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...them in weekly numbers, till government, perfectly aware of the tendency of these inflammatory means, prudently transferred the prince of prophets to a mad-house.
(William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (1))
Infidelity is served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination; in a fable, a tale, a novel, a poem; in interspersed and broken hints; remote and oblique surmises.... in a word, in any form, rather than the fight one, that of a professed and regular disquisition.
(William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (2))
ONE OF THE MOST SUBVERSIVE MOMENTS IN WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR'S Gebir occurs in book six when Tamar, a poor shepherd and Gebir's brother, falls madly in love with an Egyptian nymph who takes him on a magical flight over Europe. In the middle of this episode, Landor inserts a provocative vision about the coming of an egalitarian social utopia: passing over the island of Corsica, the nymph prophetically announces the fall of all tyrannical monarchs--which includes the tragic lovers of this tale, Gebir, the King of Spain, and Charoba, the Queen of Egypt--and the coming of "A mortal man above all mortal men" who will usher in a Golden Age of justice that spreads from Europe to the East (6: 193). Based on Landor's footnote to the 1803 edition of Gebir, it is safe to presume that this passage was largely intended as an allegory on Napoleon and the French Republic (Corsica being Napoleon's birthplace), in which case Napoleon acquires a messianic status as the redeemer of world history. (3) What is perplexing about this use of political allegory is the context in which it is articulated rather than its subversive content; the principles of the French Revolution are placed in the mouth of an Egyptian nymph, who in this poem (and in the mind of late eighteenth-century readers) is a symbolic figure of hermetic magic and enthusiastic prophecy.
The main plot of Landor's oriental tale derives from a medieval, Arabic-Islamic genre rooted in hermeticism. Published in 1672, the English translation of Murtada ibn al-Khafif's The Egyptian History contains a section on the romance of Gebir and Charoba that Landor knew via Clara Reeve's work. In the 1803 preface to Gebir, Landor admits to having borrowed the plot of Gebir from Reeve's oriental tale, "The History of Charoba," which contains a retelling of Murtada's romance located in the last section of The Progress of Romance (1785) (Gebir 343). Not much is known about the life and works of Murtada ibn al-Khafif, except that he was an Islamic historian from Cairo who lived between 1154 or 55 and 1237. His only known book, The Egyptian History, survives in the French and English translations. The original Arabic manuscript cannot be located. (4) His stories and epics promote a syncretic account of "Universal History": a medieval Islamic tradition of writing history that relies on the genre of the romance narrative in order to tie together the mythic pasts of the preadamites and the descendants of Noah with the rise of Mohammed in the early seventh century. Egyptian historians such as Murtada promoted this form of "Islamic Humanism," and like Landor, looked toward ancient, pre-Islamic Egypt as the home of hermetic wisdom and esoteric science. (5)
By borrowing from this Islamic-hermetic tradition, Landor's Gebir shares a close affinity to the anticlerical historiographies written by radical Protestants and hermetic philosophers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Paolo Rossi has documented in The Dark Abyss of Time, any discussion of the biblical chronology was a politically vexed affair between orthodox Christians and heterodox freethinkers. Since the early seventeenth century, Anglican clergymen were bent on defending two claims against the onslaught of infidelity: that the Mosaic account spoke about the history of all humankind, not simply about one people among others, the Hebrews, and that Divine revelation cannot possibly predate the Mosaic account. Otherwise, the Bible loses its privileged authority in relation to paganism, Judaism, and Mahometanism. (6) Radical hermetic thinkers, along with mystics and Quakers, not only refuted these two claims, but deployed a broad interpretation of the "Light" of Christian history in order to demonstrate that the church was responsible for having corrupted the pristine prophetic tradition. In most cases, this pure mystical light of primitive Christianity was construed as the embodiment of an anticlerical monotheism that originated from Hermes Trismegistos' teachings and was then passed down to Noah, Moses, Christ, and Mohammed. (7)
Certainly, the Landor of the early Victorian period was very explicit about the need to reform the Church of England. In Letters of a Conservative (1836), he follows Milton's line of argument in claiming "that the union of Church and State is injurious not only to civil liberty but to pure religion." (8) By ironically styling himself as a "conservative," Landor espouses a radical politics that conserves the true Apostolic Christianity from the theological mystification of nineteenth-century priestcraft. This type of "conservative" politics was beyond the pale of the two-party ideology of Whigs and Tories. Indeed, Dr. Samuel Parr and other Foxite Whigs had a difficult time coming to terms with Landor's harsh opinions when they asked him to write speeches, newspaper articles, and political pamphlets; apparently, Landor was politically useful when writing diatribes against the Tories but was looked down upon when his writing deviated from Whig party principles (Elwin 74-76, 284, 325). In other words, Parr and the Foxite Whigs were seeking parliamentary reform, whereas Landor was calling for the radical reform of Church and State. This "conservative" politics may explain why his Whig political career was cut short, and why his interest in primitive Christianity bears a closer resemblance to the radical polemics of the 1640s than to the Whig reformist politics of the post-1688 era.
Given Landor's affiliation with early radical Protestantism, this essay argues that the political significance of esoteric and oriental motifs in Gebir needs to be reconsidered in relation to the genre of the oriental tale. By the late eighteenth century, orthodox writers read obscure tales about the East as a sign of infidelity. In the epigraphs, William Paley and William Hamilton Reid imagined that prophetic oriental fables such as Gebir--a poem of "interspersed and broken hints ... [and] remote and oblique surmises"-are "inflammatory means" of fomenting a revolution against the British empire. The indirect language of tales and fables is a site of ideological resistance, particularly in the case of the genre of the oriental tale. (9) And yet many literary critics have insisted that Gebir, a quintessential oriental tale of the Romantic period, ultimately falls prey to the imperialist will to power that it originally sought to counter. In his book, Nigel Leask reads Landor's tale as the fall of the old mercantilism (Gebir's colonizing mission) and the rise of the new free trade empire (Napoleon's redemptive freedom), assuming that the genre of the oriental tale is a transparent medium for conveying these political views. (10) Side-stepping the heterodox views that inform Gebir, Man Richardson reads this tale as a celebration of Western (Christian) Europe at the expense of Eastern inferiority: Landor "shortcircuits" his own anti-colonial rhetoric "through continuing to rely ... on colonialist figures of savagery, primitivism, and the primacy of the West." (11) Against these postcolonial interpretations, I argue that because Gebir is based on a thirteenth-century Arabian romance that celebrates a hermetic-Islamic account of Mosaic history, Landor's oriental tale embodies a radical hermetic critique of Anglican-British imperialism.
But why does he extract the Gebir-Charoba romance plot from an obscure Arabian book that aligns the Mosaic account with both the mythical history of ancient Egyptian hermeticism and the tradition of Islamic prophecy? I will argue that the answer to this question lies in what Norman O. Brown calls "The Prophetic Tradition," within which Islam, far from being a "backward" or "derivative" religion, is seen as an integral part of Judeo-Christian history--serving as the first "Protestant Reformation" to replace the corrupt "Roman Law" of orthodox Christianity with the original egalitarianism of Mosaic Law. (12) This anticlerical and oppositional prophetic tradition, I argue, emerges in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century radical interpretations of hermetic history, or the ancient wisdom of the prisca sapientia. This mystical knowledge was buried in Arabic-Islamic texts that were circulating among Rosicrucians, alchemists, and Quakers in Restoration London's underground world. In aligning Landor's writings with this mystical strand of radical Protestantism, I want to revise two Saidean assumptions commonly held in regards to the Romantic oriental tale: (i) oriental primitivism is always the site of sensationalized entertainment that exoticizes the East in the eyes of the West, (ii) and that as a result, the oriental tale cannot articulate a coherent anti-colonial rhetoric. To demonstrate these points, the first half of this essay will explore the hermetic context of the primary source for the Gebir-Charoba romance plot, the English translation of Murtada's Egyptian History, tracing the religious and political effects of a hermetic prophetic tradition in Landor's writings. In comparing Landor's unorthodox views to Thomas Paine's deistic interpretation of the bible, the second half argues that Landor's appeal to Islamic-hermetic humanism in the 1803 edition of Gebir is, in effect, an attempt to forge a revolutionary, anti-colonial politics.
The Arabian prisca sapientia
Landor's understanding of Arabian culture and literature is primarily filtered through a radical interpretation of the hermetic tradition. In his Poems from the Arabic and Persian (1800), the footnotes reveal that Landor read a large number of European works on Islamic religious practices and Arabian myths about Egyptian magic (Elwin 82). He claims to have learned about his Arabian and Persian poems from a French translation of a volume of oriental poems. This volume included a preface that he found compelling. Originally appended to Poetry by the Author of Gebir (1800) and later removed for its potentially treasonable contents, Landor's supposed translation of the "Extract from the French Preface" voices outspoken support for Napoleon's Egyptian campaign during 1798-99. Its subtext contains an implicit Masonic-Hermetic narrative that celebrates the search for the prisca sapientia, the pristine wisdom of the East:
No nation pursues with an equal alacrity the arts which embellish life. In the midst of a foreign, roused and resuscitated at the unextinguished beacons of a civil, war, while calamity constantly kept pace, and sometimes struggled with glory, her general meditated, and...
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