"More Than Human": The Queer Occult Explorer of the Fin-de-Siècle

Author(s): Mark De Cicco

Source: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , 2012, Vol. 23, No. 1 (84) (2012), pp. 4-24
Published by: International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24353146

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 "More Than Human": The Queer Occult
Explorer of the Fin-de-Siecle

Mark De Cicco

I will, from this day forward, apply myself to the Great Work—which is, to
purify and exalt my Spiritual Nature so that with the Divine Aid I may at
length attain to be more than human . . . and that in this event I will not
abuse the great power entrusted to me.
—Weschcke, preface to The Golden Dawn

JL his quotation comes from one of the central oaths taken by mem
bers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn, which we
might define as inhabiting a gray area between quasi-Masonic order, cabbalistic
cult, and bachelor's fraternity, experienced a surge of popularity following its
inception in 1888 through the end of the 1920s. Claiming descent from older
occult or cabbalistic orders (including the Rosicrucians), the Golden Dawn
began attracting a membership made up of artists, intellectuals, and writers
in Britain at the fin-de-siecle, including well-known figures like W. B. Yeats,
Algernon Swinburne, and the infamous Aleister Crowley. The existence of
the Golden Dawn, and its popularity among intellectuals, is symptomatic of a
larger trend in the late nineteenth century.
In this article, I aim to show how the larger societal desire for the irrational
that was embedded in popular occult movements like the Golden Dawn was
also explored in contemporary literature of the Gothic and the supernatural.
Moreover, I will demonstrate that the yearning for irrationality displayed by
occult groups like the Golden Dawn, and writers like Algernon Blackwood,
Arthur Machen, and Robert Louis Stevenson, is an impulse marked by trans
gression and deviance that can only be described as queer.
My use of the word "queer" in this context is perhaps unusual, though
not unprecedented. In their recent, groundbreaking volume, Queering the
Gothic, William Hughes and Andrew Smith push our understanding of the
term "queer" as it relates to the Gothic beyond sexual and interpersonal
transgression, focusing attention on the "elusive" queerness of the Gothic that
Vol. 23, No. 1, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
Copyright © 2012, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

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 "More Than Human" • 5

can be "taken outside of the sexual connotations" of the term "queer" (2-3).
Following this lead, I suggest using the word "queer" in relation to the Gothic
in a triple sense, reflecting the usage of the word before the various meanings
differentiated themselves: the occult, Gothic tales of this period are therefore
simultaneously (1) peculiar, (2) eerie, and (3) sexually or physically transgres
sive. These texts are thus marked by queer happenings that engage in this
triple definition of the word queer, through the trope of irrationality and the
occult.
Such a critical approach will thus help tease out the links between vari
ous cultural phenomena of the period (e.g., literature, religion, science) and
show that the late Victorian and Edwardian era exemplify what Jasbir Puar has
termed "queer times"—a period in which, after long repression, queer, trans
gressive ideologies become incorporated into heteronormative society; in this
case through the figure of the occult explorer who attempts to exert mastery
over the queer.

Enlightened Irrationality
As Eric Hobsbawm has argued, rapid scientific advances since the Enlighten
ment (alongside increasing intellectualization of the bourgeois classes), by the
late nineteenth century appeared to have banished all that was deemed to be
"supernatural and miraculous," including "the ancient forces of religion," from
the central place they had once held, and replaced them with a more material
ist understanding of the universe and of humanity's place in it (244). As David
Punter and Glennis Byron summarize, the period was marked by "discoveries
in the sciences" like evolution and geology that "only served to aggravate a
sense of alienation and further disturb notions of human identity" (20). And
yet concurrent with this trend towards the material, by the late nineteenth
century an "array of mental and physical oddities," such as theosophism,
hypnotism, clairvoyance, spiritualism, and other occult phenomena, "helped
convince a significant number of Victorian intellectuals (and an even greater
number of nameless artisans) that the Enlightenment philosophes had been
much too hasty in dismissing the miracles and prodigies of old as fable and
hearsay" (Melechi 4). This renewed interest in the occult and the supernatural
attracted numerous well-educated and influential non-scientist intellectu
als, including artists, writers, politicians, and aristocrats, who were drawn to
occult clubs like the Golden Dawn, the pseudo-scientific Society for Psychical
Research, and to mystical groups like the Theosophists. In these new realms
that bordered on the knowable, science, religion, and the occult fused in new
and interesting ways.
Mark Morrisson notes that "a major aspect of the occult revival" dur
ing the fin-de-siecle "was an increasing interest in hermeticism, ritual magic,
and other esoteric knowledge" (2). The Golden Dawn (which counted both
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6 • Mark De Cicco

Machen and Blackwood as members) was interested in the ways that esoteric
knowledge could be used in "operations upon the self' (2). This desire to
reveal hidden secrets regarding the human condition permeates much of the
Gothic fiction of this period, including the works of Stevenson, Machen, and
Blackwood. While Stevenson was not an "occultist" like the latter two, the
occult, the supernatural, and diabolical phenomena color some of his most
famous works, including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and "Markheim."1 What is
more, much Gothic literature of this period focuses on explorations of the
effect of occult or supernatural knowledge and power on a single body, be it
Jekyll/Hyde, Machen's Mary, or Blackwood's John Silence. An examination
of these texts from the viewpoint of the occult explorer should reveal the way
that the transgressive "queer" forces of the occult attempt to imaginatively
engage with societal anxieties over religion, science, and humanity's place in
the universe. These texts thus hold up a looking glass to some of fin-de-siecle
Britain's darker cultural undercurrents.
The eagerness to accept supernatural phenomena as fact can be explained
in part by the seemingly incommensurable void that had arisen between sci
ence and religion by the late nineteenth century. Patrick Brantlinger states
that the presence of phenomena such as spiritualism and the occult in the lit
erature of the period was "a reaction both against fictional realism and against
scientific materialism" (xxiii). Karl Beckson seems to support this theory, argu
ing that for many late Victorians in a post-Darwinian world, "the impact of sci
ence on faith generated a sense of alienation and isolation" (318). Responding
to the "Darwinian nightmare of a material world without ultimate meaning for
humanity," intellectuals and artists "sought other means in their quest for a
meaningful reality" (319). This anti-materialist, anti-positivist quest led them
to the occult and the eternal/Otherworld that lay beyond the sensorial world
claimed by the materialist trend that had dominated scientific thought since
the Enlightenment (320). The occult thus offered late Victorian intellectuals
a vision of "unity in all things" that could "reestablish a sense of coherence
in their lives" (321), and in which marginalized belief in supernatural forces
could be reorganized and re-amalgamated. Hence, the popularity of occult sys
tems of belief—systems anchored in the irrational that provided an alternative
worldview to the prevailing materialist trends of the day.
Acolytes of the occult thus incorporated scientific disciplinary methods
into their occult explorations—as with Madame Blavatsky's attempts to scien
tize her brand of spiritualism—and thereby sought to rationalize the irrational
Occult knowledge was thus marked in equal parts by the thrill of scientific
discovery and the awe and terror of the unknown Other or Otherworld.
Evidence of these occult explorations, and the crossing of occult and
science, also emerges in the Gothic literature of the 1880s through the first
decades of the 1900s. The literature of the period is rife with characters who

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 "More Than Human" • 7

believe that through a blend of science and the occult they might become
somehow "more than human." Mirroring real-life occult pioneers like Bla
vatsky and Crowley, the Gothic literature of the fin-de-siecle introduces
hybridized occult/scientific explorers in many guises and settings, from familiar
figures like Bram Stoker's Van Helsing and H. G. Wells's Dr. Moreau, to lesser
known characters like W. H. Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost Finder or Richard
Marsh's Paul Lessingham in The Beetle.
In this article, I will study the occult scientist at the center of this literary
genre, which I will frame alongside some of the popular occult movements of
the period that concurrently attempted to blend science and the occult. In his
quest to become "more than human," the occult explorer struggles to assimi
late or normalize the monstrous and the abnormal. I will examine Stevenson's
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Machen's "The Great God Pan,"
and Blackwood's John Silence stories. Each of these works or collection of
works deals with the struggle of an intellectual or man of science who attempts
to use science to normalize or to "straighten" a queer, monstrously abnormal
occult. The success of the attempt to come to terms with the queer or abnor
mal, as well as the scientist's survival, depends upon the ability of the scientist
to "queer" himself and/or his subject in preparation for the encounter with the
occult Other. In other words, the occult explorer-scientist must identify this
Other, and in doing so, he must attempt to become Other in order to access
the powers that he seeks.
This preparation functions as an inoculation against the queer effects of
the occult. In other words, straight, normative figures incorporate the queer
occult into their being in order to build up resistance to its overpowering
effects. A prior, carefully planned infection with the queer occult (in the
form of occult training) allows characters, such as Blackwood's John Silence,
to survive their encounters with stronger manifestations of the supernatural.
Through this inoculation/training, Silence successfully becomes "more than
human." Other figures, such as Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll, are insufficiently inocu
lated against the queer occult, and consequently find themselves in a struggle
with the abnormal and the monstrous that ultimately leads to their death.
This queer inoculation thus functions as a means of harnessing and con
trolling queer, irrational ideologies, much in the same way that Puar describes
the absorption of modern-day queer ideologies into the heteronormative
to form what he terms "homonormative ideologies." The emergent, almost
compulsory queerness (in the triple sense of the word) of late Victorian and
Edwardian Gothic literature, and writers of this literature, seems a reflection
of this absorption of the queer into heteronormative life as a point of variation,
and not pure opposition, to the straight.
In the Gothic literature of this period, it is the learned man or scientist
who absorbs the transgressive through queer inoculation. The survivors are

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8 • Mark De Cicco

those best prepared, and whose beings are most flexible or malleable to the
queer effects of the occult. Such beings then become queer, hybrid, and even
monstrous: occult explorers with one foot in normative science and another
in the paranormal occult and the supernatural. Their pseudoscientific field of
knowledge—occult science—is, moreover, both broad and unstable, resist
ing strict definition. It hovers between alchemy and chemistry (Stevenson's
Henry Jekyll), "transcendental medicine" (Machen 1) and neurosurgery
(Machen's Dr. Raymond), and parapsychology and psychology (Blackwood's
John Silence). These hybridized figures, practitioners and repositories of queer,
liminal sciences and fields of knowledge, haunt the edges of literary repre
sentation during the fin-de-siecle, and by their very presence force readers to
confront the same uncomfortable void between reason and faith, the rational
and irrational, that as occult explorers they have attempted to bridge through
supernatural means.

Towards a Queerer Gothic

A brief theoretical clarification of my use of queer theory in reference to

Gothic literature will, no doubt, be useful. In the article "Queer Gothic"
(and a later book length study with the same title), George Haggerty uses the
term "queer Gothic" to "evoke a queer world that attempts to transgress the
binaries of sexual decorum" (383). Haggerty argues that the Gothic provides a
space "in which all normative—heteronormative, if you will—configurations
of human interaction are consistently challenged and in some cases signifi
cantly undermined" (384). Hughes and Smith locate the queer in difference—
"a sense of difference not confined simply to sexual behavior but which may
equally inform a systematic stylistic deviance from perceived norms in personal
style or artistic preference" (3). Thus, deviancy that pushes the boundaries
of societally accepted norms, sexual or otherwise, may be termed "queer,"
and "straight" may refer to adherence to societal norms, which are generally
(though not always) heteronormative.
However, the alternative and transgressive queerness here implied func
tions as more than a simple straight/queer binary. Rather, the queer opens
out from the single, straight path to a multiplicity of queer ones. The learned
men of the fin-de-siecle Gothic can best be understood as queer explorers of
multiple, transgressive pathways through what Sara Ahmed terms in Queer
Phenomenology as "reorientation." These characters, through their inoculation
with the queer forces of the occult, have reoriented themselves towards the
occult, which, like a cracked mirror, reveals an array of new, queer perspec
tives to replace the single, straight one that was once reflected.
As Max Fincher states in Queering the Gothic in the Romantic Age, "queer
ing as a way of reading ... is intimately connected to the idea of crossing ove
or between places, making links that have perhaps gone unnoticed or are not

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 "More Than Human" • 9

immediately obvious.... A queer reading attempts to articulate these points of

disruption in culture where the heteronormative is resisted" (12-13). Reading
these works in this manner, I have paid particular attention to how normative
relationships are undermined or twisted, and to how new, queer perspectives
alter one's understanding of the world.
Queer theory thus provides "a vehicle through which difference of all
kinds might conveniently be mobilized" (Hughes and Smith 4). This more
open understanding of queerness and the queer allows us to dig deeper into
the transgressive nature of the Gothic at the fin-de-siecle, and into the psyche
of the occult explorer-scientist, who is himself a dark reflection of those
whom Antonio Melechi terms the real-life "servants of the supernatural:" the
members of groups like the Theosophical Society, the Society for Psychical
Research, and the Golden Dawn.
That said, let us now turn to some of these queer supernatural servants.

Queer Gothic Bodies

In the fiction of the fin-de-siecle, the site of tension between the occult, re
gion, and scientific materialism2 is the body of the researcher and/or that
his subject. Through external, occult intervention, these bodies become dev
ant, inhabiting the liminal space of the Gothic. As Judith Halberstam write
in Skin Shows, the Gothic is characterized by the "boundaries between goo
and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception
inside and outside" (2). Drawing upon the energies of this struggle, the Goth
story pieces together "lumpen bodies . .. out of the fabric of race, class, gender,
and sexuality" (3). Within this liminal world, "the monster becomes a prima
focus of interpretation and its monstrosity seems available for any number o
meanings" (2). If we imagine the abnormal, deviant Gothic body as the fru
of the struggle between straightening and queering forces, the occult scienti
is (paradoxically, and perhaps incestuously) father, midwife, and child of th
union. The queer Gothic body, birthed through a mixture of scientific and
occult knowledge, and monstrous as it may be, is the source of both horro
and, occasionally, of salvation.
The deviant Gothic body that has been influenced by occult science
is subject to a monstrosity that is not always immediately visible, but lurk
beneath the surface. A kind of madness rooted in abnormality, and often
linked to devolution, is the key symptom of this monstrosity. In Abnormal
Michel Foucault poses the question, "is the abnormal human instinct th
resurrection of archaic human instincts?" (133). I would like to argue that
the case of the queer Gothic body, yes, it often is. One of the queer effects
the occult in these fictions is that it awakens a distant and seemingly forgo
ten past in a way akin to the Freudian uncanny. As Sigmund Freud argues,
we experience the uncanny when "something happens in our lives that seem

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10 • Mark De Cicco

to confirm . . . old, discarded beliefs" (154)- This uncanny effect of the queer
Gothic body—highlighting a living connection between distant past and pres
ent—is nowhere more obvious than in Darwin's evolutionary theory. Darwin's
ideas had, by the late nineteenth century, already been widely disseminated.
New theories spun off of evolutionary theory emerged in many different fields,
one of which was criminology (Gould 132).
Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, studied the skulls of dead
criminals looking for atavistic throwbacks to earlier evolutionary stages. For
Lombroso, "in some unfortunate individuals, the past comes to life again" to
destructive ends (Gould 133). In the Gothic fiction of the fin-de-siecle, dab
blers in the dark, arcane knowledge of occult science, and their subjects, are
more prone to atavism and degeneration. With this thought in mind, let us
now turn to the most famous example of occult devolution in the literature of
the period, Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

"Create in thyself two personalities" (Crowley)

While Stevenson does not seem to have taken a strong personal interest in the
occult, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for its part, has fascinating
links to the occult not only by way of subject matter, but also through Crowley,
a seminal figure in the Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley saw the implica
tions of Stevenson's novella not simply as mere fantasy, but rather as a source
of magical, occult inspiration. One of Crowley's magical books, the Liber
Jugorum (or the Book of the Yoke), explores the possibility of multiple personae
within the psyche (Sutin 84). As Lawrence Sutin recounts in Do What Thou
Wilt, "Crowley credited the initial idea behind Liber Jugorum to Robert Louis
Stevenson" (84). Indeed, Crowley attempted a magical experiment that sought
to prove the duality (or even multiplicity) of the personae within the human
psyche. Crowley sought to separate "one's daily persona," which deals with the
mundane happenings of life, from the "essential consciousness within," which
is a truer, purer reflection of the "higher will" that provides access to magical
power (84). That Crowley would attempt a Jekyll-like experiment illustrates
how receptive occultists were to queer ideas and possibilities outside of the
byways of normative science.
The fictional Jekyll, for his part, takes a more physical, rather than psy
chological, approach to the queer occult. For most of his life, Dr. Jekyll has
presented himself to his friends and colleagues as a sophisticated and cultured
man of science—a perfect Victorian gentleman. And yet within Jekyll there is
something not quite right—something that deviates from the straight path of
genteel respectability that once stretched out before him. There is an abnor
mality: a darker, more sinister, queer side to his personality.
In Jekyll's full statement (revealed after Jekyll/Hyde's death to his friend
Utterson), he says that he has long suffered from "a certain impatient gaiety

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 "More Than Human" • 11

of disposition" that makes it difficult for him to carry himself in the manne
expected by the upper-class Victorian society in which he lives (Stevenson
75-76). Throughout his life, he "concealed [his] pleasures" and soon foun
that he "stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life" (76). I
Sexual Anarchy, Elaine Showalter argues that the activities that Jekyll hid
from straight Victorian society are distinctly non-heteronormative. Showalte
contends that Jekyll and Hyde "can most persuasively be read as a fable of fi
de-siecle homosexual panic, the discovery and resistance of the homosexual
self' (107). This discovery is the mark that leads down queer avenues: Jekyll
disturbed by his need to lay "aside restraint and plunge in shame" (Stevenson
76), which later requires his "remorse" and "penitence" (77); and yet he
unable to stop these queer activities.
In order to absolve himself of guilt and resolve his existential crisis, Jekyll
turns to the outer limits of science and the borders of the occult. In looking for
a creative solution to his dilemma, Jekyll gradually becomes, according his ol
friend Lanyon, "too fanciful" and "unscientific" (38). Through occult science,
the tension in Jekyll between straight and queer tips in favor of the latter,
culminating in the irruption of queer abnormality that is Edward Hyde.
The nineteenth-century scientist Sir Humphry Davy writes that "Science
has . . . bestowed upon [man] powers which may be almost called creative;
which have enabled him to change and modify the beings surrounding him
(272). Jekyll takes up this idea in his efforts to separate the two parts of hi
being, an act that functions as a queer inoculation that he hopes will sav
him from the queer forces that have caused his existential crisis and madnes
Yet as Jekyll admits in his full statement, his "discoveries were incomplete
(Stevenson 77). Jekyll does not yet know enough about his own queer nature
or the equally queer nature of the concoction (with its mysterious "salts" o
indeterminate origin) safely to administer it—hence, the anxiety the first tim
he uses it, and the need to double or triple the dosage. The promise of quee
occult science proves too great, and in his haste, Jekyll falls prey to his own
hubristic fantasy of control over the queer occult. While he is successful in
separating "the evil side of [his] nature" (79) in Hyde, a being of "pure evil
(79), the results are not as he had hoped. As Jekyll admits, his normative
"good" side, like anyone else's, is not purely good but is "commingled out o
good and evil" (79). Because his reasons for using the potion are not purely
good or straight, the queer evil is "alert and swift to seize the occasion" (80),
and projects itself with increasing strength in Hyde. Jekyll's personal flaws ar
thus amplified through the prism of the god-like but only partially controlle
powers of occult science, producing evil out of someone who lived "nin
tenths a life of effort, virtue, and control" (79). Ultimately, science has faile
to deliver on its promises, and Jekyll's meddling has only queered nature's ba
ance.

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12 • Mark De Cicco

Jekyll is thus a man whose goodness and propriety are offset by a darker,
repressed side of hidden, non-normative activities that are manifested in the
queer Hyde. In losing himself to Hyde, jekyll has been betrayed by his arrogant
trust in occult science and by his inability to recognize the monstrous strength
of the abnormal within himself. Jekyll cuts the bonds of straight life that once
held him up as a paragon of propriety, and he becomes the liminal monster of
which Jeffrey Cohen warns us to be wary.
This brings us to Hyde. Hyde is a queer Gothic body of "pure evil"
(Stevenson 79) who embodies all the fears, anxieties, and failures of an
unsuccessful attempt to adhere to the straight life. In sum, Hyde is what
normative society has taught the Victorian to fear and repress: namely, the
queer hybrid—a devolved, destructive Gothic monster within. As a scientific
experiment gone haywire, Hyde represents the failure and dangers of meddling
with occult science. And yet occult science did not create Hyde—rather, it
merely unshackles him. In this Gothic world, there is a Hyde lurking within
every Victorian gentleman. Most of the time, the Hyde in the average gentle
man (such as Utterson, Enfield, and Lanyon), only emerges on occasion when
such a man takes a culturally approved trip of debauchery to the gin mills
and music halls of London's Soho neighborhood. Jekyll, through his impure
scientific/occult concoction, has allowed his Hyde free rein over his being.
All of Jekyll's non-normative, anti-societal queer energy—lust, fear, hatred,
violence—is unleashed in Hyde. That is why people are repulsed by Hyde,
for they see in him what they recognize as abnormal within themselves—the
abject, disavowed part of the self.
Thus, as Stephen Arata states, "In Edward Hyde . . . Stevenson [has] cre
ated a figure who embodies a bourgeois readership's worst fears about both a
marauding and immoral underclass and a dissipated and immoral leisure class"
(35). Hyde is a threat to the normative, but he is a threat that has long existed
in a dormant state within (hetero) normative society, unleashed through the
uncontrolled queer powers of occult science. Alone and impetuous in his
study of occult science, Jekyll underestimates the powers that it can unleash,
and thus suffers the consequences of hubris and overreaching. This fear of the
potential pitfalls of amateur dabbling in the occult is perhaps one reason that
occult societies such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn came into
existence—to prevent Jekyll-like hubristic and dangerous solo forays into the
world of the occult.

Spiritualism, the Golden Dawn, and the Final Frontier: Occult

Societies at the Fin-de-Siecle

A key site of cross germination between occult and science was the occult
society; and one of the most influential of these groups was the Theosophical
Society, which grew out of the Anglo-American phenomenon of spiritualism.
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 "More Than Human" • 13

Spiritualism, with its promise of contact with the dead through seances and
mediums, "had been meant to offer a way between the frustrating alternatives
of pseudo-science and pseudo-religion, providing a true spiritual science"
(Washington 46). However, it never lived up to this possibility, and by the
1870s, when much of the initial enthusiasm in spiritualism on both sides of the
Atlantic had begun to burn out, the fascinating figure of Madame Blavatsky
emerged to stoke the flames of popular interest in occult knowledge. Blavatsky
published Isis Unveiled in 1877, which functioned as a kind of spiritualist
textbook to occult knowledge, offering an alternative to materialist, Darwin
ian science (Washington 46). Blending a hodgepodge of Egyptian occultism,
Buddhism, and Indian mysticism, Blavatsky sought not to oppose science and
religion, but rather to "subsume those facts [presented by Victorian science]
into a grand synthesis that makes religious wisdom not the enemy of scientific
knowledge but its final goal" (52). In shaping this occult theory of science,
Blavatsky thus attempted to impose a scholarly discipline to spiritualism and
give it a veneer of intellectual respectability. Interestingly, this turn towards
systemization moved spiritualism away from its populist roots "and set it on
a path toward hermetic elitism" (Goldstein). This elitist streak in occultism
culminated in the late 1880s and 1890s with the formation of occult societies
like the Order of the Golden Dawn.
The Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn was officially founded in 1888 when
it opened its first temple in London, which was coincidentally only two years
after the publication of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Ashley
40). The Golden Dawn "taught the theory and practice of ritual magic or
practical occultism without any of the hesitations and prevarications of the
Theosophical Society" (Owen 51). The Golden Dawn aimed to bring about
the "dawning of a new spiritually enlightened era" through "the study of the
intelligent forces behind Nature, the constitution of Man, and his relation to
God" (76). The Golden Dawn thus offered its teachings as an alternative to
both post-Darwinian science and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
In contrast with the less formally structured Theosophical Society, the
Golden Dawn promised education and mentoring in occult practices through
a tightly organized hierarchy with increasing knowledge and responsibility
at each subsequent level. "The purpose of the Golden Dawn," writes Mike
Ashley, "was to study the occult sciences, especially Hebrew magic and the
Kabbala" (110). In order to promote this occult knowledge, the leaders of the
Golden Dawn "established a succession of grades through which the student
could progress by study and examination" (110-11). Secrets were revealed
gradually rather than all at once to allow the initiate time to absorb the knowl
edge.
This scholarly, pseudo-scientific approach to occult knowledge should not
be thought unusual for the period. As Jarlath Killeen writes, "the occult, in all

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14 • Mark De Cicco

its bewildering complexity and variety of manifestations, was both a scientific

and a spiritual zone" (128). For many people, the occult was a final frontier
waiting to be understood. The light of science could shine there, but it must
be a new manifestation of science shaped by a "paradigm shift"—a situation
described by Killeen:

[when] the anomalies thrown up by [scientific] experimentation and obser

vation are too great to be accommodated; what happens then is a "paradigm
shift," as a new model, which seems to account better for the anomalies,
takes over. The new model is not necessarily more "true" than the old, it just
appears to account better for the anomalies. (126)

Occult beliefs—in mediums, seances, fairies, animal magnetism, etc.—

were the anomalies. Supposedly backed by irrefutable (though usually anec
dotal or circumstantial) evidence, these occult anomalies provided the basis
for a paradigm shift—and occult societies like the Golden Dawn came to fill in
the knowledge gaps where the Royal Society dared not tread. Given this rich
background, filled as it was with new ideas and deep metaphysical uncertainty,
"no major Victorian thinker or writer," states Killeen, "from the Brontes to
the Brownings, from Dickens to Darwin, was unconcerned about the occult"
(124). It should come as no surprise, then, that two of the writers of late
Gothic tales that I have selected to examine in this article were members of
the Order of the Golden Dawn.
Although late in life Machen denigrated the Golden Dawn as "pure fool
ishness" (Ashley 118), during the 1890s and early 1900s, both he and Black
wood were active members, eventually rising into mid-ranks of the hierarchy
(113). Close in age and "both self-confessed mystics" (Joshi, Weird Tale 88),
Machen and Blackwood met and became friends through the Golden Dawn
and their mutual acquaintance and Golden Dawn brother, W. B. Yeats. As
Blackwood's biographer Ashley notes, both Machen and Blackwood made
use of the results of their study of the occult in their fiction—Blackwood
particularly so in his John Silence stories (Ashley 114). And though later in
life Machen returned spiritually to his Anglo-Catholic roots (Joshi, Weird Tale
14), Blackwood, according to Punter and Byron, "is one of the few writers of
Gothic fiction actually to have believed in the supernatural: an early adher
ence to Buddhism is modified into an interest in the Order of the Golden
Dawn, and subsequently into a personal brand of mysticism which is intensi
fied rather than challenged by extensive reading in psychology" (90). Machen,
for his part, mixed his own early mysticism with an interest in "the opposite
of Darwinian evolution, the hypothesis that a primitive capacity for evil and
horror survives in us all and can, under the right circumstances, drive us to
commit the most dreadful of deeds" (146). Nowhere is this conception more

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 "More Than Human" • 15

evident than in Machen's 1894 novella "The Great God Pan."

Science and the Old Gods

Machen's "The Great God Pan" revolves around the aftermath of an expe
ment in occult science gone awry. The story opens with Dr. Raymon
brain specialist, and his friend, Clarke, discussing Raymond's recent resea
Raymond has made enormous strides in his understanding of brain physio
and is preparing to test his surgical theory through "a trifling rearrangem
of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attentio
ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred" (2). What Raymond hope
achieve through this surgical procedure is not to relieve a medical conditio
cure disease. Rather, it is a bold attempt (through a proxy subject) to es
the boundaries of the restrictive, normative world and allow open acces
the queer occult world inhabited by ancient gods and spirits (including t
Greco-Roman god Pan)—a world that is for Raymond the "real world." T
subject of his experiment is a young girl of seventeen named Mary, wh
Raymond states, "I rescued . . . from the gutter, and from almost starvat
when she was a child; I think her life is mine to use as I see fit" (4). She
willing subject in that she submits only out of her sense of obligation to
mond. Ironically, it is through compulsion that Raymond hopes to strip a
the trappings of restrictive normativity from his subject.
The results of this experiment are horrific, though successful in so
as it lifts the veil between the normative and non-normative occult world.
Mary sees Pan, and after a frightful-looking internal struggle, she becomes, in
Raymond's words, "a hopeless idiot" (7). In her transformation into a queer
societal outcast, Mary has been subjected to what Foucault terms in History
of Madness "antique images" that have "resurfaced" (358). Here, Foucauldian
"unreason" (358), embodied by the ancient, incomprehensible god Pan, comes
face to face with modern medical knowledge, and ultimately leads to madness
and death.
Nine months after the operation, Mary gives birth to a girl (whom Ray
mond names Helen), and subsequently Mary dies, never having regained her
senses after Raymond's operation. Helen is "the daughter of a human woman,
a nonhuman force, and experimental neurosurgery" (Hurley 191), and her
subsequent life follows a path as queer as her origins. As Punter summarizes,
Mary's "child, born of her union with Pan, proceeds to confront a series of
other people with visions of the horror which underlies the quiet surface of
life" (22). Helen, the queer Gothic body, exerts a profound, dangerous influ
ence on all those around her. Raymond, sensing this, sends her away to live
with a surrogate family. In her new surroundings, Helen uses her queer charms
to seduce first a small boy and then a young woman, whom she presents to her
father, the god Pan. The boy is permanently traumatized by the sight, while

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16 • Mark De Cicco

the young woman, in addition to losing her mind, shows signs of having been
raped (whether by Pan or Helen, or both, is unclear).
As a child of occult science, Helen thus becomes a queer force of non
normative sexuality and consequently is a mental and physical danger to all of
those around her. Aware that Clarke and others have attempted to track her
down, as Helen grows into adulthood she is forced to move and change her
identity frequently. Ultimately, Helen becomes a monstrous femme fatale who
wreaks havoc upon London high society, using her various identities to lure
straight, aristocratic men to queer suicidal deaths: "There was a horror in the
air, and men looked at one another's faces when they met, each wondering
whether the other was to be the victim of the [next] nameless tragedy ... no
man knew when or where the blow would next light" (34). Helen's power
comes from her ability simultaneously to defy the dominant male will and to
attract and repel male desire. She can perhaps best be understood through the
lens of Cohen's "Monster Culture." In Thesis VI, Cohen argues that because
the monster is linked to forbidden practices, it evokes "potent escapist fan
tasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all
the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint" (16-17). Like the
ladies who tempt Sir Bors in Arthurian legend, Helen is a demon "in lascivious
disguise" (19). Helen seduces her victims at the same time that she frightens
them. As Machen's amateur detective Austin states: "Every one who saw
[Helen] at the police court said she was at once the most beautiful woman
and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on. . . . She seems to have been
a sort of enigma" (20). Jack the Ripper terrorized London only a few years
before Machen wrote this story, and it would not be farfetched to hypothesize
that Machen had stories of the Ripper in mind when he wrote "The Great
God Pan." Glennis Byron suggests that Machen one-upped the real-life killer,
as Helen's crimes "seem to exceed even the 'East End Horrors'" of Jack the
Ripper (136). Jack the Ripper, too, is believed to have seduced some of his
victims before murdering them. Helen is essentially a female, aristocratic Jack
the Ripper-figure—a queer, refracted mirror image of both sexual attraction
and horror that undermines the normative structure of late Victorian London.
Dr. Raymond has, like Jekyll before him, overreached out of his desire to
confront the non-normative. In pursuing his occult research, Raymond has
torn away the buffer of civilization and unleashed ancient forces beyond his
control, which wreak havoc on the world until a sense of order can be rein
stated by two young aristocratic amateur detectives, Austin and Villiers. With
Clarke's assistance, Austin and Villiers follow a series of cryptic clues and
track Helen down, giving her the option of death by her own hand or by that
of the hangman. Helen chooses suicide, and subsequently, her body is turned
over to Dr. Matheson (interestingly, another man of science) for examination.
The fragmentary structure of Machen's novella leaves many details to

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 "More Than Human" • 17

the imagination, but according to a letter from Dr. Matheson, it appears that
immediately after her (compelled) suicide, Helen's Gothic body is subjected to
medical examination. In other words, Dr. Matheson (with Clarke and Villiers
in attendance) endeavors to impose "civilized" normativity on Helen through
a "straight" scientific procedure—this effort to anatomize and rationalize her
difference is an attempt to discipline its extremity.
But unlike the normative body of her mother Mary, Helen's queer Gothic
body (born as it is to a human mother and a supernatural father) resists this
procedure, undergoing a monstrous transformation before the eyes of the
straight men of science. As Dr. Matheson describes in his fragmentary manu
script, "The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm
structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and per
manent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve. . . . For here there was some
internal force, of which I knew nothing, that caused dissolution and change"
(46). This fascinating description highlights the essential queerness of Helen's
Gothic body, as it resists all limitations of size, shape, and sex. It is a body
beyond evolution, beyond structure, and beyond time. As Susan Navarette
notes, "the protoplasm into which Helen's outward form eventually melts is
the sublimely abject substance—indefinite, unstable, amorphous—and thus
betrays its origins" in the union of an ancient, supernatural god and a human
woman, made possible by the intervention of occult science (190). This repul
sive queer protoplasm is the very essence of unrestrained life—the source of
much of Machen's horror.
Machen's text repeatedly breaks down in the middle of the description
ot Helen's queer shifting body, as though her remains are too queer for the
straight Dr. Matheson to comprehend, or for language to describe and ade
quately record in a scientific manuscript. As Navarette writes, "Helen's body
becomes the quintessential site of Gothic horrors" for audiences at the time
who, immersed in evolutionary debates, would have been especially disturbed
by the idea that the human body could be encroached by the "frontier of a
brute kingdom" (190). Dr. Raymond and Dr. Matheson, like Dr. Jekyll, have
failed properly to prepare themselves, or society, for the queer irruption of a
monstrous Other that throws into question the very nature of humanity, and
defies all attempts to pin down human agency. Raymond's experiment leads
only to existential chaos, madness, and death, and stands as a dire warning
against dabbling with forces beyond the pale of normative knowledge and sci
ence.

John Silence, Queer Occult Savior

Given the failed experiments of Dr. Raymond and Dr. Je
excused for thinking that writers of late Victorian and
fiction believed that occult knowledge led only to dan
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18 • Mark De Cicco

Blackwood's John Silence is a figure representative of a different trend in the

period's Gothic fiction. He is a queer occult savior, a man who has carefully
and painstakingly prepared himself to deal with the occult, and as such is able
to help others who are struggling with queer, unknown forces.
Silence is a self-described psychic detective. Unlike his more famous con
temporary, Sherlock Holmes, Silence's cases always deal with the supernatu
ral. As Ashley states, "the character of John Silence was not the first occult
detective in fiction. The idea of a specialist investigator of the occult had been
developing in Victorian fiction since ... as far back as 1833" (135). Some of
Silence's predecessors include Sheridan Le Fanu's Dr. Martin Hesselius, and
E. and H. Heron's ghost hunter Flaxman Low (135), as well as Stoker's Van
Helsing (Joshi, Introduction vi). However, Blackwood's John Silence differs
from these predecessors in that he is not merely sensitive to, or knowledgeable
about, the supernatural; rather, he is the first of these psychic detectives actu
ally to have supernatural abilities.
Interestingly, Blackwood dedicates the 1908 John Silence collection "To M.
L. W. The Original of John Silence and My Companion in Many Adventures."
Was there a real John Silence wandering around Edwardian London, investi
gating supernatural phenomena? Ashley gives many possible identities of the
mysterious "M. L. W.," but I think the most intriguing conjecture is the pos
sibility that the "real" John Silence was a fellow member of an occult splinter
group that Blackwood, Machen, and others formed after growing dissatisfied
with the Golden Dawn (Joshi, Introduction viii). We may never know the
identity of the "real" John Silence; nevertheless, from a reader's standpoint,
the dedication of the work is certainly eye-catching and makes one pause and
wonder if what you are about to read is fact, fiction, or some queer ground in
between. The end effect is that before the reader even gets to the first page
of John Silence, Physician Extraordinary, expectations are blurred and interest is
piqued.
Blackwood delves into the history and background of the fictional charac
ter Silence in only one of the stories, "A Psychical Invasion." There are other
hints and clues to Silence's past scattered around other stories, but this tale
contains his most vivid portrait (Ashley 131). By examining Blackwood's por
trayal of his detective in this seminal story, as well as some further examples
of Silence's adventures, I hope to show that Silence, while taking similar risks
to our other occult scientists, manages to make use of occult science to har
ness queer, supernatural forces and to ultimately bring balance to a world that
threatens to fall out of sync because of phenomena like the queer, "psychical
invasion" from which the first Silence story takes its title.
One of the first things that we learn about Silence is that he has a deep
interest in humanity:

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 "More Than Human" • 19

By his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was rich
by accident, and by choice—a doctor. That a man of independent means
should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who could not pay,
passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility of a soul whose first
desire was to help those who could not help themselves, puzzled them. (1-2)

Silence's nobility of character is in keeping with his portrayal as a gentleman

scholar. As a doctor, Silence has had a traditional education. But he has also
chosen to deal with other, occult forms of knowledge: "for the cases that espe
cially appeal to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible,
elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions. ... It was
beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the 'Psychic
Doctor'" (2). In order to fulfill his chosen profession, Silence must furthermore
undergo an alternative, queer education that is as obscure as the cases which
attract him:

In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted him
self to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual.
What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no one seemed
to know ... It had involved a total disappearance from the world for five
years ... his singular practice . . . spoke much for the seriousness of his
strange quest and also for the genuineness of his attainments. (2)

Silence's interest in the "peculiar" and the "singular," his "severe training" and
"genuineness," mark him as both an acolyte of the unusual as well as a man
seriously devoted to his queer profession. It is thus that Silence's mysterious
and unorthodox, yet thorough, training in the occult acts as a queer inocula
tion against the harmful effects of supernatural occult forces.
In the story "A Psychical Invasion," Silence comes to the aid of Mr.
Pender, a once-successful writer of comic stories who has, since moving house,
been haunted by a queer influence that has gradually taken possession of his
being. The haunting begins after Pender's first experimentation with hash
ish in his new home. From that point on, Pender becomes susceptible to the
"psychical invasion" of demonic forces. Initially, this is manifested in Pender's
creative output—his writings and sketches. Where he was once a popular
humorist, everything that he writes or draws now is twisted in some queer way,
and is reminiscent of a Jekyll/Hyde duality. When reading over something he
had written while under this queer invasive influence, Pender is amazed:

It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could remem
ber, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The sense was so
altered.... [OJnly curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted. Dreadful

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20 • Mark De Cicco

innuendos had managed to creep into the phrases. There was laughter of a
kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing. (15)

The same effect is achieved in Pender's sketches, which become '"nothing

but.. . lines and blots and wriggles" (17). Ultimately, the queer forces at work
here alter Pender's notion of temporality and sensation: "Each step seemed to
take five minutes" (11), and "I experienced a curious changing of the senses,
so that I perceived external things through one large main sense-channe
instead of through the five divisions .... I tell you that I heard sights and saw
sounds" (16). Pender is becoming abnormal—a queer Gothic body interacting
with occult powers.
Silence's diagnosis fascinatingly mingles straight science with occult
beliefs: "the hashish has partially opened another world to you by increasing
your rate of psychical vibration, and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive.
Ancient forces attached to this house have attacked you" (14). As a cure,
Silence decides to confront these forces himself, explaining to the frightened
Pender "my studies and training have taken me far outside these orthodox
[ideas], and I have made experiments that I could scarcely speak to you
about in language that would be intelligible to you" (19). Silence stays in the
house accompanied only by a cat and a dog, for he believes that animals are
"more often, and more truly, clairvoyant than human beings" (22). Silence
then explains the concept of "animal clairvoyance," an occult belief that he
describes in almost scientific terms.
With the animals acting as his early warning system, Silence defeats this
"psychical invasion" by stepping between the queer attacker and Pender,
"deflecting its course upon himself' (39). And yet Silence can only do thi
successfully because of his queer training and ability to absorb the queer with
out being overwhelmed by it: "after passing through the purifying filter of his
own unselfishness these energies could only add to his store of experience, of
knowledge, and therefore of power" (39). Though "the struggle was severe"
(39), Silence ultimately triumphs and restores the balance between the nor
mative and the non-normative.
John Silence is a hybrid being—knowledgeable in both traditional scien
tific and occult learning. He is also a savior, a last resort for abnormal beings
that seek normative lives. In another story, "The Camp of the Dog," Silence
helps Peter Sangree, who (unbeknownst even to himself) transforms into a
werewolf at night because of his unrequited desire for Joan Maloney, who
is herself a reincarnated soul. Silence helps to bring the man/werewolf and
woman together into a heteronormative relationship, thus curing Sangree's
case of lycanthropy. In "A Victim of Higher Space," Silence comes to the re
cue of Mr. Mudge, who is constantly fading into the fourth dimension. In thi
queer "higher space," Mudge loses all sense of three dimensional space an
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 "More Than Human" • 21

normative temporality. Silence instructs Mudge in occult techniques that help

to ground him in the normative third dimension—in effect providing Mudge
with a queer inoculation against his own queer disease.
Silence's own abnormality thus makes him capable of using occult sci
ence to enforce heteronormative order. But he also differs from Jekyll and
Raymond on a more basic level. Silence is often described as "unselfish" and
sympathetic. He is "at heart a genuine philanthropist" (2), interested in help
ing others. Jekyll and Raymond, on the other hand, are primarily interested
in their own ends, and the world suffers for it. Indeed, had Jekyll or Raymond
been able to come to Silence for help, perhaps their stories would have ended
differently. Silence stands on the opposite end of the spectrum from these
more tragic characters, as psychical doctor, occult scientist, and queer savior.

Conclusion: Towards a Queer Future

Hobsbawm has compared the Zeitgeist of the late Victorian and Edwardian
period to the feeling one might have on a train headed to an unknown dest
nation through an unfamiliar landscape (244). Irrational occult science, as it
manifested itself in both cultural movements and in literature, was an attemp
by the travelers on this train to orient themselves in the Ahmedian sense—t
find a point of stability that reconciled the conflicting human need for th
irrational with the desire for rationality. This was an attempt to make sense
an unknown future by redefining it on one's own terms.
As physically embodied by characters like John Silence, irrational occul
science is an attempt to "straighten" the occult to the statutes of one of Puar
homonormative ideologies. This immensely difficult task results in new quee
humans (such as Hyde or Helen) or queer states of human being (such
Helen's final moment of transformation, or Jekyll's increasingly unstable an
uncontrollable transformations) that draw on both materialist science and th
irrational occult to exist. This hybridized, homonormative occult science acts
as a pathway that promises power but threatens madness. All who will pass
along this path to power must run a gauntlet of madness. In Gothic literatur
this gauntlet has taken many different forms; in the works of Stevenson,
Machen, and Blackwood, the human body itself becomes a pathway and bar
rier to occult knowledge, and is simultaneously the site of the struggle with
madness and death.
Significantly, the queer occult scientist approaches the quest for occult
knowledge as an extension (or perhaps colonization) on the part of rational
thought into non-normative space. This invasion into non-normative space is
destabilizing and threatens to alienate the occult scientist from the normative
world. However, this sort of experimentation often goes awry and brings him
to the edge of the abyss of madness. Whether he falls into the abyss depends
on his skill, his devotion to his mission, and his understanding of the queer
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22 • Mark De Cicco

or abnormal that is alloyed with his heteronormative drives. If he survives

this hybridization, he becomes more than human: more powerful than he ever
could have imagined (much like John Silence). But if he fails, the occult sci
entist becomes akin to Foucault's leper—rejected and haunting the margins of
society, and doomed to be held responsible for the queer monster that he has
unleashed on the normative world.

Notes
1. Indeed, Stevenson is reported to have "recorded his own subjective states dur
ing fevers" for theorists at the Society for Psychical Research (Luckhurst xix).
2. Robert Mighall defines scientific materialism as "the mechanistic, rationalistic,
and secular approach to natural phenomena which emerged with the scientific revo
lution and the Enlightenment, and which sought to conquer such irrational supersti
tions as belief in witches, demons, and vampires" (274).

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Abstract
In this article, I aim to show how a societal desire for the irrational at the fin
de-siecle, embedded in popular occult movements like the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn, was also explored in contemporary literature of the Gothic
and the supernatural. I study the fictional occult explorer in Robert Louis
Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Arthur Machen's
"The Great God Pan," and Algernon Blackwood's John Silence stories. Each of
these works deals with the struggle of an intellectual or man of science who
attempts to use science to normalize or to "straighten" a queer, monstrously
abnormal occult. The success of the attempt to come to terms with the queer
or abnormal, as well as the explorer's survival, depends upon his ability to
"queer" himself and/or his subject in preparation for the encounter with the
occult Other.

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

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