‘The sphinx will speak at last’: Visions, Communications and Esoteric Experience

This chapter investigates visions of ancient Egypt that were understood to be grounded in supernatural truth. It examines the Egyptologists on the peripheries of magical orders, including E. A. Wallis Budge and Battiscombe Gunn, those who took part in spiritualistic activities, such as Howard Carter, as well as the individuals who involved these specialists in their magical and spiritual undertakings. Examining the lives and works of Golden Dawn magicians Florence Farr and Aleister Crowley alongside writers including Sax Rohmer and H. Rider Haggard, it exposes networks of collaboration between Egyptologists and individuals interested in Egyptian rites, and connects these relationships with the Egyptological sites, works and artefacts. Egyptological experts often attempted to distance themselves from the supernatural tales that Egyptian artefacts were particularly liable to inspire, but this was by no means universal. Examining literary overlaps between esotericism and Egyptology illuminates one of the most intriguing aspects of cultural exchange taking place between this scholarly field and culture more broadly: Egyptian spirits and magical ceremonies which Egyptologists frequently claimed had no potency in the modern world (besides in fiction) did, in fact, impress upon several practitioners; esotericists, meanwhile, turned to Egyptology and Egyptologists to buttress their rites, beliefs and experiences.

The Oriental and the Music Hall: Sound and Space in Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Chinatown

Dr Fu Manchu has proved the most enduring of the chinoiserie associated with Limehouse, however, this chapter concentrates on the representation of the space of Chinatown, rather than the representation of any one individual. It begins with a brief consideration of the Limehouse lair created for Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer, before focusing attention on the less remembered but once infamous literary chinoiserie of Thomas Burke. In particular, it examines the depiction of sound and music in his early works, and their utilisation in the construction of a Chinatown which was enmeshed within the wider East End, and whose Oriental practices intersected with Victorian music hall. In his combination of ancient Chinese melodies and pre-commercialised music hall, Burke assigned his Chinatown and East End to a previous era, his Limehouse was separated from the rest of London by time, as well as race and class. Although Burke in one sense offers Chinatown as a nostalgic alternative to the encroachment of the modern state and bourgeois culture, he also depicts it as a brutal slum where murder and suicide were commonplace. Burke’s subtly subversive chinoserie oscillates between negative and positive constructions of his synthesis of Victorian working-class and Chinese culture.