Solomon's Secret Arts (49 page)

A century earlier, this would probably have been treated as a case of demonic possession, but by 1762, in London at least, witches were no longer convincing sources of supernatural power. The situation was clearly different in Bristol, where in the same year a case of fits and visions among the three daughters of a local innkeeper led to rumours of witchcraft among the local Methodist
community.
³⁶
Popular rather than learned phenomena, ghosts were dramatically interesting to a London public that was used to theatrical representations of wonderful events. The “miraculous” British victories in the Seven Years’ War, which was just coming to an end, may have increased the general sensitivity of Londoners to omens and portents. Some, however, were sceptical from the first, including Horace Walpole, son of the former prime minister, who on a visit to Cock Lane was acutely aware of the extent to which the experience resembled a theatre performance. He described it as “not an apparition, but an audition.” He half-expected to see “rope dancing between the acts,” and he commented wittily that “they told us, as they would at a puppet show, that it [the ghost] would not come that night till seven in the morning.”
³⁷

Two years later, Walpole published
The Castle of Otranto
, the first Gothic novel. In the preface, the author (who initially maintained anonymity) apologized for the occult elements in his medieval Italian tale:

As he claimed to have translated the story from an Italian book found among the papers of a Catholic family, these excuses may have been designed to avert accusations of “popish superstition.” The book did so well, however, that Walpole claimed the second edition as his own work. A new preface compared the plot to the work of Shakespeare, a national icon and safely Protestant author, describing the novel as “an attempt to blend two types of romance, the ancient and the modern.”
³⁹
Walpole had accomplished a remarkable literary feat: he had made the occult acceptable by “modernizing” it.

Yet the supernatural events of
The Castle of Otranto
—including an enormous helmet that falls from the sky, a walking, talking ancestral portrait and a gigantic foot—are silly enough, even by eighteenth-century standards, to make the reader wonder whether the author took them any more seriously than he did the Cock Lane ghost. They are essentially stage effects, designed to cause wonderment, but not belief, on the part of readers. They remind us of how magic had been kept alive on the English stage, even when it was disappearing from print. The witches and ghosts in Shakespeare's
Macbeth
had been made more striking, although perhaps not any scarier, by William
Davenant's 1664 revisions to the play, which added dialogue, dances and songs.
⁴⁰
Witches and magicians were also frequently seen in the operas written by George Frideric Handel.
⁴¹
These supernatural elements added to the unreal or fairytale quality of the operas; in spite of the complicated machinery of smoke, trap doors and hidden wires deployed to make them astonishing as spectacles, they were not meant to be believed. The occult happenings in
The Castle of Otranto
operate in the same way.

The idea that fear could be a pleasurable emotion was typical of the late eighteenth century; it would not have made any sense to an audience of the mid-seventeenth century. Perhaps this was because the late eighteenth-century public had fewer things to be genuinely afraid of, although that explanation seems dubious. While plague and famine were less threatening, war, disease, infant mortality and sudden death would have seemed just as familiar in 1760 as in 1660. More likely, the public had developed the cultural ability to discern between different types of fear, by separating those that arose from the prospect of actual harm from those that involved no bodily danger. This capacity may have been more pronounced among urban audiences, who were more exposed to the theatre and to novels, than among labouring folk in the countryside. The sense of control over fear was analysed by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in an essay of 1773, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror”:

Although Barbauld suggests that these reactions are innate, her examples imply that they have been learned through exposure to “strange and unexpected events.”

The pleasure derived from terror may have been particularly acute among women readers. The rising level of female literacy in the eighteenth century spurred the growth of types of publications that were designed, at least in part, to suit the tastes of women, among them Gothic novels.
⁴³
The fear experienced by female characters in these works is often connected with the possibility of rape and the loss of an honourable reputation—a real enough scenario, but one that could create horrified excitement in readers of both sexes, who trusted
that deliverance would arrive for the beleaguered heroine in the end. Moreover, by recounting tales that transgressed moral as well as rational boundaries, Gothic novels could be subversive of contemporary gender values, even if they usually returned to stable social and personal relations in the final pages.

Women were prominent among Gothic novelists. The best known of them, Ann Radcliffe, author of the celebrated
Mysteries of Udolpho
, was known for employing the device of “the explained supernatural,” where an apparently occult event is ultimately revealed as having natural causes. Her religious background as a rational Unitarian may account for this approach.
⁴⁴
Nevertheless, Radcliffe acknowledged a spiritual aim in her use of occult themes, even if she almost always debunked them. They stirred up terror, which for her was a sublime emotion, and quite distinct from horror—the former “expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” while the latter “contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.”
⁴⁵
The distinction was shared by other writers, and its existence complicates attempts to interpret, not just Gothic novels, but all writings of the late eighteenth century that refer to supernatural events. Were they meant to be taken as possible, or as ways of “expanding the soul” through exercising the imagination?

The two Gothic writers whose works are most confusing in this respect are William Beckford and Matthew “Monk” Lewis. Younger and wilder than either Walpole or Radcliffe, they treated occult phenomena with an awed reverence that does not allow an easy assessment of how they should be judged. Both were the offspring of Jamaican planter families, whose fortunes were based on the real horror of slavery. One of the richest men in England, Beckford seems never to have regretted the human misery from which his vast wealth was derived. The son of a prominent Tory politician who died when he was ten years old, Beckford was dominated by his mother, whose authority he apparently resented. He was thought to be obsessed with the supernatural from a young age, although the extent of his real interest in magic is questionable.
⁴⁶
He spent much time in Switzerland and Italy, and is supposed to have been initiated into a Masonic lodge in France. Beckford became known for extravagance, especially after holding a lavish coming-of-age party in 1781 at his estate in Wiltshire, followed by an equally splendid Christmas party for which his country house was decorated by the well-known theatrical designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. Three years later, he caused a public scandal when he either horsewhipped or sodomized (or both) an aristocratic young man with whom he was enamoured. Forced to go abroad, where his first wife died in childbirth, Beckford was shocked when, against his wishes, the literary scholar Samuel Henley published an English translation of
Vathek
, an “Eastern tale” that Beckford had written in French.

This short novel is an extraordinary performance. Purporting to be a true story from the Abbasid Caliphate, its central character is a young, self-indulgent caliph under the influence of a powerful mother. The latter is an adept in astrology and necromancy, although her spells are parodies of witchcraft and bear little relationship to ritual magic. After renouncing religion and devoting himself to a horrible Giaour or evil spirit, who demands the sacrifice of young boys, Vathek is promised “the diadem of Gian Ben Gian; the talismans of Solomon; and the treasures of the pre-adamite sultans.” After various encounters with lustful ghouls and talking fish, as well as a final warning from a good spirit, Vathek enters the palace of Eblis or Satan, where he is shown the talismans, kept within “cabalistic depositaries,” and beholds the “pre-adamite” Sultan Soliman himself, tortured for his impiety by a perpetually burning heart. Vathek's mother suffers a similar ghastly fate, while the caliph is merely condemned to an eternity without hope.
⁴⁷
Shaped by Beckford's own fantasies as well as by travellers’ accounts of the Middle East,
Vathek
does not obviously reflect any contemporary strain of occult thinking—indeed, the author would later regret that he knew nothing of actual astrology.
⁴⁸
Distancing itself from the charge of “superstition” by its Arabian setting, the text is careful to avoid heterodoxy: for example, by pointing out that Soliman is not the same as the biblical king. It answers charges of immorality with a final condemnation of excessive “curiosity.” Nonetheless, the novel plays with the notion that magic, or unlimited power, is both unlawful and temptingly real.

For Beckford, the occult represents a full-fledged freedom of the imagination, for which the author himself may long, but which he cannot openly endorse, because it is so dangerous to conventional morality. As already mentioned, the shocking details were the author's own invention, as he was apparently not well informed about occult thinking of any variety. The library at Fonthill Abbey, the vast Gothic pile that he designed to house his fantasies, contained only three alchemical works among the twenty thousand volumes sold at an auction in 1823.
⁴⁹
Beckford's contemporary Matthew “Monk” Lewis, on the other hand, knew much more about occult practices, and went further in his fiction towards a kind of magical realism. Lewis's mother absconded with a music master when he was a child. By the time he inherited his father's Jamaican plantations in 1812, Lewis had become a critic of slavery, determined to improve the lives of slaves, although not necessarily to free them. His previous life had been marked by privilege as well as by rebelliousness. Lewis first embarked on a diplomatic career, journeying to the German court of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1792, where he met Goethe.
⁵⁰
If he was exposed to occult Freemasonry there or in Berlin, it could account for some of the themes in his first novel,
The Monk
, which he published in 1795, at the age of only nineteen.
Rambling and sometimes incoherent,
The Monk
remains a compelling read, combining passionate emotion with diabolism and soft-core pornography.

Lewis had clearly read manuals of ritual magic, like the
Little Key of Solomon
, on which he relied for an extraordinary scene in the novel, where the monk of the title, hoping to violate a lovely young woman, solicits the help of a nun in summoning up Satan:

Eventually, the Devil appears, in the unexpected form of a beautiful young man: “He was perfectly naked: A bright Star sparkled upon his fore-head: Two crimson wings extended themselves from his shoulders; and his silken locks were confined by a band of many-coloured fires, which played around his head.”
⁵¹
Did the youthful Lewis identify with the handsome Lucifer? Was this winsome Satan the object of demonic, homoerotic desire? Did Lewis mean his readers to sympathize with the lecherous, magic-mad monk? The novel leaves these questions open to interpretation.

Unlike Walpole or Radcliffe or even Beckford, Lewis did not try to distance himself from “superstition.” The supernatural is neither written off as a sign of the times nor explained in natural terms, and the objects of magic are not so fantastical as to be unreal, as in
Vathek
. Only the assumed fictitiousness of the narrative separates it from the occult stories found in Ebenezer Sibly's works. At the same time,
The Monk
lacks a redeeming religious vision of any sort. One searches in vain even for the sketchy warning against excessive curiosity that can be found in
Vathek
. Part of the sublime terror evoked by
The Monk
consists of guessing whether the author will himself fall into the pit of occult belief, dragging the unwitting reader along with him. Even at the end of the novel, we cannot be quite sure that he has avoided it. The cautious reader is still expected to arrive at moral judgments about the scenes laid out before him or her, but the text does not provide much assistance. We have begun to move here from the uncertain, self-conscious moral subversion of the Gothic novel to the
Romantic exaltation in freedom from moral constraint, which flourished after 1800. The contrast with the earnestly pious occult literature of previous generations could not be more starkly displayed. It was the heterodoxy and intellectual daring of occult sources, not their longing for respectability, that would most impress the Romantics, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Lord Byron and Mary Shelley. The wicked antics of Lewis's Devil-worshipping monk pointed towards the appropriation of occult thinking by a generation of Romantic writers who would employ it to serve their own literary agendas.