Initiatic Death and Katabasis
Harmachis is overwhelmed by this experience. He dies and experiences the autoscopy of his dead self: «A change – life came back to me, but between the new life and the life that had been was a gulf and difference <…> I stood; and yet it was not I who stood, but rather my spiritual part, for at my feet lay my dead Self. There it lay, rigid and still, a stamp of awful calm sealed upon its face, while I gazed on it» [Haggard 1894: 63].
Haggard’s notion is coloured here by his experience of post-mortem spirit manifestation, derived from his experience of the séance room as a young man. In fact, in his autobiography «The Days of My Life» (1926) he describes an occasion when he kicked the shins and threw rosebuds at a poor unsuspecting medium under the cover of the darkened room [Haggard 2006: 20–23].
To return to the narrative, Harmachis’ initiatic death is followed immediately by the katabasis of his spiritual self, a descent to Amenti, the «Land beyond the Setting Sun›› and the Halls of Isis herself, where the manifestation of the goddess is imminent. Here he sees winged angelic forms, with a countenance of fire. Although these derive from Christian rather than Egyptian theology, they certainly resemble the angels experienced by the scientist and mystical visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) during one of his visionary quests to Heaven[31]. Haggard had read Swedenborg as he indicates through the voice of one of his other more famous characters, Allan Quatermain, in the novel «She and Allan» (1921), and he again suggests a character in «Love Eternal» (1918a) had a tendency towards «mysticism of the Swedenborgian type»[32].
Anacalypsis, Gnosis and Palingenesis
Harmachis now finds himself in the presence of the unseen Isis. He enters into a dialogue with the goddess who tells him that she is the form of a living Nature, the anima mundi, of which he is a part, and he experiences the ultimate anacalypsis and mystical gnosis: «I am in thee and thou art in Me, O Harmachis <…> For we are bound together by the common bond of life – that life which flows through suns and stars and spaces, through Spirits and souls of men, welding all Nature to a whole that, changing ever, is yet eternally the same» <…> A Voice called aloud the awful Word, then the vapours burst and melted, and with my eyes I saw the Glory, at the very thought of which my spirit faints.<…> I sank down before the Glory.<…> There was a sound as the sound of Worlds rushing down the flood of Time – and I knew no more!» [Haggard 1894: 66–69].
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Harmachis then awakes on the floor of the temple, completing his palingenesis: «Once again I awoke – to find myself stretched at length upon the stone flooring of the Holy Place of Isis. By me stood the old Priest of the Mysteries, and in his hand was a lamp. He bent over me, and gazed earnestly upon my face. “It is day – the day of thy new birth, and thou hast lived to see it, Harmachis!”» [Ibid.: 70].
Reading some of the above passages one could quite seriously ask as an aside whether Rider Haggard was himself a mystic. Certainly his daughter Lilias thought so, and in her biography of her father «The Cloak that I Left» published in 1951 she described him as having a «strong leaning toward the mystical» – though this was apparently allied to «a sturdy common sense» [Haggard 1951: 31]. Haggard’s autobiography is peppered with references to precognitive dreams, and as mentioned above, he participated in séances as a young man and was an habitué of the esoteric circle of Lady Caithness, Duchesse de Medina Pomar (1830–1895), the great friend of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky [Coates 2003: 38–39]. At the end of his autobiography he appended an apologia for his Anglican faith, but with a profound interest in the possibilities of reincarnation, and the emergent psychical research, he was anything other than orthodox.
In summary and to conclude: in this all too brief synopsis of a rather extended passage in Haggard, it is clear that he engages the reader in a series of experiences which are representative of a hierarchy of knowledge through which the priest Harmachis progresses during the course of his telestic experience. There is a typology of mystical experience, but one should always bear in mind that one is, after all, dealing with a work of fiction. It is also clear that Haggard does not give us much in the way of esoteric insight into what might have been speculated upon as the aporia of the «Mysteries of Isis». As modern Egyptological research demonstrates, many of such «Mysteries» of Isis and Osiris were in any case public festivals rather than private initiations[33]. What these passages do present to us is Rider Haggard’s continuation of the Romantic Tradition and its preoccupation with the «Unveiling of Isis», an Isidism representative of the revelation of the hidden secrets of Nature[34]. In another of his romances with Egyptian elements, the famous «She» (1887), the ancient city of Kôr contains a temple with a veiled Statue of Truth. [Haggard 1887: 265].This is an explicit reference to a poem of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Schiller «Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais» («The Veiled Statue at Sais») written in 1795. As the novelist and author Edward Bulwer-Lytton was acknowledged by Haggard as a personal favourite, it is his translation of Schiller’s poem that is the most likely source1. In addition to this overt romantische Idealismus, the contents of the visions of Harmachis clearly provide evidence for Haggard’s absorption of the ideas prevalent in the occult milieu of the period. There is the characteristic interplay between Victorian Egyptology and Egyptosophical speculation – the Judaeo-Christianising elements common to Victorian Egyptology, but also particularly dominant in the work of Haggard’s friend and colleague Wallis Budge. Elements of Theosophy and Spiritualism counterpoised with Darwinian evolutionary theory, provide further evidence that Haggard’s oeuvre is exemplary of the melange of ideas and fin de siècle hybridity2 which underpin and define the Victorian Occult sensibility.
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1 For Bulwer-Lytton’s translation of what he renders as «The Veiled Image at Sais», see [Bulwer-Lytton 1844: 50–52].
2 For an analysis of Theosophy as what he terms a «Late-Victorian hybrid religion», see [Jeffrey 2008].
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