Jill Galvan OCCULT NETWORKS

AND THE LEGACY

OF THE INDIAN
REBELLION IN BRAM
STOKER’S DRACULA

We have all come to know (and strangely love) the bloodsucking vampire
from Transylvania. But as a prelude to a statement of argument, I want to
point out three features of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, which
may be less well known. The first is that the novel only begins, in classic
Gothic style, in a foreign castle. Much of the plot actually takes place not in
Transylvania but in London, where Dracula travels to prey on its inhabitants,
threatening to feed on them and also to transform them into beings like him-
self. As the situation is summed up by Professor Abraham Van Helsing, the
leader of the small group of characters whose defense against the vampire
occupies the novel, Dracula wants to be the “father or furtherer of a new order
of beings.”1 Because in Van Helsing’s view Dracula comes to a major English
city with the set purpose of controlling the populace and assimilating them
into his own identity, Stoker’s novel has often been read as a frightening sym-
bolic rendering of British imperialism turned on its head, what Stephen Arata
calls “reverse colonization.” Arata leans on Dracula’s self-identification as a
warrior and invader with a long and proud lineage and on the vampire’s
homeland, in the Carpathian Mountains, as a site a Victorian audience would
have associated with centuries of violent foreign imperial conquest. By this

1
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; London: Penguin, 2003), 322. Further page references to this
text will be parenthetical.

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History of Religions 435

account, Dracula represents either a guilty projection of Britain’s own impe-

rial practices—empire as monstrosity—or, inversely, Britons’ anxieties about
racial and imperial decline in the last decades of the century, in light of popu-
lar theories of degeneration as well as of geopolitical developments such as
the scramble for Africa, debates about Irish Home Rule, and General Charles
Gordon’s death at Khartoum.2
The second fact to highlight is that for a novel about an ages-old vampire,
Dracula is surprisingly rife with new technologies, communications technol-
ogies in particular, such that communicative exchange is essential to Stoker’s
tale of vampiric aggression and counteraggression. The novel is saturated
with modern media: Kodak photography, the phonograph, and the typewriter
(all three of which had been invented only within the previous couple of dec-
ades), plus shorthand and the electric telegraph. These technologies are firmly
aligned with Van Helsing’s team; they use them to fight back the vampire, as
devices for tracking his movements and conveying this information to one
another. Importantly, however, the novel also depicts an alternate, sinister
version of their methods in the occult powers of Dracula himself. Like the
electric telegraph, the vampire can transmit his thoughts from afar and with
impressive speed. This power is closely tied to his proficiency in hypnosis:
Dracula subdues each of his victims by entrancing her (and his most signifi-
cant victims are indeed female) so as to command her, even at a distance, to
do his bidding. In the case of the novel’s heroine, Mina Harker—the only
female in Van Helsing’s team of vampire pursuers—Dracula’s attack estab-
lishes a telepathic line that runs potentially in both directions, allowing him
not only to control her psyche but also to read her thoughts and will, a remote
information link that is a more preternatural version of the telegraphic data
transfers of his foes.3 Essentially Dracula’s occult communications and the
Londoners’ technological ones are in direct conflict with one another: the first
is focused on spreading vampirism, the second on eradicating it and defending
British personhood.
Third, while we tend to think of Dracula’s ethnicity as simply Eastern
European, Stoker makes it continuous with the East or “Orient,” opposing it
to the West. At the novel’s outset, when Mina’s husband, Jonathan, is travel-

2
Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 107–32. Drawing on the fact of Stoker’s Irish background, Cannon Schmitt
emphasizes the metaphorical value for Anglo-Irish relations; see Alien Nation: Nineteenth-
Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1997), 135–55.
3
On the similarity between technological and vampiric methods in Stoker’s novel, see also Jen-
nifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” ELH 59 (1992): 467–93; and Laura
Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 180–219. Here I explore the intense political reso-
nances of the contrast between these methods, especially within an imperial framework.

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436 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

ing to Dracula’s castle, he describes a stark perception of “leaving the West

and entering the East” (7). The trains in this part of the world consistently run
late, which he takes as a mark of his movement away from the West: “after
rushing to the station at 7.30 I had to sit in the carriage more than an hour
before we began to move. It seems to me that the further East you go the more
unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?” (8). Later, when
Jonathan sees some locals on the side of the road, their odd dress leads him
again to categorize them ethnically: “They are very picturesque,” he writes,
“but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as
some old Oriental band of brigands” (9).4
In what follows I argue that Dracula, as the tale of an anti-British, occultly
communicative, and Oriental villain, owes a good part of its power to disturb
from associations with the 1857–58 Indian Rebellion, or rather with the lore
that had grown up around the Rebellion by the end of the nineteenth century.
Following the protracted uprising that began with the mutiny of Indian sol-
diers, or sepoys, and spread across northern areas of the country, authority
over India was transferred from the East India Company to the Crown in a
corrective administrative effort to safeguard the region. In a distortion befit-
ting the wild flights of Gothic romance, Dracula’s paranoid vision of inverted
imperialism recalls the event that, more so than any other in the nineteenth
century, brought home to the British public the vulnerability of empire.
Although the cultural relevance of the Rebellion may seem doubtful forty
years after its occurrence, in fact its imaginative resonance seems to have be-
come more, not less, strong by the time of Stoker’s writing. While each of the
three decades ensuing right after the event—the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s—
saw the publication of only a few novels based on the history of the Rebellion,
at least nineteen appeared in the 1890s alone.5 For Gautam Chakravarty, this
late Victorian explosion of “Mutiny” fiction attests to a period of New Imperi-
alism and to India’s particularly troubled status as both Crown jewel and a

4
On Dracula’s Oriental identity in relation to his “Occidentalist” reverse colonization of Brit-
ain, see Arata, Fictions of Loss, 121–26.
5
Critics agree on the abundance of Victorian “Mutiny” fictions, especially at the fin de siècle,
but disagree on the exact numbers. Nineteen is Gautam Chakravarty’s calculation for the 1890s,
and his is also the count for the preceding decades; The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5–6. Robert Druce suggests that twenty-one
novels appeared between 1893 and 1899 alone; “‘And to Think that Henrietta Guise Was in the
Hands of Such Human Demons!’: Ideologies of the Anglo-Indian Novel from 1859–1957,” in
Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. C. C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 17–34, at 18. Patrick Brantlinger estimates at least fifty total Mutiny
novels by 1900, while Christopher Herbert estimates around sixty; see Brantlinger, Rule of Dark-
ness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1988), 199; and Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 273.

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History of Religions 437

colonial holding with a profoundly insurgent past.6 As Chakravarty further

suggests, a significant strand of 1890s Mutiny fictions combines historiogra-
phy with the romance of the adventure tale. The premise of white righteous-
ness powers stories of heroism, counterinsurgency, and surveillance—all of
which approximate core elements in Stoker’s narrative of defense against the
vampire.
Indeed, Chakravarty could be describing Dracula when he notes that the
“story of counter-insurgency is garnished richly with demonstrations of ra-
cial, religious, national and technological superiority” and “close[s] with re-
conquest.”7 Notably, Stoker’s tale of imperiled British identity is, like certain
Mutiny novels’ thrilling stories of surveillance, a conflict centered on infor-
mation and information networks: the West’s technological prowess is tested
against the insidious occult exchanges of the East. In this aspect, Dracula is
haunted by tales, tied closely to the legacy of the Rebellion, of spiritually
exotic communication relays among the Indians, relays that in their efficacy
strangely rivaled even the most sophisticated of British technological meth-
ods. Significantly, the communicative rivalry as an actual rivalry, as opposed
to a rout by Western forces, is essential to the novel’s fearful suspense. That
is, even as Dracula conjures ideas of British heroism, it also gently discon-
certs them, pushing against the patina of Western superiority by insinuating
the unplumbed depths of Eastern mystical powers.
If Dracula recalls popular Rebellion stories, this is partly because those
stories already met the Gothic genre halfway in their nightmarish detail.
Documents both fictional and nonfictional underscored the siege of the British
at Cawnpore (Kanpur) and at the Lucknow Residency, with the Cawnpore
massacre commanding the most horrified attention. Numerous accounts told
of how rebel leader Nana Sahib went back on his assurances of safe river pas-
sage to a group of British, ordering their large-scale carnage. Especially chill-
ing was the image of some two hundred women and children imprisoned for
days at Cawnpore and finally butchered with swords and axes, and of their
numerous dead bodies stuffed into a nearby well. In 1897, the year Dracula
was published, Hilda Gregg’s “The Indian Mutiny in Fiction” in Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine attributed some of the recent “flood” of interest in the
Mutiny to the dramatic fodder in the “sufferings of women and children[,]
which roused England to madness.”8 While rebel brutalities were certainly
more than matched by the reprisals of the British—who forced Indians to
defile themselves religiously by licking the blood of fellow prisoners before

6
Chakravarty, Indian Mutiny, 3.
7
Ibid., 78.
8
Hilda Gregg, “The Indian Mutiny in Fiction,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 161 (1897):
218, 224.

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438 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

being hanged or shot them from the mouths of cannons, to take just two of the
most vivid examples—it was the tales of Indian deceit and slaughter that, by
century’s end, had transformed Nana Sahib into a diabolical villain in numer-
ous works of literature9 and that constituted the genre of historical novel Rob-
ert Druce calls, precisely, “Mutiny Gothic” (another element of which, the
sexual violation of British women, I will return to later).
That Dracula’s narrative of Oriental barbarity and female predation capi-
talizes on the late Victorian renaissance in Mutiny literature is insinuated in a
couple of curious plot touches. For one thing, while for much of the novel the
countervampiric force proceeds in (now) expected ways, fending Dracula off
with garlic and staking his minions through the heart, Jonathan Harker is
armed throughout with a kukri knife. In the final scene of the novel, it is this
weapon (along with an ally’s bowie knife) that finally dispatches the vampire.
The kukri knife is a famed weapon of the Gurkhas, an Indian people whose
soldiers stayed loyal to British forces during the Rebellion. Thus Jonathan’s
stab and the victory over Dracula are laden with the memory of that other des-
perate battle against an upstart anti-British menace on foreign soil.
Another telling moment surfaces in the conversation in which Professor
Van Helsing, a student of the occult, seeks to convince his skeptical friend Dr.
John Seward that there are things in this world mere science cannot explain.
Van Helsing runs through numerous phenomena, from hypnotism and thought
reading to 900-year-old Methusaleh and ancient tortoises, and then (in his dis-
tinctive Dutch idiom) offers this example: “Can you tell me how the Indian
fakir can make himself to die and have been buried, and his grave sealed . . .
and then the men come and take away the unbroken seal, and that there lie the
Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?”
(205). Van Helsing’s lesson is notable for the way it aligns the supposed magic
of the Indian fakir—in Victorian parlance, either a Muslim mendicant or
Hindu devotee—with vampiric behavior. For the description of the fakir’s
death defiance and mystical movements in and out of a sealed grave antici-
pates by only a few pages Seward’s realization that his beloved Lucy Wes-
tenra,10 who seemingly perished and was buried, has really been slipping out
nightly from her locked tomb, doing her duty as the latest recruit in the Un-
Dead army. Moreover, the novel’s mention of the fakir probably had a special
meaning in a culture primed on accounts of the Rebellion, since these histories
often accentuated this figure, along with other religious ascetics, as a primary
agent of sedition. The fakir’s wandering, enigmatic ways were supposedly a

9
Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 201–4.
10
The name, together with Dracula’s repeated targeting of England through its women, has
often been seen as significant to the novel’s depiction of an embattled West. See, e.g., Schmitt,
Alien Nation, 143.

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History of Religions 439

means for spreading dissent among the sepoys and across the Indian popu-
lace.11 Political suspicion of Indian holy men continued thenceforward
throughout the Raj.12
While Dracula’s nods to Indian culture are significant, I read them as
evocative pointers to a certain idea of the Orient, not as exclusive indexes of
pinpointed events in India. In other words, my argument is not that Dracula
directly allegorizes the Rebellion, but rather that Stoker’s creation of a blood-
thirsty, mysteriously powerful nemesis from the East takes steam from the
mythology that had emerged around that event by the fin de siècle.13 Dracula
is a romance—a fantasy—not a historical novel; thus it is not bound to record
facts realistically or faithfully. Yet it draws on those facts opportunistically to
produce a mood of terror, a mood that works by confirming the image that
readers already had about the Orient as a place of British victimization. To
call late Victorian readers’ memory of the Rebellion a mythology is to recog-
nize how much that memory had taken on the broad outlines and stock charac-
ters of Mutiny literature and chronicles. It is also to recognize that, as many
scholars have observed, Rebellion discourse was characterized to an unusual
degree by rumor and speculation—both during its unfolding among the Brit-
ish and among the Indians, and afterward, about what exactly happened and
why. Rebellion lore was itself quasi-fictional in its dependence on anecdote
and imagining, and these imaginings were sometimes extravagant and super-
naturalist, making India’s Victorian past all the more amenable to the fantastic
manipulations of a novel like Dracula.
Amid a general late Victorian renaissance of interest in the Rebellion, Sto-
ker may have particularly gravitated toward a vision of India as a politically
unstable region. Jimmie E. Cain Jr. persuasively reads Dracula as influenced
by British anti-Russian sentiment that had deepened from the time of the Cri-
mean War and focused around holdings in Central Asia. British Russophobia
intensified in 1869 when the Russians set up forts within offensive range of
Herat (Afghanistan), viewed as a strategic portal to India. This and other
moves toward India in Russia’s “Great Game” with Britain stimulated a

11
Salahuddin Malik, 1857: War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations? British Public
Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 87, 92, 135–36; Kim A. Wagner, The Great
Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang,
2010), 11.
12
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in
India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 316.
13
For many of Stoker’s first readers, further, the memory of the Rebellion circulating in the lit-
erature of the day would have been reinforced by contemporary developments in India. Soon after
Dracula’s release, war correspondents began reporting on Pathan uprisings at the northwest fron-
tier; these popular press accounts created an intense, nervous interest in the British public. See
Glenn R. Wilkinson, “Purple Prose and the Yellow Press: Imagined Spaces and the Military Expe-
dition to Tirah, 1897,” in Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, ed. David Finkel-
stein and Douglas M. Peers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 254–76.

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440 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

“wave of Russophobic literature” by the 1880s,14 and an important voice on

the issue was the Hungarian professor Arminius Vambery, alluded to in two
passages in Dracula, as Van Helsing’s “friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth Uni-
versity” (256; see also 321). Cain notes that scholars have disputed earlier
claims that Vambery—whom Stoker met and dined with in 1890 when
Vambery visited England, and whom he saw again two years later—supplied
Stoker with tales of Vlad the Impaler (and also that Stoker’s vampire is based
on that historical figure).15 But Cain suggests that Vambery inspired Dracula
in another way: an Orientalist and frequent traveler to Central Asia, Vambery
waged a vigorous British campaign in the 1880s and 1890s to publicize Rus-
sia’s threat to overtake India, and Stoker was one of many who seriously
heeded these ideas. Vambery was widely welcomed when he lectured in
England in 1885, and his The Coming Struggle for India, published in the
same year and advocating an aggressive British policy against Russia, became
an immediate best seller. Vambery leaned on what he saw as Russia’s lack of
civilizing influence: if India fell to the Russians, it would inevitably return to
the degenerate ways from which a beneficent British government had rescued
it. Stoker began Dracula the year he met Vambery, 1890, and resumed work
on it in 1892, the year he saw Vambery give a Russophobic speech Stoker
later noted he greatly admired. On these and other bases Cain tracks evidence
of Dracula’s equivalence with Russian antagonism—including the fact that
Castle Dracula lies in an area heavily associated with embattled Russian rela-
tions with Turkey and Britain, that the vampire arrives in England on a Rus-
sian ship, and that the heroes’ final pursuit maps almost exactly midcentury
British military movements advancing and withdrawing from the Crimea.16
Cain accentuates Dracula’s attitude toward Russia, but the logic of his
account can be extended: the novel’s Russophobia is complemented by a cer-
tain view of India. For Vambery, India was volatile and, without the right
imperial guidance, in grave danger of falling back into savagery. The British
had done much, as he claimed, to civilize the region, eliminating Thuggee
(the storied murder of travelers in homage to the Hindu goddess of destruc-
tion, Kali), and tempering the “hatred and fanaticism of the various sects and
creeds,” and stood the best chance of “wip[ing] out the superstitions and vices
of decaying Asia.” From the loss of British governance would follow either

14
Jimmie E. Cain Jr., Bram Stoker and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in
“Dracula” and “The Lady of the Shroud” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 79.
15
See, e.g., Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend; A Study of Bram Stoker’s
Gothic Masterpiece, rev. ed. (Brighton: Desert Island Books, 1993), 87–98; Barbara Belford,
Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of “Dracula” (New York: Knopf, 1996), 260; and Eliza-
beth Miller, ed., Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”: A Documentary Journey into Vampire Country and
the “Dracula” Phenomenon (New York: Pegasus, 2009), 212–17.
16
Cain, Bram Stoker and Russophobia, 121, 134, 146.

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History of Religions 441

brutal Russian tyranny or, if the Indians were left to their own devices, “rap-
ine, bloodshed, and murder.”17 Especially since Stoker’s family members
served at one time or another in India (his brother Richard as a physician, his
brother Tom as a civil servant, and his father-in-law as a military officer), it is
easy to imagine that Dracula’s picture of Eastern Europe would have been
multilateral and dynamic, comprehending notions of India’s potential recidi-
vism and its insecurity under British rule, notions already seemingly borne
out by the Rebellion.
It is also quite possible that Stoker had India in mind in delineating Dracu-
la’s powers due to its Victorian reputation for occult magic. In attempts to
trace Dracula’s origins, critics have often looked to Stoker’s reading and his
documented knowledge of folklore. These materials are undoubtedly telling
yet do not necessarily account for the ambient culture of Stoker’s time, speci-
fically for how his contemporaries commonly talked about and exoticized the
kind of hypnotic abilities Dracula exhibits. Throughout the Victorian period,
Britons were fascinated by mesmerism and hypnotism, readily associating
them with India. Western mesmerists looked to Asia as a place where latent
powers of mental and bodily control through trance had long been understood,
particularly by religious figures like fakirs and yogis.18 Consider again Van
Helsing’s allusion to the fakir. James Braid, the Scottish surgeon who first the-
orized hypnotism, interpreted the fakir’s capacity to survive being buried alive
to suspended animation through self-hypnosis.19 Moreover, India was a spe-
cial focus of such beliefs: as Peter Lamont and Crispin Bates observe, ideas of
Indian “juggling”—magic tricks like levitation and the rope trick, along with
other enigmatic feats linked to trance—became essential to Victorians’ “popu-
lar image” of the region and a “major influence in shaping the public image of
the mystic East.”20
Dracula’s unusual narrative structure—it shifts back and forth from one
character’s narrative testimony to another—has often been seen as modeled
on the work of novelist Wilkie Collins, not only by modern scholars but also
by Stoker’s own reviewers, for instance, this one from the Glasgow Herald:
“The reader is held with a spell similar to that of Wilkie Collins’s ‘Moon-
stone,’ and indeed in many ways the form of narrative by diaries and letters

17
Arminius Vambery, The Coming Struggle for India (London: Cassell, 1885), 180, 197, 203.
18
On the Indians’ perceived expertise on mesmerism, see Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The
Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 132; and
David T. Schmit, “The Mesmerists Inquire about ‘Oriental Mind Powers’: West Meets East in the
Search for the Universal Trance,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 46, no. 1
(2010): 1–26.
19
Peter Lamont and Crispin Bates, “Conjuring Images of India in Nineteenth-Century Britain,”
Social History 32, no. 3 (2007): 308–24, at 314.
20
Ibid., “Conjuring Images,” 311.

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442 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

and extracts from newspapers neatly fitted into each other recalls Wilkie Col-
lins’s style.”21 Intriguingly, Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) makes Indian
occultism a prominent element of the plot. An English estate is set astir when
three “strolling conjurers” or “jugglers,”22 really three Brahmins in disguise,
are witnessed mesmerizing an English boy in order to bring on a clairvoyant
trance that will reveal the whereabouts of the titular sacred gem. In 1799, a
prologue explains, the Moonstone was looted by the uncle of the novel’s hero-
ine during the British attack on the Indian town of Seringapatam. Forgoing
historical exposition, Collins presumes his readers’ knowledge of the attack
in Seringapatam, capital of Mysore: that it occurred in response to moves by
the ruler Tipu Sultan, known as the “Tiger of Mysore,” to fight off encroach-
ing British authority and that it ended with Tipu’s death. The Moonstone’s
Brahmins have traveled to England to restore the diamond to its rightful place
within a Hindu temple, ultimately murdering the Englishman who has it in his
possession to achieve this end. Published only about a decade after the Rebel-
lion, The Moonstone (1868) arguably incorporates this event—a landmark,
like the siege of Seringapatam, in the violent history of British rule in India
and of resistance to it—as a “master-narrative” or “open secret, unnamed yet
recognizable,” as Hyungji Park phrases it.23 In engaging with Collins’s text,
then, Stoker was also engaging with that history, together with Victorian
views of Indians as a magical and religiously devoted people.
Interestingly, by the end of the century, such views also intersected with
concepts of vampirism. India’s reputation as a mystic locale became even
more ingrained with the late Victorian rise of Theosophy, which sought secret
spiritual wisdom from Eastern masters and ancient Eastern lore, particularly
of India. In Isis Unveiled (1877), founding Theosophist Helena Petrovna Bla-
vatsky not only affirms Indian occultism—from the “jugglers” who submerge
their hands in hot coals for long durations to the “wonderful powers of predic-
tion and clairvoyance possessed by certain Brahmans,” powers “well known
to every European resident of India”24—but also discusses the vampire as a
rooted Indian belief and theorizes its possibility through Theosophical con-
cepts of astral projection. “The Hindus believe, as firmly as the Serbians or
Hungarians, in vampires,” she notes, and while the vampire is “repulsive,” the
cross-cultural belief in it suggests its validity and the value of understanding

21
Quoted in Miller, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”: A Documentary Journey, 263; see also 265 for
other reviews that make the comparison with Collins.
22
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16, 17.
23
Hungji Park, “‘The Story of Our Lives’: The Moonstone and the Indian Mutiny in All the
Year Round,” in Finkelstein and Peers, Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, 84–
109, at 96.
24
H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (1877; Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972),
1:446.

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History of Religions 443

it.25 Her own explanation points to the “state of half-death” that occurs when
a body dies but the “astral soul” has not fully dissociated from it, leaving the
soul to roam in search of vital nourishment for its corpse. “These spirits,” she
quotes another thinker on the subject, “have been often seen coming out from
the graveyard: they are known to have clung to their living neighbors, and
have sucked their blood.”26 The image of graveyard wandering may remind
us of Lucy Westenra in Dracula. Similarly, in “The Vampire” (1891), an
essay by Theosophical Society’s cofounder Henry Steel Olcott in the Theoso-
phist, the following passage prefigures descriptions of Lucy, especially the
now famous scene of her staking: “[The victims’] graves and those of the
alleged vampires were opened, the fresh and ruddy condition of the corpses of
the latter recognized, the spurting of fresh blood from them, and the cries or
other signs of momentarily revived physical vitality, when the pointed stake
or the executioner’s sword was driven through the heart.”27 Olcott—who at
one point reflects on the “yogi or fakir” who “can be resuscitated after inhu-
mation for several weeks”— reiterates Blavatsky’s interpretation of vampir-
ism as astral projection, linking it firmly to hypnotic trance. The corpse lies in
a “magnetic stupor” or state of “catalepsy,” while the astral projection roves
as a “somnambulating double”—terms that again suggest Lucy, here her
trance-like, lethargic/sleepwalking dual state after Dracula’s attack.28
Stoker’s social circle included men and women drawn to mystical move-
ments, like Oscar Wilde’s wife, Constance, who was first a Theosophist and
later a member of the Golden Dawn, and we know Stoker was invited to at
least one meeting of a bibliographical society to discuss occultism.29 How-
ever he may have gotten wind of them, it seems evident that Stoker was
attuned to the supernatural ideas of his day. He was certainly aware, for in-
stance, of psychical research, the late Victorian scientific investigation of hyp-
notism, spiritualism, and other preternatural phenomena;30 his working

25
Ibid., 449, 454.
26
Ibid., 452–53; emphasis in original.
27
H. S. Olcott, “The Vampire” (1891; Theosophical Publishing House Adyar, Madras, 2012),
http://www.theosophical.org/component/content/article/65-olcott/1870-vampire. Compare: “The
Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous blood-curdling speech came from the opened red lips.
The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions . . . the blood from the pierced heart
welled and spurted up around it” (Stoker, Dracula, 230).
28
Olcott, “The Vampire.”
29
Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography, 216–17; Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Leg-
end, 82.
30
Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 73–79. John L. Greenway reads Van Helsing as akin to psy-
chical researchers in his acknowledgment of occult possibilities discounted by dominant scientific
paradigms; “Seward’s Folly: Dracula as a Critique of ‘Normal Science,’” Stanford Literature
Review 3, no. 2 (1986): 213–30.

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444 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

papers for Dracula in fact feature the character of a psychical researcher.31

If he was familiar with Theosophical ideas of vampirism specifically, the
link between these and India might have been reinforced by his acquaintance
with Sir Richard Burton. In addition to translating the Arabian Nights (1885–
88)—alluded to at one point in Dracula [37])—Burton also published a col-
lection of translated vampire tales from Hindu legend, Vikram the Vampire
(1870); Stoker later noted that in the 1870s and 1880s he discussed legends
and myths with Burton.32
But perhaps even more important than the question of whether Stoker
encountered Indian-inflected ideas of vampirism is the fact that a certain tone
attached to Victorian ideas of Indian psychical powers in general and that this
tone lent itself to the Gothic. What Peter Lamont and Crispin Bates argue about
Indian juggling, David T. Schmit argues about Indian mesmerism: both unset-
tled conventional ideas of Western supremacy over an undeveloped East,
because both left Victorians uncertain about the real nature of the phenomena,
opening up the possibility of mysterious Indian capacities that Western thin-
kers, starting with animal magnetist Franz Anton Mesmer in the late eighteenth
century, were only just beginning to fathom. Even the juggler’s performance
inspired ambivalence, with observers divided about whether his conjuring
amounted simply to a cunning sleight of hand or rather to authentic mystical
powers. Here lay the seeds of mystery and horror for a novel like Dracula. Even
before the gloss of vampirism, Indian occultism was potentially frightening in
that it implied an unusual Western disadvantage—areas of ken and ability
arrayed against the West, in the form of occult acts of will and communication.
Not coincidentally, Mutiny novels’ tales of menace against British author-
ity often featured an India suffused with “supernatural acts of magic.”33 This
theme no doubt refers back to the trope of the psychically adept Indian, but it
was probably also an extrapolation from India’s religious exoticism, consid-
ered critical to the Rebellion. Victorian politicians and periodical writers
debated how pivotal the affair of the Meerut sepoys’ new Enfield rifle car-
tridges—greased with pork and cow fat, and thus forbidden to devout Hindus
as well as Muslims to bite off and activate—was to the mutiny, and the mutiny
to the overall uprising.34 But there was much consensus about the Indians’
incensing resentment of British challenges to their faith.35 In turn, the rebels’
“fanaticism” was seen as closely allied with their conspiratorial will. The
overall picture was one of Oriental mystery and secrecy involving pre-Rebel-

31
Christopher Frayling, “Bram Stoker’s Working Papers for Dracula,” in Miller, Bram Sto-
ker’s “Dracula,” 173.
32
Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend, 82.
33
Druce, “‘And to Think,’” 21.
34
Malik, 1857: War of Independence, 44–60.
35
Ibid., 45.

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History of Religions 445

lion plots of grand proportions. Britons were already predisposed to imagine

heathen Indian plots by accounts of the secret society of Kali-worshiping
Thugs.36 After the Rebellion, one of the most pervasive and long-standing
British interpretations of the uprising traced it back to a Muslim conspiracy,
in some versions of the theory aided by reluctant yet increasingly disgruntled
and thus malleable Hindus.37 Rebellion explanations also pinpointed possible
conspiratorial masterminds, including both Hindus and Muslims, such as
Nana Sahib and the Rani of Jhansi, both of whose anger was stoked by the
British denial of hereditary rights, and the Maulvi of Faizabad.38
The idea that the Rebellion was a sinister, large-scale jihad, and that the
British defense was thus a modern Crusade, colors many Rebellion accounts
of chivalric heroism and female distress,39 and Dracula correlates with this
discursive trend. In fact, the concept of a vast anti-Christian scheme—malign
in design and complete with efficient lines of point-to-point transmission—
constitutes the drama of Stoker’s novel, calls forth the masculine bravery of
its characters, and makes this a story of information warfare. After attacking
Mina, Dracula taunts his foes by perverting Genesis, calling her “flesh of my
flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while”
(306). Van Helsing’s armory includes crucifixes and holy wafers; once Mina
is tainted, the mere touch of the wafer burns her forehead. At the same time,
her predation invigorates her male allies with Christian gallantry, to “go out
as the old knights of the Cross” (341). As Van Helsing tells her, “And oh,
Madam Mina, my dear, my dear, may we who love you be there to see, when
that red scar, the sign of God’s knowledge of what has been, shall pass away
and leave your forehead as pure as the heart we know. . . . Till then we bear
our Cross, as His Son did in obedience to His will” (316). Dracula’s plan to
diffuse his demonic “religion” is systematic: he thoroughly researches Eng-
land’s language, culture, geography, and neighborhoods before traveling
there; he hires agents to purchase properties for housing his coffins, radiated
for convenience throughout London; and he uses English characters, like
Mina and the madman Renfield, as means to access and knowledge. These
efforts inspire an equally systematic response in Dracula’s pursuers, so that
the novel’s spiritual battle often concerns which side can build the more effec-
tive network of people and information.
This battle comes down largely to a competition between Western technol-
ogy and Oriental subtlety, and in this respect it recalls the Rebellion’s own

36
Wagner, Great Fear of 1857, 9–10.
37
See especially Malik, 1857: War of Independence.
38
Wagner, Great Fear of 1857, 3–4.
39
See Nancy Paxton, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial
Imagination, 1830–1947 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Park, “‘The Story
of Our Lives’”; and Chakravarty, Indian Mutiny, 68, 78, and 127–80 passim.

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446 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

perceived communicative dynamics. The realm of information was a busy

and complicated playing field during the Rebellion. On the one side, the Brit-
ish worked assiduously to block Indian movements of bodies and messages,
patrolling river passages, intercepting mails, and censoring propaganda in the
indigenous press.40 But as a means of proactive defense, the most crucial Brit-
ish weapon was the electric telegraph. In fact the telegraph had been defined
since the first wires went up in India, just a few years before the Rebellion, by
its potential military applications—as opposed to, as was true in England, its
commercial uses. When Governor-General Lord Dalhousie was determining
wire routes, his main goal was to figure out the most probable areas of local
unrest, as well as to enable the speediest transmissions from governing sta-
tions in the event of emergency. British telegraph planners thus had insurrec-
tion well in mind, and this proved fortunate once the sepoys mutinied. Imme-
diately the telegraph was used to call together troops from all over the region
and to keep an eye on the rebels’ movements. Additionally, British soldiers
used telegraphs in the field, carrying equipment between battlefronts. The
rebels themselves well understood this technology as an impediment and
repeatedly destroyed lines, which British forces then hastily reconstructed.
All in all, the telegraph was so pivotal that many professed that had it existed
earlier, Britain would never have lost America.41 The Rebellion accentuated
in other ways, too, how crucial electric telegraphy was to empire, afterward
inspiring a fevered mission to lay a successful submarine cable directly link-
ing India to Britain. In 1865 the two were at last connected, and a more work-
able and completely British-operated cable was established in 1870. By 1908,
several British-Indian lines ensured the government’s ability for strong tacti-
cal communication with the prized region.42
But while the telegraph proved a formidable defense during the Rebellion,
the British felt that their foes had possessed their own, more sly communica-
tive advantages based in arcane systems of knowledge. The most sensational
rumor to this effect was that the Indians had sent messages to each other by
way of native telepathic abilities, sometimes known as the “Hindu Secret
Mail.”43 As late as 1903, one Richard Kerr was still recalling that the rebels
had communicated with one another “in . . . occult ways that were harassing

40
Bayly, Empire and Information, 318–20.
41
On the telegraph during the Rebellion, see Saroj Ghose, “Commercial Needs and Military
Necessities: The Telegraph in India,” in Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Techni-
cal Transfers to India, 1700–1947, ed. Roy MacLeod and Deepak Kumar (New Delhi: Sage,
1995), 153–76.
42
Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism,
1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 99–105.
43
Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 158–
59.

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History of Religions 447

to the military authorities,” but whose “secret” nature was never fully “discov-
ered.”44 Kerr’s anecdote occurs in the context of his introduction to his popu-
lar manual on wireless telegraphy (first patented in England in 1896). For him
as for many during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the compari-
son between technological and occult communications was inescapable.45
As Kerr went on to observe, “It would seem that the Oriental methods of sig-
nalling without wires must rest entirely on a highly trained mental effort. . . .
It is quite possible that the Orientals give more attention to this kind of mental
training.”46
One way to view such stories of telepathy is to see them as Britons’ super-
naturalistic elaboration on the intimate, ominous Indian bazaar talk associated
with the Rebellion, or perhaps on the pre-Rebellion circulation of chapattis.47
For a period in 1857, Indian peasants were observed to be passing these native
flat breads from village to village; each recipient would make a few more,
which were then divided and passed along to other recipients, in an exponen-
tially growing process. While some British authorities interpreted the chapatti
hand-off as an Indian ritual of warding off disease stemming from a recent
cholera epidemic, it remained largely obscure, and once the Rebellion began,
it was interpreted retrospectively as part of the conspiratorial insurrectionist
plot.48 According to one official at Agra, the chapattis traveled with awesome,
one might almost say magical, quickness, as fast as 200 miles in twenty-four
hours, twice the rate of mail runners.49 In his recollections of the Rebellion,

44
Richard Kerr, Wireless Telegraphy, Popularly Explained (London: Seeley, 1903), 2.
45
Many recent studies have focused on these perceived parallels and overlaps between techno-
logical and paranormal (spiritualistic, mesmeric, and telepathic) communications. See, for exam-
ple, Richard Noakes, “‘Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits’: Technologizing the Bodies of Victo-
rian Spiritualism,” in Bodies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 125–63, and
“Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the
Other World,” British Journal of the History of Science 32 (1999): 421–59; Pamela Thurschwell,
Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001); Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy; and Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Femi-
nine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2010).
46
Kerr, Wireless Telegraphy, 6.
47
For this view of the telepathic reports, see Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy, 159 n. 43.
48
Wagner, Great Fear of 1857, 62–69.
49
Ibid., 8, 63. Aaron Worth also notes the sense of Rebellion-era battle of networks between
the British telegraph in opposition to the chappati circulation and other enigmatically quick trans-
missions (Aaron Worth, “All India Becoming Tranquil: Wiring the Raj,” Journal of Colonialism
and Colonial History 9, no. 1 [2008], at pars. 16–18, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/
journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v009/9.1worth.html). For him, the tele-
graph became a primary symbol of British linguistic and subjective mastery, whereas the Indians
and their communications were represented as prelinguistic materiality that helped to constitute
imperial subjectivity as such. This argument risks underestimating, though, the Gothic implica-
tions of the Rebellion’s perceived communications battle and of the states of British unknowing it
entailed.

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448 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Kerr recalls the legend about bread carrying secret messages alongside his
theories of Oriental mental signaling.50 The conveyance of the chapatti, or of
some other conspiratorial medium such as goatskin fragments, likewise be-
came a common feature of the plot of the Mutiny novel.51
In this context, the mention of the fakir in Dracula is even more freighted
than first appears. Put the legends of the Hindu Secret Mail and the chapattis
together with the image of the fakir as itinerant insurgent, and one sees how
significant the idea of occult (both hidden and vaguely mystical) circulations
and transmissions was to the perceptions of the Oriental that arose out of the
Rebellion. The discourse around the event is in fact preoccupied with the idea
of the occult network. We may be tempted to say that this is simply another
confirmation of British racist stereotypes: writers on the Rebellion could not
help but envision India as a site of primitive, irrational forms of exchange, in
implicit contrast with the modern ways of the West, as exemplified, for
instance, in the electric telegraph. Certainly up through the Edwardian period,
British popular discourse leaned on the notion of Indian technological back-
wardness and used this as a rationale for Western intervention.52 But as Roger
Luckhurst notes about the rumors of Indian telepathy, these likely worked not
to undergird a master discourse of Western control but in just the opposite
way, as signs of epistemic limitation: they were “paranoid” inventions born of
administrators’ incomplete knowledge of the communities and information
patterns of an imperial outpost.53 Luckhurst takes his cue from C. A. Bayly,
for whom Said-ian theories of Orientalism cannot account for midcentury
Anglo-Indians’ real ignorance of indigenous life, an ignorance that sometimes
bred imaginings of secret societies and communications, especially at critical
points like the Rebellion.54 We are back to the conception of Eastern occult-
ism as Western lack: as a mysterious reserve of wisdom that puts Britain at an
exceptional disadvantage.
The British associated the sudden 1857 uprising itself with a significant
lack of information.55 Conversely, they felt that Indians generally possessed
the power to communicate in ways that were, as the Victorian Rebellion histo-
rian John Kaye expressed it, “almost electric.”56 For all the eventual effective-

50
Kerr, Wireless Telegraphy, 2.
51
Druce, “‘And to Think,’” 21–22.
52
A. Martin Wainright, “Representing the Technology of the Raj in Britain’s Periodical Press,”
in Finkelstein and Peers, Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, 185–209.
53
Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy, 159. As he argues more broadly, supernatural accounts
from Britain’s colonial outposts were not easily dismissed as superstition, but rather more suscepti-
ble to Victorian belief than those from the imperial center (148–80).
54
Bayly, Empire and Information, 6–7, 142–43, 167–68, 396–70.
55
Ibid., 315.
56
Kaye quoted in Bayly, Empire and Information, 315.

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History of Religions 449

ness of the telegraph, initial British relays were intermittent, and at first offi-
cials possessed just enough intelligence to begin to stem further rebellious
activity.57 Throughout the conflict, they relied on information gleaned from
the Indians themselves, from spies and newsletters.58 Late Victorian Mutiny
literature picks up on the central, apprehensive role of intelligence and message
exchange. But remarkably, while some novels reflect an out-of-touch Anglo-
Indian administration, some, emphasizing adventure, create imperial informa-
tion protagonists. In a noteworthy transformation of historical events, the coun-
terinsurgent informant is cast not as Indian, but as Anglo-Indian: he or she has
the ability to travel disguised as Indian, or in some other manner to infiltrate
and know the rebel world. In this way these Mutiny fictions rewrite the Rebel-
lion so as to fantastically remedy actual British intelligence deficiencies.59
It was within this late Victorian zeitgeist shaped by a collective memory of
a vigorous conflict between Eastern and Western realms of information that
Dracula emerged. In effect, the Mutiny shadows Dracula as the historical
event that “proves” the Orient’s fantastic mental communicative powers and
their very real consequences: their role in mounting a challenge to British
imperial dominance. Even in its form or style, Stoker’s novel inspires compar-
ison with Rebellion accounts. Its opening several chapters, composed of Jona-
than Harker’s diary—beginning en route to Dracula’s castle and containing
notes on the dress, food, and mannerisms of local culture—may well have
reminded readers of the travelogue style of numerous midcentury memoirs of
the revolt, a style that would go on to permeate British novelistic representa-
tions of India.60 Like many memoirs and retrospective diaries of the Re-
bellion, too, Jonathan’s travel narrative tells a gripping first-person story of
captivity and escape, as he frees himself from Dracula’s castle.61
But Dracula’s form is even more important for the way it reveals the
novel’s extreme investment in information and in depicting warring orders
of information. The various narrative pieces—all linked together, dated, and
arranged in chronological order—are careful records derived from a range of
voices and media: Jonathan’s diary, his wife Mina’s diary (both originally
composed in shorthand), Dr. John Seward’s diary (originally recorded on a
phonograph), memoranda by Lucy and Van Helsing, and other sundry tele-
grams, letters, and newspaper clippings. These have been deliberately col-
lected as a corpus of anything and everything Van Helsing’s team know about
Dracula. That is, the records we as Stoker’s audience read have all been read

57
Ibid., 318.
58
Ibid., 323, 325–29.
59
Chakravarty, Indian Mutiny, 136–46, 156–69.
60
Ibid., 127–36; Druce, “‘And to Think,’” 20.
61
See Chakravarty, Indian Mutiny, 128, on the frequency of the captivity narratives in Rebel-
lion writings.

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450 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

by the characters themselves: at a certain point in the plot, they decide to pool
their information, type it up, collate it, and study it in order to strategize
against their foe. In its very structure, then, Dracula announces the premise
that stealthy Eastern malevolence must be combated through meticulous,
almost obsessive intelligence gathering. The protagonists’ document collec-
tion, like the revisionist spy histories in the Rebellion fictions, seeks to pre-
clude information fissures, portraying resistance to Oriental imperilment as
the possibility of complete knowledge.
Yet Stoker’s novel also subtly suggests the unrealistic nature of this project
in light of the elusive character of the Orient. In fact, the obsession of the vam-
pire pursuers’ intelligence operations already implies the massive power their
enemy himself possesses in the field of information and communicative net-
working. This brings me to one of the things I find particularly intriguing
about Dracula: that Jonathan’s comment about the slow trains in the East
ends up being something of a red herring. The novel does not follow through
with a simple binaristic mapping of the world that sees the West as technolog-
ically and scientifically progressive and the East as mired in crude practices
and systems of belief. Or more precisely, while much of the plot does confirm
such a binary—there is great symbolic significance, after all, not only in those
slow Eastern trains but in the Western communication technologies that popu-
late the novel—simultaneously it assumes that the Orient harbors true, alter-
native forms of knowledge and communication, in relation to which Occiden-
tals themselves sometimes occupy positions of ignorance and powerlessness.
It was just such a proposition that numerous Rebellion accounts had kept
within the public consciousness. Dracula profits by this consciousness, sus-
taining horror by intertwining its protagonists’ acts of information-system
heroism with intimations of their relative information-system weakness.
This unresolved dialectic becomes most obvious when we focus on Mina
Harker. As an aside, it bears noting that as the only female member in Van
Helsing’s band, Mina is already a main focus of Dracula’s inheritance of
Mutiny mythology, in that her character brings together its threads of occult-
ism and feminine distress; the novel weaves these into a thoroughly Gothic
picture. A key rumor spawned by the Rebellion was that countless European
women and girls were raped and tortured by Indian men, and these reports
became the cynosure of ideas of the rebels’ barbarity. Although soon denied
by Victorian chroniclers, this idea of widespread violation became a common
subtext in novels on India, and the Indian rapist of English women a newly
prominent discursive figure.62 In Dracula that figure becomes even more ter-

62
Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 65, 87. See also Paxton, Writing under the Raj, espe-
cially 109–36.

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History of Religions 451

rifying in being tinged with the Oriental’s presumed mesmeric talents. The
vampire’s trance targeting of British women—Mina as well as Lucy—recalls
the Mutiny rape narrative: physical violation is rewritten as psychical viola-
tion.63 The echo is all the more resonant given the obviously sexual nature of
Dracula’s predation (his hypnotic luring of Lucy out of her bedroom to meet
him nightly for bouts of bloodsucking is just one example of this eroticism).
In a highly sentimentalized scene, Mina, her eyes glistening “with the devo-
tion of a martyr” (309), vows to kill herself or to urge her allies to kill her
should she begin to prey vampirically on others and thus to fulfill her trajec-
tory toward defilement—the state of being “Unclean! Unclean!” in the eyes
of God (316). Even this moment suggests the gendered patterns of endangered
virtue in Mutiny narratives, namely, the character of the white woman who
courts suicide or death rather than surrender to the erotic attentions of her
Indian captors.64
But Mina is also central to Dracula in another way: as the most informa-
tion and media savvy of her group. Her first encounter with Van Helsing high-
lights her knowledge of state-of-the-art inscriptive methods when she hands
him two copies of her own diary—first the original in shorthand, then a typed
one. Having transcribed Jonathan’s diary as well, Mina later has the bright
idea of transcribing all the group’s diaries and correspondence for the pur-
poses of their pursuit. By her standard, not even Dr. Seward’s most private,
heartsick reflections about his beloved Lucy can be excluded from the record
because “it is a part of the terrible story . . . because in the struggle which we
have before us to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all the
knowledge and all the help which we can get” (237). Soon Mina is working
frenetically with her husband to sew “together in chronological order every
scrap of evidence” (240). Ultimately she becomes the group’s master secre-
tary, responsible for turning all shorthand, phonographic, telegraphic, and
other records into typescript and also for generating multiple copies for distri-

63
In fact this type of villain-victim dynamic—in which an Oriental master of mind control
entrances a young, nubile white woman, who thus becomes a mental slave in an exchange often
entailing sexual innuendo—was a recurrent one in Gothic stories of the 1880s and 1890s. I would
propose that the rise of Gothic plots of Oriental psychical violation itself owes its popularity to the
late Victorian legacy of Rebellion rape: such stories flourished in a culture familiar with dramatic
tales of shameful Indian malevolence. Some relevant novels here are Marie Corelli’s The Soul of
Lilith (1892), George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897).
Kalee’s Shrine (1886) by Grant Allen and May Cotes focuses on India specifically: the villain is
the Hindu goddess Kali, whom the novel closely associates with Thuggee. In the twist on the para-
digm in Stuart Cumberland’s A Fatal Affinity (1889), young women are serially murdered on their
twenty-first birthdays by an initiate into the Hindu dark arts who attacks in astral form. For more
on the entranced or “automatic” woman in such fictions, see Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium,
61–98.
64
See, e.g., Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 70–73, on the legend, popular despite challenge by
Victorian and later histories, of Miss Wheeler’s self-sacrifice.

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452 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

bution. When they travel to Transylvania in the last stages of the hunt, she
actually brings along her machine in order to “enter everything up to the
moment.” “I feel so grateful to the man who invented the ‘Traveller’s’ type-
writer,” she notes; “I should have felt quite astray doing the work if I had to
write with a pen” (372).
If the vampire hunters are a technological army, Mina is their main organizer
and word processor. But then this makes it all the more appalling that she even-
tually gets folded into Dracula’s own operations network. This ensues as a
result of the vampire’s painstaking manipulation of communicative possibilities
and nodal access points. In as clever a use of enemy resources as the rebel “con-
spiracy” leaders’ infiltration of the British army, Dracula has employed West-
ern lawyers to create a physical network around London, buying up houses in
which to “scatter” fifty coffins, his “ghastly refuges” brought over from Tran-
sylvania to serve as home bases (278). Once situated at Carfax, the old manor
next to Dr. Seward’s private insane asylum, Dracula makes a disciple of one of
the lunatics there, Renfield. Because this patient’s “zoophagous” mania drives
him to consume lives higher and higher up the food chain (80), he is the perfect
fanatic for Dracula’s purposes. “The blood is the life! The blood is the life!” he
exclaims, distorting the Bible as heinously as Dracula himself (152). Unable to
enter a household without being invited in, Dracula vampirically seduces Ren-
field to gain entrance to the asylum and access to Mina, who is staying there
during the hunt. “Fall down and worship me!” the Count commands, to which
Renfield—lured by his hypnotic sway and the promise of legions of animals to
feed upon—responds, “Come in, Lord and Master!” (298).
Once preyed upon, Mina becomes a problematic breach in her group’s
intelligence strategy, for Dracula’s assault establishes a treacherous through-
line between his psyche and hers. While she is able to continue working dili-
gently for his foes, some unconscious part of her—the part susceptible to
trance—remains in contact with him, potentially informing him of all she
knows about attempts to destroy him. The situation is serious enough that her
allies try for a while to keep her uninformed. Even Mina herself sees this
necessity, pleading with her husband, “Promise me that you will not tell me
anything of the plans formed for the campaign against the Count. Not by word
or, inference, or implication” (346). There is something especially significant
in the fact that the very center of the group’s intelligence operations ends up
compromised by Dracula. Mina’s position within two competing information
systems simultaneously is a testament to the pure furtiveness of the Oriental,
his ability to lodge himself squarely in the midst of and in spite of the most
sophisticated cultural forms. No Western command center can be invulnera-
ble under such circumstances.
It is not just that Dracula establishes a network right under British noses
but also that, finally, his communicative tactics seem swifter, craftier, and

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History of Religions 453

more expedient than his foes’. “When my brain says ‘Come!’ to you, you shall
cross land or sea to do my bidding” (307), he boasts when he attacks Mina.
His messages are immediate, as well as inescapably effectual, which she well
realizes: “I know that when the Count wills me I must go. I know that if he
tells me to come in secret, I must come by wile; by any device to hoodwink—
even Jonathan” (347–48). By contrast, his enemies are forced to rely on meth-
ods involving a potentially ruinous lag between word and deed, volition and
action. This limitation is emphasized in the last stages of the pursuit when
Dracula flees to his homeland. Based on their intelligence, Van Helsing’s
team, certain Dracula’s ship will land at Varna, makes plans to beat him there
while monitoring his journey’s progress via regular telegrams from their own
agents. But long after their arrival at Varna, one of these dispatches staggers
them by informing them that Dracula, who has tricked them, has landed at a
different port. What’s more, having managed to probe Mina’s mind, the vam-
pire has known their own location for days. In this face-off between telegra-
phy and telepathy, the former makes a pretty dilatory showing.
Notably, too, all those modern technologies Dracula’s foes use for record
keeping become much less operable once the group is on the move and also
once Dracula tightens his vise on Mina’s psyche. Seward, having left his
bulky machine back in England, nevertheless feels hampered by its absence:
“How I miss my phonograph! To write diary with a pen is irksome to me”
(356). Although Mina tugs along a “Traveller’s typewriter,” she seems (un-
surprisingly) to have dispensed with it by the time she and Van Helsing are
racing along in a horse-drawn carriage. Even her shorthand fails her for a
time, due to Dracula’s remote but powerful entrancement. “She sleeps and
sleeps and sleeps!” Van Helsing laments. “She make no entry into her little
diary, she who write so faithful at every pause. . . . as Madam Mina write not
in her stenography, I must, in my cumbrous old fashion, that so each of us
may not go unrecorded” (386). Seward’s and Van Helsing’s grumblings about
the discomforts of ordinary handwriting, like Mina’s homage to the man
behind the Traveller’s typewriter, suggest the group’s overdependence on
technological invention for beating the vampire, given the impracticability of
these apparatus in the eleventh hour. How reliable or impressive can these
technologies really be if they are of no help when Dracula’s pursuers need
them most, in the heat of the chase?
These cumulative technological deficiencies point in turn to a practical
ideological obstacle for the West’s defenders: their manifest overconfidence
in science’s ability to tamp down the Eastern threat. Even Van Helsing—who
is well versed in occult folklore and grows frustrated by his friend Dr. Sew-
ard’s dubious attitude about events defying institutional science—falls back
at times on the idea of the superior forces of Western empiricism. Like numer-
ous Rebellion accounts maintaining that Indians were a childish people unfit

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454 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

for complex mental effort, yet also granting them the ability to engender a mass
conspiracy,65 Van Helsing’s talk is full of contradictory claims of Dracula’s
great cleverness and of his taxonomically verifiable “child-brain.” And like a
Victorian readership that alternated between, on the one hand, perceptions of
Indians as primitive and superstitious and, on the other hand, credited legends
of Hindu entrancement and the Secret Mail, Dracula’s protagonists toggle
awkwardly between validating the limits set by scientific knowledge and allow-
ing for a more capacious sphere of unexpected magical events. The note of dis-
dain in Mina’s comment about the Roumanians who, entirely appropriately, it
would seem, cross themselves when they see her scarred forehead—“They are
very, very superstitious” (384)—emphasizes the epistemological muddle that
characterizes her allies’ procedure.66
In this way the novel strains against itself. And from this strain arise its hints
that, finally, Western scientific knowledge is no match for the Orient’s amaz-
ingly supple information networks. When in the hunt’s later stages Van Hel-
sing’s team are scrounging to relocate Dracula’s trail, Mina, their information
maven, proposes that Van Helsing hypnotize her: since she and Dracula are
unconsciously connected, entrancing her should reveal his whereabouts. The
group’s hypnotism of Mina is superficially similar to Dracula’s, amounting to a
form of telepathy. Yet in an important difference, it is clearly ratified by West-
ern science through the novel’s earlier mention of neurologist Jean-Martin
Charcot, whose hypnotic practices on hysterics at Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital
drew international attention in the late Victorian period. The skeptical Seward
dismisses most weird phenomena, yet he respects Charcot’s discoveries. “I sup-
pose now,” Van Helsing asks him, “you do not believe in corporeal transfer-
ence. No? Nor in [spirit] materialization. No? Nor in astral bodies? No? Nor in
the reading of thought? No? Nor in hypnotism”—but here Seward interrupts
him: “Charcot has proved that pretty well” (204). However, if contemporary
medicine underwrites Van Helsing’s hypnotic “passes,” this method is also
quite laborious, congruent with the cautious, behindhand nature of Western sci-
ence in such matters. The effort to entrance Mina makes Van Helsing actually
sweat. Jonathan can see “his forehead . . . covered with great beads of perspira-
tion” (332). It also entails a barrage of questions: “Where are you now?” “What
do you see?” “What do you hear?” “What else do you hear?” “What are you
doing?” (332–33). This stands in marked contrast to Dracula’s imperious, light-
ning-quick command of “Come!” which brings Mina across sea or land.
Further, once the Count has discovered his adversaries’ location at Varna,
their hypnotic results become less fluid and data rich, apparently because he

65
Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 203, 222.
66
For more on the novel’s push-and-pull between conventional science and alternative knowl-
edge paradigms, see Greenway, “Seward’s Folly.”

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History of Religions 455

has strategically blocked his connection with Mina. Van Helsing infers this
strategy but also gleefully reasserts Dracula’s child-brain and declares he can-
not pull it off: “his child-mind only saw so far. . . . He think, too, that as he cut
himself off from knowing your [Mina’s] mind, there can be no knowledge of
him to you; there is where he fail! That terrible baptism of blood which he
give you make you free to go to him in spirit, as you have as yet done” (364).
As the narrative very soon plays out, though, and in another testament to the
group’s overconfidence, their hypnotic yield is considerably diminished after
Dracula’s interference. Successive attempts to put Mina under take increas-
ingly “longer” and require even “more strenuous effort” (366), much to the
group’s “despair” (367), and Van Helsing must positively hound her before
she begins to answer. “Go on; Go on! Speak, I command you!” he hectors,
“agonized” by the whole experience (368).
The fact that in a last-ditch effort Dracula’s pursuers take a page from his
own playbook, resorting to psychical influence, underscores the gaps in their
own information network. Importantly, it is also reminiscent of the coming
together of Western and Eastern intelligence methods in two Mutiny novels
published shortly before Dracula. George Henty’s Rujub the Juggler (1893)
features many common elements of Rebellion accounts: a two-faced, machi-
nating Nana Sahib; hidden Indian networks of communication, including cir-
culating chappatis and fakirs “whispering tales” to rile up the sepoys;67 and a
heroine who chooses dramatic self-sacrifice, in this case rubbing acid on her
face to destroy her alluring beauty, rather than give up her honor in an Indian
prison. Like Mina’s holy-wafer scar, sign of her threatened impurity, Isobel’s
facial disfigurement fades once she is safely out of the heathen’s grip. Isobel
is rescued in standard chivalric fashion by the protagonist Bathurst, but this is
part of a long struggle to prove his bravery given his unmanning nervous reac-
tion to loud noises. Bathurst’s quest for masculinity is set against the novel’s
motif of tigers and tiger hunting, a popular sport among Anglo-Indians
and clearly the novel’s metaphor for Britons’ overcoming of beastly Indian
rebels.68 Bathurst’s first redeeming act of manhood occurs when, in a chance

67
George A. Henty, Rujub the Juggler (1893; repr., Chicago: Donohue, 1910), 4.
68
A sporting effort to rid some villages of a murderous tiger or “man-eater” preoccupies much
of the first part of the novel, and Nana Sahib and the rebels are compared to tigers (329, 379).
Mysore’s Tipu Sultan and other displaced Indian rulers had used tigers as icons of their power. By
the end of the nineteenth century, the sport of tiger hunting, with its intricate machinery of white
hunters and Indian servants and guides, had become a concentrated exercise of Anglo-Indian hier-
archical authority, “symboliz[ing] the triumph of culture over nature and of the colonist over the
colonized”; William K. Storey, “Big Cats and Imperialism: Lion and Tiger Hunting in Kenya and
Northern India, 1898–1930,” Journal of World History 2, no. 2 (1991): 149. See also Joseph Sra-
mek, “‘Face Him Like a Briton’: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial
India, 1800–1875,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 4 (2006): 659–80. It is probably more than coinci-
dence that Mina compares Dracula, once he leaves England, to a tiger who “leaves the village from
which he has been hunted” and that Van Helsing tells her, “your simile of the tiger is good. . . .

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456 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

jungle encounter, he whips to death a tiger attacking a girl, incurring the

immense gratitude of her father, the itinerant juggler Rujub. Once the mutiny
breaks out, Rujub repays his debt to Bathurst by aiding him in tracking rebel
activity and—in a scene that strikingly anticipates Van Helsing’s hypnosis of
Mina—by entrancing his daughter so that she becomes a psychical conduit
for keeping tabs on and communicating with the imprisoned Isobel.69
Henty’s novel imagines a reconciliation between the Rebellion’s culturally
opposed forms of information expertise. Bathurst is a civil servant who travels
among villages to interview locals and research documents; after the mutiny,
he turns these observational and data-sifting skills to gathering news about the
rebels, eventually exploiting his close familiarity with Indian culture to travel
among them in disguise. But when he incorporates Rujub into his news-gath-
ering mission, he does so believing that the juggler’s abilities are not only
authentic—not mere conjuring trickery—but also beyond his Western sphere
of knowledge. Rujub’s powers are “entirely unaccountable by any laws with
which we are acquainted,” Bathurst says; his trusted friend Dr. Wade agrees:
“I can quite believe that there are many natural laws of which at present we
are entirely ignorant. I believe the knowledge of them at one time existed, but
has been entirely lost, at any rate among Western peoples.”70 Rujub himself
affirms his powers to be increasingly rare “secrets of the ancient” world.71
Although he becomes a tool in antirebel endeavors, this development does not
translate, for either Bathurst or Dr. Wade as the voice of medical authority,
into scientific mastery over the mystic East.
However, a more complicated, tense meeting of Western and Eastern
networks occurs in Flora Annie Steel’s popular On the Face of the Waters
(1896). This Mutiny novel depicts British skepticism about Indian magic,
even as—almost contradictorily—it deepens the sense of Oriental mystery
and conflates it with the menace of the unknowable. Jim Douglas is a spy for
the British authorities who ends up in Delhi while the rebels hold the city and
stays to protect the novel’s heroine from their clutches. One of his information
and rescue allies is an Indian named Tiddu, yet the alliance is colored through-
out with the suggestion of potential treachery, due to both Tiddu’s base mer-
cenary motives and his preternatural cunning. On their first meeting, Douglas
is astonished to watch Tiddu transform himself with a mere twist of a cloth

Your maneater, as they of India call the tiger who has once tasted blood of the human, care no
more for the other prey, but prowl unceasing till he get him. This that we hunt from our village is a
tiger, too, a maneater, and he never cease to prowl” (341).
69
Worth also remarks the similarity of this plot development to Dracula’s (“All India Becoming
Tranquil,” n. 12).
70
Henty, Rujub the Juggler, 132.
71
Ibid., 336.

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History of Religions 457

into a demure woman with a “furtive, modest eye.”72 Like Dracula, who can
become a bat, a wolf, or mist at will, Tiddu is a shape-shifter: he is part of a
group of itinerant performers called the “Many-Faced Tribe.”73 Likewise his
acting companion assumes the figure of a mendicant poring over his beads.
Knowing the value of “forgetting Western prejudices occasionally in dealing
with the East,” Douglas pays Tiddu to teach him this extraordinary art of dis-
guise for espionage purposes,74 yet he resists Tiddu’s claim that this art comes
down to entrancing others to see what one wants them to see. In what could
almost be a rehearsal of the scene in Dracula wherein Seward refuses to
believe in oddities unapproved by scientific men like Charcot, Douglas snick-
ers and thinks, “Animal magnetism and mesmerism were one thing: this
was another,” and then mocks Tiddu for his pretensions to resemble James
Esdaile, the Scottish surgeon who experimented with mesmeric anesthesia in
India in the 1840s.75 Douglas goes on to use Tiddu’s techniques to listen to
street conversations in the dress of a mendicant and other guises but remains
incredulous of any mystical foundation. He is at most confused or irritated by
Tiddu’s bizarre feats, as when the wily player seems almost to read Douglas’s
thoughts, or when he asserts he has “willed [Douglas] to see” a “yellow fakir”
in the road who exchanges some secret “word” with a passing trooper and
then is gone as suddenly as he appeared.76 Multiple times, Steel incorporates
the mendicant or fakir as Rebellion icon of occult knowledge and circulation,
but she also leaves uncertain the nature of this occultism. Does the obstinacy
of Western prejudice blind Douglas to its profundity? Is it merely chicanery,
or something more?
By contrast Dracula does away with such ambiguities, confronting West-
ern rationalism with literal Oriental magic—but in a way far less peaceable
than in Rujub the Juggler. The sort of tension evident in On the Face of the
Waters is ratcheted up in Stoker’s novel: trance techniques exceed, and there-
fore undermine, Western systems of knowledge, and the fakir becomes a dou-
ble of the monstrous vampire. Dracula reprocesses the stories born out of the
Rebellion—not programmatically or in order to represent that event in his-
tory, but rather as a means to fuel this novel’s own Gothic paradigm, and
because those stories had simply become inextricable from public imaginings
of the East, Dracula’s birthplace, in post-Rebellion culture (and indeed were

72
Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters (1896; New York: Macmillan, 1897), 70.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid., 72.
75
Ibid. On Esdaile’s mesmerism in the context of indigenous healing arts, see Alison Winter,
Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
187–212.
76
Steel, On the Face of the Waters, 177–78.

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458 Occult Networks in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

freshly potent in the late nineteenth century). Stoker’s novel horrifically con-
solidates Victorians’ worst conceptions of what the Oriental was capable of:
the rapacious victimization of women; the establishment of slippery, malevo-
lent communications; and systematic violence against the Occident, driven by
a deep animus against Christianity. All these traits are neatly encapsulated in
Dracula’s hypnotic enchantment, with its capacity to penetrate, rally, and tar-
get with expert ferocity.
Yet while Dracula’s absorption of Indian Rebellion lore is adventitious, it
nonetheless reflects back meaningfully on that lore by exposing elements that
may be muted in straightforward Mutiny discourse. In other words, the move-
ment from historiography or historical novel to the Gothic, a genre meant to
produce uneasiness, registers Victorians’ more apprehensive conceptions of
the Orient, as particularly inflected by British-Indian relations and as tied to
late Victorian uncertainties about the strength of the empire. This claim pre-
sumes that despite its frequent heroic narratives of reconquering fractious
natives, Rebellion discourse was never in fact one-dimensionally triumphal-
ist. As Christopher Herbert has recently shown, for example, Rebellion histo-
ries and other mid-Victorian documents are subtly riven with suggestions of
Britons’ own administrative and moral failings in India, especially concerning
their retributive atrocities.77 In the case of Dracula, the narrative of British
victory over the Orient is vexed in another way, through an emphasis on the
Occident’s practical informational weaknesses relative to the mysterious
other, weaknesses improbable and unnerving for such a modern nation. By lit-
eralizing the occult, the novel brings out and amplifies the paradoxes lurking
within traditional Rebellion narratives—between fantasies of heroism on the
one hand and dogged rumors of intelligence and communicative vulnerabil-
ities on the other. Steel’s Jim Douglas may get away with sneering at Tiddu’s
surreptitiousness; Van Helsing and his team sneer at first but must eventually
confront the nearly overwhelming power of their foe. It is a power so effective
that the vampire pursuers know they cannot win without replicating it, although
their own hypnotism proceeds with decidedly mixed results. Perhaps this is the
true meaning of that final slash of Jonathan’s kukri knife on Dracula’s throat.
In physical combat as in the realm of information, some of the best weapons
lie—surprisingly, problematically—within the Orient itself.

Ohio State University

77
For Herbert, the Victorians’ traumatic self-horror at their retributions generated its own kind
of Gothic, proliferating the figure of the devilish alter ego.

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