Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading the Sphinx

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Reading the Sphinx Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture Lynn Parramore

reading the sphinx Copyright © copyright holder name, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parramore, Lynn. Reading the sphinx : ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century literary culture / by Lynn Parramore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-230-60328-9 (alk. paper) 1. Civilization, Western—Egyptian influences. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. American literature—19th century— History and criticism. 4. English literature—Egyptian influences. 5. American literature—Egyptian influences. I. Title. CB245.P333 2008 932–dc22

2008007173

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: October 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

In loving memory of my father, Thomas Custis Parramore

In a dim corner of my room for longer than my fancy thinks A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom. —Oscar Wilde, “ The Sphinx”

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

viii 1

1

The Egyptomania Craze: From Wedgwood China to the Washington Monument

17

2

Tales from the Crypt: Theories of Cultural Burial

45

3

The Exquisite Corpse: Nineteenth-Century Literary Revivals

69

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The Empire of the Imagination: Egypt and Esoterica

91

5

Strangers in a Strange Land: Travelers in Egypt

123

6

Oedipus Aegyptiacus: Egypt and Early Psychology

147

Afterlives

171

Works Cited

179

Index

191

Author Biography

199

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Farideh Koohi-Kamali at Palgrave and especially to Dr. Marilyn Gaul, my editor, who has offered me inspiration and advice on this project. It was she who made this book possible, and I have been fortunate to know her as an inspired teacher, a wise mentor, and a caring friend. I would also like to thank Dr. Jeffrey Spear, my dissertation advisor at New York University. His friendship, support, and encouragement helped me to produce the work that formed the first layers of this book. The following people have contributed to Reading the Sphinx, and I would like to express my eternal appreciation to them: Chris Hand for combing online auctions for nineteenth-century ephemera and offering his generous support in so many ways; Jarred Swafford for the cover design; Frederick Doner for reading early chapters and offering encouragement; James Bourne for lending his air mattress in London and accompanying me to Victorian cemeteries. Thanks also to Charles Noble and Hannah Obee of the Chatsworth Collection and Paige Newman of the Virginia Historical Society. I thank all the friends whose laughter and kindness offered me cheer while I was entombed in my apartment and in research libraries, digging into the past. I am particularly grateful to my mother, Dr. Barbara Parramore, for her unwavering support and invaluable help.

Introduction

A stranger is arrived from Greece . . . —Herodotus, Histories

W

hen Herodotus traveled to Egypt in the middle of the fifth century BCE, he was awestruck by what he found. In his Histories, he decides to “speak at great length” of Egypt because “there is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works which defy description” (2.35). The first western historian guides the reader through a world of bizarre animal cults, magical rites, wondrous temples, and gigantic monuments, giving detailed accounts of the Egyptians’ vast knowledge of medicine, mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, and architecture. Herodotus’s insatiable curiosity is aroused. How do embalmers prepare mummies? What giant machines were used to build the pyramids? Why do the Egyptians consider themselves “the most ancient race in the world?” (2.15). The Egyptian historical figures Herodotus describes are passionate and often violent. Cruel Cheops forces his people to labor as slaves to erect his pyramid, prostituting his own daughter to raise the necessary funds. The murderous Queen Nitocris lures her enemies into a chamber and turns the Nile upon them while they feast. The Egyptians do not know moderation. They practice religion “to excess, far beyond any other race of men” (2.37). They are obsessed with ceremonies, rituals, and their own past. People living in the interior devote themselves “far more than any other people . . . to the preservation of the memory of past actions.” This attention to memory makes them, asserts Herodotus, “the best skilled in history of any men than I have ever known” (2.77). Above all, Herodotus casts Egypt as the stranger. The Egyptians do not follow the customs of Greece or any other nation. “Not only is the climate different from that of the rest of the world, and their rivers unlike any other rivers,” he proclaims, “but the people are also, in most of their manners and customs, exactly reverse the common practice of mankind” (2.35).

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Egypt is a land of mysteries. The fertility goddess Isis rules with her brother Osiris, her priests guarding secrets Herodotus is unwilling to disclose. What he does reveal gives the Egyptians credit for a crucial element of western theology. They were the first to teach the immortality of the human soul, an idea the Greeks merely borrowed. Herodotus recounts a tale told to him by the priests of Thebes that gives a surprising origin for the great oracular tradition of Greece. In one version, two Egyptian holy women are carried away from Thebes by Phoenicians. One is sold to Libya and one to Greece, where they found the first oracles of the two countries. In another version, two black female doves fly from Thebes to Libya and Greece. The dove landing in Greece speaks in a human voice and orders an oracle to Zeus to be founded on the spot. Amazingly, Herodotus is convinced that Egyptian holy women were likely the first to speak for the gods of Greece. Herodotus cites the behavior of Egyptian women as a key example of the strangeness of the culture. According to his reports, they attend the markets and trade while their husbands stay at home weaving. Women urinate standing up, while men sit down. Women carry burdens on their shoulders, but men carry them on their heads. Women, not men, are bound to support their parents financially. In Egypt, men must wear two garments, but the women only have to wear one. Egyptian women perform strange acts of public sex. Some are so alluring that they must be allowed to rot before being handed over to embalmers who might otherwise violate them. Though the strangeness of Egypt defies description, Herodotus speaks at length not only to fascinate and entertain his audience but also because his writing has a cultural purpose. At the time of his visit, the glory days of Egypt were long over. The Athenians, in contrast, were enjoying a golden age. Under the great statesman Pericles, Athens had become the jewel of the Greek city-states, both culturally and politically. Herodotus proudly traces the lineage of his young nation to Egypt, claiming that the Greeks are the rightful heirs of Egyptian science, theology, and wisdom. He enjoys borrowing a little luster from the Egyptians, but he also makes it clear that the Greeks—a rational people—have moved beyond the archaic ways of the “mother of all races.” Weird cults, animal obsessions, and oddly behaving women will not do in Greece. Herodotus was an observant traveler, but he did not understand the Egyptian language and probably talked to the priests of Memphis, Thebes, and Sais through translators. Though Egypt cannot “speak” directly to him, Herodotus’s narrative becomes the authoritative text on Egypt in the West for centuries. His creative concoction of myth, fact, anecdote, and fantasy creates a foundation for cultural perceptions that shape western identity. In 401 BCE, Sophocles’ grandson produced his play Oedipus at

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Colonus for the Festival of Dionysus. Oedipus complains of the behavior of his sons, who allow their sisters to care for their father and protect him in his wanderings: Ah! They behave as if they were Egyptians Bred the Egyptian way! Down there, the men Sit indoors all day long; weaving; The women go out and attend to business. (337–41)

This passage shows that Sophocles has taken Herodotus’s stories as fact. The map of western memory is being drawn, and Egypt has become a place that Greek writers turn to when they wish to define what is culturally normal and what is not. Plato, born in Athens in 427 BCE, may or may not have traveled to Egypt, but he was certainly interested in the relationship between the Greeks and the Egyptians. The great philosopher was a proud aristocrat from a prominent lineage and was more reluctant than Herodotus to accept the Egyptians as cultural ancestors. In his dialogues, Plato questions a longstanding tradition that Greek sages sought wisdom in Egypt. The character of Critias in Timaeus tells a story of the lawmaker Solon’s supposed visit to the Egyptian city of Sais. In this holy city, he is invited to give the priests a report of Greek history. Solon’s history receives a strange response. “O Solon, Solon,” cries one of the priests, “you Hellenes are never anything but children . . .” (Timaeus, 22b). The amused priest explains that the Greeks are unaware of the great antiquity of their culture because catastrophes have wiped out Solon’s ancestors along with their historical records. The Athenians, rather than the Egyptians, were the greatest artists, the bravest soldiers, and the creators of the “noblest polity” in the ancient world. The priest asserts that Greek civilization predates that of the Egyptians by one thousand years. The wondrous Egyptian skill in philosophy, divination, and medicine is a mere legacy of the awesome wisdom of the ancient Greeks. This incredible tale allows the Greeks in Plato’s dialogue to take a cultural leap. Not only have they separated themselves from an older civilization, but they now claim primacy over it. The Greek brotherhood of philosophy replaces the priests of Isis at Sais as the authority on intellectual matters. Plato’s stance became highly influential to Greek writers that followed him, shaping their ideas about themselves and their place in the world. Born in 46 CE, Plutarch once visited Egypt, but he did not travel extensively. He followed Plato in seeking to sever the cultural umbilical cord linking Greece to the land on the Nile. A mayor and priest of Apollo, Plutarch was an intellectual celebrity in the Roman Empire, which by this time

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encompassed Greece. He wrote a highly influential series of essays known as the Moralia, which stands in western tradition as the second most important classical writing on Egypt after the Histories. Plutarch took great pride in the heroes of Greek history but criticized Herodotus for factual errors and his historical interpretations. In Plutarch and His Times, R. H. Barrow points out that Plutarch was particularly annoyed with Herodotus for criticizing the city-states that saved Greece from Persia. As Barrow puts it, “Plutarch is fanatically biased in favor of the Greek cities; they can do no wrong” (157). Plutarch concedes that Greek wise men gained wisdom in Egypt but recoils from the idea of Egyptians as cultural predecessors. While Herodotus traces Greek customs and theology to Egypt, Plutarch absurdly attempts to derive Egyptian words from Greek roots and claims that Egyptian religion comes from Greek sources. During Plutarch’s time, Isis was worshipped widely in Greece. In his essay Isis and Osiris, addressed to a priestess of Isis at Delphi, he insists that “Isis” is actually a Greek word. The Greek Zeus acknowledges Isis: he is “near her and with her and in close communion” (351: 2); but he alone is supreme in the heavens. The goddess whose inscription in Sais reads, “I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised” becomes a mere handmaiden of the all-powerful Zeus. Plutarch notes that Egyptian priests place sphinxes in front their shrines and temples to “indicate that their religious teaching has in it an enigmatical sort of wisdom” (354: 9). Here, he associates the benign tomb-guarding Egyptian sphinxes with the Sphinx of Greek tradition, the clever female monster who threatens travelers with her riddle. He turns Egypt into a land of magic and trickery instead of truth and piety. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, Plutarch’s treatise would serve as the authority on Egyptian religion, as there was nothing to dispute his extravagant claims. Plutarch consistently links Egypt with negative feminine qualities. In A Letter to Apollonius, he accuses the Egyptians of mourning too much for the dead, a custom that is “very feminine and weak, and ignoble, since women are more given to it than men” (12–13). In Plutarch’s Lives, Egypt is a woman-centered land of eroticism, magic, debauchery, and deceit. His story of Antony, the Roman general that turned away from his country when he fell into Cleopatra’s arms, becomes a blueprint for relations between Egypt and the West. The Egyptian queen that Plutarch conjures in Lives is a dangerous siren, floating down the river in her magnificent barge. She speaks in an alluring voice that sounds like “an instrument of many strings” (1119). The powerful and clever queen is bent on luring Rome to destruction by catching Antony in her web. She calls herself the “new Isis” and reduces

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the once-vigorous Antony to behaving like man “under the effect of some drug or magic” (1125). Antony loses his identity in her archaic world, rejecting his Roman wife Octavia “to please the foreign and unlawful woman” (1154). Through Plutarch’s account of this famous chapter of Roman history, foreign and unlawful women come to stand for Egyptian culture as a whole. Egypt is the place where western writers locate forbidden desires and fears. Shakespeare would rely heavily on Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s narrative to produce his famous image of the quintessential femme fatale in Antony and Cleopatra. Each successive Greek version of Egypt strengthens the notion that the Egyptians are a primal, feminine, mysterious people best left behind. The most powerful Egyptian incarnations of the feminine are diminished Greek tradition and connected with dark mysteries and death instead of life and fertility. Hecate and Persephone, the descendants of Isis, are consigned to the underworld. Still, Egypt remained culturally important in the Roman world. Augustus hauled two magnificent obelisks to Rome after the defeat of Cleopatra that stood as visual reminders of his triumph. Many prominent Romans were enamored with Egypt, including the emperor Hadrian. When his lover Antinous drowned himself in the Nile, a cult arose identifying the young man with the Egyptian god Osiris. The bereaved emperor ordered Egyptian-style statues of Antinous to be placed throughout the empire and erected an obelisk in his memory in Rome. In the second century CE, the Roman writer Apuleius, who traveled to Egypt, wrote of the mystical followers of Isis in his novel the Golden Ass. As time passed, ancient Egypt was absorbed into Roman culture to the point that most people forgot the sources of the stories and architectural legacies that Rome had borrowed from its neighbor on the Nile. Ancient Egypt was fading in memory, but it was never quite obliterated. Biblical Egypt And on that very day the LORD brought the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt . . . —Exodus 12:50

Biblical accounts made Egypt more interesting to westerners than Assyria or even Greece, as John David Wortham observes (93). Like classical writings, these descriptions were widely considered factual until well into the nineteenth century, shaping western identity through comparisons with

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Egypt. Biblical narratives express a tension between claiming Egypt as a cultural parent and rejecting it as a dangerous influence. Egypt and Israel are closely linked in the story of the origins of the Hebrew people, but the Hebrews are unwilling to remember Egypt as a cultural ancestor; instead, they cast it as an enemy. Biblical Egyptians are pagans, whores, idolaters, and magicians. The transfer of sin onto Egypt is significant in Exodus, which recounts the birth of the Hebrew nation. The Hebrews win not only physical release from Egypt when they escape from bondage but also freedom from cultural domination. They distance themselves from the Egyptians by associating the strangeness of the country with the alienness of femininity. Solomon is convicted of “whoredom” when he marries an Egyptian princess. In Isaiah, the Lord rides into Egypt on a swift cloud to terrify Egyptian “charmers, witches, and wizards.” On this day, says the Lord, “shall Egypt be like unto women: and it shall be afraid and fear because of the shaking of the hand of the LORD of hosts, which he shaketh over it” (12:17). Genesis turns sexual relations between Egyptians and Israelites into a cultural battle. When Abram prostitutes his wife Sarai to Pharaoh, he risks his position as potential father of a new culture. In the figure of the desirable Hagar, Egypt is transformed from a virile king into a female slave who will serve the future nation of Israel by bearing Abram’s children. Ultimately, the Egyptian Hagar is rejected. She becomes the “bad mother” whose body must be banished. Once Hagar is out of the way, Abram and the barren Sarai—reborn as Abraham and Sarah—can become the parents of a new nation. Yet Hagar’s memory haunts the Bible. Her descendants, the Arabian patriarchs, constantly make war on the offspring of Sarah and Abraham. The Lord’s command for the Hebrews to turn away from foreign religious images is the most dramatic attempt to erase Egyptian influence. “You shall not make for yourself any graven image,” says the Lord, “or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:4). The sensual, animalistic, bisexual embodiments of Egyptian worship become blasphemous, and looking in the wrong direction becomes a dangerous act. This moment in the development of western cultural identity links Egypt to spectatorship in ways that will influence the reception of Egyptian art in the West. The western treatment of Egyptian objects and images reveals a troubling memory of fear and desire in which Egypt becomes a symbol of fleshy, sinful strangeness. What Hungarian psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok call “preservative repression” in The Shell and the Kernel sums up what has

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happened to this cultural creation, this Egypt-as-stranger. It becomes sealed up in a psychic crypt, haunting the subject from within (Torok 1: 100–102). Egypt-as-stranger gets passed down, inscribed in cultural memories that remain remarkably stable because they derive from canonical texts. When western travelers and adventurers began to dig up Egyptian relics from their tombs after thousands of years of burial, they disturbed this crypt. Traditional relationships between self and other, east and west, male and female, “true” and “false” religions, and “good” and “bad” cultures began to shift like desert sand. Egypt and the Early Church Believing they were sacrilegious, early Christians let Egyptian monuments fall into ruin. Often they destroyed them in an effort to wipe away the traces of a threatening ancient civilization. They hacked away at statues, plastered over brilliantly colored wall scenes, and converted temples into churches. As they superimposed their culture over the older one, the Christians absorbed visible Egyptian remains into their own narratives. Travelers who passed through on the way to the Holy Land came to believe that the pyramids and other monuments were part of biblical history. One of the domes of St. Mark’s in Venice contains a twelfth-century mosaic depicting the pyramids as Joseph’s granaries, an idea first suggested by fifth-century Latin writers. By the fourteenth century, a popular guidebook for pilgrims repeated the tale of Joseph’s granaries and became an unchallenged source on Egypt for centuries. While Christianity was on the rise in the Roman Empire, Isis was still gaining converts. In The Secret Lore of Egypt, Egyptologist Eric Hornung notes that by the Egyptian Late Period (ca. 664–332 BCE), Isis had become a universal goddess, “the one who is all” (Hornung 65). She embodied the cosmic order and controlled fate. She was the great virgin, the divine mother, and the queen of the universe—attributes that later turned up in the Christian Mary. The Isis cult spread into the far-flung territories of the Roman Empire in northwest Holland and England. In 391 CE, the emperor Theodosius officially outlawed pagan cults, but Isis worship continued into the sixth century CE in Italy and Egypt until persecution finally swept her into the shadows (Hornung 65–72). By this time, there was another contender with Christianity on the scene. The new rival, a magus figure known as Hermes Trismegistus, was a fusion of the Egyptian Thoth and the Greek Hermes, gods associated with magic and written language. Both the classical and biblical accounts stoked the western fascination with Egyptian occult secrets. The early Christians dealt with this heretical

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legacy by outlawing the language of ancient Egypt, striking a major blow against the “false” gods. However, Neoplatonists kept the interest in Egyptian mysticism alive, focusing on the wisdom that Solon reputedly obtained in Sais. Neoplatonists and the proponents of various occult traditions believed that hieroglyphic writing held the keys to philosophical truths. They began to see the figure of Hermes Trismegistus as a precursor of Christ and even the source of his teachings. Men who fashioned themselves after him as the learned mediators of Egyptian wisdom enjoyed an air of glamour and access to valuable secrets. Certain church fathers responded to this trend by claiming Egyptian wisdom in the service of Christianity. St. Jerome, a Christian apologist, defended the practice. He likened it to a Christian warrior taking to wife a beautiful woman among enemies, captured and purified so that she may be used without fear of contamination. D.W. Robertson, Jr. points out that a passage from the writings of St. Augustine was even more influential than St. Jerome’s “beautiful captive” defense of turning pagan wisdom to western purposes: Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and grave burdens which the people of Israel detested and avoided, so also they had vases and ornaments of gold and silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them secretly as they fled, as if to put them to a better use . . . In the same way all the teachings of the pagans contain not only simulated and superstitious imaginings . . . which [Christians] ought to abominate and avoid, [but] liberal disciplines more suited to the uses of truth, and some most useful precepts concerning morals. Even some truths concerning the worship of one God are discovered among them. These are, as it were, their gold and silver, which they did not institute themselves but dug up from certain mines of divine Providence. . . . When the Christian separates himself . . . he should take this treasure with him for the just use of the teaching of the Gospel. (qtd. in Robertson 340–42).

The notions of the “beautiful captive” and “Egyptian gold” blur the boundary between Israel and Egypt that was so crucial to Judeo-Christian identity. St. Augustine tries to preserve the separation by insisting that anything legitimate in Egyptian learning was “dug up,” or stolen, from Providence. His inversion of cultural genealogy echoes the approaches of Plato and Plutarch in subsuming what is considered valuable about Egypt into Christian tradition, and leaving the rest behind.

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Secret Egypt: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment During the Renaissance, Neoplatonists and Hermeticists began to identify Moses with Hermes Trismegistus and returned credit to ancient Egypt as the source of philosophical truths and occult secrets. Italian humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino, the first to translate all of Plato’s extant works into Latin, also translated a collection of documents known as the Corpus Hermeticum that dealt with philosophy, alchemy, and magic. These documents were thought to date back to Pharaonic Egypt, though it is now known that they were actually Hellenistic Greek. The Corpus sparked a revival of Egyptian wisdom, prompting many of the intellectual stars of the day to turn their attention eastward. Swiss alchemist Paracelsus traveled to Egypt seeking enlightenment, and the French occultist Nostradamus studied hieroglyphics for their magical secrets. The Polish astronomer Copernicus cited Hermes Trismegistus as an authority in his work, while the philosopher and occultist Giordano Bruno went so far as to regret the destruction of the “good religion” of Egypt by the Christians. Unfortunately, Bruno’s heresy eventually got him burned at the stake, but Renaissance Hermeticism spread to England, where Thomas More imagined a religion with Hermetic elements in his Utopia (1516). English poet Edmund Spencer conjured a fantastic medley of Egyptian lore in his Faerie Queene (1590–96). Spencer’s Church of Isis is an otherworldly place where priests interpret the prophetic dreams of the legendary warrior-maiden Britomart. In Italy, the cultural center of the Renaissance, visitors could see many original Egyptian objects as well as Egyptianized forms that fancifully blended ancient and contemporary styles. One item that caused a stir in Europe was a bronze and silver tablet known as the Mensa Isiaca, currently housed in the Egyptian Museum in Turin. This relic, unearthed in Rome on the site of the ancient temple of Isis in the 1520s, swarmed with Egyptian deities, symbols, and hieroglyphs pertaining to Isis’s cult. Esoteric scholars became obsessed with divining the magical secrets of the tablet. The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who claimed to be able to read hieroglyphics, wrote a treatise called Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1654) in which he investigated the mysteries of Mensa Isiaca. The tablet is now known to have been created by a Roman craftsman in the first century CE, and, unfortunately for Kircher, its symbols were not true hieroglyphs. However, the Jesuit’s extensive body of work contained many valuable contributions to the knowledge of ancient Egypt. Some hail him as the first Egyptologist. By the early seventeenth century, the secret Rosicrucian brotherhood was claiming Hermes Trismegistus and ancient Egypt as the sources of necromancy and alchemy. This prestigious group boasted Roger Bacon, René

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Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Sir Isaac Newton as members. Rosicrucians eventually settled in America, where they influenced the Founding Fathers. In 1614, the theologian Isaac Casaubon discredited the Corpus Hermeticum, showing that at least some of the texts were far more recent than scholars had believed. For a while, the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus fell out of favor, but the magus made a comeback in the eighteenth century. Controversial proponents of atheism, pantheism, Deism, free thinking, and other heresies looked to him as a philosophical guide. The Freemasons, an influential secret society, traced their origins to Egypt and used symbols such as pyramids, Egyptian columns, and Isis-headed capitals. Freemasonry spread from England to the Continent and to America, where its roster included Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. Egypt and Imperial Expansion In 1610, scholar, poet, and moralist George Sandys wrote a popular travelogue called Relations of Africa that draws heavily on Herodotus, Homer, and other ancient canonical writers. He describes Egypt as land of ruins where monstrous statues crumble into dust and fabulous ancient cities lie buried in the sands of time. “Amongst the hidden mysteries of Nature,” he declares, “there is none more wonderful than the Nile,” which works the opposite of any other river, “little when others are great and in their decrease increasing” (2: 94). His description of the Egyptian Labyrinth, an intricate ruined mortuary temple, contains hints of gothic flair. The passages of the labyrinth are “as darke as hell.” They “confound the memory and distract the intention, leading into inextricable error” (2: 113). For Sandys, the labyrinth was a rich symbol of the perplexing path of life whose meaning the sensitive English traveler could appreciate. By the time of Sandys’s writing, Egypt had been an Islamic country for a thousand years and had been recently annexed by the Ottoman Turks. According to Sandys, the ancient Egyptians were to be admired, but the current inhabitants of the country were “ignorant” Arabians and “Moores” who did not value their magnificent works (2: 108–9). This attitude became common as imperialism gained momentum. European travelers who saw themselves the true inheritors of the cultural legacy of ancient Egypt felt free to bring home valuable treasures to display and sell. Despite Judeo-Christian iconoclasm, Rome, the center of the Catholic Church, displayed Egyptian relics in important public spaces. The British

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had fewer visual evocations of Egypt, and they became hungry for artifacts as imperial expansion progressed. During the Reformation when the Church of England separated from Rome, English Protestants had stripped churches of holy relics and religious images. In The Shows of London, Richard Altick explains that when they did this, the Protestants created a visual void in religious practice (5–7). Ironically, it was the graven images of ancient Egypt originally banished by the Lord that came to fill this void. What God had excluded from memory returned as a cultural fixation. Eighteenth-century explorers resurrected visual communion with the past of Egypt through their vivid accounts and lush illustrations. Readers could discover the majesty of ancient monuments in Reverend Richard Pococke’s A Description of the East and Some Other Countries (1743–45) and the Danish Frederik Ludvig Norden’s Travels in Egypt and Nubia (1757). Traveling artists like Richard Dalton painted Egypt to life, lifting the curtain of a country few Europeans had seen. Architects began to experiment with Egyptian styles, and Egyptian monuments and tombs sprang up in graveyards and gardens. Interior designers brought Rococo sarcophagi and sphinxes into the homes of the wealthy. Egypt became the rage among the educated classes as antiquarians and gentleman-collectors set up curiosity cabinets where they proudly displayed Egyptian treasures. By 1741, members of the Egyptian Society, including Pococke and Norden, were meeting regularly in London to dine and discuss their antiquities. Egypt in Pre-Napoleonic Literature The figure of Cleopatra was perennially fascinating to Europeans. The legend of this famously mutable figure shifted according to the preoccupations of successive historical periods. In her study Cleopatra, Lucy Hughes-Hallett notes that in the medieval period, the queen became an emblem of courtly love in works of poets like Chaucer, who portrayed her in his Legend of Good Women. She points out that as scholars found and translated ancient texts in the centuries following Chaucer, Cleopatra became a popular tragic figure on the stage in Italy, France, Germany, and England (113–15). In 1559, the French Renaissance scholar Jacques Amyot translated Plutarch’s Lives, and twenty years later Sir Thomas North translated Amyot’s text into English. As noted, Shakespeare relied on North’s translation of Plutarch in writing Antony and Cleopatra (ca. 1606). The Roman soldier Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s play illustrates her return from an example of virtue back into the elusive, dangerous, shape-changing siren described by Plutarch:

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Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety: other women cloy The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; for vilest things Become themselves in her: that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish. (2.2: 270–76)

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is “riggish,” meaning “unmaidenly,” a suggestion that her sexuality is impure and contaminating. The Roman leader Antony abandons the creation his own “lawful race” with his virtuous wife Octavia for a barren union with the “unlawful” Egyptian harlot. Cleopatra transforms in the course of the play from Antony’s esteemed partner into a desperate witch who emasculates him: “O thy vile lady,” laments Antony, “She has robbed me of my sword!” (4.14: 22–23). Shakespeare’s Egypt is a woman’s land oozing with slime and infested with serpents, intriguing but poisonous. Antony regularly refers to Cleopatra as the “serpent of old Nile,” making her the symbol of its archaic monstrosity. Shakespeare expresses the conflict between Egypt as a place of origins and an alien world in a story that echoes biblical narratives. Like the people of Israel, Antony is a slave in Egypt, bound by “strong Egyptian fetters.” Cleopatra, the embodiment of Isis, is a dangerous mother who threatens to engulf him. Her previous union with Caesar has produced an heir who threatens the future of Rome. Antony’s lawful wife, the modest, cold, and dull Octavia, echoes Sarai, while the desirable Cleopatra suggests the figure of Hagar. If Cleopatra wins this bid for cultural parenting, Rome will become Egyptian. In the world of the play, Egypt is the wrong place for lawful marriage and procreation. Octavius wants to be certain that Cleopatra and her child Caesarian will not be able to claim the legacy of the West. For this reason, he plans to take the queen of Egypt to Rome to display as a trophy: “For her life in Rome / Would be eternal in our triumph” (4.1: 65–66). Cleopatra’s suicide foils Octavius’s plan, but before she dies, the queen rejects her Egyptianness by turning away from Isis, the “fleeting moon.” Cleopatra is transmuted into Egyptian gold, purified of her toxic otherness, and redeemed. The death of the last native-born Egyptian ruler safely buries the archaic world she represents in the past, while Antony’s demise instructs future westerners to steer clear of the dangerous land of Egypt. Despite Shakespeare’s characterization of Egypt as a land of vice, later Renaissance writers depicted it as a place of ethical example. Edward Young, remembered for his poem “Night Thoughts,” wrote a play about the mythical Egyptian King Busiris that was staged in Drury Theatre in

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1719. The first act of Busiris, King of Egypt opens with an ode to positive Egyptian traits: If glorious structures, and immortal deeds, Enlarge the thought and set our souls on fire My tongue has been too cold in Egypt’s praise The queen of nations, and the boast of times Mother of science and house of the gods Scarce can I open wide my lab’ring mind To comprehend the vast idea, big, With arts and arms so boundless in their frames. (1.1: 1–8)

A three-volume novel by French priest Jean Terrasson went even further in praising ancient Egypt and became a sourcebook for the Freemasons. Sethos (1771) is presented as an account given by an anonymous Greek of the second century CE who finds a manuscript recording the life of Sethos, an Egyptian prince of the thirteenth century BCE. Terrasson’s Egypt is a culturally advanced country ruled by the wise Queen Nephte, whose incompetent husband stays out of political affairs. Terrasson repeats many of Herodotus’s assertions in the course of the novel, including the notion that the Egyptians first conceived the soul’s immortality. He also turns the customs of women reported by the historian into positive cultural traits. During Sethos’s time, “the Greeks were as yet a barbarous nation,” especially in regard to “their custom of locking up their wives” (Terrasson 63). Egypt, in contrast, was a land where women were educated and freely conversed with men, who were perfectly comfortable seeing them naked. This egalitarian country is enlightened by a vast system of science, technology, art, and law that requires initiation into the mysteries of the goddess Isis. The initiate Sethos brings Isis’s wisdom to the uncivilized places of the world, spreading her golden light into Arabia and Africa. Isis is the model colonial queen who redeems rather than contaminates. Father Terrasson’s popular novel delighted the Masons with its idea of an international society of enlightened disciples. His vision of Egypt influenced Mozart’s evocation of a mystical land of truth in The Magic Flute. Egyptian theatrical sets influenced by Sethos thrilled audiences with their depiction of Egypt as a beautiful, exotic land of incomparable monuments and art. Early Romantic writers continued the trend of looking to ancient Egypt as a source of philosophical truth and aesthetic inspiration. Baron Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, a poet of early German Romanticism known by the pseudonym Novalis, wrote an unfinished novel called The

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Novices of Sais (1798) in which the natural world becomes a glorious hieroglyph waiting to be read. The themes of an ancient mystical age, rituals of initiation, and a veiled female figure as the source of wisdom converge in this profound meditation on the beautiful enigma of nature. In the 1780s and 1790s, revolutionary changes took place in the field of horticulture, raising new questions. Did the task of deciphering nature properly belong to poets or scientists? Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was able to bridge these two worlds. His wild and wonderful best-selling book of poems on plants and nature, The Botanic Garden (1791), expresses Isis’s association with agriculture and fertility. Darwin presents nature in a variety of female characters, many drawn from myth. He notes that in Egypt, Medusa was once a “hieroglyph” of divine wisdom, only later becoming a terrifying monster in Greek tradition. One of the most striking illustrations in Darwin’s book shows a drawing by Henry Fuseli engraved by William Blake called “The Fertilization of Egypt.” The dog-headed god Anubis stands over the Nile facing the figure of Yahweh, his hands reaching up to sky to call for rain. In this vision, Egypt becomes the source of life, the birthplace of nature and an equal partner of Israel. The gothic literary genre, in contrast, expressed a growing interest in the dark and decadent side of ancient Egypt. This tradition rose out of an aesthetic revival in architecture and interior decorating that was seen as opposing the “classical” style of Greece and Rome. Critics derided the gothic style as barbaric and disordering to the human mind, while writers used gothic settings to create weird atmospheres for their stories. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764–65), the first gothic romance in English, combines gloomy architecture with supernatural terror. After Walpole’s book, the term “gothic” was applied to literature featuring ponderous castles, spooky graveyards, and dark cathedrals. Gothic writers understood that the obsession with Egypt played into the idea of human beings haunted by an occult order and fascinated by relics of a primitive past. Walpole, a connoisseur and avid antiquarian, poked fun at the obsession with Egyptian antiquity in a series of fanciful, satiric stories called the Hieroglyphic Tales. In “The King and His Three Daughters,” an Egyptian prince sparks a passion for the style of his country among fashionable courtiers. Walpole comically describes Prince Quifferiquimini as a man who “would have been the most accomplished hero of his age, if he had not been dead, and had spoken any language but the Egyptian, and had not had three legs” (32). Despite the prince’s absurdity, the courtiers slavishly imitate his outlandish fashion: “Every thing was to be á la Quifferiquimini. Both men and women of fashion left off rouge to look the more cadaverous; their cloathes were embroidered with hieroglyphics, and all the ugly characters they could gather from Egyptian antiquities, with which they

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were forced to be contented, it being impossible to learn a language that is lost; and all tables, chairs, stools, cabinets and couches, were made with only three legs; the last, however, soon went out of fashion, as being very inconvenient” (31). Walpole’s tale emphasizes the folly of such cultural adultery, but his ridicule did not prevent English connoisseurs from showing off their extravagant eccentricity by embracing Egyptian antiquity with open arms. William Beckford was just the sort of man that Walpole deplored. His father, the Lord Mayor of London, had grown rich through Jamaican sugar plantations and bought an estate that he equipped with a pseudo-Egyptian hall. The younger William, who delighted in the Arabian Nights (translated into English in 1708), became an avid collector and builder. He reconstructed his father’s estate and used it to store his immense collection of art and artifacts. His novel Vathek, originally written in French and published in English in 1786, blends popular Oriental elements with the gothic style. The book became a hit with Romantic writers fascinated by the East. Lord Byron referred to it as his “Bible.” Beckford tells the story of the Caliph Vathek, who renounces Islam to pursue his quest for pleasure and supernatural power. Equipped with an evil eye and an insatiable appetite, Vathek dabbles in astrology in his giant tower. His sorceress mother is fascinated by Egyptian magic, collecting mummies that she can exchange with the “infernal powers” for occult secrets. The plot of the novel hinges on a magical sword covered with indecipherable signs delivered to Vathek by a mysterious Indian. Even when a scholar successfully produces a translation, the signs on the sword continually change. In the end, Vathek is condemned to hell for his coveting of occult secrets and forced to wander speechlessly for eternity. Beckford’s novel emphasizes the sensual delights of collecting and links them to the interest in the supernatural. The outrageous, flagrantly bisexual, and decadent Beckford identified himself with the voluptuous Vathek: he also built a grand tower, studied the occult, and pursued his insatiable appetite for rarities. The grasping Vathek attempts to master the emblems of an alien world by turning them into playthings. He wants to turn relics into fetish objects whose ancient power he can absorb. But the signs on his mysterious sword remain elusive, haunting him with secrets he is unable to access. Beckford’s decadent style and exotic taste influenced collectors, artists, and decorators in the coming years. In 1844, the reclusive eighty-threeyear-old aesthete died after having fought unsuccessfully to have his claims to royal English lineage recognized. The British denied him the emblems of aristocracy, and so Beckford turned to the ancient world for suitable memorials for his extravagant life. He was entombed in Bath in a pink

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granite sarcophagus of his own design, inscribed with a line from Vathek: “Enjoying humbly the most precious gift of Heaven, Hope.” By this time, the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs had been decoded and the lid torn off the ancient crypt of memory. The movement toward this culturally transformative discovery began when an upstart Corsican general dreamed of forging his legacy in Egypt, making up his mind to claim the treasures that lay buried in the sand.

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The Egyptomania Craze From Wedgwood China to the Washington Monument

“Soldiers,” said Napoleon, “from the summit of yonder Pyramids forty ages behold you!” And the battle began. —F. de Bourienne, Bourienne’s Memoirs of Napoleon

B

y the end of the eighteenth century, the spinning jennies and smokespewing factories of the Industrial Revolution had transformed England into the richest nation in Europe. Trade with North and South America and the all-important India was booming. The British boasted the largest merchant marine in the world and an unrivaled navy to protect it. The French, in contrast, were reeling from the chaos that followed the French Revolution. The ruling Directory sought revenge on the British, who had caused colonial losses in America and Asia. They turned to Napoleon Bonaparte, the charismatic young general who had won electrifying victory in the Italian Campaign. In 1798, the general called his troops to Marseilles, spreading fears of invasion throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire. No one knew that Bonaparte had a secret mission. He planned to hoist the French flag over the pyramids. Bonaparte was inspired by classical accounts of Egypt that thrilled him as a boy. He imagined his quixotic campaign as a way to bring enlightenment to a once-glorious country that was now benighted and miserable. He would oust the ruling Marmelukes and, as a bonus, disrupt the English trade route to India. The ambitious general presented himself as a new Alexander the Great who would add fresh glory to his name in Egypt. Once Bonaparte’s soldiers got over their surprise at his intentions, they caught the general’s Egyptian fever. “We turned our hopes towards Egypt,” wrote one captain, “our imagination, inflamed by our memory of history,

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endowed each Egyptian lady with all the charms of a Cleopatra” (Moiret 38). For Napoleon and his army, the romanticized past of Egypt was even more alluring than its present. Europeans had gradually become more curious about ancient Egypt in the eighteenth century, but Napoleon’s three-year sojourn from 1798 to 1801 sparked an obsession so intense it came to be known as “Egyptomania.” Both French and British strategists saw contemporary Egypt as an important link to India and the Far East, but they also gleaned the value of the ancient relics under the desert. Bonaparte was determined to lay claim to these treasures and brought along a commission of top scientists and scholars with his army. The savants, as they were called, had orders to dig the desert for cultural gold. They were certainly not the first to go treasure hunting in Egypt. The Egyptians themselves had begun to systematically plunder their own past toward the end of the Twentieth Dynasty. The Roman emperors followed suit, hauling off their share of Egyptian antiquities. Brian M. Fagan reports that in the Middle Ages, the Arabs took to looting so enthusiastically that grave robbing became a taxed industry. Guidebooks of the period showed treasure hunters how to find tombs using magical incantations (Fagan 38–39). Napoleon’s savants were the first to conduct a large-scale operation in the name of scholarship. His military campaign fizzled after initial success, but the savants attacked their mission with unquenchable zeal. They swarmed over the ruins of Karnak and Luxor (ancient Thebes), wearing top hats as they worked under the blazing sun. At Edfu, they discovered massive columns of a magnificent temple of the god Horus poking up from the sand. Braving dire weather and dysentery, they sailed as far as the island of Philae, near the ancient border of Nubia. There they saw an enchanting temple of Isis built on the spot where legends told that the goddess had found her dismembered husband’s heart. The savants carefully studied and catalogued each relic they found. They produced eerily accurate engravings and filled their portfolios with a wealth of drawings and data. When Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated the general in the Battle of the Nile, the savants threatened to burn their work rather than hand it over to the British. The winners let them keep much of it but seized the most significant prizes. These were quickly dispatched to the British Museum, where most of them remain. If they had lost contemporary Egypt as a territory, the French were not about to concede its coveted past. The folio-sized pages of a twenty-volume set called Description de L’Egypte, which appeared between 1809 and 1828, showed the stunning results of the savants’ work. Napoleon himself edited the Description, which brimmed with detailed engravings of Egyptian architecture, artifacts, and landscapes. The frontispiece bolstered French

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claims to the cultural legacy of Egypt by showing the general as an ancient conqueror raising a spear over a fabulous scene of monuments. Napoleon and the Nile Style In France, Bonaparte’s campaign triggered a vogue for Egyptian themes in architecture and the decorative arts. The archaeological findings of French surveyors stirred practitioners of emerging artistic styles just as the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii had inspired Neoclassical artists to imitate the art of Greece and Rome. Before the Description, Baron Dominique Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte (Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, published in Paris in 1802; translated into English in 1803) gave accurate renderings of Egyptian architecture that artists eagerly studied. Denon, a skilled artist responsible for a popular collection of pornographic etchings before joining Napoleon’s campaign, emphasized the loftiness and sublime grandeur of the Egyptian style. The association of Egypt with learning made Egyptian themes perfect for libraries and universities, while the link with eternity gave cemetery designs a solemn air. The Empire and Regency styles that rose out of Neoclassicism were fed by rivalries between the French and the British. Napoleon I, who crowned himself emperor of France in 1804, vied for cultural supremacy with the British prince regent, who ruled for his father, the mad King George III. Through art, ancient Egypt was again a cultural battleground. The Empire style reflected Napoleon’s enthusiasm for antiquity and his taste for clean lines and martial themes. His official architects and decorators, Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, incorporated the Empire style into their designs for the Palace of the Louvre and Tuileries Palace. Their influential guidebook, Recueil de décorations intérieures (Guide to Interior Design, 1801 and 1812), illustrated several eye-catching Egyptian designs, including a desk adorned with Isis figures, a clock decorated with the goddess’s crescent moon, and a cornice topped with sphinxes. Architects, painters, sculptors, and designers imitated Percier and Fontaine’s work and copied popular pattern books like Joseph Beunat’s Recuil des dessins d’ornements d’architecture (Empire Styles and Designs, 1813). The more mass-directed pattern books freely mixed classical and Egyptian forms, showing regal sphinxes crouching alongside frolicking satyrs and flying cupids. Designers in factories used Egyptian motifs to dress up objects of every description, from handkerchiefs to ice cream buckets. In 1808, the celebrated printed cotton manufacturer Christophe-Phillipe Oberkampf

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produced a pattern called “The Monuments of Egypt.” The fabric showed scenes of sphinxes guarding temples and obelisks covered in hieroglyphs. In 1806, the Paris Rue Martel Factory turned out a widely copied gilded clock. The lavish piece incorporated an exact replica of Denon’s drawing of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, a favorite of Napoleon’s soldiers. These designs were extremely popular among the wealthy, who sought sphinx inkstands, obelisk candelabra, and massive clock sets of bronze and marble that typically featured a timepiece topped with Egyptian beasts flanked by freestanding obelisks. Such clocks routinely fetch over fifteen thousand dollars in current antique markets. Denon encouraged manufacturers at Sèvres to create a show-stopping Egyptian Service (1804–12) to promote French porcelain production. His public relations instincts told him this could turn attention from his friend Napoleon’s military defeat in Egypt to the glory of his cultural conquest. The elaborate ensemble for dessert, coffee, and tea included an intricate centerpiece based on Egyptian temples from preliminary plates of the Description. The centerpiece, stretching out over twenty-two feet, made colossal Egyptian monuments fit neatly on a palace dining-room table. Napoleon wanted to keep the service, but he eventually gave it to Czar Alexander I in appreciation for his support of the Egyptian Campaign. Empress Josephine admired it so much that she ordered a second set. Soon, Egyptian-style services became must-have items for the fashionable. Louis XVIII later gave the empress’s service to the Duke of Wellington following the Battle of Waterloo. Nothing struck the imagination of the French more than the stylish way the ancient Egyptians dealt with death. While Europeans were depositing bones in humble barrows, Egyptians were building stupendous monuments and embalming bodies that would survive for millennia. In Architecture in France in the Eighteenth-century, Wend Von Kalnein explains that after French revolutionaries toppled the tombs and monuments of France’s former kings, attitudes toward burial customs began to shift. In the new France, public memorials were no longer just for monarchs. “Men of genius” and “men of virtue” could have first-class accommodations in the afterlife, too (Von Kalnein 255–56). City planners facing hygiene and space problems in traditional churchyards proposed burying the dead in new landscaped cemeteries. Their ideas caught on in 1804 when the emperor ordered a spacious cemetery in Paris, later known as the Père Lachaise. The striking design called for a central crematory in the shape of a pyramid, surrounded by Egyptianstyle sepulchral monuments. Throughout Europe and America, funerary architects created grand resting places for the dead based on the designs of Père Lachaise and popular French pattern books. Obelisks, Egyptian

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cornices, and pyramids continued to appear among the flowered paths and grassy lawns of public cemeteries well into the twentieth century. Thomas Jefferson’s grave is marked with an obelisk, as are those of Edgar Allan Poe and Beethoven. Napoleon was a great myth builder. He had a knack for using Egyptian iconography to shape his legacy in the popular imagination. In 1806, he ordered the construction of six public fountains in honor of his Egyptian Campaign. Just as the pharaohs had once gloried in their mastery of the Nile, Napoleon showed off his control of modern French water systems. The Rue de Sèvres fountain depicts the winged sun-disk motif and an Egyptian-style figure based on a statue of Antinous. A sphinx graces the center of another fountain at the Place du Châtelet on the Right Bank. The emperor was especially keen on obelisks, the same symbols that Roman conquerors had used to associate themselves with Pharaonic power. In 1809, he expressed a wish to have an obelisk erected in PontNeuf to commemorate his victories in Prussia and Poland. This was never done, but in 1836, Louise XVIII had a gigantic red granite obelisk exalting the reign of Ramses II placed in the largest public square in Paris, the Place de la Concorde, where traffic now whirls incongruously around the ancient monument. A gift of ruler Muhammad Ali, the obelisk is one of a trio known as Cleopatra’s Needles. The other two stand in London and New York City. These obelisks were not connected to Cleopatra historically, but Mary Hamer observes that the French obelisk was placed on the exact spot where Marie Antoinette was humiliated and guillotined. This visual symbol subtly links the French victory over that unlawful female to the Roman triumph over the dangerous Egyptian queen (Hamer 78). Napoleon associated himself with the manly vigor of the pharaohs, but he also linked himself with Isis, the great symbol of fecundity and rebirth. His interest in Isis had to do with a long-standing belief among Parisian historians that the city owed its name to the Egyptian goddess. In 1809, the emperor set up a commission to investigate tales of an Isis cult in Paris and legends connecting the goddess to the emblematic ship of the city (a trace of Isis’s ancient association with passages and navigation). To the emperor’s delight, the commission confirmed the legends. In 1811, the maternal goddess of Egypt was shown on the new Parisian coat of arms, guiding the French passage into the future at the prow of an ancient ship. Napoleon was determined that France would lead the world in fashion as well as architecture and design. He aimed to revive the French fabric and lace industries that had fallen on hard times during the revolution. By blocking the import of English textiles, he sought to undermine the what the French dismissed as the “nation of shop-keepers” across the channel.

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He ordered the women of his court never to wear the same gown twice, forcing them to buy more expensive material for their dressmakers. As early as 1801, a writer for the English Lady’s Magazine reported a new color known as “Egyptian earth,” favored in Parisian robes and hair ribbons (“Parisian Fashions”). Between 1804 and 1807, designers of Empire-style robes added exotic elements to their creations, weaving Egyptian decorations onto fabric borders. Turban headdresses and cashmere shawls, like those Napoleon brought Josephine from Egypt, were the height of fashion, lending an Eastern flair to ladies’ costumes. Napoleon also had an eye for jewelry, inspiring the taste for archaeologically themed cameos and jewels. In 2007, an online auction listed a pair of silver and tortoiseshell earrings from the Empire period showing a frontal view of the Great Sphinx of Giza. Jewelers crafting such pieces incorporating Egyptian monuments were adorning the bodies of French women with symbols of cultural triumph. Egypt in Regency England Everything now must be Egyptian: the ladies wear crocodile ornaments, and you sit upon a sphinx in a room hung round with mummies, and with long black lean-armed long-nosed hieroglyphical men, who are enough to make the children afraid to go to bed. The very shopboards must be metamorphosed into the mode, and painted in Egyptian letters, which, as the Egyptians had no letters, you will doubtless conceive must be curious. —Robert Southey, Letters from England

The prince regent was not going to be outdone by his nemesis and began his own sponsorship of the arts across the channel. The Regency style, influenced by French designs, expressed the prince’s extravagance and exotic tastes. While Empire artists were celebrating Napoleon’s victories, Regency artists reflected public enthusiasm for Lord Nelson’s triumphs in Egypt. Their work promoted England as the rightful heir to Egyptian antiquities and artistic styles. Long after the military battle in Egypt had been settled, the contest to claim the past continued in factories and drawing rooms. Under the prince regent’s patronage, British manufacturers and architects became enormously influential throughout Europe, challenging their rivals in France. Regency designer Thomas Hope admired the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an Italian artist, designer, and architect known for etchings of antiquities in Rome. He also drew inspiration from Denon’s Voyage and his own extensive travels through Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Egypt. In 1807, Hope compiled his designs in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration,

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sparking a trend in archeologically based furniture. In the preface to his book, Hope expresses the Anglo-French rivalry in taste. He warns British designers to shun eighteenth-century styles derived from the “wretched ideas and trivial conceits, borrowed from the worst models of the degraded French school” (Hope 1). Hope’s volume contains plates illustrating the magnificent Egyptian Room of his London residence, which he opened for public viewing in 1804. He wanted this room to be the last word in Regency Egyptian Revival style, creating wall ornaments based on Egyptian scrolls and ceiling decorations taken from mummy cases. He proudly displayed a mummy in the center in a case of his own design. Contemporary interpretations of Egyptian style stood side-by-side with ancient objects in Hope’s room, including a modern onyx standing pharaoh and an antique Egyptian Isis of green basalt. Some of the stylish furnishings bursting with Egyptian deities and beasts that appear in his book can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. Several pieces still enliven the drawing rooms of some of the most elegant homes in England, such as the seat of Lord Faringdon in Buscot Park. Sir John Soane, a prominent Neoclassical architect influenced by Hope, was a Deist and Freemason who preferred antique themes to Christian imagery. Soane was struck by the grandeur and magnitude of ancient Egyptian architecture and paid special homage to temple designs: “The extent of these structures tires the eyes, their grandeur and unaffected simplicity fire the imagination, whilst the varied play of light and shade, bursting through different parts in every direction, and occasionally falling upon the colossal sculpture on the walls, must always produce the most powerful effect on beholders” (Soane 36). Soane packed his fine house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields with a vast collection of ancient artifacts, including his prize possession, an alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I. He gave the pharaoh’s resting place a new home in a specially designed basement room called the Sepulchral Chamber. When Soane’s treasure arrived in London, he threw a three-day party, inviting guests to view the sarcophagus by the light of flickering candles. Soane’s house, now a museum, contains sketches on movable panels that show his designs for Egyptian-style mausoleums. He used the ouroboros, an Egyptian motif depicting a snake biting its tail, in the design for his own tomb. The form of the domed vault of his tomb later influenced Giles Gilbert Scott’s design for the iconic red telephone box, making a tribute to ancient Egypt visible on every street corner. Soane’s legacy was also carried on by his apprentice Sir Robert Smirke, who produced a design for an Egyptian Room using Egyptian-style caryatids inspired by interiors he saw on his visits to Rome.

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Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, the most fashionable jewelers and goldsmiths in London, ensured that the wealthy had plenty of Egyptian-themed objects to choose from. The Duke of Cumberland, the brother of the prince regent and future King of Hanover, ordered a set of silver tureens from the firm. The design mingled winged Egyptian busts with classical motifs and royal ducal emblems, demonstrating how European aristocrats sought to visually trace their lineage back to the land of the pharaohs. The tureens, among the finest examples of the Egyptian-style work of Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, are now part of Gilbert Collection in Somerset House, London. Like their Parisian counterparts, British dress designers explored Egyptian styles in ladies’ fashions. In 1807, readers of the literary and fashion magazine Le Beau Monde were introduced to an Egyptian masquerade costume that called for a lace headdress and tight, thick curls on the forehead. The rather unconvincing costume includes an “Egyptian train of lilac spider net, showered with pearls, and worked in the centre with a large star of the same” (“Fashions for July”). Egyptian women did not wear floorlength lace trains, but the idea that they would shows how little Europeans really knew of ancient customs. In 1812, the editor of the Lady’s Monthly Museum, another popular fashion magazine, presented the latest style for evening party dress, “an Egyptian robe of peach blossom, evening primrose or lilac, shot with white or day primrose colour” (“The Dresses invented by Mrs. Osgood”). The Staffordshire firm of Josiah Wedgwood, known for its classical motifs, also produced Egyptian-themed work. The founder was an avid antiquarian who predicted future trends by incorporating Egyptian motifs in his black basalt ware (a type of fine-grained stoneware) well before Napoleon’s campaign. His son, Josiah Wedgwood II, went on to create Egyptian designs for everything from candlesticks to reproductions of canopic jars, vessels originally used to store mummy viscera. Winged sun disks and sphinxes adorn the red and black Egyptian-style tea services that became coveted items of the Wedgwood line. Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum can see the variety of Egyptian-themed objects produced in early nineteenth-century Britain. The collection includes a Wedgwood teapot and stand decorated with sitting sphinxes, a wallpaper border with a sphinx and mummy pattern, and an Egyptian-style clock featuring sphinxes and a falcon-headed Horus designed by master clockmaker Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy. A painted Egyptian-style Regency chair housed in the museum was based on the designs of George Smith, a craftsman influenced by Hope, whose Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1808) further popularized the Egyptian style in the furniture trade.

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Other influential books promoting Egyptian motifs include Rudolf Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufacturers, Fashions and Politics (1808–28) and Thomas Sheraton’s The Cabinet Directory (1803) and The Cabinet-Maker, Upholsterer and General Artist’s Encyclopedia (1804–6). Cabinet maker Thomas Chippendale gave Egyptian touches to furniture made for Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s house at Stourhead in 1802 and 1805. Throughout England, wealthy aristocrats read in libraries fitted with Egyptian scrolls, seated beside fireplaces adorned with mummy cases. Their bookcases stood on the heads of Egyptian goddesses, and their desks rested on Egyptian-style pylons. Original Egyptian relics were also highly prized. Chatsworth, the seat of the dukes of Devonshire, houses two ancient Egyptian statues of Sekhmet dating from the Eighteenth Dynasty (1570–1304 BCE). Curator Charles Noble reported to me that they were acquired by the sixth Duke of Devonshire (1790–1858), known as the “Bachelor Duke.” He obtained them from collector and pioneer Egyptologist William John Bankes, who procured them at Karnak to decorate his country house, Kingston Lacy. Hannah Obee, curator of decorative arts at Chatsworth, notes that the duke’s collection also includes several Egyptian Revival pieces, among them a nineteenth-century bronze and gilt candelabra featuring branches supported by Egyptian figures, a Berlin porcelain gold ground-coffee service that includes a coffee pot and teapot with recumbent sphinxes for finials, and a Naples Giustiniani creamware coffee pot formed as a canopic jar. The rakish prince regent and his cohorts were the style leaders of the day, throwing elaborate parties in extravagant palaces. In 1786, the prince rented a farmhouse in the seaside town of Brighton that was soon enlarged into a Neoclassical villa. Around 1802, a visitor described an “Egyptian Gallery . . . the walls of which are covered with a historical paper” (qtd. in Curl 143). Between 1815 and 1822, the renowned architect John Nash recreated the villa as a fairy-tale palace featuring Moghul and Islamic architectural elements along with Chinese and Indian interiors. The Royal Pavilion, now open to the public, contains several Egyptian-style items. Visitors can imagine the prince’s guests seated in the dining room, basking in the glow of candelabra featuring Egyptian figures holding tablets covered with hieroglyphs. In 2007, the music room housed a loaned Regency lamp celebrating the Battle of Trafalgar adorned with sphinxes and Egyptian figures. Such pieces were excellent propaganda for Lord Nelson’s image as the conqueror of ancient Egypt through his victory over the French. As Egyptomania flourished among the wealthy, the masses were getting a taste of the Nile style, too. Bullock’s Museum, also known as “Egyptian Hall,” in Piccadilly, London, was one of the first major buildings influenced by Egyptian themes. Traveler and naturalist William Bullock wanted

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a museum to house his collection of curiosities that would be as eye-catching as his finds. In 1811, Peter Frederick Robison designed a façade for the museum using hieroglyph-covered columns that lured passersby with its exotic flair. Architects from Penzance to Kentucky copied its fantastic style. When Egyptian Hall opened in 1812, the public poured in to view Bullock’s dazzling displays of Egyptian art and artifacts. In 1819, J. B. Papworth outfitted the interior with Egyptian-style columns, winged disks, and uraei (the sacred serpents typically shown on royal headdresses). At this point, Bullock sold his collection and converted the museum into an exhibition space. Egyptian Hall became a major venue for art shows, many of which brought Egyptian wonders to a curious public. The Egyptian fever of British architects spread to America, where Benjamin Latrobe designed an Egyptian-style reading room for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In Russia, Egyptian-style halls appeared in palaces in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Not everyone was thrilled by the trend. The noted architect C. A. Busby griped about an Egyptian plague worse than locusts: “Of all the vanities which a sickly fashion has produced, the Egyptian style in modern architecture appears the most absurd: a style which, for domestic buildings, borders on the monstrous. Its massy members and barbarous ornaments are a reproach to the taste of its admirers; and the travels of Denon have produced more evil than the elegance of the engravings and splendour of his publication can be allowed to have compensated” (Busby 11). Busby’s lament hints at how the association of Egypt with the strange and repugnant was still alive beneath all the fascination—a warning of cultural contamination that had to be stopped. Despite such warnings, Egyptian-style porches and porticoes cropped up on private houses, while courthouses and even prisons took on forms that Ramses the Great might have recognized. Collecting Egypt During the Napoleonic period, European collectors purchasing a stonecarved scarab or a goddess figurine were symbolically linking themselves to an impressive ancient civilization that outshone their own past. In his essay “That Obscure Object of Desire,” Nicholas Daly describes Egyptian artifacts as a special kind of commodity, with their unknown origins, vaguely understood original purposes, and “other-worldly nature.” Their fascinating surfaces distracted viewers from negative Egyptian associations in western cultural memory (Daly 27–33). Collectors could enjoy the satisfaction of cultural cannibalism by swallowing the past into the belly of their drawing rooms. In his short story, “The Mummy’s Foot” (1840),

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French author Theophile Gautier explored the problems created by cluttering the home with Egyptian relics. The narrator decides that the foot of an Egyptian princess in a Parisian shop will make the perfect paperweight for his desk. In his dreams, the princess returns to demand her foot back, reminding him of the danger of owning mysterious objects. Members of the scientific community did not want to see a princess become a paperweight. They began to campaign to bring rare antiquities out of private trophy cases and into new museums where they could be properly contained. Wealthy collectors could simultaneously flatter their egos and contribute to public education by placing their treasures in the grand new spaces. Sir Hans Sloane’s personal collection of Egyptian artifacts became the foundation of the British Museum. Altick observes that Sloane deserves credit for transforming curiosity cabinets into museums and bringing these mysterious objects under the scrutiny of British scientists (Altick 15). Londoners of all classes—some of whom were not yet welcome in museums—could spend the afternoon gazing at curious foreign objects in public pavilions and exhibitions venues. Panoramas, cylindrical surfaces designed to show large-scale scenes, made viewing Egypt exciting as never before. Spectators walked through a darkened passageway to arrive in the middle of a 360-degree painting that might take them anywhere on the globe. They felt time and space collapsing in an experience as thrilling as contemporary IMAX theaters. Visiting foreign lands in such a venue was much cheaper and more convenient than experiencing the real thing. Frederick Catherwood was a traveler who turned his experience into profit, entering the panorama business in 1835. After a three-year journey to Egypt and the Holy Land, he returned to exhibit his scenes of Thebes and Karnak at the Leicester Square Panorama. In the 1850s, panoramas began to move, becoming the precursors of the modern motion picture. Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi’s awe-inspiring “Grand Moving Panorama of the Nile” stretched eight-hundred feet long. It carried viewers on a virtual journey of nearly two-thousand miles, finishing with a view of the pyramids and the Sphinx. One of the most popular venues for panoramas was Egyptian Hall, where visitors could watch the Israelites escaping from Egypt and travel vicariously through the ruins of Karnak and Abu Simbel. As the century progressed, British Museum curators gradually secured the Egyptian objects of carnivals and private collections in their carefully controlled public facility. However, one item baffled them—a three-foothigh chunk of black basalt bearing parallel inscriptions in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and demotic characters. It had been discovered in 1799 by Napoleon’s troops near the Egyptian town of Rosetta, but the English carried it to the British Museum following Nelson’s victory. French scholars

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had copies of the scripts and raced against their British rivals to crack the code of the strange signs. While the British Thomas Young and the French Jean-François Champollion delved into the mystery, a host of quacks, clerics, and occultists claimed that the Rosetta Stone revealed everything from apocalyptic prophecies to astrological magic. Enthusiasts of every kind were fighting to claim the lost knowledge of the stone. Meanwhile, adventurers set out to grab what remained of the physical history of Egypt. Giovanni Battista Belzoni opened new horizons for the display of ancient Egypt in the course of his extraordinary career. Born in 1778 in Padua, the handsome, six-and-a-half-foot Belzoni performed some years in a carnival, his feats as a strongman earning him the nickname “The Great Belzoni.” He was a skilled technician and became interested in using waterworks for spectacular effects in theatrical performances in the early 1800s. In 1815, the adventurous Belzoni traveled to Egypt to convince Muhammad Ali, the fierce Macedonian ruler bent on modernizing his country, to adopt a waterwheel project. When an ill-starred demonstration snapped the leg of his assistant, the undaunted Belzoni hatched an even more audacious scheme. The former circus giant proposed bringing the colossal head of a fallen statue of Ramses II from Thebes to England. Taken with the idea, His Majesty’s Consul General Henry Salt told Belzoni that the project would be “most cheerfully supported by an enlightened nation, eager to anticipate its Rivals in the prosecution of the best interests of science and literature” (qtd. in Mayes 124). Napoleon had coveted the great head during his campaign, but the feat of transporting an object weighing close to eight tons had eluded him. The daring Belzoni set forth on a quest to accomplish what Napoleon could not: he would haul this glorious symbol of the past to London. After a series of mishaps that would have stopped a less determined man, he finally got the head on a ship bound for England. Belzoni was satisfied that the magnificent monuments of Egypt belonged to the British, remarking that he found the head of Ramses II “apparently smiling on me, at the thought of being taken to England” (Belzoni 39). As the ship approached, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Horace Smith challenged each other to write a poem about the head, resulting in Shelley’s short poem, “Ozymandias.” John Murray, founder of the influential Quarterly Review, published Belzoni’s accounts of his adventures in Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries in Egypt and Nubia (1820), which was well received by the literati, including Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron.

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Mummy Dearest Mummies were the big game of treasure hunters, described as “the highest form of currency among collectors of Egyptian antiquities” (MacGregor 174). Egyptian corpses first appeared in western literature in the accounts of Renaissance travelers like John Sanderson. An agent of the Turkey Company, Sanderson was commissioned to search Egyptian tombs for mummies that could fetch handsome prices in Europe. In 1586, Sanderson and his companions descended into a dark cavern in the mummy pits outside of Cairo. They walked over a jumble of bodies, breaking off heads and appendages along the way. Sanderson could have sold embalmed body parts to an apothecary who would crush them into powder for medicine used to cure conditions ranging from vertigo to epilepsy. Medieval doctors thought mummy medicine particularly effective for problems associated with the female reproductive system. They prescribed it to induce abortion, prevent conception, and bring on missed menstrual cycles. Francis Bacon, Sir Robert Boyle, and Samuel Johnson described mummy medicine in their writings, and Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne knew about it, too. In the fifth chapter of his Urn-Burial, Browne expresses his dismay at living in a time when “Mummy is become Merchandise” and “Pharaoh is sold for Balsoms” (Browne). Karl H. Dannenfeldt reports that exasperated Egyptian officials tried to prohibit the export of mummies for this purpose. They were horrified by the violation of graves and felt that Christians were not worthy of eating the dead bodies of Egyptians (Dannenfeldt 19). In a gruesome twist, traders sometimes passed off fresh corpses as mummies when they could not come up with the original article. From a psychological point of view, the desire to eat dead Egyptians makes perverse sense. Mummies, like the bodies of women, represent the magical link between life and death. They symbolize both the fecundity of the soil of Egypt and the barrenness of the sepulchers and deserts. Shrouds wrapped tightly over naked flesh tempt the viewer with sensuous enjoyment and the thrill of violation. In The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle observes that the mysterious scrolls covered with hieroglyphs hidden among their creases suggest forbidden knowledge, identifying the mummy with the folds and recesses of the vagina (Pringle 204–5). Eating mummies makes literal what looking at them achieves metaphorically. It turns the fears and repulsion associated with the female body into something appetizing. After Napoleon brought a pair of mummified heads back from Egypt, wealthy collectors across Europe began to take tea in their parlors with embalmed corpses. Belzoni, fired by his success with the colossal head of

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Ramses II, set off to explore the mummy pits at Thebes. He stripped naked to squeeze through a cavity in the rock and then slid through a narrow passage into a mother lode of mummies. Belzoni describes this event in his Narratives, conjuring a scene straight out of a gothic novel: A vast quantity of dust rises . . . I could taste that the mummies were rather unpleasant to swallow . . . I sunk altogether among the broken mummies, with a crash of bones, rags, and wooden cases, which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour . . . I could not remove from the place, however, without increasing it, and every step I took I crushed a mummy in some part or other. . . . It was choked with mummies, and I could not pass without putting my face in contact with that of some decayed Egyptian . . . I could not avoid being covered with bones, legs, arms, and heads rolling from above. Thus I proceeded from one cave to another, all full of mummies piled up in various ways, some standing, some lying, and some on their heads. (Belzoni 157)

Belzoni’s description of entering into the cavity of the rock hints at sexual violation. His account of the horror of swallowing mummies conveys the fear of contamination by foreign bodies. The ghastly mummies piled helter-skelter evoke a sense of reproduction gone wrong, turning the tomb into a horrifically fertile womb. Far away from Egyptian tombs, crowds gathered in the public spaces of London to see mummies punished for their monstrosity. The popular mummy striptease was one of the most bizarre spectacles a Londoner could observe on a Sunday outing. Showmen at various venues put on public mummy unwrappings, often, as Pringle notes, to the music of a brass band. She emphasizes that it was not just the jostling riffraff who came to enjoy the show. Poets, princes, and scientists all became eager voyeurs as the objects of fear and desire were mutilated and then discarded (368). In 1842, the London Times published an account of the unrolling of the mummy of a young woman of twenty-one. In “The Unrolling of an Egyptian Mummy,” the writer reassures readers that there was “nothing whatever indelicate in the interesting operation,” noting “the presence of about 200 highly respectable spectators, a great part of whom were ladies.” Mr. Birch of the British Museum lectured as he began to loosen linen bandages. Starting at the delicately small feet, he worked his way up to the head, which was “found quite perfect”—and then promptly fell off. For more than three hours, the man of science explored the gingerbread-colored flesh; he first exposed hip bones, then shoulders and ribs, “till at last the fully developed frame of a human being 3,000 years old, lay open to the gaze of the

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company” (5). Through this dissection, the British Museum turns the female body into the object of all-seeing science, claiming ownership through an acceptable form of pornographic spectatorship. Mummy dissectors became celebrities. Egypt enthusiast Warren R. Dawson wrote an article for the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology in 1934 describing the well-known dissector Thomas Joseph Pettigrew. When Belzoni asked the surgeon to help examine some of his mummies, a life-long love affair began. The doctor became famous for his sold-out “unrollings,” earning him the nickname “Mummy Pettigrew.” He published an illustrated History of Egyptian Mummies in 1834, heightening public enthusiasm for these lurid performances. Pettigrew’s dramatic, erotically tinged unrollings became so popular that at one gathering, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself got squeezed out of the room (Dawson 173). In 1837, the Literary Gazette ran a description of Pettigrew’s operations on a female Greco-Egyptian mummy. Persons of both sexes gathered to view knees covered with lustrous lotus-shaped gold pieces and gilded toes cased in delicate sandals. An observer emphasized the dissector’s sensual satisfaction, noting how “Pettigrew assumed with an air of modest triumph his station at the table on which the Mummy was placed” (qtd. in Dawson 148). As the room filled with the fragrance of embalming fluids, the audience cheered each time Pettigrew’s scissors revealed a scarab or unusual treasure. It was as if the bejeweled body of Cleopatra herself had been captured and laid out on the table for all to enjoy. In 1843, Pettigrew joined the new British Archaeological Association, whose annual congresses climaxed with a mummy unrolling. A witness at Canterbury Theatre noted the “gay appearance” of the stage and the crowded boxes, which included “the leading families of the neighborhood” (qtd. in Dawson 179). Accompanied by his son, Pettigrew eagerly cut away for an hour until he uncovered the mummy’s “complacent smile.” He then triumphantly passed pieces of vile-smelling bandage for the ladies of the audience. In a final flourish, the doctor raised his saw and hacked off the back of the skull. Not everyone applauded these performances; there were a few satiric responses: E’en on that sink of all iniquity, the Stage, The sacrilegious monsters dared engage On Friday evening to strip a corse— A Mummy they called it—and what was worse, Sawed through the head—as it had been a cheese; (Praise be where due, the powder made them sneeze) Then placed upon its feet the insulted dead, Gave three wild yell, called cheers—and went to bed. (qtd. in Dawson 180)

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The doctor may have gone to bed after his performance, but nightmares were sure to follow. In fiction, mummies would get their revenge by chasing Englishmen through the vaults of their psyches. Looking East in the Victorian Age In 1838, the ambitious Muhammad Ali declared his intention to make Egypt and Syria independent of Ottoman rule, causing British concern about commerce and military links with the Far East. Egyptomania was declining among the upper classes, but the masses were more enthusiastic than ever. Prominent public events fed the middle-class passion for ancient Egypt, such as the erection of the Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in 1836. International fairs provided a new venue for Europeans seeking entertainment and edification, and no fair was complete without a lavish Egyptian exhibition. Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was an enthusiastic advocate of the Great Exhibition of 1851, envisioned as a symbol of British pomp and power. The Crystal Palace, a colossal iron and glass structure designed to house the exhibit, included a series of elaborate courts that gave millions the chance to view the art and architecture of various historical periods— the world under one British roof. The most awe-inspiring was the Egyptian Court where visitors could immerse themselves in a simulated experience of ancient Egypt and then retire for tea and cakes. Paris’s Universal Exposition of 1867 was Emperor Napoleon III’s response to the Great Exhibition. It featured a replica of an Egyptian temple that visitors approached through a grand avenue of sphinxes, carrying them back, as a guidebook explained, through forty centuries of history. Other exhibition venues like the Elephant Pavilion at the Antwerp Zoo (1855–56), based on the temples of Philae, expressed the ancient continuing association of Egypt with the bestial and the bizarre. By the 1850s, many middle-class travelers could afford to see Egyptian monuments for themselves. Steamships carried voyagers from Southampton to Alexandria in just fifteen days. Enthusiastic travelers filled diaries with their observations and sketches, sending home boatloads of letters and postcards of the most impressive Egyptian sights. On July 12, 2007, an official of the Burke & Herbert Bank & Trust of Alexandria, Virginia, found two steamer trunks in a basement vault belonging to Mary Custis Lee, the daughter of General Robert E. Lee. Among important family papers and mementoes, Mary had saved eighty-four postcards collected during a trip to Egypt, including color scenes of Cairo, Edfou, Karnak, Philae, Thebes, and the Nile. The postcards are housed at the Virginia Historical Society headquarters in Richmond.

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When Champollion solved the mystery of hieroglyphics in 1822, the new field of Egyptology became attractive to both scholars and amateurs. Educated classes read the widely circulated Description de l’Egypte after its first printing in 1828 and followed archaeological expeditions in riveting periodical accounts. One such expedition was mounted in 1850 by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette who explored Saqqara, the burial ground of Apis bulls sacred to the god Ptah. Like the fairy tale Aladdin, he dug under the earth until he discovered a beautiful door. When he pried it open, Mariette was astonished to see the tomb of Apis filled with a breathtaking array of granite coffins. He went on to unearth several priceless artifacts, including exquisite jewelry thought to belong to Ramses II’s son. In 1867, the Egyptologist’s most impressive finds were displayed at the French Exposition. When Empress Eugenie, the fashionable wife of Napoleon III, saw the jewels belonging to the Egyptian Queen A-Hetep, she asked to keep them. Mariette, who had won them in a near-fatal scuffle with an Egyptian governor, refused. Mariette’s work encouraged the passion for scientifically accurate depictions of Egypt in art and design. The Grammar of Ornament, by Victorian designer and illustrator Owen Jones (1856, reissued in 1868 with color plates), was considered a masterpiece of nineteenth-century color printing. The volume included thousands of examples of ornamental motifs and designs, many drawn from antiquity. One plate presented Egyptian column capitals sprouting curved lotus leaves painted in vivid greens, golds, and reds. Jones, as influential as Frank Lloyd Wright in his day, had traveled to the Middle East on a grand tour as a young man and had overseen eastern displays in the Great Exhibition. He joined forces with several of the most prominent London decorative firms in designing wallpapers, silks, carpets, and paper items carrying detailed Egyptian and Persian motifs. Manufacturers were not so fastidious about historical accuracy. They adapted the sublime style of ancient Egypt to add charm to various objects. For example, an 1850 Egyptian Revival automaton singing bird box produced in France made little chirping noises when opened. Garden decorating books such as those compiled by the French horticulturalist Boitard inspired Egyptian-themed fern stands and benches festooned with cobras. Wallpapers produced in the 1860s featured quaint-looking obelisks and mummy cases standing amid lush greenery and colorful flowers. Bridal cake boxes bristled with hieroglyphs, and glass pickle plates displayed Egyptian palms. The solemn figure of the Egyptian sphinx crouched on “muffineers” (shakers used to sprinkle sugar on muffins), snuffboxes, and soap dishes. In fall of 2007, Victorian Egyptian Revival chamber pots dancing with blue– and red–winged sphinxes were available to online shoppers for around five hundred dollars.

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Architects highlighted the association of Egypt with wisdom and justice in their designs for police stations, prisons, and courthouses. The grandeur and mystery of the new architecture was meant to inspire criminals to turn from their evil ways. In the 1830s, English architect John Haviland designed a courthouse and prison known as “The Tombs” in New York City. Prisoners were supposed to be thinking about eternal justice as they walked through the massive columns, even though the prison became infamous for corruption. Herman Melville’s character Bartleby in his short story “Bartleby the Scrivner” is an angst-ridden clerk working in the Dead Letter Office of Manhattan who turns away from modernity to die in despair in the Tomb’s inner courtyard, surrounded by the power of “some strange magic” in which he sensed “the heart of the eternal pyramids” (Melville 46). In death, Bartleby turns to ancient Egypt for the dignity and solace that the modern world cannot offer him. Egyptian motifs began to appear on religious buildings. English, American, and Australian houses of worship—from Methodist churches to Jewish synagogues—displayed Egyptian decorations. The Downtown Presbyterian Church of Richmond, Virginia, designed by Philadelphia architect William Strickland, is one of three surviving Egyptian Revival churches in the United States. Members of the conservative congregation still walk through lotus-bud columns under a winged sun disk and uraei—symbols once frequently used by occultists. In such churches, the Lord’s commandment against looking at graven images is blithely broken every Sunday. One of the most curious intersections of ancient Egypt and American religion occurred in 1827. Joseph Smith, like many Americans, was a firm believer in divination and used “seer stones” to guide him to buried treasure. This special ability helped him find a set of golden tablets engraved with hieroglyphs in an ancient language he called “reformed Egyptian.” At the time, Champollion had already deciphered hieroglyphs, but his work was not yet widely available or even known in some parts of the United States. The divinely inspired Smith claimed to have translated these tablets, which recorded the Book of Mormon, through seer stones that gave him access to a spiritual plane where translations became clear. Smith was a Mason prior to founding Mormonism, and early Mormon temple architecture expressed a connection to Egypt in symbols associated with Freemasonry. The Salt Lake City Temple, for example, features the symbol of the all-seeing eye, derived from the eye of Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris. In 1832, the British Parliament passed a bill calling for private cemeteries to be built outside London to deal with overcrowded churchyards. Engineers constructed seven cemeteries in the next decade, which became known as the “Magnificent Seven.” London architects Stephen Geary and James Bunstone created the imposing Egyptian Avenue in Highgate

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Cemetery in 1838, featuring an entrance using Egyptian-style columns and obelisks. Two years later, William Hosking designed the Egyptian-style entrance to the cemetery in Abney Park. Visitors strolling the paths of these two splendid Victorian cemeteries can see obelisks peeping through leafy oak branches and moss-covered pyramids rising up from the damp English soil. Names like Julius Beer (1836–80), owner of the Observer newspaper, are inscribed on these Egyptian forms, a testimony to the cachet such designs carried for prominent Londoners. The Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, also boasts several nineteenth-century Egyptianstyle tombs. Plain obelisks are the most common form, but the Philip and Chapman families chose highly detailed draped obelisks with fantastic gothic features to adorn their graves. Egyptian motifs appeared in commercial buildings as well. In 1838, John Haviland designed an Egyptian-style building for the Pennsylvania Fire Insurance Co., assuring customers of eternal commitment. The façade has now been incorporated into the Penn Mutual skyscraper of Philadelphia. An 1826 design for a Russian suspension bridge in St. Petersburg featured Egyptian pylons and capitals that gave users a sense security through the association with enduring architecture. The “Temple Mills” of Leeds (1842), fashioned in the style of an Egyptian temple, linked the production of fine linen in Egypt to British flax-spinning. Advertisers used Egyptian themes, too, incorporating them into promotions in illustrated magazines, newspapers, trade catalogues, and illustrated trading cards. Some products had a logical connection to the ancient world, such as Sphinx Embalming Fluid, produced in Syracuse, New York. In other cases, the link had to be spelled out for buyers. Carter’s Ink Company was founded in Boston in 1858 and rose to become the largest ink manufacturer in the world. The firm advertised its Sphinx brand indelible ink with a catchy slogan, “You Can’t Get It Out,” accompanied by an image of the Great Sphinx at Giza. In the same vein, the logo of A. G. Baylis & Sons Studley’s Sphinx brand gramophone needles assured buyers that they could count on a product that was “Always the Same.” Robert Chesebrough, who invented of petroleum jelly in 1872, placed a lithographed image of the Central Park obelisk on his trading card for Vaseline, along with a slogan that alluded to the medicinal legacy of Egypt: “The Elixir Vitae, Great Magic Healer of a Thousand Pains.” The manufacturers of sewing machines (invented by Elias Howe, Jr. in 1846) experienced a struggle making their product attractive to the female consumer because it was originally used by male factory workers who mass-produced military apparel. Designers took great pains to embellish the machines with symbols of sexiness and femininity. A London company placed an advertisement in the Paris 1867 Universal Exhibition Catalogue

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for “New Hand Sewing Machines” named after great beauties of the past, including the “Cleopatra.” In Washington, D.C., citizens marked the one hundredth anniversary of George Washington’s birth in 1833 by forming an association to build a grand memorial. Freemasonry had been an important influence on the Founding Fathers and the designers of the U.S. capital, many who were members of the Brotherhood. The reverse side of the great seal of the United States depicts an unfinished pyramid with a hovering eye derived from the eye of Horus—proof of the prevalence of Masonic imagery in the early days of the country. George Washington was the master of the Alexandria Lodge at the time he took office and was buried with full Masonic honors. In the middle of the 1830s, the Washington National Monument Society announced a competition for the design of the first president’s memorial. In The Secret Architecture of Our Nation’s Capital, David Ovason reports that one proposal was a massive pyramid based on Masonic designs, which was passed over in favor of a giant obelisk. Originally, an Egyptian-style portal depicting the winged sun disk was set in front of the monument but later removed, perhaps due to increasing hostility toward the Masons (Ovason 127–34). Nevertheless, Ovason notes that a total of twenty-one Masonic dedication stones can be seen can be today on the monument’s interior staircase, including one depicting the Weeping Virgin. This figure is based on Isis, whose tears were said to water the Nile (174). The maternal goddess of Egypt may have a central place in the most powerful capital of the western world. Ovason presents an intriguing theory that many aspects of the obelisk are connected to Egyptian astrology, particularly the star Sirius associated with Isis in Masonic lore (138). Paris was closely associated with Washington, D.C. through French support of the American Revolution, and since that city carried Isis on its official seal, early Americans steeped in Freemasonry may have wished to invoke the goddess’s protective powers, too. Before the opening of the Suez Canal, Egyptian Revival jewelry was part of a general taste for archaeological revivals. Certain Egyptian motifs were embraced by Victorians, though they were not as prevalent as Etruscan Revival or Greek Revival themes. Scarabs, the beetles that symbolize rebirth and the afterlife, were particularly popular. Jewelers used original carved scarabs picked up by travelers and also produced reproductions. Some of the most beautiful designs incorporated iridescent stones to mimic the beetle’s colorful wings. The fashionable wore earrings, pendants, and even crosses made of scarabs. Victorian ladies did not hesitate to buy jewelry made from real beetles, letting dried insect carcasses dangle from their ears and necks. Mourning jewelry was also extremely popular in the Victorian

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era. Lockets, rings, and pendants sometimes depicted obelisks to symbolize memory and eternal life. Egyptian-themed silverware was much more popular than jewelry during this period, as Dale Reeves Nicholls observes (Nicholls 134). Gorham, the renowned Massachusetts-based producer of silverware, produced several Egyptian patterns around 1870, including “Isis,” “Lotus,” “Egyptian Revival,” and “Silence.” The “Isis” flatware featured a winged serpent between the handle and the bowl or blade. Trays and pitchers in Gorham’s tea services rested on little sphinx feet. The firm also made a few pieces of Egyptian Revival jewelry, such as silver stickpins topped with pharaohs’ heads. Between 1825 and 1910, Adams & Company, a Pittsburgh-based glass company, manufactured a pressed glassware pattern called “Pyramids and Parthenon” that mixed Egyptian and Greek motifs. Nicholls points out that it was not until the opening of the Suez Canal, however, that Egypt once again took center stage in decoration (134–38). East Meets West: The Suez Canal The French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps oversaw the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, joining the Mediterranean and Red Seas for the first time. This incredible feat sparked a renewed interest in Egypt across the world. Egypt made front-page news again when the Egyptian government gave massive obelisks to England, France, and America in hopes of securing financial aid and promoting friendly ties. William James Erasmus Wilson, a distinguished anatomist and dermatologist, funded the transport of the English obelisk to London, where it was set on the Victoria Embankment in 1878. Cornelius Vanderbilt sponsored the transport of the American obelisk, which was erected in Central Park in 1880. It now stands inside a leafy enclosure behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Following these exciting events, Egypt appeared frequently in political cartoons and sheet music such as the jaunty “Sphinx Galop” of 1877 (Regier 110). Advertisers promoting exotic items like cigarettes, tobacco, silk, and perfume often turned to Egyptian imagery. Cruwell tobacco advertisements used historical frescoes depicting the monument of the pharaohs. The makers of Egyptian Deities cigarettes illustrated the rarity and exquisiteness of their product with the image of a pharaoh assessing the charms of an Egyptian beauty. Palmolive soap graphics reminded customers of Cleopatra’s legendary and timeless beauty. Perfumes with names like “Nile Lily” (launched by Warren Hill in 1885) and “Le Lys du Nil” (launched by Rallet in 1890) lured buyers with their romantic associations and bottles carrying ornate

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chromolithographed labels with Egyptian themes. Hoyt’s Egyptian Cologne, manufactured in New York the 1860s, showed an image of the Sphinx and pyramids on the bottles. A trade card read, “The most delicate and lasting fragrance in the world.” Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Sphinx” (1894) captures the late Victorian image of Egypt as a mysterious land of erotic temptation and sensuality. A student envisions the Sphinx as a luxurious, lustful beast with velvet fur and ivory claws who watches him from a corner of his room. This sphinx is a romantic opponent who taunts the young man with secret with knowledge of his forbidden desires. In his short story, “A Sphinx Without a Secret” (1891), Wilde alludes to the fabled beast again as a mysterious lover who eludes her suitor. A young man falls in love with a beautiful woman dressed in silver and moonstones who is possessed with a “mania for mystery.” Her “passion for secrecy” is such that she tells no one the details of her life and lets rooms in a boarding house in order to play the role of a mystery novel heroine, wearing a veil as she peruses books in the parlor. Her “secret” is merely a love of secrets and a desire to appear unreadable (Wilde). Late Victorian jewelers capitalized on the association of Egypt with exquisite feminine adornment by fashioning the finest Egyptian-style pieces of the nineteenth century, including combs, brooches, hairpins, necklaces, and earrings using lavish architectural styles. The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review kept Americans abreast of the latest trends in European jewelry, illustrating charms and amulets that pharaohs once distributed as gifts. In 2006, Sotheby’s set a world record when nineteenthcentury Revival jewels created by London-based Italian jewelers Castellani & Giuliano sold for well over seven million dollars. One of the stars of this collection was a magnificent gold, ruby, turquoise, pearl, and diamond Egyptian Revival parure (a set comprising earrings, a bracelet, and a necklace) desgined by Guiliano around 1870. During the 1870s, Ismail Pasha, the grandson of Muhammed Ali, was khedive of Egypt, governing under Ottoman rule until the British occupation began in 1882. The khedive was eager to identify his country with Europe and asked the Italian Romantic composer Giuseppe Verdi to create an opera that would celebrate Egyptian glory. Reluctant at first, Verdi was soon bitten by the Egypt bug and plunged into study of its ancient history. The result was Aida, his most famous opera that opened in Cairo in 1871. It was hailed as a new symbol of Egyptian identity, even though it was created by Europeans. Mariette, by this time director of the Ancient Egyptian Museum in Bulaq, cowrote the story and supervised the production, requiring Parisian designers to create historically accurate costumes and sets. The opera presents the tale of an Ethiopian princess enslaved in Egypt who is loved by one of the pharaoh’s captains. Following the legend

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of Cleopatra, she proves her devotion to the condemned captain by dying with him in a tomb. Opera had already provided spectacles of ancient Egypt in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a mystical tale of the struggle between a magus figure and an Egyptian Queen of the Night. A decade after Mozart’s opera premiered in Vienna, the Paris Opera put on Les Mysteres d’Isis, a parody of The Magic Flute, which critics applauded for its elaborate Egyptian-style sets. In France, operas based on the story of Antony and Cleopatra had been staged for Napoleon in honor of his Egyptian Campaigns and featured sets drawn from Denon and the Description. Beginning in the 1860s, artists explored changing attitudes toward women through depictions of Cleopatra. Her image gradually evolved from a corseted Victorian matron to a femme fatale in flowing robes. In 1877, Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted a voluptuous, passive Cleopatra lounging in her boudoir as men peer in from the side. In contrast, John William Waterhouse’s portrait of 1888 shows a sexy Cleopatra sitting upright and staring defiantly—no longer the object of the male gaze but a subject in her own right. Fashion also reflected Cleopatra’s changing image. In 1860, the editor of Peterson’s Magazine had called for a prim “Cleopatra wreath” as part of a ladies’ evening ensemble (“Fashions for January 1860”), but by the 1890s the Egyptian queen’s image was selling rouge—a cosmetic traditionally used by prostitutes. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, actresses portraying Cleopatra swooned, preened, and sashayed across the stage, wearing costumes that women rushed to copy. The dark, statuesque actress Isabella Glyn, who appeared in British stage productions of Antony and Cleopatra in 1855 and 1867, was considered, despite her modest Victorian crinolines, as the ultimate embodiment of the Egyptian queen’s animalistic sexuality and rapture in death. In 1890, New Orleans–born actress Cora Urquhart Potter, who had deserted her husband to take the stage, played Cleopatra in diaphanous, sequined robes that showed off her shapely legs. She launched a mania for Egyptian styles, described by American novelist Clara Lanza in 1890 in an article for the Milwaukee Journal: When Mrs. Potter played Cleopatra all New York went mad—over what? Her impersonation of the ill fated queen? Not at all. You, my dear girl, know as well as I do what was the cause of the Egyptomania that spread like wildfire through the feminine part of the metropolitan community. Were ever such robes seen before? Were they not enough to make the soul of woman sigh itself out with envious yearning? That elegant reptile the asp came into fashion at once. Gold and jeweled girdles and scarabei were to be seen everywhere. (Lanza 4)

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The same year, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt graced the stage dripping in baubles created by the great glassmaker and jeweler René Lalique. Promotional photographs show a moment of feminine conspiracy as Bernhardt’s Cleopatra sprawls over a sofa and caresses her attendant who kneels on a tiger skin. The tempestuous Bernhardt captivated audiences with a passionate, erotic portrayal of Cleopatra that even included a few stripteases. The resulting fad for scarabs and serpents lasted through the flapper era. The celebrated British beauty Lily Langtry also took her turn as Cleopatra. By that time, she had already become the first actress to endorse a commercial product as the face of Pear’s soap. She made the exoticism of Egypt appealing and safe with her famous lily-white skin. An 1891 publicity photo shows the voluptuous Langtry gazing into a mirror as she reclines on a sofa—a symbol of vain, dreamy sensuality. Despite the purity suggested by her name and complexion, Langtry’s ongoing affair with the Prince of Wales added piquancy to her portrayal of a woman with an insatiable sexual appetite. The evocative contradictions embodied by Langtry helped the growing cosmetics industry bring makeup from the theater to women’s dressing rooms. Respectable women could now paint their faces like prostitutes while identifying with a beloved actress. Little Egypt Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous animal, get hence! You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be. —Oscar Wilde, “ The Sphinx”

The salacious side of the Cleopatra myth surfaced on the stages of burlesques and variety shows. “Little Egypt” was a stage name that came to be associated with exotic dancers in the 1880s and ‘90s. Dancing entertainments featuring eastern women, along with portrayals of the legendary “Dance of the Seven Veils” believed to have been performed by the Jewish princess Salome, gave rise to Orientalist “hoochy koochy” interpretations of Middle Eastern dance. Show-business promoter Sol Bloom, who later became a U.S. congressman, was the entertainment director of the Chicago Exposition of 1893, put on to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. This was the first international fair to

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include a separate entertainment complex, which was known as the Midway Plaisance. This section of the fair, a forerunner of the modern amusement park, was conceived to attract working-class visitors. Fairgoers spun on the first and largest Ferris wheel, rode an ice railway, and walked over an electric moving sidewalk. The most popular exhibit of the Midway Plaisance, “A Street in Cairo,” attracted two and a half million people within six months of its opening. Eager crowds jostled to enjoy the snake charmers, camel rides, and, most of all, a sensational troop of undulating dancers. In his autobiography, Bloom claimed to have made up a melody on the piano at a press briefing introducing his Eastern dancers. He failed to copyright the piece, allowing other composers of the day to pick up the unforgettable tune for their songs (Bloom 135). “The Streets of Cairo,” written by James Thornton in 1895, is the one that remains famous. His lyrics begin by conjuring the innocence of a “poor little maid”: I will sing you a song, And it won’t be very long, ’Bout a maiden sweet, And she never would do wrong.

The song ends with the young maiden revealed as a femme fatale in “abbreviated clothes” who lures men to their destruction. Parody lyrics to the melody, which came to be known as the “Hootchy Kootchy Dance,” became familiar to generations of snickering schoolchildren: “Oh they don’t wear pants in the Southern part of France,” and so on (Fuld 276). Bloom advertised his dancing show as a “Belly Dancing” performance—a name that became synonymous with sensual Oriental dances like those performed in the French Moulin Rouge. Moralists were scandalized by the shaking and gyrations of Bloom’s dancers. The Board of Lady Managers of the Exposition expressed grave concerns, while Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, tried to have the shows shut down. In Looking for Little Egypt, Donna Carlton reports that a female Spiritualist named Ida Craddock reportedly argued in favor of the performances, calling them representations of a purely religious dance. Critics apparently did not buy into her theory and continued to express outrage that ironically set off a nationwide craze. Once again, the urge to suppress produced unquenchable fascination (Carlton 49–50). Fantastic stories circulated around a dancer called “Little Egypt” who was supposed to have been the star of Bloom’s shows. According to legend, she popularized the newly invented zipper to shimmy out of her clothes. Mark Twain was said to have had a heart attack when she performed.

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Thomas Edison reportedly came to the fair to film her for one of his first motion pictures. Little Egypt was hailed as the first screen sex symbol and the woman who saved the Chicago Exposition from financial ruin. She became famous for just about everything except the simple truth: she never existed. The imaginary figure of Little Egypt is the biblical temptress, the bold Egyptian woman of classical legend, and the sensuous Cleopatra of Plutarch and Shakespeare all rolled into one. After exhaustive research, Carlton was unable to find any contemporary accounts of this dancer. She concluded that the legend of Little Egypt emerged from a stew of scandal, clever promotion, and popular fascination with exotic dancing. The dozen or so women who actually performed in Bloom’s shows were Egyptian ghawazi dancers who carried on an archaic dance style known as the danse du ventre, possibly a relic of ancient goddess worship. In Egypt, ghawazi were frowned upon by Muslims for their uninhibited movements and “temporary marriages.” By the nineteenth century, they were associated with prostitution and often eagerly sought out by visiting Europeans. A young Gustave Flaubert made a trip to the home of one of these dancers while traveling in Egypt in the 1840s and recorded his adventure in his diary and letters, selections of which are available in Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert in Egypt (1986). After the Chicago Exposition, promoters capitalized on the legend of Little Egypt, presenting a slew of dancers calling themselves by the name in traveling carnivals, vaudeville shows, and burlesques. Soon, Little Egypt’s hoochy koochy was being performed on stages throughout the country. As Kathy Peiss points out in Hope in a Jar, Little Egypt sold more than just show tickets. Advertisers of the growing cosmetics industry used her image, along with that of Cleopatra, to sell rouge and makeup (Peiss 146–48). In 1896, someone calling herself Little Egypt made headlines after performing at a bachelor party put on by the two grandsons of showman P. T. Barnum in New York. A vice squad raided the dance, and Little Egypt was called to testify before a police board while titillated crowds thronged outside. Impresario Oscar Hammerstein seized the moment and contracted the dancer to perform in a skit about the raided party, “Silly’s Dinner,” which became a smashing success on Broadway. As the legend grew, the association of Egypt and sexy, brazen women evolved along with it. In the 1890s and early 1900s, Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations of the saucy “Gibson Girl” became the dominant model of female beauty, shown on products ranging from pillow covers to umbrella stands. However, a 1912 discovery by German archaeologists in the ruins of the ancient city of the pharaoh Akhenaten gave the world an image that would eventually overtake the round-faced Gibson Girl. This “new” face of fashion belonged

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to the heretic pharaoh’s wife, Nefertiti, whose name means “the beautiful woman has come.” The German team smuggled a bust depicting Nefertiti out of Egypt to Berlin, where it became the most copied and admired female face in the world. The queen’s slender, high-cheekboned style of beauty still dominates the fashion runways of the twenty-first century. In 1922, Howard Carter held a candle at the entrance of the Tomb of King Tutankhamun. “Can you see anything?” asked his companion, Lord Carnarvon. “Yes,” answered Carter, breathless with excitement. “Wonderful things” (Carter 35) With that, the Egyptian craze started all over again, and collectors clamored for reproductions of objects from the pharaoh’s crypt. Flappers, the Cleopatras and Isises of the new century, strutted out in gold Egyptian-style slip dresses, wearing sequined headdresses with vultures poised at their foreheads. Designers celebrated the revival in Art Deco fashions, including beaded evening bags, sphinx cigarette cases, and lotusblossom necklaces. Cleopatra became an icon in the new motion picture industry, embodied in the sultry, kohled image of Theda Bara. The legend of Little Egypt never died, and by 1935, this figure of fantasy had become so famous that her story was told in Hollywood in The Great Ziegfeld, which credited her with saving the Chicago Exposition from ruin. A film called Little Egypt appeared in 1951, depicting her as a café dancer who comes to the 1893 exposition and passes herself off as a princess. The Coasters released a song called “Little Egypt” in the 1950s, telling the story of a carnival dancer who is unmasked, and Elvis Presley later covered the tune. Through pop culture, Egyptian women had come to symbolize independence, ingenuity, and self-confident sexuality that flew in the face of the old Victorian ideals of femininity. They were the mothers of women’s liberation and the midwives of the sexual revolution, though their images still presented traces of the old cultural fears, first conjured by Herodotus. Through the encounter sparked by Napoleon’s campaign, images of a long-buried civilization had risen from the dust and settled over Europe and America in a way that shaped modern identity, helping to reorganize a culture that had been divided from itself since Moses told his followers to look away from Egypt and Herodotus cast Egypt as the stranger. To paraphrase the English writer P. G. Wodehouse, the scarab was in the scheme of things, and there was no turning back.

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Tales from the Crypt Theories of Cultural Burial

I am yesterday, today, and tomorrow, for I am born again and again. —The Book of the Dead

I

n the late twentieth century, literary critics, artists, feminists, classicists, postcolonial scholars, social historians, Afrocentrists, archaeologists, Egyptologists, Middle Eastern scholars, and purveyors of pop culture engaged in lively debates about the place of Egypt in western history and culture. They spilled rivers of ink questioning the legitimacy of inherited ideas and restyling the ways people think about an ancient civilization. Over five thousand years after the beginning of the First Dynasty, westerners continue shape their identities by reimagining the past. New developments, such as the recent discovery of the mummy of a great female ruler, spark discussions that show how cultural memory continues to evolve. What follows is a survey of ideas that have contributed significantly to reevaluations of Egypt. I have also outlined theories of culture and psychology that help to answer the question of why nineteenth-century Europeans became fascinated by a civilization at once so remote and yet curiously familiar. Finally, I discuss my idea that the feminization of Egypt was a byproduct of a very old cultural separation between east and west. The notion that cultural memory shapes perceptions of origin, identity, and inheritance serves as the pathway through which I will be exploring Egyptian tombs. Said’s Orientalism

In 1978, the literary critic Edward W. Said challenged accepted ideas about western representations of the East in his Orientalism. Most graduate students in the humanities are aware of Said’s proposition of Eurocentric

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biases toward Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture that served to legitimize imperial ambitions. Said points to the end of the eighteenth century as the beginning of Orientalism as an official way of thinking about the East—or the Near East, as Europeans usually perceived the Orient. As a Palestinian-American professor at Columbia University who attended British schools in Cairo as a boy, Said was in a unique position to consider the history and consequences of western dominance over the Orient. He drew upon Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida’s theories of the link between knowledge and power to call for a reevaluation of western depictions of the Orient. He explores this theme in more detail in Culture and Imperialism (1993). According to Said, no matter how well-meaning and knowledgeable westerners approaching the East may have been, their perceptions were distorted by the reality of European political domination—both consciously and unconsciously. Influential cultural theorists such as Hamid Dabashi, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak continue to explore important issues raised by Said in the field of postcolonial studies, where they focus on themes of Eurocentrism and elite dominance in philosophy, literature, and film. On the other hand, critics of Said’s work have pointed out that his opposition of Occident and Orient may not account for the complexity of what he calls Orientalism. Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis observes that Orientalist scholarship was not always connected to imperialism and actually predated it. In his Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (1995), John MacKenzie notes that western artists approaching Orientalist themes were often genuinely inspired by their subjects and unsympathetic toward imperial projects. Is Egypt part of Said’s Orient? Yes and no. Historically, the Orient comprised many places in western tradition—Turkey, Persia, Syria, Lebanon, North Africa, and, to a lesser extent, India and China. Said observes that in many ways, the “Orient” was really a site of the imagination—a perfumed locale of tempting pleasures dreamed of by imperial conquerors. The nineteenth-century English painter John Frederick Lewis’s popular images of pillow-strewn harems, turbaned sheiks, and colorful bazaars demonstrate the popularity of presenting Egypt as part of this Oriental realm. They are a testimony to a view of ancient Egypt clouded by a haze of Oriental fantasy. But beneath the dreamy palm-fringed oases, ancient Egypt is something distinct from the Orient. For Europeans, the land of the pharaohs has been more than “a sort of surrogate and even underground self,” as Said describes the Orient (Orientalism 3). Egypt has also been a revered ancestor that westerners sometimes wanted to reclaim. For nineteenth-century Europeans, Egypt was a site of multiple layers—a contemporary Islamic

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world sitting on top of a biblical realm that rested on an even more remote Pharaonic past that was coming to life as archaeologists and Egyptologists unearthed its relics and discovered its history. In her Letters from Egypt (1849–50), Florence Nightingale expressed the bewilderingly stratified history a nineteenth-century western traveler confronted: “Here Osiris and his worshipers lived; here Abraham and Moses walked; here Aristotle came; here, later, Mahomet learnt the best of his religion and studied Christianity; here, perhaps our Saviour’s Mother brought her little son to open his eyes to the light” (Nightingale 33). The closeness of ancient Egypt to the origins of western identity also separates it from the frame of Orientalism. “Egypt is the past of both Israel and Greece and thus Europe,” observes German Egyptologist Jan Assmann. “This fact makes the case of Egypt radically different from that of China, India, or ‘Orientalism’ in general” (Moses the Egyptian 9). In his introduction to Orientalism, Said notes that Europeans and Americans studying the Orient belong “to a power with definite interest in the Orient almost since the time of Homer” (11). However, Homer appears to have known Pharaonic Egypt well, constructing it in his poetry as a mythic site of wealth and power, awe-inspiring legend, and mysterious, feminine associations. The archaic legacies that the Greeks and Hebrews wove into their own cultural productions give Egypt a distinct cultural and psychic place in western memory. Said’s tendency to absorb ancient Egypt into Orientalism reflects his project to release the contemporary Orient from a long history of western dominance. The fact that Europeans claiming Egyptian antiquities had been denouncing Muslims as unfit to inherit the past since the Renaissance shows how Orientalist prejudices became entangled with the memories of Egypt that predated such imperial biases. Modern Egyptian nationalists and Egyptologists have cited Orientalism in their demands for the return of significant artifacts to what they see as their proper home—the museums of Cairo and Alexandria. Egyptian Egyptologist Zawi Hawass has urged the British to make up for past looting by relinquishing the Rosetta Stone, which he considers an icon of Egyptian identity. He has made similar requests to the governments and curators of other nations where important relics are kept. The struggle over Egyptian treasures continues in clashes of national interest and identity. Egyptian Perspectives In his Colonising Egypt (1988), Timothy Mitchell provides a view of nineteenth-century experiences of imperialism from the Egyptian side. He uses Foucault’s theories of control to explain how European methods of

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building, education, civic administration, and military training contoured the country for the benefit of foreigners and native elites. Mitchell explores how European visitors accustomed to orderly, controlled exhibitions reacted when they met Egypt face-to-face, scrambling up the pyramids in green spectacles to hold the landscape in their gaze. Trevor Mostyn’s Egypt’s Belle Epoque: Cairo and the Age of the Hedonists (1989) reveals nineteenthcentury Egypt from another angle, showing how Egyptians themselves participated in imperialist projects. For example, Mostyn recounts how Ismail Pasha’s 1867 visit to the Universal Exhibition in Paris inspired the khedive to recreate Cairo as a glittering, glamorous Paris of Africa, a playground for European elites. Moystyn’s work also emphasizes how the overspending of Egyptian rulers led to debt and disarray that opened the door for British occupation. He complicates the picture of European dominance and Egyptian victimization. Donald Malcolm Reid’s Whose Pharaohs? (2002) explores how the promoters of modern Egyptian national identity have dealt with the Pharaonic past. He investigates the little-known history of Egyptian archaeology, highlighting the activities of Egyptian laborers, tomb raiders, antiquities dealers, colonial officials, and nationalists to challenge the idea of Egyptians as the passive victims of looting. He shows the tension between Egyptian elites who enthusiastically embraced antiquity and Muslims who saw the ancient Egyptians as an idolatrous people who oppressed Moses and the Israelites. Reid emphasizes the contributions of non-westerners to Egyptology, including ruler Muhammad Ali, the pioneering archaeologist Joseph Hekekyan, and Egyptian scholar Rifaa al-Tahtawi. His study reveals a nuanced picture of Europeans and Egyptians colliding and occasionally joining forces as they confronted Egyptian heritage. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena Could Greek philosophy be rooted in Egyptian thought? Is it possible that the Pythagorean theory was conceived on the shores of the Nile and the Euphrates rather than in ancient Greece? Could it be that Western civilization was born on the so-called Dark Continent? —“Description of Black Athena”

The provocative description above refers to Black Athena (1987–2006), a bestselling three-volume series written by Martin Bernal that sent shock waves through academia. Bernal started work on Black Athena while teaching Chinese politics at Cornell University, an atypical background for a late twentieth-century scholar approaching ancient Egypt.

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Bernal’s first volume challenges Eurocentric biases in classical scholarship, especially those of the last two hundred years. He claims that Greek civilization had deep roots in Afro-Asiatic cultures and further observes that the Egyptian people could “usefully be called black” (Bernal 1: 241–42). In his second volume, Bernal continues his exploration of the Greek debt to Egypt, adding evidence from archaeology and comparative mythology. He focuses on language in his third volume, making the controversial claim that 40 percent of Greek words came from Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. Bernal asserts that this language legacy was the result of the invasion and colonization of Greece by Egyptian and Semitic peoples, whose culture formed the core of Greek politics, religion, and philosophy. Bernal’s work demands a total reassessment of the prevailing views of Mediterranean history. Bernal, a self-described outsider, was born in London as the illegitimate child of a literary mother. His grandfather was a distinguished Egyptologist and his father an outspoken communist. Bernal earned a PhD in Chinese Studies at Cambridge, where he served as a fellow at King’s College before taking a professorship in government at Cornell. In the 1980s, he stopped teaching Chinese politics and became a “public nuisance,” as he put it, at Cornell and Cambridge (1:xv). He labored over the research for Black Athena over nearly three decades. Scholars from a wide range of fields objected to Bernal’s focus on the Greek debt to Phoenicia and Egypt. In contrast, influential authors writing from the perspective of Afrocentrism (a movement centered on black historical consciousness) such as Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, John Henrik Clark, Leonard Jeffries, and Molefi Kete Asante responded enthusiastically. They used Black Athena to support their claims that Greek civilization was created by black Africans in Egypt and have studied the relationship between ancient Egyptians and modern people of African descent, whom they designate as the legitimate heirs of Egypt. Historian and Africana studies expert William Jeremiah Moses and others refer to the focus on ancient Egypt within the Afrocentric movement as “Egyptocentrism.” Moses defines the movement as the “sometimes sentimental, sometimes cynical, attempt to claim Egyptian ancestry for black Americans,” pointing out that Egyptocentrism tends to “reconstruct the peoples of ancient Egypt in terms of traditional American racial perceptions” (Moses 5–6). Moses observes a tension among Afrocentric scholars who wish to identify with ancient Egypt and those who reject it for a variety of reasons. The biblical story of the bondage in Egypt, for example, had a long-standing importance to African-American slaves who identified with the people of Israel against Egyptians oppressors.

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Afrocentric theorists seeking to claim ancient Egyptian cultural legacies have accused others of not giving enough support to the project. Kenyan-born African scholar Ali Mazrui charged the prominent AfricanAmerican literature professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of “dis-Africanizing” ancient Egypt in his film Wonders of the African World (1999). Gates dryly responded, “I suspect that if the average ancient Egyptian had shown up in Mississippi in 1950, they would have been flung into the back of the bus. And that is black enough for me” (Gates 1–2). Many of Bernal’s critics have accused him of rewriting history in pursuit of his own political agenda, while some have focused on the racial implications of his work: “Neither Cleopatra Nor Socrates Was Black,” protested the title of an article by Carol Innerst in the conservative Washington Times in March 1996. Archaeologists frequently chastised Bernal for shoddy research and for focusing on propaganda at the expense of scientific research. In a March 1992 article for the New York Review of Books, Harvard archaeologist Emily Vermeule described Bernal’s book as a “whirling confusion of half-digested reading, bold linguistic supposition, and preconceived dogma” (Vermeule). Egyptologist Jan Assmann welcomed Bernal’s investigation into the history of the Eurocentric memory of Egypt but lamented his attempt to challenge it by focusing on facts instead of inherited perceptions. Classical scholars rebutted Black Athena, accusing Bernal of speculating on matters outside his field. Classicists generally agree that the Greeks revered Egyptian civilization but do not accept that their cultural genealogy should be traced to Egypt. Mary Lefkowitz of Wellesley College responded to Bernal’s thesis in Not Out of Africa (1996), pointing out factual errors in Black Athena and accusing Bernal of participating in a dangerous trend more productive of racial tension than serious inquiry. After Lefkowitz’s book (which has also been cited for factual errors), the controversy about Black Athena raged in classrooms, panels, blogs, periodicals, books, films, and even a segment on the American television news magazine 60 Minutes. Bernal’s controversial work has stimulated scholars to investigate Egyptian and Semitic influences on Greece, though they continue to debate the nature of this influence. Gender Studies and Ancient Egypt Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum’s new Sackler Center for Feminist Art (opened in March 2007) find a curious exhibit—a giant triangular table with place settings for 39 mythical and historical women. Each invisible

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guest is given a plate decorated with vulvas, butterflies, or flowers, set on a colorful textile runner. The names of another 999 female figures— from primordial fertility goddesses to twentieth-century scientists—are inscribed on the white-tile porcelain floor. This monumental installation is American artist Judy Chicago’s feminist magnum opus, The Dinner Party (1974–79), an expression of the 1970s focus on women’s contributions to civilization and the celebration of female sexuality. The daughter of a union leader and political activist, Judy Chicago has been a controversial figure in the art world. When The Dinner Party opened in San Francisco in 1979, some cheered, while others scoffed. In 1980, New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer called the images of female genitalia “kitsch” and denounced the installation as “very bad art . . . mired in the pieties of a political cause” (Kramer C1). Museums refused to exhibit The Dinner Party, forcing supporters to raise money to show the work in alternative settings. Some feminists saw Chicago’s work as reactionary and “essentialist”— that is, reducing women to their sexual and reproductive functions. In 1990, the University of the District of Columbia offered a permanent place for the exhibit, but a media firestorm incinerated the project. A writer for the Washington Times dismissed it as lesbian history, while evangelist Pat Robertson dubbed it blasphemy. Finally, philanthropist Elizabeth Sackler found it a permanent place in the Brooklyn Museum. Though still controversial, Chicago’s work is widely considered an icon of feminist art and the women’s movement of the 1970s. As an artist, Judy Chicago has been officially invited to the party. Hatshepsut, the Female Pharaoh The first historical figure represented at Chicago’s table of honor is Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh who ruled at the height of Egyptian power. Her setting includes a plate painted with a blue and red vulva in raised relief radiating colorful waves. A runner is embroidered with her name, surrounded by ankhs, Pharaonic collars, and other symbols of her life and achievements. In Chicago’s exhibit, the pharaoh herself is invisible, just as she was for over three thousand years, nearly erased from history until 1828 when Champollion noticed some peculiar inscriptions at Deir el-Bahri, a complex of mortuary temples near Luxor. The Deir el-Bahri inscriptions seemed to refer to images of a male pharaoh as “she.” Perplexed, Champollion consulted Manetho, an Egyptian historian and priest of the third century BCE. He discovered a reference to a female ruler named Amessis, whom he took to be the person referenced

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in the inscriptions. Wondering why the images on the temple walls were male, Champollion proposed that Amessis was an Eighteenth Dynasty queen in whose name one or more pharaohs reigned. This unsatisfactory answer prompted several prominent Egyptologists to investigate further. It was Karl Richard Lespius, the leader of a Prussian expedition from 1842–45, who realized that the male pharaoh depicted in the temple and the “she” of the inscriptions were actually the same person. This was even more puzzling, and for the next twenty-five years Egyptologists debated the mystery, finally agreeing that there had indeed been a female pharaoh named Hatshepsut. Still, no one could agree on the details of her reign or why she had taken the unusual step of calling herself “pharaoh.” The mystery deepened as scholars discovered that persons unknown had tried to obliterate her memory, smashing her monuments and striking her name from king lists. Images of King Hatshepsut on the walls of tombs and temples had been hacked away, leaving only a blank human form. Mariette, Henri Edouard Naville, Howard Carter, Herbert E. Winlock, and others developed theories to fill this mysterious void. Many thought there must have been a terrible feud in the ruling family of Thebes, the capital of ancient Egypt. Hatshepsut was the “wicked stepmother” who wrested control from her wronged and furious stepson and nephew, Thutmose III. She was a licentious woman, carrying on an affair with her architect, Senenmut, who either dominated her or was her sexual slave. These conjectures were based less on evidence than nineteenthcentury ideas about a woman’s proper role. For Victorians, a woman wearing a false beard and presenting herself as the king of Egypt seemed highly improper. Up until the mid-twentieth century, scholars continued to concoct stories about Hatshepsut that expressed their cultural biases. She was an outrageous fraud, duping the Egyptians into accepting her as a divinely ordained king. She was mentally unstable, an egomaniac, an incompetent menace who made the country weak. More sympathetic portraits cast her as a passive, peaceful monarch whose womanly attributes made her shun wars and conquests—an Egyptian Mother Superior. When Chicago began working on The Dinner Party, archaeologists and Egyptologists did not typically focus on gender issues in their work. Toward the mid-1970s, the situation began to change as scholars questioned Egyptology as an objective, value-free science. Brian M. Fagan’s The Rape of the Nile (1975), Peter France’s The Rape of Egypt (1991), and John and Elizabeth Romer’s The Rape of Tutankhamun (1993) all contributed to a better understanding of the cultural attitudes that motivated scholars, explorers, and archaeologists approaching ancient Egypt. The metaphor of “rape”

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repeatedly used in these books demonstrates how such scholars linked issues of gender to the history of western dominance and imperialism. Roberta Gilchrest’s Gender and Archaeology (1999) introduces feminist perspectives on the mutability and conflicting nature of ideas about sexuality and gender. Margaret W. Conkey and Ruth E. Tringham have explored the relationship between archaeology and the much-derided Goddess Movement, whose proponents have made broad claims about the place of female-centered religion in prehistory and antiquity. Goddess Movement supporters propose a matriarchal period in ancient Egypt, though archaeologists have not found convincing evidence of such a stage. However, Egyptologists calling for reevaluations of women’s roles in ancient Egypt have pointed out that most of the evidence was recorded by male elites who may have downplayed their importance. Gay Robins’s Women in Ancient Egypt (1993), Joyce Tyldesley’s Daughters of Isis Women of Ancient Egypt (1994), Barbara Waterson’s Women in Ancient Egypt (1991), Dominique Montserrat’s Women and Family Life (1998), and Zahi Hawass’s Silent Images: Women in Pharaonic Egypt (2000) have all increased the understanding of the public and private lives of Egyptian women in antiquity. By the 1960s, the prevailing theories about Hatshepsut had begun to lose credence. In the 1970s, scholars began to present a more sympathetic view of the pharaoh. Peter Dorman debunked the theory that Hatshepsut’s relationship with her advisor Senenmut was necessarily romantic in The Monuments of Senenmut (1988). Later, in a 2001 article, he dismissed the “wicked stepmother” characterization as no more than a fairy tale drawn from western folk literature (Dorman, “Hatshepsut” 1–6). Gradually, Hatshepsut began to emerge as a successful and highly competent ruler. Egyptologists now agree that Hatshepsut reigned over stability and prosperity for twenty-two years, beginning around 1480 BCE. She was the eldest daughter of Thutmose I and Queen Ahmose, the first king and queen of the powerful Thutmoside clan of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Evidence indicates that when her father died, Hatshepsut married her half brother, Thutmose II, the son of a secondary wife of Thutmose I, and became queen consort. Thutmose II, who may have been a minor when he took office, had a daughter with Hatshepsut and a son with a secondary wife. When Thutmose II died, his son, Thutmose III, was still a child. Hatshepsut, the boy’s stepmother/aunt, became a co-regent with him—a well-established tradition in the Egyptian monarchy. At first, Hatshepsut ruled as co-regent, but later declared herself pharaoh. She did not suddenly seize the throne but gradually assumed the pharaoh’s office by taking on male titles, using masculine grammatical forms for her name, and depicting herself in male attire. She claimed that she was

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her father’s intended heir, and priests boosted her claim by circulating the myth that she was the daughter of the god Amen-Re. Hatshepsut, more powerful than better-known Egyptian queens like Cleopatra and Nefertiti, guarded borders and conducted a profitable trading mission to the fabulous, perfumed land of Punt. She not only waged wars but may have even accompanied her soldiers on a campaign in Nubia. The architectural wonders of Hatshepsut’s reign include several magnificent obelisks and a mortuary temple considered to be one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. After her death, someone took steps to erase traces of Hatshepsut’s reign. Precisely who did it and why is unclear. Thutmose III did not go on an immediate rampage motivated by revenge, since defacements occurred twenty years later. Joyce Tyldesley proposes that given the incompleteness of the erasure, the motive may not have been to obliterate Hatshepsut completely but to erase the memory of her status as pharaoh. Her omission from later Egyptian king lists does not preclude the possibility that she was remembered as a queen-consort or queen-regent, especially since she appears as a ruler in Manetho’s chronology. As Tyldesley explains, “Tuthmosis may well have found it advisable to remove all traces of the unconventional female king whose reign might possibly be interpreted by future generations as a grave offense against maat, and whose unorthodox co-regency might well cast serious doubt upon the legitimacy of his own right to rule. Hatchepsut’s crime need be nothing more than the fact that she was a woman” (Tyldesley 225). Assmann describes maat as a concept of universal order encompassing truth and justice. Maat was the pharaoh’s responsibility, and if the pharaoh did not uphold maat on earth through the proper observance of religious rituals and festivals, the universal order would collapse (Religion and Cultural Memory 33). Though the pharaoh alone was responsible for maat, the queen consort also had a role to play in public life. In the Eighteenth Dynasty, her role was particularly significant: she used the title “God’s Wife” to indicate that she had had sexual intercourse with the god Amen to produce the king. Hatshepsut may have instated her daughter in this role, thus making sure that maat was properly upheld. Nevertheless, by assuming the pharaoh’s traditional role, she was intervening in maat in a radical way. After her, the only Eighteenth Dynasty woman thought to have reigned in her own right was Nefertiti, who possibly ruled after the death of her husband but did not take the title of pharaoh. Nefertiti’s husband, the great-great-great-nephew of Hatshepsut, was the revolutionary Ahkenaten who tried to convert Egypt to the exclusive worship of the sun god Aten. This pharaoh’s memory was also deliberately erased, and some believe that his erasure plays a key role in the formation of western identity. The legacy of Hatshepsut’s suppression has been less fully

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explored, but it, too, may have left traces in western anxiety about women who are too close to God and too fluid in their identities. Ancient peoples attempting to distance themselves from Egypt may have been influenced by the memory of the long reign of a woman who presented herself as wife and daughter of the gods and the supreme ruler of the Egyptian empire. A Mummy Lost and Found Whatever happened following Hatshepsut’s death, her mummy vanished at some point. It was not in the cache of royal mummies found in 1871 and 1881 in Deir Al-Bahari, and it was missing from the unfinished tomb Howard Carter discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 1902. In 1920, Carter found two sarcophagi in this tomb, one Hatshepsut’s, one her father’s— both empty. In searching the Valley of the Kings in 1903, Carter had stumbled upon the modest tomb of two female mummies. One was eventually identified as Hatshepsut’s wet nurse and taken to the Cairo museum, but the other mummy remained unknown. In further explorations, archaeologists discovered some of Hatshepsut’s funerary objects, such as canopic jars and figurines, but still no mummy. In 1989, American Egyptologist Donald P. Ryan rediscovered the modest tomb that Carter that had disclosed. He found the female mummy who had been left there lying forlorn with strands of reddish-blond hair scattered on the floor beside her. Ryan was struck by the placement of the left arm crossed over the chest, indicative of royalty. Was this the long-lost mummy of the Hatshepsut? Some Egyptologists thought it was a possibility. In 2006, an Egyptian archaeological team led by Zahi Hawass set out to reinvestigate the mystery of Hatshepsut’s mummy. Meanwhile, the pharaoh was gaining celebrity status, having starred in a popular exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art the same year. As part of his investigation, Hawass decided to first examine the magnificent unfinished tomb in the Valley of the Kings that had originally been built for Hatshepsut. Photos showed Hawass clutching a rope Indiana Jones–style as he entered the treacherous tomb. His team braved slippery tunnels and noxious clouds of dried bat dung, but the prize was still out of their grasp. Like Howard Carter, they found Hatshepsut’s sarcophagus, minus the mummy. In June of 2007, Hawass made a stunning announcement. He had found Hatshepsut’s mummy—and it was indeed the one left lying in that simple tomb discovered by Carter over a hundred years before. The solution to the mummy’s identity was straight out of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. A tooth found inside a wooden box inscribed with Hatshepsut’s name precisely matched the space of a missing molar in the mummy’s jaw

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socket, like Cinderella’s slipper. In a television special overview, Hawass gushed that “this is the most important discovery in the Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tutankhamun, and one of the greatest adventures of my life” (The Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen). A photograph shows Hawass gazing tenderly upon Hatshepsut, as if awakening a sleeping beauty. The image captures the first great woman in history being rescued by the most famous Egyptian Egyptologist in the world. Hawass’s spectacular find was the subject of a television special aired in July 2007 by the Discovery network. Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen presents the tenacious Hawass trying to identify Hatshepsut’s mummy in a mystery narrative that Nancy Banks-Smith of the Guardian described as “CSI: Cairo.” Around the time the special aired, John Noble Wilford of the New York Times reported that early tests of mitochondrial DNA made by Hawass’s team showed a relationship between the mummy of Hatshepsut and that of her ancestor Ahmose Nefertari, further proof of its identity. People who thought that the culture wars of the late twentieth century were over found themselves mistaken in the reactions to Hatshepsut’s mummy in the popular press and on the Internet. “Mummy of Cross-Dressing Pharaoh Uncovered,” announced a news Web site written by “citizen journalists” in a bulletin that went on to describe the pharaoh as “a legend in lesbian circles and the ultimate gay woman of power and mystery.” It was not Hatshepsut’s popularity in the gay community, however, that fascinated many commentators. Rather, it was her mummy’s appearance. The Egyptian Museum in Cairo houses a sculpted head of Hatshepsut, one of several depictions that have been found showing the pharaoh as a woman. The description on the museum’s Web site is as follows: “This head belonging to Hatshepsut derives from one of her statues at Deir El-Bahari. It portrays the queen in idealized Osirian form, but still showing delicate feminine features such as the curving eyebrows, the wide eyes extended by cosmetic lines, the delicate aquiline nose and the gracious mouth. A certain intelligence and beauty emanate from the face. The well preserved colours enhance the expression” (“Queen Hatshepsut”). Hatshepsut’s mummy presented a different image—that of a fat, middle-aged woman with pendulous breasts, rotting teeth, and a possible skin disease. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Lisa Anderson lamented, “Grotesquely obese and a dental disaster, Egypt’s long-lost Queen Hatshepsut was no raving beauty.” On July 7, 2007, Stefan Ahitei proclaimed on a popular Web index that “Mummy Analysis Shows Ancient Egyptian Queen Was Fat, Balding and Bearded—As ugly as Cleopatra.” Ahitei’s commentary alluded to recent reassessments of Cleopatra’s appearance and suggested that Hatshepsut’s black and red nail polish was something out of a “horror movie.” On June 26, 2007, a user on a science news Web site offered the

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opinion that Hatshepsut’s erasure was a reaction to her monstrous looks: “Of course,” wrote the blogger, “an ugly queen would not be perceived as divine by her subjects” (Richards). Others were titillated by the reputed size of Hatshepsut’s three-thousand-year-old breasts: “Egyptian Mummy Has Gigantic Breasts,” announced Rosella Lorenzi in a story on Discovery News. Bloggers on the Web site raved about their size and shape. The color of the mummy’s hair was a hot topic on the Internet. Was it really red, as photos suggested? If so, why? Hatshepsut’s hair color went unmentioned in Hawass’s comments and in the New York Times coverage, but Nevine El-Aref, writing for an online weekly based in Cairo, asserted that the hair was dyed. Bloggers had heated exchanges over the meaning of Hatshepsut’s alleged red hair. Some saw the claim as way to deAfricanize the pharaoh and suggested that hair was actually dyed with henna or bleached by the sun. Whatever the pharaoh’s hair color and however she may have looked during her reign, such debates point to a continuing preoccupation with race, gender, and sexuality circulating in the construction of the past. After over three thousand years of erasure, Hatshepsut became the prism through which twenty-first century identity politics was refracted. Egypt and Cultural Memory I have raised up what was dismembered . . . —Inscription of King Hatshepsut (qtd. in Tyldesley, Hatchepsut)

The story of Hatshepsut is an appropriate place to begin discussing the theory of cultural memory—that is to say, memory as more than just a function of biology. Maurice Halbwachs proposed that the social memories humans develop through communication with others are key to forming and maintaining their identities. Just as biological memories can become distorted or interrupted, social memories can also be altered. In Religion and Cultural Memory, Assmann focuses on the cultural dimension of memory, observing that shared written, oral, and visual histories that are inherited tell humans how to remember the past. Some theorists, such as Carl Jung, have suggested that cultural memory is inscribed in human bodies or souls, but Assmann considers these ideas unnecessary to explain its power and endurance. He observes that a group or culture does not have a memory in the literal sense in which an individual has a memory, but the individual’s memory does exist in a social and cultural context. Cultural memory is more than just tradition, which may be deliberately handed down over a few generations. It stretches far into

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the past and also has an unconscious dimension, encompassing “the ageold, out-of-the-way, and discarded . . . heretical, subversive and disowned” aspects of a culture’s shared identity (Religion and Cultural Memory 27). Cultural memory carries tensions that groups emphasize during different periods of their development. Assmann observes that despite the fragmented, conflicted nature of cultural memory, groups tend to perceive the preservation of the past as the restoration of a lost unity. This idea is expressed in the English words “re-membering” and “re-collecting,” which suggest putting things together that have been dispersed (Religion and Cultural Memory 11). When conflict arises, members of a group may turn to memory to shore up their identity. Assmann and others have pointed out that canonized written texts are the most powerful agents of a group’s shared memory. The Book of Deuteronomy, for example, calls for the Hebrews to remember the Exodus from Egypt by every conceivable means, from communal feasting to body-marking. The combined effect of these remembering techniques has been so powerful that the story of the Exodus is still a central aspect of Jewish identity today. Assmann explains that Hebrew cultural memory is particularly dependent on written texts because of the rejection of graven images. Historians of cultural memory are not concerned with facts as such, which may have led Bernal into trouble, but with how memory constructs history. For example, Assmann cites a biblical reference that Moses was trained in the wisdom of the Egyptians that appears only once in Acts (7:22). The question for him is not whether or not this is actually true but why seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans ignored all the other available images of Moses in the Bible and focused on this one memory, even though it was in conflict with western ideals. The idea of Moses the Egyptian, as opposed to Moses the Hebrew, is an example of a countermemory—a trace of the past that had been rejected in the dominant inherited narrative. Such memory traces indicate countercurrents of dissent and uncertainty, threatening the reorganization of identity when they arise. The Trauma of Akhenaten For many theorists, pain or trauma plays a crucial role in the shaping of memory. Freud was fascinated by the story of Moses in the history of the Hebrews. In Moses and Monotheism (1939), he dismisses Jung’s concept of a “collective unconscious” and offers his own idea of “archaic inheritance” to explain the origins of Hebrew identity. According to him, Moses was an Egyptian who gave the Hebrews the religion of monotheism but was

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murdered in the wilderness because his people were not ready to accept this idea. He proposes that the Jewish religion became centered on repressing the murder of its founder and dealing with lingering guilt. Freud’s theory hinges on the connection between Moses and the pharaoh Akhenaten who came to the throne of Egypt around 1353 BCE. This pharaoh first went by the name Amenhotep IV, after Amen, a Theban creation deity who had become the state god, along with his consort Mut, a mother goddess. Soon, however, the pharaoh began to focus on Aten, a god represented as the divine solar disk who had been associated with the sun god Re or Ra. Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten in honor of Aten and eventually outlawed the worship of other traditional gods in the Egyptian pantheon. O Sole God, beside whom there is none! You made the earth as you wished, you alone All peoples, herds and flocks: All upon earth that walk on legs All on high that fly on wings. (Akhenaten, The Great Hymn to the Aten)

Akhenaten changed the style of art to reflect his revolutionary religious views and went on to make changes in architecture and official inscriptions. This great reorganizer of Egyptian identity moved the capital from Thebes to a new city called Akhetaten (modern Amarna) and continued to alter Egyptian art to reflect more naturalistic styles. He obliterated the image of the god Amen wherever he found it, even on his father’s royal cartouches. For the conservative Egyptians, his interference with memory and identity seems to have gone too far. After Akhenaten’s death, the Aten cult he had founded fell out of favor. His heir Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun in the second year of his reign to reinstate Amen and abandoned the city of Akhetaten. Later successors knocked down Akhenaten’s temples, using them for building materials. Finally, Akhenaten and his supporters were excised from the official lists of pharaohs. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the identity of this radical pharaoh was rediscovered and traces of his reign were unearthed by archaeologists. Right away, scholars began to notice similarities between Akhenaten’s religion and Moses’s monotheism. After three thousand years, Akhenaten was about to shock the world all over again. In Akhenaten: History, Fantasy, and Ancient Egypt, Dominique Monserrat observes that since his rediscovery, Akhenaten has been mythologized endlessly, compared to everyone from Oliver Cromwell to Jesus Christ (Monserrat 12). Freud made the comparison to Moses famous, discovering

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the foundation of the western psyche in the figure of the pharaoh. In Freud’s analysis, he was a man obsessed with his mother who created a fantasy father cult to erase his own father. He saw Akhenaten’s religious system as the result of the oedipal complex, the psychic struggle in which the father is a competitor for the exclusive love of the mother. Freud identified Moses as an Egyptian living at the time of Akhenaten and concluded that after the pharaoh’s fall, Moses preserved the notion of a single, transcendent god and departed Egypt to lead a new people in this faith. Freud described the religion of Akhenaten and that of Moses as “father religions” that elevate God the father at the expense of all other gods. Such religions pass on the oedipal complex along with its peculiar tensions. Freud saw the Hebrew injunction against graven images as a stripping away of the sensual element of divinity, a symptom of the son’s forbidden desire for the mother’s body, which is linked to repressed hostility against the father. For Assmann, Freud’s elaborate theory of father ambivalence is superfluous, because the hostility against the father is plainly written into the biblical texts where father figures like Moses, John the Baptist, and Jesus receive rough treatment. Biblical narratives also reveal a preoccupation with dangerous sexual desire for mothers and daughters and the suppression of female deities, which centers on images of women that display their power and unlawful association with the divine. Female gods in the Bible are always false. A crucial link between the religion of Akhenaten and that of Moses is the distinction they make between the “true” god and “false” gods. This idea was radically different from the polytheism of antiquity, where people from different countries had no problem recognizing each other’s sun god or earth goddess. Assmann stresses that before Akhenaten, the Egyptians would not imagine calling anyone’s gods “false”—foreign gods were simply familiar manifestations of divinity with different names. Polytheism tended to be tolerant and fluid, while monotheism emerged as rigid and intolerant of other religions. The novelty of monotheism was that of making other gods false. Assmann refers to this innovation as the “Mosaic” distinction, since it is known in the West through Moses, rather than Akhenaten who became excluded from memory. He observes that the idea of calling gods “false” does not come naturally to human beings, “for such gods have the seductive attractions that they seem to be based on the evidence of our senses, something that is absent from revealed truth” (Religion and Cultural Memory 57). Through graven images, polytheistic people could touch and encounter divinity in ways that worshippers of the remote and invisible father figure of monotheism could not.

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The Mosaic distinction is highly relevant to the reception and memory of ancient Egypt in the West because it is a model that creates an alien culture, making Israel forever “right” and Egypt forever “wrong.” Israel becomes wholesome, wise, and sane, while Egypt is a place of sorcery, plagues, and madness. The Egyptians, on their side, considered Hebrew iconoclasm to be a symptom of a physically disfiguring epidemic. The Egyptian historian Manetho, for example, described Moses as a rebellious Egyptian priest who made himself the leader of a colony of lepers—a conflicting memory trace that may have erupted in anti-Semitic portraits of Jews as diseased. The Hebrew tradition, however, became the dominant narrative in the West. That story turns Egypt into a place that should be forgotten, associated with oblivion and the unconscious. Egypt becomes a realm of confused identity, alien language, and incomprehensible signs. Dreams, visions, and apparitions hover inside its haunted tombs, constantly threatening to disrupt the seamless narrative of western cultural history. It also becomes feminized. Egypt, the Land of Women I believe that the feminization of Egypt was a significant byproduct of the Mosaic distinction and, to a lesser extent, Greek characterizations that were passed down in western canonical texts. In Hebrew tradition, particularly, Egypt becomes a primeval world of women, while Israel is the right and proper land of the father. The point is not whether Egypt was actually woman-centered historically, as Goddess Movement proponents would have it, but rather that Hebrews and Greeks used the idea of Egypt as a feminine realm to distinguish themselves from the older culture. In the realm of cultural memory, historical facts are obscured by myths that bolster and perpetuate group identity. Though ancient Egypt was more egalitarian than other ancient cultures, it was not matriarchal. However, its association with women helped both Hebrews and Greeks carve out their own male-centered identities through contrast. This strategy of making cultural distinctions based on gender explains why the mother figure is removed from stories of origin in the Hebrew narrative and displaced into other realms, including Egypt. When the Canaanites, with whom the Israelites have intermarried, worship the “queen of heaven,” they commit the ultimate blasphemy. In Isaiah, Jerusalem is full of “diviners from the east” and “ruled by women” (3.12). The hands of the people are “full of blood,” tainted with sins of “scarlet” and “crimson” that suggest menstrual contamination. The filthy, “bloodstained” daughters of Zion (4.2) are particularly responsible for this state of iniquity, strutting

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about and “glancing wantonly with their eyes” (3.16). The Lord punishes their flagrant displays of sensuality by exposing their “secret parts” (3.17) and stripping away their “crescents” and “amulets” (3.18). As the Lord berates the people of Jerusalem, he repeatedly reminds them they had been led out of Egypt and should have left behind its unclean ways—the ways of women. I wonder if the accusation of the Canaanites being “ruled by women” is a memory trace of Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh. Dating the Exodus is tricky, but whether it was a revolt, an expulsion, or a series of departures taking place over time for a variety of reasons, the late Eighteenth Dynasty is generally associated with Hebrew migration from Egypt. The pharaoh or pharaohs associated with the Exodus have been variously identified as Thutmose III (Hatshepsut’s nephew/stepson) and Amenhotep II (the son of Thutmose III), or, at the latest, Ramses II who ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE, roughly two hundred years after Hatshepsut. Two hundred years is generally considered by memory theorists to be the outer limit of memories passed down directly from generation to generation, independent of other sources. Egypt dominated Canaan throughout the Eighteenth Dynasty until the time of Ramses II in the early Nineteenth Dynasty, and the memory of a powerful pharaoh like Hatshepsut, who ruled for twenty-two years, must have lingered in spite of the attempt to obliterate her reign. Manetho’s history shows that she was remembered far beyond the time of the Exodus at least as a queen consort, if not as an actual pharaoh. In any case, the worship and rule of women is connected to Egypt in the Bible and remembered as something sinful. In Isaiah, the Lord commands his people to throw their idols into caves—to bury hideous reminders of false gods away from sight. Egypt, the land of idolaters, will be conquered once and for all. The Lord will dry up the Nile, the symbol of Egyptian fertility, and ride to Egypt on a “swift cloud,” making the idols tremble and emptying the spirits and hearts of the people (19.1–6). They will be cleansed of the sin of wanting to gaze upon the Lord’s competitors. Over and over, the Lord reminds his people, “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god” (44.6). Religious scholars have observed that this pronouncement is strikingly similar to the inscription on the statue of Isis at Sais: “I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal hath ever removed.” In Isaiah, when the Lord has a showdown with a goddess he calls the “virgin daughter of Babylon” (47.1) and the “daughter of the Chaldeans” (47.5), the father-god asserts his status as sole divinity in the style of Aten. This particular goddess has been identified with both the Assyrian Ishtar and the Canaanite Astarte, both of whom are linked to the Egyptian Isis.

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In the biblical battle of the sexes, the Lord strips the sorceress-goddess of her title “mistress of kingdoms.” He denounces her claim to wisdom and her Isaic assertion, “I am, and there is no one besides me” (47.5–10). However, in the very act of calling her up for dismissal, the Lord acknowledges the goddess’s potency and ironically causes her presence to linger in Hebrew cultural memory until she reemerges in Christianity as the Virgin Mary. Constantly asking people to remember to forget something is like asking them not to think of a pink elephant—it guarantees the return of the excluded idea. Counter-memory traces swirl and eddy beneath the dominant narrative, needing only a moment of cultural upheaval to reemerge as a torrent. After Hatshepsut’s reign was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, Christian scholars began to cast her as the Egyptian princess who adopted Moses. In this current of counter-memory, Moses is said to be the offspring of Hatshepsut by the god Amen. Depictions of Hatshepsut at Deir El Bahri showing an infant in her arms are interpreted as Hatshepsut and the baby Moses. Biblical historians Michael Harbin (The Promise and the Blessing [2005]) and Jeffrey Donley (The Everything Guide to the History of the Bible [2006]) outline theories that weave the female pharaoh into Judeo-Christian history, which Christian blog sites regularly repeat as fact. Through such reinterpretations of cultural memory, the suppression of women in the biblical narrative is swept away, and the female pharaoh becomes the mother of the Hebrew religion, just as the ancient mother goddesses excluded from the Bible resurfaced in heretical strains of philosophy, occultism, and alternative religious narratives in the West. Psychic Tombs What Otto Fenichel calls “scopophilia,” the love of looking at what is forbidden, helps to explain why nineteenth-century Europeans were so eager to experience ancient Egypt as spectacle and claim its visual relics. Fenichel asks, “What is the sin in looking?” (Fenichel 390). The answer, he proposes, lies in the link between looking and identification. If seeing means taking the other into the self, then the biblical injunction against graven images makes sense: “If a man looks upon God face to face,” writes Fenichel, “something of the glory of God passes into him. It is this impious act, likening oneself to God, which is forbidden” (390). The biblical commandment reserves the act of looking for the father and demands a separation between father and son in the patriarchal scheme. Looking at “false” gods is forbidden, too, but for reasons that may have more to do with the mother than the father. Many of the sensual images

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of divinity that surrounded Egyptians were female: Queen Isis, “the eye of Ra”; the cow goddess Hathor; Uadjet, the cobra goddess; and countless more. From a psychoanalytic perspective, looking at these female bodies enacts a dangerous desire. The Hebrew religious code addresses this desire by rejecting images that suggest the mother’s fleshy eroticism, her bestial “other” nature embodied in goddesses who come not from heaven above but from the earth beneath or the waters beneath the earth. Potent, animalistic female images also appear in Greek myth as archaic reminders of dangerous looking. Medusa, who probably originated as an eastern nature goddess, becomes a terrifying monster with living serpents for hair whose deadly gaze turns men into stone. For Freud, the tale of Medusa resonates with his theory of the oedipal complex in which the male child fears castration for his crime of seeing the mother as an erotic object. In his essay “Medusa’s Head,” Freud theorizes that Medusa represents a fear of the mother’s genitals, symbolized in her snaky head. She embodies the terror of being castrated for illicit observation (Freud 264–65). Laura Mulvey expands on Freud’s theories in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” suggesting that those who gaze use fetishism as a way of circumventing the threat of female images (32). Through the Hebrew injunction and such Greek tales of monstrous and abominable female creatures, the oedipal struggle is written into cultural memory as a relationship between the West (the son who wishes to look) and the East (the mother, the object of the gaze). Women’s bodies—along with creepy-crawlies, dead things, and dark places—become the sources of secret visual pleasure, and Egypt arises as the symbol around which these ideas cluster. Such forbidden ideas remain in the psyche like tombs, troubling reminders of what is buried. Stories of dismemberment also point to cultural memories in which something is separated from identity but lingers in strange recurring signs. When the hero Perseus cuts off Medusa’s head, her threat remains in the fearsome gaze that transcends death. The rich, fascinating myth of Oedipus also reveals a memory of something threatening that has not been completely forgotten. Oedipus, the son of Laius and Jocasta, became king of Thebes after solving the riddle of the man-eating Sphinx. While traveling the road to Thebes, he meets the Sphinx who poses her famous question, “What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?” Oedipus’s correct answer is “man,” who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age. Upon hearing his answer, the Sphinx is said to have destroyed herself. Though Oedipus initially defeats the Sphinx who questions him, the fear and desire she represents dogs his steps when he unknowingly kills

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his father and marries his mother. When his crimes are revealed, Oedipus blinds himself so that his eyes will never behold such a monster again. People expressing fantasies about ingestion, capture, and containment are signaling the urge to re-member or re-connect with something that has been buried. Maria Torok records the curious phenomenon of psychoanalytic patients suffering from the illness of mourning who report dreams of eating and then burying a dead body that she calls the “exquisite corpse.” This sepulchral figure represents the forbidden object in the psyche that the traumatized person seeks to revive to experience forbidden pleasure (1: 107–16). The western obsession with Egyptian mummies is an example of a cultural phenomenon corresponding to such individual urges. The urge to eat, unwrap, and lock them away in display cabinets points to a painful psychic and cultural separation that has required repression. In the nineteenth century, the physical remains of Egypt were unearthed from their tombs, setting off a train of buried memories through which the psyche became reorganized. Language and Desire Many theorists have discussed language as a mechanism that conceals as much, or more, than it reveals. Abraham and Torok thought of language as a fundamental means of keeping alive what has been buried. Words form a crypt in which memory traces survive the gap of time. For Julia Kristeva, there is always something operating beyond and beneath the official language humans inherit. For her, this “something” is associated with the maternal body, the first source of rhythms, tones, and movements for every human being. In Kristeva’s view, the patriarchal monotheism of Judaism triumphed over matriarchal, fertility-based early religions and reduced western women to being the “silent other.” She observes that patrilinear monotheistic tradition requires a radical separation of the sexes that is perpetuated through language (Kristeva, About Chinese Women 19). While Kristeva’s idea of an original matriarchal, fertility-based religious system is controversial, the very existence of this counter-memory points to the separations required by the Mosaic distinction. In western cultural memory, men are typically the guardians of the word of God, held to possess social subjectivity and official access to language. The language of ancient Egypt was suppressed in part because of its closeness to what was supposed to have been forgotten—the irrational world of the senses connected to women. However, Neoplatonists and proponents of various occult traditions came to insist that hieroglyphic writing was actually the source of truth,

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revealing what the dominant cultural narrative disavowed. In Hermetic tradition, Hermes Trismegistus is the tongue of Ra—the source of speech and the revealer of the hidden. The androgynous figure of Hermes Trismegistus permits access to forbidden language that is expressed by the metaphor of a veil. The veil hides the organic vitality of nature, symbolized in the figure of Isis, the embodiment of the reality beyond the obfuscation of words. The western practice of consuming and containing objects associated with ancient Egypt was a strategy for keeping cultural identity stable and undisturbed. The struggle to interpret and control hieroglyphic language was also a bid to control cultural narratives. When Champollion decoded the language that concealed Egyptian history, inherited narratives were suddenly open to question. Writers explored the resulting cultural turbulence in a rich variety of stories in which Egypt acquired new meaning, creating some of the most popular and imaginative strains of nineteenthcentury art. Travel and Estrangement Freud conceived “the uncanny” as a sense of the unfamiliar that brings people back to a secret place within themselves. This paradoxical experience serves as a useful path for thinking about nineteenth-century travel to Egypt. In considering the uncanny, Freud points to a division in the psyche that relies on repression but also urges the subject toward confrontation with what is buried. Expanding on Freud’s ideas, Kristeva discusses her notions of the “stranger” and “inner exile” in her book Strangers to Ourselves. She demonstrates that in the act of traveling, the foreigner who feels divided seeks to expand the boundaries of self in safety. “Should one recognize,” asks Kristeva, “that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within?” (Strangers to Ourselves 14). She suggests that when traveling, people who are marginalized at home are free to experience desires and act in ways that were previously unthinkable. Through the experience of exile, they are able to address inner alienation. Kristeva focuses on the male subject when she follows the footsteps of the stranger through history and literature. For her, the inner exile, so distressing that it drives the subject from home, is a sign of alienation from the mother. As Kristeva explains, “The foreigner . . . has lost his mother. Camus understood it well: his Stranger reveals himself at the time of his mother’s death . . . As far back as his memory can reach, [the Stranger’s being] is delightfully bruised: misunderstood by a loved and yet absent minded, discreet, or worried mother, the exile is a stranger to his mother.

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He does not call her, he asks nothing of her. Arrogant, he proudly holds on to what he lacks, to absence, to some symbol or other” (Strangers to Ourselves 5). Western men writing about traveling to Egypt often expressed their journeys as a way to flee from the anxiety of alienation. In Egypt, some sought an imaginary place that lay beyond trauma and the suffocation of home. The young Gustave Flaubert left his overprotective mother to seek his dreamland in a long journey to Egypt, searching its ruins and brothels for materials to reconstruct a new identity. As he traveled, he turned his fleeting encounters with Egyptian women into the substance of narratives in which he could safely engage with their fearful potency. When he did so, he realized that what had seemed alien and threatening was already part of his western identity, already inscribed in his inheritance. Concepts of the uncanny and inner exile are also useful for examining how nineteenth-century women who were marginalized at home gained opportunities to escape their situation in Egypt. Their narratives show how they engaged in productive re-membering that opened paths for selfregeneration. Amelia Edwards’s journey up the Nile, for example, demonstrates how a woman estranged in her homeland and divided in her psyche found a new and purposeful identity among Egyptian tombs. When an Egyptian died, he or she had to embark on a journey into the underworld to confront irrational, chaotic forces. Only when this primordial world had been successfully navigated could the soul depart from the tomb in the boat of Ra and enjoy a renewed life in heaven to eat, drink, and even make love in the presence of the gods. Nineteenth-century journeys into Egyptian ruins are trips to the underworld where western travelers confront what has been excluded from their inherited cultural narrative. The rich and varied writings of visionary people who made this journey— both literally and metaphorically—helped guide their contemporaries through the changes that propelled the West into the future through the confrontation with the past.

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The Exquisite Corpse Nineteenth-Century Literary Revivals

For a collector . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not only that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. —Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

O

n June 30, 1819, Urban Sylvanus, the editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine, summed up the preoccupations of what he called the current “wonder-working age.” He lamented a world that was changing too fast, leaving human beings in a bewildering swirl of shifting paradigms and monstrous technology. Populations were exploding. Steam engines and new-fangled machines threatened to eclipse the age-old rhythms of life. Medical “free-thinkers” had deprived human beings of souls with their mechanistic view of the body. Against these alarming trends, “we must summon the confidence to appeal to the past,” wrote the editor, “as a probable pledge to the future” (Preface to The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, from January to June 1819). Romantic writers often turned to the ancient world as a source of inspiration and philosophical illumination that could not be accessed through the modern, industrial realm. John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” possibly inspired by the poet’s visit to the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, expresses the value of wisdom gained through aesthetic experience and contemplation of the eternal: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats famously wrote. “That is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (5.49–50). For writers of the Romantic movement, life was more than the accumulation of facts. Living fully meant reaching toward meaning that lay in the elusive, intangible realm of emotion and intuition. Keats chose the Greek god Apollo, the incarnation of music and poetry, as the champion of creativity and the representative of the human soul’s most profound longings.

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In mythic tradition, Apollo, the giver of light and creator of order, had to constantly struggle with darkness and the threat of chaos. Myths tell that only four days after his birth, Apollo fought with an ancient cave-dwelling serpent called the Python, the source of oracles for the priestesses at Delphi. He redeems the murder of this divine serpent by taking her oracular abilities into himself. Apollo transmutes the polluting influence of the past into the voice of truth and rationality. Keats’s unfinished poem “Hyperion,” begun in 1818, presents a battle of the gods in which the Greek Olympians square off against the ancient Titans, who are identified with Egypt. Apollo seeks to overthrow the archaic sun god Hyperion, whose sublime and terrible image recalls Milton’s glorious Satan in Paradise Lost. Hyperion is an Egyptian colossus, striding from hall to hall, “His palace bright / Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold, / And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisk” (1.7.176–78). Though beautiful, Hyperion’s palace is a dead place full of phantoms. Its hieroglyphs have become indecipherable, their meaning forgotten. This primeval Egyptian god, the “Son of Mysteries,” is a remote despot, clinging to the vestiges of his power. Keats identifies with the Greek point of view, which he associates with beauty and humanity. Egypt, however majestic, represents something primitive and oppressive that must be left behind. The time when “sages look’d to Egypt for their lore” (1.3.34) is long past, and the day has come for new enlightenment. Keats draws on mythology to present conflicting visions of the cultural past. Apollo is the hero, but ironically, he gets upstaged by Hyperion, whose palace receives the most lush and vivid descriptions in the poem. The sensual Egyptian sun god shines as bright as Milton’s Satan, whose complex and alluring personality threatens to eclipse God’s glory in Paradise Lost. The ghosts of Hyperion’s palace represent the elements of western identity that trouble the artist seeking transcendence through creation and the celebration of beauty. They are the dark, flickering passions of the human spirit, the fearful remembrances of death, decay, and dangerous desire. These violent forces threaten to drag the artist down from the heights of Mount Olympus into the tombs beneath the earth where nightmares hold sway and the Python’s ghost still hisses her secrets. Keats’s poem remained unfinished, pointing to unfinished business with what Egypt stood for in cultural memory. The nineteenth-century obsession to collect the material vestiges of the past of Egypt indicated that the phantoms in the tomb were still active, the old gods not yet left behind. Sometime before 1828, Wordsworth went to see the collection of antiquary Charles Townley, acquired by the British Museum in 1805. Later, he wrote a dream-like poem in which a magical Egyptian ship bearing a

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mysterious princess approaches King Arthur’s knights on an English beach. In a note preceding the published poem, he indicates that a particular eastern sculpture in the Townley collection stuck in his memory, the form of a lotus flower with a goddess rising out of it. “The Egyptian Maid, Or, The Romance of the Water Lily” (1830) reveals British anxieties about cultural heritage by presenting a confrontation between representatives of the Christian, Arthurian past and the pagan forces of Egypt. The Arthurian knights vie to claim the Egyptian princess who has washed ashore in a corpse-like stupor. They seek the “wished-for Bride” of England as a trophy in a cultural encounter that enacts a psychic struggle. Mummy-like, the sleeping beauty offers the fantasy of claiming the past of Egypt through the ownership of a strange and inert female body. The princess, unappreciated in her native country, becomes valuable in England as an object to be touched and ogled. In a contest to win her, Sir Galahad swoons over her motionless body, crying, “Mine was she—mine she is, though dead” (Wordsworth, line 325). Though he covets the princess as an object, Galahad bestows a kiss that magically brings her to life under new cultural terms. Turning from her heathen faith, the reanimated Egyptian is baptized a Christian. Galahad the pure has redeemed the princess who becomes the “beautiful captive” described by St. Jerome. The magician Merlin represents another, more subversive side of Wordsworth’s confrontation. He admires the beautiful ship that brought the princess but envies it, too, and fears the potent heathen magic of its goddess symbol. The knights are attracted to a dead body, but Merlin is drawn to the life force of the alien mothership, which is both wonderful and threatening. Unable to resolve his conflicting responses, he destroys the ship in a fit of rage, causing the waves to carry the princess to the English shore. Merlin’s actions have separated what is “safe” about the past, the passive princess, from what is not, the threatening ancient goddess. The princess is the “wished-for Bride,” but the goddess is the stranger that must be excluded: Provoked to envious spleen, he cast An altered look upon the advancing Stranger Whom he had hailed with joy, and cried, “My Art shall help to tame her pride—” Anon the breeze became a blast, And the waves rose, and sky portended danger. (lines 25–30)

Merlin’s mixed feelings about the Egyptian ship hint at the ambiguity of the poem, suggested by the either/or of the title. Is Egypt the virginal, passive Egyptian Maid or the Water Lily, the symbol of the potent, threatening

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mother? Is the foreign influence from the past something to welcome or something to fear? Merlin’s reaction suggests that he is not quite sure. He destroys the ship but lets the princess escape, too. This uncertain outcome opens the possibility for a more complex engagement with excluded reality in which artificial boundaries collapse. Merlin in his role as the curious outsider expresses the conflicted desire to expand the self to acknowledge forces of desire and irrationality that have been repressed. His ability to see the divinity and admirable qualities of the stranger is a step toward the expansion of cultural identity. Romancing the Stone The Egyptian whom you see today, you shall never see again. —Exodus 14:13

The idea of a ship carrying a potent symbol of the past to the shores of England was more than poetic fancy. In 1817, eager British subjects were imagining a gigantic Egyptian head of fine-grain red granite—thousands of years old and weighing eight tons—floating on a ship bound for England. Belzoni had removed the head often incorrectly identified as the “Younger Memnon” from the mortuary temple of Ramses II in Thebes, setting it on a journey that would eventually end at the British Museum. Ramses II was the pharaoh actually represented by the colossus—the same monarch many of Belzoni’s contemporaries believed to have been described in Exodus as the oppressor of the Hebrews whose daughter adopts the baby Moses. British antiquarians claiming ownership of the head reengaged with ancient cultural narratives in several ways. The “capture” of the pharaoh reversed the biblical bondage of the Israelites in Egypt and enacted the triumph of Moses. Through Ramses, the British could stake a claim to the grand monuments of his reign. The possession of the head also suggested that the British Museum would now control Egyptian wisdom and secrets. The legacy of Roman imperial victory was conjured, too. Vanquished and symbolically castrated through his severed head, Ramses would be dragged to London and put on display, much as Octavius planned to do to Cleopatra. However appealing these strategies of cultural triumph may have been, their execution carried certain risks. As the philosopher Walter Benjamin observes in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” collected objects have a way of turning the tables on their would-be captors (Benjamin 62).

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I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look upon my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing besides remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” (Shelley, Ozymandias)

Shelley wrote Ozymandias while Ramses’s head was en route to England. “Ozymandias” was the name given to Ramses II by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, whose Library of History describes the statue and the proud inscription on its pedestal: “King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works” (1.47). Though Shelley had never traveled to Egypt, he was aware of the historian’s description of the pharaoh’s passive and serene expression—a memory very much at odds with the cruel figure of the pharaoh in Exodus. Belzoni had echoed Diodorus’s description, rather than the biblical images, when he observed the head smiling at him at the thought of being taken to England. Shelley rejected the images of Diodorus and Belzoni, offering a reinterpretation of the Hebrew version of a threatening cultural opponent. Shelley’s pharaoh is not smiling but sneering aggressively. His visage is only “half sunk,” and a life force still emanates from the dead stone. The reader is invited to gaze at the face of a king stamped on a rock, but eerily that gaze is returned—mirroring back the observer’s presumed victory. Ozymandias’s head recalls the head of the mythic Medusa, whom the Greeks described as a beautiful young woman ravished by the sea god Poseidon while worshipping in Athena’s temple. Athena, outraged by the violation of her temple, punished Medusa by turning her lovely hair into snakes and cursing her with the power to turn men into stone if they looked upon her. The hero Perseus, aided by Athena, used a reflective shield and curved sword to decapitate Medusa, but her severed head retained the glaring, paralyzing eyes. A year after the publication of Ozymandias, Shelley wrote a poem that evoked the goddess in a fragmentary lyric, “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery” (1819).

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In this poem, Shelley imagines the stone head of Medusa on display in a famous Italian museum. The object radiates a life force that is “fiery and lurid, struggling underneath / The agonies of anguish and of death” (lines 7–8). Visitors to the gallery observe traces of beauty in her face at odds with the dreadfulness of her visage. Vipers curl up from her head, their brazen, glaring eyes “kindled” by an “inextricable error” (line 35). The error can be read in two ways: Athena erred in punishing Medusa, who had done nothing more than attract Poseidon’s desire with her beautiful body. The viewers in the gallery also err in not recognizing her divinity and assuming that she is has been safely fetishized. Though broken and objectified, Medusa is not conquered; her story is not yet over. She is a living memory, existing as an “ever-shifting mirror” (line 37) of terror and beauty that transcends death. Like Medusa, Shelley’s Ozymandias challenges his capture. Staring defiantly, he negates the Lord’s words in Exodus promising the Hebrews that they will never again have to look upon the pharaoh and his people once they cross the Red Sea. Ozymandias compromises the freedom from graven images that Moses bequeathed. The colossus, an example of idols that the Hebrews were meant to shun, is now worshipped as an object of priceless value. Ozymandias disrupts cultural memory and the divisions that reflect it. Looking at him and absorbing his words causes the boundaries between east and west, subject and object, matter and spirit to blur. In Shelley’s vision, the sensual, terrible potency of the excluded stranger is revived through the gazer’s curiosity. The reassuring words, “nothing besides remains,” become an ironic hint that something does remain—ready to leap out of containment. Ozymandias foreshadows the terrifying monsters that break free from their museum cases in subsequent treatments of Egypt in literature and popular fiction. When the head of Ramses II finally arrived at the British Museum, members of the press crowed over the event as an expression of British cultural supremacy. In an announcement entitled “Egyptian Head of Memnon at the British Museum” in January of 1819, The Gentleman’s Magazine congratulated the public on what “may perhaps be considered as the most perfect specimen of Egyptian art in the world” (61). The head of Ramses II inspired countless literary tributes in addition to Shelley’s. Despite all the confident talk of having secured this “specimen” for the benefit of the English, it was seemingly impossible for a writer to think about the head without imagining the pharaoh coming to life and making defiant, disdainful speeches at his awestruck observer. In February 1821, London Magazine published an excerpt from a sketch called “Memnon’s Head”:

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In London, now with face erect I gaze On England’s pallid sons, whose eyes up-cast View my colossal features with amaze, And deeply ponder on my glories past. (128)

From his throne in the British Museum, Ramses usurps the place of god the father as the one who is privileged to look. He stares contemptuously at viewers and paralyzes them with his words, making a mockery of the satisfaction of cultural triumph. The idea of a talking colossus can be traced to the tradition of a “speaking” statue of Memnon, otherwise known as Amenhotep II, the father of the heretic king Akhenaten. The legendary statue was said to make strange musical sounds during certain weather conditions. Pilgrims who came to visit the marvelous statue would leave with a characteristic formulation: “I heard Memnon.” Europeans familiar with the story attributed the sounds to the magical or deliberately deceitful productions of Egyptian priests. In England, the confusion over the identity of Belzoni’s head led some to speculate that the fragment housed in the British Museum might belong to this very statue. Shelley’s evocation of the voice of Ozymandias probably contributed to a merging of Ozymandias/Ramses and Memnon/Amenhotep in the popular imagination. In any case, the passive image of Ramses II inherited from Diodorus faded as poets conjured the defiant potency of the colossal head. Historically, Ramses II was one of the most powerful rulers of ancient Egypt, rumored to have lived ninety-nine years and to have fathered one hundred children. The mummified body of this figure of history and legend was found in the Valley of Kings in 1881 and placed in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. In the early twentieth century, a change in temperature caused the mummy’s arm to make a sudden movement, much to the horror of onlookers. The fictional motif of the mummy’s curse, already vivid in the popular imagination through images like Shelley’s, was fed by reports of this incident. As the forceful nature of Ramses II was re-membered through the stone head, ancient traditions of Pharaonic sexual energy became reactivated. The name of Ramses was eventually linked to what George Bernard Shaw called the “greatest invention of the nineteenth century”: the rubber condom (Denoon). By the 1880s, New York City entrepreneur Julius Schmid was selling his “Ramses” brand condoms in packages featuring sensual images of the pharaoh. Advertisers realized that the association of such an illustrious figure with a product linked to sexual vice could help to legitimize its use. They were correct, much to the dismay of outraged moralists.

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Didactic writers also found inspiration in ancient Egypt. They washed the memory of Egypt clean of vice and conscripted it in the service of promoting moral health rather than sexual freedom. Egypt for Little Readers Sarah Atkins, afterwards Lucy Sarah Wilson, followed the well-established trends of didacticism and romantic geography to produce several books for young people on travel and nature. Wilson wrote The India Cabinet Opened (1821) to describe the natural curiosities of India to British children through the voice of a wise and benevolent mother. Her books, which include biblical stories and introductions to the beauties of rural areas, tend to stimulate the imagination while emphasizing detachment and scientific fact-collecting. In The Fruits of Enterprize (1821), Wilson presents the highlights of Belzoni’s accounts of his activities in Egypt. His colorful—and often highly questionable—adventures become lessons on the values of industry, or “enterprise” and perseverance. Quotations and homilies fill Wilson’s pages like the fragments in a collector’s cabinet. They serve to support and reinforce teachings that rest on categorical divisions—chief among them the distinction between “us” and “them.” In Wilson’s book, the negative qualities traditionally associated with ancient Egypt are transposed onto the current inhabitants of the country. Belzoni’s archaeological activities are undertaken on behalf of the British crown, and consequently, the achievements of the ancient Egyptians are associated with the triumphs of western civilization. The archaic world is forgiven its excesses and even raised to the status of cultural ancestor. The cover and frontispiece of The Fruits of Enterprize feature an image of the now-famous “Head of Memnon.” In the context of Wilson’s didactic children’s tale, the pharaoh is an emblem of greatness and industry and a double of Belzoni himself, the larger-than-life and busy adventurer who brought him “home” to England. The narrative begins with a cozy domestic scene of a mother talking to her four children about the pyramids as they take tea. “Mrs. A,” an expert on everything from harem habits to mechanical engineering, dictates how Laura, Emily, Owen, and Bernard are to view the various features of the country as the children eagerly trace a map of Egypt with their fingers. The map is a central image in Wilson’s book, anchoring the mother’s story and providing a neat facsimile of the places she describes. Little Emily’s eyes sparkle as Mrs. A lays maps over the library table, and the children marvel at how they are able to locate exotic places on the carefully drawn paper. Efficient, practical, and factual, maps

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are the tools of empire. They are the indispensable reference points of imagination, which must not be allowed to stray out of its proper bounds. The children think of Egypt as a great curiosity cabinet. Upon hearing Mrs. A’s description of Belzoni’s visit to the temple at Tentyra, Laura remarks that this temple must be “the cabinet of the Egyptian arts” (Wilson 36). The children are also familiar with facsimiles of Egyptian art through Belzoni’s displays at Egyptian Hall, which they have seen in London. From 1820–21, Belzoni’s exhibition of his discoveries in Egypt had been a rousing success, drawing nearly two thousand attendees on opening day to see his watercolors and wax “squeezes” of reliefs from the tomb of Seti I. Such representations inform the children’s perception of Egyptian antiquity as something to be sketched, exhibited, and examined with the correct degree of scientific detachment. Mrs. A begins her account of Belzoni with the “ingenious” and “industrious” explorer attempting sell his waterwheel to Mohammad Ali, who is too ignorant to appreciate its wondrous efficiency. Mohammad Ali is presented as an indolent, superstitious Turk, so indifferent to Egyptian monuments that he does not consider the head of Memnon worth sending to the King of England; for who would want an old piece of rock? Belzoni’s patient labors teach the value of perseverance as he convinces the stubborn viceroy to allow him to remove the precious head. Armed with sketch books and shovels, Belzoni sets out to conquer a savage and often hostile land where his benevolent archaeological mission is constantly thwarted. “Whenever you want a stimulus to patient, persevering industry,” instructs Mrs. A, “think of Belzoni!” (86). The man some would consider a tomb robber becomes a paragon of virtue. Mrs. A speaks of his “principal aim to rob the Egyptians of their papyri” (108), as if such looting were perfectly right and natural. Children are taught that the ancient Egyptians are a remote but great people who erected “stupendous edifices” and then promptly fell into oblivion. They are magical beings who belong to a hazy, wondrous age. Theban ruins appear to Belzoni “like a city of giants, who were all destroyed, leaving only the remains of various temples, as proof of their existence” (Wilson 37). The ancient Egyptians are strange but precociously talented and clever. Mrs. A admires the Egyptian art considered blasphemous in the Bible for its “sweet simplicity” that never fails to appear “pleasant to the beholder” (110–11). Looking through the lens of empire transmutes dangerous images into Egyptian gold. The Egyptians, reports Mrs. A approvingly, were an industrious people who were nearly as talented as the English—but not quite. They wove linen “nearly as fine as ours” and beat gold “nearly as thin as ours” (109). They

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are so admirable, in fact, that they may even be the ancestors of the British. Mrs. A tells how Belzoni convinces local chiefs to allow him to remove artifacts by assuring them that he intends to take them home to see if English people are descended from the pharaohs. On one occasion, he refers to the ancient Egyptians as his “ancestors.” Mrs. A holds it to be “universally admitted” that ancient Egypt was “the queen of nations” and the “mother of science,” quoting the opening paean to Egypt from Edward Young’s play Busiris (Wilson 100). Wilson carefully selects quotations from European writers who admire Egyptian grandeur, ignoring those that show the ancient world as the realm of vice. The family library is well stocked with reference books and illustrated volumes that depict Egypt as a cultural treasure house. At one point, Laura leaps up to consult a volume of the French historian Charles Rollin’s illustrated 1774 history of Egypt and nearby countries, which became available in English in 1808. Through such educational aids, ancient Egypt is defined and mapped on a cultural template that removes unpleasant associations. The contemporary Egyptians, however, do not occupy the same universe as those who lived in the glorious, mythic world presented in these texts. The modern Egyptians, or “Arabs,” are variously described as treacherous, selfish, filthy, greedy, effeminate, slavish, and given to performing strange dances. They are perplexed by modern advances like electricity and do not even know simple technology such as the use of a shuttle for the loom. Belzoni meets people in the course of his excavations who live in caves “like wild beasts” and house themselves in tombs among the mummies of an “ancient people of which . . . they know nothing” (116). The best are ignorant but happy. The worst are “complete savages, and wholly unacquainted with any kind of labor” (72). The children wonder how their industrious mama can tolerate the lazy Egyptians. “Effeminate indolence is born with the Egyptian,” explains Mrs. A patiently. “It grows as he grows, and descends with him into the grave” (189). Intellectually incurious, the womanly Arabs only desire stupefying calm among clouds of incense. The children eagerly repeat these Orientalist characterizations, interrupting their mother’s narrative to exclaim over the deceit or ignorance of a particular Arab. Little Bernard casually refers to the Arabs as “enemies.” Wilson presents the British as the true heirs of Egypt by convicting the Arabs on the same charges leveled against the Egyptians in the Bible. The ancient Egyptians, in contrast, have been elevated to the status of ancestors, and so it becomes permissible to associate Moses with them. The vast wisdom of Egypt, reports Mrs. A, is “obvious both from sacred and profane history.” She proudly proclaims Moses to have been trained in their wisdom and asserts that Solomon acknowledged Egypt as “the parent of

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all philosophical knowledge” (113). Magic and trickery, the trademarks of biblical Egyptians, are now attributed solely to the Arabs. The only blameworthy feature of the ancient Egyptians is their religion. Mrs. A describes their sphinxes as symbols of “strength and innocence; the power and purity of their gods” (78). However, when she later explains to the children that the Egyptians worshipped animals, little Bernard finds this information disquieting. He immediately repeats a nationalistic nursery-room verse as a charm against pernicious idolatrous influence: I thank the goodness and the grace Which on my birth have smil’d And made me, in these Christian days, A happy English child. I was not born, as thousands are, Where God was never known, And taught to pray a useless prayer To blocks of wood and stone. (114)

Though the Egyptians did not know the “true” god, their works are nevertheless seen as conduits of elevated emotions when properly regarded. Wilson makes it clear that sublime feelings are not the spontaneous result of experience but reactions that must be carefully taught to children. Pyramids, broken columns, and desert scenery generate feelings of “superior pleasure” that “superior minds only can enjoy” (99). A scene Belzoni meets in the western desert of the Nile fits the correct mold of controlled sublime experience. This encounter is presented as a relationship between observer and object like that of a gallery visitor gazing in quiet detachment upon a painting: “The scene here was beautiful: the silence of the night; the beams of the radiant moon shining on the calm surface of the crystal lake; the group of fisherman; the little fire; altogether formed a picture which Belzoni had never before in reality witnessed, though I know not how often his lively imagination had painted such a scene” (227). Sublimity is an attitude that viewers project onto experience, rather than a feeling inspired in a transporting moment. Mrs. A puts the children through catechisms on sublimity, inviting them to practice until their responses are automatic. Would it not, she asks, be “very natural” for ruins to put the viewer in mind of the fleetingness of time? “Yes, mama,” Laura dutifully replies. “And such feelings would be both melancholy and pleasing” (100). Laura has learned her lesson well. When Mrs. A describes columns that make Belzoni want to prostrate himself, young Owen responds gamely that the scene would have suited “dear Laura” who is “fond of anything sublime” (98).

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Laura’s fondness for the sublime hints at something that seeps through the trained responses that organize the world into safe, predictable patterns. Sublimity and horror were often closely linked in the Romantic imagination. Edmund Burke proposed that sublimity and beauty were mutually exclusive, as light is to darkness. Pagan temples, ghosts, and anything that is obscure and little understood, including God, could produce the feeling of sublime terror. This sense of fear mixed with fascination has attractions that resist control and cannot be easily mapped. Freud’s essay on the uncanny focused not on external, alien objects that produce fearful fascination but disturbingly familiar things, such as houses and bodies in which hints of desire and decay lurk beneath the surface. Horror can be considered as the crossroad where terror and uncanniness meet—the place where something eerily familiar rises up to accost the subject, sweeping away moral order and stable identity. Horror is what lies beyond a carefully ordered vision of reality, forcing the subject to think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable. Mrs. A explains that while pyramids produce elevated emotions, mummies “impress upon the mind disgust and horror” (105). Dead Egyptians come alive in her description of Belzoni’s exploration of mummy caves, conversing with one another as their noxious emanations and dust threaten to suffocate the explorers. There is something intensely disturbing and unwholesome about these bodies that threatens to contaminate those who have interrupted their rest. The hints of disturbance conveyed by Wilson in her children’s story explode into full-blown horror in a novel written the same year by another young woman who also had mummies and morality on her mind. The Mummy’s Revenge Not that I blame curiosity—no—I admire it above all things! —Jane Loudon, The Mummy

One Sunday afternoon in 1821, an unknown twenty-three-year-old writer went to view a mummy unwrapping at a theater in Piccadilly Circus. The experience sparked the idea for a story that resulted in Jane Loudon’s science fiction novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. The tale concerns the adventures of a young British scholar and his mentor who travel to Egypt—easily reached by aerial balloon—to awaken the mummy of the pharaoh Cheops with a galvanic battery. Loudon’s novel marks the first time a mummy’s curse appears in western literature—the beginning of a long line of stories that still send shivers through movie audiences.

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The author, who later became famous for ladies’ guides to horticulture, presents a tale whose surface narrative teaches conservative moral lessons on the danger of misguided scientific and occult pursuits. However, her delight in gothic horror and full realization of the mummy’s perspective demonstrate Loudon’s ability to combine didacticism with a subversive inquiry into the legitimacy of moral systems. She collapses the boundary between the curious observer and an object that demands a reckoning with reality that is both uncontrollable and needful for a whole and cohesive identity. Loudon knew Belzoni’s lurid accounts of Egyptian mummy pits and was likely aware that he was the first westerner to explore the interior of the pyramids. Newspapers were filled with accounts of Belzoni’s investigation of what was then known as the First Pyramid, or the Great Pyramid of Cheops—the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing. Cheops was familiar through Herodotus, who described the pharaoh as an oppressive, wicked tyrant who forced his people to build his magnificent pyramid and even prostituted his own daughter to fund his egomaniacal project. Inside Cheops’s pyramid, Belzoni found the polished granite sarcophagus of the pharaoh, but it was empty, the lid broken into two pieces nearby. Loudon imagines a monstrosity that breaks free from the crypt of western tradition and merges his universal moral order with a technology-obsessed modern sensibility. Loudon’s futuristic England is a wealthy, advanced country whose malcontented population flirts with democracy, atheism, and other innovations only to descend into a state of anarchy. At the time the novel begins, a female sovereign, considered almost as a supernatural being, has established a Catholic dynasty of despotic virgins and appointed the indolent Claudia as successor. Edric, the second son of a nobleman, refuses to follow the military career of his older brother and dreams of pursuing occult and philosophical studies. He is an outsider, weary of languishing in obscurity and harried by doubts about his place in the world. The passionate young man yearns for soul-inspiring intellectual achievement unavailable in his materialistic native country. Though dazzling mechanical wonders are everywhere, from moveable houses to aerial balloons, Egyptian antiquity is still a source of wonder to British scientists. Edric’s mentor Dr. Entwerfen persuades his pupil to travel to Egypt by reminding him that the Egyptians “possessed knowledge and science far beyond even the boasted improvements of modern times” and “have surpassed us” in everything “except their religion” (42). Egypt is an alternative realm where Edric hopes to worship the goddess Nature and explore her forbidden secrets.

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Edric’s interest in the occult has awakened disturbing fantasies. He tells his Catholic confessor of a dream of picking his way through a dark wood to find a subterranean charnel house. His description recalls Belzoni’s account of exploring Egyptian mummy pits that were repeated in Wilson’s children’s book: “I shrank back with horror as I found the arm I grasped soften to my touch, and a disgusting mass of corruption give way beneath my fingers!—Shuddering I awoke—a cold sweat hanging upon my brow and every nerve thrilling with convulsive agony” (16). Loudon understands the erotic undercurrents of Belzoni’s experience. Edric’s dream leaves him with a passion to talk to a dead spirit who knows “the secrets of the grave” (16). Like Pandora, the mythic woman whose curiosity drives her to open a vessel containing the evils of humankind, Edric is haunted with the compulsion to pry into prohibited spaces. His curiosity and desire to escape a loveless dynastic marriage urged by his father drives him to attempt the reanimation of Cheops, whose mummy has at last been located. For him, the bridal chamber of England is a dead end, but the Egyptian burial chamber is a thrilling place where life can be renewed. Edric and Dr. Entwerfen’s entry into the pyramid of Cheops reads like a parody of sexual intercourse. Describing himself as a “weak, feeble worm,” bent on “the gratification of my unearthly longing,” Edric slides through a “dark, narrow passage” and “majestic portals” leading to a recess moved by a “secret spring” that suggests a vaginal cavity (67–68). The haunted burial chamber is covered in images of the evil and “savage” god Typhon, depicted as a fearsome dragon recalling the ancient, polluting serpent Python. Bosoms throbbing with “unspeakable” desires and a “wild, undefinable delight,” the men are disturbed by the uncanny feeling of “immensity and obscurity” as they penetrate the “fearful regions of terror and the tomb” (68). Inside, they find a wondrous lamp that has been burning for thousands of years, fueled by a mysterious substance whose crimson color suggests blood. By the light of this ghastly lamp, Edric gazes upon the sarcophagus of Cheops. This remarkable artifact depicts oedipal scenes of the pharaoh raping a maiden (later revealed to be his sister) and stabbing an old man to death (his father). The instant the Englishmen pry open the sarcophagus, the red lamp reveals the place of death to be pulsing monstrously with life. The pharaoh is presented as a sleeping beauty waiting to be awakened, swathed in “folds of red and white,” with lustrous raven hair and “snowwhite” teeth. However, a “sardonic smile” reminiscent of Ozymandias plays upon his lips, suggesting that he is not quite as passive as he seems (71). When they attempt to revive him, the Mummy greets the men’s curiosity with a paralyzing stare: “In vain Edric attempted to rouse himself; in vain to turn away from that withering glance. The mummy’s eyes still

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pursued him with their ghastly brightness; they seemed to possess the fabled fascination of those of the rattle-snake, and though he shrunk from their gaze, they still glared horribly upon him. Edric’s senses swam, yet he could not move from the spot; he remained fixed, chained, and immoveable, his eyes still riveted upon the mummy, and every thought absorbed in horror” (72). In this scene, the scopophilic gaze described by Fenichel is turned back upon the transgressive viewer. Loudon explores the act of looking by taking on the positions of both observer and observed in her third-person narration. The mummy’s character places her inside the object, gazing out, while Edric’s perspective allows her to examine the horrifying alien being through the viewer’s eyes. This double vision erases the lines between subject and object that began to blur Shelley’s evocations of Ozymandias and Medusa. As the men stare, the mummy laughs, mocking the prurient, “undefinable” interest that lies behind their occult pursuits—he refuses to play by the rules of the “weak, feeble worm.” In Freud’s view, the male subject turns away from the mother in his passage through the oedipal phase, which causes the object of his desire to be psychically buried as an “other within.” The mummy is the symbol of this rejected desire, rising up from the crypt to avenge exclusion. His first utterance is an orgasmic roar that causes Edric and the doctor to swoon in a dead faint. When they come to their senses, the mummy is gone, and the Englishmen are hauled off to jail by the Egyptian authorities. The prisoner of the crypt has turned the tables on his potential captors. While the two men are plotting their escape, the mummy commandeers their aerial balloon and sails toward England, his ancient passions flowing through every vein. In his introduction to the 1994 edition (the first since 1872), Alan Rauch observes that Loudon’s mummy occupies the empty space left by a motherless world (Rauch xxv). Almost every major character in the novel lacks a mother, and England’s virgin monarchs must give up their fertility and sexuality in order to secure power. The mummy, representative of an archaic, preoedipal realm, is part monster and part angel. He is like the ancient goddesses of nature who generate both bounty and destruction—a symbol of the passions that are forbidden those who do not conform to their prescribed roles. When the mummy arrives in England, his first act of vengeance is to turn technology against the unnatural virgin queen. When his aerial balloon crushes Claudia, the shocked citizens greet this event with an indescribable dread and a growing curiosity about the monstrous stranger: “In the mean time the Mummy had stalked solemnly through the city, urged more by instinct than design; the mist that still hung over him, making him seem like one wandering in a dream. Yet still he advanced; his path, like that of a

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destroying angel, spreading consternation as he went, and all he met flying horror stricken at his sight: many, however, when the monster had passed, crept softly back to gaze after him” (91). Cheops’s past crimes of killing his father and raping his sister mark him as the ultimate threat to the western moral order. Conversely, the curiosity he inspires suggests a desire for experiences excluded from this realm. Right away, the mummy makes an evil Catholic friar his slave and sets about punishing those who have violated his universal sense of justice. He punishes corruption, rewards the honest, and generally cleans up the mess that is England. He mocks the British for being afraid to talk to the dead—something his own people understood to be a necessary part of living. The mummy teaches the people of London how to reengage fruitfully with the past, how to remember. Loudon’s mummy is fearful not just for his monstrous appearance but for his insight into the absurdity and corruption of western society. He is able to break through the containment of fetishism, scopophilia and burial, disturbing cultural memory, and psychic geography. Loudon’s novel traces a path from engagement with the stranger that begins with the attempt at mastery and arrives at the possibility for open dialogue and inclusion. Her story takes the curiosity of Merlin and the potency of Ozymandias and unites them in a cultural confrontation that is ultimately healing. Future mummies in literature and film who return to pursue their passions tend to be either objects of pity or horror rather than sources of guidance. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote two mummy stories, The Ring of Thoth (1890) and Lot No. 249 (1892), that present mummies who temporarily vex the living but do not reorder the world that they find. Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1896) defines the mummy as a sensual, twisted villain bent on destruction. His tale concerns an archaeologist’s discovery of the mummy of a female queen whose name has been erased. The queen, inspired by negative assessments of Hatshepsut, is found to have been a murderous sorceress whose evil spirit now terrorizes the living and must be banished back to the crypt. Stoker’s version is the one that is remembered in literature and pop culture, while Loudon’s is all but forgotten. The mummy figure of twentieth-century horror films, memorably portrayed by Boris Karloff in Karl Freund’s classic The Mummy (1932), is patterned after Stoker’s monster as a being that contaminates life rather that restores it. Karloff ’s Imhotep is a lustful magician-priest who chases a British girl he believes to be the reincarnation of his ancient, forbidden love. In modern multiplexes, this particular mummy’s exquisite corpse is typically revived to preserve the exclusions of memory rather than to dissolve them. No matter how close Imhotep comes to satisfying his ancient passions, he always ends up just where he started—cursed and buried. Unlike Loudon’s

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mummy, he arrives to preserve and strengthen the status quo of a present that represses the past. Loudon’s curious outsiders, Edric and Dr. Entwerfen, are struck dumb in their first glimpse of ancient Egyptian wonders, contemplating mysteries that have escaped the probing of science and occultism. The sublime pyramids remind Dr. Entwerfen of the inscription dedicated to the goddess Isis at Sais: “I am whatever was, whatever is, and whatever shall be; no mortal has, as yet, presumed to raise the veil that covers me” (64). At the end of the novel, exactly one year after the mummy’s awakening, a haunting inner voice compels Edric to return to Cheops’s tomb. By this time, the mummy’s guidance has caused a wise king and queen—echoing the loving pair of Osiris and Isis—to supplant Britain’s dynasty of virgins. Their joint rule heralds a new order in which both male and female authority is recognized, nature and technology can coexist, and past and present harmoniously merge into the stream of an enlightened future. However promising this outcome, Edric has not yet found a satisfactory place for himself in the scheme of things. His return to his father’s baronial seat has made him more doubtful than ever about his western inheritance, and his curiosity about the mummy’s secrets remains unsatisfied. As he stands before the tomb of Cheops, Edric feels his identity dissolving and “his senses [becoming] bewildered” as he proceeds “without knowing whither he was going” (296). Edric’s final confrontation with the mummy evokes an occult initiation ceremony that teaches the young man to temper his desire to possess the secrets of nature. As a reward for his successful initiation, the mummy praises Edric as the only reasonable man he has met in the course of his reanimation. Edric alone has learned to appreciate the indecipherable mystery of nature without trying to conquer or claim it. The mummy gives Edric a final piece of advice before returning forever to his sarcophagus where he can rest in peace since his cursed past is now redeemed: “Learn wisdom by experience! Seek not to pry into secrets denied to man” (297). Edric’s future contemplation of nature will be guided by humility and reverence rather than arrogance and covetousness. It was not for Jane Loudon to lift Isis’s veil any further in fiction. After writing The Mummy!, she married a botanist and turned her literary endeavors to treatises on horticulture. Through these writings, which she self-illustrated with detailed color lithographs, she could share her enthusiasm and reverence for the natural world with the women of her day. Others took up where she left off. Nineteenth-century Spiritualists sought authority in the figure of the veiled Isis for their subversive communications with the dead and reinterpretations of the natural order. Late Romantic writers

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also explored the mysteries of Egypt and searched for the veiled goddess who guards inaccessible knowledge. Rites of Passage The Irish writer Thomas Moore mixed traditions of the gothic and the Oriental tale in his novel The Epicurean (1827), which tells the story of Alciphron, the leader of a group of ancient Greek Epicureans who seek the secret of immortality in Egypt. Epicureans, followers of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, focused on sensation and intuition as a path to knowledge, and they were denounced by Christian polemicists who associated their philosophy with hedonism, materialism, and atheism. Nevertheless, Epicurean revivalists emerged in seventeenth-century France and played a significant role in shaping the thought of modern Europe. Victorian detractors associated the philosophy with decadence and effeminacy, construing it as an oppositional force to masculine Christianity, while aesthetes like Oscar Wilde saw it as a source of inspiration for their focus on beauty and sensory perception. Like Terrasson’s Sethos, Moore’s novel is framed as a true account, a translation of an ancient Greek manuscript that records Alciphron’s adventures in the enchanted region of Egypt. Alciphron’s description of this grand and melancholy country is characterized by dazzling sensual imagery, rapturous emotions, and appreciation of beautiful Egyptian women. Struck by the inscription of Isis at Sais, the Greek becomes obsessed with penetrating the goddess’s veil and initiation into her mysteries. Moon-worshipping, dancing maidens dedicated to Isis transfix Alciphron, who falls madly in love with a priestess he sometimes imagines as having turned into a blackened corpse. The image of the corpse signals the disturbing recognition of death that attends the investigation of the cycles of nature and their expression in the sexual attraction between man and woman. Alciphron follows his quest for sensual love and immortality through a subterranean realm where he takes part in initiation rituals. During the course of this underworld journey, his memory is awakened to a primeval, forgotten life of spiritual fulfillment. Eventually he turns from this vision of spirituality, giving up the “idolatrous” religion of Isis in exchange for Christian asceticism. Moore’s sympathy with this turnaround is belied by the lush and ecstatic portraits of Egyptian spirituality, which are more appealing than the stark religion of Christ that may have pleased his critics. Like Moore, the late Romantic writer Edgar Allan Poe used Egyptian religious themes in his gothic short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” first published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839. In this tale, Poe

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explores the idea of a traumatic initiation into wisdom using the tradition of Egyptian mysteries as a pattern for this transition. Unlike Moore, he does not turn away from the pagan wisdom of the past but sees it as a path toward redemption. Poe’s story opens with the narrator gazing upon the desolate house of his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who has fallen victim to a mysterious illness. The ancient, crumbling house, later revealed to be monstrously alive, is eerily mirrored in a pool of water. This vision of house and reflection calls up a feeling of dread in the narrator: “An utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium . . . the hideous dropping off of the veil” (Poe, “Usher” 245). In his essay “The ‘Mysteries’ of Edgar Poe,” Barton St. Armand considers the Egyptian imagery conjured in this vision: “Like a skull half-sunk in the desert sands, or a sphinx partially uncovered by desert winds, the House of Usher confronts the narrator with the shock of a sepulchral memento mori, and, in describing its effect, he thinks automatically of a fragment of the Mysteries associated with Egypt, the land of death, sphinxes, pyramids, and their reigning goddess, Isis” (St. Armand 67). Artists throughout western history have expressed the theme of the memento mori (Latin for “remembrance of death”) through symbols meant to remind the viewer of the inescapable fact of death. Inside the tomb-like House of Usher, the narrator finds his friend Roderick, whose mummylike appearance is both cadaverous and beautiful. He appears to be a relic of an ancient Hebrew line—his nose is “of a delicate Hebrew model,” (Poe, “Usher” 250) and his eyes are animated with a strange luminosity. Roderick’s sister Madeline, glimpsed only as a ghostly shadow, also suffers from an inexplicable illness that gradually paralyses her and turns her into an emaciated, corpse-like being. The unnamed narrator tries to find out what is making the inhabitants of the House of Usher sick. His questions reveal the curious fact that the ancient family has produced no branches but only a single line of descent. This situation, which smacks of incest, has resulted in the transmission “from sire to son” of an inherited illness vaguely described as a “family evil” (251). The symptoms manifest in a peculiar malfunction of the senses, in which the odor of flowers, certain textures, and the taste of food are rendered unbearable. Roderick lives with an “intolerable agitation of the soul,” which convinces him that his family mansion is alive and exerting terrible influence (251). As Roderick worries over Madeline’s decline and his own health, he expresses his secret agony in nightmarish paintings of vaults and tunnels, the haunting music of his guitar, and the study of various occult books that St. Armand identifies as expressing a common theme of Egyptian or

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Eleusian mysteries. As Roderick and the narrator explore these occult treatises, Madeline finally succumbs to her strange illness, and the two men place her inert body in a dark dungeon in the bowels of the house. Seeing them together, the narrator notices a “striking similitude” between brother and sister who turn out to be twins who share “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature” (258). As a crack in the wall of the house gradually widens, Roderick displays vivid signs of hysteria and seems to be carrying “some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage” (260). Finally he becomes completely unhinged, revealing to the narrator something almost too horrible for words: “I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb!” (266). As a storm arises, Madeline appears, and her untimely burial is revealed: It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated. (267)

As the reanimated sister causes the death of her brother, the sound of tumultuous shouting fills the air. The narrator barely manages to escape as the House of Usher crumbles and collapses into the pool of water, dissolving into the mirror that had reflected it. This ecstatic scene is the moment of the soul’s awakening when the paralyzing legacy of ascetic Christianity gives way to a more expansive pagan inheritance in which the divinity of the sensual world is not denied. In St. Armand’s reading, the narrator of the tale corresponds to the initiate of the Isis cult who enters a subterranean temple to witness the enactment of the rebirth of Osiris (represented by Roderick) and his mystic marriage to his sister Isis (Roderick’s sister Madeline). St. Armand views the narrator as an unwilling initiate who first experiences these mysteries as catastrophe rather than enlightenment and rebirth. The crack in the wall represents an irreconcilable gap in the conventional spiritual and emotional perspectives of Poe’s time, but the union of Roderick and Madeline expresses hope that a profound crisis could lead to regeneration and the soul’s transcendence. The nature of the crisis reflected in Poe’s tale can also be understood as a disturbance in cultural memory in which the exclusions necessitated by inheritance have produced a sickness transmitted from father to son. The

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guilt associated with these exclusions is expressed by Roderick’s unspeakable secret—that the women of the House of Usher have been buried alive. As a last-ditch effort to deny this burial, Roderick frantically paints and plays his guitar, performing the sublimating cultural activities that distract him from the ancient crime revealed by his hysteria. However, his futile activities cannot repress the fact that the burial is recalled and its object named. The result is a recognition that the long-standing partitioning of the self cannot be maintained. Roderick’s guilty secret is a family sickness, passed on in collective memory. The buried sister reveals the consequence of pathological exclusion that is handed down, an example of what Abraham and Torok call transgenerational haunting. In their psychoanalytic model, such haunting illuminates the beginnings of social institutions, cultural patterns, and political ideologies that rest precariously on repressions and artificial categories (1.171–76, 181). As the crack in the house grows, the recognition of what is excluded increases until there is nothing left to hold the old, rigid system together, and the house dissolves into the fluidity in the pool of water. Roderick’s soul, and consequently the collective soul of his people, is baptized and reborn, not to be redeemed by Christianity but freed from the oppressive aspects of this inheritance. The crypt of the unconscious is uncovered, and its flawed structure collapses. In Poe’s story, the other within (Madeline), does not return to flicker about the crypt but is united with her captor in a climax of transcendence. The separation between male and female—signifying all the other divisions imposed by the Mosaic distinction—cannot hold. The two are twins, mutually dependent and complementary. Since the suffering caused by Madeline’s exclusion has been acknowledged, the dead can finally be laid to rest, the soul freed. The narrator who witnesses this transformation will not return to the former state of delusion. His namelessness suggests an unfixed identity that can confront reality without the burdens of a troubled inheritance. Poe’s writing illustrates that the maladies of the divided western soul require courageous trials of uncertainty and terror if the spirit is to be truly reborn. In his satirical short story “Some Words with a Mummy” (first published in the American Weekly Review in 1845), Poe mocks the self-congratulation of nineteenth-century scientists whose cultural and intellectual arrogance threaten cultural progress and psychic renewal. A gentleman is awakened from the deep slumber produced by the bourgeois indulgences of a sumptuous meal and a “capital conscience” by summons to attend a mummy unrolling performed by his friend Dr. Ponnonner. The mummy, comically named “Allamistakeo,” is perfectly preserved, including his eyes, which possess a “certain wild stare.” On a lark, one of the gathered

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scholars suggests the reanimation of the mummy by means of electricity. This mummy hilariously responds to an electric shock in his toe by kicking the presumptuous Dr. Ponnonner through a window and denouncing him as a “fat little fool.” After the group regains its composure, the members settle down to converse with Allamistakeo over wine and cigars. To their chagrin, the mummy upbraids them for their “deplorable ignorance” of scientific matters. He ridicules their historical perspective and misguided notions of everything from the origins of the universe to current occult fads. He is unimpressed by modern railroads, contemptuous of democracy, and convinced that the nineteenth century has produced nothing worthy of his observation, apart from some cough drops. He exposes the smugness of his audience as a sham. The men’s shallow appeals to the past have done nothing to illuminate either their present or future. The defeated narrator returns home to write up the encounter for posterity, summarizing his “enlightenment” as follows: “My wife is a shrew. The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that every thing is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045. As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall just step over to Ponnonner’s and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years” (Poe, “Some Words with a Mummy”). Poe’s send-up of the follies of the wonder-working age shows that a pledge to the future must mean more than conscripting the past into the service of empty superiority or the preservation of delusions. Egypt can be a source of illumination rather than fetishistic mystification—a spring of the power of the imagination that is the true force of creativity. Poe’s playful warning suggests that if nineteenth-century citizens are not prepared to confront their own prejudices and acknowledge that their “progress” has excluded much that is valuable from the past, they are only nailing the lids of their own cultural coffins, becoming the undead monsters they so abhor.

4

The Empire of the Imagination Egypt and Esoterica

There are two worlds, the world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination. —Leigh Hunt, Men, Women and Books

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othing is too wonderful to be true,” proclaimed the great British experimenter Michael Faraday in his laboratory notebook in 1849. His researches into electricity and magnetism during the 1830s had given scientific proof that the world was charged by strange invisible forces. Despite widespread skepticism, instantaneous contact between distant people using electric sparks became possible when Samuel F. B. Morse established the first successful telegraphic link in 1844 between Washington and Baltimore with a soul-stirring message: “What hath God wrought?” In the midst of these curious developments, westerners were drawn to a variety of esoteric and occult phenomena. People reported out-ofbody experiences, glimpsed fairies, and visited mediums. They delved into astrology, the Kabbala, alchemy, divination, and numerology. Pyramidologists proclaimed Egyptian pyramids to be geometric shapes buzzing with supernatural forces. Such pursuits were not considered merely eccentric diversions. They were compelling fields of inquiry that drew many serious intellectuals interested in the connections between scientific and mystical phenomena. William Petrie, whose son William Flinders Petrie became the founder of Egyptian archaeology, was a pyramidologist. He followed in the footsteps of Sir Isaac Newton, who had been keenly interested in the subject. In 1775, Viennese physician Friedrich Anton Mesmer had proposed the existence of an invisible magnetic fluid that could be harnessed for healing. In the 1840s, German chemist Baron Carl von Reichenbach postulated an energy field visible to certain sensitive young women who became the

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precursors of spirit mediums. At Cambridge University, members of the Ghost Society, formed in 1851, investigated the phenomena of specters and poltergeists. Occult enthusiasts forged various mystical orders, among them the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis. Both of these drew upon Egyptian magic, ritual, and iconography. Egyptian mysticism and other ancient traditions seemed to promise answers to the most perplexing questions of the day. The Magus Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, was a daring seeker of mysteries and naturally drawn to the occult. Several of his novels, including Godolphin (1833), Zanoni (1842), The Haunters and the Haunted (1859), A Strange Story (1862), and The Coming Race (1871), swirl with ghosts, mesmerists, and subterranean adventurers. They also reflect nineteenthcentury anxieties about technology, female dominance, and Darwinism. Though Bulwer-Lytton was interested in the link between science and spirituality, he rejected scientific materialism as soulless and championed the imagination as the surest path to enlightenment. The sensitive artist was not willing to give up his soul in the name of science. After his mother died in 1843, Bulwer-Lytton began to pursue the idea of communication with the dead. He hosted séances, dabbled in phrenology, and practiced mesmerism. He even performed peculiar experiments demonstrating what he believed to be telepathic communication between snails. Early in his occult-mania, Bulwer-Lytton turned his attention to ancient Egypt, the place where science and spirituality seemed to have been inseparable. A novel in which the cult of Isis and its magician high priest is central became his most enduring contribution to literature. The Last days of Pompeii (1834), like Loudon’s The Mummy, presents a crisis of cultural and spiritual authority set in ancient times rather than projected into the future. The Greek protagonist Glaucus and his beloved Ione are living in Pompeii just before the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Imperial Rome is the dominating cultural force, but the influence of Egypt continues through Arbaces, the ominous high priest of the Temple of Isis. Members of the new Christian sect are fervently promoting their religion, hoping to convert the citizens of Pompeii. Outside the borders of the city, the frightening Witch of Vesuvius leads a shunned existence, cackling enigmatically at the people of Pompeii in her dark cave. Bulwer-Lytton’s Pompeii, like Loudon’s futuristic England, is oddly devoid of mothers. Ione has no mother, nor does Glaucus, nor the blind slave Lydia who secretly loves him. The decrepit crone of Mount Vesuvius is an antimother who curses anyone unfortunate enough to stumble

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upon her lair. Despite this motherlessness, a sensual feminine influence surrounds the aristocrats who dress in effeminate clothing and lounge in cavernous baths. For many nineteenth-century British travelers and scholars, the discovery of erotic influences in archaeological sites represented a danger from the past that had to be guarded against. In The Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick describes how eighteenth-century excavations at Pompeii unearthed shocking frescoes in the baths, brothels, and temples that depicted frolicking prostitutes and sensual images of Isis and her worshippers. Kendrick notes that Bulwer-Lytton was familiar with these images, citing the novelist’s description of Pompeii as a city where baths and public places manifested “the energy of corruption . . . the refinement of vice” (qtd. in Kendrick 10). Bulwer-Lytton’s Pompeii has no flesh-and-blood mothers, but traces of a supernatural Egyptian mother linger in ancient rituals performed by Greek and Roman priests of the Temple of Isis who know nothing of her forgotten mysteries. The Christians challenge the authority of this dying cult, viewing Isis an obstacle to the acceptance of Christ. They aim to shut down her temple and impose the law of a father god who will silence Isis once and for all. From the Christians’ perspective, Isis is a deceiving temptress. The Christian who seeks to convert the young priest Alpaecides describes the gods of Egypt as the “blackest of criminals” who threaten those who are “haunted by the promises of Egypt” (Bulwer-Lytton 94). When Alpaecides gazes at the sculpted sphinxes at the home of his mentor Arbaces, he is gripped by a “nameless and ghostly fear” (95). For him, the monstrous aspect of Isis begins to supplant her motherly side as the object of reverence turns into the object of horror. The person closest to Isis is the sensual and scheming priest Arbaces, the vestige of an Egyptian royal line far more threatening to the Christians than the effeminate Greeks and Romans. Arbaces’s ancient lineage symbolizes the umbilical cord tying the son to the mother that has not been completely severed. He sees Isis as an emblem of the closely guarded secrets of nature, which only a gifted few are destined to penetrate. Immortality is the object of his quest, which he pursues with dangerous zeal. Arbaces recalls Loudon’s mummy, gliding like a shadow through the streets of Pompeii. This mummy figure, however, is not a promoter of universal values but a dark magus who seeks forbidden power through his occult pursuits. Arbaces, who is eventually revealed to be Hermes Trismegistus himself, is an envious outsider who wishes to take Isis’s power into himself. Unknown to anyone, he has been speaking oracles of his own invention in the name of the goddess. Ultimately, his ventriloquism turns into spiritual possession in which he channels forces that he cannot control.

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The Christians have no need to pry into the secrets of nature because their religion has already promised them immortality. Arbaces, on the other hand, is troubled by the inevitable cycles of life and death. Like Wordsworth’s Merlin, he is caught between admiration for the ancient, feminine power of nature, and a desire to control it through magic. The unresolved conflict between the Christians and the priest Arbaces suggests that the author was not completely satisfied either with sanctimonious religion, which excludes the reality of nature, or arrogant occultism, which strives to master it. In the realm of the novel, the Christians are ultimately unable to silence Isis, and Arbaces fails in his attempt control her voice. The reality of the other within always seeps through the fantasies of denial and mastery. The figure of the Witch of Vesuvius is the embodiment of uncontrollable reality, which is defined as untamed nature. In confronting the ancient crone, the people of Pompeii face a deadly subterranean force. She is the Sphinx resurrected, the oracle of the tomb, and one of the biblical false gods from beneath the earth. Her decrepitude and potency threaten to remind the Pompeiins that birth is always haunted by death and mastery troubled by desire and dependency. During a storm, young Glaucus takes refuge in the Witch’s cave where he unwisely laughs at this figure associated with the triform Hecate, an ancient goddess of the underworld: Away with your stories of Hades, Which the Flamen has forged to affright us— We laugh at your three Maiden Ladies, Your Fate—and your sullen Cocytus. (467)

The Witch has the last laugh. Her magic causes Glaucus to turn into a babbling idiot who returns to the city to wander the streets muttering hallucinatory songs and incantations. Through him, the oracular voice of a foreign, threatening mother has begun to leak into Pompeii. Glaucus’s madness allows him to utter unspeakable desires, but only temporarily. He eventually comes to his senses, and just as he does, he finds himself confronted with Arbaces who is begging a statue of Isis to wreak vengeance on the infidel. For a moment, the statue is animated, and its Medusa-like eyes paralyze Glaucus. Suddenly an earthquake begins, knocking down the statue of Isis and preventing Arbaces from murdering Glaucus. The idol is destroyed, but the vengeance of the excluded mother goddess has just begun. Unlike the frightened men, the women of Pompeii welcome the eruption of Vesuvius with crazed elation. A young girl breaks out into an ecstatic

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prophecy: “Tramp! Tramp! How gayley they go! Ho, ho! For the morrow’s merry show!” (470). As the volcano spits black smoke, the men stare at each other dumbly, but the women fill the air with their “universal shrieks.” On the morning of the eruption, strange signs appear, among them the sound of sullen laughter floating along the plains. Amid these signs, the Witch of Vesuvius crosses the boundary of the city dressed in the “obsolete robes of the stranger.” The people of Pompeii are terror stricken upon seeing her, “as if one long entombed had risen once more amongst the living” (472–73). As this ominous stranger approaches the palace of Arbaces, he is dreaming of being trapped in a cavern with a female monster that appears as a colossal sculpture of his “ancestral sphinx.” An unbidden voice issues from Arbaces’ lips to ask this being to reveal her identity. In response, she thunders, “I am That which thou hast acknowledged . . . My name is NATURE!” (474–75). Nature is the mother at her most fierce and threatening. She is material reality, the matter whose meaning derives from the Latin word for mother, mater—the opposite of spirit. She is the fleshy, fearsome lost ancestor who predates the father, represented by the intangible Christian god. In the moment of Arbaces’ traumatic confrontation with the dream sphinx, violent natural forces emerge. With a deafening roar, something limitless and universal flows over Pompeii, and forgotten memories and secrets are exposed in an erotic eruption. The geography of reality is altered as the culture upheld by fantasies and deceit is engulfed. Instead of being converted to Christianity or subdued by the magus Arbaces, the citizens of Pompeii are swept under poisonous red lava that oozes like menstrual blood. They are frozen into commemorative monuments that both bury and reveal the desires of the flesh and fears of nature that forever threaten the Christian religion. Bulwer-Lytton’s narrative reflects how archaeological excavations brought Europeans face to face with the haunting realities that challenged their history, culture, and institutions. The sensual art and the relics of ancient religion they found testified to their undying influence. The immense popularity of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel suggested that the author had tapped into a crisis in cultural memory and inherited psychic paradigms. His narrative hints at a sea change taking place in the collective imagination in which certain realities could no longer be successfully excluded. Spiritualism was a vivid reflection of this change. In the séance room, the other within began to speak for itself. Then it took on a female body and marched into the middle of Victorian society and demanded a reckoning.

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The Medium’s Message “She is the intellectual wonder of the age.” “She is an inscrutable rhapsodist.” “What a sequence of metaphysical abstractions!” “What a horrible attack on religion!” “What an eloquent exposition of the principles of Christianity!” “What a sacrilegious assault on the Church!” “What an unanswerable rebuke to our modern Pharisees!” —Excerpt from “Miss Cora Hatch, The Eloquent Medium of The Spiritualists,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

Spiritualism started in upstate New York, a region exploding with radical ideas and social experiments. In 1847, two teenage girls known as the Fox sisters began to communicate with a spirit in their house through raps and knocks. Some suspected that the girls were merely cracking the joints in their fingers and toes, but the sensational reports of their apocalyptic messages and the excitement of their performances made them national celebrities. Enthusiasts of Spiritualism gathered around tables, waiting for ghosts to tilt them in a type of séance known as “table turning.” Sometimes messages flowed spontaneously through the medium’s hand in a technique called “automatic writing.” Many mediums favored a device known as a “talking board” that used a small piece of wood with legs or wheels that glided over a board marked with letters and numbers. This device became so popular that it was eventually patented in Baltimore in the 1890s and named the “Ouija or Egyptian luck board”—a testimony to the connection between Spiritualism and the magical land of Egypt. For some, these activities were just a parlor game, but for many, Spiritualism was a new religion that merged scientific inquiry with spiritual fulfillment. Proponents talked eagerly of communicating with the dead through a “spiritual telegraph,” a channel that would allow the living to reach through the ether to unseen intelligences who would share their enlightenment with the world. Spiritualists saw women as having special gifts for other-worldly communication. In The Darkened Room, Alex Owen observes that the involvement of women in Spiritualism is a window into the sexual politics of the nineteenth century. Barbara Goldsmith’s Other Powers illuminates the intersection between the American suffrage movement and the rise of Spiritualism. Their studies reveal how the new religious movement allowed women to exercise authority in unprecedented ways. Ironically, the views of Victorian femininity popularized by Evangelicals gave women compelling arguments for spiritual authority (Owen 7). The

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ideal woman, or “Angel in the House,” as a popular 1854 poem by Coventry Patmore described her, primly presided over the parlor with her innate moral and spiritual gifts. The parlor, it turned out, was just the place for intimate séances—a setting where the medium literally and metaphorically found herself “at home.” Women’s expected renunciation of self made it convenient for them to claim spiritual possession, while their reputed sensitive nerves allowed them to claim susceptibility to paranormal phenomena. Through Spiritualism, the female table turners were turning the tables on those who wished to constrain them. Throughout the 1850s and the period of the Civil War, several leading American Spiritualists went to England. The movement converged with British suffrage, which had been sparked by unfair reforms that disenfranchised women even as they increased voting right among men. English female mediums, like their counterparts across the Atlantic, gained access to forbidden speech of all kinds in the séance room. Mediums were not exclusively female; but, as Owen notes, male and female mediums behaved differently in séances. A respectable woman could shout obscenities in a male voice, whisper erotically to male sitters, and even kiss and touch their bodies. Male mediums, on the other hand, had to be wary of displaying too much “mind passivity” and other feminine-coded traits, as they could be denounced as homosexuals (213). The female medium encouraged hidden desires to emerge, blurring the boundaries between life and death, body and spirit, male and female, self and other. As Owen explains, “The very vocabulary of trance mediumship oozed sexuality. Mediums surrendered and were then entered, seized, possessed by another. . . . Physical intimacy was a legitimate aspect of spiritualist practice, whether it was the healing touch or the linking of arms and hands around the séance table. The fact was that dark séances were ‘admirable for a flirtation,’ and it is not difficult to see how the darkness, excitement and emotional intensity of the occasion could create the right conditions for an urgent declaration of passion or a little fevered adultery” (218). In the dark, identities dissolved into streams of ectoplasm, the paranormal fluid thought to issue from the medium’s mouth and fingertips. “The Perfect Medium,” a 2006 exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, showed how early photographs “captured” the incredible emanations, ghosts, transfigurations, and auras the medium’s conjuring produced, along with the variety of guises in which she appeared. Several mediums, such as the pretty and enchanting Florence Cook who mastered the full materialization of a spirit named “Katie King,” became celebrities. They offered experiences far more exhilarating than a traditional church service, filling emotional and spiritual needs.

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In the 1860s and 1870s, Freemasonry was also gaining momentum. Its male members presented themselves as a universal fraternity whose foundation dated back to the building of King Solomon’s temple. Freemasonry tended to be exclusive, hierarchical, and focused on God as the divine architect of the universe. Spiritualism, in contrast, was comparatively populist, emphasized the divine authority of women, and accepted a wider range of religious views. Both Spiritualism and male-centered occult societies pointed directly to ancient Egypt as the source of traditions that could enrich and enliven their activities. With the rise of Spiritualism, women began competing with men as interpreters, mediators, and embodiments of ancient Egyptian mysteries. The medium was vying with the magus for the right to speak for Egypt. Echoes in the Cave Who of our modern materialistic dwarfs and unbelieving Sadducees will dare to lift the veil of Isis? —Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled

According to some Egyptian texts, Isis was a magician who obtained her powers from the god Ra by forming a snake from his spittle and causing it to bite him. Through this trickery, she forced Ra to reveal his name, which gave her the god’s full magical knowledge. Certain powerful female mediums of the nineteenth century looked to Isis for their authority, using it to challenge the provenance of male occultists that had been secure for centuries. Helena Blavatsky, a large, loquacious, chain-smoking occultist whose magnetic gaze can still be seen staring from advertisements for the Theosophical Society, styled herself as a modern-day priestess of Isis. Foreign, female, and formidable, she used the force of her charismatic personality and wily intellect to outmaneuver men who dominated the field of esoteric studies. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, Blavatsky married a mucholder man but soon abandoned her husband and eventually traveled to Egypt where she became taken with snake-charming and Coptic magic. The details of Blavatsky’s life between 1848 and 1858 are sketchy, but her cousin, Count Witte, reports that she traveled extensively on the continent and married a famous opera singer. She later resurfaced as an apprentice to the famous British medium Daniel Douglas Home, who converted her to Spiritualism. The successful adept returned to Russia, where society embraced her séances. Later, she accompanied the opera singer to Cairo. After her husband’s accidental drowning, she spent time in Egypt alone,

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developing esoteric ideas that led to her first book, Isis Unveiled. By 1875, Blavatsky had founded the Theosophical Society, spreading her version of eastern religious, philosophical, and occult concepts throughout the western world. In 1904, Theosophist G. R. S. Mead admitted that Blavatsky was an “enigma which is as mysterious as the riddle of the ancient Sphinx” (“Concerning H. P. B.”). Passionately defended, violently denounced, and harshly ridiculed, Blavatsky has been called a savior, the “Sphinx of the Nineteenth Century,” a con artist, a plagiarist, a spy, and a manipulator of men. Blavatsky claimed to receive miraculous letters from various “masters” that dropped from thin air and convinced followers that she had access to sacred writings through a plane of existence beyond the senses. Male scholars and occultists watched closely, perceiving her as a dangerous trickster in petticoats. Blavatsky’s interest in the esoteric began during her childhood, a time when Russian Christian orthodoxy still carried pagan undercurrents of shamanism, earthy wisdom, and mysticism. Occultism had an ancient and robust tradition in Russia, including a longstanding belief in the figure of Nectanabus, a sorcerer king of Egypt who was said to be the true father of Alexander the Great. Egyptian magic, divination, trances, and astrology were all part of this world where women were seen as the conduits of spirits and ancestors. In Russia, the traditions of western monotheism were far from secure. The young Blavatsky was keen on British occult writers. She wrote Isis Unveiled (1877) under impressions of her visit to Egypt in the 1840s as well as books like The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Readers worldwide brought copies of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel to Naples and Pompeii, where a travel industry sprang up to guide them through the author’s vision of the ancient world, just as twenty-first-century fans of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code travel to Paris and Rome seeking special literary tours. Bulwer-Lytton was popular in Russia, where Blavatsky’s mother launched her literary career by writing a condensation of Godolphin for a magazine. Critics of Bulwer-Lytton have expressed the view that his writings had pernicious influence on sensitive young women. Mid-twentieth-century critic S. B. Liljegren, for example, notes that the novels were especially appreciated by young girls and high-strung people with a “superstitious turn of mind.” He charges the stories with creating an irresistible impression on girls “who experience the lure of fame, power and unknown realms of mysticism, whose imagination is in a ferment of unclear ideas” (Liljegren 10). He compares Blavatsky to Bulwer-Lytton’s magus Arbaces and accuses her of having a similar demonic nature that was noticed by her male relatives.

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Liljegren’s references to Blavatsky’s demonic nature, emotional instability, and slavish devotion to Bulwer-Lytton point to her complex position in the Victorian world. She shared with the author she admired an aristocratic heritage and a penchant for subversive activity, but as a foreign woman she was less likely to be tolerated. In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky acknowledges Bulwer-Lytton as a sort of spiritual ancestor, citing his understanding of Egyptian spirits, or “elementals”: “No author in the world of literature ever gave a more truthful or more poetical description of these beings (the soulless elemental beings) than Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton . . . Now himself a thing not of matter but an Idea of joy and light, his words sound more like the faithful echo of memory than the exuberant outflow of mere imagination” (1: 285–86). Blavatsky embraces Bulwer-Lytton as her predecessor but subtly suggests that his voice is merely a “faithful echo” of a memory that she herself embodies. In doing so, she revises cultural genealogies associated with ancient Egypt, positing herself as the chosen daughter/messiah of its truth. She transforms the echoes of male writers into her own oracular pronouncements that would alter the spiritual landscape of the nineteenth century. “The Cave of Echoes” is a horror tale Blavatsky claimed to have taken from Russian police records and a trustworthy eyewitness. A criminal is trapped in a cave where whispers become joined by mocking voices until the sounds grow as loud as pistol shots. The noxious effusions of the cave envelope the criminal in a cloud of “red and sinister” vapor as the surrounding mountain shakes to its foundation. The voices, the red cloud, and the trembling mountain (recalling The Last Days of Pompeii) point to a feminine force rising up to dispense justice. The story was first published in 1878 in the Banner of Light, a Spiritualist periodical, but later Blavatsky used the “true story” as evidence of her own occult theories in a version that appeared in The Theosophist in 1883. She presents the tale as a warning of the mortal dangers people incur when séances get “out of control.” Blavatsky posits herself as priestess of Isis, as the only safe conduit to the underworld. Expanding this theme, her first book mocks and accuses the “criminals” of western monotheism who have illegitimately claimed to speak for an ancient, divine mother. The Pistol Fired Blavatsky habitually crossed the boundaries of proper feminine behavior, wearing men’s clothing and earning the masculine nickname “Jack.” She refused to follow the prescribed path of Victorian womanhood, focusing

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instead on becoming a powerful public figure. Aware of the fierce animosity she aroused, Blavatsky griped: “I am repeatedly reminded of the fact that, as a public character, a woman who, instead of pursuing her womanly duties, sleeping with her husband, breeding children, wiping their noses, minding her kitchen, and consoling herself with matrimonial assistants on the sly and behind her husband’s back, I have chosen a path that has led me to notoriety and fame; and that therefore I had to expect all that befell me” (qtd. in Neff 29). Such deep resentment reflects the challenges a Victorian woman faced in escaping the long-standing cultural traditions that excluded her from power. Mediumship was a creative way around this exclusion. In taking on various personalities both male and female, the medium might explore her subjectivity without being locked away in an insane asylum—the fate of many women who dared to deviate from cultural norms. The battle to represent Spiritualism and occultism was conducted not only between men and women but between women themselves, whose jealousy guarded this newfound territory. In an 1887 letter to her colleague Charles C. Massey, Blavatsky blasts a rival medium for accessing ancient authority and using language as freely as she herself did: “Of all the flap-doodles, Cora [Hatch] Tappan’s last is the greatest. Did you read her masterly dissection of the word Occultism? or her Symbolism on the mother, the letter M and the religion of the ancients? Really, the woman seems to have a Verbo-mania. She gallops furiously through the Dictionaries clutching adjectives, nouns, and verbs with both hands as she passes and crams them into her mouth. It’s a perfect Niagara of Spiritual flap-doodle” (Algeo). Blavatsky was determined to escape the fate of being perceived as mad and afflicted by “verbo-mania.” Her oracular words would command, and her message would be heard. By the mid 1870s, Blavatsky announced that a secret, mystical brotherhood of men headquartered in Egypt had chosen her to reveal a message of truth. She convinced New York lawyer Henry Olcott to support her, producing letters to him from a certain “Brotherhood of Luxor” that suggested Blavatsky would bring him to the “golden gate of truth” as a reward. Critics like Liljegren have noted that the style of these letters borrowed heavily from Bulwer-Lytton’s novels in their references to “the Dweller” (an ominous Egyptian figure from Zanoni) as well as Rosicrucian and Freemason ritual. Turning the language of male magi to her own purposes, Blavatsky determined to use the authority of Isis to encourage the emergence of a female-centered religion drawn from foreign and ancient sources.

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The Birth of Theosophy In October 1875, the engineer and architect George H. Felt was giving a lecture in Blavatsky’s New York home on Irving Street. His theme was a theory that hieroglyphs were the drawings of spirits, or “elementals” that could be controlled by mediums. The audience was enthusiastic, and the discussion turned to the formation of a group that would investigate such topics. The “Egyptological Society” was proposed as a name for the group, but this was passed over in favor of the “Theosophical Society.” The Theosophical Society founders aimed to engage in serious research and distance themselves from Spiritualism, which had become associated with frivolousness and free love. As correspondence secretary, Blavatsky began to transmit a message of truth that would transcend the perversions of western Christianity. In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky promotes the importance of contacting the spiritual ancestors of the human race and appoints herself as their oracle. In support of her claims, she presents material transmitted to her from the burned libraries of Alexandria and from Isis herself. In writing to her sister Vera, Blavatsky emphasizes the oracular gifts that facilitated her writing: I am writing Isis, not writing, rather copying out and drawing that which She personally shows to me. Upon my word, sometimes it seems to me that the ancient Goddess of Beauty in person leads me through all the countries of past centuries which I have to describe . . . I sit with my eyes open and to all appearances see and hear everything real and actual around me, and yet at the same time see and hear that which I write. I feel short of breath; I am afraid to make the slightest movement for fear the spell might be broken. (qtd. in Meade 160)

Blavatsky’s letter shows the strength of her identification with Isis and the pleasure of surrendering to spiritual possession. She feels herself to be one with the goddess who restores life to her mutilated consort Osiris and in doing so becomes the ancestral parent of all Egyptians. Blavatsky sought to reenact this myth as she gathered the fragments of ancient wisdom, resurrecting them to give birth to a new religion. Isis Unveiled was an instant hit; the first thousand copies sold out in ten days. The New York Herald hailed the book as “a most valuable contribution to philosophical literature,” while the bookseller and publisher Bernard Quaritch predicted that it would become a classic in England. The editor of the New York Times, however, indignantly refused to read the work. His paper, he stated, had “a holy horror of Mme. Blavatsky and her letters” (qtd. in Cranston 161). Blavatsky countered that such men were

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unfit to comprehend spiritual wisdom or “magic.” In Isis Unveiled, under the editorial heading “White men almost incapable of magic,” Blavatsky warns that spiritual enlightenment faced daunting challenges in Europe and America. She charges western men with arrogance and devotion to centuries of dogmatic superstition. Unlike their eastern counterparts, they lack the intuition and will that were required to harness occult forces, which only come by proper inheritance. For Blavatsky, western monotheists were the illegitimate heirs of eastern wisdom. Paganism was the true religion, while Judaism, Christianity, and Islam merely borrowed their inspiration from this “ethnic parent.” The last sentence of Isis Unveiled insists that the ancestor of human wisdom is foreign and female, embodied in the form of the “Unveiled Truth” associated with Isis (2: 640). As Isis’s self-appointed heir, Blavatsky audaciously posits herself as the manifestation of this truth. While the world was reacting to Blavatsky and her book, a young Englishman was hoisting the British flag over a freshly annexed South Africa. It was H. Rider Haggard’s first job, and Bulwer-Lytton’s brother Henry had secured him the position. In the popular writer’s most famous work of fiction, a white man would attempt to gaze on the unveiled truth, personified in the foreign, female form of Ayesha, the mother of all Egyptian monsters. Dreaming of She We have been looking for a mystery, and we certainly seem to have found one. —H. Rider Haggard, She

The “Occult Mother,” a popular figure in Victorian fiction, was greatly influenced by Blavatsky’s persona, as Diana Basham explains in The Trial of Women (Basham 178). In his novel She, Haggard offers an eerily unforgettable portrayal in Ayesha, the female ruler of a lost civilization. In Basham’s view, Haggard was intentionally dramatizing some of the claims made in Isis Unveiled (193). For example, She is the first novel by a best-selling author to deal with reincarnation, a concept popularized by the Theosophical Society and Blavatsky’s writings. The monstrous Ayesha’s threat to take over the British Empire also mirrors Blavatsky’s mission to transmit foreign ideas to the West. Blavatsky approved of Haggard’s vision of the despotic Occult Mother Ayesha. In her Theosophical work The Secret Doctrine, she writes that the author had “a prophetic or rather a retrospective clairvoyant dream before he wrote ‘SHE’” (2: 317). Haggard’s dream-like vision was highly

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contagious in the West. Since its publication, his story has been told in dozens of films, radio productions, spoofs, and sequels. Freud found his own dreams haunted by Ayesha as he began to plumb the depths of the human psyche. Haggard’s creation haunts the foundation of modern consciousness, signaling worries about feminine influences from the past. As early as the eighteenth century, missionaries reported matrilineal societies among existing nonwestern cultures. In “Social Science, and the Meanings of Modernity” (1999), Anne Taylor Allen notes that some speculated that these were traces of the original form of the human family. During the first half of the nineteenth century, European scholars began to challenge the primacy of patriarchal culture. In 1861, British legal scholar Sir Henry Maine answered these challenges in an extensive study that reasserted the claim that patriarchy had existed throughout human history (Allen 5). The Swiss anthropologist and legal scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen, on the other hand, proposed that patriarchal culture was not inevitable but contingent upon time, place, and culture. In his Mother Right (published in English in 1861), Bachofen suggested a “matriarchal age” in which the mother-child bond was the first social tie and the basis of the moral sensibility. “Woman at this stage,” explains Bachofen, “was the repository of all culture, of all benevolence, of all devotion, of all concern for the living and grief for the dead” (Bachofen 79). The anthropologist delved into the myths and legends of ancient societies, concluding that women had controlled marriage and had been the original source of inheritance. Bachofen erred in taking the legends of a matriarchal age as evidence for their factual existence, but he was correct in noticing that there had been identity struggles in the ancient world in which the idea of such a stage was circulated. In the 1860s, when biblical and classical texts were discredited as the sources for the origins of human society, researchers began looking to nonwestern societies for insights into human prehistory. Allen reports that by the 1880s, the British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor and the German Adolf Bastian, founders of the field in their respective countries, hailed Bachofen as a pioneer. They accepted the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy as an essential and universal stage of cultural development (8–9). Early feminists seized upon such theories to denounce women’s second-class status in the contemporary world. British writer Mona Caird, for example, indicted marriage and women’s subjugation by referencing a matriarchal age. “The family knew but one parent,” Caird asserted, “the mother; her name was transmitted, and property—when that began to exist—was inherited through her, and her only” (Caird 189). Many ethnologists took the theory of the matriarchal age seriously but denounced

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it as a brutish time. They insisted on patriarchy as a step forward in the evolution of human culture, a widespread view that appeared in early anthropological works as well as Haggard’s novel. She is another story of contested cultural inheritance. Once again, mothers have mysteriously gone missing. Holly, the narrator, is an orphan. His “parent” is Cambridge University, which nurtures his intellect and sense of personal and national identity. His adopted son Leo is also an orphan, whom Holly raises himself because “I would have no woman to lord it over me about the child, and steal his affections from me” (Haggard 21). For Leo, inheritance comes through the written word in the form of Holly’s scholarly books. Through Holly and Leo, Haggard posits western patrilineal legacy against the matrilineal order of a remote African realm ruled by a queen whose awesome power is reflected in her arresting title: “She-whomust-be-obeyed.” Haggard’s interests in Egyptian archaeology, Spiritualism, and mysticism converged in She, which he wrote in a miraculous six weeks. Some contemporaries attributed the speed of his production to Haggard’s membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which gave him access to secret sources of ancient knowledge. His novel is an occult-tinged story that hinges on a tale encrypted on a pottery sherd concerning the tragic romance of an Egyptian priest of Isis named Kallikrates, the ancestor of Leo Vincey. The mysterious pottery sherd is a Rosetta Stone, engraved with cryptic characters representing a forgotten tongue deciphered through a Greek translation. The script encodes a mystery of desire and revenge that must be resolved by Holly and Leo. Leo’s deceased father has bequeathed him a letter concerning a mysterious realm called “Kor” and its murderous queen. Leo, the strapping young emblem of British manhood, is discovered to have an Egyptian female ancestor, a princess named Amenartas who may have been mad. She is the source of the fantastic story of Ayesha, a queen who slew the priest Kallikrates, Amenartas’s husband, when he spurned her. The voice of Leo’s father reaches from beyond the grave to call for vengeance on Ayesha in a single command: “Remember.” Vengeance is also inscribed in Leo’s Latinderived surname, “Vincey.” Holly remarks, “It is very curious to observe how the idea of revenge, inspired by an Egyptian before the time of Christ, thus, as it were, embalmed in an English family name” (37). In order to remember, or re-collect the cultural narrative whose unity is threatened by the memory of a female monster, Holly and Leo must trace a path back to an archaic feminine world. At the outset of the adventure, Holly, Leo, and the servant Job open an Egyptian container decorated with sphinxes that holds the inscribed sherd. The treasure chest is a Pandora’s box that reveals a riddle: “In Earth

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and Skie and Sea / Strange things there be” (35). At first, Holly denounces the riddle as “absolute balderdash” but soon succumbs to his curiosity. He and his comrades set forth to “follow after myths and seek out the secrets of Nature” (74) through paths that lead them past poisonous swamps and waters that heave “like a troubled woman’s breast” to Ayesha’s sepulchral realm (56). Holly’s narration recalls that of the witty, skeptical, and often awestruck Herodotus. This echo allows Haggard to tap into the earliest western memories associated with foreign, woman-centered realms. Holly’s descriptions of Ayesha’s enslaved subjects, the Amahagger, follow Herodotus’s accounts of the ancient Egyptians. Holly speculates that the ancestors of the tribe are somehow connected to the Egyptians, noting that the people drink from vessels decorated with “love-scenes” that appear to be canopic jars “after the fashion of the Egyptians” (90). The descriptions of the roles of the men and women as monstrously inverted, and the focus on issues of inheritance is particularly reminiscent of Herodotus. Holly reports that “descent is traced only through the line of the mother, and while individuals are as proud of a long and superior female ancestry as we are of our families in Europe, they never pay attention to, or even acknowledge, any man as their father, even when their male parentage is perfectly well known” (81). Women are sexually dominant, the objects of worship, and “do as they please,” though they are ritualistically slaughtered every second generation when they become “unbearable” (114). Though woman-centered, Amahagger society is associated with barrenness. Holly deciphers their name as meaning “People of the Rock,” an insight underscoring his complaint that nature is a “stony-hearted mother” who starves her children. Like Herodotus, Holly stirs interest in this mysterious, foreign place but also withholds. “How am I to describe it?” he exclaims upon seeing Ayesha remove her veil. “I cannot—simply, I cannot! The man does not live whose pen could convey a sense of what I saw” (100). In Ayesha, the scholarly Holly has found something that defies the mastery of his language. The passage into Ayesha’s realm makes the men increasingly confused and disoriented. Holly dreams of being buried alive and accosted by the ghostly queen: “Ideas, visions, almost inspirations floated . . . with startling vividness. Most of them were grotesque enough, some were ghastly, some recalled thoughts and sensations that had for years been buried in the debris of my past life. But, behind them all, hovered the shape of that awful woman, and through them gleamed the memory of her entrancing loveliness” (161). In describing the “memory” of a woman he does not know, Holly reveals that his identity is based on inherited cultural memories that are dissolving and revealing something hidden. In Kor, the dismembered

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pieces of the forgotten past of Egypt are re-membered in the form of a female tyrant. Memory is fluid in Ayesha’s realm, washing away the authority of written texts. “Memory writes no record,” proclaims Ayesha, stirring a vessel of water in which her memories live (237). For her, truth and memory are the same; they cannot be written down. Truth is “writ in letters of blood” (282), and memory begins in the womb, the source of legitimate inheritance. Ayesha’s memories exist beyond language, encoded in the body. Throughout his encounters with Ayesha, Holly constantly wishes to forget what he is experiencing, but as his physical attraction grows, his ability to draw boundaries in his psyche diminishes. In the figure of Ayesha, Bulwer-Lytton’s Witch of Vesuvius is momentarily restored to her youthful beauty and power, her oracular voice returned. The psychic topography of preservative repression is cracked in Haggard’s tale, just as the physical surface of Pompeii splits open in Bulwer-Lytton’s. The men feel themselves to be splitting as they get closer to Kor. Leo imagines that he is divided into two halves, while Holly thinks he might be the reincarnation of a forgotten self or the relic of a “line of ancestral selves.” Looking at a painting of a primitive warrior on the wall, he expresses an unsettling confusion of identity: “By Jove!” he cries, “Perhaps I was you and you are I” (160). Maps cannot find Ayesha’s realm. When asked for directions, the Amahagger guide replies cryptically, “Where she is, there she is,” an echo of the Isaic inscription at Sais. Critics have noted the problem of geography in She, which Gary K. Wolfe terms the “location of the impossible.” As he puts it, Ayesha seems to exist “somewhere between private psychological fantasy and culturally shared myth” (Wolfe 13). “My empire,” she explains, “is of the imagination” (Haggard 175). This is place where cultural memory circulates beyond language in a place called “Kor,” the core of the psyche. Her abode is a haunted place of tombs and ruins where graven images—images from the grave—attest to the counter-memories that have not been successfully erased. It takes only a slight alteration to convert the name of the terrifying “Amahagger” into “Ma Haggard,” revealing the primary signifier “ma” as a haunting presence beneath the inherited language that excludes the mother. “She” is a pronoun because Ayesha’s reality is unnamable, “unbearable” in the sense of being incommunicable through language. The puzzle of that eerie pronoun echoes the confusion of the Egyptologist Lespius when he discovered the trace of a forgotten female pharaoh on the wall of the tomb at Deir el-Bahri in a single, disturbing word: She. Ayesha, like Loudon’s mummy, does not play by the rules. She will not be ravished or purified or used in the service of western patriarchy in any

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way. This unlawful female manifests the matriarchal past popularized by Bachofen and the threatening “New Woman” of the nineteenth century. “The law,” She scoffs, “Can’t thou not understand, oh Holly, that I am above the law?” (255). Ayesha predates the law, ruling with her oracular voice. When She speaks to Leo, her voice enters him and reduces him to gurgling noises, just as feminine voices possess Arbaces and Glaucus in Bulwer-Lytton’s tale. For the Englishmen, written language is the safeguard against the imagination and the vehicle for justice inscribed on the sherd. But Ayesha’s voice contains a counterforce, carrying the vengeance of the buried stranger. Her language signifies the retribution of Isis, who was deserted by the priest Kallikrates, and also conveys Ayesha’s revenge on Leo for turning from her embrace. Like Isis, Ayesha has power over life and death, and her veiled face recalls the popular image of the goddess. Ayesha’s pagan power has survived Christianity—for her, Jesus is an obscure, distant memory. In her inverted world, it is Christ who is forgotten. She is an oracular priestess and clever philosopher, the fictional fusing of the medium and the magus. She crosses the borders of good and evil, right and wrong, and male and female. Perhaps, muses Job, She is the devil, “the old gentleman himself, or perhaps his wife, if he has one” (245). Ayesha claims divine power and wishes to remake Leo and Holly in her own image, to fashion them “like that old Sphinx of Egypt” who lives “from age to age” and mocks men with her riddle (284–85). She seeks to draw them into complete union with herself, reinstating the mother-child bond. Her final order before attempting to renew her own immortality and bestow this gift upon the men directs Leo and Holly to “dream upon thy mother’s kiss” (290). Her sensual, physical version of re-membering, which comes through the mother, is beginning to triumph over the patrilineal re-collecting compelled by the written command of Leo’s father and his family surname. Ayesha must be destroyed in order for the inheritance of western cultural memory to be reclaimed. When She bathes in the feminine fire of life, described as the blood of the earth and located in earth’s “womb,” Ayesha finds that the fire has inexplicably transformed into a destructive, phallic pillar that kills her. As She stands in the pillar of fire, her voice falters as her body shrivels into something like a “badly preserved Egyptian mummy” (293), a decrepit, unintelligible relic. Holly admits that had Ayesha lived, She would have “opposed herself to the eternal Law” and “revolutionized society” (295). In her demise, the fantasy of preservative repression— the exclusion of the feminine stranger from memory—is reinstated. The mummy has been wrestled back into the crypt. After his adventure, Holly

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looks forward to the restoration of his identity, defined as forgetting. “Blessed is sleep,” he muses, “for it swallows up recollection” (310). Ayesha’s vow to return to life belies this fantasy, suggesting that the disruptions in cultural memory She has caused cannot be so easily forgotten. Holly laments that “She was stamped and carven on our hearts” and would remain as long as “memory and identity remained” (299). Her exclusion has guaranteed her survival. In the last line of She, Holly wonders prophetically if the story is really over. It was not: in 1905, Haggard published a sequel, Ayesha, the Return of She. The vision of She remained vivid in Haggard’s imagination, an idea that delighted Blavatsky. In praising She in her article “Sign of the Times,” Blavatsky draws a distinction between older writers like Bulwer-Lytton and a new generation of visionaries exemplified by Haggard: These are no fictions, but true presentiments of what lies in the bosom of the future, and much of which is already born—nay corroborated by scientific experiments. Sign of the times! Close of a psychic cycle! The time for phenomena with, or through mediums whether professional or otherwise, is gone by. It was the early season of the blossoming, of the era mentioned even in the Bible; the tree of Occultism is now preparing for “fruiting,” and the Spirit of the Occult is awakening in the blood of the new generations. If the old men only “dream dreams,” the young ones see already visions, and— record them in novels and works of fiction (“The Signs of the Times”).

For Blavatsky, the time of dreaming and channeling the past was over. Real human beings were called upon to embody the part that writers had imagined for them. The Ancient Goddess and the New Woman My heart longs for Egypt! As I have fought for Egypt’s past, so I will live for Egypt in the future. —Florence Farr, The Beloved of Hathor

The tree of Theosophy grew many branches in literature and the arts, some cultivated by women who nourished their creativity by turning to ancient Egypt. Marie Corelli, a prolific and popular writer of occult tales, wrote a novella called Ziska (1897) starring a mysterious Egyptian princess who bewitches a group of European tourists. Corelli’s tourists, who are wintering in Egypt, are derided as ape-like creatures who use the Sphinx as a target for their water bottles. They

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cannot resist sketching everything in Egypt that seizes their attention, including the beautiful, uncanny Ziska. Strangely, their busy pencils and brushes fail to capture Ziska, whose image shifts on the canvas every time she is drawn. Eventually, the princess reveals herself in the secret subterranean chamber of a pyramid as an undead spirit convinced that one of tourists is the reincarnation of a lover who murdered her in ancient times. For Ziska, her murderer’s chief crime lay in sending her into the afterlife without proper rites, which consigned her to invisibility. Now she is doubly furious, for the tourist she believes to be her murderer wishes to reduce her to a pictorial object of curiosity. Ziska will not be erased all over again: “Never again can you hurl forth my anguished soul unprepared to the outer darkness of things invisible; never again! For I am free!—free with an immortal freedom—free to work out repentance or revenge—even as Man is free to shape his course for good or evil. He chooses evil; I choose revenge!” (Corelli, Ziska 294). The speech of the Egyptian princess sounds like feminist fury and retribution, but the author’s point of view on women is not so easily categorized. Corelli was one of the first celebrity authors of the nineteenth century, boasting a fan base that included Queen Victoria, who kept a complete set of her works at Balmoral. She was not a hit with critics, who scoffed at the melodrama and flamboyance of her work, even as her stories about reincarnation, astral travel, and technology broke sales records. She is still a star in the New Age movement and a camp figure in the gay community. Corelli may have been a lesbian and certainly deplored what she perceived as the base carnality of men as opposed to the superior spiritual nature of women. She was also an outspoken opponent of the suffrage movement. Corelli was concerned that women would lose their special influence if they sought emancipation. In her essay “The Advance of Woman,” Corelli warns that in “claiming and securing intellectual equality with Man” a woman should remember “that such a position is only to be held by always maintaining and preserving as great an Unlikeness to him as possible in her life and surroundings” (182). This insistence on the essential difference between men and women was a common stance in the 1880s, revealing how the claims to female superiority collided with the struggle for political emancipation. Late Victorian women often found themselves beset by conflicting urges to live in a man’s world and transcend it. The Theosophy tree bore exquisite fruit in the form of Florence Farr (1860–1917), an actress, author, feminist, and celebrated beauty who became the leader of the English lodges of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn the same year that Corelli published Ziska. Farr was a friend and collaborator of William Butler Yeats (for a time, a follower of Blavatsky), Ezra Pound, Oscar Wilde, and the artist Aubrey Beardsley. Her circle

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included many of the leading artistic and intellectual figures of fin de siècle London. Unlike Corelli, Farr was a vehement supporter of women’s suffrage. She was a New Woman, an embodiment of the feminist ideal of the late nineteenth century whose life and career reveals the closeness of Spiritualism and Theosophy to radical politics. Farr, the daughter of a prominent physician and hygienist, attended Queen’s College, the first women’s college in England, where she felt bored and stifled. She soon took to the stage and after modest success made an unfortunate marriage to fellow actor Edward Emery. Her husband’s infantilizing treatment and the soul-crushing routine of domestic work outraged her, prompting a lifelong protest against the restrictions of Victorian marriage. When the couple separated, Farr found a home in Bedford Park, a London haven of intellectuals and artists where women were treated as equals. Farr’s remarkable beauty and her “golden voice” not only captivated theater audiences but also attracted many of the prominent men of her day. The besotted George Bernard Shaw determined to mold Farr into his vision of the New Woman. He devoted himself to promoting the acting career that he hoped would enhance his plays. For William Butler Yeats, another ardent admirer, Farr was a beautiful muse whose melodic voice lent magic to his poetry. In Yeats’s play The Countess Cathleen, Farr portrayed a minstrel who could see into the spirit world. Shaw’s Arms and The Man, written for Farr, gave her a memorable role as saucy servant who steals the hero from the female lead. Yeats saw Farr as an ethereal spiritguide, while Shaw thought of her as a kind of audacious superwoman, the proper mate for him, the superman. Farr was not inclined to conform to either vision. She produced her own plays in which she starred and earned critical praise as the first actress in England to perform in Ibsen’s plays. Eventually, Farr lost interest in acting as she turned her attention to Theosophy. She began haunting the British Museum with her friends Moina Mathers and Annie Horniman, where they studied Egyptology and mystical books. The idea of Egypt as a kind of mystical Promised Land was still in the air at the time. While the Theosophical Society was turning to Buddhism and other Far Eastern traditions, Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford broke with Blavatsky’s movement and founded the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn in 1885. The Golden Dawn admitted both men and women, drawing many prominent intellectuals. Some members of the society were Rosicrucians or Masons who merged the traditions of femalecentered Spiritualism and male-dominated occult orders. W. B. Yeats, Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, and author Arthur Machen belonged to the group and promoted the continuation of the mystical traditions that had been abandoned by the Theosophical Society.

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In 1890, Farr joined the Golden Dawn where her recitations during rituals electrified members. She began to write treatises on Egyptian mysticism, working on Egyptology at the British Museum with Sir E. Wallis Budge, the museum’s Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities. Her Egyptian Magic (1896) shows parallels between Egyptian rites and Hermetic, Kabbalistic, Alchemical, and Rosicrucian traditions. Farr’s investigation went far beyond library research. She devoted herself to “scrying,” or crystal gazing, and believed that she had contacted an ancient Egyptian priestess through this activity. In Women of the Golden Dawn, Mary K. Greer reports that Farr’s first contact with the spirit occurred at the British Museum, possibly in the form of a mummy of the priestess (Greer 167). For Farr, as for Loudon, a mummy need not be a monster; it could be a spiritual guide. Shaw was incensed at Farr’s activities and derided her interest in mysticism. His play Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) specifically mocks her enthusiasm for Egyptology. Cleopatra’s character, inspired by Farr, is a silly, superstitious flirt interested in table-rapping. She calls herself a “modern woman” and dispenses wisdom while strumming a hand-held harp, a probable reference to Farr’s poetry performances using a psaltery. Shaw’s Cleopatra is a lusty young woman who boasts of the husbands she will consume and then discard, exhibiting a reckless sexuality that may also allude to Farr. Shaw describes Farr’s promiscuity in an explanatory preface to Florence Farr, Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats: Letters, reporting a long list of “adventures” that never led to anything serious. He notes her “violent” reaction against Victorian morals, especially in the “sexual and domestic” realm. The lingering pain of a spurned lover seeps through Shaw’s terse account of Farr, exploding in the letters in which he accuses her of tormenting him while offering withering critiques of her acting. In an 1896 letter, he accuses her of abandoning him and her acting career, complaining that she will “undo the work of all these years by a phrase and a shilling’s work of exoteric Egyptology” (Shaw, Letters 15). Shaw could not bear to see his New Woman in ancient Egyptian garb. Undeterred, Farr rose through the ranks of the Golden Dawn and eventually became its leader. In 1901, she collaborated with her friend Olivia Shakespear in writing and producing two one-act plays depicting Egyptian magical tales, both set in ancient Egypt. They were published under the title The Serpent’s Path: The Magical Plays of Florence Farr in 2005. The Beloved of Hathor deals with the folly of a warrior-priest named Aahmes who rejects spiritual wisdom for earthly love and power. The two chief female characters are Ranoutet, the wise and formidable high priestess of the Egyptian mother goddess Hathor (played by Farr), and Nouferou, a passionate young sorceress in love with Aahmes (portrayed by Farr’s

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niece). Nouferou burns for knowledge and freedom denied by her father and has secretly joined a battle in order to witness things women were not supposed to see. She is brought to the Temple of Hathor after being rescued from ruffians by Aahmes, where she meets Ranoutet. Nouferou complains to the high priestess of constraints on her sexuality: “I am weary of the speech of the wise, who have not wisdom; who would tell me that Egyptian women must always be discreet and secret” (Farr, The Serpent’s Path 10). The motherly priestess Ranoutet attempts to explain to her that earthly love must be subordinated to spiritual wisdom, but Nouferou rejects this position. She casts a spell on Aahmes and smashes an image of him, causing him to turn away from Hathor and fall in love with her. The result is disaster; both Nouferou and Aahmes are ruined. Farr’s story reverses the biblical injunction against graven images by suggesting that turning away from them results in punishment rather than release. She warns young women against allowing their sexual desires to overwhelm them. This may have been Farr’s rebuke to the men in her life who wished her to subordinate her own inclinations to their erotic interests. The rash young Nouferou and the older, wiser Ranoutet suggest versions of her younger and older selves. Shrine of the Golden Hawk, the second Egyptian play, tells the story of a mystic named Nectoris, portrayed by Farr. Nectoris seeks the divine wisdom of the god Heru, represented by a talisman in the form of a golden falcon that lies in a chamber guarded by the magician Gebuel. In her grail-like quest, Nectoris presents herself to Gebuel to ask for the wisdom “hidden behind the veil” (23). Their conversation reveals that she already knows more than the magician, having “lived among strangers” in her dreams and hearing divine voices since she was a child (24). Nectoris has a spiritual double called the Ka (which Farr also believed she had) whom she tells of voices instructing her that a “woman wise with the serpent-wisdom” will capture the talisman of Heru and bring joy to the Egyptians (26). From that time, the voices tell her Egypt will be ruled by women. The Ka is a voice of affirmation, approving of Nectoris and proclaiming her “worthy of her Inheritance” (26). Gebuel warns Nectoris that she will certainly be destroyed if she tries to seize the golden falcon. However, Nectoris not only survives the test but dances ecstatically on the floor of the forbidden chamber, holding up the idol in triumph. When she emerges, Gebuel is astonished: Gebuel: You are not slain before the face of Heru? Nectoris: I am not slain! Gebuel: How have you, being unveiled, looked upon his face?

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Nectoris: I look upon the face of the god because his eyes are my eyes, and his power is my power, his spirit is my spirit. I am an Egyptian and mistress of mysteries. I have become one with Heru, for I have eaten of his substance and I have drunk of his spirit, and I am henceforth ruler of holy places. (28)

Gebuel acknowledges Nectoris’s superior power but begs her to return the talisman. She refuses, telling him that his dark reign is over. Moses-like, she instructs him to go forth and share the new wisdom, which will protect the world from floods and famine. He accepts her law and promises to follow Nectoris’s teachings. Farr’s play presents an alternative vision of biblical history in which God’s will is manifested in an Egyptian female leader whose influence is nourishing, like the nectar suggested by her name, “Nectoris,” rather than poisonous and contaminating. The traditional story of the grail quest is converted into a heroic narrative of feminine transcendence. Pandora has opened her box to release good instead of evil. Through these echoes of inherited myth, Farr rewrites cultural memory and presents the divided self united in a moment of ecstasy. Yeats was in the audience the night these plays were first performed. In a review, he pronounced them “new in their subject” and described them as “less plays than fragments—fragments of a beautiful forgotten worship.” Though he complained of the lack of dramatic action and too-realistic acting, he praised Farr’s “sweetness and gravity” and her beautiful voice. “One understood that something interesting was being done,” wrote Yeats, “not very well done, indeed—but something one had never seen before, and might never see again” (Yeats, “Egyptian Plays” 47–48). Farr never wrote another play, though she continued to give poetry recitals and stayed involved in the theater by directing, composing music, and occasionally acting. She quit the Golden Dawn in 1902, joining the Theosophical Society of London, later taking a position in a school for girls in Ceylon, where she died of breast cancer. The Sphinx Farr’s prophetic vision of a new world order originating in Egypt order is all but forgotten, but Yeats’s is not. There are few poems in the English language more frequently quoted than “The Second Coming,” begun in 1919 on the eve of the Great War and the Russian Bolshevist Revolution and published in 1920 in The Dial.

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Yeats’s occult-influenced poem is an apocalyptic vision of the end of a two-thousand-year cyle of history initiated at the birth of Christ. I read it as a metaphor for the end of a western cultural era based on exclusion and division and the emergence of a more inclusive, pluralistic world. The birth of this world begins in Egypt, the scene of an ancient separation: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (Yeats, “The Second Coming”)

Many critics have read the sphinx-like creature in Yeats’s poem as a symbol of anarchy and violence, but others have noticed that it more likely represents a force of justice and well-deserved retribution. In this light, the creature is a destroying angel, terrible but necessary to end an era that has fallen into irreparable disorder. The strange creature of this poem had long haunted Yeats. In a 1916 essay, he observes that “only the dead may fully possess being, thus explaining why we gaze with so much feeling on the Sphinx” (“Certain Noble Plays of Japan” 226). In the introduction to his play The Resurrection, he explains that some time around 1914, “I began to imagine, as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction.” He noted that the beast was “afterwards described in my poem ‘The Second Coming’” (qtd. in Neil Mann, “The System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision”).

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The Sphinx appears by name in Yeats’s 1919 poem, “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes.” Here, he presents the creature as a being from a dream “with woman breast and lion paw” (2.1.18) who gazes “upon all things known, all things unknown, / In triumph of intellect” (2.4.30–31). Under a new moon, the Sphinx stands beside a figure of Buddha as two girls dance ecstatically between them to celebrate the arrival of a new religious order. The female form of the Sphinx generally conjures a picture of the Greek monster who threatens Oedipus, but Regier points out that the Sphinx of Giza was long thought to be female. This Egyptian Sphinx, which appears to be male, became feminized in western tradition as were so many other things associated with Egypt. When Mark Twain visited Egypt in 1867, he saw a female sphinx gazing out from the desert (Regier 16). Yeats describes the creature of “The Second Coming” as having the head of a man, but in light of the feminine associations sphinxes carried for Yeats, the figure is probably a being that transcends gender, uniting feminine and masculine life-giving forces. The Sphinx of “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” is not a figure of terror but a symbol of creativity whose presence is welcomed with joy. In “The Second Coming,” the creature is greeted not with joy but with mixed feelings of anxiety and relief at the coming of a new era. There is a sense that what the beginning of the twentieth century has wrought is so violent and corrupt that redemption may mean annihilation. However, in early versions of “The Second Coming,” Yeats used the expression “second birth” rather than “second coming” to describe his apocalypse. As his sensual, inexorable sphinx-like creature is released from the desert, the Christian era dissolves into a tide of blood, reminiscent of the red lava that flows over Pompeii in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel. Ovid told that the Sphinx hurled herself into an abyss after Oedipus triumphed over her, but Yeats’s creature has arisen—on its way to be reborn after a long stony sleep. In the poet’s imagination, ancient Egypt has been transformed from a symbol of horror to a sign of redemption. The tomb of the past is shown to be a womb where life always renews itself. On this fragile note of hope, modernity officially begins.

Figure 1 Sphinx fountain at the Place du Chatelet in Paris, constructed in honor of Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign in 1808

Figure 2 Entrance to Egyptian Avenue in London’s Highgate Cemetery, 1838

Figure 3 Central Park Obelisk (Cleopatra’s Neele), unveiled in 1881

Figure 4 Mummy unwrapping at Cairo’s Boulak Museum, Illustrated London News, 1886.

Figure 5 Advertisement for Carter’s Sphinx Indelible Ink, 1889

Figure 6 Advertisement for Egyptian Deities Cigarettes, 1905

Figure 7 Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra, 1891

Figure 8 Egyptian woodcut from Philippson’s Bible

5

Strangers in a Strange Land Travelers in Egypt

I / Have lost my way for ever . . . I have fled myself —Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

R

ivers are among the most potent symbols in mythology, representing rebirth, the unconscious, and all things maternal. Life springs from water, and the Nile, which nourishes the desert, is the most life-giving of all rivers. Conversely, rivers are also connected to death and to the terrifying and transformative passages of the soul (Jung, Symbols of Transformation 200, 218–19). In The Odyssey, Homer tells what happened after the Trojan War, when the weary Menelaus, whose wife Helen’s abduction started ten years of battle, is trying to get home. Strong winds blow his ship off course, and he finds himself stuck in Egypt. Realizing that he has transgressed against the gods, he seeks Proteus, a shape-changing wizard. Menelaus hides among the stinking seals that surround Proteus’s cave and catches hold of the wizard, forcing him to say which god must be appeased for a safe passage home. Proteus reveals that Menelaus, whom he calls, “the Stranger,” will never find his way home to Greece until he travels “the long and woeful way to Egypt” up the “divine” river, the “water of the gods” (4.80). In the story of Menelaus, the Nile is the vehicle of the journey into the deepest regions of the psyche. The Spartan king comes to Egypt as a stranger, but through his Nile passage, he is able to locate himself, healing the estrangement brought on by war, displacement, and separation from his wife. During the nineteenth century, adventurers, scholars, holiday makers, invalids, artists, imperial representatives, and tourists made daring psychic journeys when they traveled to Egypt. They reengaged with cultural memories, reversing the migration of the Hebrews and following the wanderings of Herodotus. They went to see the land of Ramses the

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Great, the home of Cleopatra, the fabled realm of the Orient, and the place described by medieval pilgrims. The Nile was a trail leading through individual and shared history where chapters of the forgotten past unfolded before the traveler’s eyes. Modes of Experience Western travelers arrived in Egypt with stores of mental images from canonical texts, guidebooks, galleries, and museums, eager to see if Egypt would conform to their expectations. E. W. Lane, author of the popular 1836 ethnographic study Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, described his anticipation on arrival: “As I approached the shore,” records Lane, “I felt like an eastern bridegroom, about to lift up the veil of his bride, and to see, for the first time, the features which were to charm, or disappoint, or disgust him” (qtd. in Thompson 570). Some found that face to face experience with the physical reality of Egypt sobered their Romantic enchantment. Others experimented with foreign ways and tried out new forms of authority and freedom. Writers used patterns of distancing, identification, remembering, and forgetting to express their psychological and cultural experiences. Egypt offered material that people used to construct new identities. Early Egyptologist James Burton sojourned in Egypt from 1822 to 1834. The eccentric Burton made a long journey up the Nile, undertook excavations in Thebes, and then spent several years living in the desert surrounded by servants and slave girls. In his essay “The Forgotten Egyptologist,” Neil Cooke reports that Burton returned to England with a Greek slave girl and a Noah’s ark full of animals, including a bloodthirsty hyena and a giraffe, which, upon reaching Calais, slipped on a sheet of ice and died (Cooke 91). Lucie Duff-Gordon, author of the popular Letters from Egypt (1865), relocated to Egypt to try to heal a physical ailment, tuberculosis. In the course of her experience, she learned Arabic and developed close relationships with the men and women of Egypt, gaining social and political power that would have been impossible at home. Lady Hester Stanhope, the niece of Prime Minister William Pitt, earned the nickname “Queen of the Desert” through her colorful adventures in the East. From 1863 to 1869, she starred in her own Romantic narrative in Egypt, traveling openly with her lover, wearing male attire, and smoking pipes with the most powerful men in the country. Two published volumes of her letters home were enormously popular with Victorians.

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Early photographer Francis Firth left his stultifying job as grocer in search of excitement. He found it in Egypt in the 1850s, carrying his cumbersome camera equipment by horseback, camel, and boat. His topographic photography brought accurate and fresh views of Egyptian monuments to a wide audience. Such daring travelers enhanced the sense of Egypt as a place where people could reinvent themselves. Just as India attracted western seekers of all kinds in the 1960s, Egypt lured nineteenth-century travelers in search of life-renewing experiences. Until the 1870s, Nile travel usually meant booking passage on a dahabiyah, a word meaning “golden craft” in Arabic. Such large, flat-bottomed houseboats featured spacious cabins, dining rooms, and lounges on the main deck, where awnings allowed travelers to stay cool during the heat. A leisurely round trip from Cairo to Luxor (ancient Thebes) on a dahabiyah took about forty days. Travelers could also opt for a longer, fifty-day trip to Aswan, near the First Cataract. Egyptologist Sir John Gardner Wilkinson’s Hand-book for Travellers in Egypt (1847) gave useful instructions on hiring boats and on itineraries and details on the principal sights. He advised that a complete tour of Egypt, including Cairo and Alexandria, would take three months—a sojourn practical only for the well-to-do. Later, John Mason Cook had an idea that would forever alter the travel scene in Egypt: why not carry tourists up the Nile on steamers? John, the son of Thomas Cook, the first travel agent, was an astute businessman who knew a goldmine when he saw one. In 1870, he convinced Viceroy Ismail to grant Thomas Cook & Son the right to run Egyptian government steamers from Cairo to Aswan. In 1874, the viceroy granted an extension of the service to the border of Sudan, near the Second Cataract, giving the company exclusive rights to carry mail along the Nile. Mail steamers soon provided vehicles for a more accessible kind of river journey. Steamer trips were cheap and speedy, bringing the European middle classes swarming to Egyptian shores and chugging along its waters. Thomas Cook & Son advertised the Egyptian sun as a cure-all, calling on travelers to escape the dreary English winters and improve their health. The Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo became a hub for British travelers when it opened in 1841. The proprietors offered guests a well-stocked bar, a luxurious dining room, and guidebooks to take with them on their travels. Egypt became a health resort and holiday playground, and Cook’s tours were synonymous with convenient and comfortable travel. By the end of the century, Cook steamers became so ubiquitous on the Nile that some dubbed it “Cook’s Canal.” The 1897 edition of Cook’s guide to Egypt assured potential travelers that the land condemned in the Bible was not as forbidding as they might

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imagine. The author gave the biblical oracle of Isaiah a new spin, claiming that the swift cloud of destruction that had brought the Lord to Egypt “is sometimes irradiated by a gleam of hope” (Introduction, Cook’s 1897). The Lord, according to Cook’s guide, spared Egypt from the worst punishment meted out to idolatrous nations. Did not the survival of ancient relics prove it? The guide assured that an exotic, primeval land of bounty and beauty awaited the traveler. A description evokes the panorama to convey the idea of a safe, controlled, ocular experience: “Each day unrolls to you a panorama of wide, waving fields . . . a pastoral country where the sound of murmuring water comes to you at every turn . . . where, in open meadow or thick wood shade by the water’s edge, half-naked men and women halt in their lazy working, and stare at you; and, lastly, where, on either bank of this calm-flowing river, colossal ruins and silent cities of the dead confront you with memories of a lost empire, and solemn temples here and there are mirrored in the stream” (Cook’s 1897, 172). Cook’s tourists could gaze upon such wonders by taking a twenty-day tour on a first-class tourist steamer from Cairo to Aswan or make the voyage on a mail steamer in just eleven days. They roamed in groups, clutching Baedeker’s little red handbooks and Murray’s guides under their arms. Often, they inscribed their names on monuments, following the example of Belzoni who left his mark on ruins up and down the Nile. When they made it to the top of the Great Pyramid, tourists were treated to Arab guides singing “God Save the Queen” or “Yankee Doodle” (Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile 488). Such tourists, griped W. Minto in his essay “Pilgrimages” in the English Illustrated Magazine in March 1885, were loathsome with their “restless, vacuous, gaping curiosity.” Compared to the pilgrims of old, they were frivolous and, even worse, “highly unromantic” (Minto 431). More serious travelers who wanted to avoid such ignominy still chose to charter a dahabiyah, which gave them the chance to take on a more active role camping among the ruins. Both Cook’s holiday tourists and travelers undertaking more extensive journeys shared their experience with people at home, bringing back souvenirs and relics (often fake) that would be proudly displayed in their parlors. They bought little retractable pencils housed in cases shaped like mummies or pharaohs that gave them a convenient way to record their impressions as well as a keepsake. Hawkers sold commemorative plates, figurines, and tourist jewelry. Charm bracelets dangling from Victorian arms carrying images of pyramids and obelisks were particularly popular. Those who could not make the journey had a wide variety of travelogues available to give them an armchair experience of Egypt. Mark Twain provided a whimsical account in The Innocents Abroad (1869), describing his collisions with camels and his disgust at watching an American tourist

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try to hack a souvenir off the face of the Sphinx. Victorians also read historical novels set in Egypt such as the wildly popular An Egyptian Princess (1864), written by German author and Egyptologist Georg Ebers. The burgeoning art of photography brought an exciting new visual dimension to foreign locales. Photographers experimenting with glass-plate negatives produced images of stark beauty and crystalline clarity. Victorians looked at ruins and monuments in photographic prints, snapshot albums, gallery exhibitions, and photographic postcards. The Great Exhibition introduced the stereograph, or steroview, a hand-held device that gave the viewer a three-dimensional photographic image of the pyramids and other sights. Victorians read the accounts of professionals in the new fields of Egyptology, anthropology, and archaeology who began to seek first-hand experience in their work. For example, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who helped define Egyptology, wrote popular works read by a wide audience. His detailed account of an archaeologist’s daily life, Ten Years’ Digging in Egypt (1881–1891), was eagerly consumed. Through such accounts, Egypt was closer to the West than ever before. Flight into Egypt Anyone who is a little attentive rediscovers here much more than he discovers. The seeds of a thousand notions that one carried within oneself grow and become more definite, like so many refreshed memories. —Flaubert, Letter to Dr. Jules Cloquet, 1850

Gustave Flaubert traveled to Egypt in 1849 at the age of twenty-eight. He was accompanied by his friend Maxime Du Camp, who was to undertake a challenging photographic mission. The pair may well have passed an eighteen-year-old Helena Blavatsky, AWOL from her marriage, strolling among the hotels and streets of Cairo on the arm of an aged countess. Like Blavatsky, Flaubert plunged into this alien world in an effort to escape the constrictions of home. The eager young man arrived with a head filled with seedling ideas that he hoped would bear fruit in Egypt. Flaubert, the son of a prominent surgeon, grew up in a fashionably outfitted home whose cozy salon featured a fireplace adorned with replicas of Egyptian mummy cases. His introduction to Egypt came through the classical works of Herodotus, Pliny, and Strabo, as well as Shakespeare. Under the gray skies of his hometown Rouen, Flaubert dreamed of sun-steeped ancient landscapes as a refuge from the dreary confinement of provincial France. Shakespeare’s colorful descriptions of Alexandria gave him a sense of Egypt as a place where eroticism, excitement, and death mingled.

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Biographer Frederick Brown explores Flaubert’s teenage stories, including the uncanny tale “Rage et impuissance” (1836), which describes a doctor accidentally buried alive after taking opium. While buried, the doctor has romantic dreams of “love in a tomb” (qtd. in Brown, Flaubert 62). Mysterious, sepulchral Egypt was the ideal homeland for the western Romantic outsider, a site of ancient passions and delightful déjà vu. At the time of his departure for Egypt, Flaubert was a sickly epileptic with no job, no publications to his name, and an extremely overprotective mother. Madame Flaubert would only agree to a journey to Egypt because she thought the climate would improve her son’s health. In 1972, Francis Steegmuller compiled a selection of published and unpublished works written by Flaubert and Du Camp entitled Flaubert in Egypt. The book provides an intimate and frank account of the men’s reflections on their journey. In his travel notes, Flaubert describes the conflicted emotions that erupted in parting from his mother: Finally I got away. My mother was sitting in an armchair beside the fire, and in the midst of caressing and talking with her I suddenly kissed her on the forehead, rushed from the room, seized my hat, and ran out of the house. How she screamed when I closed the door of the living room behind me! It reminded me of the scream just after the death of my father, when she took his hand. My eyes were dry; I felt a kind of constriction around my heart, but little emotion except nervousness and even a kind of anger. (19)

In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva writes of the foreigner as a person who has lost his mother, exemplified in the character of Meursault in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. She suggests that this maternal estrangement is often accompanied by rage and a tendency for the traveler to call up the mother’s presence in the form of other women (Kristeva, Strangers 5). Through such encounters, the fitful traveler searches compulsively for a home away from home. Prior to his journey, Flaubert’s writing expresses an intense urge to escape from home, which he associates with women who want to confine him. Afraid that his lover Louise Colet might sap his strength, Flaubert declares his desire to “live in a country where no one loves me or knows me, where my name doesn’t pluck heart strings, where my death, my absence won’t cost anyone a tear” (qtd. in Brown, Flaubert 188–89). Traveling allowed him to stay connected to his mother without having to suffer her smothering presence and freed him from romantic entanglements he experienced as engulfing. The writer’s letters to Madame Flaubert published in Flaubert in Egypt resemble romantic missives, replete with “poor darlings” and professions

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of terrible anxiety. He writes frequently about homesickness, a feeling Freud identifies as a longing for the mother’s body. Flaubert proclaims to his mother that the separation might prove to be too much for his sensitive nerves. He predicts that his journey may make him too “worn out” to continue; she need only say the word and Flaubert will return (22). He takes pains to reassure Madame Flaubert that his domestic needs are not being neglected. The young man dutifully provides his mother an inventory of his clothing, including his “flannel drawers” (46). Elsewhere, Flaubert shows a different side of his traveling persona. His diary and letters to friends convey heady excitement about his adventure and newfound independence. Their humorous, candid tone reveals a young man’s obsession with Egyptian bath houses and brothels. Steegmuller observes that Flaubert, influenced by the accounts of Herodotus, habitually likened Egypt to an ancient courtesan, the “embracing, strangling viper of the Nile” who offers pleasures at once alluring and dangerous (54). The bewildering world Flaubert describes during his travels is the perfect place for a young man to test boundaries, with its limitless landscape and uninhibited people. Here he can forget about irritating timetables and future plans. Egypt is a giddy place of shifting layers where the lively Islamic Orient of harems and coffee houses rests precariously on the Pharaonic Egypt of tombs and ghosts. Flaubert’s job in Egypt was to gather information for the French Ministry of Agriculture, but it was really nothing more than a title. He traveled at his leisure, freely inventing his identity and enjoying passing himself off as a prince: “It is unbelievable,” he writes to his mother from Alexandria, “how well we are treated here—it’s as though we were princes, and I’m not joking” (31). Flaubert and Du Camp shed their cumbersome European clothes for flowing Arab costumes, allowing themselves to blend into the city streets and bazaars. A photograph taken by Du Camp shows Flaubert striking a romantic pose in Arab robes in the garden of the Hôtel du Nil in Cairo (reprinted in Flaubert in Egypt 41). In Egypt, the men can fulfill their most forbidden fantasies. Flaubert’s accounts of bestiality and licentiousness follow Herodotus in their tension between curiosity and repugnance. In Cairo, pleasure is available for purchase. Men regularly have sex with boys in bathhouses, and Europeans entertain themselves with dark-skinned foreign “whores” whose hair is decorated with gold coins that symbolize their commodity status. Du Camp salivates over Nubian women, but “he is just as excited about little negro boys” (43). During this part of the journey, Flaubert is haunted by signs of the potent female idols that once threatened the Hebrew religion. He writes about Isis, the symbolic mother identified with the physical landscape. “I think of the invocation to Isis,” he gushes in his travel notes.

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“‘Hail, hail, black soil of Egypt!’ The soil of Egypt is black” (49). Flaubert muses that the color of the earth is the same shade as the Nubian women he sees at the slave market. He construes the land as a beautiful, foreign commodity that, like its women, must serve and satisfy the traveler. After two months of traveling on land, Flaubert and Du Camp embarked on a seventeen-week journey along the Nile. They traveled in a cange (a forty-foot boat with a large triangular sail) that Du Camp equipped with a French flag waving jauntily from the stern. As the pace of their journey slows, Flaubert imagines the river as being worn out from of all the countries it has crossed, “weary of endlessly murmuring the same monotonous complaint that it has traveled too far” (98). Beneath a glowing red night sky, he begins to fantasize about Cleopatra. While he connects Isis with the black soil of Egypt, Flaubert associates Cleopatra with the mysterious flowing waters of the Nile. “Like the ocean,” he writes, “this river sends our thoughts back almost incalculable distances; then there is the eternal dream of Cleopatra” (98). The ancient queen is a timeless memory of desire, frightening and irresistible. The dreams of Cleopatra that haunt Flaubert at night as he floats on the Nile echo a novella written by his close friend Theophile Gautier, One of Cleopatra’s Nights (1845), that merges Romantic fiction, fantasy, and horror. Gautier had not yet traveled to Egypt when he started writing his novella, but he already claimed it as an imaginative home. Hughes-Hallett reports that Gautier was struck with Egyptomania upon viewing Prosper Marilhat’s picture La Place de L’Esbekieh au Caire, raving that “this painting . . . inspired in me a nostalgia for an Orient in which I had never set foot. I believed that I had just then discovered my true home-land” (qtd. in Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra 205). Gautier’s Egypt is an uncanny realm of sepulchers and profound silence. It is a “gloomy, enigmatic, incomprehensible” place where “imagination has produced in it only monstrous chimeras and monuments immeasurable” (Gautier 17). The fearful queen who rules over this dream world is Cleopatra, whose embrace is both irresistible and deadly. Each night she chooses a new lover, whose night of ecstasy must be paid for by execution in the morning. At first, Gautier’s queen is nameless. She is an emblem of the perfect woman whom “dreamers will find forever [in the] depths of their dreams” (11). Drifting on the Nile in her sumptuous barge, she is an archetype of the femme fatale and a literary cousin of Haggard’s immortal queen. Cleopatra is the personification of death and barrenness, an unnatural beauty wrapped in mummy-like tissues who kills the men that desire her before their union can bear fruit. She is also an automaton, endlessly repeating death scenes that hint at the castration fear her insatiable sexuality evokes.

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Gautier breaks the spell of Cleopatra’s uncanniness by turning her into a spectacle. Hughes-Hallett explains that the nineteenth-century Cleopatra was typically shown surrounded by domestic objects symbolizing her mysterious powers, such as ivory furniture, fabulous clothes, costly jewels, and golden sphinxes. Surrounded with these lustrous objects, Cleopatra is captured in lush prose descriptions that safely fetishize her rather than confront the fears she represents (213). As Gautier’s Cleopatra performs a bawdy dance in her glittering palace, she is transformed from a powerful queen into a lewd prostitute. It is she, rather than her lovers, who becomes the object to be consumed and discarded. This is the post-Romantic Cleopatra that Flaubert looks for in the home of the celebrated dancer Kuchuk Hanem. One of Gustave’s Nights The foreigner is a dreamer making love with absence, one exquisitely expressed. —Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

Uncanniness is the sense that emerges when the boundaries between imagination and reality become blurred. At times, Flaubert responds to this uneasiness with a cynical stance that deflates the Egypt of his imagination. At Saqquara, the sprawling necropolis whose tombs excited Belzoni, Flaubert’s only concern is to find his baggage. A masked ball in Cairo prompts irritable descriptions of women as “three-franc whores” that make him think of “something comical about the stiffness and stupidity of it all” (68). “The Egyptian temples bore me profoundly,” he complains. “Oh necessity! To do what you are supposed to do; to be always, according to circumstances (and despite the aversion of the moment) what a young man, or a tourist, or an artist, or a son, or a citizen, etc. is supposed to be!” (qtd. in Kimmelman 24). Flaubert wishes to forge a unique identity and to take charge of his own story, but this creative fulfillment eludes him. “I try to take hold of everything I see; I’d like to imagine something,” he writes to his mother. “But what, I don’t know. It seems to me I have become utterly stupid. In the temples we read travelers’ names; they strike us as petty and futile” (160). Beneath the frustration and boredom, the writer is troubled by a persistent feeling of disorientation. Egyptian music makes “frightful” sounds “wild enough to drive one crazy” (93). The uncanny siren song of Egypt lures Flaubert into rowdy brothels where reality and imagination merge. In March of 1850, Flaubert and Du Camp went ashore at the small town of

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Esna where a colony of dancing girls lived among the mud buildings and coffee houses. Kuchuk Hanem was a famous beauty and ghawazi dancer in the tradition of those who later caused a sensation at the Chicago Exposition of 1893. At the time of Flaubert’s visit, she was one of the most eagerly sought entertainers in Upper Egypt where the ghawazi had been driven following their banishment from Cairo by Mohammad Ali. In 1836, Lane described them as a people living separately from the Egyptians, retaining their own unique customs and a dialect that made their “speech unintelligible to strangers” (Lane 380). He notes that they were distinct from the awalim, a class of educated female singers, making it clear that the brazen, immodest ghawazi belong to a lower class and are little better than prostitutes. His commentary associates them with the lascivious women of ancient Egypt: “In many of the tombs of the ancient Egyptians we find representations of females dancing in private entertainments . . . in a manner similar to the Ghawazee; but even more licentious; one or more of these performers being generally depicted in a state of perfect nudity” (379). Lane asserts that the ghawazi are descended from the dancers who entertained the pharaohs, hinting that their performances are so lewd that “the scenes which ensue cannot be described” (379). Though beautiful, the ghawazi are dominating and intimidating. The husband of a ghawazi is subject to her will: “He performs for her the offices of a servant and procurer; and generally, if she be a dancer, he is also her musician” (380). The resettled ghawazi of Esna were those best known to travelers. Descriptions of them appear frequently in nineteenth-century travel memoirs and guidebooks. American writer George William Curtis traveled to Egypt the same year as Flaubert and recorded his visit to Kuchuk Hanem as one of the most memorable stops on his journey. His account, Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851), refers to the ghawazi as women linked to Cleopatra with whom the traveler finds himself “cutting adrift his Western morals” (Curtis 124). He assures readers that this is to be expected, because “the idea of woman disappears entirely in your mind in the East except as an exquisite and fascinating toy” (122). The legacies of western memory are unquestioned in his narrative. The ghawazi dancers of this period typically performed a series of standard routines, the most famous of which was known as “the Bee.” In this dance, the woman performed a striptease while pretending to search frantically for a bee that is buzzing inside her clothes. The Bee was Kuchuk Hanem’s signature dance, and Flaubert and Du Camp could not pass Esna without treating themselves to this erotic amusement. Flaubert’s account of Kuchuk begins with her servant, accompanied by a little painted pet sheep, guiding the men through courtyards and portals

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that lead to the dancer’s uncanny lair. Inside, Kuchuk rises from her bath as a scented, mysterious siren, draped in violet gauze. She is not an Arab, Flaubert insists, but a lighter-skinned creature with sultry dark eyes. He describes her showy ornaments in lush details that associate her with Cleopatra, but this Cleopatra is far from domesticated. As Flaubert stares in wonder, her gauzy image turns into a vivid picture of rippling flesh, unruly hair, and nostrils that flare like an untamed beast. Distancing himself from her wildness, Flaubert matter-of-factly notes a bad tooth with the detachment of a buyer judging a horse for sale. Immediately, Flaubert and Du Camp ask to have intercourse with her in succession. With this act, they unveil Kuchuk, partially lifting her uncanny spell. Later, when she performs her jumpy, robotic dance, Flaubert expresses impatience and disgust at the foreign beauty. Something has been revealed that the eyes should not have seen. Nearby, a man with a rag covering his eye fumbles with a stringed instrument. “Nothing,” complains Flaubert, “could have been more discordant or disagreeable” than the oneeyed man and his music (115). In his essay on the uncanny, Freud discusses damaged eyes as a symbol of castration fears, citing a story by the German Romantic author E. T. A. Hoffmann in which a young man falls in love with a dancing mechanized doll. “The Sandman” exemplifies a scenario in which the male gaze, which ought to animate the female replica it has fashioned Pygmalion-like, is confronted with a real woman who displays her disturbing mutability through the shifting of her dance postures, threatening to castrate her viewers by enslaving them with her sexual power. The one-eyed musician Flaubert describes personifies the fear of impotence and castration that Kuchuk threatens while she dances. Kuchuk’s house is a lurid, fetid cave where she and her “savage” and “writhing” companions drink and cavort among the mud walls. Kuchuk is no “Angel in the House”; she is inhospitable and imperious. Flaubert tries to come to grips with Kuchuk and her strange surroundings through his sharply critical descriptions, but she evades him. As his dream takes on the contours of a nightmare, his need to possess Kuchuk sexually increases. She becomes the embodiment of frightful memories, mocking his thoughts of the elegant, static figures on an ancient Greek vase with her ugly, “brutal” dance. She is the dream of the past turned into disturbing reality. Gradually, Flaubert begins to identify with Kuchuk’s bestiality, just as Odysseus’s men in The Odyssey fall under the spell of the sorceress Circe, whose magic turns them into wild animals. As they have intercourse, Flaubert holds Kuchuk’s necklace between his teeth, feeling “like a tiger.” After the sex act is complete, he regains his composure, commenting detachedly on the “absolutely sculptural design of her knees” as she sits still on the divan (118). He convinces Kuchuk to let him spend the night in her bed,

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where she becomes an inert sexual toy with her genitals neatly cut off. A circumcised mannequin, her sleeping body appears castrated and objectified. Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet after his journey that “the Oriental women is a machine” who “makes no distinction between one man and another man.” Her pleasure, he observes, “must be very slight, since the well known button, the seat of same, is sliced off at any early age” (220). Throughout the night, Flaubert tries to conquer the psychic geography that Kuchuk represents by repeatedly asking for sex. Through her, he offers a payback to Cleopatra, the dominating queen of western tradition who dressed Antony in her clothes and wore his sword. Like Apollo wrestling the Python, Flaubert does battle with the strangling viper that haunts his dreams. In his fantasy, Kuchuk will not enslave her western lover but will be captured by his pen and debased in his description of the bedbugs that infest her room. Yet the moment of triumph is clouded by suffering and conflict: “How flattering it would be to one’s pride if at the moment of leaving you were sure that you left a memory behind, and that she would think of you more than of the others who have been there, that you would remain in her heart!” (119). The tenderness of this reflection belies Flaubert’s cold descriptions of his sexual encounters. Sex is not enough; Flaubert wishes to be remembered, to linger in the forbidden place he must leave behind. It is he who does not wish to be discarded and excluded. Kuchuk symbolizes a yearning for home that cannot be fulfilled. Instead of satisfaction, the writer experiences painful separation by entering the woman’s home and penetrating her body. Kuchuk is a memory that cannot be forgotten once called up. “In each of [his] key quartet of different relationships,” writes Julian Barnes, “Flaubert wanted to move quickly from the experience to the memory of the experience, from the part that was shared to the part where he controlled everything—the memory, the story, the imaginative use to which the encounter was put” (Barnes 15). Throughout the remainder of his journey, Kuchuk’s ghost haunts him with remembrances of his dividedness and estrangement. Though he wishes to create his identity and narrative voice, he feels oddly sterile after leaving Kuchuk. He has been contaminated; the memory of Kuchuk has inscribed itself onto his body in the pustules of venereal disease that erupt after leaving her. Menelaus, the Stranger, traveled the woeful way to Egypt, but according to some accounts, he returned home with a Helen whose dangerous magical powers remained intact. Once he was back in Madame Flaubert’s cozy salon, Flaubert’s omnipotence, his attempt to put mind over matter—over mater—still eluded him. Kuchuk’s strange magic emanates from his subsequent writings. Her memory survives in the form of the seductive Carthaginian priestess of Flaubert’s novel Salammbô (1862). The writer also evokes

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her dancing in the Queen of Sheba’s “bee” dance in The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) and in Salome’s dance in his novella Herodias (1877). Most vividly, Flaubert remembers her sexual potency in the figure of Emma Bovary, whose name may have been inspired by the name of one of the proprietors of the Hôtel du Nil. In Madame Bovary (1864), Flaubert recalls his experience as a frustrated, alienated traveler to create a portrait of a restless woman troubled by unfulfilled desire. He identified so closely with her character that he once famously pronounced, “Madame Bovary, C’est Moi.” Flaubert claimed in a letter to a friend that “I don’t use women. . . . I consume them by sight. . . . You and I are made to feel, to narrate, and not to possess” (qtd. in Brown, Flaubert 146). This conflicted admission contains hints of yearning and empathy that transcend the sexual bravado of his youth. He cannot possess the stranger because he is her. Both Flaubert and his creation Madame Bovary try to escape the pain of true connection through fantasies, but neither finds this evasion to be a remedy for psychic estrangement. Madame Bovary is the uncanny story of a woman’s haunted psyche that shocked nineteenth-century readers because it frankly expressed her erotic desires. Kuchuk, Madame Bovary’s real-life predecessor, may have embodied the archaic feminine associations of ancient Egypt for Flaubert, but she also heralds a new era in which the uncanny feminine ghost of the past is allowed to fully materialize. Flaubert creatively manifested ancient dreams of Egypt into the present and, in doing so, altered the future of western literature. His work gave birth to realism, a movement centered on re-membering experience as it truly is, rather than as inherited fantasies dictate. Flaubert can be seen as a pioneer of this newly recognized artistic territory, the place where fantasy gives way to reality, and memory is transmuted into authentic experience. Border Crossings According to myth, Isis began her divine life as a whole being, the one-inherself joined with Osiris in her mother’s womb. When her brother/husband is murdered and dismembered, Isis becomes a female pilgrim as she travels across Egypt to locate the fragments of his body. She re-members the pieces that represent her own divided psyche, making it whole again. Memory in the Isis myth is an active, creative, and fluid force. Her re-membering, though dangerous, is an act transformation. She welcomes back the lost parts of herself after a long and painful separation. When nineteenth-century women traveled outside the West’s physical boundaries, some became pilgrims in search of regeneration and expansion, using Egypt as a stage on which to recreate their lives. Amelia Edwards

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was already a highly successful writer of novels and ghost stories when she journeyed to Egypt in 1870. Though middle-aged, she found the experience life altering. Her newfound love of antiquities prompted her to take up Egyptology and transform herself into one of the founders of the new field. The observations she made as she traveled up the Nile reveal the process of transformation as a gradual movement from alienation to deep intimacy with the past that opens new horizons for the future. Edwards was born in 1831 in London, where her Irish mother educated the precocious child at home. She showed literary talent, but her greatest desire was to become an artist. Painting was considered an unhealthy occupation for a young girl, so Edwards tried music, then finally settled on writing articles and stories for the Saturday Review and the Morning Post. Biographer Joan Rees notes that Edwards’s escape from an engagement with a man she actively disliked prompted her cousin Matilda, also a writer, to explain her as one who “possessed the perilous dower of personal fascination.” Matilda observed that “no one ever exercised stronger influence, and it was hardly her fault if she at times awakened interest or affection she could not return” (qtd. in Rees, Amelia Edwards 10). Matilda’s description reveals Edwards as a charismatic young woman who was not ready to follow the most obvious path laid out for her by Victorian society. In her early twenties, Edwards found excitement in trips to the Continent. She had a brief relationship with a sophisticated man named Emile Steger and enjoyed riding and even pistol-shooting. Her early fiction expresses a taste for high-spirited adventure, while later novels like In the Days of My Youth (1873) reveal knowledge of masculine domains that was highly unusual for a middle-class woman of the time, such as scenes of male bath houses that shocked contemporary reviewers (Rees 13). Rees describes Edwards’s fascination with French feminist novelist George Sand, who wore men’s clothing in public, and suggests that Edwards may have done the same with Steger. Daring women in London were known to occasionally wear men’s clothing to go to the theater and to enter clubs. A photograph of a young Lucy Renshawe, Edwards’s close friend and traveling companion, shows her with a man’s haircut and clothing (Rees 12–13). Edwards was introduced to radical ideas and politics in artists’ studios frequented by Welsh social reformer Robert Owen and Matilda Hays, a translator of George Sand. However, when her parents died suddenly in 1860, the unmarried, jobless, and grief-stricken Edwards was taken in by family friends, the Brayshers, who forced her to participate in stifling rounds of social events. After the death of Mrs. Braysher’s husband and child in 1863, the women lived together in a secluded house in Westburyon-Trym. Like Flaubert, Edwards felt oppressed and tense in her relationship with Mrs. Braysher and other maternal figures. Her novel Debenham’s

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Vow (1870) features a young husband plagued by his relationship with an overbearing mother. Edwards was able to escape occasionally through travel, including a trip with Lucy Renshawe chronicled as Sights and Stories: A Holiday Tour Through Northern Belgium (1862). By 1871, however, she suffered from depression and ill health. At this time, Edwards went on a daring expedition to the Dolomites, a remote section of the Alps. She and Lucy Renshawe traveled without the expected male chaperone, relishing the challenges they faced in penetrating isolated areas. In the highly successful Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (1873), Edwards describes their journey in a narrative that combines curiosity, humor, and a taste for adventure. Edwards never married, traveling and living exclusively with women. In the supernatural stories she wrote for Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round, she explores issues of home and uncanniness, exposing the hypocrisies of women’s expected roles in Victorian England. By narrating in a male voice, Edwards was able to look at women’s experiences from the outside and offer observations that may have been less acceptable to readers had the voice been female. Edwards was never an outspoken supporter of women’s rights; she preferred to give her critiques indirectly through fiction. “An Engineer’s Story” (1866) represents psychic estrangement in the voice of a male narrator. Set in exotic locales, this tale centers on a love triangle between two men and a femme fatale. Englishmen Ben and Mathew are close friends until they move to Italy, where they meet Gianetta, an eerie, statue-like shopkeeper’s daughter. The foreign woman is a tawdry Cleopatra, surrounded by cheap jewels and toys in her mother’s shop. In the mind of Ben, the narrator, she becomes a rare object, compared to a painting in the Louvre that “represented a woman . . . looking over her shoulder into a circular mirror held by a bearded man in the background. In this man, as I then understood, the artist had painted his own portrait; in her, the portrait of the woman he loved” (Edwards). This image unfolds like a hall of mirrors, making it difficult to determine who is the voyeur and who is the object. The artist and the woman seem to occupy both positions simultaneously, as does Edwards, the author of the tale who observes and inhabits her characters. As Ben and Mathew compete for the love of the strange Gianatta, she takes on the active role manipulating the men as if they were marionettes. Ultimately, the alien, threatening woman must be excluded from the triangle to reestablish the bond between the two men. This occurs when Gianetta thwarts her suitors by selling herself to a rich aristocrat, provoking Ben to a fit of rage in which he murders Mathew. Horrified at his crime, Ben wanders the earth, traveling up the Nile to nurse his broken

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heart, dreaming of punishing Gianetta for separating him forever from his friend Mathew. Eventually Ben learns that a train on which he works as an engineer will carry Gianetta. He plans to crash the train, killing himself along with his enemy. At the last moment, the motherly ghost of Mathew appears and saves Ben from his own destruction. The reunion between the two friends is ecstatic and cataclysmic, ending with Ben falling as if he “had been smitten with an axe.” This tale of a dangerous passage closes with a testimony from Ben that his supernatural experience is true, despite the fact that he expects to be told “that I was suffering from pressure on the brain” (Edwards). Possibly there was a connection between Edwards’s relationship with her close friend Marianne North and the tortured friendship of the two men in the story. Rees notes that in the midst of the depressive episode that coincided with her friendship to North, Edwards also complained of “pressure on the brain” (Rees 22). “An Engineer’s Story” carries homoerotic undercurrents, but it can also be read as the rejection of a marriage system that objectifies women. Edwards explores the grim possibility of a loveless union made for material advantage and seems to choose the bond between same-sex friends, however perilous the path. Engineer Ben’s choice of travel up the Nile to comfort his broken heart reflects a long-standing tradition that the soul could be cured of its maladies in Egypt. Lady Hester Stanhope made the journey in 1810 in the wake of the triple loss of her uncle William Pitt, her lover, and her brother. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray traveled to Egypt in 1844 following his wife’s final nervous breakdown. In 1873, Amelia Edwards and Lucy Renshawe set off on a walking tour of France but were thwarted by a turn in the weather. On a whim, they decided to change their plans and visit Egypt. That decision would permanently alter the course of Edwards’s life and the history of Egyptology. The Secret of the Sphinx In the preface to the first edition of A Thousand Miles up the Nile, Edwards considers the light that has been shed on the darkness of the past through the decipherment of hieroglyphs. “So the old mystery of Egypt . . . has vanished,” writes Edwards. “Each year that now passes over our heads sees some old problem solved. Each day brings some long-buried truth to light” (xv). Even so, she hints, Egypt retains a lingering sense of secrecy. She ends the preface with an image of a fellah pressing his ear to lips of a colossal sphinx that is buried to the neck in sand beneath a starry sky. “Some instinct of the old Egyptian blood tells him that the creature is God-like,” writes Edwards.

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“He is conscious of a great mystery lying far back in the past. He has, perhaps, a dim, confused notion that the Big Head knows it all, whatever it might be” (xvi). Beneath the image is a cryptic line: “Each must interpret for himself / The Secret of The Sphinx” (xvii). In Edwards’s travel narrative, she takes on the role of the fellah, the searcher for knowledge, and also the mysterious Sphinx, the guardian of impenetrable secrets. After her contemplative opening, Edwards whisks the reader to the bustling metropolis of Cairo. The popular Shepheard’s Hotel is jam-packed with Cook’s tourists, independent travelers, invalids, artists, and “sportsmen keen on crocodiles” (1). When someone wants to know what made the women come to Egypt, Edwards replies offhandedly that she and Renshawe “had just taken refuge in Egypt as one might turn aside into the Burlington Arcade or the Passage des Panoramas—to get out of the rain” (2). Rather than plunging into an alien world, the two women seem to be doing nothing more unusual than going for an afternoon stroll in a gallery. Everything in Cairo is a spectacle to be enjoyed, appearing as if it had been put there to be painted. Shop fronts look “like open cabinets full of shelves,” exposing Egypt to the idle curiosity of passersby (10). The Nile journey begins in a flurry of farewells and a frantic gathering of parcels. The women will be taking a dahabiyah, rather than a steamer, and want to be sure they have all the comforts of home on their long trip. The dahabiyah, a long-standing symbol of Egyptian antique ways, is incongruously flying a Union Jack. The boat is named The Philae after the sacred place where Isis located Osiris’s heart, but Edwards describes it as something like “a civic or an Oxford University barge” (39). On board, she and her companion put their vessel in order with floral arrangements, sketches, and even a piano. Presenting a “cozy and home-like” appearance, The Philae brings English domesticity to the Nile. The river that confronts Edwards two decades after Flaubert’s journey is no longer a tranquil passageway out of contemporary life; the busy waters are choked with foreigners. The traveler discovers “that nine-tenths of those whom he is likely to meet up the river are English or American” (18). Edwards aims to settle in and let Egyptian history unfold itself, “for the land of Egypt is . . . a Great Book—not very easy reading, perhaps, under any circumstances; but at all events quite difficult enough already without the added puzzlement of being read backwards” (70). The difficulty of “reading” a place where the traveler drifts backwards through time is the first hint of disorientation in what has so far been described as a rather prosaic place. Egyptian music calls Edwards out of complacency and into an alien realm, just as it did for Flaubert: “The singer quavered; the musicians thrummed; the rest softly clapped their hands to time, and waited their turn to chime in with the chorus. Meanwhile the lantern lit up their

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swarthy faces and their glittering teeth. The great mast towered up into the darkness. The river gleamed below. The stars shone overhead. We felt we were indeed strangers in a strange land” (46). The ghost-story writer uses her gothic sensibility to conjure the strange and frightening effects of the music. By the end of the journey, Egyptian music has become as soothing as mother’s lullaby—a shift demonstrating the movement from rejection of the alien to acceptance of the universal. At the outset of her journey, Edwards renders exotic sights familiar more as a defense, an assurance to herself and readers that she is in control of the scene. A curving pyramid is like a roof in Paris, while the sand slopes below cliffs recall an Alpine snowdrift. Edwards’s narrative voice often comes across as mother teaching her children how to feel secure in a strange place. Another, more subversive voice comes through when Edwards turns her attention to her compatriots. Her sharp critiques of the English travelers sound very different from her homey reassurances of the cultural familiarity of Egypt. Newlyweds “struggling through that helpless phase of human life called the honeymoon” are ironically dubbed the “Happy Couple.” This pair is ridiculous to Edwards, who describes them as an effeminate “Idle Man” and his doll-like “Little Lady” (88). Their union appears shallow next to Edwards’s more satisfying bond with Renshawe. The frugal, hard-working native sailors are much more appealing to the writer than her complacent fellow Europeans; they are “fine young men” who look like “the ancient Egyptian statues” (41). As her identification with Egypt increases, Edwards begins to write about Englishness as something strange. Near Saqquara, her party comes into contact with people who have never seen Europeans before. The Egyptians stare in wonder, and a young wife snatches up her baby and pulls her veil down because she fears “the evil eye.” Edwards tries to invert the gaze that turns strangers into curiosities, straining to see herself through the other’s perspective. “We cut a sorry figure,” she writes, “with our hideous palm-leaf hats, green veils, and white umbrellas” (50). The Egyptian mother and child are described as part of the natural landscape, while the odd-looking English travelers stick out like a sore thumb. When the travelers begin to see the ancient monuments of Egypt rising from the banks along the river, Edwards gradually grows unsettled. At first, Egypt fits neatly with what one already “knows.” At Memphis, she reports that “we have of course been dipping into Herodotus—everyone takes Herodotus up the Nile—and our heads are full of the ancient glories of this famous city” (64). The sights of Memphis are two-dimensional, taking “their due place in the picture-gallery of one’s memory” (67). Later, Edwards moves toward recognition that the pictures of memory are insufficient in the face of the new reality. The facsimile in Owen’s Grammar

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of Ornament, for example, “conveys not the remotest idea” of the delicate tints of the painted temple at Philae (217). At Abu Simbel, the site of massive rock temples carved into a mountain by Ramses II, Edwards feels that she has left the familiar world behind. She is free to cast aside “the teachings of the present” and allow herself “to belong to the past” (215). As the present dissolves, images of the gods appear to climb down from the ancient walls. Edwards describes the uncanny experience of sitting at the feet of the gods in a sanctuary: “All at once . . . it flashed upon me that a whole mountain hung—ready, perhaps, to cave in—above my head. Seized by a sudden panic such as one feels in dreams, I tried to run; but my feet dragged, and the floor seemed to sink under them. I felt I could not have called for help. . . . It would have been a grand way of dying . . . and a still grander way of being buried” (304). In this passage, Edwards is no longer an outsider looking in. She is part of the scene, allowing her own identity crumble as she welcomes the fantasy of engulfment by the past. As the ship glides along the river, Edwards frequently becomes a part of the scenes she witnesses. Dervishes are whirling forces of nature whose long hair floats in the air. As Edwards watches attentively, the boundaries between Englishness and foreignness become blurred: “Our own heads seemed to be going round at last; and more than one of the ladies present looked longingly towards the door” (29–30). Edwards, in contrast, does not look away. She is not only looking but recording what she sees in lush detail, reveling in the experience of drawing closer to the unfamiliar. The tombs of Sheykh Abd-el-Koorneh make Edwards feel happily at home. She enters the caverns of the dead remembering having read Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians as a child. The sights appear intimately familiar, like “old and half-forgotten friends.” It seems to her that she has met the “kindly brown people” in some “previous stage of existence”—walking in their gardens, listening to their music, sharing their feasts (415). She imagines having attended the funeral represented on the wall and sharing the experience of a mummy who seeks Osiris’s judgment, a hint of the yearning for spiritual guidance her own culture does not offer. Edwards inscribes herself into the scene like the painter of the beautiful woman in “An Engineer’s Story.” She becomes the engineer of an alternative reality, transforming uncanniness into hominess. In the tombs, Edwards feasts with images of the ancient Egyptians in an act of communion, experiencing a seamless continuity in which the boundaries of self and stranger dissolve. She begins to see the landscape of Egypt as an extension of her own body and feels horrified to see mummies “hauled out by rude hands” only to end up in a collector’s cabinet. She mourns to think of these “startlingly human” forms catalogued in a museum and looked upon as “specimens,” for “they once were living beings

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like ourselves” (414). Edwards’s Orientalist sense of superiority sometimes crops up in such reflections. The rude hands of the Arabs are implicitly juxtaposed with her own hands that lovingly caress precious relics. Years later, as an Egyptologist, she proudly boasted of keeping the heads of two Egyptians in her closet, where she fancied they talked to each other at night. Her love for Egypt has a possessive aspect, and she does not delve deeply into her own agenda as she hungrily consumes the past. Throughout her narrative, Edwards displays a fascination with ancient Egyptian religion, particularly its emphasis on mother figures. The maternal figure of Hathor comes to stand for the physical land scarred by the technology of gunpowder workshops and telegraph wires. What, she asks, does modern warfare or science have to do with “the Lady of Beauty and the Western Shades, the Nurse of Horus, the Egyptian Aphrodite, to whom yonder mountain of wrought stone and all these wastes were sacred?” (119). At Philae, Edwards is moved deeply by images of the “divine fostermother” Hathor nurturing her son Horus along with a scene of Isis reviving Osiris. She imagines the soothing songs of the “divine sisters,” while a real mother sings to her baby nearby, and vows to inscribe the moment in her memory: “I look; I listen; I promise myself that I will remember it all in years to come” (389). The chapter ends with her sketch of a Nubian woman and an infant expressing the eternal union between mother and child. Through this conscious memory-making, Edwards reorganizes her psyche, replacing inherited recollections with new visions that emphasize connection rather than separation. The Judeo-Christian father religion of western tradition holds little appeal for Edwards. She expresses a subversive satisfaction at the demise of Christianity in Philae, where priests once attempted to take over the sacred temple of Isis. She imagines that the priests’ departure freed the residents of Luxor to sleep “soundly as if no ghost-like, mutilated Gods were looking on mournfully in the moonlight. . . . The Gods are avenged now. The creed which dethroned them is dethroned” (223). Edwards re-members and reinstates the old religion, calling deities to life through her prose. Through her identification with Isis and Hathor, she progresses toward her own psychic regeneration. Not all images of women please her. The bas-relief of Cleopatra at Denderah repulses her with its “cruelty, subtlety, and voluptuousness” (123). The manipulative femme fatale is the opposite of the sincere and natural images of Hathor and Isis, who seem to correspond to Edwards and Renshawe. Dancing girls at Luxor disgust her with their gaudy ornaments and painted faces. A Nubian dancer wearing no make up, in contrast, strikes Edwards as beautiful. Bored and bejeweled women in harems are prisoners to be pitied. Edwards asks one woman if she would like to see Karnak, two

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miles from her home, and is shocked to find that she does not have the least desire to see it. Women who do not look, but are merely objects of the gaze of others, are tragic figures. Edwards rejoices in the forceful aspect of the river whose languid drifting captured the fancy of Gautier and Flaubert. She is enchanted by the Nile’s foaming, eddying overflow, and “wildness.” In its dizzying swirls, the First Cataract is “new, strange, and beautiful” (195). The Second Cataract is “everywhere full of life, full of voices,” a potent expression of the vital maternal force of nature (318). Edwards wonders at the Nile’s self-fertilizing ability, such as the way the ancient mud serves to nourish adjacent fields. Egypt becomes the Great Mother, regenerative and self-sprung. Her people are aboriginal and her history self-produced. The Egyptians, Edwards asserts, are a race of “unmixed autochthonous descent. [They] started from the fertile heart of their own mother country, and began by being great at home” (472). The uncanniness of home is completely dissolved as the traveler heals her estrangement. Edwards describes nature as a “beautiful spectre,” a mysterious column of whirling dust envisioned as “the stranger from the south” that rises up fleetingly and dissolves (406). Nature, cast as the fearsome stranger in Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction, has become a welcomed friend, and Renshawe embodies this benign spirit. Named merely as “L,” Lucy Renshawe haunts the narrative, recalling Mathew, the maternal ghost companion of “An Engineer’s Story.” She is the lost mother resurrected to bring joy, rather than to terrify: “L” is the anti-She. Renshawe heals the sick and feeds the animals on board. The native Egyptians call her “Doctor-lady” and treat her as a mother figure. They offer tributes of flowers, pebbles, and sculpted fragments. Rees reports that later in life, Edwards offered tributes of nuts and lentils to the figurines of Egyptian deities that filled her home (Rees 91). As Edwards’s identity shifts, her relationship to language changes. In the Great Hall of Seti at Luxor, she faces something impossible to describe, an engulfing power beyond language: “It is a place that strikes you into silence; that empties you, as it were, not only of words but of ideas . . . I could only look, and be silent” (141). The idea of being “emptied of language” suggests that the writer will have to renegotiate her existence in words, to learn to speak another tongue. Edwards’s uncanny fiction expresses a sense of buried secrets that vex the mind, but in her narration of Egypt, secrets are simply part of the landscape and accepted rather than feared. Pondering an unknown obelisk, Edwards admits that “Egyptology, which has solved the enigma of the Sphinx, is powerless here. The obelisk of the quarry holds its secret safe, and holds it for ever” (189). An obelisk would mark Edwards’s grave in a churchyard at Bristol, presiding over the remains of a woman

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who seemed to come to terms with her own secrets through her journey up the Nile. The travelogue ends with an image of the Sphinx who is “older than the Pyramids, older than history, the monster [lying] couchant like a watchdog, looking ever to the east, as if for some dawn that has not yet risen” (490). In this image, Edwards anticipates Yeats’s vision of a sphinx-like harbinger of the future but suggests that the time for its revelation has not yet come. The Sphinx described by Edwards knows the fluidity and multiplicity of human consciousness, which false memories and artificial constraints can never fully conceal. This being patiently waits to speak its secrets until a time when human beings are ready to hear. Queen of the Waters After returning to England, Edwards wrote only one more novel. However, she inspired author Elizabeth Peters to create the popular character Amelia Peabody, a scholarly suffragette who explores Egyptian ruins, solves crime mysteries, and causes her nemesis Sethos to renounce his evil ways. The real-life Amelia turned her literary efforts to the promotion of Egyptology, which became her cause. She spent two years working on A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, during which time she studied at the British Museum and transformed herself into a serious scholar. She appointed herself the sphinx-like figure who guarded Egyptian antiquity from reckless dismemberment. Her travelogue, published in 1876, was a spectacular success. Edwards’s extensive work for the Egypt Exploration Society, which she cofounded, made her the creative intermediary between the past of Egypt and the present of England. Edwards’s Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers (1891) is based on lectures she gave in the United States on Egyptian subjects. It includes an entire chapter on Hatshepsut, whom she refers to as “Queen Hatasu.” Edwards disagrees with contemporary opinions that downplayed the pharaoh’s importance and boldly introduces her topic by pronouncing her “the Queen Elizabeth of Egyptian history.” She asserts that Hatshepsut “was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary women in the annals of the ancient East” (261). Hatshepsut is a hero of the past restored to glory in Edwards’s prose. Edwards correctly rejects the theory that Hatshepsut was a usurper. She discusses her reign as a period of peace in which the pharaoh erected some of the most magnificent monuments of Egypt, including an obelisk she describes as the most wondrous ever built. In Edwards’s eyes, the greatest achievement of Hatshepsut was her expedition to the land of Punt. She

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proposes that this voyage must have been made through an ancient waterway dug beneath the contemporary site of the Suez Canal: It would seem, indeed, as if the great woman-Pharaoh who first conceived the daring project of launching her ships upon an unknown sea, was by far the most likely person to canalize that channel by which alone, so far as we can see, it would have been possible for them to go forth. For my own part, I have not the slightest doubt that Queen Hatasu was the scientific ancestress of M. de Lesseps; and that it was to the genius and energy of this extraordinary woman that Egypt owed that great work of canalization which first united the Nile with the Red Sea. (281)

Edwards’s proposition that Hatshepsut built a canal is unlikely, but her notion of the Egyptian ruler as a “scientific ancestress” fits the pattern of nineteenth-century women determined to challenge inherited cultural genealogies. It is fitting that a woman who found her purpose through an adventurous journey up the Nile would admire a ruler who wanted to brave unknown waters. Hatshepsut emerges in Edwards’s book as a master of navigation whose daring mission brought back coveted gifts from a mysterious foreign land. Her ships returned not only with an abundance of gold and jewels but also with a menagerie of animals and the precious saplings of trees that would grow at the pharaoh’s temple. An inscription describing her voyage proclaims that “never since the beginning of the world have the like wonders been brought by any king” (291). Hatshepsut is the ruler whose glory lies in cultural cross-pollination, in bringing home what is alien and making it familiar. Some scholars believe that roots of the trees she planted still exist today. After Edwards’s death, two friends went to her home to go through her belongings. Flinders Petrie, the great Egyptologist whom she had mentored, and colleague Kate Bradbury found a house so tightly packed with Egyptian objects—scarabs, figurines, and scraps of mummy cloth—that it was difficult to walk. Her house, observed Bradbury, was “solid” (qtd. in Rees 91). Transformed by her Nile journey, Edwards had collected fragments of the past to nourish a life of solid purpose. She found a home for herself in the study of the past and, in doing so, created a lasting legacy as the godmother of Egyptology.

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Oedipus Aegyptiacus Egypt and Early Psychology

The seeds are planted, the ideas, the inspiration; the words rise like wheat from his mouth. . . . A man reaps what he sows. What he dreams of shall come to pass. —The Book of the Dead, Papyrus at Ani

T

he ancient Egyptians were very serious about dreaming, turning to dreams to make important decisions, heal diseases, and predict the future. An Egyptian could consult a priest or professional dream interpreter or study a dream book, which listed the meaning of various symbols such as falling or looking in a mirror. Dreams were seen as trips to the underworld and messages from the gods. The Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh Tuthmosis once took a nap under the Sphinx and dreamed of being visited by Hamarkis, a sun god associated with Horus. Hamarkis told Tuthmosis that if he cleared away the sand engulfing the Sphinx, he would become pharaoh. He followed these instructions and went on to rule Egypt. The Great Sphinx of Giza still holds the famous “Dream Stele” between its paws, recording the dream of Tuthmosis. Those who composed the Bible took the power to interpret dreams away from the Egyptians and transferred it to the Hebrews. In Genesis, the pharaoh has a dream that stumps his wisest magicians. He calls on Joseph to solve the riddle after hearing of the Hebrews’ great knowledge in this area. Joseph explains that the Hebrew God is the only true interpreter of dreams. Through God, Joseph correctly solves the mystery of the pharaoh’s dream, besting the magicians and rising to great power in Egypt. The story is a cultural memory trace in which the association of dreams and Egypt is passed down despite—or because of—the deliberate attempt to leave it behind. In the early nineteenth century, dream interpretation became disreputable as scientists attributed dreaming to such mundane causes

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as street noises and indigestion. Edgar Allan Poe plays with this idea in “Some Words with a Mummy,” where the narrator goes to bed following a hefty meal, suggesting that his adventure may have only been a dream. Despite scientific dismissal, occultists like Blavatsky persisted in connecting dreams and mystical phenomena throughout the Victorian era. In an 1890 essay, she declares that “the only means of interpreting dreams is the clairvoyant faculty and the spiritual intuition of the interpreter” (Blavatsky, “Dreams”). In other words, only a medium was equipped to divine the meaning of dreams. As priestess of Isis, Blavatsky reclaims the Egyptian power of interpretation. A few years later, Sigmund Freud stunned the scientific community by pronouncing dreams to be “the royal road to the unconscious” (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams 4–5. Citations refer to the Standard Edition unless otherwise indicated). In his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud took a ride on the royal road, and twice it led him straight to an Egyptian tomb. The story of how he got there involves a passion for antiquities, a Bible, and a burning need to establish himself as the master of the unconscious. Freud the Archaeologist Freud was addicted to antiquities. A visitor to 19 Berggasse in Vienna, where he lived and worked from 1891 to 1938, would have encountered an astonishing array of relics from Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Near East, and Asia. Egypt was especially well represented in sphinxes, scarabs, ancient urns, reliefs, and mummified animals. The doctor hung a print of the rockcut temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel above the legendary couch in his study. An army of figurines marched across his desk, including Isis, Hathor, Osiris, and the falcon-headed Horus. His collection included a stunning bronze of Isis nursing the infant Horus and several mummy bandages decorated with magic spells from The Book of the Dead. Freud’s collecting was more than an idle pastime; it was a passion. He started consulting antiquities dealers after his father’s death, a time when he was engaged in the exhausting project of analyzing his own psyche. The bespectacled doctor could often be seen at dinnertime gazing at a new acquisition placed in front of his plate. By the time he fled Vienna for London to escape the Nazis, he owned over two thousand objects and fought hard to ensure that his splendid collection came with him. Freud was attuned enough to obsessions to understand that his collecting was compulsive. Biographer Peter Gay reports that he described it once

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as an addiction second only to his need for nicotine (170). His precious relics inspired him while he worked, helping to fix fleeting ideas in his memory, as he once told his patient Hilda Doolittle. The patients he guided into the vaults of their unconscious would look up from the couch to see figures from the remote past staring down at them. To a famous patient known as the Wolf Man, the room appeared to be a “forest of sculptures” that reminded him more of “an archaeologist’s study” than a doctor’s office (qtd. in Gay 170). The Wolf Man’s observation was a keen one. Flinders Petrie, the father of scientific archaeology, showed modern excavators how to read unearthed relics in the 1870s, and Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, taught psychic explorers how to read the relics of the psyche two decades later. Flinders Petrie had urged Egyptologists to sift through the layers of dig sites, observing potsherds and other seemingly insignificant refuse in order to reconstruct the past. Similarly, Freud persuaded investigators to use his new methods to call up trivial memories to piece together the patient’s life story. He described his method of analysis as the gathering of fragments— the process of assembling a jumble of hints and allusions into a continuous narrative. Freud was not only a collector; he was a great re-collector. Freud was fascinated by archaeology and once claimed that he had read more books on the subject than psychology (Gay 161). He followed the important excavations in Egypt as avidly as anyone of his day. A photograph from his collection shows a sculpture of the pharaoh Akhenaten, whose ancient city began to emerge from the sand through the work of British and German Egyptologists in 1891. This pharaoh would come to play a major role in Freud’s narrative of the birth of western identity. Freud’s ideas were nourished by a circle of fellow enthusiasts. Archaeology professor Emanuel Löwy was a close friend, and the two often exchanged theories that they applied to their respective fields (Gay 171). In treating a patient called the Rat Man, Freud explained the unconscious mind by showing him the antiquities perched on his shelves: “They were really only objects from tombs,” he commented. “Their burial had meant preservation for them” (qtd. in Gay 264). Freud, the Indiana Jones of the psyche, used metaphors of digging and burial to describe how he penetrated the layers of the mind to reveal its secrets. In his essay “A Mighty Metaphor: The Analogy of Archaeology and Psychoanalysis,” Donald Kuspit observes that his use of archeological language was not only a way of romanticizing the work of psychoanalysis, but it also helped to broaden the appeal of his new field beyond the realm of pointy-headed scientists. Unlike psychoanalysts—at best considered quirky doctors working in the margins of medicine—late

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nineteenth-century archaeologists were respected scholars whose heroic explorations had produced momentous results. Freud wanted to present the psychoanalyst as a daring investigator who, like the archaeologist, knew how to look beyond the surface of things. He hoped that explorers of the mind would make even more astounding discoveries than the archaeologists he so admired (Kuspit 133). The psychoanalyst would not only vanquish the most mysterious illnesses but completely reconfigure the human perception of reality. Dreams and memories were his materials; psychoanalytic theories were his tools. One of Freud’s most significant theories of memory was his controversial idea of the “primal scene”—the disturbing and arousing sight of parents having sex. Freud thought that this early scene, whether real or fantasy, could haunt the child and produce terrible symptoms later in life. For him, the primal scene was part of the deepest layer of the unconscious. It was the foundation of the oedipal struggle in which the child feels desire for his mother and rivalry toward his father. Initially, Freud thought that female children went through this phase just as male children did, experiencing “penis envy” and rivalry toward their mothers. For children of both sexes, the passage through the oedipal phase was key to the emergence of subjectivity—the ability to view the world outside the self. Freud constantly tinkered with his oedipal theory, eventually discovering traces of a stage of human development even earlier than the oedipal phase. He called this primal phase the “preoedipal stage,” which consisted of an unbroken union between mother and child that preceded the influence of any third party. For the child, the oedipal mother was an object of desire, but the preoedipal mother evoked more complex emotions. She nourished and cared for the infant, but her omnipotence also threatened to engulf him. She was both life giver and menace. The male child was saved from the preoedipal mother by the father, with whom he learned to identify, but the female child had a more complex passage to negotiate. Freud discussed his surprising discovery of a female preoedipal phase in archaeological terms, likening it the unearthing of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization that preceded Greece. The existence of the female preoedipal phase suggested that attachment to the mother had a greater significance for women than men. The male child passed through the oedipal phase by turning away from his mother, but for the female child, the attachment to the mother was more powerful and ambiguous, making it more difficult for her to attain subjectivity. Freud’s metaphor associates the female psyche with early civilizations and the archaic goddesses that had been dismissed in Judeo-Christian tradition. Like a ghost, the preoedipal mother seems to haunt Freud’s work, troubling his narrative of the father-son relationship. As feminist theorist

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Madelon Sprengthnether observes, “She is the object of his fascinated and horrified gaze, at the same time that she elicits a desire to possess and to know. In her disappearing act, she evades and frustrates his attempts at grand theory at the same time that she lures him, like a fata morgana, into the mists of metapsychology” (Sprengthnether 5). Sprengthnether concludes that the preoedipal mother’s awesome reproductive and regenerative powers are the sources of suppressed fear and envy in the male subject, who harbors conflicted longings to reconnect with her and assume her power. In The Interpretation of Dreams, the preoedipal mother makes two appearances in Egyptian guise. Freud certainly had Egypt on his mind while writing this book, referring to it in an 1899 letter to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss as his “Egyptian Dream Book” (Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, 1887–1904 367). Through Freud’s dreams, Egypt becomes the place of the original primal scene. It is the feminized, archaic location where the oedipal narrative begins and the birthplace of the western psyche. The Egyptian Dream Book I said, “there is mystery in this place, I am instructed, I know the script the shape of this bird is a letter, they call it the hieroglyph strive not, it is dedicate to the goddess here, she is Isis” —H. D., Helen in Egypt Nay my son, where she is, there she is. —H. Rider Haggard, She

One of the items Freud kept on the shelf of his consulting room was Philippson’s Bible, the work of a German rabbi illustrated with striking woodcuts, many of which showed ancient Egyptian scenes. Freud was intrigued by these images as a child, even before he learned to read. Philippson’s Bible was designed to introduce readers to modern archaeology and comparative religion. It also made the graven images of Egypt available on the pages of the very text that makes them blasphemous. Through Philippson, Egyptian imagery forms the earliest layer of Freud’s religious exposure, predating his understanding of written Hebrew texts. This Bible was so important to Freud that his father sent him a volume as a gift, possibly for his thirty-fifth

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birthday in 1891. Critics Eva Rosenfeld and Didier Anzieu surmise that this gift stirred childhood memories whose traces appear in The Interpretation of Dreams, written at the end of the decade. This work is widely considered to be Freud’s most important contribution to psychology, proposing that dreams conceal wishes that the dreamer is unable to acknowledge. The job of the analyst is to uncover these secret wishes to help the patient resolve inner conflicts. The Interpretation of Dreams contains several of Freud’s own dreams, along with his remarkably candid attempts to tease out the secret wishes and conflicts that lay buried in them. Self-examination was a difficult task and one that he forbade future analysts to undertake. However, since Freud was the first psychoanalyst, there was no one yet available to delve into his unconscious using his methods. So he set off on the royal road alone, just as the legendary Oedipus had once done. According to Greek myth, Oedipus journeys to Thebes after leaving behind his home in Cornith and meets the terrifying Sphinx along the road who asks him to solve a riddle. Freud likewise met some strange beings on his journey into the unconscious, and he, too, struggled to answer the difficult questions they posed. Freud presents the final dream in his book, often called the “Egyptian bird dream,” as an example of an anxiety dream, which he suspiciously claims not to have had since he was a child. The Egyptian bird dream is the only childhood dream Freud ever recorded in his work and published letters, making it, as Anzieu observes, a rare window into the contents of his own psychic crypt (295). Many scholars believe that this strange dream contains first hints of the oedipal complex, originating in Freud’s childhood and surfacing in 1896 when his father died and he started to analyze himself. Freud’s account of the Egyptian bird dream is brief but dramatic: “It was a very vivid one, and in it I saw my beloved mother, with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression on her features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with birds’ beaks and laid upon the bed. I awoke in tears and screaming, and interrupted my parents’ sleep” (Interpretation of Dreams 583). Freud reports that “the strangely draped and unnaturally tall figures with birds’ beaks” came from illustrations in Philippson’s Bible. Commentators usually associate these figures with the falcon-headed Horus, who shows up frequently in the woodcuts. As Freud delves deeper into the meaning of the dream, he remembers a playmate named Philip who used a German slang term for sex, vögeln, derived from the word for bird, Vogel. So far, he has connected the name of his friend with the name of the illustrated Bible and associated the birdbeaked figures with something sexual. He then observes that the dream represents a fear that his mother was dying, which made him wake up to make sure she was not really dead. Freud concludes that the dream can be

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traced back to “an obscure and evidently sexual craving” for his mother that his conscious mind represses (584). Her dying expression in the dream is actually an expression of sexual ecstasy. This is a classic oedipal interpretation, casting Freud as the falcon-headed Horus, desiring his mother, Isis. Anzieu gives a more complex oedipal reading of this dream, suggesting that the additional bird-beaked figures hovering over the mother are rivals. In Anzieu’s view, Freud is the watcher/dreamer who is excluded from the primal scene. The bird beaks represent both the father’s penis that the son is forbidden to look at and the hostile foreign gods of the Bible, represented by the figures from Philippson. Though Freud does not name the gender of the bird-beaked figures, Anzieu assumes that they are male. He does so because of the link between the German word vögeln and the notion of predatory sex, expressed in the idea of men “birding the women” (Anzieu 305). Rosenfeld gives a reading in which the bird-beaked figures have female associations that Freud does not acknowledge in his analysis. Though Freud links predatory birds with sex in his Egyptian dream, he connects them elsewhere to maternal figures. In analyzing a dream recorded by Leonardo da Vinci, for example, he notes the similarity between the name of the Egyptian vulture-goddess, Mut, and the German word for mother, Mutter (Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood 39). To use a Freudian phrase, the bird-beaked figures appear to be overdetermined, or carrying multiple associations. Rosenfeld observes that falcon-headed sphinxes were occasionally found in sculptures representing the god Horus. This links the bird figures in Freud’s dream to the Greek Sphinx, a monstrous preoedipal mother. Freud identified with Oedipus, the vanquisher of the Sphinx, but he also identified with the Sphinx herself. A possible source for Freud’s Egyptian bird dream is woodcut from Philippson showing a bier set on the back of an elongated sphinx-like figure. A person is lying on the bier, corresponding to the mother figure and bed in Freud’s dream. The bier is flanked by two draped beings that match the “strangely draped” figures he describes. An outstretched wing hovers above, which Rosenfeld identifies as belonging to Horus. She concludes that through the sphinx association and the feminine traits linked to birds, a preoedipal mother is haunting this dream as a ghost behind the oedipal narrative. In her view, Freud had left something in the background of his dream analysis that he was unwilling or unable to acknowledge (Rosenfeld 100–105). I propose that there is another plausible identification of the birdbeaked figures. Commentators assume that the bird mentioned in Freud’s dream is a falcon, because that is the translation for the German word Falke given in James Strachey’s Standard Edition of Freud’s works. Falke, however,

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may be translated either as “falcon” or “hawk.” In A. A. Brill’s translation, the bird-beaked figures are “sparrowhawks” rather than falcons (Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill 436). If “sparrowhawk” is what Freud had in mind when he described the bird figures, then he may have been thinking of Isis. According to myth, Isis hovered over the body of her dead husband Osiris in the form of a sparrowhawk (sometimes rendered as a falcon), fanning life into him with her wings to conceive Horus. The figure implied by the outstretched wing may be Isis, then, shown in the act of becoming pregnant. If Freud is identifying with Isis in his dream, then he is claiming her reproductive and regenerative powers. He was certainly fascinated by the Egyptian belief in rebirth and regeneration in the afterlife. His antiquities collection contained several funerary objects, including a painted image of Osiris, the husband of Isis. Freud’s Egyptian bird dream allows him to fantasize that he, as Isis, has given birth to himself, as Horus. He becomes his own father and mother. Freud once remarked that Egyptians believed the vulture to be capable of parthenogenesis, the act of giving birth alone. Isis was sometimes depicted with a vulture headdress, and she was often conflated with the mother goddess Mut, adding to a string of associations that link the bird figures in his dream to self-regenerating beings. In the third chapter of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud describes a feeling of passing through a narrow defile and suddenly reaching a great height, an expression he used to articulate the process of producing ideas. This fantasy of self-birth, linked to intellectual activity, appears in another personal dream he records in his book. In this dream, Freud’s mentor Brücke instructs him to dissect his own pelvis and legs, which are disassociated from his body and viewed in a dissecting room. A woman identified as “Louise N.” assists in the dissection. After observing his “eviscerated” pelvis from several angles, the dreamer gets his legs back and finds himself riding in a cab that is driven through the door of a house and along a passage that finally emerges in the open air. Suddenly, the cab driver is replaced by an “Alpine guide” who “carries” the dreamer over “slippery ground” to a small house with an open window. The mysterious guide places the dreamer/Freud on a wooden plank set over a “chasm” between the ground and this second house. Lying on the plank, the dreamer becomes “frightened” about his legs and notices men lying on wooden benches inside the house with children asleep beside them. These children seem to be the key to his passage into the house (451–52). In thinking about what may have precipitated the dream, Freud recalls something about Louise N., the woman assisting him in the dissection. She had, in reality, been helping him in his dream work. Louise N. had

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recently asked for something to read, and Freud offered her Rider Haggard’s She. He described the novel to her as a strange book full of hidden meaning in which “the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions . . .” (453). At this point, Louise N. interrupts to declare that she “already knows” the book and asks him if he has something of his own to give her. Freud is stumped and forced to admit that his “own immortal works have not yet been written” (453). When Louise N. sarcastically asks whether he will ever produce them, Freud has the uncanny feeling that “someone else was admonishing me through her mouth and I was silent” (454). Freud admits that the anxiety of producing his dream book and his fear of exposing himself in it had produced thoughts “too deep to become conscious” (454). He concludes that these unconscious thoughts were stirred up by the mention of She and form the buried layer of his dream. Several of the dream elements come from the conclusion of Haggard’s novel, where a female guide leads men into a mysterious feminine realm. Freud notes that She is destroyed in the end in a subterranean fire, rather than finding immortality for herself and others. The scene of death that closes the novel corresponds to the scene of the second house in the dream, which Freud recognizes as a coffin, or grave. In She, a fearsome woman associated with Isis haunts men’s dreams. The task of Haggard’s scholar is to solve a riddle on a fragment contained in a box decorated with sphinxes, emblems of feminine monstrosity in western tradition. He follows the trail of the mystery into the realm of Kor (the core of the psyche) where he must defend masculine rationality and western patrilineal inheritance. Through painful trials, he manages to escape Ayesha’s “empire of the imagination” where a feminine voice rules. Freud’s description of the uncanny experience of being accused by the voice of “someone else” from a woman’s mouth (Louise N.) suggests a fear of some archaic feminine voice threatening to thwart his quest for immortality by asking a question he cannot answer, just as Oedipus was threatened by the Sphinx. For Freud, every dream reveals a wish. In this case, he asserts that his underlying wish is that if he must be buried, he would like it to be in an Etruscan grave like the one that he had visited at an excavation site. The Etruscans were the earliest Romans, and their architecture and monuments—their immortal works—left an influential legacy in western civilization. Freud was intrigued by Rome as a place where several cultural layers rest on top of each other. In the dream, the Etruscan grave he desires rests over a haunted Egyptian tomb in which ancient forces linger and threaten: “Accordingly, I woke up in a ‘mental fright,’ even after the successful emergence of the idea that children may perhaps achieve what their father has failed to—a fresh allusion to the strange novel in which a person’s identity

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is retained through a series of generations after two thousand years” (455). Freud’s hope for immortality is manifested in the desire to give birth to an immortal work, but his eviscerated pelvis suggests an empty womb, and his missing legs denote impotence. The dreamer struggles toward self-birth when he recovers his missing body parts and emerges into open air, but the mysterious guide interrupts to bear the dreamer to a tomb/womb. When he awakens, the dreamer is still buried, trapped in a terrifying tomb. Freud’s incomplete analysis of his dream suggests that some of the unconscious thoughts awakened by She also remained buried—thoughts that appear to be linked to Egypt and its maternal associations. Freud’s father died before he wrote his dream book, but his powerful mother was still alive. Her presence may haunt this dream in the form of the guide figure he associates with the “eternal feminine.” The second dream mirrors the Egyptian bird dream in several ways, with its tomb, bier, and hovering figure connected to Isis and the Sphinx. In both dreams, Egypt is associated with an archaic feminine force from which the dreamer wishes to escape. The first dream is a fantasy of self-birth, but in the second dream, the female guide leads him to a grave. In “Myths of castration: Freud’s ‘eternal feminine’ and Rider Haggard’s She,” Shannon Young observes that if the mother figure/guide would perish in the dream like Ayesha in Haggard’s novel, then Freud would be free to take over her role as the ruler of the empire of the imagination. He would become “the guide”—the interpreter of the unconscious (Young). In the years that coincided with and followed Freud’s dream investigations, the unchartered territory of the unconscious became a battleground. Psychologists, mediums, and a new breed of investigators called “psychical researchers” fought to decide who would be the legitimate guide to this mysterious realm linked to archaic forces. Many considered this struggle to be of the highest importance to the progress of civilization. The biblical Hebrews understood it well; the one who holds the keys to dreams is omnipotent—the god of all. The Spirit of Psychology how did I know the vulture? why did I invoke the mother? why was he seized with terror? in the dark, I must have looked an inked-in shadow; but with his anger, that ember I became

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what his accusation made me, Isis, forever with that Child, the Hawk Horus —H. D., Helen in Egypt

Between 1880 and 1920, explorers of the human mind were interested in depth psychology, which focused on the unconscious aspects of human experience. Proponents often devoted themselves to the study of mediums, mysticism, and multiple states of awareness. Eugene Taylor observes that though the occult-centered branches of depth psychology were highly influential until the general acceptance of psychoanalysis following World War II, their history and significance are typically suppressed (Taylor 240–43). The early obsession with spirits and mediums became an embarrassment to psychologists trying to legitimize their field when such interests fell out of favor. The Nobel Prize–winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck was not embarrassed and eagerly shared his fascination with memory, mystery, and mediums. Maeterlinck was one of many spiritual seekers of his day looking for ancient magic in a new century. In The Unknown Guest (1914), he fuses paranormal research with psychology, proposing that a mysterious entity exists in the “subliminal unconscious”—a plane that mediums were thought to be able to access. This entity, transcending time and space, haunts the rational mind, “reading in our very souls forgotten secrets of the past, sentiments that have not yet taken shape, intentions as yet unborn” (Maeterlinck 366). Sensitive people experience the guest/ghost as a maternal voice, a “heterogeneous” force producing “mutilated revelations” that exist “within ourselves.” Associated with Oriental locales, the Unknown Guest “has seen the crack in the vault” that separates conscience, temporal existence from an eternal, archaic life experienced in the unconscious (410). Maeterlinck was excited by the possibility that all people might someday be able to hear this voice, believing that reconnection with the archaic realm promised progress for human civilization. Maeterlinck’s discussion of an “other within,” memory, psychic splitting, wisdom-infused Oriental locales, and haunting maternal voices ties together with amazing comprehensiveness the themes so often associated with Egypt in western cultural memory. His theory illustrates how early psychology both reflected and mediated an ancient separation that was understood to have been handed down in individuals as a psychic rift. In The Magic of Maeterlinck, Patrick Mahoney reports that Maeterlinck had traveled to Egypt on a second honeymoon with his wife Renee, where they became enamored with the ancient, mysterious monuments. The writer

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saw the ancient Egyptians as a people who had understood the unconscious dimensions of reality to which modern human beings were not attuned (Mahoney 144). They knew and welcomed the guest. For Maeterlinck, this being that recalls lost knowledge was as real as the steam engine and electricity wires; human beings had just forgotten how to hear it. Maeterlinck thought that the medium was able to aid psychology by channeling the Unknown Guest. However, scientific circles were increasingly making the medium and her guest unwelcome. For some, this was not so much because they disbelieved—though many of them did—but because they wanted to take the medium’s place as the mediator of this voice. Much as professional obstetricians elbowed midwives out of mainstream medicine in the 1890s, professional psychologists and scientists often sought to denounce mediums so that they could subsume their activities under the banner of science. More Things in Heaven and Earth Spiritualism came from America, but phrenology and mesmerism, linked closely with psychology, grew out of the Viennese scientific community. In the 1780s, F. A. Mesmer made trance and clairvoyance familiar to Europeans. A century later, these phenomena were legitimized by the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Nicknamed “the Napoleon of the neuroses,” Charcot used hypnosis at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris to conquer hysteria in women. A well-known illustration shows Charcot holding a woman arching over his arm, her blouse slipping down from her shoulders as the doctor gestures toward the enthralled male audience. As a young doctor visiting Paris in 1885, Freud was so awed by the charismatic Charcot and his theater of unstable women that he decided then and there to dedicate himself to psychology. When he was not observing Charcot’s mastery of female hysteria, Freud was often haunting the Louvre’s Egyptian rooms, where he described “bas reliefs painted Egypt in burning colors, veritable colossi of kings, real sphinxes, a world as in a dream” (qtd. in Gay 47). Freud understood the importance of Egypt in the history of medicine, and he also knew of its association with the occult. He could not ignore the connection between the two realms, a symbiosis that both fascinated and troubled him. Freud claimed to dedicate himself to the field of material science, but he took several side trips into the world of the occult. He was certainly not the only scientist to do so. Charles Darwin himself attended a séance at the home of his brother Erasmus in January 1874, though he was not very unenthusiastic. Freud’s first writing on the occult, published posthumously,

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dates from November 10, 1899, less than a week after the appearance of The Interpretation of Dreams. He takes paranormal phenomena seriously in “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy” (1921); “Dreams and Telepathy” (1922); and “The Occult Significance of Dreams” (1925), a section written for a revised edition The Interpretation of Dreams but never included. In 1932, Freud wrote a lecture entitled “Dreams and the Occult” as part of his New Introductory Lectures, proposing that telepathy may have been an archaic form of communication. In “Dreams and the Occult,” Freud claims to treat occult phenomena exactly the same way he would treat any other object of scientific investigation (91). Privately, he expressed other views. His friend and colleague Ernest Jones reveals how Freud often regaled him late at night with stories about his uncanny experiences. When questioned, Freud habitually quoted a line from Hamlet (paraphrased in She as the riddle on the pottery sherd): “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy” (qtd. in Jones 3:383). Freud admitted to Jones that he had sometimes unconsciously performed magical actions as charms against disaster, such as the time he broke a beautiful Egyptian figurine as a sacrifice to save a cherished friendship. His Egyptian relics held magic for him, invested with powers and memory associations that haunted him as he worked. Freud carried on a lively correspondence with his colleague Sandor Ferenczi on occult issues, describing a visit to a female soothsayer in 1909 that he was convinced was telepathic. In 1913, he arranged a séance with a female medium at his home after Ferenczi’s address to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on telepathy. Though Freud was unimpressed by her performance, he later admitted to his friend Eitingon that there were two subjects that perplexed him to distraction—the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy and occultism. In response to Jones’s impatience at his belief in telepathy, Freud responded that his “sin” of conversion to telepathy was a private matter, “like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking, and many other things, and that the theme of telepathy is in essence alien to psychoanalysis” (qtd. in Jones 3:395–96). Freud understood that telepathy was dangerous territory for the psychoanalyst. The notion that human beings could automatically transfer unconscious material between them conflicted with the idea of an analyst required to excavate and interpret the buried contents of the mind. Telepathy suggested an alien intelligence penetrating the psyche, an unwelcome guest to the analyst, who wanted to see himself as the sovereign of this realm. Occult influences in the mind were a threat, but Freud nevertheless told his friend Hereward Carrington that “if I had my life to live over again

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I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis” (qtd. in Jones 3:392). Prominent psychologists of Freud’s era argued at length over the meaning of mediums and their frequent claims of telepathy. Writing on “The Mutations of the Self ” in The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James concluded that the medium was not a lunatic but a normal permutation of the psychologically healthy individual (James 1.10). Baron von Schrenck Notzing, a respected psychiatrist as well as a psychical researcher, devoted extensive study to mediums throughout Europe. Researchers like Myers, Flournoy, James, and Schrenck Notzing took female mediums seriously as people who possessed rare psychological gifts. Others in the medical community viewed mediums largely as diseased women best treated in insane asylums. In Radical Spirits, Anne Braude notes that while Spiritualists thought that women’s reputed special sensitivities could produce revelation, doctors often viewed such traits as pathological (Braude 145, 158–61). For these doctors, mediumship was a symptom of hysteria, a disease associated with women that originated in a Greek term describing illness caused by a “wandering uterus.” American doctors described the medium’s insanity as “mediomania,” a madness thought to be the result of an improperly tilted womb. In the 1870s, Dr. Frederic Marvin argued that the disease stemmed from sexual pathology and the refusal to accept prescribed roles. Spiritualistic mediumship, in contrast, gave sensitive women a privileged position. Mediums who had suffered in childhood were considered particularly fit for a spiritual calling (Owen 206). Blavatsky discovered her receptivity to occult phenomena during childhood and adolescence, as did Florence Cook and other famous mediums. Many women found that mediumship cured their ills where orthodox treatments had failed. Medical mediums and clairvoyant physicians, often women, used trances to cure disease, attributing the healing power to spirits. In an 1863 article published in London’s MacMillan’s Magazine, the writer complains of the many advertisements for medical mediums listed in American newspapers, citing several examples, such Madame Clifford, a Brooklynite who advertised herself as a Spiritualist and medical medium, assuring potential clients that she “detects diseases, prescribes remedies, and finds absent friends” (Dicey 72). Her medical services were available for a fee of one dollar, and she was willing to dispense business advice, too. Spiritualist healers challenged orthodox medicine, defending women’s natural health and suitability for the role of healer. Doctors responded by branding them as bamboozlers, witches, and women of degraded morals. Freud displayed an attitude toward mediums common to nineteenthcentury orthodox doctors in “Dreams and the Occult,” where he dismisses

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mediums as childish tricksters and declares that nothing of value had ever been produced in a séance (94). The Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which Freud joined in 1911, became famous for discrediting female mystics. Founded in 1882 by three Cambridge dons interested in Spiritualism (Edmund Gurney, F. W. Myers, and Henry Sidgwick), the SPR ended the career of several mediums. In 1885, the group gained fame by denouncing Blavatsky in a document known as the Hodgson Report, which damaged her reputation and cast her as a dangerous manipulator of men. Despite this condemnation, Blavatsky’s influence continued to spread. A branch of the Theosophical Society was founded in Vienna in 1887 by her associate Friedrich Eckstein, attracting an influential circle dedicated to Spiritualism, paranormal phenomena, hypnotism, and séances. From Séance to Analytic Session The analytic process developed by Freud merges spiritual and occult traditions with scientific materialism. In several key aspects, the medium was the precursor of the analyst. She conjured the ghosts of the past and channeled unconscious thoughts through spontaneous language and archaic symbols. She promised to console the grief-stricken and cure the sick. She exerted great influence over her sitters, who sometimes projected their sexual desires onto her. Her trademark, telepathy, brought on the exchange of thoughts and feelings between people, as did transference, the analytic process in which feelings of one person are unconsciously redirected to another. Early psychoanalytic sessions look something like séances in reverse. Sensitive women came to be cured, rather than to cure. They would be encouraged to conform to prescribed roles, instead of stepping outside of them. Freud labeled his patient Dora as an hysteric because she masturbated, a neurotic because she was bisexual. In analysis, the medium becomes the hysteric, her trances and oracles turning into fits and babbling. The hysteric, as Hannah S. Decker observes, was the object of special antipathy in the medical community of the late nineteenth century—a “female vampire” that had to be subdued (100–101). She was an undead monster who had to be wrestled into the crypt of conformity. Spiritualists and members of occult societies were known for practicing rituals and enacting scenes drawn from ancient cultures, particularly Egypt. Freud carried on these traditions in his consulting room where he became the master of Egyptian secrets through the display of his ancient artifacts. He restages the scenes of his Egyptian dreams as he hovers above

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a figure lying inert on the couch while bird-beaked figures look down from the shelves. Freud described transference as the “battleground upon which the most important struggles between psychoanalyst and patient are fought” (qtd. in Ingram). In this battle, the analyst becomes the object of redirected emotion and must use countertransference against the patient as a defense. Ingram observes that Freud’s original term for transference (Übertragung) is much closer to the notion of “translation” than the English term. She notes that the Latin root of both transference and translation is translatus. This verb describes something that is “borne” or carried over, linked to the Greek metaphor describing birth. These original meanings of Übertragung evoke movement, both in the sense of carrying as one does a child or burden and also carrying something across a boundary, relocating it to a new place. The archaic sense of translation connotes “rapture” or “entrancement,” while theological tradition construes translation as the movement directly to heaven without death. All of these meanings come together in the analytic session. Freud “translates” the object of the patient’s transference (her sexuality) into countertransference. He defends against his fear of rapture and entrancement by rebirthing the dangerous pleasure into the oedipal narrative. The theological tradition of transference also comes through in the analytic session. The analyst ascends to a heavenly scene in which he is mother, father, and child—universal, immortal, and omnipotent. Through this fantasy, he escapes the threat of death represented by the Egyptian relics that surround him. The consulting room is a tomb where Freud usurps paternal authority by freely looking at the graven images on the shelves, “birding the women” as he identifies with the ancient, falcon-headed gods. It is also a womb where Freud assumes the maternal, regenerating power of archaic goddesses represented by the maternal figures that stand on his desk and shelves. He is both god-the-father and god-the-mother, giving birth to his master oedipal narrative through his work and publications. Freud ends his paper “Dreams and the Occult” with the thorny subject of telepathic communication seemingly conquered. His last words on this occult phenomenon demonstrate insistence of his mastery over it: “And with that we return to our starting point—the study of psychoanalysis” (109). However, Freud’s obsession with his precious artifacts revealed something troubling his unconscious. His collecting, like his interest in telepathy, suggests a relationship with the preoedipal mother still haunted by fear and desire. Freud’s positions on women are often troubling by modern standards, but his very interest in the female psyche was progressive for his time. His willingness to acknowledge what the oedipal narrative

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had buried gradually increased as his experience grew. While he enacted his fantasies in his early analytic sessions, his female patients of later years were often able to construct their own creative narratives of transcendence and regeneration. The analyst and the analysand powered each other’s fantasies, but they also healed each other’s wounds. Several of Freud’s female patients, including his daughter Anna, became distinguished analysts themselves, freely questioning his oedipal narrative and finding their own authoritative voices within the psychoanalytic sphere. Others, like the bisexual American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), emerged from his séance-like sessions fortified with regenerated creative drive. In her writing, H. D. analyzed the analyst and recreated Egypt as a site of maternal powers. Susan Stanford Friedman has compiled a volume of H. D.’s letters concerning her experience in Vienna that gives an intimate look at the analysand’s relationship to the analyst. At the time Freud analyzed H. D., he had accumulated four decades of experience. In 1933, the “Oracle from Vienna,” as H. D. liked to call Freud, read the “hieroglyphics” of the poet’s unconscious and declared that she was “stuck” in the preoedipal stage and must “return to the womb” (Analyzing Freud 142). During their sessions, Freud spoke to H. D. of tombs she had visited at Luxor and Philae, sometimes placing a tiny figurine of Athena he described as “the veiled Isis” in her hand, as if acknowledging that he, too, must return to the tomb/womb (H. D., Tribute to Freud 187). He had already admitted that the oedipal complex was not sufficient for explaining female development and was explicitly acknowledging his feeling of becoming a maternal figure in the analytic session: “I must tell you,” he said to H. D., “I do not like to be the mother in transference—it always surprises me and shocks me a little. I feel so very masculine” (qtd. in H. D., Tribute to Freud xxxvii). He acknowledged, however, that the occurrence was common. H. D., whom her friend Stephen Guest referred to as a “priestess of Isis,” wrote an unpublished collection of poems after her analysis with Freud. A Dead Priestess Speaks presents an oracular voice that rises up from the grave after a long and painful burial. In these poems, H. D. reconsiders the myth of Electra, the story of a girl devastated by the death of her father Agamemnon, whom her mother Clytemnestra murdered with her lover’s help. According to myth, Electra was overcome with rage and joins with her brother Orestes to kill her mother and her mother’s lover. Electra became an emblem of madness, tortured virginity, death, and dark feminine powers in western cultural memory. Jung coined the name of the counterpart to the oedipal complex in women from this myth: the “Electra complex.” H. D.’s poem cycle reflects a challenge to the predominance of the Oedipus myth in western cultural memory that Jill Scott observes in Electra

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After Freud. Electra becomes a figure of peace and renewal who speaks to her mother in the underworld and comes to understand and respect her. Electra and her brother emerge as a complimentary male and female pair reminiscent of Isis and Osiris. H. D. transforms Electra from the angry, prepubescent girl of Greece into the fully formed and emotionally mature woman of Egypt. H. D.’s longest and most complex work, Helen in Egypt, transfers the femme fatale of Greek myth from the battlefield of Troy to the primeval land of Egypt. She uses an alternative version of the myth, a cultural counter-memory in which Helen is said to have lived in Egypt and acquired magical powers there. H. D.’s poem restores power and subjectivity to a figure who had been maligned and reduced to a cipher in western tradition. According to legend, Stesichorus, a Greek lyric poet, wrote a poem denouncing Helen and was struck blind for doing so. He expiates his crime by recovering Helen’s reputation in his Pallinode and wins his sight back. H. D. suggests that the Greek version of Helen is nothing more than an illusion, expanding on a preserved fragment of Stesichorus’s Pallinode to create an alternative history. For H. D., the real Helen is located in Egypt. H. D.’s Helen comes into possession of intuitive wisdom in Egypt, learning to translate the language of a hooting bird. Her lover Achilles sees the bird as a “carrion creature” (vulture), but Helen understands that the “night-bird” is actually the “protective mother-goddess” Isis—not a “death-symbol,” but a “life-symbol.” Helen’s possession of such knowledge provokes Achilles, who accuses her of witchcraft and saddles her with a son, “the Hawk Horus,” who rejects her. She defends herself to Achilles by explaining that her wisdom precedes the written language of God: “I was not instructed,” she tells him, “but I ‘read’ the script.” Achilles follows the Word of God, which is passed on from father to son, but Helen has no need of this knowledge. As Louise N. told Freud when he handed her the book She, Helen “knows it already” (H.D., Helen in Egypt 21–23). As poet, the medium-hysteric recovers her lost oracular voice. She resurrects the language of Isis, the voice of those Egyptian women described by Herodotus who first spoke for the gods of Greece. H. D. translates this language into a timeless realm in which past, present, and future merge. Helen reveals Isis to be a central emblem of the human psyche—the whole arc and “the circle complete.” Isis, the mother, is simply nature, and “there is no before and no after” her. Achilles recognizes that separation is merely an illusion, understanding that to hear secret her name “would weld him to her” (279, 300).

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Moses and Matriarchy As for the word which you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD, we will not listen to you. But we will do everything that we have vowed, burn incense to the queen of heaven and pour out libations to her. —Jeremiah 44:15–18

In the years following his mother’s death in 1930, Freud labored over his controversial Moses and Monotheism (1939), a story of western origins that excavates a buried history of Judeo-Christian tradition that is haunted by Egyptian ghosts. Gay observes that the treasures Freud collected from Egyptian tombs “seemed reminders of a lost world to which he and his people, the Jews, could trace their remote roots,” reminding him, as he told Ferenczi, of the “strange secret yearning” of childhood wishes “never to be fulfilled and not adapted to reality” (qtd. in Gay 172). In Gay’s opinion, the secret yearnings of Freud’s childhood rose up to haunt him when his mother died. Strangely, he skipped her funeral and sent his daughter Anna in his place. Although he told a friend the previous year that “the loss of a mother must be something quite remarkable, not to be compared with anything else” (qtd. in Gay 573), Freud suspiciously claimed that he felt neither grief nor pain at the time of his own mother’s death, suggesting an inability to confront the loss and the presence of deep and conflicted feelings. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud explores the legitimacy of cultural memories. His audacious claim is that Moses was not a Hebrew but an Egyptian aristocrat and follower of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, the first monotheist. He postulates a terrible struggle in Egyptian society between polytheists and monotheists in which Moses, a supporter of monotheism, confronts polytheists who were turning upon Akhenaten. According to his theory, Moses was forced to flee Egypt, taking with him a Semitic tribe that had been enslaved. He intended to teach them his monotheistic religion and lead them to the Promised Land. Freud deduces that Moses never made it to the Promised Land because his followers turned on him and murdered him, unable to accept either his religion or his insistence on circumcision. On one level, the story of murder, guilt, and penance expresses Freud’s anxiety over the Nazis’ destructive march across Europe. By 1933, the Nazis were publicly burning Freud’s books in Berlin. In 1934, the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was murdered, and by 1938, Nazis troops had invaded Vienna. Death-head swastikas appeared on the pavement that led to Freud’s door, and he was horrified, at the age of eighty-two, to see his home raided and his daughter

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Anna held and interrogated for an entire day. After harrowing negotiations in which much of his property was confiscated, Freud was able to escape with his immediate family to London, where he finished working on Moses and Monotheism. In London, he continued to work on his strange book on religion. Despite the emphasis on the father, Gay and others have pointed out that the book also reveals a current of anxiety about the mother. Freud had been the favorite son of a young mother with a forceful personality who exerted considerable influence over his life. His discovery of childhood sexual feelings toward her formed the basis of his oedipal theory and the very foundation of psychoanalysis. Amalia Freud died at the age of ninety-five, having been a potent presence in Freud’s life for three quarters of a century. The surface narrative of Moses and Monotheism tells of the killing of the father, but it carries counter-memories of the burial of the mother. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud expresses a childhood wish for a return to the realm of Egypt—the place represented on the pages of the Bible that fascinated him as a boy. The land of forbidden graven images becomes the source of original pain, the location of the first sin. It also emerges as the maternal realm in which the oedipal narrative unravels. Like Menelaus, Freud had to travel the woeful way to Egypt to confront his psychic estrangement. Freud had been considering the preoedipal mother in his work since 1912, when Jung displaced the father and elevated the mother in his theory of the incest taboo. Jung’s view of the story of Oedipus placed the emphasis not on the killing of the father but on the threat of the mother, represented by the monstrous Sphinx. Freud had to do battle with the Sphinx that Jung had placed in his royal road, and in response he wrote Totem and Taboo (1913), where he applied psychoanalytic theories to the fields of archeology, anthropology, and religion. Here, Freud asserts that certain taboos observed in primitive societies reveal fears and desires associated with incest between the son and the mother and between the brother and the sister. The most controversial essay in the book draws on Charles Darwin’s tentative speculation that early human societies may have been arranged in the form of a violent and jealous alpha male surrounded by a harem of females, the “primal horde.” Freud combines the primal horde idea with a theory of sacrificial ritual derived from Scottish Old Testament scholar and Orientalist William Robertson Smith. He surmises that a band of prehistoric brothers who had been driven away by the alpha male returned to confront their father, whom they both feared and respected. Together, they killed him and made a communal feast of his body—an act whose traces remain in ritual religious meals, such as those that appear in Judeo-Christian tradition. Freud completely ignores the prevalent fantasy of devouring the mother, though

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he had seen it in his own casework: Totem and Taboo is insistently a story of fathers and sons. He goes on to propose that once the band of brothers had disposed of the father, the love they had for him returned, and they felt terrible guilt. To appease their guilt, they made the father more powerful in death than in life, raising him to the status of a god who forbids the sexual enjoyment of mothers and sisters. Freud’s theory reasserts the oedipal narrative of patricide and primal incest by placing it in the earliest phases of human cultural development. During the period between Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Freud struggled with concepts of matriarchy and challenges to his incest taboo theory displayed in the work of anthropologist James Frazer, an expert on mythology and comparative religion and Bachofen, the author of Mother Right. He described his aversion to such ideas in exchanges with his friend and fellow analyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, yet traces of them already appeared in Totem and Taboo. For example, in the first essay, “The savage’s fear of incest,” he references an archaic system of inheritance through the mother that predates inheritance derived from the father. In an essay aptly named “The ambivalence of emotions,” he asserts that “it is a general law in mythology that a preceding stage, just because it has been overcome and pushed back by a higher stage, maintains itself next to it in a debased form so that the objects of its veneration become objects of aversion” (36). The ancient female figures of myth that fascinated him—Isis, Athena, Medusa, and the matriarchal goddess of Crete—would later make appearances in Moses and Monotheism. Freud acknowledges the notion that such figures belong to an early stage of religion that predates the father religion in Moses and Monotheism, though he never fully explains their lingering influence. By the time of Moses and Monotheism, Freud was determined to remember the fragmented story of the origins of western identity as a grand oedipal narrative. However, he conjures the preoedipal mother at the very beginning of his book in a key argument concerning the identity of Moses, dismissing biblical tradition by giving the name of Moses an Egyptian etymology, instead of Hebrew. Egyptian names, he observes, customarily carried two parts—one, a generic name for child, “mose,” and the other, a paternal prefix. Ptahmose, for example, would simply mean “child of Ptah.” Freud proposes that in the case of Moses, a paternal prefix was dropped, resulting in a name that reflects the generic Egyptian word for child. Because the name of his father has been dropped and forgotten, Moses becomes simply the child of Egypt. He is found floating in the waters of the Nile, the great maternal symbol of Egypt connected to Isis. Moses is then adopted by an Egyptian princess, herself a daughter of Isis, as Egyptian tradition dictated. Thus Freud’s story of patrilineal inheritance ironically makes Moses both the son and the grandson of Isis.

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The preoedipal mother continues to appear in this memory tale, showing up in history “at one period—it is hard to say when” (105). She surfaces as the maternal consort of Javhe who has been forgotten but whose traces remain in the Old Testament. She emerges again in the ancient mothergoddess of Crete, who was eventually displaced by the cult of the fathergod Zeus. She also appears in certain “magical and mysterious elements” in Christianity. Freud proposes that Athena is a vestige of this ancient mother figure, whom the Greeks turned on because she could not protect them from natural disasters. They demote her to the status of daughter and strip away her reproductive power by making her a virgin. These traces of ancient maternal figures suggest that behind the crimes of patricide in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, there is another crime. The mother has been “buried alive,” and the son’s guilt for this crime is even stronger than his guilt for killing the father because the repression is more thorough. Poe’s tale of the burial of the women of the House of Usher is a vivid illustration of such a crime and its consequences. The mark of circumcision, which Freud describes as “uncanny,” becomes a substitution for an earlier separation, a physical and symbolic representation of the severing of the umbilical cord. Circumcision can be read as a memory of the turning away from the mother. Freud repeatedly makes a case in Moses and Monotheism for the analogous relationship between cultural evolution and the development of the individual psyche. The individual’s troublesome yearning for connection with the preoedipal mother and denial of that yearning is written into western cultural memory through preservative repression and countermemories that will not go away. Freud’s story recapitulates the alienation between ancient Egypt and the West but simultaneously restores the mother’s legacy in making Moses the child of Egypt. The western engagement with Egypt has come full circle, and what was denied in Greek and Hebrew tradition returns more powerfully than ever. In Moses and Monotheism, Egypt becomes the mother of the West, and the crime of the burial of the mother is expiated. As the mother is restored, so is the daughter. Freud demonstrated this restoration in his own life. His psychoanalytic legacy—and his memories of Egypt—were passed on, but not to a son. In recalling the dream of Haggard’s She, he indicates that children are the key to his “eternal passage.” Freud and his wife Martha had three sons, but it was their brilliant daughter Anna who received his intellectual inheritance, becoming a renowned psychoanalyst and the preserver of his eternal works. Freud also bequeathed his precious Egyptian antiquities to Anna, implying that ancient Egypt is properly the birthright not just of the son but of the daughter, too.

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Visitors can tour the house where Freud lived and worked in London, now a museum. Inside, Egyptian relics peer from mantles, glass cabinets, shelves, and the surface of the doctor’s writing desk, just as he left them. From September to October 2006, the museum celebrated the 150-year anniversary of Freud’s birth with a special exhibition. An award-winning artist spent two years in residence studying and responding to Freud’s antiquities, creating sculptures of bronze, stone, and clay that mirrored and commented on the objects collected from Egyptian tombs. The postmodern exhibit showed the artist’s modern sculptures placed alongside original pieces in pairs, creating a series of visual dialogues. A female mummy mask stood poised next to a contemporary bust of a woman whose intense gaze and strong features suggest a life force leaping from beyond the grave. The title of the exhibit, Relative Relations, expresses the sculptor’s questioning of how relationships exist through time through the medium of art. The title also refers to the name of the artist, Jane McAdam Freud. She is the daughter of painter Lucien Freud and the great-granddaughter of the father of psychoanalysis. Her reimagining of Egyptian dreams testifies that in the twenty-first century, the past can act as a source of creative inspiration to the living. Ancient separations linger, but at least a healing dialogue has been established between self and other, male and female, east and west, the spiritual and physical worlds. This dialogue, symbolized in Jane McAdam Freud’s work, holds the promise of the future.

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Afterlives

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emories of ancient Egypt are alive in the new millennium. They are encoded in the physical landscape, cultural practices, and psychic geographies of the West. Americans carry Egypt in their pockets. Consider the dollar bill—the most potent symbol of wealth in the world exudes Egyptian magic through the Masonic eye and pyramid. Watch CNN, a premiere cable news source, where newscaster Wolf Blitzer draws authority from an image of the stark obelisk of the Washington Monument. Stroll through the crowded Egyptian rooms of the British Museum or the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where a 2007 exhibition of King Tut drew a record-breaking 1.3 million visitors eager to catch a glimpse of the relics of the boy king. Cityscapes burst with Egyptian iconography. The obelisk has evolved into the skyscraper, conceived by Art Deco architects who turned to the past to create the soaring verticality of modern life. In 2004, the new Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle thrust Egyptian geometry into the New York City skyline. The building, described by Herbert Muschamp in the New York Times as “modern noir,” is Egyptian in scale, the sleek forms of its towers inspired by architecture created in the fourteenth century BCE. Nearby, Trump International Hotel and Tower echoes the Egyptian design of its neighbor with gleaming pyramidal pilasters (Muschamp). The skyline of San Francisco, already distinct with the Transamerica Pyramid skyscraper, will soon be redefined by a 1,200-foot obelisk destined to be the tallest building on the West Coast. The new Transbay Transit Center, designed by Pelli-Hines, will be a hub for high-speed rail, making mass transit in northern California fast and seamless as never before. The obelisk, described on the center Web site as a “simple and eternal form,” will feature cutting-edge sustainability, pointing skyward as a symbol of hope for a balance between technology and nature (“Project Overview”). Egypt, a symbol of antiquity, is yoked to futurism and extraterrestrial life. Erich von Däniken’s best-selling Chariots of the Gods (1968) is rooted in pyramidology, painting a picture of ancient astronauts who used the pyramids as landing sites. According to Von Däniken, the gods and goddesses of Egypt were aliens who gifted humanity with their superior knowledge.

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The book served as the inspiration for many science fiction television and film productions, including the original television series Battlestar Galactica (1978–79) and the film Stargate (1994). In Stargate, the Victorian archaeologist-hero becomes an Egyptologist-astronaut, saving the earth from the Egyptian god Ra, who turns out to be a menacing alien. Such fantasies demonstrate the enduring strength of the Egypt-as-stranger memory that Herodotus first inscribed into western history. Ancient Egypt also flourishes in the New Age movement and occult societies. Proponents look to antiquity as a source of spiritual wisdom, following a long line of seekers who have turned to Egypt. Rosicrucian groups are still active in America, and many of them were born during the occult revival in the late nineteenth century. The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Planetarium in San Jose, California houses a splendid collection of Egyptian artifacts and a full-scale replica of an Egyptian temple. It has become one of the most visited tourist attractions in the city, especially popular among schoolchildren. On December 30, 1999, New Age enthusiasts and other Egyptophiles gathered in the desert surrounding the Giza pyramids to celebrate the new millennium. As the date approached, rumors spread of a secret society bent on world domination meeting inside the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Amid considerable controversy, the Egyptian government allowed the on-site production of an extravaganza that included an electronic opera. Plans for replacing a golden capstone at the peak of the Great Pyramid by helicopter were cancelled, as Muslims complained of the expense and the irrelevance of the date to the Islamic calendar. Nevertheless, thousands of international tourists came to Giza to welcome the seventh millennium among monuments built 4,500 years ago. From the vast distances of outer space, astronauts are able to see the pyramids of Egypt. They can also perceive a light beaming up from the middle of Las Vegas, Nevada. The brightest beam in the world shoots up from the apex of the Luxor Hotel and Casino, a thirty-story pyramid of jet black glass. Like the postmodern pyramid of metal and glass at the Louvre, it has become a world-famous landmark. A gigantic sphinx guarding the hotel entrance lures visitors by conjuring Egyptian magic and colossal wealth. Inside, guests can go on a virtual archeological dig in a thrilling IMAX motion simulator ride called “In Search of the Obelisk.” They are invited to walk through an authentic replica of the tomb of Tutankhamun, based on Howard Carter’s description of his discoveries in 1922. In 2008, the Luxor Hotel will host a popular television show featuring Criss Angel, a celebrity magician who dazzles audiences with hypnosis, illusion, and escape stunts.

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In July, 2007, MGM Mirage announced plans to update the resort by stripping away the kitschy Egyptian elements and replacing them with sleeker, quieter features. A marketing representative announced that the pyramid is no longer a symbol of ancient Egypt but of “sexiness” and “nightlife” (Benston). Ironically, the postmodern pyramid will look much more like the unadorned originals once the kitschy accoutrements are gone. The pyramids at Giza have stood silently through thousands of years of interpretations of their meaning and will no doubt stand long after this most recent one has come and gone. Throughout the twentieth century, writers continued to respond to the mystery of Egypt. Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke drew inspiration from his 1911 Nile journey, made on a Cook’s steamer. In his Duino Elegies, he expresses a yearning for Egyptian mystic pantheism. German Nobel Prize– winner Thomas Mann followed Freud’s Moses and Monotheism in linking early Judaism with the monotheism of Akhenaten. In his acclaimed tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers (1926–43), he makes Joseph the contemporary of the heretic pharaoh. British writer Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60) is the most celebrated modern western fiction set in Egypt. Durrell’s masterpiece, originally subtitled “The Book of The Dead,” focuses on the World War II period of modern Alexandria, but the past is powerfully present. Like many writers before him, Durrell taps into Egyptian antiquity to build a sensual, exotic atmosphere. He also shows his modern sensibilities in referring to Alexandria as “the capital of memory” and associating the layered past of the city with the Freudian layers of the unconscious. His story follows the struggle of expatriates living in a world still haunted by ancient ghosts as the period of British imperialism gives way the postcolonial era. Ancient Egypt has also played a significant role in genre fiction. Horror master H. P. Lovecraft evoked ancient Egypt in several tales, including “Under the Pyramids,” which begins with a line connecting Egypt to all that remains unexplained: “Mystery attracts mystery” (Lovecraft 3). The story, written for Harry Houdini, appeared under the great magician’s byline in a 1924 issue of Weird Tales. Agatha Christie set all of her detective novels in the twentieth century, with a single exception. Death Comes as the End (1944) takes place in ancient Thebes, a setting that drew Christie’s attention when she worked with her archaeologist husband, Sir Max Mallowan, in the Middle East. In recent years, Margaret George has proved that historical fiction set in Egypt still attracts a wide audience. The Memoirs of Cleopatra (1998), which spawned a television miniseries in 1999, depicts the queen transformed from a femme fatale into a shrewd survivor, reflecting an increased acceptance of women wielding political power.

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Anne Rice, a master of neo-Gothic storytelling, turned to ancient Egypt in The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (1991), the story of a mummy’s curse that harkens back to nineteenth-century narratives. Rice is best known for her highly successful Vampire Chronicles (1976–2003), a novel series that resurrects the figure of the vampire and adds a dash of Egyptian spice. Queen of the Damned (published in 1988, filmed in 2002), considered to be the apex of the series, places the origin of these haunted, contaminating, sexually ambiguous monsters in ancient Egypt. The plot concerns the awakening of an Egyptian queen named Akasha, the mother of all vampires and an echo of Rider Haggard’s Ayesha. Akasha is a bad mother who seeks to become the parent of a new world order ruled by women. Her rise is watched closely by a society of paranormal researchers, and her demise involves a Medusa-like decapitation. Rice’s novels seem to transgress traditional boundaries, but they carry strong conservative undercurrents, demonstrating the tension between new freedoms and old paradigms. In 2005, following a conversion to Catholicism, Rice announced that she would write no more horror fiction and would only publish religiously themed work. Her first such book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005), places Jesus in Egypt during his early childhood and traces the discovery of his divine nature and the departure of his family for Israel. In Christ the Lord, Egypt is no longer the birthplace of monsters but of the Christian religion—the imaginary place that Rice must leave behind as she begins her new religious life. Rice may wish to banish haunting Egyptian memories, but it is likely that the fans of her horror fiction will keep them alive. Art Deco movie palaces of the 1920s and ‘30s fashioned after Egyptian temples show the enduring influence of Egypt as spectacle. Movie producers have mined Egyptian gold for the silver screen in forms as various as the guises of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. These include biblical history (The Ten Commandments, 1956, and Prince of Egypt, 1998), seduction (Cleopatra, 1963), horror (The Mummy, 1932 and 1999–2007), romantic nostalgia (The English Patient, 1996), intrigue (The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977, and Death on the Nile, 1978), fantasy/adventure (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981), and science fiction (Stargate, 1994). In 1963, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s version of Cleopatra turned into a titanic of a movie that nearly sank Twentieth Century Fox. A box office disappointment, it ended the era of the “sword-and-sandal” epic until the recent resurrections of Gladiator (2000) and Troy (2004). Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra as a power-hungry, domineering femme fatale, her broad expanses of creamy white skin captivating audiences even as the plot meanders hopelessly. This Cleopatra did nothing to challenge dominant

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cultural memories of the queen but made movie history as one of the most costly films ever produced. In fall, 2007, at the time of this writing, fashion reporters rave about the “new” Egyptian eye spotted on New York runways, a style that ancient Roman fashion leaders would have appreciated. Meanwhile, stories circulate of an upcoming, big-budget epic about Nefertiti, the powerful and beautiful wife of Akhenaten. The film is slated to star the Oscar-winning African American actress Halle Berry, who has been working to realize the film with director Marc Foster. Her power in Hollywood coupled with a shift in racial perceptions of ancient Egypt suggest that Nefertiti will be the female Egyptian icon of the new millennium, along with the increasingly popular Hatshepsut. British producer John Heyman is also planning an epic about Nefertiti, inspired by controversial best-seller Moses and Akhenaten (1990), written by Egyptian journalist Ahmed Osman. The tagline sums up Osman’s hypothesis, which promises to stir provocative counter-memories: “A love affair between Nefertiti and Moses.” The closeness of Egypt to Hebrew history is increasingly something to celebrate, rather than to hide. Television producers have made pop culture history through ancient Egypt. From 1975 through 1977, Saturday morning brought American children images of the great goddess of Egypt chasing criminals in a white miniskirt. Filmation’s The Secrets of Isis was the first weekly American liveaction television series starring a female superhero. A science teacher named Andrea Thomas discovers an amulent of Hatshepsut on an archaeological dig and inherits the powers of Isis. By calling out “O Mighty Isis!” she is transformed into the goddess, using magic spells to fly and move objects. Several episodes carried messages of egalitarianism, reminding children that girls are just as good as boys and gently mocking male characters who doubt Andrea/Isis’s abilities. Twenty years later, a digital love affair with Egypt began in the form of a female character that merged the brainy superhero Isis with the swashbuckling Indiana Jones. The Tomb Raider video game, published by Eidos Interactive in 1996, follows the adventures of Lara Croft, a British archaeologist who hunts for treasures in various exotic locales, including the ruins of Egypt. In 2006, Lara Croft was awarded a Guinness World Record that recognized her as the most successful human video game heroine in history. The first cyber celebrity, the curvaceous Lara has been denounced as a Generation X pinup girl. She has also been hailed as a postfeminist icon with whom male and female game players actively identify. Her lack of romantic involvement leaves the question of her sexuality open, while her forceful character suggests that sex appeal and strength can coexist. Lara is the heroic offspring of technology—part dominatrix, part cyborg, part

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comic book character. She is popular in the homes of adolescent boys and also in lesbian nightclubs. In the realm of video games, Laura is an avatar who dissolves the boundary between character and player. Both male and female players fight with her hands and see through her eyes. She is a transgressor to cheer for, a female who dares to seek forbidden places. The Tomb Raider game spawned many sequels and a movie series starring the sultry and openly bisexual actress Angelina Jolie. As Lara Croft, Jolie battles monsters with an attitude that rivals James Bond for its cool panache. Sporting oversized breasts, Jolie’s Lara is a sword-fighting, bungee-jumping, pistol-packing savant who battles chromium robots in the simulated Egyptian ruins below her mansion. The first film, Paramount’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), shows Lara finding half of a mysterious triangular artifact decorated with the eye of Horus, which gives its owner power over time. Those who hold the other half of the triangle are the Illuminati, an eighteenth-century society linked to Rosicrucians and Freemasons presented in the movie as an evil brotherhood pursuing world supremacy. In a plot that reverses many of the elements of Rider Haggard’s She, Lara finds a letter from her deceased father that calls upon her to seek the missing half of the relic in an ancient city in the bowels of the earth. Most critics disliked the thin plot, but many preferred the film overall to Universal’s summer blockbuster, The Mummy Returns, an old-fashioned mummy story updated with CGI effects. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider became the first profitable computer game turned motion picture and boasted the largest opening ever for a movie headlined by a woman. Lara became an icon, Jolie a star. Travelers still flock to Egypt in droves. Greeting the Sphinx is a feather in the cap of the modern globetrotter. Well-organized tourism allows visitors to experience ancient Egypt in a sound-and-light show at the pyramids, a Pharaonic theme park, and a visit to an ancient oasis where inhabitants are said to possess the secrets of the universe. The ancient ruins that fascinated nineteenth-century travelers—the Valley of Kings, the Karnak temple complex, and Abu Simbel—offer the convenience of multilingual guides and historical lectures. Belly dancing and bazaars are still in plentiful supply, along with new amusements, such as playing golf in the shadow of the pyramids. Tourists can reach southern Egypt by plane, but a Nile cruise is still the top choice for those wishing to explore ruins. Nile cruisers, the offspring of Victorian dahabiyahs, offer swimming pools, nightclubs, in-room hot tubs, and Internet access. Those seeking a more traditional experience can choose to sail in a felucca (small sailboat) or even on a restored dahabiyah, a floating tribute to nineteenth-century adventurers.

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Unfortunately, all has not been well with Egyptian tourism. In 1997, Islamic terrorists massacred sixty-two tourists trapped inside the spectacular mortuary temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri, shocking the world and discouraging travelers. Tourism slowed even further in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2001. Westerners, Americans especially, have come to regard contemporary Egypt with fear and suspicion heightened by the image of Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian terrorist believed to have crashed the first airplane into the World Trade Center. In Egypt, citizens grow increasingly unsettled by American foreign policy and become more hostile toward the United States. Ancient ills that have been passed on for thousands of years flare up with renewed potency in fantasies of global Jewish conspiracies and crusades against “evildoers” in the East. Acid rain threatens the Sphinx, and poisonous intolerance threatens the future of humanity. Strong medicine is needed. In the twenty-first century, mummies are medicine again, but this time, to much better effect. Egyptologist Rosalie David leads the Manchester Museum Mummy Project, working with a team made up of archaeologists, scientists, and doctors to study the secrets of ancient human remains. It was Victorian Egyptology that made this current research possible. The Manchester Egyptian collection began in the 1890s with objects from the excavations of William M. Flinders Petrie. In 1908, the pioneering anthropologist Margaret Murray began to oversee the scientific investigation of two mummies, moving the studies of ancient remains away from theatrical unrollings. Mummy DNA reveals information about diseases and offers hope for cures. It also exposes the genetic relationships between ancient populations and the development of genetic material through time. Evolutionary biology has taught that individual inheritance is encoded in bodies as much as culture, embedded in the elegant strands of DNA that carry the genes of ancestral fathers and mothers through time. In the blueprint of nature, male and female elements are in unison, complementary. Cultural notions of inheritance are gradually shifting to reflect natural egalitarianism. Western women often choose to retain their surnames after marriage, and fathers have begun to take on a role that appears to be “postoedipal.” They are no longer destined to act as forbidding figures of authority but are accepted as sources of nurturing and warmth. The rigid definitions of the past have been challenged and transformed. Quantum physics has led science into the mystical realm of atomic particles, where Newtonian logic collapses, and uncertainty rules. In postmodern philosophy and literary criticism, proponents of Derridean deconstruction have spread the notion that meaning is in flux. From this perspective, habitual ways of categorizing the world become illusory. Whatever is

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present carries traces of what is absent, and the past lives in the future. In such a world, the multilayered history and polytheism of ancient Egypt is appealing, becoming a metaphor for all that is mutable and dispersed. The ancient gods and goddesses offer models of transformation and creativity. Egyptian heritage belongs to all humanity, offering wisdom and inspiration that can brighten the future. The Sphinx has much to say, if human beings will only listen.

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Index

Abraham, Nicolas, 6, 65, 89 Ackermann, Rudolf, 25 Ahitei, Stefan, 56 Aida (opera), 38 Akhenaten, King, 42, 75, 175 Freud on, 58–60, 149, 165, 173 history of, 58–60 memory erasure of, 54 Albert, Prince, 32 Alexander I, Czar, 20 Ali, Muhammad, 21, 28, 32, 38, 48, 77, 132 Allen, Anne Taylor, 104 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 39 al-Tahtawi, Rifaa, 48 Altick, Richard, 11, 27 Amenhotep II, King, 62, 75 Amyot, Jacques, 11 Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 167 Anzieu, Didier, 151–53 Apollo, 3, 69–70, 134 Apuleius, 5 Arthurian legend, 71 Asante, Molefi Kete, 49 Assmann, Jan, 47, 50, 54, 57–58, 60 Atta, Mohammed, 177 Augustine, Saint, 8 Augustus, Emperor, 5 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 104, 108, 167 Bacon, Francis, 29, 159 Bacon, Roger, 9 Bankes, William John, 25 Banks-Smith, Nancy, 56 Bara, Theda, 43 Barnes, Julian, 134

Barrow, R. H., 4 Basham, Diana, 103 Bastian, Adolf, 104 Battle of the Nile, 18 Battle of Trafalgar, 25 Battle of Waterloo, 20 Battlestar Galactica (television series), 172 Beardsley, Aubrey, 110 Beckford, William, 15–16 Beer, Julius, 35 Belzoni, Giovanni Battista, 28–31, 72–73, 75–82, 126, 131 Benjamin, Walter, 69, 72 ben-Jochannan, Yosef A. A., 49 Bernal, Martin, 48–50, 58 Bernhardt, Sarah, 40, 121 Berry, Halle, 175 Beunat, Joseph, 19 Bhabha, Homi K., 46 Blake, William, 14 Blavatsky, Helena, 98–103, 109, 110, 111, 127, 148, 160–61 Blitzer, Wolf, 171 Bloom, Sol, 40–42 Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon I, Emperor Bonomi, Joseph, 27 Bourienne, F. de, 17 Boyle, Sir Robert, 29 Bradbury, Kate, 145 Braude, Anne, 160 Brill, A. A., 153–54 British Museum, 18, 27–28, 30–31, 69–75, 111–12, 144, 171 Brown, Dan, 99

192

INDEX

Brown, Frederick, 128 Browne, Sir Thomas, 29 Bruno, Giordano, 9 Budge, Sir E. Wallis, 112 Bullock, William, 25–26 Bullock’s Museum, 25–26 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George Earl, 92–95, 99–103, 107–109, 116, 143 Bunstone, James, 34–35 Burton, James, 124 Busby, C. A., 26 Byron, Lord, 15, 28 Caird, Mona, 104 Camus, Albert, 66, 128 Carlton, Donna, 41–42 Carrington, Hereward, 159–60 Carter, Howard, 43, 52, 55, 172 Casaubon, Isaac, 10 Catherwood, Frederick, 27 Champollion, Jean-François, 28, 33–34, 51–52, 66 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 158 Chaucer, 11 Cheops, King, 1, 80–85, 172 Chesebrough, Robert, 35 Chicago Exposition of 1893, 40–43, 132 Chicago, Judy, 51–52 Chippendale, Thomas, 25 Christianity ascetic, 88 Edwards on, 142 Egypt and early, 7–10 masculine, 86 preoedipal mother in, 168 in She, 108 theosophy and, 102–3 Christie, Agatha, 55, 173 Clark, John Henrik, 49 Cleopatra actresses portraying, 39, 121 advertising and, 37 beauty of, 37 Elizabeth Taylor as, 174–75

fascination with, 11 Flaubert and, 130, 133–34 Gautier’s, 130–31 images of, 39–40, 42, 56, 142 Little Egypt and, 40–43 Mankiewicz and, 174 Plutarch and, 4–5, 42 Shakespeare’s, 11–12, 42, 123, 174 Shaw’s, 112 Cleopatra’s Needles, 21, 118 Colet, Louise, 128, 134 Comstock, Anthony, 41 Conkey, Margaret W., 53 Cook, Florence, 97, 160 Cook, John Mason, 125, 173 Cook, Thomas, 125–26, 139 Cooke, Neil, 124 Copernicus, 9 Corelli, Marie, 109–11 Craddock, Ida, 41 cultural memory disruptions of, 74, 84, 88, 108–9 Egypt and, 26, 57–58, 70, 147, 157 evolution of, 45 feminine power and, 45, 163 historical facts and, 58, 61 language and, 107 oedipal struggle and, 64–65, 163, 168 reinterpretations of, 63, 114 shaping effects of, 45 theory of, 57–58 Curtis, George William, 132 Dabashi, Hamid, 46 Dalton, Richard, 11 Daly, Nicholas, 26 Dannenfeldt, Karl H., 29 Darwin, Charles, 14, 158, 166 Darwin, Erasmus, 14, 158 Darwinism, 92 David, Rosalie, 177 Dawson, Warren R., 31 Decker, Hannah S., 161

INDEX

Denon, Baron Dominique Vivant, 19–20, 22, 26, 39 Derrida, Jacques, 46 Descartes, René, 9–10 Description de L’Egypte, 18–20, 33, 39 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 165 Donley, Jeffrey, 63 Dorman, Peter, 53 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 84 Du Camp, Maxime, 127–33 Duff-Gordon, Lucie, 124 Durrell, Lawrence, 173 Ebers, Georg, 127 Edison, Thomas, 42 Edwards, Amelia, 67, 135–45 Egypt Biblical, 5–7 in cultural memory, 26, 57–58, 70, 147, 157 and the early church, 7–8 excesses of, 1 feminization of, 45, 61–63, 151 and imperial expansion, 10–11 in pre-Napoleonic literature, 11–16 Secret, 9–10 as stranger, 1, 6–7, 43, 172 tourism in, 32, 99, 123–24, 176–77 women of, 2 Egypt, travelers to Apuleius, 5 Benzoni, 28 Blavatsky, 98–99 Catherwood, 27 Cook, 125–26 Curtis, 132 Dalton, 11 Denon, 19, 22, 26 Edwards, 135–40 Firth, 125 Flaubert, 42, 127–31 Herodotus, 1–2 Lane, 124 Maeterlinck, 157–58 Paracelsus, 9

193

Plutarch, 3–4 Sanderson, 29 Sandys, 10 Wilkinson, 125 See also travel and estrangement; travelogues Egyptian Avenue (Highgate Cemetery), 34–35 Egyptian Campaigns, Napoleon’s, 20, 21, 39, 117 Egyptian earth (color), 22 Egyptian Service (dessert, coffee, and tea service), 20 Egyptian Society, 11, 165 Egyptocentrism, 49 Egyptomania European collectors and, 26–28 “Little Egypt” and, 40–42 mummies and, 29–32 Napoleonic, 17–22, 24, 26–29, 39 in Regency England, 22–26 Suez Canal and, 37–40 Victorian, 32–37 El-Aref, Nevine, 57 Electra complex, 163–64 Emery, Edward, 111 Empire style, 19–22 Eurocentrism, 45–46, 49–50 Fagan, Brian M., 18, 52 Faraday, Michael, 91 Farr, Florence, 109–14 Felt, George H., 102 Fenichel, Otto, 63, 83 Ferenczi, Sandor, 159, 165 Ficino, Marsilio, 9 Firth, Francis, 125 Flaubert, Gustave, 42, 67, 127–36, 139, 143 Fleiss, Wilhelm, 151 Flinders Petrie, William Matthew, 91, 127, 145, 149, 177 Fontaine, Pierre-François-Léonard, 19 Foster, Marc, 175 Foucault, Michel, 46–48

194

INDEX

France, Peter, 52 Franklin, Benjamin, 10 Frazer, James, 167 Freemasonry, 10, 13, 23, 34, 36, 98, 101, 176 Freud, Amalia, 166 Freud, Anna, 166 Freud, Jane McAdam, 169 Freud, Sigmund on Akhenaten, 58–60, 149, 165, 173 analytic process and, 161–64 archeology and, 148–51 Ayesha and, 104 on dreams, 151–56 and Egyptian bird dream, 152–56 on homesickness, 129 on Isis, 153–56, 163, 167 Louise N. and, 154–55, 164 on Medusa, 64 on Moses, 58–60, 165–69 on the uncanny, 66, 80, 133 See also oedipal complex Freund, Karl, 84 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 163 Fuseli, Henry, 14 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 50 Gautier, Theophile, 26–27, 130–31, 143 Gay, Peter, 148–49, 165–66 Geary, Stephen, 34 George, Margaret, 173 George III, King, 19 ghawazi dancers, 42, 132 Gibson, Charles Dana, 42 Gilchrest, Roberta, 53 Glyn, Isabella, 39 Goddess Movement, 53, 61 Golden Dawn. See Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Goldsmith, Barbara, 96 Gonne, Maud, 111 grave robbing, 18 Great Exhibition of 1851, 32–33, 127 Great Sphinx of Giza, 22, 35, 147

Greer, Mary K., 112 Guest, Stephen, 163 Hadrian, Emperor, 5 Hagar, 6, 12 Haggard, H. Rider, 103–9, 130, 151, 154–56, 168, 174, 176 Halbwachs, Maurice, 57 Hamer, Mary, 21 Hammerstein, Oscar, 42 Hanem, Kuchuk, 131–35 Harbin, Michael, 63 Hatshepsut, Queen, 51–57, 62–63, 84, 144–45, 175, 177 Haviland, John, 34–35 Hawass, Zahi, 47, 53, 55–57 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 149, 151, 157, 163–64 Hekekyan, Joseph, 48 Hermes Trismegistus, 7–10, 66, 93 Hermeticism, 9–10, 66, 110–12 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 92, 105, 110–12, 114 Herodotus on Egypt, 1–4, 172 influence of, 10, 13, 43, 81, 106, 123, 127, 129, 140, 164 Heyman, John, 175 hieroglyphics, 8, 9, 14, 33, 65–66 Hoare, Sir Richard Colt, 25 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 133 Home, Daniel Douglas, 98 Homer, 10, 47, 123, 133 Hope, Thomas, 22–24 Horniman, Annie, 111 Hornung, Eric, 7 Houdini, Harry, 173 Howe, Elias, Jr., 35 Hughes-Hallett, Lucy, 11, 130–31 Hunt, Leigh, 91 Hyperion, 70 inner exile, 66–67 Innerst, Carol, 50

INDEX

Isis Apuleius and, 5 associated with navigation, 21 Blavatsky on, 98–103, 108, 148 Bulwer-Lytton and, 92–94 Cleopatra and, 12 cult of, 7–9, 21, 86, 88, 92 Darwin and, 14 descendents of, 5, 34, 167 dream interpretation and, 148, 153–56 Edwards and, 139, 142 Flaubert and, 129–30 Freud and, 153–56, 163, 167 H. D. and, 151, 157, 163–64 Herodotus and, 2 inscription to at Sais, 85–86 Masonic lore and, 36 mythology of, 135, 139, 142, 154 Napoleon and, 21 Plutarch and, 4–5 Poe and, 87, 88 Secrets of Isis (television program) and, 175 Shakespeare and, 12 in silverware patterns, 37 Spencer and, 9 in statues and figures, 10, 19, 23, 36–37, 62, 94, 148 Terrasson and, 13 Tomb Raider (video game) and, 175 as universal goddess, 7 veil of, 85, 98, 163 worship of women and, 62, 64, 66 Islam, 10, 15, 25, 42, 46–48, 103, 129, 172, 177 Israel, 5–6, 8, 12, 14, 47, 49, 61, 72, 174 James, William, 160 Jefferson, Thomas, 10, 21 Jeffries, Leonard, 49 Jerome, Saint, 8, 71 jewelry, 22, 33, 36–37, 38, 126 Johnson, Samuel, 29 Jolie, Angelina, 176

195

Jones, Ernest, 159–60 Jones, Owen, 33 Josephine, Empress, 20, 22 Jung, Carl, 57–58, 163, 166 Karloff, Boris, 84 Keats, John, 69–70 Kendrick, Walter, 93 Kingsford, Anna, 111 Kircher, Athanasius, 9 Kramer, Hilton, 51 Kristeva, Julie, 65–66, 128, 131 Kuspit, Donald, 149–50 Lane, E. W., 124, 132, 141 Langtry, Lily, 40 Lanza, Clara, 39 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (movie), 176 Latrobe, Benjamin, 26 Lee, Mary Custis, 32 Lee, Robert E., 32 Lefkowitz, Mary, 50 Leibniz, Gottfried, 10 Lespius, Karl Richard, 52, 107 Lewis, Bernard, 46 Lewis, John Frederick, 46 Liljegren, S. B., 99–101 Little Egypt, 40–43 Lorenzi, Rosella, 57 Loudon, Jane, 80–85, 92–93, 107, 112 Louis XVIII, King, 20, 21 Lovecraft, H. P., 173 Löwy, Emanuel, 149 Luxor Obelisk, 32 Maat, 54 Machen, Arthur, 111 MacKenzie, John, 46 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 157–58 Magic Flute (opera), 13, 39 Magnificent Seven (cemeteries), 34–35 Mahoney, Patrick, 157–58 Maine, Sir Henry, 104 Maitland, Edward, 111 Manetho, 51, 54, 61, 62

196

INDEX

Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 174–75 Mann, Thomas, 173 Mariette, Auguste, 33, 38, 52 Marvin, Frederic, 160 Massey, Charles C., 101 Mathers, Moina, 111 matriarchal age, 104 Mazrui, Ali, 50 Mead, G. R. S., 99 mediums, spiritual, 91, 92, 96–98, 101, 102, 109, 156–58, 160–61 Medusa, 14, 64, 73–74, 83, 94 Melville, Herman, 34 Mensa Isiaca (relic), 9 Merlin, 71–72, 84, 94 Mesmer, F. A., 91, 158 Milton, John, 70 Mitchell, Timothy, 47–48 Montserrat, Dominique, 53, 60–61 “Monuments of Egypt” pattern, 20 Moore, Thomas, 86–87 More, Sir Thomas, 9 Morse, Samuel F. B., 91 Mosaic distinction, 60–61, 65, 89 Moses (biblical), 9, 43, 47–48, 58–61, 63, 72, 74, 78, 165–68 Moses, William Jeremiah, 49 Mostyn, Trevor, 48 Mozart, 13, 39 Mulvey, Laura, 64 mummies as currency, 29–30 curse of, 75 dissection of, 30–31 eating of, 29 fascination with, 15, 22–25, 29–33, 65, 169 fiction about, 26–27, 30, 32, 80–86, 89–90, 92, 93, 108, 112, 141, 148, 174 medicine and, 29, 177 movies about, 84, 174, 176 unrollings of, 30–31, 89 mummy of Hatshepsut, 55–57 mummy of Ramses II, 75

Mummy Returns, The (movie), 176 Muschamp, Herbert, 171 Myers, F. W., 160, 161 Napoleon I, Emperor, 17–22, 24, 26–29, 39, 43, 117 Napoleon III, Emperor, 32–33 Nash, John, 25 Naville, Henri Edouard, 52 Nefertiti, Queen, 43, 54, 175 Nelson, Lord Horatio, 18, 22, 25, 27 Newton, Sir Isaac, 10, 91 Nicholls, Dale Reeves, 37 Nightingale, Florence, 47 Nitocris, Queen, 1 Noble, Charles, 25 Norden, Frederik Ludvig, 11 North, Sir Thomas, 5, 11 Nostradamus, 9 Novalis. See von Hardenberg, Baron Georg Philipp Friedrich (Novalis) Obee, Hannah, 25 obelisks, 5, 20–21, 32, 33, 35–37, 54, 70, 118, 143–44, 171–72 Oberkampf, Christophe-Phillipe, 19–20 Occult Mother, 103–4 Octavia, 5, 12 oedipal complex Akhenaten and, 60 analytic consulting room and, 162 Egyptian bird dream and, 152–53 female development and, 163 Freud’s maternal relationship and, 166 H. D. and, 163–64 Jung and, 163, 166 Loudon and, 82–83 Medusa and, 64 phases of, 150–51 preoedipal mother and, 150–51, 153, 162, 166–68 postoedipal role of fathers and, 177 as primal, 167 questioning of, 163–64

INDEX

Oedipus, 2, 64–65, 116, 152, 153, 155 Orientalism, 45–47, 142 Osman, Ahmed, 175 Ovason, David, 36 Ovid, 116 Owen, Alex, 96–97 Owen, Robert, 136 Papworth, J. B., 26 Paracelsus, 9 Pasha, Ismail, 38, 48 Patmore, Coventry, 97 Peiss, Kathy, 42 Percier, Charles, 19 Pericles, 2 Peters, Elizabeth, 144 Petrie, William, 91. See also son Flinders Petrie, William Matthew Pettigrew, Thomas Joseph, 31 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 22 Plato, 3, 8–9 Plutarch, 3–5, 8, 11, 42 Pococke, Richard, 11 Poe, Edgar Allan, 21, 86–90, 148, 168 Potter, Cora Urquhart, 39 Pound, Ezra, 110 preservation repression, 6–7, 107–9, 168 Presley, Elvis, 43 Pringle, Heather, 29–30 psychology, 156–58. See also Freud, Sigmund; oedipal complex Quaritch, Bernard, 102 Ramses II, King, 21, 26, 28–30, 33, 62, 72–75, 141, 148 Rauch, Alan, 84 Rees, Joan, 136–37 Regency Egyptian Revival style, 19, 22–25 Regier, Willis Goth, 116 Reid, Donald Malcolm, 48 Renshawe, Lucy, 136–40, 142–43 Rice, Anne, 174

197

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 173 Robertson, D. W., Jr., 8 Robertson, Pat, 51 Robins, Gay, 53 Robison, Peter Frederick, 26 Rollin, Charles, 78 Romer, Elizabeth, 52 Romer, John, 52 Rosenfeld, Eva, 151–53 Rosetta Stone, 27–28, 47, 105 Rosicrucians, 9–10, 101, 111–12, 172, 176 Ryan, Donald P., 55 Sackler, Elizabeth, 51 Said, Edward W., 45–47 Salt, Henry, 28 Sand, George, 136 Sanderson, John, 29 Sandys, George, 10 savants, Napoleon’s, 18 scarabs, 26, 36, 40, 43 Schmid, Julius, 75 Schrenck Notzing, Baron von, 160 scopophilia, 63, 84 Scott, Giles Gilbert, 23 Scott, Jill, 163–64 Scott, Sir Walter, 28 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of, 177 Shakespear, Olivia, 112 Shakespeare, William, 5, 11–12, 29, 42, 123, 127, 159, 174 Shaw, George Bernard, 75–76, 111–12 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 28, 73–75, 83 Sheraton, Thomas, 25 silverware, 37 Sloane, Sir Hans, 27 Smirke, Sir Robert, 23 Smith, George, 24 Smith, Horace, 28 Smith, Joseph, 34 Smith, William Robertson, 166 Soane, Sir John, 23 Sophocles, 2–3

198

INDEX

Southey, Robert, 22 Spencer, Edmund, 9 sphinx, figure of the decorations and, 4, 11, 19–22, 24–25, 32–33, 38, 43, 105, 117, 131, 155, 172 female form of, 116, 153 Freud and, 153, 158 in literature, 38, 40, 87, 93, 95, 105, 115–16, 138–39, 144 as symbol, 79 Sphinx, Greek, 4, 64, 99, 147, 152–53, 155–56, 166 Sphinx of Giza, Great, 22, 27, 35, 38, 108, 109, 176–78 spiritualism, 85–86, 95–102, 105, 111, 158, 160–61 Spivak, Gayatri, 46 Sprengthnether, Madelon, 150–51 Stanhope, Lady Hester, 124, 138 Stargate (movie), 172 St. Armand, Barton, 87–88 Steegmuller, Francis, 42, 128–29 Stoker, Bram, 84 stranger, the Edwards on, 140–41, 143 Egypt as, 1, 6–7, 43, 172 exclusion of the feminine, 108 goddess as, 71 Kristeva on, 66–67, 128, 131 travel and, 66–72, 123 Suez Canal, 36–37, 145 Sylvanus, Urban, 69 Terrasson, Jean, 13, 86 Theodosius, Emperor, 7 Theosophical Society, 98, 99, 101–3, 111, 114, 161 Thornton, James, 41 Thutmose I, King, 53 Thutmose II, King, 53 Thutmose III, King, 52–54, 62 Tomb Raider (video game), 175–76 Torok, Maria, 6–7, 65, 89 Townley, Charles, 70–71 travel and estrangement, 66–67. See also Egypt, travelers to

travelogues, 10, 126, 135–44 Tringham, Ruth E., 53 Tutankhamun, King, 43, 56, 59, 171, 172 Twain, Mark, 41, 116, 126 Tyldesley, Joyce, 53–54, 57 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 104 uncanny, concept of the, 66–67, 80, 131, 133, 155, 159, 168 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 37 Verdi, Giuseppe, 38 Vermeule, Emily, 50 Victoria, Queen, 32, 110 Victoria and Albert Museum, 23–24 von Däniken, Erich, 171 von Hardenberg, Baron Georg Philipp Friedrich (Novalis), 13–14 Von Kalnein, Wend, 20 von Reichenbach, Baron Carl, 91–92 Vulliamy, Benjamin Lewis, 24 Walpole, Horace, 14–15 Washington, George, 10, 36 Waterhouse, John William, 39 Waterson, Barbara, 53 Wedgwood china, 24 Wilde, Oscar, 38, 40, 47, 86, 110 Wilford, John Noble, 56 Wilkinson, Sir John Gardner, 125 Wilson, Lucy Sarah (Atkins), 76–80, 82 Wilson, Williams James Erasmus, 37 Winlock, Herbert E., 52 Wodehouse, P. G., 43 Wolfe, Gary K., 107 Wordsworth, William, 70–71, 94 Wortham, John David, 5 Yeats, William Butler, 110–16, 144 Young, Edward, 12–13, 78 Young, Shannon, 156 Young, Thomas, 28 Zeus, 2, 4, 168

Author Biography

Lynn Parramore received her PhD from New York University in 2007, where she has taught essay writing and cultural theory. She is a freelance writer and researcher whose work encompasses film, television, periodicals, and online publications. An avid world traveler, she has taught English in the Czech Republic and is founding editor of IgoUgo.com, an award-winning travel Web site and community.