“Meaning is not in things, but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay; in the interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads. Meaning is transitional as it is transitory; in the puns or bridges, the correspondence.”
Norman O Brown, Love’s Body

Whenever I exit London Bridge station, I make a brief nod in the direction of Cross Bones graveyard – its part of my recognition of London’s network of sacred spaces. I’ve been to some of the monthly vigils held at this place, but more often than not, just strolling past it – and knowing that it’s there amid the bustle of London is enough for me. A couple of mornings ago, I wandered down to the gate and spent a few minutes gazing at it, occasionally reaching out to briefly touch the ribbons – some incribed with names and dates from the eighteenth century – festooning the bars. A van passes, a train slowly clunks aross the bridge over Redcross Way. Reflecting on what this materialisation of death and loss means for me, whilst stroking a faded ribbon, brought to mind Carolyn Dinshaw’s evocative phrase from her book Getting Medieval of the need for making “a touch across time”.

Cross Bones graveyard was “discovered” in the 1990s by the Museum of London Archeology Service during the construction of the Jubilee Underground line. In 1992, 148 skeletons were removed, and the archeologists estimated that the site could contain up to 15,000 bodies. Cross Bones has been identified as an unconsecrated graveyard primarily used to interr prostitutes who were excluded from Christian burial.

Cross Bones is part of the “Southwark Stews”. In the fourteenth century Southwark came under the juristiction of the City of London, but certain areas – called “liberties” remained under the control of powerful church officials. It was in the so-called Liberty of Winchester, (controlled by the Bishop Winchester) that the “stews” – licensed brothels – were established (the name “stews” comes from the vapour baths by which brothel-goers tried to steam themselves free of venereal disease). It’s likely that Southwark had a thriving brothel culture before the enterprising bishop decided to profit from legalising and regulating them. The area was renown for a variety of “noisome” trades, such as brewing, tanning, and lime-burning, as well as small traders who wanted to escape the craft and guild regulations of the City. Southwark was also home to a large proportion of foreigners described using the term Doche (which encompassed Dutch, Flemish and Germans).

The ordinances drawn up to regulate the brothels included the strictures that prostitutes were barred from living or boarding at the stewhouses, and during religious holidays the prostitutes had to leave not only the stewhouses but the entire area of the liberty (both these regulations were routinely violated) and the stewhouses were ordered closed during nights when Parliament sat. Women who took lovers and maintained them financially were punished with prison (the bishop had his own prison, the Clink), fines, and banishment from the area. Once a woman became “public property” she had no right to a private life. It is from these regulations that the euphemism – “single women” (used to describe Cross Bones) emerges with the attendant idea that women who were not attached to a husband were in effect, common property. Southwark was also home to Whilst the City of London had no legal jurisdiction over Southwark, its councillors attempted to keep prostitutes from the Stews out of the city – for example, in 1351 prostitutes were barred from adopting the dress of “good and noble dames” (vestments trimmed with fur or lined with silk) and told to wear only simple clothes and a striped hood; and an order in 1391 banned boatmen from ferrying men and women across the river to the stews.

In the eighteenth century, Cross Bones had become a general graveyard for paupers, and by 1853 the site was apparently so full of bodies that it was closed as a health hazard and for the most part, forgotten, until its rediscovery in the 1990s.

Why then, choose Cross Bones for reflections on queering sacred space?

As Adrian Harris says in his paper – Honouring the Outcast Dead – Cross Bones is a unique “sacred site”. It’s “discovery” is fairly recent, for a start, and like many fragments of London’s history, it almost seamlessly blends into the maze of architectural styles – were it not for the iron be-ribboned gate, it would be just another walled-off area, easy to miss, easy to walk past.

Considered as a Pagan site for finding connection with the sacred, Cross Bones is somewhat atypical – unlike more familiar sacred sites such as Stonehenge or Avebury, it’s located within an urban setting. I think this itself makes Cross Bones worthy of more attention. Despite occasional forays into “urban shamanism” Pagan discourses on sacred sites tend to focus on sacred place-making outside of metropolitan centres. Nor can Cross Bones be easily accomodated in the “pagan ownership” narratives that sometimes underwrite contestations of sacred space – that prior to the onset of Christianity (or even the Romans) such sites were “pagan” and that on that basis, contemporary Pagans are “reclaiming” the space as their own. Nor is it immediately obvious how a graveyard for sex workers and infants intersects with the broader theme of “honouring/connecting with ancestors” via the perspective that sites such as Avebury or Stonehenge represent ancient forms of spirituality. Again, Cross Bones is different – it’s sacredness is new – a product of its rediscovery and the subsequent events held there. Adrian, in his paper, draws a parallel between the tokens on the gate at Cross Bones and the “shrines” that mark “the site of road accident deaths” but they also recall for me, the “rag tree” offerings at West Kennet, Avebury and Augustine’s Well at Cerne Abbas.

At the same time, Cross Bones is a fragile site – dependent for its survival, ultimately, on the willingness of Transport for London (TfL), for whom the site represents a prime development area, to work with “local community concerns” such as The Friends of Cross Bones’ proposal that part of the site be put aside for a memorial garden (see Goose Garden for developments). It’s also “fragile” in the sense that its not segregated from other spaces – it’s not, for the most part a “quiet” space where one can easily gain that sense of hushed reverence that we tend to associate with the experience of “sacred space” (from standing stones to Christian churches).

Cross Bones is I’d suggest, a site where pluralistic affiliations coexist and collide. You don’t have to make an affiliation with John Constable’s elaborate The Southwark Mysteries to appreciate Cross Bones, or to feel a connection with the “outcast dead” interred there. That is a matter of self-identification, and the public Cross Bones events have a firm commitment to inclusiveness – no one would be turned away for not being sufficiently “outcast”, and the events attract a wide variety of attendees – people who live in the area, visiting Pagans, Christians, local politicians and the London Mayor (see this Indymedia article for some debate about linking Cross Bones to St. George’s day). As Cross Bones events are not only celebratory, but also work to raise the profile of the site in order that it is not built over, the events have to be inclusive to the widest possible spectrum of potential allies.

Although its well-recognised that the site is Christian (albeit “outcast Christians”) and as Adrian points out, the only icon inside the graveyard is a statue of the Madonna, London Pagans make up a good proportion of those who attend both the monthly vigils and the Halloween festivals which have been held yearly there since 1998. More recently, Cross Bones has become incorporated into walking events organised by Cooltan Arts – marking International Women’s Day and International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia – which in 2011 included a blessing by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (May Day Largactyl Shuffle) at Cross Bones. Not only is Cross Bones a site for remembering its interred “Whores and Paupers of Southwark” but in 2007, messages were pinned to the gate memorialising five women sex-workers who were murdered that year in Ipswich. It has also been recognised as an important site by the International Union of Sex Workers who would like to see the site preserved as a memorial for sex workers. There are other possible claimants too – an 1833 report, expressing concerns over public health and grave-robbing speaks of Cross Bones having an “Irish Corner”.

Here lay your hearts, your flowers,
Your Book of Hours,
Your fingers, your thumbs,
Your Miss You, Mums.
Here hang your hopes, your dreams,
Your Might-Have-Beens,
Your locks, your keys,
Your Mysteries.
The Southwark Mysteries

Cross Bones would not have become a sacred space without John Constable, whose visionary contact with a genuis loci – “the goose” moved him to begin the monthly vigils, the celebrations, and the campaign to preserve the site in some form. His play, The Southwark Mysteries has been performed at both the Globe Theatre and Southwark Cathedral, and caused a minor controversy when it was first performed, due to its depictions of a “swearing Jesus” and a female Satan wearing a strapon phallus. Although John Constable’s own magical perspective (see The Goose, The Crow and The Cross Bones Portal) is often the first point of contact for people wanting to find out more about Cross Bones – I think what is interesting here is that Constable works hard to stress that what is happening at Cross Bones is an “unfolding vision” rather than an attempt to create a particular doctrine.

From the crossbones website’s Halloween event page:

The form of the ritual embodies these contraries: combining a sense of awe and reverence with a bawdy humour befitting The Goose. It presents a syncretic vision of healing and transformation, rooted in native pagan animism and Crow’s idiosyncratic Goddess worship, and encompassing elements of ‘left-hand’ Magdalene Gnosticism, Buddhism, Tantra, spiritualism and the Western Magical Tradition. However, Crow has always asserted that The Goose’s teachings are not a doctrine, creed or belief-system. They can best be understood as a spiritual practice in which conflicting ideas can co-exist within a spiritual or astral state of ‘Liberty’ or ongoing process of liberation. The Southwark Mysteries and other teachings of the Goose-Crow source are revealed in poetry and song, as allusions and emblems of that which cannot be spoken, rather than as literal, ‘gospel’ truth.

Yet at the same time that Constable/Crow makes this appeal to openness – to an “ongoing process of liberation” I think its obvious that the events he has staged there have played an instrumental role in shaping the emerging “mysteries” of Cross Bones. I wonder if, in time, other enactments will accrue around similar burial sites in London such as Cripplegate in Warwick Place or the Bethlem graveyard (again recently rediscovered due to excavations around Liverpool Street Station)? Possibly only if someone comes forwards who is passionate about the sites to devote care and attention to them.

Carolyn Dinshaw, in Getting Medieval describes what she terms the “queer historical impulse” – a desire to make that “touch across time” that is based not in continuity but a “shared positionality” – an “impulse toward making connections across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural phenomena left out of sexual categories back then and, on the other, those left out of current sexual categories now.”
She proposes a politics based not on identity – that is, the continuist model of history which emphasises an easy, essential sameness between past and present – but using the past, and a sense of partial connection to work for connectivity and coalition, crossing boundaries not only across time, but more conventional divides (such as academic-nonacademic, or queer-normative). Dinshaw’s work seeks to interrupt the temporal seperation between past and present.

Cross Bones, I think, fits well with both of these strands, in terms of its coalition, inclusive politics, and its presence as a tangible reminder that the past is never truly gone, that it continues to be felt and that its meanings are always contested, revised, and reconfigured.

“Among the women I saw some men dressed like women, with whom they go about regularly, never joining the men. The commander called them amaricados, perhaps because the Yumas call effeminate men maricas. I asked who these men were, and they replied that they were not men like the rest, and for this reason they went around covered in this way. From this I inferred that they must be hermaphrodites but from what I learned later I understood that they were sodomites, dedicated to nefarious practices. …I conclude that in this matter of incontinence there will be much to do when the Holy Faith and the Christian religion are established among them.”Fray Pedro Font, Font’s Complete Diary of the Second Anza Expedition 1775-1776

For this post, I’m going to briefly summarise some themes in contemporary scholarship relating to eighteenth century attitudes to sex and gender, which underwent great changes throughout the century. This is useful for understanding eighteenth century accounts of shamanism, as many of these accounts throughout the century increasingly focused on what we would now call “gender-variance” as a marker for shamanic behaviour. Several scholars have argued that due to changes in the way sexuality and gender were understood in eighteenth-century European culture, contact accounts of primitive cultures shifted from a general representation of whole cultures being inclined towards same-sex relations towards an increased focus upon same-sex desires as a special case – that of the “effeminate sodomite”. According to Rudi Bleys (1996):

The actual or presumed coincidence of cross-gender roles with same-sex praxis made the former instrumental to new sexual theory in Europe that locked sodomy inexorably into the corset of femininity. Passivity, more particularly, as located in the receptive use of the anus, became quintessential to the ‘sodomite’ identity – a different idea, altogether, from previous notions of sodomy, which included the active partner as well as the passive one, men as well as women.(p81)

Mark Johnson (2009) argues that European encounters with males who dressed as women and engaged in women’s occupations were both fascinating and a source of consternation for European travellers, and that encounters with these “primitive” others were both shaped by, and themselves influenced changing discourses about the nature of sex and gender – in particular, informing what was to become the dominant image of homosexuality. I will look at some of these accounts in more detail in future posts, but for now I’m going to briefly examine the ideas of two influential theorists – Thomas Laqueur and Randolph Trumbach.

From one sex to two sexes?
The central argument of Thomas Laqueur’s Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (1992) is that the understanding of the relationship between men and women underwent a major transformation over the course of the eighteenth century. Prior to this transformation, a ‘one-sex model’ was the dominant scheme, based on the idea that the body was composed of four humours – cold, hot, moist and dry – and that men were dominantly composed of hot and dry humours, and women by cold and moist humours – and that differences of sex were differences of degree. Semen, for example, was produced by bodily heat, and it was thought that women with too much bodily heat could produce semen and even, if they became too hot through excessive exercise, suddenly develop a penis. Menstruation was similarly understood not as something unique to women, but as an example of the body’s propensity to bleed in order to expell excess materials. Only one body existed, and it was represented as essentially male, and whilst females were thought of as “lesser males” with outside-in bodies; men and women were not considered to be radically different in terms of bodily constitution. Medical literature conceptualised the female body as an “inferior” version of the male body, with equivalences between testicles and ovaries; scrotum and uterus; foreskin and labia. Some physicians believed that men’s genitalia were externalised due to the heat of male bodies, which “drove” their organs outwards. Metaphysical understandings of the hierarchy of nature made men and women part of the same order, with men placed above women. However, whilst women becoming men due to excess heat was accepted, the notion that men could become women was not, due to the belief that nature tended towards perfection – and for a man to become a woman would be unnatural – the perfect becoming imperfect.

Laqueur argues that during the eighteenth century, this ‘one-sex model’ was replaced by a ‘two-sex model’ in which men and women became anatomically, opposites, radically different from each other:

“Thus the old [Galenic] model, in which men and women were arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection, their vital heat, along an axis whose telos was male, gave way by the eighteenth century to a new model of radical dimorphism, of biological divergence. An anatomy and physiology of incommensurability replaced a metaphysics of hierarchy in the representation of woman in relation to man.”

Laqueur proposes that the “two-sex” model emerged primarily due to political changes and the decline of religious authority and not to medical discoveries. Laqueur proposes that in order to reinforce the political notion of natural rights, bodies were redefined in terms of opposite sexes. Power could only be formally granted to one group (men) and withheld from another group (women) if the two were distinct and incommensurable – and Political theorists turned to biology and medical treatises in order to justify this view in terms of emerging scientific discourse, rather than Adam’s dominance over Eve. So for example, The demotion of the pre-Englightenment metaphysical order took place at the same time as the fragmentation of social order:

“The rise of evangelical religion, Enlightenment political theory, the deveopment of new sorts of public spaces in the eighteenth century, Lockean ideas of marriage as a contract, the cataclysmic possibilities for social change wrought by the French revolution, postrevolutionary conservatism, postrevolutionary feminism. the factory system with its restructuring of the division of labour, the rise of a free market economy in services or commodities, the birth of classes, singly or in combination – none of these things caused the making of a new sexed body. Instead, the remaking of the body is itself intrinsic to each of these developments.” (1992, p11)

There is some debate amongst scholars over the timing of this shift to the “two-sex model” with some historians locating the shift beginning to occurr in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, whilst others have pointed out that this process was also historically uneven, with the single-sex and two-sex frameworks continuing to exist side-by-side for some time. Despite critiques however, Laqueuer’s work has had a considerable impact on contemporary studies of sexuality & gender.

Mollies: a third gender?
Randolph Trumbach, in his book Sex and the Gender Revolution proposes that:

“Around 1700 in northwestern Europe, in England, France and the Dutch Republic, there appeared a minority of adult men whose sexual desires were directed exclusively toward adult and adolescent males. These men could be identified by what seemed to their contemporaries to be effeminate behaviour in speech, movement and dress. They had not, however, entirely transformed themselves into women but instead combined into a third gender selected aspects of the behavior of the majority of men and women. Since a comparable minority of masculinised women who exclusively desired other women did not appear until the 1770s, it is therefore the case that for most of the eighteenth century there existed in northern Europe what might be described as a system of three genders composed of men, women, and sodomites”
(p3)

According to Trumbach, prior to the eighteenth century in European societies, same-sex desire between males was organised around differences in age, between active, adult men and passive boys – a pattern which he points out, was present in ancient Greece and Rome, and in early Christian Europe and in the later Middle Ages. Trumbach cites the work of Michael Rocke (see Forbidden Friendships) in demonstrating that in Renaissance Florence, sodomy was nigh on universal between men, but always structured by age. Trumbach points out that although sodomy was illegal, and the church spoke out against it as immoral “the actual sexual behaviour of men had changed very little from what it had been in the ancient pagan Mediterrranean world” (p5).

From the 1690s onwards, opinion changed from the old system, which was characterised by all males passing through a period of sexual passivity in adolescence, to a new system, wherein sexual passivity and homosexual desire was presumed to be indicative of an effeminate minority. These “new” adult sodomites were known colloquially as mollies – a term which, Trumbach says, was first applied to female prostitutes, and were charactised he argues, by playing two roles – one in the public world and another in the so-called “molly-house” inside which they took women’s names and adopted the speech and body movements of women. Historians have uncovered a well-established network of molly-house and open-air meeting places distributed throughout London in the early eighteenth-century. In addition to Mother Clap’s molly-house in Holborn, there were also houses near the Old Bailey and Newgate Prison, in Soho, Charing Cross, Drury Lane and St. James’s Square. A pamphlet attacking Charles Hitchins, a prominent thief-taker in London in the 1710s describes the behaviour inside a molly-house:

…they had no sooner entered but the Marshal was complemented by the company with the titles of Madam and Ladyship. The man asking the occasion of these uncommon devoirs, the Marshal said it was a familiar language common to the house. The man was not long there before he was more surprised than at first. The men calling one another ‘my dear’ and hugging, kissing and tickling each other as if they were a mixture of wanton males and females, and assuming effeminate voices and airs; some telling others that they ought to be whipped for not coming to school more frequently … Some were completely rigged in gowns, petticoats, headcloths, fine laced shoes, furbelowed scarves, and masks; some had riding hoods; some were dressed like milkmaids, others like shepherdesses with green hats, waistcoats and petticoats; and others had their faces patched and painted and wore very extensive hoop petticoats, which had been very lately introduced.”
(quoted in Hitchcock, p68)

Mollies became the focus of increased public scrutiny and condemnation, and some historians have argued that the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which attacked effeminate sodomites in print, helped forge a link between the flouting of codes of masculine behaviour with the idea that such men were exclusively interested in sex with other men. These societies were concerned with social reform, particularly the elimination of blasphemy, idleness, and lewd and disorderly behaviour. They frequently relied on informers and agents to gather evidence, and although their most frequent targets were prostitutes, it is their attacks on molly houses (1699, 1707 and 1726) which has provided much of the historical evidence for the existence of molly culture. The Societies published trial reports, public sermons and accounts of their own activities, and from the late 1690s onwards there were frequent references to both molly-houses and sodomites in printed pamphlets and newspapers. Hitchcock points out that whilst the Reformation Societies closed down molly-houses, those men who were publicly exposed on the pillory were sometimes savagely treated by the London crowd – many were severely injured and some men died. (see secret sexualities for further discussion).

Men displaying effeminate mannerisms were increasingly subject to blackmail, persecution and punishment and it is argued that the increased emphasis on legal regulation also contributed to the idea that the sodomite was a distinct social and sexual type. Prior to the eighteenth century, the term “sodomite” encompassed a wide range of acts, but by the early eighteenth-century, it came to denote almost exclusively sexual acts between men. Trumbach discusses how many boys and men charged with sodomy were represented, at their trials as ‘mollies’ (regardless of whether or not they exhibited signs of effeminacy) and suffered the stigma and the harsh punishments associated with such an attribution. Such developments, he contends, obliged men to present their masculine status exclusively through their interest in women – and sex ceased to be represented as that which took place between an active and passive partner (regardless of gender) but as an act between men and women.

As the eighteenth century progressed, sodomy and effeminacy came under increasing scientific scrutiny. Some social theorists interpreted same-sex desire as being produced by luxury, excess and idleness – an explanation which pointed not only to modern European cultures, but also “primitive” societies (see previous post for some related discussion). The sailor John Marra for example, in his Journal of the Resolution’s Voyage in 1772, 1773, 1774 and 1775 on Discovery in the Southern Hemisphere (published in London in 1775) described the polynesians as “an effeminate race, intoxicated with pleasure, and enfeebled by indulgence” (Wilson, 2004, p351). Effeminacy could also be a product of cultures where men spent too much time around women, or as John Millar theorised, societies where women had too much political or social status.

Sources
Rudi Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-male Sexual Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750-1918 (Cassell, 1996)
Martin B. Duberman (ed) A queer world: the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies reader (New York University Press, 1997)
Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Tim Hitchcock English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997)
Thomas Laqueur Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992)
Mark Johnson Transgression and the Making of ‘Western’ Sexual Sciences in Donnan, Magowan (eds) Transgressive sex: subversion and control in erotic encounters (Berghahn Books, 2009)
Bradford Mudge (ed) When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Kim M. Phillips & Barry Reay Sex before Sexuality: A Premodern History (Polity Press, 2011)
Michael Rocke Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford University Press 1996)
Will Roscoe Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (St. Martin’s Press, 2000)
Rousseau, Porter (eds) Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester University Press, 1987)
Randolph Trumbach Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the third gender in Enlightenment London v. 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
Kathleen Wilson (ed) A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (State University of New York, 2004)

“What concerns Pan is fit to be sung before all mankind. Indeed his doings are most honourable.”
Lord Dunsany Alexander & Three Small Plays 1925

I ‘discovered’ the writings of Lord Dunsany in my early twenties, initially through reading HP Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature and, almost at the same time, coming across a collection of Sidney Sime’s illustrations of Dunsany’s fiction. Together, they put the hook in me, and after devouring The King of Elfland’s Daughter I was from that point on, always on the lookout for collections of his short stories. Back in 2000, I came across the anthology Time and the Gods from the Gollancz “Fantasy Masterworks” series and its never been far from my bedside since. One of my all-time favourite of Dunsany’s tales is The Beggars (online here)with its theme of finding the sacred and the mysterious within the outward signs of London’s industrial landscape:

And all the while the ugly smoke went upwards, the smoke that has stifled Romance and blackened the birds. This, I thought, they can neither praise nor bless. And when they saw it they raised their hands towards it, towards the thousand chimneys, saying, “Behold the smoke. The old coal-forests that have lain so long in the dark, and so long still, are dancing now and going back to the sun. Forget not Earth, O our brother, and we wish thee joy of the sun.”

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957) – the 18th Baron Dunsany was a man of many talents – poet, novelist, playwright (he has the distinction of having five plays running simultaneously); traveller (across Europe, Africa and India) and soldier (he served in the Boer War, was at the War Office in WWI and in the Home Guard in WWII). He ran for parliament (unsuccessfully) and had a reputation as one of the finest chess players of his day. His first major work of fantasy was The Gods of Pegana, published in 1905 to widespread critical acclaim. Over the next fourteen years he produced classics such as Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), The Book of Wonder (1912) and The Last Book of Wonder (1916). By 1916, according to S.T. Joshi (1995), Dunsany was one of the most critically acclaimed authors in Britain – and the United States (he made his first literary tour of the US in 1919). In 1909, his first play The Glittering Gate (the writing of which was prompted by Yeats) was performed at the Abbey Theatre. It was followed by King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior and The Gods of the Mountain, both in 1911.

Pan appears in three of the vignettes in Dunsany’s Fifty-One Tales (1915). Both “The Death of Pan” and “The Tomb of Pan” are concerned with pointing out that reports of Pan’s “death” are premature, whilst in “The Prayer of the Flowers” the flowers, lamenting the loss of the woods under the spread of “cancrous cities” are comforted by Pan – “Be patient a little, these things are not for long.” The encroachment of industrialisation over the natural (and fantastical) world – and the idea that nature looks forwards to the demise of industrial man – is a recurrent theme throughout Dunsany’s work. In “How Ali Came To The Black Country” this sense of conflict between industrial modernity and the retreat of the fantastical is made present: “Now it is clear,” said Ali, “that the chief devil that vexes England and has done all this harm, who herds men into cities and will not let them rest, is even the devil Steam.” The constraint of “devil Steam” will bring a return to romance: “And Ali said: “When we have cast this devil into the sea there will come back again the woods and ferns and all the beautiful things that the world hath, the little leaping hares shall be seen at play, there shall be music on the hills again, and at twilight ease and quiet and after the twilight stars.” Similarly, in “A Narrow Escape” the magician, about to curse London says: “”Let them all perish,” he said, “and London pass away, tram lines and bricks and pavement, the usurpers too long of the fields, let them all pass away and the wild hares come back, blackberry and briar-rose.”

The Blessing of Pan (1927) has quite a different style to Dunsany’s earlier work. There is no sign of the archaic, quasi-biblical style that Lovecraft refers to as “crystalline singing prose” familiar from works such as Time and the Gods. Gone is the sense of the blurring of the everyday with the fantastical – I’m thinking here of the story of The Bird of The Difficult Eye wherein the master thief Neepy Thang reaches fairyland via “the purple ticket at Victoria Station”. Although The Blessing of Pan is at its heart, concerned with the conflict between industrial modernity and the “romance” of nature, its unfolding throughout the novel is not overt – there is a quiet inevitability in Pan’s spreading influence over the community.

The Blessing of Pan is told from the perspective of Elderick Anwrel, the mild-mannered reverend of the community of Wolding. Anwrel is increasingly disturbed by a haunting, compelling tune played by a boy, Tommy Duffin, who has fashioned a pipe made from reeds. The tune, as the story unfolds, exercises an unwholesome influence on the population of Wolding – first the young women, then the young men, and then the other inhabitants – even Anwrel’s wife, are compelled to dance to the tune of the pipes on nearby Wold Hill, atop which is a megalithic site – the “Old Stones of Wolding”. Finally, Anwrel himself joins the people in their revelry, performing a pagan sacrifice. Anwrel is portrayed sympathetically – he is neither a bigot or a fool, but very much a part of the local community, and who is tormented over what is happening to his flock. Yet although Anwrel feels increasingly estranged from his community, this is not reciprocal – rather, the people of Wolding, if anything, are sorry for his lack of understanding. Towards the end of the novel, for example, he has an exchange with his wife:

“Augusta,” he said. No other words came to say to her.
“I stayed till you finished,” she said.
He looked at her and did not speak; so she spoke instead.
“I thought…” she began.
“What did you think?” he said at last.
“I thought you would have come too,” she said.
“I?” he asked.
“We all thought so,” she answered.
Was everyone and everything driving him to the old stones beyond Wold Hill? He remained silent.
“You wouldn’t come?” she asked.
“Never,” he said.
“It’s almost a pity,” she said.
“A pity!” exclaimed Anwrel.
“Only,” she said, “because they were thinking of sacrificing a bull. And you would have done it so well.”

Perhaps Anwrel’s flaw is that if anything, he places too much trust to others to resolve the problem of what is happening in Wolding – he places a touching (although entirely misplaced) faith in the worldliness of his superior, the Bishop; in the presumed Classical learning of The Reverend Hetley (who is entirely deaf to the music of the pipes) and the power of Saint Ethelbruda, who is credited with driving the last pagan out of England, and whose reputed resting-place he visits. The only person who seems to understand, is Perkin, a “crazed wanderer” although Perkin does not offer the kind of support which Anwrel desires. Perkin’s peculiar advice to Anwrel is “Keep your illusions, man; keep your illusions”. Perkin, through knowing “too much” has lost his illusions, and when Anwrel tells Perkin that it is Pan who is troubling him, he tells Anwrel that his illusions – if they are strong enough – will keep Pan out. But when Anwrel poses the question “But what if they’re weaker than he?” Perkin says: “…Pan was always friendly to Man. That’s you and me you know. We may have changed a lot this last two thousand years; but that’s you and me still. Why, I’d let him come nosing in.”

As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly plain that Anwrel knows that his “illusion” is his faith – and for that faith to be effective, it needs to be communal:

“But what shall I do? What shall I do?” cried Anwrel.
“Why, what does one need but illusions?” answered Perkin.
“They’re gone. I’ve lost them,” said the vicar.
“One can’t hold them all alone.” He spread his hands to the emptiness of his room. “I’ve none to help me now.”
“Plenty of friends over there,” said Perkin, pointing to Wold Hill. “Plenty of illusions.”
“But,” gasped Anwrel, “but they’re the enemy’s!”
“They’re yours if you want them,” said Perkin.

Dunsany’s satire is directed towards Anwrel’s superiors in the church. The novel opens with Anwrel pondering how to communicate to his superior his suspicions about the effects of the unearthly music – and who replies that Anwrel should merely take a holiday (he recommends Brighton as “particularly invigorating”). On his return, Anwrel finds that the situation has worsened – and he begins to suspect “what kind of power” in inspiring Tommy Duffin – the power of the God Pan. Later, Anwrel visits the bishop in person to air his worries – but receives a friendly chat about hobbies, whilst the bishop’s assistant reccomends encouraging the village boys to take up cricket. Similarly, the reverend Hetley, who stands in for Anwrel when he takes his vacation, is portrayed as being deaf to both the lure of the pipes and their effects on the community. Although Anwrel turns to Hetley for support – for Hetley is a “Classical Scholar” whom Anwrel hopes can give him advice about Pan – he too can only recommend “cricket” as a way of turning the young men of Wolding towards healthy pursuits.The church is too caught up in its own self-satisfaction and convention to even recognise what is going on in Wolding, let alone make any effective response.

As Pan’s influence grows over the people of Wolding, the daily routines and habits of life break down; a farmer no longer bothers to gather in his hay; the postman no longer brings the mail, and Anwrel’s maid neglects her cleaning duties. In one scene, Anwrel overhears the schoolmistress giving a lesson. It sounds to him as though she is saying “Egg, oh, pan, pan, tone, tone, Iofone….” but she is, Anwrel realises, teaching the children the phrase “ego Pan panton ton lophon Arkadiou basileus” (“I, Pan, the king of all the Arcadian slopes”).

Quite why Pan should select Wolding is never really made explicit. Anwrel has vague suspicions about his predecessor – the mysterious Reverend Arthur Davidson – spreading a malign influence, but he never really investigates this fully – there are vague hints that Davidson could have been an avatar of Pan – or Pan himself. Anwrel wonders why Pan has chosen Wolding for his attention, and Dunsany’s answer is that Wolding, unlike many other English communities, is less touched by the forces of modernity, such as factories and mining.

The novel climaxes on a Sunday, with Anwrel preaching to his parishoners in church. Tommy Duffin enters the churchyard playing his panpipes, and the whole congregation quietly tiptoes out. There is a delicious irony, particularly for a Pagan reader, in Anwrel’s sermon here, as he exhorts his parishoners to recall the “old ways” of their fathers – he doubtless intending to conjure a vision of Wolding’s Christian past – but he forgets, seemingly, that there are of course, older ways than Christianity. That night, Anwrel himself succumbs to the lure of the pipes, and sacrifices a bull at dawn with a paleolithic stone axe. Once more, he rejoins his community, and the people of Wolding, content in their recovery of the “old ways” sink into a quiet retreat from modern life, becoming increasingly self-sufficient – a kind of invisibility, broken only by visits of gypsies and the occasional world-weary wanderer who finds their way to Wolding.

Tommy Duffin’s curious music that lured one away from the present, and that then seemed to wake up old memories that nobody guessed were there, seems to have come at a time when something sleeping within us first guessed that the way by which we were then progressing t’wards the noise of machinery and the clamour of our sellers, amidst which we live today, was a wearying way, and they turned from it. And turning from it they turned away from the folk that were beginning to live as we do (chapter 35)

It’s clear, in The Blessing of Pan that Dunsany is firmly on the side of the return of Pan; but the novel, in its depiction of a conflict between the modern and the pagan, is without antagonism or any sense of overt challenge between the two. Christianity – or at least the mild-mannered Christianity embodied in Anwrel, is far too feeble to put up any kind of resistance to the lure of Pan. The only person who is challenged; who struggles – is Anwrel himself. His superiors in the church are heedless to any sense of “danger” and the people of Wolding only express vague misgivings which are soon lost in the music of the pipes. Anwrel, just before he performs the bull sacrifice at the stones realises this:

A fight, as he looked back now over all these weeks, had been fought by himself alone, a fight utterly vital to the Church, and one such as she had not had to contend in since the very earliest centuries. With any support he would have won. … And what had happened? His own bishop by kindness, by tact and by superior ability had merely avoided a scandal. Upon that alone he had concentrated. Then learning had failed him in Hetley. Then all that was busy and practical, in Porton. Then Heaven and Earth. He knew not which of these last had been the bitterer blow, Heaven, when Ethelbruda had failed him, or Earth, when all the simple folk that he loved had gone out of his church and over the hill to the enemy.

After Pan’s triumph, it seems that there is a tacit agreement that Wolding be left alone – it becomes a place where people don’t go – but not out of some vague, brooding sense of horror or malignity as one finds, say, in a Lovecraft tale, but just the feeling that it is somehow “queer”. We are left with Wolding’s continued existence according to the cyclic changes of season – “ploughing and sowing and harvest all went their round as of old … they seemed to find amongst silent unfoldings and ripenings, that are the great occasions of Nature, enough to replace those more resounding changes that are the triumph of man’s ingenuity, and which we have gained and they lost.”

Sources
Lord Dunsany, Alexander & Three Small Plays (GP Putnam & Sons, 1925)
Lord Dunsany The Blessing of Pan (Wildside Press, 2003)
ST Joshi, Lord Dunsany: master of the Anglo-Irish imagination (Greenwood Press, 1995)
HP Lovecraft Supernatural Horror in Literature

Lord Dunsany websites
Dunsany bibliography
website of the Dunsany family
Works of Lord Dunsany
Review of The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Sidney Sime websites
John Coulthart’s Journal – Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany
Sidney Sime on the Victorian web
Biography of Sidney Sime

“…there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground…”
Bulwer-Lytton, 1871, The Coming Race

The “occult” novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) had a tremendous impact on nineteenth century occult thought. Christopher Knowles & Joseph Michael Linsner (2007) call him, the “Stephen King of his era” whilst Joceyln Godwin (1994) considers his novel Zanoni to be the most important literary influence on Victorian esotericism. It is from Zanoni for example, that occultists borrowed the concept of “the Dweller on the Threshold” – the ordeal of facing the embodiment of fear before the adept can gain admittance to higher spheres.

The theosophist C. Nelson Stewart (Bulwer Lytton as Occultist, 1927) says that:

“If one were asked to name the book which more than any other provided a matrix for the building-up of modern theosophical philosophy in the English language, Zanoni seems the inevitable choice. Indeed, not only does a glance through the earlier literature published by the Theosophical Society never fail to reveal it as an oft-quoted book, but the advertisement pages show it being sold and translated as a kind of text-book.”

Various esoteric groups of the period claimed Bulwer-Lytton as an adept, and some contemporary authors (for example, Greg Bishop, in Wake Up Down There!: The Excluded Middle Anthology ) have asserted that Bulwer-Lytton was both a theosophist and a member of the Golden Dawn. According to Christopher McIntosh (1998) Bulwer-Lytton was proposed and voted an Honorary Grand Patron of the Soc. Ros (Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia) in 1871, but this occurred without his knowledge. When he found out about this preferment, Bulwer-Lytton wrote to John Yarker expressing his annoyance, and Yarker sent an apologetic reply. “As far as is known Lytton never attended a meeting of the Soc. Ros.” (see also Godwin, 1994, p218 for further discussion). Westcott, in his 1916 pamphlet The Rosicrucians, Past and Present, at Home and Abroad states that:

“The late Lord Lytton, the author of “Zanoni” and “The Strange Story” who was in 1871 Grand Patron of our Society, took very great interest in this form of Philosophy, although he never reached the highest degree of knowledge: for public reasons he once made a disavowal of his membership of the Rosicrucians, but he had been admitted as a Frater of the German Rosicrucian College at Frankfurt on the main: that College was closed after 1850.”

For this post, I’m going to focus on Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel The Coming Race in order to highlight the emerging occult discourse which united the scientific advances in thermodynamics, social evolution and occult adeptship with the perfection of the will.

The Coming Race
The Coming Race (available online) explores themes which resonate closely with thermodynamics. The narrator, an independently wealthy American traveler, accidentally finds his way into a subterranean world populated by a race of beings who call themselves the “Vril-ya.” The “Vril-ya” have established a technological utopia, powered by “Vril” – an “all-permeating fluid” which is mastered through the training of the will, and which confers upon them tremendous powers of healing and destruction alike. The Vril-ya are ruled by a benevolent dictator, and their philosophy of society is presented as “no happiness without order, no order without authority, no authority without unity.” The Vril-ya have learned to master the passions that motivate crime or greed, and have a “natural instinct” for obedience. Their women are taller than the men, yet are “the most amiable, conciliatory, and submissive wives.” They are caucasian in appearance, with blue eyes and “hair of a deep golden auburn”.

The Coming Race makes many references to contemporary scientists and theories such as the luminiferous ether, and the heated debate over Darwin’s theories. Faraday is quoted in chapter 7:

“I have long held an opinion,” says that illustrious experimentalist, “almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.”

Vril and the Will
The narrator of The Coming Race, in describing vril mentions magnetism, galvanism, mesmerism, electro-biology and “odic force” as “the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest” – that these forms have “one common origin” and are convertible into one another and mutually dependent. Vril, directed through a vril-staff, can be used to heal, power machines, or for destructive purposes. Bulwer-Lytton explained Vril to his friend John Forster: “I did not mean Vril for mesmerism, but for electricity, developed into uses as yet only dimly guessed, which I hold to be a mere branch current of the one great fluid pervading all nature.”

Bulwer-Lytton’s concept of Vril develops out of a recurrent theme in his earlier works; the notion of the all-prevasive, connecting power of electricity is explored in Zanoni where the eastern sage Mejnour “professed to find a link between all intellectual beings in the existence of a certain all-pervading and invisible fluid resembling electricity, yet distinct from the known operations of that mysterious agency.” Similarly, in A Strange Story (1862) the physician Allen Fenwick performs experiments on inducing electrical currents via the exercise of will.

In a previous post in this series (Polarity and the spirited body – II) I examined some of the links between the capacity for mediumship and the notion of “passivity” (in particular, feminine passivity). In Isis Unveiled Madame Blavaksty makes a crucial distinction between occultism and spiritualism in that: “Mediumship is the opposite of adeptship; the medium is the passive instrument of foreign influences, the adept actively controls himself and all inferior potencies” and “One common vital principle pervades all things, and this is controllable by the perfected human will. The adept can stimulate the movements of the natural forces in plants and animals in a preternatural degree. Such experiments are not obstructions of nature, but quickenings; the conditions of intenser vital action are given. The adept can control the sensations and alter the conditions of the physical and astral bodies of other persons not adepts; he can also govern and employ, as he chooses, the spirits of the elements. He cannot control the immortal spirit of any human being, living or dead, for all such spirits are alike sparks of the Divine Essence, and not subject to any foreign domination.” (my italics) For Blavatsky then, the crucial distinction between spiritualism and “true occultism” is that Occultism is based on the “power” of a trained and perfected human will, awakened, strengthened, the “absolute ruler within his body” as opposed to the “passivity” of spirit mediumship. Again, this theme of developing the will in order to restrain the senses and “purify desires” is one than runs throughout Zanoni. In The Coming Race it is the use of the will which enables the advanced magical technology of the Vril-ya – not only does it have curative and destructive properties and powers all aspects of the Vril-ya’s industrial civilisation, it also enables the transmission of thoughts between individuals, and the rapid ascquisition of knowledge.

As Alex Owen (2004) says, the occultism of the late nineteenth century was “characterised by the will to both know and control the natural world” and that “total self-mastery and an indomitable will are the foremost prerequisities for magical Adeptship” (p6). She notes the relationship between the notion of self-mastery and the “bourgeois individualism” associated with the nineteenth century and points out that in this period, “occultism emerged at a time of growing uneasiness over what many perceived as the loss of personal integrity and authority in the face of an homogenizing mass society.” I would say that the occult concern with the will reflected wider cultural tropes concerning will-power, self-discipline, and correct behaviour. The Theosophical Society (and other esoteric movements in the nineteenth century) emerged during a period of social upheaval which saw the rise of various “social purity” movements (and there was a good deal of cross-over in membership of, for example, the Theosophical Society and various social purity campaigns in both the UK and USA). These movements stressed the importance of self-governance and moral regulation, often phrased in terms of developing “good character” which entailed practices of self-restraint and conformance to public virtues. “Character” was the visible, outward marker of inner, moral qualities, and the exercise of will-power in achieving self-control was central to this project. Hence social progress was rooted, ultimately, in the development of moral character. The idealisation of these virtues can be seen in theosophical accounts of the conditions for an aspiring occult “chela” – which stress the absolute necessity for “mental and physical purity” as well as courage, and a “calm indifference” to the vagaries of the world. Adepts were similarly idealised as being entirely selfless, and incapable, due to their evolved nature, of any kind of unchaste or immoral action (a belief which was severely strained through the successive scandals erupting around Charles Leadbeater from 1912 onwards). I think its clear from Blavatsky’s writing that for her, at least, occultism and morality were inextricably intertwined (see Tantra’s Metahistory III: The Left-hand Path – II for further discussion of Blavatsky’s view of Occultism & morality). An editorial in Lucifer (1889) reporting on the activities of one Hiram E. Butler (whose work had been favourably reviewed the year before) and his Boston-based “Esoteric Society” makes the following assertions: “The practice of mesmerism has always been discountenanced by the Theosophists, yet the literature on the subject has been utilized by Butler and his confederates, who have been teaching a bastard sort of mesmerism to their dupes, calling it ‘spiritual development’. The mesmeric force is simply sex-magnetism. In this simple statement is the secret of spiritualistic ‘mediumship’ as well as ‘mesmerism’ and ‘black magic’. It is also the secret of the invariable fall into vice and sexual degradation of fools who dabble in such things, whether they call it ‘mediumship,’ ‘mesmerism,’ ‘mental healing.’ or what not. … The whole thing is very, very vile, and the less people have to do with those subjects in that way the better for them. True occultism has nothing to do with the filfthy subject. … The ‘Esotericism’ of these specimens of Boston culture is identical with the voodooism of the negroes. It is called tantrika in India and is filfthy in the extreme.”

It might seem that I am straying somewhat from the focus of this series – the representations of gender polarity in relation to various “forces” and their wider cultural contexts – but I think that examining the emerging emphasis on the will in nineteenth-century occultism, together with notions of individual/social progress and evolution forms an important “bridge” to later occult theories of the body as an ecology of manageable forces – subject to laws and capable of being directed via correct “training” and discipline. Although initially, such “mastery of forces” is seen as a facility only available to occult adepts, the idea that one can manage and control the body’s energies, like other “occult powers” (such as astral projection) are subject to increasing democratisation throughout the twentieth century.

The Coming Race – with its themes of utopianism, racial superiority, enlightened vegetarianism and technological prowess was an alluring vision of the future, and ran to five editions in the first year of its publication. Like Zanoni, it too was highly influential on nineteenth century occultism – and in particular on Madame Blavatsky and other prominent Theosophists. Blavatsky writes: “The name vril may be fiction [but] the force itself is doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works.” (quoted from Barkun, 2003) Similarly, in Isis Unveiled she names Vril as but one name amongst “an infinite confusion of names to express one and the same thing” – equating Vril to different forms of “sacred fire” as well as “the Akasa of the Hindu adepts; the Astral light of Eliphas Levi; the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists; the od of Reichenbach …. galvanism; and finally electricity” (1,125, 128-129). She also asserts (in The Secret Doctrine that Bulwer-Lytton derived the idea of Vril from ancient Indian writings dealing with “those terrible engines of destruction known to the Mahabharatan Aryans.” SB Liljegren’s monograph (1955) shows how much of a debt Madame Blavatsky’s writing owes to Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, particularly The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Zanoni.

Unsurprisingly, Vril is a popular topic circulating throughout theosophical writing from the late nineteenth century onwards, particularly when authors wished to make a link between occult forces and scientific discoveries – one example being that Bulwer-Lytton’s concept of Vril is a “foretelling” of the discovery of radium, or of atomic energy. As a trope, it allows the linkage between ancient “occult secrets” and contemporary scientific discovery, with the promise that in the future, humanity will have evolved enough (both morally and spiritually) to understand and utilise such forces wisely. Theosophists tended to be optimistic (no less than contemporary occultists) that orthodox science was on the brink of validating their beliefs and theories. The concept of Vril itself (guaranteed one kind of immortality by John L. Johnston’s “liquid life” beef extract – Bovril from 1886) was frequently claimed by occultists to have originated in “ancient writings” (a claim started by Madame Blavatsky) and often equated with akasa (often translated as a variant of “astral force”) particularly because the manipulation of this “force” was restricted to adepts. For example, W.J Colville, in Studies in Theosophy: Historical and Practical says:

“This subtle, all-pervading force is amenable to the control of a high order of intelligence only, and while universally present in nature, cannot be manipulated and utilized except by persons in whom the lower principle (homo) is subservient to the higher principle (vir.)”

Imagining utopia?
The idea of an advanced race preparing to replace humanity – the Vril-ya (descended not from apes, but from frogs) – also neatly dovetailed into theosophical theories of race and racial progression – which also reflected wider cultural concerns such as the enthusiasm for eugenics, education and moral improvement. Theosophist theories of racial development and progress were complex, and some Theosophists, such as Susan E Gay (see this post for related discussion) evisaged a future race that would reproduce via parthenogenesis. In The Coming Race, the narrator explains that the letter V “nearly always denotes excellence or power” and that “vril” equates to civilisation and the Vril-ya, “the civilised nations” as vril is the basis of their society and power (it has also been suggested that “vril” is a contraction of ‘virility’). This language was related to Indo-Germanic or Aryan racial theories (Bulwer-Lytton dedicated The Coming Race to Max Muller). Some scholars have suggested that Blavatsky saw in the Vril-ya a confirmation of her notion of “ascended masters”.

Anne Besant made a great deal of use of the theme The Coming Race in her writings. In one lecture (later published in 1917) entitled “The Coming Race” she makes an exhaustive analysis of racial types and features – including the notion that different races have different nervous systems: “If a Chinaman or a Japanese is wounded in battle, he has much more chance of recovery than one of the Aryan Race. The Red Indian, again, of America, who is also a fourth Race Man, will bear a wound that would kill any of you by shock, not by bleeding but by nervous shock, and he will recover from a wound which would kill a fifth Race man.” (see previous post). She proposes that the “Coming Race” will be typified by compassion, brotherhood and wisdom, and is particularly emerging in America, Australia, and New Zealand. Signs of “The Coming Race” include the birth of children with a “nervous system so delicately poised that it is always in danger of jar and injury.” She laments the conditions of cities such as London, but rather than wanting to “abolish” them says that “For, mind, that which is destructive to a delicate nervous system is the necessary stimulus for the evolution of a nervous system of lower and coarser type.” For those of a finer nervous organisation – and their children – she says the “best policy is to leave London for the country, and surround themselves and the children of the Coming Race with sweeter and better environments.” There is much advice in this essay how to prepare oneself for the advent of “the Coming Race” – by avoiding meat, alcohol, practising meditation and cultivating selflessness – ” the training of the life into expressions along higher lines.”

Sources
Michael Barkun A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (University of California Press, 2003)
Annie Besant, The Coming Race (Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, 1917)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, David Seed (editor) The Coming Race (Wesleyan University Press, 2005)
Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Univ. Michigan Press, 2001)
Jox Dixon Divine feminine: theosophy and feminism in England (John Hopkins University Press, 2003)
Joceyln Godwin The Theosophical Enlightenment (SUNY, 1994)
Christopher Knowles, Joseph Michael Linsner Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heros (Weiser Red Wheel, 2007)
SB Liljegren, Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels and Isis Unveiled (Harvard University Press, 1955)
Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (Samuel Weiser, 1998)
Leslie George Mitchell Bulwer Lytton: the rise and fall of a Victorian man of letters (Hambledon Continuum, 2003)
Alex Owen The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Betsy van Schlun. Science and the Imagination: Mesmerism, Media and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature (Galda+Wilch Verlag, 2007)

Online sources
Wikipedia entry Vril (accessed 11/05/2011)
Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer-Lytton: A Brief Biography
Image of Bulwer-Lytton from www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/mclenan/41.html (scanned by Philip V Allingham)

Sharada Sugirtharajah’s Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (Routledge, 2003 – also available for Adobe Digital Editions and Kindle) examines how “Hinduism” has been defined and interpreted via Western categorisations from the eighteenth century to the present day. Sugirtharajah examines how western fascination with India has ranged from romantic admiration to outright ridicule, and how at the same time, Indian reformers drew upon orientalist representations in order to formulate a unified Hindu identity. Focusing on the work of two scholars – William Jones and Max Muller; two missionaries – William Ward and Nichol Farquhar and a western reading of the 1987 Sati case, Sugirtharajah ably demonstrates how Western constructions of Hinduism by orientalists and missionaries produced a Hinduism which, to a large extent, confirmed their own “theological and ideological suppositions”. Of the value of the postcolonial approach, she says: Postcolonial theory is useful in that it reveals the link between knowledge and power and between representation and mediation, and highlights homogenizing, essentializing and universalizing tendencies in varied discourses, reading and interpretative strategies.

Following a brief discussion of the historical usage of the term “Hinduism” particularly by orientalists to create the notion of a homogenised (and thereby managable) religion, the first chapter examines the work of William Jones and his attempts to reconcile Indian ancient texts with a biblical chronology; his poetic romanticisation of Indian deities (which nonetheless locks Hinduism into a primitive “pagan” past) and his desire to reshape and discipline Hindu laws along Justinian lines. Sugirtharajah then turns her attention to Max Muller, famous for his translation of the Vedas and pioneer of comparative religion and mythology.Sugirtharajah argues that Muller was instrumental in creating a “textual” Hinduism which was informed by nineteenth century ideas of evolution and comparative philology. Muller, like Jones and other orientalists, believed that contemporary Hindus had become detached from the original meanings of their religion, and that he could provide a “corrective” reading which would benefit both colonised and colonisers alike. Muller, locates India’s “greatness” in its remote past, and romanticises India’s static, timeless nature in the quest for European orgins and the rural idyll.

The third chapter focuses on the nineteenth century missionary William Ward and his relentless denunciation of Hindu religion and morals. Ward is of course, well-known also for his description of “tuntra” in his 1817 work (title) as “things too abominable to be revealed to a Christian public”. Unsurprisingly, Ward sees finds no coherence in Indian beliefs and practices, religious or otherwise, and he sees Indians as “effeminate” worshipping deities – “monsters of vice” – which “encourage immoral behaviour.” Sugirtharajah then turns to another missionary, the Scottish Nichol Farquhar, whose 1913 book The Crown of Hinduism argued for an “inclusivist” approach to Hinduism. So, rather than Ward’s blanket rejection of anything Hindu, Farquhar instead views Hinduism as “imperfect” – requiring its fulfilment in Christianity. Thus his inclusivism can only grant a secondary or lower status to Hinduism, and Hinduism only becomes meaningful when interpreted through the lens of Protestant Christianity.

The fifth chapter, Courtly text and Courting Sati examines the topic of Sati (“widow immolation”) by critiquing the work of a contemporary scholar, Julia Leslie – specifically, her essay “Suttee or sati: victim or victor” in Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women and prompted by the highly publicised death of an eighteen-year old woman, Roop Kanwar, in Rajasthan in 1987. The crux of Sugirtharajah’s argument here is that Leslie interprets this event using an eighteenth-century sanskrit text whose author, needless to say, sets a high value on sati. What is problematic here, according to Sugirtharajah is that by privileging such a brahminical text in creating an account of ideal Indian womanhood, Leslie ignores other accounts of womanhood (which don’t view women as subservient and passive) and unwittingly reinforces the notion that Hindu religion and culture is static and unchanging. This is a difficult, yet thought-provoking chapter.

The final chapter deals with how some features of orientalist representations of Hinduism continue to be replicated in postcolonial contexts: Ironically, Hindus are using more or less the very same tools used by Western scholars of Hinduism in order to clear up misconceptions and present a homogenized view of Hinduism. What is conspicuous is that Hindus living outside India are now drawing on the Western orientalist conception of religion as a unified category in order to make Hinduism intelligible to both insiders and outsiders. (p134). Sugirtharajah examines some features of movements such as ISKON and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in forging a universalised Hinduism. Sugirtharajah also points to some of the ideas which arise through the course of her book – for example, that the concept and theorisation of religion is itself problematic due to its Western Christian theological presuppositions – and in particular its bias towards textual sources:

Religion, to the ordinary Hindu, is not simply confined to texts or to a prescribed set of beliefs. It includes these aspects yet it encompasses a wide variety of other areas such as art, dance, music and folklore; post-Enlightenment scholars of religion, however, take little note of these non-textual domains. There is a marked reluctance to shift the focus from texts. Even a cursory glance at some of the current introductory material on Hinduism reflects a predominantly text-oriented approach. It is largely through the lens of brahminical textual and ritual traditions that Hinduism is perceived. In other words, textual Hinduism is given primary consideration. (p140)

What I found particularly useful was Sugirtharajah’s focus on the orientalist pursuit and production of knowledge (pace Said and Foucault) and how this is inextricably linked with colonial expansion and conquest – so that the translation of texts such as The Laws of Manu and Muller’s Sacred Books of the East were both supported by the East India Company in order to exercise more effective control over the Indian population, and that “intellectual conquest” (to use Muller’s phrasing) was as much a concern of Empire as economic and military power. Sugirtharajah’s discussion of the binary dichotomies deployed by the missionaries Ward and Farquhar in order to both categorise and establish a hierarchical difference between Christianity and Hinduism is also useful. Imagining Hinduism highlights important issues such as the difficulty that western-based scholarship has had with dealing with a highly pluralistic culture; the problems of ethnocentric bias; and the problems of unreflexively applying western categorisations in interpreting a different culture.

All in all, this is an excellent, thought-provoking book that I find myself continually returning to.

“On my visit this Morning to Tynah and his Wife, I found with her a person, who altho I was certain was a Man, had great marks of effeminacy about him and created in me certain notions which I wished to find out if there were any foundations for. On asking Iddeah who he was, she without any hesitation told me he was a friend of hers, and a class of people common in Otaheite called Mahoo. That the Men had frequent connections with him and that he lived, observed the same ceremonies, and eat as the Women did. The Effeminacy of this persons speech induced me to think that he had suffered castration, and that other unnatural and shocking things were done by him, and particularly as I had myself some Idea that it was common in this sea. I was however mistaken in all my conjectures except that things equally disgusting were committed.”
William Bligh, The Log of the Bounty, 1789

At the end of the opening post in this series, I said I’d be taking a look at some Eighteenth Century accounts of shamanism and gender-variance. Before doing so however, I want to examine some broader transformations in the period which will, I hope, serve to place these accounts in context – specifically, discourses relating to sex, gender, and human varieties (i.e. race). These transformations were inextricably linked to encounters with the peoples of the New World, and these encounters (recorded or “imagined”) played a formative role in the establishment of European boundaries of normative sex and gender. As Mark Johnson (2009) points out: “Central to the changing terms and shifting ground of homosexual transgression in the West has been the figure of the gender-variant other, a recurrent and repeated leitmotiv of ethnological and sexological imaginings since the Enlightenment.”

For this post, I’m going to briefly focus on the relationship between climate and temperament – both in the New World and the Mediterranean which came to the fore in the eighteenth century.

In the first post in this series, I noted the linkage made between climate and effeminacy. Roxanne Wheeler, in her book The Complexion of Race explains the dominant conception of human variety as being rooted in the biblical account of creation – a theory of shared human origins now referred to as monogenesis – which led to assumptions that all peoples were originally born with white skins, and that variations were due to climate and lifestyle – and that the scientific term used to designate different groups of people was variety rather than race. She argues that religion and clothing were significant markers of similarity and difference, and that: “Climate and humoral theory, in one form or another, provided the most important rubric for thinking about human differences in the eighteenth century, in regard to both complexion and civil society”. Climactic theories of human variations became much more influential in the eighteenth century, with treatises such as Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748) and Samuel Smith’s Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). Montesquieu asserted that peoples in hot climates were prone to lively and excitable passions, which led to a state of constant arousal and immoral behaviour. This, together with physical weakness and lassitude, entailed that the people were lazy and easily enslaved due to a lack of “strength of spirit”. Smith opines that all races came from a single creation, and that all subsequent racial difference is a result of climate. Savages – all of whom are, unless “urged by some violent passion” always indolent. Moreover, idleness is the cause of savagery, and a people can degenerate, into a darker race, if they live in a hot climate.

The inherent idleness of savage peoples was a recurrent theme throughout the period:

“They are, without doubt, both in Body and Mind, the laziest People under the Sun. A monstrous Indisposition to Thought and Action runs through all the Nations of ‘em: And their whole earthly Happiness seems to lie in Indolence and Supinity.”
Peter Kolb, Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope (1731)

Sarah Jordan, in The Anxieties of Idleness points out that the British saw industriousness as a virtue – and rationalised their entitlement to empire on the basis that they possessed the industriousness to make proper use of the land. African idleness became a justification for slavery. Similar views were made in regard to India. Thomas Salmon’s New Geographical and Historical Grammar (1772) says that “the warmth of these Eastern climates has doubtless ever contributed to the indolence and effeminacy of its inhabitants; and it may be doubted whether they ever had the industry and active spirits of the inhabitants of Europe, who found the necessity of labour for their support, which the Asiatics had less occasion for, through the luxuriancy of their soil.”

Similarly, Alexander Dow’s Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan (1770) associates Indian hygiene and avoidance of alcohol as signs of idleness. “Habit makes the warm bath a luxury of a bewitching kind.” and “The prohibition of wine is also favourable to despotism. It prevents that free communication of sentiment which awakens mankind from a torpid indifference to their natural rights.”

The idea that climate could lead to degeneration and indolence for the colonisers as well as the colonised became a source of anxiety, and there were concerns that the British in India, for example, would succumb to the effeminising influences of the country, which intensified in the nineteenth century. Climactic theories persisted well into the nineteenth century – for example, in Richard Burton’s infamous concept of the Sodatic Zone which I will examine in more depth in due course.

Italian Vices
The influence of climate was not exclusively reserved for explaining the oddities of the New World. As I noted in my last post on Pan, the British were both attracted and repulsed by the erotic possibilities of Italy.

Paula Findlen’s engaging account (2009) of An Historical and Physical Dissertation on the Case of Catherine Vizzani, edited and published by John Cleland in 1751 provides some useful clues. This book, as Findlen explains, claimed to describe “The Adventures of a young Woman, born at Rome, who for eight years passed in the Habit of a Man, was killed for an Amour with a young Lady; and being found, on Dissection, a true Virgin, narrowly escaped being treated as a Saint. With some Curious and Anatomical Remarks on the Nature and Existence of the Hymen.” Despite the lurid possibilities of a tale of sex between women, cross-dressing and the pecularities of the Italians, the book was not apparently, a success. At the end of the volume, Cleland expresses the climatic view of Italy: “In a warm country like theirs, where Impurities of all Sorts are but too frequent, it may well happen that such strange Accidents may, from Time to Time, arise as highly to excite both their Wonder and their Attention.” The climatic values: laxity of morals, indolence, and religious transgressions were also applied to Italy (and France, to a lesser extent), and the popularity of the Grand Tour led to increased anxieties about about the effects on British moral values.

The anonymous author of Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (1729) proferred the view that Italy was the “mother and nurse of sodomy” and linked the growth of sodomy to the growing popularity in England of Italian opera. Similar anxieties were expressed concerning the popularity of masquerade balls (for a brief discussion, see this article I wrote for The Bent Pentacle).

In the next post I’ll look at eighteenth century notions of sex and gender.

Sources
Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth and Catherine M. Sama Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour (Stanford University Press, 2009)
Mark Johnson Transgression and the Making of ‘Western’ Sexual Sciences in Donnan, Magowan (eds) Transgressive sex: subversion and control in erotic encounters (Berghahn Books, 2009)
Sarah Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth Century British Literature and Culture (Bucknell University Press, 2004)
Thomas Laqueur Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992)
Robert P. Maccubbin (ed) ‘Tis nature’s fault: unauthorized sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
G.S. Rousseau Perilous enlightenment: pre- and post-modern discourses : sexual, historical (Manchester University Press, 1991)
Rousseau, Porter (eds) Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester University Press, 1987)
Lee Wallace, Sexual encounters: Pacific texts, modern sexualities (Cornell University, 2003)
Roxanne Wheeler The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)

“Shocking things go on here. You wouldn’t believe it! Licentiousness! Orgies! …. Even bingo. Oh yes.”
Lurcio (Frankie Howerd), Up Pompeii

“If a boy has the fortune to be born beautiful, but does not offer his arse for the enjoyment of others, may he fall in love with a beautiful girl and never manage to bed her.”
Graffiti found at Pompeii, quoted from Varone, 2001, p131

In 1734 Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples and Sicily commenced a programme of digging around Naples to search for classical treasures, which led to the excavation of Herculaneum (1738) the rediscovery of Pompeii (1763) and the Villa dei Papiri. The discoveries – which included the Villa of Diomedes (1771) in which eighteen bodies of women and children caught by the eruption attracted great interest – and by the 1760s Naples and Pompeii had become one of the favourite stopping points for those undertaking the Grand Tour. But amidst the wealth of classical treasures brought out of the ground were objects of a more troubling nature. One such find was a marble statue of Pan copulating with a goat, unearthed from the Villa dei Papiri in 1752.

According to Judith Harris, Charles and his court were present at Karl Weber’s excavation site when this sculpture group was brought to light:

“Amidst a flotilla of courtiers in silks and befurred velvet finery, Charles and his Prussian wife Queen Maria Amalia arrived in a rustling, stately procession and took their seats on folding chairs. From the bowels of the earth the carved white marble group of two embracing figures, which Weber had found in the Great Peristyle, appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, borne upon a litter carried by prison labourers. A shiver of excitement rippled through the court. Already the dainty turn of that horn revealed the prized Greek look. When the whole sculpture group hoved into view two heads could be seen and two bodies. One seemed to be a man of sorts, though at closer look he wore two small horns on his head. He gazed fondly into the female’s languid marble eyes. For locked in his embrace was a female goat, surely the prettiest in the flock, whom he was in the act of penetrating.”
(Harris, 2005, p47)

Charles was shocked by this find, ordered the excavations to be halted, and consigned the statue to a cupboard, with access granted only with the direct permission of the king himself. Johann Winckelmann asked permission to view the statue, but was turned down. Standards must have lapsed later, as Richard Payne Knight, in his Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786) refers to the statue as “well-known”. In the early nineteenth century, this statue became part of the collection of the so-called “Secret Cabinet” to which access was restricted to only “persons of mature age and of proven morality”, a decree made by Francis I in 1819, after visiting the Royal Bourbon Museum. By 1823, any artefacts judged to be “disreputable objects of pagan licentiousness” were restricted to this private room.

One N. Brooke, in his Observations on the manners and customs of Italy (1798) was apparently so disturbed by the sculpture of Pan and the goat that he reported it to be made of bronze, rather than marble:

“At the end of one of the galleries is a small room kept locked, and having no ladies with us, my friend ordered it to be opened, in which is placed a single bronze statue of a goat and satyr in a joined unnatural position, that which decency cannot be described, and had it been mine I would have thrown it into the burning mountain, which had once buried it under its lava.”
(quoted from Mattusch, 2005, p156)

News of these discoveries travelled quickly, despite Bourbon attempts to restrict publications relating to the excavations. The diplomat Dominique-Vivant Denon made a series of drawings (including the infamous Pan & goat) based on the erotic artefacts from Pompeii, and published it under the title Priapees et sujets divers. Collectors converged on Naples and there was a brisk trade in manufacturing copies of erotic objects. Winckelmann reported finding on the market forgeries of Priapic figures from Pompeii in paint and sculpture. One venetian artist, Guiseppe Guerra, specialised in producing copies of frescoes dominated by phallic images, for sale to enthusiastic tourists.

Pierre-Sylvain Maréchal, between 1780 and 1803, published a nine-volume work devoted to the finds at Herculaneum, which contained engravings of priapean themes (though Pan was omitted). Maréchal, whilst portraying the ancient Romans as “childlike” and “innocent” tended to apologise for the presence of erotic imagery and artefacts:

“I know of no way to justify the Ancients in this cynical habit. Their imagination, inflamed by the lure of pleasure, desired that all objects, even the most indifferent and alien to this purpose, should remind them of what seems to have been the sole focus of their existence. Vases, lamps, everyday utensils, and the most necessary articles of furniture became, as it were, accomplices of their libertinism, by showing them its crude simulacrum. We must believe that articles shaped like this were intended only for bawdyhouses.”
(quoted from Kendrick, 1997, p9)

Before the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, Rome had been thought as a font of austere majesty and wisdom, but as the excavations uncovered a wide range of sexually explicit objects and scenes, painted on walls and floor mosaics, on vases, in sculpture and everyday objects, scholars gradually (and reluctantly) came to the conclusion that such erotic displays were not exceptions, but the rule. One popular notion which arose in the wake of these discoveries was that the Roman Empire had collapsed because of moral corruption and depravity (a view that still retains some currency, judging by Roberto De Mattei’s comments back in April, 2011) – and that the eruption of Vesuvius was a divine punishment for the licentiousness of the inhabitants of Pompeii.

There is considerable evidence to suggest that literate people in the eighteenth century were aware of ancient Greek and Roman sexual behaviour – see for example Immorality of the Ancient Philosophers, 1735. References to ancient same-sex lovers such as Ganymede and Antinous appear throughout eighteenth-century texts both as terms of derision and ‘codes’ for establishing shared interest. Anne Lister, for example is said to have learned Latin and Greek in order to seek out references to love and sex between women, and also used classical references to same-sex love in negotiating her affairs with other women. Petronius’ infamous Roman novel, Satyricon (see Wikipedia for a plot synopsis) was available in the eighteenth century and there is a reference made to its corrupting (‘sodomitical’) influence in Tobias Smollett’s (1748) novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random.

The Grand Tour
In the eighteenth century it became fashionable for young men of wealth and rank to go on “the Grand Tour” to France and Italy in order to have their education finished. The tour generally lasted between two and five years, and the great cultural centres of Paris, Rome and Naples were favourite stopping points. The discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum also added to the attractions of the Grand Tour, and wealthy antiquarians flocked to Naples, first as collectors, and later as dealers. Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to Naples from 1764, amassed an enormous collection of antiquities, and his residence became a popular stop on the Tour. The Tour was also an opportunity for sexual adventure, and there were frequent worries that travel to France and Italy would “effeminate” young men. Italy, in particular, had a reputation for sodomy and tracts such as Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (1729) blamed Italian influences such as opera, whilst Churchill’s 1764 poem The Times had it that:

“ITALIA, nurse of ev’ry softer art,
Who, feigning to refine, unmans the heart,
Who lays the realms of Sense and Virtue waste,
Who marrs whilst she pretends to mend our taste,
ITALIA, to compleat and crown our shame”
The Times

Attitudes to Italy were also coloured by anti-Catholic sentiments and by the climatic theory of temperament. For example, Montesquieu, in his 1748 work, The Spirit of the Laws claimed that people of cold climates tended to be industrious and orderly whilst those who dwelt in hot climates tended to be lazy and chaotic.

In addition to its cultural possibilities, the Grand Tour was also attractive for the possibility of sexual adventures – including those of a transgressive nature. William Beckford referred to Italy as “the place for sinners of a certain sort”.

The discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum also helped fuel a rise in interest in Classical art – and collections of classical art became emblems of of the wealth and taste of their owners. Such was the passion of English collectors for examples of classical art that one contemporary Italian commented “Were our Amphitheatre portable, the English would carry it off.” Not only was the acquisition and possession of art a form of social prestige, but also it was considered desirable to display at the very least an articulate enthusiasm for one’s collection. This led to the growth of interest in theories of art.

The collections of antiquarians such as Elias Ashmole, Charles Townley, Richard Payne Knight and Sir William Hamilton contributed heavily to the foundation of the British Museum. Charles Townley (1737-1805), possessed a terracotta reproduction of Pan and the she-goat by the English sculptor, Joseph Nollekens, who had viewed the original in the 1760s (it ended up in the British Museum’s ‘Private Case’ which later (1865) became known as the “secret museum”). This also led to a re-evaluation of myth. Early Enlightenment thought tended not to admire myth – rationalists such as Voltaire and David Hume portrayed myth as an erroneous attempt by primitive people to explain the world, and deists such as John Toland saw both Christianity and pagan myth as corruptions of a natural primitive monotheism. The discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum led to a new interest in interpreting myths as a necessary part of the Classical past.

One influential theorist of ancient art – who also contributed to the rise of interest in Roman erotic themes – particularly the popular notion of “Roman Orgies” – was the self-styled Baron d’Hancarville (1719-1805) who was engaged by Sir William Hamilton to produce a sumptuous catalogue of his collection – a four-volume set of illustrated volumes, accompanied by an essay on the origins of Greek art (Hamilton’s catalogue of vases was an influence on James Wedgwood, who began to produce vases based on the illustrations of Hamilton’s collection in his pottery factory).

d’Hancarville was by all accounts a colourful character, an art historian who supplanted his income with occasional theft and the production of pornographic works. Around 1769-70 D’Hancarville produced two pornographic works – Monumens de la vie privee des douze Cesars (“Monuments of the private lives of the twelve Caesars”) which purported to be a catalogue of etchings taken from various antique objects that depicted the sexual adventures of the various Roman emperors, but the etchings were “fictional” being drawn from the works of Suetonius and Tacitus (Vivant Denon may have been one of the engravers who produced the illustrations). d’Hancarville also authored Monumens du culte secret des Dames Romaines (“Monuments of the secret rites of Roman Women”) which again, purported to show illustrations drawn from cameos depicting pagan erotic practices. Caesars was scandalous, but also proved to popular – and pirated editions began to circulate.

Illustrations from Monumens de la vie privee des douze Cesars

d’Hancarville went on to publish Recherches sur l’Origine, l’Esprit les Progres des Arts de la Grece (1785), a central theme of which was that all art in every culture originated from a single primitive religion, and that this religion was sexual in nature. He attempted to demonstrate that that the image of a bull breaking an egg (the bull representing the generative power of the creator) can be found in every culture. d’Hancarville proposed that previous interpretations of the mythology of the Classic world – which relied on texts, were incorrect. Instead, he concentrated on the artifacts being revealed at Pompeii – vases, sculptures, coins and engraved gems. d’Hancarville, Hamilton (and Charles Townley) played a role in the publication of Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786).

The sculpture of Pan and the goat now resides in the “Gabinetto Segreto” (“Secret Chamber”) section of Naples’ National Archeological Museum together with a statue of a rather lecherous Pan together with Daphnis, which was originally part of the Farnese collection. This collection was made viewable by the general public in 2000.

Sources
Alistair Blanshard, Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, Salvatore Settis, The Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press 2010)
Judith Harris, Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery (I.B. Tauris, 2009)
Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (University of California Press, 1997)
Carol C. Mattusch The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum: Life and Afterlife of a Sculpture Collection (Getty Publications, 2005)
Partha Mitter Much Maligned Monsters: a History of European Reactions to Indian Art (University of Chicago Press, 1977)
Vin Nardizzi & Stephen Guy-Bray (eds) Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate,2009)
Antonio Varone, Erotica pompeiana: love inscriptions on the walls of Pompeii (L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2001)

“Star and nerve-tissue are parts of the system-stellar and nervous forces are correlated. Nay more; sensation awakens thought and kindles emotion, so that this wondrous dynamic chain binds into living unity the realms of matter and mind through measureless amplitudes of space and time.”
Edward Youmans, 1869, The Correlation and Conservation of Force

This post will examine the arrival of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century and consider its wider cultural impact – in particular how it was used to reinforce gender regimes. Scientific pronouncements in the nineteenth century were tremendously influential, not only due to the link between science and technological advancement and achievements, but also due to the belief that the universe was inherently lawful. Faced with changes in religious belief and social unrest both at home and abroad, many diverse groups in Victorian culture had a vested interest in articulating a universal set of laws applicable to any facet of society, and led to an increased enthusiasm for classification, codification and the quantifiable measurement of various “social forces” and ailments. The nineteenth century drive to classify and regulate bodies, be they individual or social – is apparent in a diverse range of disciplinary practices, from mental health, the regulation of labour, the various “social hygiene” movements and the emergence of sexology, to the classificationary regimes applied to the management of colonial subjects such as fingerprinting, eugenic interventions, or the classification of entire Indian tribes as “hereditary criminals”.

(NB: I have also argued in the ordering-machine series that this impetus to order and categorise the world – to produce a total knowledge system – also underwrote much of nineteenth century occult theory.)

The birth of energy physics
Nineteenth-century physics saw several important developments which would have far-reaching consequences. During the early decades of the century, several breakthroughs occurred which moved physics towards a grand, unified theory. In 1806 Sir Humphrey Davy announced that electrical force was responsible for the molecular structure of matter. Advances such as Joseph Fourier’s mathematical theory of heat, the wave theory of light (which proposed that light was propograted by the vibrations of ether); Faraday’s experiments in the early 1830s established the relationships between magnetism and electricity all contributed towards the unification and convertability of “forces”. In 1824, Sadi Carnot provided an analysis of the circulation of heat between hot and cold bodies in terms of the operation of steam engines – allowing the emergence of a unified approach to heat, electricity, and magnetism:

“The concept of energy provided the science of physics with a new and unifying framework and brought the phenomena of physics within the mechanical view of nature, embracing heat, light, and electricity, together with mechanics, in a single conceptual structure”.
(Harman, 1982)

The term “thermodynamics” was coined by Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in 1854. In 1865, Rudolph Clausius stated the two laws as:

(1) “The energy of the universe is constant. The first law implies that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. In a closed system, though energy may change forms, the total energy is always conserved.”

and

(2) “The entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum. “Entropy” is the term given to the measure of disorder in a system. The second law thus implies that in a closed system, energy always changes to increasingly less orderly, less usable forms.”

The two laws of thermodynamics had an extraordinary impact on nineteenth century culture, giving rise to, as Anson Rabinach points out, “a new vision of social modernity”. Its universal principles were widely applied to the rethinking of work in terms of labour power, to economics, medicine, psychology, etc. Freud took the energetic model into his expositions of sexuality; Marx too was heavily influenced by the idea of labour power as a quantifiable force. The universal power of energy appealed to materialists, romantics, and those seeking the scientific validation of scripture alike.

the Human Motor
“The animal body therefore does not differ from the steam engine as regards the manner in which it obtains heat and force”
von Helmholtz, (quoted in Rabinbach, p61)

As nineteenth century physics advanced, it generated new metaphors for the body, so that the view of the previous century of the body as l’homme machine – in which the body was essentially mechanistic and engineered, was replaced by that of the “Human Motor” – an engine regulated by internal principles (including internal, self-motivation), with its own internal fuel reservoir, and converting that fuel into heat and thence into physical work. There was a great effort to quantify, measure and intrumentalise the body’s energies, in the hope of achieving perfection. As a motor, the human body was frequently compared to a steam engine, sometimes with the brain acting as an “engineer” – and “nerve force” came to occupy a kind of middle ground between the insubstantial mind, and the forces of nature. The anatomist John Cleland pondered the possibility that “thought and physical energy are mutually convertible.” Other scientists were skeptical though, and preferred to avoid the relationship between mind and matter. Thomas H. Huxley famously declared that “We are conscious automata” arguing that changes in consciousness were caused by “molecular changes in brain-substance”.

Nerve force, from the 1860s onwards, seemed to hold out the promise for a new approach to health rooted in the scientific principles of thermodynamics. Health required the careful management and expenditure of energy, and those who spent their forces unwisely, suffered nervous exhaustion (the language of nerve force often uses financial metaphors). Nerve force was understood in terms of electricity, and bodily activities produced discharges of nerve force in the same way that a Leyden Jar discharges electricity. George Beard (see this post) drew a direct parallel between the nervous system and Edison’s electric light. Thinking was quickly judged to be the greatest drain on body energies, often to the extent that other activities were excluded – such as loving relationships or sports. Herbert Spencer asserted that “instense mental application … is accompanied by a cessation in the production of sperm-cells” and conversely, that “undue production of sperm-cells involves cerebral inactivity.” Pleasures too, had to be strictly regulated and moderated, on order to balance the energy cost involved. Degeneration and dissipation was also a threat, and anti-masturbation tracts often used the laguage of the energy economy, arguing that it contravened the need to conserve body energy for both self and nation.

The second law’s emphasis on dissipation and increase in entropy was, for some, a confirmation of the religious notion of divine purpose. In the 1850s, Lord Kelvin, in a series of public lectures and debates, raised the possibility of a cataclysmic cooldown – heat death” – which would eventually cause all life and evolution to cease. This was a shock to those who held the belief that progress was eternal. Kelvin and his colleagues viewed this “heat death” as the irreversible loss of energy that would reduce the Earth to a cold, lifeless rock and used the Second Law to argue against Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. Victorian anxieties over “heat death” and degeneration can be seen in HG Wells’ (1874) The Time Machine. The laws of thermodynamics were also combined with Darwinian evolutionary theory. Thomas H. Huxley’s writings on race (for example, Man’s Place in Nature) make an equivalence between evolution and social progress and empire, but also makes use of the second law in therorising how “unfit races” (i.e. savages) will inevitably disappear.

thermodynamics and gender
The “human motor” was implicitly male and caucasian (there was a widespread belief that heat led to low energy levels and as a consequence, idleness – and other vices – and that idleness was particularly associated with “primitive races” – I’ll be looking at this idea more closely in the series on shamanism and gender-variance). The principle of the first law of thermodynamics – energy conservation – was used to explain that the “energy” women expended in reproduction meant that they lacked the reserves for any other purpose. Herbert Spencer (1873) for example, claimed that there was a “somewhat earlier arrest of individual evolution in women than in men, necessitated by the reservation of vital power to meet the cost of reproduction.” Patrick Geddes’ and J. Arthur Thompson’s The Evolution of Sex (1889) argued that maleness and femaleness were differentiated down to the level of cellular metabolism. Men were thus active, energetic and variable, whilst women were sluggish, passive and conservative. Geddes was not in favour of women’s suffrage: “What was decided among the prehistoric protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament.” Similarly, in 1891, the psychologist Harry Campbell proclaimed that women were not only “less intellectual” than men, but that the “emotional and intellectual portions” of men and women are “somewhat in inverse ratio.” Although there were dissenters, notably the botanist Lydia Becker and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who declared in 19870 “I find nothing in physiology which indicates that the woman’s intellect is organically inferior to the man’s intellect” and stressed the importance of environmental influences; the belief that thermodynamics and biology “proved” the inevitability of the “seperate spheres” of women and men was the dominant one. Darwin, Galton, and the influential physician Henry Maudsley for example, asserted that differences between the sexes were innate, and that education and environment have little effect (if any). The argument was extended further in biological terms, with the notion that women’s nervous systems were less well developed than men’s, as were their brains (see previous post). Also, it was frequently asserted that women’s (and savages) purported ability to withstand discomfort “stoically” was an indication of their “lower development”.

The law of energy conservation was also used to argue against women’s education. It was frequently asserted that, since the human body had a finite supply of energy which had to be carefully regulated, educating women would place them under undue “mental strain” which would be injurious to their health. A physician, T.S. Coulson, in discussing the dangers of education for women asserted: “If you use the force of your steam-engine for generating electricity, you can not have it for sawing your wood.” referring to the view that women’s bodies were biologically and energetically concerned with reproduction and nuturance, and nothing else. Similarly, William Acton (1857) argued that women were indifferent to sex and that this was entirely natural, in order to “prevent the male’s vital energies from being overly expended at any one time” whilst other medical men, such as Henry Maudsley, defined women entirely in terms of their “reproductive functions”. Not only was education a danger for women as individuals, but it also threatened the future development of the race, and there were frequent claims that women’s intellectual advancement would lead to them becoming “unsexed”, and uninterested in continuing the human species.

In the next post in this series I will examine how these ideas influenced occult thought – with particular reference to the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Sources
Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Univ. Michigan Press, 2001)
Barri J. Gold ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (The MIT Press, 2010)
Peter Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Patricia Murphy, In Science’s Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (University of Missouri Press, 2006)
Anson Rabinach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Basic Books, Inc. 1990)
Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Harvard University Press, 1991)

What is wrong with the terms “teacher”, “thinker”, “theorist”, “philosopher”?  Not only do I think those are very fine titles, but then I choose my associations to schools and teachings without feeling coerced by some sort of imagined notion of kinship.  I certainly wouldn’t go around referring to Aleister Crowley as my “magickal ancestor”. That would just feel…weird to me.  When someone has philosophical positions I admire, in my view, it empowers both of us when I affiliate with their teachings based on their merit.  I also simply like the concept of encouraging contemporary Pagan philosophers, and despite my critiques of traditionality in general, something in me likes the continuity it suggests.  It also suggests that someone’s life work is worthy of respect for reasons aside from their longevity. Additionally, I think the term “elders” has the added effect of downplaying the significant intellectual and cultural contributions of women within modern Paganism.  I just think the very act of publically recognizing women as thinkers, agents and leaders is critically important.   Simply referring to these women as “elders” says very little about actual achievement, certainly not to the world outside of modern Pagan culture.

But the real point here is actually the one about appropriation.  There are currently some quite seriously misguided, in my view, attempts to legitimize contemporary Paganism by associating it with the world’s indigenous religions.  Claiming that modern Pagans are struggling under the same conditions as, say, the Native Americans or Native Australians is highly disingenuous and also disrespectful.  Of course, European Pagans suffered under the spread of Christianity,  but to claim that we today are those people, or frankly even historically or culturally equivalent, is a real twist of history, and is also massively disrespectful to peoples today who are struggling so directly with colonization, displacement, and the effects of genocide.  Furthermore, in having worked as an anthropologist with an indigenous population for nearly 20 years, I find that the conflation of religion with indigenaity is also problematic and reductive.  Many Native Americans are, in fact, Christian, and this makes them no less Native American, just as some of the people I work with are Pagan, Methodist, Anglican, Buddhist, the list goes on. Certainly there are places where our rights to worship are being challenged, and some may be outright persecuted, but I think that in the modern world the intellectual idea of freedom of religion alone should be sufficient to justify our practice.  We don’t need to be hitching our wagon to dispossessed peoples who have genuinely earned the voices they have.

I realize that the notion of modern Pagan elders and ancestors probably emerged from the counterculture of the 1970s, and reflects a spirit of egalitarianism and the values we want to see, including respect for people who have contributed a lifetime of work to their tradition. However, times have changed, and the suggestions of tribalism that such language suggests carries different associations now, some of which may not be appropriate or sensible to adopt. As Pagans, we should feel confident enough to simply be who we are in the modern world, and be sensitive enough to choose our words wisely.

On Liminal Nation last year there was a discussion regarding the perceived relationship between gender liminality and magic – particularly shamanism. This is a huge area, with no easy answers (although plenty have been supplied, admittedly) but what piqued my interest here was not so much that there is a relationship between people who have been identified as existing outside of the regulatory gender binary and a predisposition towards shamanism (or other magical practices) – but how the two became linked as ethnographical and scientfic categories.

It’s not uncommon to see in popular texts this relationship between gender-variance and a predisposition towards shamanic/magical practice being treated as a transcultural universal (much in the same way that the term Shaman itself) – sometimes to the extreme that any person who identifies as LBGTQI (and any other permutation) is said to be potentially “shamanic” – and occasionally, with the subtext that LBGTQI persons are likely to be better at being shamans/magicians than straight folks. Occasionally, I’ve seen this argument put forwards as a new and radical idea. Equally, there is the simplistic idea that the “presence” of gender-liminal or gender-variant sacred specialists is an indicated that such cultures are, (or were) generally more relaxed or affirmative towards LGBTQI persons than, say, contemporary Euro-American culture.

So I’m interested in how this (presumed) relationship between shamanism and gender-variance came about. I initially thought that the mid-nineteenth century – with the rise of both sexology (and the consequent categorisation of sexual behaviour and identities) and the growth of the tendency to label religious specialists as hysterical or neurotic would have been a key moment, but I’ve actually found that many of the tropes that we commonly emcounter in contemporary discourse on shamanism – such as initiations, gender-variance, trance states and creativity for example, can all be found in eighteenth century writings. I do find it interesting that a great deal of contemporary writing on shamanism and its relation to sexuality still draws on eighteenth and nineteenth-century scholarship, much of which was inherently hostile to either shamanism or gender-variance – which I mentioned in passing in my observations on The Golden Bough in January, 2010.

For this series of posts then, I’m going to examine the historical development of the relationship between shamanism and sexuality as western categories and how they were related to wider cultural issues and trends. I’ll start with a bit of scene-setting; examining some aspects of European attitudes to native peoples and sexual practices prior to the first wave of “shamanic discovery” in the eighteenth century.

Noble and Ignoble Savages
Historical records which explicitly make a relationship between the religious practices of “primitives”, “unnatural vices” and gender variance can be found from the sixteenth century onward, as this collection of documents – Native Americans/Gay Americans 1528-1976 indicates. Similarly, accounts which made an explicit link between “hermaphrodites”, sodomy and ceremonial specialisation amongst the native peoples of South America go back to the sixteenth century – and the sodomy trope was, as Michael Horswell (2005) argues, used by the Spanish to justify their conquest and conversion of the Incas. Horswell’s work shows that in sixteenth century Spanish texts, a link between sodomy, effeminacy, cross-dressing and hot climates (which recurs, as I will discuss in later posts, throughout eighteenth and nineteenth century writings) was already being established:

“all the rest were sodomites, especially those who lived on the coasts and in warm lands; so much so that young men paraded around dressed in women’s clothes in order to work in the diabolical and abominable role”
(quoted in Horswell, p73)

It is also from the Spanish in the sixteenth century that the first mentions of bradaje – later anglicised into berdache can be found:

“I saw a wicked behavior (diablura), and it is that I saw one man married (casado) to another, and these are effeminate, impotent men (unos hombres amarionados impotents). And they go about covered like women, and they perform the tasks of women, and they do not use a bow, and they carry very great loads. And among these we saw many of them, thus unmanly as I say, and they are more muscular than other men and taller; they suffer very large loads.”
quoted in Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Warfare, Homosexuality, and Gender Status Among American Indian Men in the Southwest in Foster, 2007

Emerging European notions of “the savage” were complex. It’s not unusual to find savage peoples compared to the idealised figures of Classical mythology, and elsewhere, indiscriminately labelled as cannibals. Savages were portrayed as lacking property, religion, laws, morality or self-restraint – any feature, in fact, which Europeans thought of as essential to civilisation.

Marc Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Novvelle France (1609) praised the Indians of New France:

“Also we must say of them that they are truely noble [emphasis added], not having any action but is generous, whether we consider their hunting or their employment in the wars, or search out their domestical actions, wherein the women do exercise themselves, in that which is proper unto to them, and the men in that which belongeth to arms, and other things befitting them, such as we have said, or will speak of in due place.”
(quoted in Ellingson, p22)

Ter Ellingson (2001) argues that Lescarbot’s work – which establishes the idea of the “Noble Savage” is a typical example of a European attempting to understand a different culture in terns of familiar social frameworks – that Lescarbot’s assertion of savage “nobility” was not the kind of romantic idealism one might associate with Rousseau or Hobbes, but the simple conclusion that because all the native hunted, they were – legally speaking – noble, because for Europeans, hunting was a privilege which distinquished nobles from commoners.

Travel accounts were augmented by the reports of missionaries, for example the account of Louis Hennepin (1640-1701) recounting his experiences of the Mississipi Valley:

“Nothing can be imagin’d more horrible than the Cries and Yellings, and the strange Contorsions of these Rascals, when they fall to juggling or conjuring; at the same time they do it very cleverly. They never cure anyone, nor predict anything that falls outm but purely by chance: mean time they have a thousand Fetches to bubble [i.e., cheat] the poor people, when the accident does not answer their Predictions and Remedies; for as Isaid, they are both Prophets and Quacks.”
(quoted in Flaherty, 1992, p31)

Accounts of shamans trying to hinder the missionaries’ work of conversion also began to appear, as well as the disappearance of shamanic practitioners in the face of advancing conversion. Neil S Price (2001, p4) notes that the idea that Shamanism represented a collective and widespread pattern of belief first arose when Christian missionaries in Siberia began to treat shamanic practices as a “pagan religion” which could be overthrown.

One of the first uses of the Germanicized term schaman can be found in the 1692 book North and East Tartary by Nicolas Witzen. Witzen’s book was an account of his travels across Russia and the tribal peoples he encountered, and their “schamans” or “priests of the Devil.” It was very common during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to see accounts of native people’s religion explained in terms of devil worship or necromancy. As long as authors were careful to discuss savage peoples within the boundaries of the devil rhetoric, then they were able to discuss aspects of native practices such as trances, healing or the use of narcotic substances. Samuel Purchas’ 1613 work Purchas His Pilgrimage can be seen as an early attempt at comparative religion, in that Purchas reviews accounts of religious beliefs all over the world in his attempt to establish the supremacy of Anglian Christianity. Purchas’ work provides an early account of a shamanic trance, and also makes reference to reports of “women-men” in California and Peru:

“Every Temple or principall house of adoration kept one man or two or more, which went attired like women, even from the time of their childhod and spake like them, imitating them in everything. Under pretext of holiness and Religion, their principall men, on principall daies, had that hellish commerce.”
(quoted in Flaherty, 1992, p35)

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, accounts of native peoples’ religious practices took an increasingly skeptical turn as the popularity of explaining any religious phenomena in rational terms developed.

In the next post I’ll take a look at some Eighteenth century accounts of shamanism.

Sources
Ter J Ellingson, The myth of the Noble Savage (University of California Press, 2001)
Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1992)
Thomas Foster (ed), Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (New York University Press, 2007)
Gyrus, War & the Noble Savage: A Critical Inquiry into Recent Accounts of Violence amongst Uncivilised Peoples (Dreamflesh Press, 2009)
Michael J Horswell, Decolonizing the sodomite: queer tropes of sexuality in colonial Andean culture (University of Texas Press, 2005)
Neil S Price (ed), The Archaeology of Shamanism (Routledge, 2001)