ABSTRACT
Since the rise of the novel as a popular literary form in the eighteenth century, fiction writers have utilized motifs from “the cultic milieu” (Campbell 1972), a parallel cultural stream opposed to both Christianity and the Enlightenment. The cultic milieu includes occult sciences (astrology, alchemy, and so on), esoteric fraternities, conspiracism, and other types of “rejected knowledge” (Webb 1974: 10). The social networks mediating these alternative discourses were secretive and often hostile to authority, both qualities that appealed to authors in the “gothic” and sensationalist modes. Gothic fictions emphasized the Mediterranean Roman Catholic world, including secret societies and exotic beliefs as plot devices (Nelson 2007). Thus, gothic novels featured esoteric motifs but reading them was not intended to lead to gnosis. In the nineteenth century esoteric novels were in vogue, the majority of which were indebted to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842), a “Rosicrucian” tale of the near-immortal adept Zanoni, his teacher Mejnour, neophyte Clarence Glyndon, and the beautiful opera singer Viola Pisani. Zanoni’s marriage to Viola and the birth of their child involves him forgoing immortality. Zanoni dies by the guillotine in Revolutionary France. Zanoni influenced writers as diverse as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who drew upon its encyclopedic occult lore in Isis Unveiled (1877), and Charles Dickens, who in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) made use of Bulwer-Lytton’s ending (Ferguson 2017: 430).
