by James Reese
115. So the antechamber is called.
116. Stoker’s use of “spirit/soul” here is telling, and begs some explication if one is to understand the “strangeness” earlier referred to.
The Egyptians were an almost absurdly spiritual people. As regards the Egyptian spirit/soul, they believed that the deceased were divisible thusly: into the khat (physical body), the ka (astral body), the ba (soul), the khu (spirit), the sekhem (life force), the khaibit (shadow), and the ren (name). Prayers, rites, rituals and sundry other gruesome processes—delve into the details of mummification, Ms. Durand, if you doubt me—were put to purpose to ensure that each aspect of the deceased was accorded a proper send-off, one enticing them to stay in the Afterlife and leave the living alone. A most tricky business, this, to judge from the Dossier.
117. A nemyss, this, like that famously sported by King Tutankhamen; however—and despite the Victorian craze for all things Egyptian—the reader is reminded that Tut’s tomb would not be discovered for another thirty-four years, Howard Carter not disclosing it until 1922.
118. So the Temple Chiefs sat in accord with the known rules of the Order: left to right, they were the Imperator, the Praemonstratur, and the Cancellarius.
119. True; the Cancellarius served as secretary of the Order. That it was a young Wm. Butler Yeats serving as secretary is of extreme interest, and doubtless true. “The mystical life,” Yeats would later write, “is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
120. One pities poor Stoker here and wants to help:
It seems likely that the bearded men in question were two of the Order’s original members. The Imperator is likely to have been Dr. W. Wynn Westcott, with the bald Praemonstratur being Dr. W. R. Woodman, a retired physician and Freemason of whom little else is known. Westcott, however, whom history credits with founding the Order’s Isis-Urania Temple No. 3, merits more of an introduction, but before offering one I must backtrack a bit:
The last quarter of the 19th c. was a time of renewed interest in all things occult, as ever it is when millenniums turn. (Witness our own Y2K tomfoolery.) The Victorians, however, were more prone than most peoples to this, as their days were defined by a Queen too dour for description and as science was fast debunking all that was left to them of spiritual, or even supernatural, explanations of the universe. Into this void—this Longing for the Larger—stepped many charlatans, spiritualists, so-called psychics and swindlers, none of greater interest here than the Russian-born Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder—in New York City, in 1875—of the Theosophical Society.
Blavastsky claimed to be in contact with spirit teachers who were revealing to her long-hoarded secret doctrines, or esoterica. These guides—Serapis Bey, Polydurus, Isurenus, and John King by name—had chosen Blavatsky, said she, to carry on the work of Zoroaster and Solomon; that is, the Western, or Hermetic, tradition. This she was happy to do, for a while.
However, when, some years later, Blavastsky converted to Buddhism, shifting her allegiance to Eastern traditions—and guided now by Koot Hoomi, Morya, and Djwal Khul—she left her Western-leaning followers in the proverbial lurch. One such follower was Dr. Westcott, who went on to found the Golden Dawn along with Dr. Woodman and a third man, Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers, whom we may dismiss as a wacko, albeit a charismatic one; but more about Mathers to come, as it seems he served as Hierophant, or initiating priest, at Stoker’s ill-fated induction into the Order.
121. The aforementioned MacGregor Mathers.
122. Constance Wilde was, then, the Dadouche, whose job it was to consecrate the Temple with fire. Or incense at least.
123. Marginalia, in Stoker’s hand, reads “Peck.” Wm. Peck was the city astronomer for Edinburgh, and soon would found a Temple in that city—Amen-Ra No. 6. Later events described in the Dossier confirm that it was Peck present at the Isis-Urania No. 3 on 1 June 1888, serving as the Phylax.
124. Who “declaims”? Actors do. Thus, it seems Stoker here references Florence Farr, an actress second only to Ellen Terry on the London stage and so ideally suited to serve as Kerykissa, leading the rituals alongside the Hierophant. Stoker will soon confirm this, in fact.
It is likely Farr was drawn into the Order by Yeats, who was then vying for her attentions with George Bernard Shaw, a battle he’d soon surrender in order to commence his life-long pursuit of Maud Gonne; who, it should be said, may well have been an early member of the Order herself, though there is no indication she was present on the day in question.
125. There remain but three adepts: the Hiereus, the Hegemon, and the Stolistes. Only the Stolistes can be identified with any certainty. She is likely to have been Moina Mathers, née Mina Bergson; who, in addition, perhaps, to having lent her prenom to Dracula’s own Mina Harker, was the Geneva-born sister of the Nobel Prize–winning philosopher Henri Bergson and herself a graduate of the Slade School of Art in London. As the wife of MacGregor Mathers, and the earliest known initiate into the Isis-Urania No. 3, surely it was she who’d adorned the Temple so.
126. A swashbuckling Mathers had been wounded in a fencing duel.
127. Shabti figurines were typically buried with the affluent dead to serve as an afterlife workforce; and sistrums are rattles used in summoning rituals.
Here I must wonder what role E. A. Wallis Budge may have played in the Order. Surely, he’d have been sought as a member, as his contemporaries hinted. Was he an adept? If so, did he “borrow” artifacts from the British Museum for the use of the Order?
128. Tartarus (as Hell) is in fact a Platonic concept, one adopted by the Golden Dawn.
Plato also believed in what he called a World Soul and the idea that an individual is capable of recovering knowledge from the divine, or Divine, if only he or she can recall something of what was surrendered upon reincarnating. The Dossier will posit whether the opposite be true: Can a deity reincarnate into a human host, taking on his or her knowledge, traits, etc.? This, of course, is commonly called possession.
129. Technically, The Bornless Ritual for the Invocation of the Higher Genius. Stoker’s notes are so comprehensive here—in fact, the ellipses in this transcription are mine—we may conclude that he had the written ritual before him as he wrote.
130. We may excuse Stoker his confusion, as my copy of this same ritual states that at this juncture the Hierophant was to “make one complete circumambulation of the Temple deosil, to formulate the Angle of Kether in the Supernal Triangle of the Genius. Pass to the South, assume the astral god-form of Horus, and let the invocation proceed till Fire purges you of all blemish. Use Spirit Pentagram of Actives and Invoking Pentagram of Fire.” Indeed.
131. Here Stoker speaks for the first time of the relatively rare phenomenon known as synaesthesia, a condition in which persons perceive sensory stimuli via a sense other than the one being stimulated, i.e., seeing a sound, or tasting a shape. Of particular interest to readers of the Dossier is the fact that synaesthetic responses to stimuli are commonly attested to by two groups of people: creatives—artists, composers, writers, etc.—and those present at alleged instances of spirit possession.
132. Evidently, Mathers was drawing the pentagrams with their two points upwards, not down, thereby paying homage to the world of matter and not spirit: evil, in a word.
133. This from a friend working in antiquities at the Louvre, a woman both kind and incurious enough to answer my questions without posing any of her own:
Alternate spellings of Set, or Seth, were Setesh and Sutekh, the pronunciations of which may have been similar to that of the word for dessert, tesherit, itself similar to tesher, meaning “red”; consequently, Set, after his fall, became associated both with the desert and all things red, i.e., redheads, so uncommon amongst native Egyptians as to further associate him with foreigners and seal his status as the anti-God of the Egyptians, the Evil One.
Note, too, that Jonathan Harker’s hair will turn suddenly white in the course of his pursuing the Cou
nt.
134. The River of Lethe, in Greek mythology, ran through Hades and conferred forgetfulness on those who bathed in it.
135. Capital city and port of the Isle of Man.
136. Sir Walter Scott, b. 1771, d. 1832; known as the “Midlothian melodramatist.”
137. Stoker is not mistaken: the quote comes from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Act II, Scene V.
138. One of which would be Dracula’s Dr. Seward recording his diary onto a similar machine.
139. And several aliases, of which Hall Caine likely knew nothing.
140. This after he’d been run out of St. John, New Brunswick, in 1860, upon the death of a patient, James Portmore; to whom, Tumblety testified, he’d given nothing but a “tincture of parsley tea.” At the Portmore inquest, Tumblety was further accused of dealing abortifacients to prostitutes, notably one Philomene Dumas; to whom he’d sold, for twenty dollars, pills containing “cayenne peppers, aloes, oil of savine and cantharides.” By the time Tumblety was acquitted of all charges, he’d already absented himself, slipping southwards into the States.
141. Who, it has often been supposed, may have given Tumblety a venereal disease of some sort. Whether or not this heartbreak of his preceded the above-mentioned accusations of Ms. Philomene Dumas is unknown, though the question thus raised is a valid one: Did Tumblety seek to avenge himself on Ms. Dumas or others in her line of work?
142. Research leads me to posit that this was one Isaac Golladay.
Tumblety befriended the much-younger Golladay—the nephew of two former congressmen from Kentucky—while living in Washington. The boy’s father, however, formed a bad opinion of Tumblety, and when he sought to end the liaison, Isaac left Washington. Tumblety himself departed mere days later. Whether or not a reunion was effected is unknown. Known is this: Isaac Golladay was never heard from again.
143. Tumblety was, by now, well launched on a lifelong cycle of arrest and revenge. Charges against him would range from charlatanism to the peddling of pornography, from gross indecency to the corruption of youth, and, of course, murder most foul.
144. I am their possessor at present, as Stoker, deeming the pamphlets evidentiary, included them in the Dossier.
145. Indeed. Contemporaries reported that posters advertising the Pimple Banisher adorned Washington’s walls. A Colonel C. A. Dunham attested to having seen Tumblety in the capital some days after the Battle of Bull Run—21 July 1861—in a pose the Colonel described as “typical”: dressed in a richly embroidered coat pinned to which were medals of unknown provenance, cavalry trousers showing a bright yellow stripe, riding boots, and his preferred spurs. Atop his head was a semi-military peaked cap. In such attire, said the Colonel, Tumblety was a frequent sight at the city’s hotels as well as the War Department and Navy Yard, talking always of how he’d recently accepted but deferred an appointment as brigade surgeon.
146. As historians—not to mention the descendants of the real Dr. Blackburn—might take issue with Stoker’s indifference, let me add that the doctor was acquitted of what he called “charges too preposterous for intelligent men to believe,” and took up practice in Kentucky, where he fought a yellow fever outbreak in 1878 and was eventually elected governor.
147. Here Stoker dissembles in deference to Caine. As a literary man—and one knowledgeable, surely, of his friend’s predilections—he was more than capable of parsing the letter’s quoted line.
148. It is perhaps difficult to convey to to-day’s reader the danger then posed to Hall Caine by the supposed existence, or rather the potential resurfacing, of such letters; yet the Dossier itself hinges upon that very danger. It is this—exposure, in a word—that will keep Stoker and Co. from resorting to the authorities later on. Had they done so, Caine’s world would have come crashing down.
Too, it bears mentioning that blackmail was a booming business amongst the Victorians. Let Oscar Wilde stand as illustration: some few years on—in 1895—similar letters sent to several of his “sporting fellows” would seal his fate, bringing on charges and a conviction under the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Act of 1885; which states (48&49 Vict. C.69, 11):
“Any male person who, in public or private, commits or is party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.”
149. He was. And so it seems either Tumblety sought to fleece Caine of what little money he then had, or something else—perhaps an alias he could not let fall—had separated Tumblety from his money for a short while. It cannot be known.
150. Lady Wilde was a dear and trusted friend, true, but doubtless fresh in Stoker’s mind was her recent publication, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland, with Sketches of the Irish Past. This she’d follow up in 1890 with Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland, Contributions to Irish Lore. Though much of the research requisite to these volumes had been done by Sir William Wilde, it was Lady Wilde—herself no stranger to the strange—who brought them to fruition.
151. The former the haunted hero of The Bells; the latter Prince Hal, or Henry V, from Shakespeare’s eponymous play.
152. Frederick George Abberline was actually forty-five in 1888.
153. CID: Criminal Investigative Division.
154. “Slumming”: a term used by the Victorians to denote, with irony, one’s placing oneself amongst one’s inferiors in a place beneath one’s station, usually in the pursuit of illicit pleasures.
155. Here Stoker’s underscoring has torn the page.
156. Act I, Scene III, The Merchant of Venice, where the play tells us Antonio has often spat upon Shylock the Jew. How the Lyceum played this, I don’t know, though Stoker here states that spittle—or its facsimile—came into play nightly. Odd, then, that Henry Irving would wear the same stained cape offstage.
157. This letter is both undated and without salutation, though I think it safe to assume that Stoker sent it sometime after his letter of 14 June 1888, as clearly he takes issue here with Caine’s reply to that letter.
158. Uncommonly “cute” of Stoker, this punning.
159. Early morning, then: Sunday 15 July.
160. Whether Stoker wrote his planned apology or one came from Hall Caine, I cannot say: the Dossier neither contains nor makes mention of either. Suffice it to say that by mid-July of 1888 the men were once again allies and friends.
161. The journal shows three successive versions of the 5 a.m. entry, each slightly more legible than the last but all three identical in content. These are not drafts; rather, they appear to be the rote work by which Stoker tried to steady his hand and heart.
162. One wonders who. A working woman of Whitechapel?
Daniel Farson, Stoker’s grandnephew, held in his 1975 Stoker biography that Stoker sought sexual solace outside his marriage, going so far as to attribute Stoker’s slow death—and the weirdness of his later work—to tertiary syphilis and its symptoms. However, I am inclined to side with the majority of biographers who attribute Stoker’s death to the aftereffects of stroke.
163. It seems that no Child of Light succeeded in involving E. A. Wallis Budge in the Tumblety business, as his name soon disappears from the Dossier.
164. Lest he accuse Stoker of destroying valuable evidence, to-day’s reader is reminded that fingerprinting played no part in the detection of crimes in England prior to 1901—a development, by the way, owing much to the advocacy of Sir Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin.
165. Laudanum: a hydro-alcoholic solution containing either 1% morphine or 10% opium. Its being widely available and commonly used to calm the nerves, bedside carafes of the stuff were common then.
166. On the original—contained in the Dossier—someone, presumably Stoker, has traced over the blood letters in
ink.
167. Kha (astral body) and khaibit (shadow); see The Second Epoch, note 42.
168. Wilde would not only try theatre, he would revolutionize it. By the time of his later fall—his conviction, in 1895, on charges of gross indecency—he would be supreme in the London theatre, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest running concurrently. Whether Stoker read any of Wilde’s plays prior to their performance is unknown, but none were ever produced at the Lyceum Theatre.
169. Stoker’s marginalia: “Exp. [expurgated?] version of same copied-out/sent by Sunday’s post to Park St.”
170. As will Count Dracula in his turn.
171. The reference is to John Milton and his epic poem Paradise Lost, which added the adjective “Cimmerian” to Webster’s dictionary, c. 1580: “very dark or gloomy; ‘under ebon shades…in dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.’”
172. It is to be hoped that Stoker did his homework before contacting Inspector Donald—not Douglas—Swanson; but whether or not Swanson was Stoker’s source within Scotland Yard, it soon becomes evident he had one. In this instance, however, the details sought seem to have been found in the popular press, i.e. The Times (see next entry in the Dossier).