well as by the sciences themselves.
Of all the light-bearing Egyptian women conjured up in the nineteenth- and early twentieth- century imagination, however, the forerunner to New York City’s Statue of Liberty is the most monumental; due to the expense of the project, it also never progressed beyond a design on paper. ‘Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia’, designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1904), was conceived as a lighthouse for the Suez Canal. Bartholdi’s design takes the shape of an Egyptian woman with one arm low in a welcoming gesture and the other holding aloft a torch. While the figure is meant to suggest a modern Egyptian peasant woman, Bartholdi was also inspired by Egypt’s ancient history; he was impressed by the ‘kindly and impassive glance’ of the sphinx, which ‘seems … to be fixed upon an unlimited future’, and something of this welcoming character was seemingly intended to feature, too, in this guardian of the Canal.63 Bartholdi’s Egyptian woman stands atop a pylon-shaped plinth, in another nod to Egypt’s ancient history. One version of Bartholdi’s sketch shows the woman’s headband as a light source, a feature that would find an afterlife in the Statue of Liberty, which itself functioned as a lighthouse from 1886 to 1901 (it was, also, the first lighthouse in the United States to be powered by electricity).64 While the Statue of Liberty retained little of Bartholdi’s original Egyptian design, Egypt remained intrinsically associated with the kinds of feats of engineering it represented. The legendary lighthouse of Alexandria known as ‘Pharos’, is represented in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century illustrations as akin to a modern skyscraper.
An interesting juxtaposition thus emerges: the electric lighting surrounding artefacts and replicas including various cities’ obelisks contributed to an association between ancient Egyptian imagery and that of modern scientific innovation. They co- existed side by side and may well have gone some way in uniting the two concepts in the cultural imagi-nation. As museums and other recreational spaces became electrically lit, ancient Egypt was discovered anew, no longer the gloomy cousin of Greece and Rome but a vibrant civilisation in its own right. That lighting designs incorporated Egyptian figures holding aloft these symbols of enlightenment marks an ambiguous shift. In these spaces, ancient Egyptians – often individuals emblematic of royalty – become light bearers. On the one hand, they are servants to the Westerners using such spaces, literally objectified and fulfilling a menial function. On the other, they are imagined as guardians of knowledge, even as gilded immortal bodies, wielders of alchemical power. Certainly, what such complicated and at time contradictory meetings between the ancient and the modern ultimately established were ever- expanding opportunities for contact and for imaginative interpretation as to what this contact could mean. One key possibility would be that electricity might revive ancient Egypt, shocking its dead back to life, and allowing them to speak in the modern world.
Shocking Mummies
Mummy reanimation in modern literature – and electricity’s power to achieve this – has its roots in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Referred to by its creator as more grotesque than ‘a mummy again endued with animation’, Frankenstein’s creature is awakened through a scientific process that is left ambiguous.65 Described simply as having been achieved through the use of ‘instruments of life’ designed to instil a ‘spark of being into the lifeless thing’, the reanimation process is not explicitly specified as electrical in nature.66 Nevertheless, the novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, echoes the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) description of the American polymath and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and his experiments with lightning; Franklin was, according to Kant, ‘dem Prometheus der neuern Zeiten’ (‘the Prometheus of modern times’).67 That the Shelleys were au fait with galvanism, which, as I go on to outline, is connected to mummy reanimation in several subsequent narratives, suggests a common scientific root to all of these early nineteenth- century texts.68 Accordingly, the creature’s awakening tends to be imagined through the use of galvanic equipment, and in retellings of Shelley’s tale, is often powered by a bolt of lightning that strikes a lightning rod during a storm.69 If Shelley’s initial comparison of the creature to a reanimated mummy seems a fleeting one, she reaffirms the creature’s mummy- like appearance towards the novel’s close: the creature’s hand, Robert Walton observes, ‘was … in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy’.70
The influence of Frankenstein and the possibility of implied electrical reanimation on later texts dealing with mummy revival can-not be underestimated. As Constance Classen points out, referring to mummies in nineteenth- century museum collections, ‘[c]ontemporary scientific experimentation made it possible to imagine such a revival occurring at any moment’.71 It was not long after the arrival of Shelley’s celebrated Gothic novel that the first reanimated Egyptian mummy in fiction appeared: Jane Webb’s futuristic tale of a resuscitated Cheops was published in 1827. While Webb’s heavy debt to Shelley’s novel is undeniable – with reviewers commenting on how the resuscitation of Cheops ‘would have been very fine, had not the conception, in some degree, been forestalled by Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein’72 – the scene in which the reanimation of the mummy takes place is described in far greater technological detail.73 Webb’s mummy reanimation – which is later revealed to be the work of God rather than that of the scientist – is first presented as being explicitly electrical in nature, achieved through the use of a galvanic battery:
Worked up to desperation, he applied the wires of the battery and put the apparatus in motion, whilst a demoniac laugh of derision appeared to ring in his ears, and the surrounding mummies seemed starting from their places and dancing in unearthly merriment. Thunder now roared in tremendous peals through the Pyramids, shaking their enormous masses to the foundation, and vivid flashes of light darted round in quick succession. Edric stood aghast amidst this fearful convulsion of nature … Still, he stood immovable, and gazing intently on the mummy, whose eyes had opened with the shock, and were now fixed on those of Edric, shining with super-natural lustre.74
While the electrical current is applied solely to Cheops’s body, it is as if the entire Giza Necropolis is suffused with electricity. Other mummies in the pyramid chamber appear to move as if they too have been shocked; Webb seems to take a particular pleasure in infusing the description of ‘the surrounding mummies [which] seemed starting’ with a kind of sizzling sibilance that mimics the sounds of the electric spark. It is not just this particular pyramid that is affected, but all of them, as if the force at work is an external thunderstorm rather than a battery (perhaps a clue as to divine intervention). As Sara Brio records, Edric as a representative of the England of 2126 employs galvanism as emblematic of ‘scientific and technological advancement’ to his own ends.75 But hierarchies of power are immediately flipped with the application of the electric current; in the ‘supernatural lustre’ of Cheops’s gaze can be read his unshakeable authority. Cheops, as ‘a purveyor of mystical knowledge’, is the British scientists’ superior. Unlike Shelley’s creature, who awakes as an innocent, only to be shunned by his creator, Cheops is experienced, adaptable and very quickly garners power in this futuristic setting. In his fixed gaze is the self- assuredness of a superior intelligence.
Less well documented than the influence of Shelley’s text, though significant to an understanding of the influences on the first depiction of a reanimated mummy in literature, is Webb’s friendship with the celebrated British painter John Martin (1789–1854), to whom Melanie Keene refers as ‘the most famous geological artist’, aligning him with contemporaneous scientific endeavours.76 In illuminating electrical motifs in Martin’s paintings of Egyptian settings, I hope to unearth another potential line of inspiration for Webb beyond Shelley’s precedent. Martin’s painting, Seventh Plague of Egypt (1823), for instance, depicts the cataclysmic biblical storm summoned by Moses, who stands holding his staff aloft like a magus. While the otherworldly light that almost connects the summits of the pyramids is not the typical jagged bolts of lightning of his other works, in watercolour studies and in subsequent engravings that saw the image popularised, sharp lines of electrical discharges are visible through the clouds (figure 5). The blue-tinted illumination that tears through the sky in the painting thus appears to be electrical light shining through storm-clouds, lightning symbolising, as it did in many of Martin’s paintings, divine wrath. Webb, orphaned in 1824, the year Martin’s painting was exhibited in the Society of British Artists’ inaugural exhibition in London, enjoyed a close friendship with Martin at this time.77 Alan Rauch draws parallels between Webb’s novel and Martin’s painting An Ideal Portrait of the Last Man (1826), citing similarities in subject matter to a shared awareness of Shelley’s novel.78 If, as Rauch suggests, the pair discussed Frankenstein and harnessed its inspirational potential for their own works, then their mutual depiction of the pyramids and electrical forces implies that Martin’s painting may have had its own influence on Webb, prefiguring the ‘[t]hunder’ and ‘flashes of light’ within the Great Pyramid in her novel. Considered together, therefore, Webb and Martin present pictures of Egypt connected explicitly to electrical power, which laid the foundations for connections between electricity and ancient Egypt in the literary imagination later in the nineteenth century.
In turn, the British painter and printmaker J. M. W. Turner (17751851) may have provided inspiration for Martin’s picture of an electrical storm over the pyramids. His The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800) depicts the fabled tempest illuminating a pyramid and, as is the case with Martin’s painting, bolts of lightning are more explicitly identifiable as the source of light in subsequent engravings of the image (figure 6). While Egypt’s climate makes lightning relatively rare, the biblical story of the plagues of Egypt cemented the association between Egypt and storms, particularly at a time when the nascence of Egyptology meant that, culturally speaking, when British people thought of ancient Egypt they thought first of Joseph or Moses. Early nineteenth- century imagery of electrical storms in Egypt was yet more widespread: night- time views of Pompey’s Pillar and Cleopatra’s Needle painted in watercolours around the advent of the nineteenth century by one Private William Porter show Roman and Egyptian monoliths set against backgrounds of skies streaked with lightning.79 Catriona Kennedy reads ‘[t]he shafts of light that illuminate both moments’ in these watercolour paintings ‘as celebrating the British expedition’s contribution to the scholarly understanding of Egypt’.80 Kennedy discerns in these dramatic, stormy images ‘the Old Testament Plagues of Egypt, and the Seventh Plague, a hugely destructive thunderstorm, in particular’.81 Through his Seventh Plague of Egypt, Martin participated in this tradition, using lightning as symbolic of divine power in Egyptian settings again in his mezzotints that post-dated Webb’s mummy reanimation novel, The Destroying Angel (1836) and The Death of the First Born (1836).
Electrical stimulation proved influential on other texts with ancient Egyptian subject matter, as in the little-known ‘British theologian- turned- astronomer’ Alexander Copland’s 1834 poems ‘The Mummy Awaked’ and ‘The Mummy’s Reply’.82 In the former, the poetic voice claims the ability to ‘rouse the dead by a galvanic battery’, insulting the mummy’s appearance while boasting of the modern ability to ‘transmute old rags to gold’ by transforming material into banknotes.83 In the latter poem, the mummy, while claiming to ‘love to hear the changes which have been’, mockingly retorts by inviting the voice to:
Touch my poor frame, and make my body all
Just as it was before grim Death stood by.
If you can do but this, then I’ll believe,
That you can all which you have said achieve.84
Merely being ‘rouse[d] ’ by the instruments of modern science is not satisfactory for the mummy, who dreams rather of being as she was before death; for her, it is the restoration of her living beauty as well as her life – that is, through an act of true alchemy – that would demonstrate real scientific mastery. When the mummy explains that she will cease to speak ‘To such as you, who know so much already’, her tone is, as Jasmine Day points out, ‘haughty’ and ‘chastising’.85 In her rebuff of 16 stanzas (which feels somewhat curt after the 55 stanzas of ‘The Mummy Awaked’), the mummy ultimately reinforces the limits of modern scientific progress, specifically ridiculing the inadequacies of galvanism. There are, of course, interesting gender and national dynamics at play here: the Western masculine scientist proposes to experiment on his Eastern feminine subject, who rebuffs him; later in the century, the Egyptian woman assumes the position of scientist and wields astounding alchemical powers.
References to electricity in relation to the ancient Egyptian dead continued throughout the century. The motion of the titular appendage in Théophile Gautier’s ‘Le Pied de momie’ (1840) is likened to twitching muscles in receipt of an electric shock; the foot moves as if it were ‘en contact avec une pile voltaïque’ (‘in contact with a voltaic pile’).86 The ‘pile voltaïque’ refers to the pile pioneered by Volta, which was a precursor to the battery and, according to Patricia Fara, ‘often said to be the last Enlightenment instrument … mark[ing] not only a new century, but also the beginning of modern physics’.87 Another simile likens the foot’s movement to that of ‘une grenouille effarée’ (‘a startled frog’),88 calling to mind Luigi (1737–98) and Lucia Galvani’s (1743–88) experiments into static electricity and its effect on the nerves in frogs’ legs: the application of electricity caused the muscles in the frogs’ legs to twitch.89 A scientific instrument called the ‘frog galvanoscope’ (essentially a skinned frog’s leg with an exposed nerve, to which a conductor of electricity might be applied) invented by Galvani and used to detect voltage was still in use around the mid- nineteenth century.
Galvanism as a method of mummy revival was a concept borrowed by Edgar Allan Poe in his popular burlesque on the topic, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845). Poe’s mummy – Allamistakeo – is revived by electricity generated by a ‘Voltaic pile’; a ‘wire’ attaches the ‘battery’ to the ‘temporal muscle’, causing the mummy’s eyelids to close.90 The next point of application is ‘the great toe of the right foot’, through which they access the ‘bisected nerves’ of ‘the abductor muscle’; stimulation, in this case, again recalls the Galvanis’ experiments with frogs’ legs: ‘the mummy first drew up its right knee so as to bring it nearly into contact with the abdomen, and then, straighten[ed] the limb with inconceivable force’.91 It is the third and final shock that ultimately revives the mummy, this time via ‘a profound incision into the tip of the subject’s nose’. The effect, Poe relates, was ‘morally and physically – figuratively and literally … electric’.92 Allamistakeo reveals that ancient Egyptian civilisation was far more advanced than that of the modern American men who restore him to life, observing disparagingly that he ‘perceive[s] they are yet in the infancy of Galvanism, and cannot accomplish with it what was a common thing among us in the old days’.93 While ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ is the earliest of the fictional texts examined in this article which specifically credits the ancient Egyptians with superior knowledge of electricity, reprints of Poe’s tale in new editions – including the collection of Poe’s works Tales of Mystery, Imagination and Humour; and Poems (1852) with its illustration of Allamistakeo, which Day has identified as ‘the earliest known modern visual depiction of a living mummy’94 – saw Poe’s text repackaged for readers in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, 1890s and 1900s.
Other electrical reanimations of the early nineteenth century reappeared in new formats later in the century, including Webb’s The Mummy, which was reprinted by Frederick Warne as a cheap edition in 1872, and which was subsequently serialised in Dicks’ English Library of Standard Works in weekly instalments between April and June 1894. As such, this text had several moments of cultural currency long after its author’s death, exposing new generations to the mummy awakened by electrical stimulation. Such conventions evidently transcended genre and form. George Day and Allen Reed’s farce The Mummy (first performed in London in August 1896 before moving to Broadway later that year) also featured a titular mummy reanimated by a ‘galvanic battery’.95 The trope continued into the early twentieth century, where it can be seen, too, in silent films, including the Thanhouser Company’s The Mummy (1911), in which a mummified ancient Egyptian princess is accidentally awoken from a death-like sleep, ‘pop[ping] … out from her coffin’ when her body comes into contact with a live electrical wire.96 Electrification was used for comic effect a decade later in William Watson’s comedy short Tut! Tut! King (1923), in which a team of scientists apply electric shocks to what they believe to be mummies in a bid to revive them, the joke being that the individuals subject to this treatment are actually a couple of unfortunate modern men hiding in the mummy cases. Richard Freeman observes that other than the supernatural methods used in Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story ‘Lot No. 249’ (1892), fiction featuring mummy reanimation of the era employs either electricity or chemical stimulation, through the use of an elixir, as the technique by which the subject is awakened.97 Aside from Doyle’s tale, therefore, with its clearer indication of otherworldly pow-ers, the key to reviving the ancient Egyptian dead is pervasively imagined as being rooted in science, albeit one that is often inflected with occult associations.
Tales such as these highlight the established connection between ancient Egypt and electricity in the broader cultural consciousness. Life was not only breathed into the mummies but into understandings of Egypt: this was a wider process of reanimation. Egypt’s ancient monuments and relics, already associated with metallic conductors of electricity were being metaphorically revivified, illuminated by electric lights in public and in museums, and lit by increasingly dramatic lighting used in theatrical depictions of the civilisation. Amidst this context of increasing electrical encounters with ancient Egypt, stories of electrical reanimation through the use of galvanic batteries have an extensive history, these long- standing links harking back to before the beginning of Victoria’s reign. As we shall go on to see, electrical demonstrations by eminent scientists in the latter half of the nineteenth century also proved suitable for transference onto scenes of ancient Egyptian occultism. Novel light effects were experienced as magical, mystical and arcane despite being the product of cutting-edge scientific knowledge, and so the transplantation of such scenes into depictions of Egyptian magic makes ancient Egyptian power appear timeless: simultaneously ancient and modern.
Electrical Demonstrations
Beyond the epic storms of John Martin, and Webb’s galvanic experiment in Cheops’s tomb, electrical phenomena were reported in the vicinity of the pyramids of Giza. The German inventor Werner von Siemens (1816–92), whose company manufactured the tubes with which Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923) would go on to study X-rays and which supplied the carbon for the electric lights at the British Museum, recounted a peculiar experience in Egypt as he took some time away from laying telegraphic cable in the Red Sea. Standing at the summit of the Great Pyramid of Giza during a sandstorm, he notes in his Personal Recollections (1893) that he and his engineers could hear ‘a remarkable hissing noise’.98 Even more curiously, when one of his Egyptian guides lifted ‘his outstretched finger above his head a sharp singing sound arose, which ceased as soon as he lowered his hand’.99 Siemens raised his own finger and felt ‘a prickling sensation’, which he deduced was the result of an electrical phenomenon when he felt ‘a slight electric shock’ as he attempted to drink from a wine bottle.100 In a moment of inspired ingenuity, Siemens fashioned the wine bottle into a rudimentary Leyden jar, which he charged by holding it aloft, producing ‘loud cracking sparks’.101 The Egyptians, believing the static electricity to be the result of ‘magic’ that might damage the pyramid, requested that Siemens and his men leave.102 When he refused, one of the Egyptians attempted to forcibly remove him, provoking Siemens to use the wine bottle as an electrical weapon. Touching the man on the nose, Siemens felt a ‘strong concussion’, noting that his opponent must have had a much more ‘violent shock’ as ‘he fell speechless to the ground, and several seconds elapsed … before with a sudden cry he raised himself, and sprang howling down the steps of the pyramid’.103 Siemens adopts a role somewhere between the stage magician and the physicist. With theatrical execution, he harnesses the unusual electrical properties of the Great Pyramid, something which had been anticipated in earlier fiction featuring the reanimation of mummies, including Webb’s tale in which the resurrection takes place within the pyramid itself. In a reversal of the mummy reanimation plot, bringing the lifeless subject to a state of consciousness, Siemens utilises electrical force to render the conscious subject cataleptic, at least for a few seconds.
By the closing years of the century, the image of the Westerner inspiring fear in Egyptians through demonstrations of electrical power made its way into fiction. In Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), the titular monster responds with terror to ‘an electrical machine, giving an eighteen inch spark’ controlled by the inventor Sidney Atherton, who himself ‘occupies [the] ambiguous position between scientist and magician’, which, as we have seen elsewhere, is often the domain of ancient Egyptian characters.104 Here, the Egyptian monster is superstitious and degenerate rather than progressive and advanced. Marsh’s character is a hybrid in every sense. Able to fluctuate between male and female, human and insect, its depiction as capable of adapting to its modern surroundings and yet fearful of modern technology suggests a blurring of stereotypes of the ancient and modern Egyptian. This is also implied by the way in which the creature, supposedly a devotee to the ancient Egyptian religion, ‘salaamed down to the ground’ at the sight of the electrical spark, aligning the eponymous monster with the modern Egyptians fearful of Siemens’s power atop the Great Pyramid.105 The image of the scientific showman, whether Siemens or Marsh’s character Atherton, producing sparks and shocks for dramatic effect, is not limited to the Westerner, however. Indeed, these powers were often transcribed onto ancient Egyptian characters, Marsh’s text in fact being something of an outlier.
The Bengali author Dinendra Kumar Roy, for instance, translated and adapted Guy Boothby’s novel Pharos the Egyptian (1898; 1899), publishing Pishach purohit (‘The Zombie Priest’) in 1910. As Projit Bihari Mukharji outlines, in Roy’s revised narrative the Bengali protagonist Naren Sen first encounters the ancient Egyptian villain Ra-Tai by the River Thames; this episode is a ‘fairly faithful … translation’ of Boothby’s original in which the British artist Cyril Forrester finds himself face to face with the eponymous Pharos. Roy makes a significant change to Boothby’s text, however: the addition of a reference to electromagnetism. Mukharji elucidates that Naren recognises Ra-Tai’s supernormal controlling abilities; Naren relates, ‘upon the touch of this man, quite inexplicably, the state of my body became akin to the way one’s hand becomes immobilized and insensible upon [accidentally] touching an electric battery’.106 As such, Roy transforms the body of Boothby’s antagonist into yet another electrically charged living mummy. Mukharji observes that Roy’s employment of electricity originates in the works of several authors I have already mentioned in this article – Shelley, Bulwer- Lytton and Blavatsky (he records that Poe is also cited by early Bengali science- fiction authors as a common influence)107 – while a fleeting reference to Marie Corelli and H. Rider Haggard in Pishach purohit’s preface suggests other sources – and, indeed, more complex chains of influence – that might have led Roy to augment the beginning of his reworking of Boothby’s narrative in this particular way.108
Roy’s intriguing revision of Boothby’s text invites a consideration of the kinds of literature to which he claims to be indebted, and which encouraged the translocation of electrical powers into Egyptian hands. As this section goes on to show, inspired by the likes of Nikola Tesla, ancient Egyptians in texts by H. Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker master and manipulate the electrical with ease, drawing upon electrical showmanship on a far greater scale than Siemens’s impromptu experiments atop the Great Pyramid. It may well be the case that such depictions of ancient Egyptians as master ‘electricians’ in works by these authors directly led to Roy’s take on Boothby’s electrically charged antagonist.
By the late nineteenth century, electricity had emerged as one of the most thrilling tools put to use by scientists whose demonstrations overlapped with the theatrical and were in direct competition with the metropolis’ theatres, panoramas, dioramas and magic- lantern shows, among other visual spectacles.109 Earlier in the century, lecture halls were filled by audiences desperate to witness evidence of the ‘strange invisible forces’ explored by Michael Faraday (1791–1867) in his presentations of electromagnetism.110 By the late nineteenth century Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American physicist and engineer, had emerged as one of Faraday’s most glorified successors, stunning eager audiences with his extraordinary displays of electrical mastery. Tesla’s demonstrations were not of wires moved by electromagnetism or even the simple shocks and sparks produced by the galvanic batteries of his predecessors that had been popular since the time of Faraday’s mentor Humphry Davy (1778–1829), but were something more akin to wizardry.111 Iwan Rhys Morus and Graeme Gooday both emphasise Tesla’s flamboyant showmanship which helped transform his demonstrations into magical spectacles.112 As Gooday notes, electricity was often anthropomorphised at the end of the nineteenth century, with personifications taking the form of goddesses and fairies if female, and wizards, genies, imps and infants if male.113 Tesla appeared to encourage his own depiction as one of these types: the wizard, or a magical masculine embodiment of electricity itself, which had a striking impact on depictions of magical light effects in literature concerning ancient Egypt.
In 1892, Tesla’s lecture on fluorescent lighting at the Royal Institution was celebrated as a ‘dazzling theatrical display’, securing his reputation as one of the great scientific showmen of the age.114 Contemporary reports of Tesla’s demonstrations vary in style, mainly in the degree to which they explain the science behind his impressive feats. They tend to be united, however, in a general sense of awe at the seemingly magical effects that Tesla produced. The British scientist Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919) – who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for Physics, and to become President of the Royal Society and President of the Social for Psychical Research – eulogised Tesla, commending his display, and making particular reference to how Tesla made his name appear ‘in letters of fire’.115 While an article reporting on the event published in Scientific American sticks mainly to the impartial terminology of scientific observation (a ‘blue phosphorescent light’ and ‘sparks … obtained over a distance of 1¼ inches’, among other phenomena, are recorded), the author appears unable to contain an outburst of magical imagery towards the end: ‘The lecturer took in his hand a glass wand, 3 feet long, and, with no special connection of any sort to his body or to the glass, when waved in the magnet field it shone like a flaming sword.’116 The choice of the term ‘wand’ emphasises the enchanted aura of Tesla’s performance, whilst also suggesting the scientific advancement of fantasy civilisations, including the electrically charged wands, staffs and ‘rods’ used by Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril-ya. Crucially, magic was not just invoked in reports of Tesla’s demonstrations such as this in the popular periodical press (or even the popular scientific press), but also in technical journals including the Electrical Review and Engineering.117 It is evident that Tesla’s displays could not be fully explained via the neat, impartial language of scientific description, as parallels are repeatedly drawn between his apparatus and magical implements, with Tesla represented a kind of sorcerer. That Tesla’s work appears to have been a subject of great interest for the celebrated physicists and spiritualists William Crookes (1832–1919) and Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) suggests that its applications were perceived to have straddled the physical and the psychical.118
After his success in London, Tesla lectured for the French Physical Society and the International Society of Electricians in Paris, an event recorded by the French engineer Édouard Hospitalier (1852–1907) writing for La Nature. In his article, which is accompanied by two illustrations, Hospitalier introduces Tesla as ‘un pionnier de la science électrique, l’un de ceux qui auront amorcé les progrès futurs par une transformation presque radicale des anciens procédés et des anciens errements’ (‘a pioneer of electrical science, one of those who will have initiated future progress by an almost radical transformation of the old methods and the old errors’).119 ‘Anciens’ can mean ‘old’, as the context here suggests, but it can also mean ‘ancient’. The ambiguity as to how ‘old’ these ‘old methods’ really are makes it tempting to read Hospitalier as imagining Tesla as part of a scientific lineage that stretches back to antiquity. Much of Hospitalier’s language, indeed, can be read in a way that casts Tesla’s demonstrations as ancient or magical; he describes Tesla’s ‘expériences’ as ‘magnifiques’, ‘remarquables’ and ‘mémorables’, ‘expériences’ meaning ‘experiences’ as well as ‘experiments’, another interesting example of language’s rich possibilities that suggests the scientific only as much as it skirts it.120 The description of the event as a ‘séance’ also has a pertinent dual meaning: Hospitalier uses the word to mean ‘sitting’, but the term had taken on supernatural connotations by the latter half of the nineteenth century with the fashionable rise of spiritualism. Hospitalier is impressed with ‘la puissance et la grandeur des effets’ (‘the power and magnitude of the effects’), the ‘décharges lumineuses’ that ‘traversent l’air’ (‘luminous discharges’ which ‘pass through the air’) and tubes that each shine with ‘une vive lueur’ (‘a vivid glow’), the hue depending on the gas inside.121 Much of his account might describe effects produced in spiritualist séances, hovering at the boundary of the supernatural and the scientific. Tesla is reported as producing spectacles of biblical proportions. Hospitalier describes him as ‘comme un apôtre’ (‘like an apostle’), whose equipment produces ‘décharges en forme de flamme’ (‘flame- shaped discharges’).122
The two illustrations that accompany the piece contrast in style. The first, by an artist called Gilbert, depicts Tesla during the lecture (figure 7). The second, by the French engraver and illustrator Louis Poyet, is of an alternator (through which high-frequency alternating currents might be produced). In Gilbert’s image, Tesla brandishes illuminated tubes in front of his rapt audience. To the bottom left of the illustration, one member of the audience appears to have his mouth open in awe, while, to the bottom right, another man breaks into spontaneous applause. The perspective is such that the viewer is positioned as another audience member, further back than the first couple of rows visible in the image. Tesla makes direct eye contact with the viewer; his body language is one of confident mastery, and the eye is drawn to the scientist who, not needing to look at his equipment, seems to enjoy the self- conscious theatricality of the proceedings.
Tesla was consistently portrayed in such a way. In an 1895 article in The Century Illustrated Magazine, long- exposure photographs of Tesla’s experiments with phosphorescent light bulbs take on an almost supernatural quality. These images present Tesla’s indistinct features illuminated by a kind of spectral haze – one is reminded of séance photographs – while also captured is the American novelist Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen- name, Mark Twain.123 Their friendship, based on reciprocal admiration for the one’s technical abilities and the other’s weaving of compelling fictions, is symbolically captured in images that are as much theatrical compositions as they are documentations of sci-entific experiments. It was around this time that Tesla inadvertently created the first X-ray image in America (in an attempt to capture a picture of Twain); he subsequently corresponded with and shared radiographs with Röntgen. Tesla’s laboratory, in a poem that immediately follows the article written by The Century’s associate editor and close friend of Tesla, Robert Underwood Johnson (1853–1937), is further presented as a Gothic space. Johnson conceives of Tesla’s ‘[t]houghts’ as taking the form of ‘blessèd spirits’: these appear ‘ghostly figures’ ‘in the dark’.124
In a later piece in Pearson’s Magazine entitled ‘The New Wizard of the West’, Tesla’s laboratory is described as a ‘miracle- factory’ and he himself is an ‘audacious wizard’.125 By heralding Tesla as ‘The New Wizard of the West’, M’Govern uses a moniker suggestive of that of Scottish stage magician John Henry Anderson (1814–74), the ‘Wizard of the North’. Anderson was famed for his variety of ‘quasi-scientific magic’, ‘blend[ing] illusion and science, heavily reliant on technological apparatus’, and thus, M’Govern co- opts for Tesla a lineage rooted in performance magic heavily inflected with scientific enquiry.126 Anderson cultivated an understanding of his work as operating simultaneously within categories of the genuine supernatural, illusory performance, and modern scientific demonstration – he was referred to in the press as a ‘physicist’, and was billed from 1840 onwards as ‘Professor Anderson’ (as Geoffrey Frederick Lamb observes, ‘conjurors of the period freely awarded themselves professorships and doctorates’).127 Furthermore, Anderson explained his effects by positing himself as an inheritor of ancient technological feats: he ‘claimed to “use the appliances and agencies resorted to by the Egyptian Magi” ’ (to which he gave mystical names such as ‘the Casket of the Alchemists’) with ‘the assistance of the greatest mechanicians and the most scientific men of the age’, all the while ‘play[ing] to the perception of genuine magical ability’.128 If, as Karl Bell claims, Anderson ‘blurr[ed] distinctions between science and magic’, then Tesla certainly continued this legacy.129
The interviewer lists a series of amazing demonstrations. Tesla summons ‘a ball of leaping red flame’ by simply ‘snapping his fingers’, he makes the darkened laboratory glow with ‘a strange light as beautiful as that of the moon’ but as powerful as sunlight, withstands powerful currents that instantly kill animals, and emerges from darkness with an illuminated ‘halo … formed by myriads of tongues of electric flame’ that emerge from his own body.130 Of course, it is not the snapping of Tesla’s fingers that produces these effects, but the inclusion of this detail conveys Tesla’s awareness of his own showmanship, taking pleasure in the act of misdirection that conceals how the effect is really produced.
One of the images accompanying the article, an illustration of Tesla by Warwick Goble (1862–1943), further enhances the connection that Tesla was cultivating between himself, as a modern scientist, and as a ‘quasi- alchemical [master] of a hidden mystery’.131 That this illustration was contributed by Goble, who had previously illustrated H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds – originally serialised in Britain in Pearson’s Magazine just two years prior – is suggestive of the generic fluidity of fiction and science writing that Will Tattersdill has observed in magazine publishing at the fin de siècle more broadly.132 The illustration posits the account at the edge of credibility: a scientific romance. Tesla, masterfully occupying the central space, is the narrative’s hero.
While the very image of the modern gentleman- scientist in Goble’s portrait, the syntax of the image’s caption, ‘Nikola Tesla holding in his hands balls of flame’, appears to be deliberately archaic – verging on biblical. Holding spectral light in each hand, Tesla, like the electric statues in Shepheard’s Hotel – through both image and text – was meant to symbolise a kind of timeless enlightenment, simultaneously modern and ancient. This tension between the extremely old and the extremely new is captured, too, in the article’s title. The now infamous photographs of Tesla sitting among seven-metre sparks in his Colorado Springs laboratory were part of the same scheme. The photos were actually exposed multiple times, creating the impression of the scientist, calm within the centre of the veritable thunderstorm that rages around him. As Gooday eloquently expresses, Tesla, ‘magus-like’, was encouraging an image of himself as ‘manipulator of lightning and prophet of the most spectacular electrical technologies’.133 The religious connotations are impossible to ignore. Holding orbs of light in his hands or emitting huge sparks from his own body that create the illuminative appearance of a halo, Tesla was only serving to further his depiction as ‘a half-intoxicated god’, one who, like the characters of early science fiction who sought to reanimate mummies, planned to perform miracles with his modern machines by waking the dead.134
Tesla was not alone in this practice. His rival and fellow inventor, Thomas Edison, was nurturing a similar image of himself as a maker of magic through his theatrical use of the electric light, employing the language of ancient occultism in order to further this persona.135 Although Tesla excelled at exemplifying contradictory roles, as simultaneously ‘hypermodern’ and ‘archaic’, common to both scientists was a desire to enrapture and beguile with scientific exhibition combined with grandiose ceremonious showmanship, one which presented the physical as the magical and the scientist as the enchanter.136
Tesla differed from many of his colleagues and competitors, however, in the eccentricity of his claims. From an early age he had been able to visualise complex machines that he could test in his mind; eventually he would state that the visionary ideas that suddenly came to him were being transmitted from Mars.137 He also made fantastical assertions about electrical knowledge in the ancient world. Describing ‘the history of electrical development’ as ‘a story more wonderful than any tale from the Arabian Nights’ – immediately setting a tone of exoticism and fantasy – in an article written for Manufacturers Record, Tesla believed that ‘Moses was undoubtedly a practical and skillful electrician far in advance of his time’, and considered it ‘very plausible to assume that the sons of Aaron were killed by a high-tension discharge’.138 Such bold proclamations about the mastery with which the ancients handled electricity were far more often attributed to occultists such as Blavatsky, yet Tesla’s reputation for genius resulted in the publication of these notions in respectable journals. That the editor of Manufacturers Record, a practical periodical focusing on developments in trade and industry, would introduce Tesla as ‘inventor, physicist, electrical wizard and seer’, suggests that Tesla’s vision of Moses as educated among the palatial courts of Pharaoh and creating electrical weapons should be entertained more seriously.139 As a modern ‘electrician’, Tesla considered himself an inheritor of the knowl-edge of these ancient forerunners.
Gooday stresses the influence of such scientific showmanship on the scientific romance literature of the period, which often combined electrical and supernatural themes.140 H. Rider Haggard’s short story ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ makes an interesting case study, as it appears explicitly to draw upon descriptions of Tesla’s impressive electrical performances, uniting contemporary concepts with ancient supernaturalism rather than the hypermodern. In Haggard’s tale, Smith, an amateur Egyptologist, finds himself locked in the Cairo Museum overnight. Looking for a suitable place to sleep, he enters the central hall, boarded up while awaiting repairs. Here, in the darkness, the spirits of the museum’s mummies convene with the gods, forming a ‘great congregation’.141 The phantoms stand in ranks facing the god Osiris, who stares out from the top of a flight of steps, emitting a spectral glow. The room is brightened by the ‘pale and ghostly’ light which, like the light Tesla summoned on stage, is described as having ‘a blue tinge’.142 As the light increases in intensity, it shoots out in ‘long tongues … which joined themselves together, illuminating all that huge hall’.143 Later, it takes the form of ‘a blue spark’ that transforms into ‘upward pouring rays’.144 The strange forms that the supernatural light appears to take are eerily reminiscent of descriptions of Tesla’s fluorescent light, powered by an alternating current, and the positioning of Osiris and the spirits echo the set-up of the lecture hall, with Tesla at the front, and his eager audience facing him in rows. Indeed, much of the imagery and terminology is replicated from press reports of his demonstrations, particularly the ‘tongues’ of light, and the religious parallels between Tesla’s and Osiris’s light- producing bodies (Osiris ‘radiat[es] glory’).145 Haggard elevates the scientist to the position of a god, standing in front of a worshipful audience. Simultaneously, the ethereal light symbolising ancient Egyptian magic is aligned with very modern ways in which electricity could be manipulated. Upon the discovery of Smith the pharaohs speak ‘together, in a voice that rolled round the hall like thunder’, and when the ‘kings and queens’ make judgement on Smith’s fate they ‘thundered an answer’: their collective spectral voice is repeatedly compared to the effects of natural electrical phenomena.146
In an illustration captioned ‘Cleopatra Lifted Her Hands and Stood Thus for a While’ by the artist Alec Ball (figure 8), Haggard’s evocations of Tesla’s lectures are visualized; the bare-breasted Cleopatra, addressing the group after the departure of Osiris (and the goddesses Isis and Hathor who momentarily materialise and disappear) must have been the more obviously titillating choice than the presumably fully covered Osiris. As in images of Tesla standing before an audience, Cleopatra is met with rows of ancient Egyptian royals. She holds aloft a sceptre, similar to the ‘staffs’ or ‘wands’ brandished by Tesla (a detail that is not given in Haggard’s text but which Ball evidently saw fit to include), and she appears surrounded by a halo of spectral light. This same illustration, in a full-colour version, was the artwork that graced the front of the issue of The Strand Magazine that included this second instalment in Haggard’s three-part serial. Haggard’s merging of the powers of the mortal scientist and immortal god, modernity and antiquity reveals the extent to which Victorian and Edwardian electrical display impacted upon visual culture, but also the reciprocity of this relationship: the supernatural was projected back onto the scientific, encouraged by scientific romances such as Haggard’s that not only brought these threads together, but often rendered them indistinguishable. The city, with its electric lights, obelisks and wizard- like showmen, was inspiring the construction of factual and literary writing as part of the same discourse that celebrated and explained science via the imagery of antiquity. This, however, was not restricted to electricity as visible light, but was apparent in discussions of other kinds of electromagnetic radiation, including invisible X-rays.
X-Rays and Radioactivity
In 1892 the celebrated physicist and chemist William Crookes commented on the existence of ‘an almost infinite range of ethereal vibrations or electrical rays’, which he believed could revolutionise telegraphic communications.147 A few years later, and aided by Crookes’s experiments with vacuums, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen successfully produced X-rays, a hitherto unrecorded form of electromagnetic radiation, which he tantalisingly described as ‘a new kind of invisible light’.148 Crookes was quick to speculate as to ‘the possibility of links between roentgen rays and the cerebral ganglia’, and that an undiscovered organ in the brain might be ‘capable of transmitting and receiving … electrical rays’.149 X-rays, he thought, might prove a psychic counterpart to longer wavelength radio waves, allowing the transmission of messages telepathically (a biological counterpart to telegraphy), and even communication with the world of the spirits.150 Crookes theorised that the parapsychological was intimately entwined with the findings of contemporary physics, occupying different zones of the same electromagnetic spectrum. An ardent spiritualist (who would go on to become president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1896), member of the Theosophical Society, and initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crookes saw modern scientific developments and discoveries as illuminating aspects of his occult interests. He believed that the ether, the ‘impalpable, invisible entity, by which all space is supposed to be filled’ and which contained countless ‘channels of communication’ also sustained ‘ghost- light … invisible to the naked eye’, and acted as a medium that allowed ‘ethereal bodies to rise up’.151 In other words, the matter through which light and electrical signals passed was envisaged as the same substance that allowed the spirits to fluctuate between visible and invisible forms. These links between the electromagnetic field and the occult, endorsed by Crookes and certain other high- profile scientists, anticipated turn-of-the-century associations between electricity, radiation and ancient Egypt, which, through its reputation as the birthplace of magic, was already central to Victorian conceptions of the supernatural and the magical.
Steve Vinson has recently read translations of ancient Egyptian texts in the late nineteenth century productively in the context of – as he terms it – the ‘thoroughly- modern phenomenon’ of ‘Victorian/ Edwardian esotericism’, which responded not only to ‘vastly more, and more varied, raw material to draw on than Western occultists had ever known’ but also to ‘modern … science’: ‘invisible natural phenomena like electro-magnetism and radioactivity’.152 Vinson suggests that interpretations of genuine ancient Egyptian texts took on Gothic resonances in this age, whereby ‘the supernatural’, ‘the exotic’ and ‘hidden wisdom’ in the Egyptian source material was expanded upon to reflect late Victorian and Edwardian concerns. As this section of the article illustrates, original texts of the period are also receptive to these occult and scientific pressures and look back to ancient Egypt as much as they look forward to the promises of these discoveries.
Following their identification in the late nineteenth century, X-rays proved an even more mysterious phenomenon than static electricity and visible light effects. Higher frequency waves than the light of the visible spectrum, they were considered ‘a new kind of invisible light’, penetrating the flesh but not bone.153 The ghostly images that they produced seemingly depicting the human body as it would appear after death and decay had strong supernatural connotations, and there was speculation by some, including Crookes (by this time President of the Society for Psychical Research), that they were related to the telepathic transmission of thoughts.154 Their visual similarities to spirit photographs, with their translucent flesh, meant that as soon as the first X-ray radiographs were produced, they were regarded as new tools in the effort to prove the existence of the spirit world, and furthered the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fascination with spiritualism.155 Indeed, X-rays became one of the implements of the psychical researcher, notably put to use by the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) in his investigations into the ectoplasmic materialisations produced by fellow Italian and spiritualist medium Eusapia Palladino, an individual who allowed some of the most famous scientists in the world, including Marie and Pierre Curie (1859–1906), to examine her.156 Simultaneously, X-ray radiographs were treated as modern spectacles, both in person via technologies such as Edison’s fluoroscope, a device that created X- ray images that moved in real time, and in the still, reproduced images of the periodical press, thus, occupying a similar place in the cultural consciousness as that of electricity: spectacular, sensational and otherworldly.157
Just a few months after Röntgen’s discovery, in March 1896, X-ray radiographs of mummified remains – of a cat and a human child – were produced for the first time, published in the German physicist Walter König’s (1859–1936) booklet ‘14 Photographiën mit Röntgenstrahlen aufgenommen im Physikalischen Verein’.158 Later that year, the Belgian botanist Henri Ferdinand van Heurck (1838–1909) produced a radiograph of an ibis, and British doctor Charles Thurstan Holland (1863–1941) – who would go on to specialise in radiology – ‘obtained a radiograph of a mummified bird’.159 The most striking early X- ray radiograph of mummified remains is perhaps that published by the French medical researcher and photographer Albert Londe (1858–1917) in La Nature in 1897, accompanied by a black- and- white photograph for comparison (figure 9). The juxtaposition of these two images is one of their most intriguing qualities, making immediately apparent the benefits of X-ray imaging for the purposes of Egyptological examination: the mummy can be ‘unwrapped’ without any physical damage to the body. Equally, the radiograph of the ancient Egyptian remains reveals that the mummy, held to be a figure of horror in the cultural consciousness by this point for several decades, is, underneath its desiccated flesh, just like living subjects of radiography. The hand calls to mind the first published X-ray radiograph: that depicting the hand bones of Anna Bertha Ludwig (1839–1919), Röntgen’s wife, which circulated internationally.160 As Simon Avery establishes, radiographs ‘[d]irsupt[ed] the perceived boundaries between … life and death’, offering the living ‘an image of what would remain after death and decomposition had taken place’.161 Equally, I would add, radiographs rendered living and dead bodies virtually indistinguishable from each other, imbuing X- ray radiographs of mummified bodies with the Gothic possibility of revival.
Londe worked at Paris’s Salpêtrière Hospital, having been hired by the famed French neurologist Jean- Martin Charcot (1825–93) in 1878. His colleague, the French dermatologist Jean Alfred Fournier (1832–1914), Londe relates, ‘mettre à notre disposition quelques pièces curieuses’ (‘put at our disposal several curious pieces’) that were X-rayed, but which could not be included in the article for reasons of space.162 These included a mummy’s skull, a mummified leg and arm, a small mummy, and a mummiform dog that Londe speculated was actually an ancient Egyptian toy (the implication being that there were no bones found within). The article’s opening, not with details of these ancient Egyptian specimens but rather with an account of Londe’s analysis of a ‘Fiji mermaid’ (a composite of primate and fish remains), adds a fantastical element to the piece, though the tone is one of scepticism: radiography allows Londe to declare the mermaid fake without having to dissect it. The potential for sensationalism remains, however, with Londe commenting on the possibility of discovering ‘des surprises désagréables’ (‘disagreeable surprises’) when examining radiographs.163
The archaeological benefits of using this technique were immediately apparent, and as a result it proved popular with some of the era’s most eminent Egyptologists. Among them were Flinders Petrie (1853–1942), who took plates of a mummy at the British Museum in 1897, and Gaston Maspero (1846–1916), who was the director of the Cairo Museum when its mummy of Thuthmose IV was examined using Egypt’s only X- ray equipment in 1903.164 With the aid of Howard Carter (1874–1939), the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith transported the mummified body of Thuthmose IV to the premises of one Dr. Khayat, an Egyptian radiologist, where Khayat produced the first ever radiograph images of the mummified remains of a royal ancient Egyptian.165 Several years later, Smith published a catalogue of the mummified bodies of ancient Egyptian royalty in the collections of the Cairo Museum, referring to features apparent in Khayat’s X-ray radiographs.
Smith finds a fictional counterpart in Haggard’s ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, likely serving as inspiration for the tale’s protagonist J. E. Smith. The similarities between the two men’s names (Smith often published under his initials as G. E. Smith), the setting of the Cairo Museum, and a passing reference comparing the glare of the Egyptian spirits to ‘a Röntgen ray’ appear to indicate that Haggard was drawing upon true experiences to inspire his fiction.166 Indeed, that ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ opens with a paragraph that critiques scientists’ beliefs ‘that there is nothing in man which the dissecting- table will not explain’ appears to be a joking nod to Smith’s anatomical expertise. And, unlike in many mummy romances, the amateur Egyptologist does not unearth the perfectly preserved form of his ancient paramour; rather, nearly all that remains of the mummy are bones, as if most of her body is encountered as a radiograph image. Indeed, in a visual reversal of the first radiographs, many of which depicted skeletal hands (as in Röntgen’s famous image of his wife’s hand, in which the ring on her fourth finger appears bulky and opaque), the only body part to have survived from antiquity is her ‘hand, broken off at the wrist’ wearing ‘two gold rings’.
Further evidence for the biological basis of Haggard’s character lies in the similarities between Maspero and Haggard’s unnamed director of the Museum: both are congenial, French, and willing to turn a blind eye to the discoverers of artefacts pocketing some of their more precious finds. The parallels are all the more striking considering that Maspero was still the Cairo Museum’s director in 1912 when Haggard wrote the story, the same year as Smith’s study of the Museum’s mummies, which he had unwrapped with Maspero between 1881 and 1905.167 Furthermore, as Roger Luckhurst records, the winter of 1912 saw Haggard’s third trip to Egypt, which stimulated a wave of Egyptian themes in his subsequent works, ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ among them.168 Notably, the royal mummies that Haggard’s narrator lists include Meneptah, whom Haggard and his daughter Angela (1883–1973) had privately inspected during this very visit, an opportunity facilitated by Maspero.169 Haggard’s familiarity with Smith’s work – if not first- hand then second- hand in conversation with Maspero – is cemented when his narrator records that ‘the doctors said he died of ossification of the arteries, and that the vessels of the heart were full of lime’.170 Smith observes in his study of Meneptah’s body that ‘[t]he aorta was in an extreme stage of calcareous degeneration, large bone-like patches standing out prominently from the walls of the vessel’.171 ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ was thus, while fantastical, also a receptacle for the most up- to- date Egyptological knowledge that X- ray radiography facilitated.
Rameses II is another pharaoh specifically mentioned in ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, along with an anecdote about the pharaoh’s unrolling that appears to be based on the real procedure undertaken by Maspero, in which the mummy’s arm spontaneously lifted upon unwrapping. Haggard’s narrator also refers to Seti II, whose mummy had been among the nine unwrapped by Smith in 1905.172 Certainly, Haggard approved of X- raying techniques. His views were expressed in the 22 July 1904 issue of The Daily Mail. In something of a stark contrast to the sensational ways in which such bodies are treated in his fiction (which usually depicts the type of violence enacted on these bodies from ancient times to his present by those in search of valuables interred with the personage – including, crucially, by Egyptologists themselves), Haggard opined that, out of respect to the dead, mummies should be returned to their tombs after examination, rather than be installed behind glass in a museum: ‘The mummies can first be unrolled, photographed, measured, weighted, Rontgen- rayed, etc. After that what more has science to learn from them?’173 His opinion had not changed by 1923, towards the end of his life, when he wrote a similar letter to The Times, calling for experts to ‘X-ray them; learn what we can of history from them … but then hide them away for ever, as we ourselves would be hidden away’.174
Haggard’s tale, in which the spectral light that emerges from Osiris’s body is described, tellingly, as ‘penetrating’, brings together the ancient Egyptian supernatural and the language and imagery of recent scientific developments.175 Within the congregation, it is Khaemuas, ‘the mightiest magician that ever was in Egypt’, who first sees Smith, and this representative of the height of ancient Egyptian magical power to whom a power akin to that of the X-ray is attributed. Haggard writes, ‘the eyes of that dreadful magician were fixed upon him, and that a bone had a better chance of escaping the search of a Röntgen ray than he of hiding himself from their baleful glare’.176 The dual meaning of ‘glare’ makes it an interesting lexical choice to express both Khaemuas’s fierce expression while simultaneously evoking the power of intense light. Intriguingly, the idea of X-rays emanating from eyes appears in Röntgen’s interview for McClure’s Magazine shortly after his discovery; the interviewer, H. J. W. Dam, uses X-rays as a metaphor for Röntgen’s perceptiveness, commenting that ‘[t]he rays from the Röntgen eyes instantly penetrated the deeply hidden purpose’.177 Haggard attributes this same metaphorical power to the eyes of his Egyptian magician, who assumes the place of the trailblazing scientist.
In ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, the ‘Röntgen ray’ emanates not from the Egyptologist’s equipment but from the very bodies he is supposed to be studying – literally in the case of Osiris and metaphorically in the case of Khaemuas – seeing the removal of agency from the Egyptologist. Haggard translates a kind of supernatural mastery of electromagnetic energy onto the gods and ghosts of ancient Egypt and, in a narrative twist of a decidedly theosophical character, we learn that Smith (himself based on a scientist familiar with radiography) is the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian (implied to be the ancient predecessors to showmen such as Tesla). Thus, Haggard’s tale is one in which the ancients wield anachronistic powers, reversing power dynamics of the active and the passive, in order to reassert themselves over cutting- edge techniques being put to use in Egyptology.
Haggard’s veiled allusions to real practitioners with an interest in X-raying mummies correspond to Bram Stoker’s reliance upon developments in theories of radiation when writing The Jewel of Seven Stars, an influence recorded by David Glover and Carol A. Senf.178 Stoker first published his novel in 1903, the year in which scientific pioneers in the field of radioactivity, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel (1852–1908), jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physics.179 That same year, Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) and Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) explained the concept of radioactive decay, and Crookes invented the spinthariscope, an instrument for the observation of the process.180 Stoker alludes to a number of recent scientific discoveries to add a level of academic credence to his reimagining of the classic mummy reanimation plot, in which ‘the exertion of magical will and radioactive particles coexist in the vanishing point between science and the occult’.181 The experiment requires several magical items and the sarcophagus of Queen Tera to be arranged in a specific way to recreate the magnetic, electrical and radioactive conditions of Tera’s original Egyptian tomb, forming ‘a kind of magical nuclear device’.182 If successful, the novel’s fanatical Egyptologist Abel Trelawny hopes that they will ‘be able to let in on the world of modern science such a flood of light from the Old World as will change every condition of thought and experiment and practice’.183 Trelawny’s chosen image of ancient Egyptian knowledge as ‘a flood of light’ is apt. Throughout the novel, otherworldly light symbolises the mysterious nature of ancient Egyptian power, which hovers at the nexus between science and sorcery. Trelawny believes that the ancient Egyptians possessed ‘a knowledge beyond what our age has ever known’, and as a result would revolutionise the modern world through its advancement of scientific understanding.184
The key to Tera’s revival is a Magic Coffer, which ‘glows from within’ when exposed to starlight or the light of special lamps, but not to sunlight.185 Stoker implies that the artefact responds to types of radiation listed by Trelawny, including ‘Röntgen and Cathode and Becquerel rays’.186 Trelawny also suggests that the newly discovered substances radium, helium, polonium and argon may be involved in contributing to its unusual properties, the aforementioned being an assortment of radioactive metals and noble gases (both radium and polonium having been discovered by the Curies in 1898).187 Stoker’s text, particularly towards the novel’s climax, is dense with allusions to the work of the early Nobel Prize winners. ‘Rontgen won the first Prize in Physics in 1901’ and ‘Becquerel and the Curies shared the Prize in Physics in 1903’; as Tania Anne Woloshyn points out, ‘[t]he mania for these rays … was only further fuelled by the prizes’.188 Indeed, the linguistic emphasis on the word ‘noble’, which only occurs in the final third of Stoker’s text, phonetically invokes both the noble gases, designated as such in 1898, and the Nobel Prizes, named after the Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel (1833–96). Margaret speaks of Tera’s ‘nobler dreams’ and hopes of being revived in a ‘nobler world’.189 Speaking ‘noble words’ of Tera’s plan, Margaret’s face is ‘lit from within by a noble light’.190
The special lamps that produce the unusual luminescence are explained to contain cedar oil (commonly used in mummy embalming), which is described as having a particular refractive effect on the light.191 Their flames burn with ‘a slow, steady light, growing more and more bright; and changing in colour from blue to crystal white’.192 The light, already signified as unusual through its changes in hue and intensity, performs similarly to X-rays. When the light interacts with the Magic Coffer, it shines with ‘a delicate glow’ that increases in luminosity until it appears ‘like a blazing jewel’ that emits a ‘faint greenish vapour’.193
A prototype of the radioactive artefact perhaps exists in the Irish palmist William John Warner’s (1866–1936) The Hand of Fate; or, A Study of Destiny (1898), published under his aliases, Count Louis Hamon and Cheiro. This ‘Strange Psychological Story’ concerns three men trapped inside a singular Egyptian tomb. When their light source is nearly extinguished, one of the men discovers the key to their escape: ‘a large ring’ featuring ‘a curious flat stone of a greenish colour’ inscribed with hieroglyphs, which can be seen ‘phosphorescent, emitting a pale uncertain shimmer’ in the darkness.194 The stone is suggestive of phosphorous paint, which was used to create glowing effects in séances,195 or ‘uranium glass’, glass that has faint fluorescent qualities due to its uranium content. While uranium had been used in glassmaking since antiquity, it was at its fashionable peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The ring is equally evocative of the fluorescent screens that Röntgen observed glowing faintly green when exposed to X-rays, and which became staple tools in scientific investigations into radioactivity. When we consider, too, that the ancient Egyptian artefact in E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906) also emits a ‘green radiance’ when magically activated in dark conditions, and the illuminated translucent arch-ways opened up by the amulet as being visually depicted in such a way as to suggest light bulbs or even Crookes tubes (figure 10), we start to build a picture of Stoker’s glowing Egyptian apparatus as part of a wider trend.196 Indeed, published the year after the first appearance of The Jewel of Seven Stars, Charlotte Bryson Taylor’s In the Dwellings of the Wilderness (1904) features other glowing Egyptian artefacts discussed in terms that imply contemporaneous discussions of radioactivity. Taylor’s protagonists break into a tomb only to find a ‘perpetual lamp’, an indefinite light source thousands of years old, the likes of which were of considerable interest to leading figures in the nineteenth- century magical revival, including Blavatsky, who claimed that ‘the ancient Egyptians … used [perpetual] lamps far more than any other nation.197 That the lamp is lit ‘not [by] a flame’ as in the examples given by Blavatsky, ‘but a pale radiance as from some material highly phosphorescent’ is the first indicator that the lamp is an artefact meant to conjure up images of contemporaneous scientific experiments in darkened laboratories.198 Particularly telling is the language used to describe the light, ‘a small atom of life, set in the midst of universal death’ evoking the terminology associated with radioactive decay.199 Writing in 1900, the American chemist Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903), reflecting on ‘New Sources of Light and of Röntgen Rays’ in Popular Science Monthly, questioned, ‘[a] re we about to realize the chimerical dream of the alchemists?’200 The recent discovery of ‘mineral substances that apparently give out light perpetually without any exciting cause’– is exactly the apparatus that Taylor imagines, resituating it in the ancient context of the Egyptian tomb.201 In Taylor’s narrative, it is not modern scientists who ‘realiz[e] the dream of the alchemists’, but the ancient Egyptians themselves who harness the power of radioactive elements.202 A fuller imagining of a conceptual collision between the ancient magic and contemporary science than Cheiro’s fleetingly mentioned ring, then, and a forerunner to Nesbit’s and Taylor’s glowing artefacts, Stoker’s Coffer typifies the ways in which ancient Egyptian technologies were imagined as quite literally outshining con-temporary scientific equipment.203
Kate Hebblethwaite notes that the concept of transmutation also appears to have made an impression on Stoker’s plot. Suggesting that Tera’s resurrection is ‘a spiritual version of Rutherford and Soddy’s theory of the conversion of one chemical element into another through nuclear reaction’, Hebblethwaite argues that in the text’s original ending in which the queen vanishes, she has in fact taken possession of Margaret’s body, her spirit moving from one medium to another.204 While the theory of transmutation outlined in Rutherford and Soddy’s ‘Theory of Atomic Disintegration’ (1902) was proposed in the year preceding the original publication of Stoker’s novel, making this concept’s influence on the text incredibly up to date, there is something much more ancient at work. At the time, both transmutation and X- rays were closely associated with alchemy.205 Rutherford and Soddy’s discovery was often illustrated in the press by ancient alchemical emblems, such as the ouroboros, a symbol first used by the ancient Egyptians, while the end of the nineteenth century saw an alchemical revival, during which there were numerous reports that common metals had been transformed into gold through the application of X-rays.206 In Glasgow in 1904, a company was established whose aim was to modify lead into mercury and iron into copper, while ‘[i]n France, four alchemical societies and a university of alchemy were founded’.207 As a legendary science with its origins in ancient Egypt, the transformation of one woman into another appears to be part of an alchemical mythology that also emphasises the permanence of the soul. Tera’s ruby cut into the shape of a scarab, placed over her heart during the experiment, functions as the philosopher’s stone, converting death to life by providing the queen’s spirit with a younger body, mirroring contemporary depictions of radium as ‘a miraculous healing agent, the elixir of life’ or the legendary stone itself.208 While other texts had imagined ancient Egyptians living forever, or instead with vastly elongated life spans – the best- known being Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Ring of Thoth’ (1890) and George Griffith’s ‘The Lost Elixir’ (1903), in which the concoction is known as ‘the tears of Isis’, suggestive of divine power – Stoker’s novel far more explicitly veils his alchemical agents in the language of contemporaneous science.209
It is clear that Stoker was drawing upon the latest scientific developments in his novel and, indeed, Clive Leatherdale has proposed that there is evidence to suggest that Stoker was keeping abreast of the publications of the great scientists of the age, including a particular paper co- authored by the French physician Albert Laborde (1878–1968) and Pierre Curie c.1900.210 Like Haggard, who fashioned the Egyptian god Osiris as a kind of ancient Tesla, Stoker did not stop at scientific concepts, and drew upon real scientists as inspiration. The similarities between Marie Curie and the novel’s ancient Egyptian Tera are striking. Curie was depicted romantically by the press; she was driven to discover forces that were enigmatic and hidden, which created ‘beautiful and eerie effect such as luminescence, color changes in gems, and unexpected chemical reactions’.211 The perceived disparity between Curie’s unobtrusive and delicate demeanour and her phenomenal achievements as a pioneering female scientist only served to further public fascination with her and her work.212 As women at the forefront of their respective – and, seemingly, closely related – sciences, Curie and Queen Tera appear to have much in common. While a number of critics have already identified the cryptic encoding of Tera’s name within her English doppelgänger, Margaret Trelawny’s,213 linking the novel’s female characters with Curie reveals yet another facet to Stoker’s polysemic name- play; the similarities between ‘Margaret’ and ‘Marie’ – to say nothing of the linguistic echo of ‘Tesla’ and ‘Tera’ – point to a deliberate alignment of the novel’s female characters and this contemporary scientist, both unique individuals who are exceptions to the rule that women were excluded from the ‘technological sublime’, a useful term coined by Leo Marx to describe the inspirational potential of technological advancement.214
It is possible, given these connections, that Curie’s sudden celebrity catalysed the writing of The Jewel of Seven Stars. In around 1873, Stoker recorded an idea for a narrative in one of his early journals: ‘Story of a man brought to life in a dissecting room by the application of a new power unexpected’.215 If the novel emerged from this kernel – which resembles The Jewel of Seven Stars more than any other work in Stoker’s œuvre – the alterations to the original concept 30 years later may be significant. Curie’s remarkable discoveries certainly brought to light ‘a new power unexpected’ that captured the public imagination and, as such, would have provided a suitable foundation upon which Stoker could weave his scientific romance. The multiple ties to Curie and her work evident in the novel suggest that the change of the subject’s sex from male in his original idea to female in his published work was also provoked by Curie and the fascination that she inspired as the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. Stoker’s translocation of this ‘power’ into ancient Egyptian civilisation certainly makes its reappearance and importance in the modern world all the more ‘unexpected’. By channelling these neoteric concepts in The Jewel of Seven Stars, Stoker combined elements of the Gothic fantasy – so often preoccupied with antiquity – and the recent findings of contemporary science.
Haggard followed suit, retrospectively offering an explanation for the life- giving pillar of fire in She (1887) based on the discovery of radium in his sequel Ayesha, the Return of She (1905), a couple of years after the initial publication of Stoker’s novel.216 In a chapter entitled ‘Ayesha’s Alchemy’, we are granted access to Ayesha’s ‘laboratory’ with its ‘metal flasks and various strange- shaped instruments’, set within a volcano at the peak of which is an enormous stone ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol of life.217 While the geographical setting is Tibet rather than Egypt, and while Ayesha herself is not ethnically Egyptian, she is nevertheless a priestess of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis (at times even suggested to be an incarnation of Isis herself).218 As is the case with many of the Egyptian spaces encountered across this article, the laboratory is illumined by ‘a gentle light’ that does not radiate from a ‘lamp or flame of fire’ but an unnamed mysterious source.219 Ayesha reveals the source of the light, a substance (later revealed to be gold) from which emanates ‘blistering and intolerable’ rays.220 The narrative makes explicit that Ayesha ‘held at her command the elemental forces of Nature, such as those that lie hid in electricity’, and here we are presented with Ayesha mastering forces implied to be X-rays through their effect on her body: while the mortal protagonists experience symptoms akin to radiation burns even when wearing protective clothing, ‘she … seemed a woman of molten steel in whose body the bones were visible’, suffering no ill effects.221 Equally, the ‘Fire of Life’ first encountered in She is speculated to have ‘owed its origin to the emanations from radium, or some kindred substance’.222 In both She and Ayesha, these mysterious forces have the power either to injure or destroy, or to reverse ageing and maintain youthfulness. At a time when X-rays’ and radium’s medical applications – and medical dangers – were only beginning to be understood, ‘Ayesha was’ as Haggard’s ‘editor’ relays, ‘familiar with’ ‘these marvellous rays or emanations’ ‘and their enormous possibilities’; ‘our chemists and scientific men’, he suggests, ‘have, at present, but explored the fringe’.223
As a civilisation whose remnants and mortal remains were being re-examined in the light of revolutionary scientific techniques, ancient Egypt’s association with the modern scientific process, and radical new media such as the X-ray radiograph, itself strongly associated with spiritualism, was inevitable. Marjorie C. Malley even suggests that spiritualism and occultism prepared society to accept the newly discovered invisible rays and the ghostly images they produced.224 Credited with unparalleled aptitude in such magical sciences as alchemy, ancient Egypt seemed to be antiquity’s counterpart to the incredible spectacles produced by modern trailblazing scientists, whose experiments offered tantalising possibilities of telepathy or communion with the spirit world. This concept was not merely confined to the realms of fiction but treated by some as an actual possibility. Soddy, for example, argued that the destruction of Atlantis had come about through the Atlanteans’ inexpert attempts to use atomic energy.225 The use of the imagery and theory behind contemporary science in these texts thus hints at a greater hope that continued study of antiquity might lead to similarly revolutionary advances in occult science, which would make accessible the ghosts of the past.
Scientists and Gods
Unlike the scientifically inflected fantastical stories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that, as Melanie Keene argues, ‘demonstrate how, for many, the sciences came to replace the lore of old as the most significant marvel and wonder’, this literature provides a counterpoint to perceptions of antiquity as inconsequential when confronted by modern developments.226 Instead, this fiction posits science and antiquity in a dangerous embrace. Resultantly, it is clear that in the late Victorian and Edwardian consciousness, modernity did not necessarily equate to scientific or spiritual advancement. Alchemy, as the pinnacle of mythological science, was, by its very definition, ancient, foreign and teetering on the brink of the magical. As a result, modern scientific developments that appeared to approach the unreachable heights of alchemy were often best described in ancient terms. In ancient Egypt, the lapis lazuli blue hair and gold-plated skin on funerary masks signified the alchemical transformation from mortal into god, a miraculous process that could be undertaken only after death. In the late nineteenth century, equivalent acts which produced otherworldly colour changes, sparks and luminescence about the body of the scientist mimicked a similar process of deification. The more miraculous the scientific processes seemed to be, dramatised as sensory bombardments of glowing coloured tubes, blazing letters, glass wands, eerie luminosity and biblical tongues of flame, the closer the scientist became to a deity.
The city space is crucial to this coming together of the ancient and the modern. Its very fabric the product of multiple eras, London, in particular, with its obelisks standing stark against backdrops of electric lights, encouraged the blurring of the ancient and the modern. The city entertainment that often featured ancient or occult subject matter in its magic-lantern shows, immersive and exotic panoramas, spiritualist séances and early moving pictures, meant that science had to compete by becoming a similar kind of spectacle itself. The thrilling science of the lecture hall was growing ever more distant from the comparatively dry experiments of the laboratory. Science, like the city whose theatrical electrical lighting had emerged victorious in public and private spaces, had become a spectacular commodity.
Outside of the lecture hall, the fantastic imagery of scientific breakthroughs found its way into literature describing ancient powers. Most telling of all are the references to real scientists – most notably, in Haggard’s and Stoker’s veiled allusions to Nikola Tesla and Marie Curie. They align their ancient Egyptian characters with the modern scientists to give their literary magic modern relevance and potency. In doing so, they also ascribe some level of mysterious otherworldly qualities to these scientists, romantic notions that were already being nurtured by the scientists themselves, or by the journalists who detailed their experiments. As Perry Miller states of the technological sublime, ‘the true sublime behind the obvious sublime of the immersive pageant of Technology … is mind itself’.227 Visionaries like Tesla and Curie became godlike through their mental powers, which resulted in technologies that could produce such wonder, whose transcendence emulated ancient miracles and related back to alchemical tradition. Concurrently, ancient magic was given new significance within the realms of these new quasi-alchemical disciplines. In contrast to an evolutionary idea of linear progress over time, of a potentially threatening stream of unstoppable innovation, visionaries and their discoveries were imagined as inheritors of ancient practices, heirs to Egypt and recipients of alchemical lore.
While the imagination of ancient Egypt’s scientific superiority had most frequently been employed as a satirical device in Victorian texts, downplaying modern achievements, the writings of Stoker and Haggard reveal a significant shift in tone, recasting the farcical as the solemn. With impressive visionaries such as Tesla proposing that the ancients had known of the forces only recently rediscovered, such claims took on a new gravitas. Accordingly, it became appropriate and potent for individuals breathing the same cultural air to explore Egyptian themes through novel physical concepts, and to describe demonstrations of these new marvels couched in language evoking antiquity. In opposition to the portrayal of modern literary scientists wielding god- like powers over their experimentees, The Jewel of Seven Stars and ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ illustrate a transfer of agency from the experimenter to the subject. Ancient Egyptian bodies, once submitted to scrutiny, began to exert power over their investigators, manipulating the latest scientific phenomena with a fluency outdoing and overwhelming their modern counterparts.
See endnotes and bibliography at source
Chapter 3 (120-176) from Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt, by Eleanor Dobson (UCL Press, 10.06.2022), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.