The Dedalus Occult Reader: The Garden of Hermetic Dreams

THE EDITOR

Gary Lachman is the author of Turn Off Your Mind: the Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Aquarian Age, A Secret History of Consciousness, The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse, In Search of P.D.Ouspensky: The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjieff. As Gary Valentine he is the author of New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation with Blondie, Iggy Pop and Others 1974–1981, a memoir of his years as a musician in New York in the 1970s.

A founding member of the rock group Blondie, he wrote some of the band’s early hits. Before moving to London in 1996 and becoming a full time writer, Gary studied philosophy, taught English literature, was Science Writer for a major American university, and managed a metaphysical bookstore. He is a regular contributor to Fortean Times, and has written for TLS, Guardian, Independent on Sunday, Mojo, Bizarre, and other journals in the US and UK.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As is usual in the making of a book, many people helped in the preparation of this one. My thanks go to Peter Owen for the kind permission to use an extract from Norman Glass’ translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Journey to the Orient. I would also like to thank Penguin Books for their permission to use a selection from David McDuff’s translation of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. My special thanks go to Eric Lane, for having the foresight to realize that an anthology like this would be a worthy project, and for making available all of the Dedalus material. Mike Mitchell’s new translations of the Goethe and Hoffmann selections are invaluable, as is the attention David Bird gave to the cover design. Mark Pilkington was an indispensable aid in securing Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams. I would very much like to give a warm thanks to Christina, Allison and Marysia of Treadwell’s Bookshop and also to my fellow habitués of The Plough, for providing a warm resting place in an otherwise desolate intellectual landscape. The British Library, as always, was an incomparable resource. Lastly, I would once again like to thank my sons Joshua and Max for their perceptive insights into all aspects of the book.

CONTENTS

Title

The Editor

Acknowledgements

  1. Introduction Foraging in Atlantis

  2. Vathek by William Beckford

  3. The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte

  4. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki

  5. The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lilly by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  6. The Golden Flower Pot by E.T.A. Hoffmann

  7. Séraphita by Honoré de Balzac

  8. Journey to the Orient by Gérard de Nerval

  9. Zanoni by Edward-Bulwer Lytton

10. Occult Memories by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

11. Là-Bas by Joris-Karl Huysmans

12. The Fiery Angel by Valery Briusov

13. The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes by H.G. Wells

14. A Victim of Higher Space by Algernon Blackwood

15. The Hashish Man by Lord Dunsany

16. The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen

17. The Horla by Guy de Maupassant

18. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink

19. Petersburg by Andrei Bely

20. Satan Wants Me by Robert Irwin

Biographies

Bibliography

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Foraging in Atlantis

People have been interested in stories about the supernatural and the underworld, in spirits, witches, magicians and miracles ever since they first sat around the prehistoric camp fire and listened to late stone age poets tell their tales. Although in more recent times a dreary, generic ‘realism’ has dominated serious fiction, the hunger for other worlds, magical powers and strange landscapes remains in popular consciousness and accounts for the success of bestselling books like the Harry Potter series, and Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials novels, as well as for film blockbusters like The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. Human consciousness seems to be programmed with a fundamental dissatisfaction with the world as given, with the ‘facts’ of life. We are not content with the ‘triviality of everydayness’, as the philosopher Heidegger put it. Confronted with mute, brute reality, human beings feel an instinctive yearning for some kind of ‘beyond’, for something more, and early in our history, we discovered that the most effective means of achieving this was through language. In After Babel, George Steiner argues that it was through the discovery of falsehood, of language’s ability to speak ‘that which is not’, that human beings developed notions of the future, of freedom and creativity. As Nietzsche knew and argued, ‘untruth’ – by which he meant art – can be of greater value to life than ‘truth’. And what Nietzsche meant by ‘truth’ is what we mean by it: science.

While science, or, more accurately, scientism, increasingly dominates our twenty-first century world-view, accounting for more and more of our experience, demystifying everything from romantic attraction to consciousness itself, there remains in the human imagination a stubborn resistance to a complete, rational explanation of life, and a reluctance to fully abandon some form of belief in magic which, ultimately, means a belief in human freedom. Only in a world which remains at a fundamental level inexplicable – that is, living and creative – can magic exist. And it is only in such a world that we could be in any sense free. In a fully explained world what we understand by magic and freedom would be meaningless. A fully explained world would be, in essence, a dead world.

One form this resistance to complete explanation has taken is occultism. In the popular mind, ‘the occult’ has a very wide brief, including under its auspices a variety of unconventional and often bizarre beliefs and practices. Astral travel, channelling, reincarnation, UFOs, astrology, mind-reading and many other unusual pursuits all find a niche in the popular mind as somehow ‘occult’. For the majority these are more or less the property of cranks and crackpots, but for the sympathetic few, these and other beliefs are attractive because they elude the obsessive urge for explanation. Muddleheaded, hare-brained and naive as much popular occultism is, it is not solely a testament to weak minds and wishful thinking. Like the perennial appeal of romantic love (explained nowadays by chemical reactions), popular occultism is a raw, unsophisticated expression of a deep, universal need. Critics of occultism like Adorno, who find in it only evidence for a kind of spiritual capitalism and a mass exodus from rational thought, do not, I believe, see the whole picture. It’s true that the most recent form of popular occultism – the New Age – has a considerable cash turnover, producing unquestioned profits for many highly questionable prophets. But that a basic need is pandered to meretriciously is no fault of the need, nor is it an argument against it. The hunger for something more that dubious gurus exploit is a valid hunger; what is unfortunate is that many lack discrimination, and satisfy their spiritual appetite with the equivalent of junk food.

But just as physical hunger can be assuaged by fast food or haute cuisine, the hunger for something more than what immediate reality provides can be sated by daily horoscopes or by a more sophisticated offering. Along with the occultism of fortune-tellers and love potions, there is a more demanding form, a tradition of occult thought of which the popular variant is only a recent offshoot. This more sophisticated form of occultism is at bottom a literary tradition, a genre and a canon of works. Like the potential for transcendence inherent in language itself – it’s ability to speak ‘otherwise’ and ‘change’ reality – sophisticated occultism is about the power of words, the efficacy of language and writing. It is no mere metaphor when we speak of the ‘magic’ of poetry. The poet, the seer, the magician and the mystic are one. We speak of magic ‘spells’ and magic words. Witches’ grimoires are grammars. Speaking the correct word at the appropriate time determines the failure or success of ritual. To know the name of a demon is to have power over him. Kabbalah, on which nearly all of modern occultism is based, is fundamentally about the magical powers of letters. Magical texts are central: the Goetia, The Key of Solomon, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, The Book of the Dead, The Picatrix, the Corpus Hermeticum, and perhaps the most famous magical book of all, the fabled Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. ‘Thrice Greatest Hermes’, the legendary father of alchemy and magic, was himself the author of some 365 books and in the Egyptian pantheon, was related to Thoth, the Ibis-headed god of writing.

Writing, writers, books and readers: these are the basic ingredients of occultism. But a further refinement is necessary. For most of human history, the kind of practices and beliefs that we today call occult and which receive from most of us benign indifference or vehement rejection were, on the contrary, considered highly reputable pursuits. In Europe alone, until relatively recently, to practise astrology, alchemy, ceremonial magic or prophecy required the equivalent of a university degree; these were disciplines as difficult as mathematics, philosophy or theology. There were, of course, naive seers, men and women gifted with a talent for natural magic, healers with knowledge of the powers of herbs, roots or with visions and second sight. But the main body of occult lore demanded intellect and knowledge, scholarship, application and perseverance. To give some idea of the high regard the occult warranted, in 1460, the Renaissance patron Cosimo de’ Medici ordered his scribe Marsilio Ficino to break off translating Plato, in order to turn his attention to a newly discovered batch of occult manuscripts, allegedly the work of Hermes Trismegistus himself. The effect was that hermetic philosophy penetrated all aspects of the Renaissance. Two centuries later, Isaac Newton, whose name is synonymous with modern science and the Age of Reason, busied himself more with alchemy and the mystical symbolism of the Bible than he did with gravity, which, being invisible, was as much an occult – meaning ‘hidden’ – power as any other. Ironically, it was after Newton unveiled the clockwork universe, set in motion by a Deus Abscondus, that the occult lost its status. The laws of inertia required only a single push; after that the heavens rained angels, spirits, celestial powers, until today what is left is a vast but meaningless space, brought into existence by sheer chance, and tenanted by blind balls of rock or gas, on one of which reside the accidental arrangement of atoms we call the human race.

In a few hundred years, this development led to our current ‘explained’ universe, patiently awaiting its final ‘theory of everything’; it also made occultism what it is today. Paradoxically, prior to the Age of Reason, practitioners of occult disciplines were themselves very keen on having the universe explained. There was little room for human freedom in ancient conceptions of astrology. The stars determined our courses. Demons plagued our every step. The individual as we know him barely existed, and was little more than a cog in the cosmic wheel responsible for the rise and fall of dynasties and kingdoms. Although Humanism is generally considered an enemy of the occult and the irrational, it was only after the Renaissance that ideas of personal freedom and destiny became significant. It was precisely the emphasis on human strength, will and purpose as opposed to that of the gods, that led to the rise of the great magicians. Equally paradoxical, it was that emphasis on the human that forged the chains that now shackle the imagination. Freed from dogma and myth, the human mind recognised the truth: the universe was, as Newton saw, a machine, with ourselves only negligible parts of the mechanism.

Yet, for all its undoubted triumphs, the new scientific world-view didn’t win over everyone. A sensitive minority was troubled by its rise, and by the loss of meaning its growing success ensured. The dogma and authority of the church had been undercut, but the cost was high. Mankind was free, but, as was becoming increasingly clear, the universe itself was pointless.

It was at this point – the late eighteenth century – that occultism as we know it began. This is the theme of my earlier book, The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse (2003), of which this present volume can be considered the second part, and in which appear essays on all of the writers included here, as well as a selection of non-fiction occult literature. There was of course a tradition behind the occult renaissance of the late eighteenth century: the Rosicrucians, the alchemists, hermetic thinkers like Paracelsus. But the key fact for occultism as we know it, is that it is an alternative to scientific thought. The occult was abandoned by the architects of the Age of Reason, but it was not forgotten, and in the years that followed, it became a kind of reservoir of rejected knowledge, available to the artists, poets, writers, philosophers and musicians who were dissatisfied with the new, Newtonian dispensation. The writings and ideas of centuries past were brought together and made available in popular editions. To the Rosicrucian, hermetic, kabbalistic, Gnostic and alchemical traditions were added new ideas, like those of the Scandinavian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the Austrian healer Franz Mesmer. By the late eighteenth century, a body of knowledge that would influence subsequent generations had come together into a relatively coherent philosophy. The Dedalus Occult Reader brings together for the first time a representative collection of some of the works that resulted when some of the most important writers of the last two centuries drank from this source of hidden wisdom.

Unlike many anthologies of occult tales, the majority of writings collected here are not by authors generally considered supernatural or occult. Of the nineteen, only three – Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and Gustav Meyrink – can be considered strictly occult writers, while to these only three more, Jacques Cazotte, Lord Dunsany and E.T. A. Hoffmann, can be added as full-time fantasists (Dunsany wrote prodigiously in other areas, but he is remembered today solely for his fantasy fiction). H.G. Wells wrote science fiction only early in his career, then went on to write novels and socio-political tracts about the problems of modern life. Out of nearly three hundred short stories, Maupassant wrote only thirty horror tales. Goethe and Balzac wrote about alchemy, but their occult writings make up only a fraction of their vast bodies of work. Bulwer-Lytton is remembered today mostly for his influence on nineteenth century occultism; in his time he was best known for his ‘silver fork’ romances and his ‘Newgate’ novels. Andrei Bely and Valery Briusov, both deeply interested in different forms of occultism, were prose stylists and poets of the first rank, and were central figures in the Russian Symbolist and Modernist movements. William Beckford and Jan Potocki are literary oddities: Beckford the dilettante who wrote his single masterpiece in a burst of Kerouac-like inspiration, Potocki the polyglot traveller and scholar who was also the author of a book with perhaps the strangest history in all of literature. Gérard de Nerval, Villiers de l’Isle Adam and J.K. Huysmans, though fascinated by the occult, wrote about much else and their occultism is mainly an expression of the Romantic and Decadent sensibilities of their times.

An anthology of occult writings by occultists might be interesting, but it wouldn’t tell us anything we didn’t know. My aim in bringing together these disparate works is to show that far from the marginal phenomenon we generally think it is, occultism had a powerful impact on much of mainstream western culture, a theme spelled out fully in A Dark Muse. That influence remains today, but since the 1960s, except for the occasional violence accompanying some forms of Satanism, the ‘shock value’ of occultism has for the most part been diluted. What we know as the New Age is in many ways a kind of domesticated occultism. Alternative health stores, yoga centres, head shops and metaphysical bookshops appear on many high streets; what was one time radical and hard to find is now blended in with corner shops and newsagents. Likewise, much of the threatening aspect of occultism has found a home in Goth, death rock and other forms of pop music. In many ways, occultism today is but one of a variety of alternative life styles and sub-cultures. (For more on the occult and popular culture, see my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (2001).) That such a steady and vital influence has received scant attention suggests a serious lack in our understanding of cultural history. While not a devotee of any occult school, like many of the writers included in this anthology, I see in some forms of occultism a possibility of freedom and meaning, lacking in more conventional modes of thought. The dark side is not necessarily evil. In Jungian psychology, ‘the shadow’ is the complement of a too bright and one-sided rationality. It may contain much that is unpleasant, even absurd. But it is also the source of new growth, new insight and new beginnings.

The time span covered by these selections runs from the Enlightenment to Modernism; the stories can be arranged chronologically following the changes in meaning that the occult had for different periods. The general trajectory follows a path that the literary critic Erich Heller called ‘the journey into the interior.’ During the Enlightenment, occultism had much to do with the politics of the time; the ideas of Swedenborg and Mesmer were blended with Freemasonry and the craze for secret societies that presaged the French Revolution. But the occult was also part of the Enlightenment philosophe’s fascination with all forms of knowledge, his curiosity about strange lands and customs, and with the intoxication that an early science, just beginning to grasp its power over nature, engendered. Jacques Cazotte’s, William Beckford’s and Jan Potocki’s work are examples of this.

This ‘extraverted’ occultism, however, retreated from the outer world after the collapse of the Revolution into the Terror. The new world that the political forms of occultism hoped to create was now sought for within. Romantic occultism was about the exploration of the psyche, the voyage into the vast recesses of ‘inner space’. Against the Cartesian/Newtonian picture of man as a machine caught up in a workings of a clockwork cosmos, Romantics like Goethe saw him as something just short of a god. Yet, stepping through the inner portal had its dangers. Goethe, with one foot in the classical world, was strong enough to survive the buffetings of the unconscious, as well as the inevitable let down of being returned to the dull, prosaic world, after a brief tenure in ecstasy. Others, however, were not so resistant. Of the Romantic occultists offered here – E. T. A. Hoffmann, Balzac, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Gérard de Nerval – four died young, casualties of their attempts to actualize their ‘godhood’; one, Nerval, by his own hand, after repeated internments in asylums.

This need to ‘go beyond’ – the family motto of Villiers – led to a fascination with what today is called ‘transgression’, examples of which are found in the Satanic occultism of J.K. Huysmans and Valery Briusov, two writers firmly associated with the decadent and Symbolist schools of literature. In many ways, the history of literary occultism is the history of Symbolism, for it is with Swedenborg’s doctrine of symbolic correspondence – encapsulated in Baudelaire’s seminal poem Correspondences – that the literary search for a ‘higher world’ begins its paradoxical descent into decadence and the fin de siècle, a theme more fully explored in A Dark Muse.

Swedenborg argued that the external, physical world is only a symbol of an inner, spiritual one, and while the early Romantics tried to bridge the gap between the two – the challenge most effectively portrayed in Hoffmann’s The Golden Flower Pot – later epigone opted for a complete rejection of the everyday in favour of the strange and, ultimately, unwholesome. More times than not, this resulted in a kind of suicide, as we find in Arthur Machen’s classic of perversity, The Hill of Dreams. Other late Romantics were perhaps less total in their world rejection, but their work nonetheless approaches and, very often, crosses the borders of madness. In Maupassant’s The Horla, it is the ‘other world’ itself that attacks mundane reality, a theme we find also in Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, both of which deal with hallucinatory states of consciousness and a paralyzing sense of impending doom.

Not all writers of the fin de siècle, however, skated on such thin ice. Most accounts of the period emphasize its decadent aspect, but the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw a remarkable congruence of scientific and occult thought, blending ideas of ‘higher space’ and human evolution with ancient beliefs and mystical experience. The result was a wholly optimistic vision of human potential. With philosophers like Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, writers like Bernard Shaw, and occultists like Madame Blavatsky, the figures making up what we might call the ‘positive’ fin de siècle looked forward to the near future, when the gap between this world and the higher one would be bridged. The selections from H.G. Wells, Algernon Blackwood and Lord Dunsany all deal with this theme. Wells, a proponent of science, was in no way an occultist, but the scientific ideas he treated were often the same ones as many occultists were exploring; a good example of this is Algernon Blackwood’s A Victim of Higher Space. Lord Dunsany, neither an occultist nor scientist but immensely popular at the time, is included to provide a slight touch of humour, and to show how ideas of metaphysics and magic were familiar fare to the general reader. Along with Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who presaged many of the ideas of the ‘scientific’ fin de siècle (‘higher space’, advanced races, the superman), we can see these tales as a typically English approach to the occult: level-headed, sceptical but sympathetic, and less prone to the excesses of their continental counterparts.

Along with the chronological arrangement, the selections can also be grouped thematically. There are the exotic or oriental occult tales (Beckford, Potocki, Nerval); the initiatory ones (Bulwer-Lytton, Goethe, Balzac, Hoffmann, Cazotte); tales of what we might call ‘psychotic occultism’ (Maupassant, Meyrink, Bely), decadent occultism (Machen, Huysmans, Villers de l’Isle-Adam, Briusov), as well as tales of ‘higher space’ (Blackwood, Wells, Dunsany). This, of course, is not an exhaustive account of the types of occult literature, but it does, I think, show that by the late eighteenth century, occultism had formed into a more or less coherent philosophy, with a canon of recurring themes and ideas.

The central theme of occult literature is, however, one I mentioned earlier: that of the contrast between ‘this’ world and the ‘other’. And as I said, no one, I think, has treated this as effectively as Hoffmann does in The Golden Flower Pot. In writing this, Hoffmann goes beyond occultism and tackles what for me is the fundamental question of human existence. The reader, caught up in Hoffmann’s glittering tale, is initiated into the problem and must decide whether the realms of poetry and magic – those rare moments of affirmation and meaning – are ‘real’, or merely entertaining diversions from the proper and dreary business of getting on in life. Are the Archivist Lindhorst’s (at once a dealer in words and a magician) accounts of his ‘freehold in Atlantis’ mere ‘oriental bombast’, as the burghers of Dresden maintain, or are they, as he nonchalantly retorts, more true than anything else he could tell them? For all the darkness, madness and plain silliness that has occasioned their adventures, those writers of the last two centuries who have spent time foraging in Atlantis, have, I believe, answered that question.

From Vathek

BY WILLIAM BECKFORD

Vathek, ninth Caliph of the race of the Abassides, was the son of Motassem, and the grandson of Haroun Al Raschid. From an early accession to the throne, and the talents he possessed to adorn it, his subjects were induced to expect that his reign would be long and happy. His figure was pleasing and majestic; but when he was angry one of his eyes became so terrible that no person could bear to behold it, and the wretch upon whom it was fixed instantly fell backward, and sometimes expired. For fear, however, of depopulating his dominions and making his palace desolate he but rarely gave way to his anger.

Being much addicted to women and the pleasures of the table, he sought by his affability to procure agreeable companions; and he succeeded the better as his generosity was unbounded, and his indulgences unrestrained, for he was by no means scrupulous, nor did he think with the Caliph Omar Ben Abdalaziz that it was necessary to make a hell of this world to enjoy Paradise in the next.

He surpassed in magnificence all his predecessors. The palace of Alkoremmi, which his father Motassem had erected on the hill of Pied Horses, and which commanded the whole city of Samarah, was in his idea far too scanty; he added therefore five wings, or rather other palaces, which he destined for the particular gratification of each of his senses.

In the first of these were tables continually covered with the most exquisite dainties, which were supplied both by night and by day, according to their constant consumption, whilst the most delicious wines and the choicest cordials flowed forth from a hundred fountains that were never exhausted. This palace was called ‘The Eternal or Unsatiating Banquet.’

The second was styled ‘The Temple of Melody, or the Nectar of the Soul.’ It was inhabited by the most skilful musicians and admired poets of the time, who not only displayed their talents within, but, dispersing in bands without, caused every surrounding scene to reverberate their songs, which were continually varied in the most delightful succession.

The palace named ‘The Delight of the Eyes, or the Support of Memory,’ was one entire enchantment. Rarities collected from every corner of the earth were there found in such profusion as to dazzle and confound, but for the order in which they were arranged. One gallery exhibited the pictures of the celebrated Mani, and statues that seemed to be alive. Here a well-managed perspective attracted the sight; there the magic of optics agreeably deceived it; whilst the naturalist on his part exhibited, in their several classes, the various gifts that Heaven had bestowed on our globe. In a word, Vathek omitted nothing in this palace that might gratify the curiosity of those who resorted to it, although he was not able to satisfy his own, for he was of all men the most curious.

‘The Palace of Perfumes,’ which was termed likewise ‘The Incentive to Pleasure,’ consisted of various halls, where the different perfumes which the earth produces were kept perpetually burning in censers of gold. Flambeaux and aromatic lamps were here lighted in open day. But the too powerful effects of this agreeable delirium might be avoided by descending into an immense garden, where an assemblage of every fragrant flower diffused through the air the purest odours. The fifth palace, denominated ‘The Retreat of Joy, or the Dangerous,’ was frequented by troops of young females beautiful as the houris, and not less seducing, who never failed to receive with caresses all whom the Caliph allowed to approach them; for he was by no means disposed to be jealous, as his own women were secluded within the palace he inhabited himself. Notwithstanding the sensuality in which Vathek indulged, he experienced no abatement in the love of his people, who thought that a sovereign immersed in pleasure was not less tolerable to his subjects than one that employed himself in creating them foes. But the unquiet and impetuous disposition of the Caliph would not allow him to rest there; he had studied so much for his amusement in the lifetime of his father as to acquire a great deal of knowledge, though not a sufficiency to satisfy himself; for he wished to know everything, even sciences that did not exist. He was fond of engaging in disputes with the learned, but liked them not to push their opposition with warmth; he stopped the mouths of those with presents whose mouths could be stopped, whilst others, whom his liberality was unable to subdue, he sent to prison to cool their blood: a remedy that often succeeded.

Vathek discovered also a predilection for theological controversy, but it was not with the orthodox that he usually held. By this means he induced the zealots to oppose him, and then persecuted them in return; for he resolved at any rate to have reason on his side. The great prophet Mahomet, whose vicars the caliphs are, beheld with indignation from his abode in the seventh heaven the irreligious conduct of such a vicegerent. ‘Let us leave him to himself,’ said he to the genii, who are always ready to receive his commands; ‘let us see to what lengths his folly and impiety will carry him; if he run into excess we shall know how to chastise him. Assist him, therefore, to complete the tower which, in imitation of Nimrod, he hath begun, not, like that great warrior, to escape being drowned, but from the insolent curiosity of penetrating the secrets of Heaven; he will not divine the fate that awaits him.’

The genii obeyed, and when the workmen had raised their structure a cubit in the day-time, two cubits more were added in the night. The expedition with which the fabric arose was not a little flattering to the vanity of Vathek. He fancied that even insensible matter showed a forwardness to subserve his designs, not considering that the successes of the foolish and wicked form the first rod of their chastisement.

His pride arrived at its height when, having ascended for the first time the eleven thousand stairs of his tower, he cast his eyes below, and beheld men not larger than pismires, mountains than shells, and cities than bee-hives. The idea which such an elevation inspired of his own grandeur completely bewildered him; he was almost ready to adore himself, till, lifting his eyes upward, he saw the stars as high above him as they appeared when he stood on the surface of the earth. He consoled himself, however, for this transient perception of his littleness with the thought of being great in the eyes of others, and flattered himself that the light of his mind would extend beyond the reach of his sight, and transfer to the stars the decrees of his destiny. With this view the inquisitive prince passed most of his nights on the summit of his tower, till he became an adept in the mysteries of astrology, and imagined that the planets had disclosed to him the most marvellous adventures, which were to be accomplished by an extraordinary personage from a country altogether unknown. Prompted by motives of curiosity, he had always been courteous to strangers, but from this instant he redoubled his attention, and ordered it to be announced by sound of trumpet, through all the streets of Samarah, that no one of his subjects, on peril of displeasure, should either lodge or detain a traveller, but forthwith bring him to the palace.

Not long after this proclamation there arrived in his metropolis a man so hideous that the very guards who arrested him were forced to shut their eyes as they led him along. The Caliph himself appeared startled at so horrible a visage, but joy succeeded to this emotion of terror when the stranger displayed to his view such rarities as he had never before seen, and of which he had no conception.

In reality, nothing was ever so extraordinary as the merchandise this stranger produced; most of his curiosities, which were not less admirable for their workmanship than splendour, had, besides, their several virtues described on a parchment fastened to each. There were slippers which enabled the feet to walk; knives that cut without the motion of a hand; sabres which dealt the blow at the person they were wished to strike; and the whole enriched with gems that were hitherto unknown.

The sabres, whose blades emitted a dazzling radiance, fixed more than all the Caliph’s attention, who promised himself to decipher at his leisure the uncouth characters engraven on their sides. Without, therefore, demanding their price, he ordered all the coined gold to be brought from his treasury, and commanded the merchant to take what he pleased; the stranger complied with modesty and silence.

Vathek, imagining that the merchant’s taciturnity was occasioned by the awe which his presence inspired, encouraged him to advance, and asked him, with an air of condescension, ‘Who he was? whence he came? and where he obtained such beautiful commodities?’ The man, or rather monster, instead of making a reply, thrice rubbed his forehead, which, as well as his body, was blacker than ebony, four times clapped his paunch, the projection of which was enormous, opened wide his huge eyes, which glowed like firebrands, began to laugh with a hideous noise, and discovered his long amber-coloured teeth bestreaked with green.

The Caliph, though a little startled, renewed his inquiries, but without being able to procure a reply; at which, beginning to be ruffled, he exclaimed: ‘Knowest thou, varlet, who I am? and at whom thou art aiming thy gibes?’ Then, addressing his guards, ‘Have ye heard him speak? is he dumb?’

‘He hath spoken,’ they replied, ‘though but little.’

‘Let him speak again, then,’ said Vathek, ‘and tell me who he is, from whence he came, and where he procured these singular curiosities, or I swear by the ass of Balaam that I will make him rue his pertinacity.’

The menace was accompanied by the Caliph with one of his angry and perilous glances, which the stranger sustained without the slightest emotion, although his eyes were fixed on the terrible eye of the prince.

No words can describe the amazement of the courtiers when they beheld this rude merchant withstand the encounter unshocked. They all fell prostrate with their faces on the ground to avoid the risk of their lives, and continued in the same abject posture till the Caliph exclaimed in a furious tone, ‘Up, cowards! seize the miscreant! see that he be committed to prison and guarded by the best of my soldiers! Let him, however, retain the money I gave him; it is not my intent to take from him his property; I only want him to speak.’

No sooner had he uttered these words than the stranger was surrounded, pinioned with strong fetters, and hurried away to the prison of the great tower, which was encompassed by seven empalements of iron bars, and armed with spikes in every direction longer and sharper than spits. The Caliph, nevertheless, remained in the most violent agitation; he sat down indeed to eat, but of the three hundred dishes that were daily placed before him could taste of no more than thirty-two.

A diet to which he had been so little accustomed was sufficient of itself to prevent him from sleeping; what then must be its effect when joined to the anxiety that preyed upon his spirits? At the first glimpse of dawn he hastened to the prison, again to importune this intractable stranger; but the rage of Vathek exceeded all bounds on finding the prison empty, the gates burst asunder, and his guards lying lifeless around him. In the paroxysm of his passion he fell furiously on the poor carcases, and kicked them till evening without intermission. His courtiers and vizirs exerted their efforts to soothe his extravagance, but finding every expedient ineffectual, they all united in one vociferation: ‘The Caliph is gone mad! the Caliph is out of his senses!’

This outcry, which soon resounded through the streets of Samarah, at length reaching the ears of Carathis, his mother, she flew in the utmost consternation to try her ascendency on the mind of her son. Her tears and caresses called off his attention, and he was prevailed upon by her entreaties to be brought back to the palace.

Carathis, apprehensive of leaving Vathek to himself, caused him to be put to bed, and seating herself by him, endeavoured by her conversation to heal and compose him. Nor could any one have attempted it with better success, for the Caliph not only loved her as a mother, but respected her as a person of superior genius; it was she who had induced him, being a Greek herself, to adopt all the sciences and systems of her country, which good Mussulmans hold in such thorough abhorrence.

Judicial astrology was one of those systems in which Carathis was a perfect adept; she began, therefore, with reminding her son of the promise which the stars had made him, and intimated an intention of consulting them again.

‘Alas!’ sighed the Caliph, as soon as he could speak, ‘what a fool have I been! not for the kicks bestowed on my guards who so tamely submitted to death, but for never considering that this extraordinary man was the same the planets had foretold, whom, instead of ill-treating, I should have conciliated by all the arts of persuasion.’

‘The past,’ said Carathis, ‘cannot be recalled, but it behoves us to think of the future; perhaps you may again see the object you so much regret; it is possible the inscriptions on the sabres will afford information. Eat, therefore, and take thy repose, my dear son; we will consider to-morrow in what manner to act.’

Vathek yielded to her counsel as well as he could, and arose in the morning with a mind more at ease. The sabres he commanded to be instantly brought, and poring upon them through a green glass, that their glittering might not dazzle, he set himself in earnest to decipher the inscriptions; but his reiterated attempts were all of them nugatory; in vain did he beat his head and bite his nails, not a letter of the whole was he able to ascertain. So unlucky a disappointment would have undone him again had not Carathis by good fortune entered the apartment.

‘Have patience, son!’ said she; ‘you certainly are possessed of every important science, but the knowledge of languages is a trifle at best, and the accomplishment of none but a pedant. Issue forth a proclamation that you will confer such rewards as become your greatness upon any one that shall interpret what you do not understand, and what it is beneath you to learn; you will soon find your curiosity gratified.’

‘That may be,’ said the Caliph; ‘but in the meantime I shall be horribly disgusted by a crowd of smatterers, who will come to the trial as much for the pleasure of retailing their jargon as from the hope of gaining the reward. To avoid this evil it will be proper to add that I will put every candidate to death who shall fail to give satisfaction; for, thank Heaven! I have skill enough to distinguish between one that translates and one that invents.’

‘Of that I have no doubt,’ replied Carathis; ‘but to put the ignorant to death is somewhat severe, and may be productive of dangerous effects; content yourself with commanding their beards to be burnt – beards in a state are not quite so essential as men.’

The Caliph submitted to the reasons of his mother, and sending for Morakanabad, his prime vizir, said: ‘Let the common criers proclaim, not only in Samarah, but throughout every city in my empire, that whosoever will repair hither, and decipher certain characters which appear to be inexplicable, shall experience the liberality for which I am renowned; but that all who fail upon trial shall have their beards burnt off to