Egyptian Souls in Victorian Minds: The Transmigration of the “Ka” in Egyptianising Fiction

The discovery of the Ancient Egyptian conception of the soul (“Ka” and “Ba”) is contemporaneous with a sense of disenchantment brought about by the scientific positivism which marks the second half of the nineteenth century. The idea of the transmigration of the soul offered fascinating possibilities for writers of Gothic fiction. Bram Stoker in The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), Henry Rider Haggard in “Smith and the Pharaohs” (1913) and Algernon Blackwood in The Wave (1916) imagined the devastating effects of the awakening of an Egyptian soul within a modern character. In these texts, the archaeological work undertaken by Egyptologists to excavate the buried past of Ancient Egypt soon becomes an archaeology of the modern psyche, a psyche haunted by the return of an archaic and imperial repressed.