Events

1916 saw the publication of Hereward Carrington’s Zenobia: A Dream of Ancient Egypt: A Psychic Drama in Seven Scenes, a work which does not appear to have ever been performed. Carrington was an American Spiritualist, psychical researcher and stage magician, and his little-known play draws upon the conventions of Victorian mummy fiction and contemporaneous occultism, from Spiritualism to the rites of esoteric groups such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This talk uses Zenobia as a starting point for a wider consideration of the occult theatre of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Golden Dawn magicians MacGregor and Moina Mathers' Rites of Isis (performed in Paris in 1900), with reference, too, to ancient Egyptian supernaturalism as depicted in popular fiction of the time. Ultimately, this talk reveals the blending of various systems of belief when it came to the imagination of the ancient Egyptian supernatural on the fin-de-siècle stage, enhanced by the multisensory possibilities – the smoke and mirrors – that theatre technologies promised.  

Dr Eleanor Dobson is Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt (UCL Press, 2022), and the editor of Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt (Manchester University Press, 2020).