“l am not at Freemason,“ Dickens informed a friendly inquirer in l850. Although followed by an expression of polite interest in certain reading matter that his correspondent had offered to send, the disclaimer of membership could hardly be firmer. Yet Masonic symbolism pervades both The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) and its famous precursor in the genre of detective fiction, Willkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1863). Whether or not Collins and Dickens were Freemasons in the strict sense, both seem to have written for two audiences at once—a group of insiders alerted to the Masonic context, and a group of outsiders completely unaware of its relevance.

The uncomprehending outsiders probably included many who were Freemasons in the strict sense, since the hidden signals are often too bawdy to have been acceptable to ordinary, middle-class Victorians. On the other hand, Dickens and Collins were surely not playing this game with the sole aim of amusing each other. Their code may well have furnished an anecdotal and technical point of departure for Henry James's mischievous parable, “The Figure in the Carpet." But unlike James‘s Hugh Vereker, Dickens and Collins had no need to invent their pattern, or to wait a lifetime for some reader to find it turned inside out in a temple at Bombay. The signals are too strong, and too heavily indebted to an objective, pre-existent iconology, to suggest extremes of patient isolation.

The evidence for this conjecture lies in the way the novels echo not only Masonic ritual, but also a number of non-fictional writings that trace Freemasonry to its origins in pagan mysteries, in Gnosticism and Rosicrucianism, and in hermetic codes and plots associated with the Stuarts. In the first and second pans of this essay, I shall concentrate on the demonstrable relationship of the texts to Masonic or quasi-Masonic sources. Then, having tried to show why at least some hypothesis of hidden signaling seems unavoidable. l shall discuss the impact of this practice on our perception of the total works of art in which it appears.

What emerges from the Masonic content is an emblematic counterpoint of incessant and protean irony — of contrasts, polarities, foreshadowings, double entendres, dialectical syntheses and mirror-image reversals. W. L. Wilmshurst observes of “Jachin and Boaz," the two pillars at the entrance of the temple:

In one of their aspects they stand for what is known in Eastern philosophy as the “pairs of opposites." Everything in nature is dual and can only be known in contrast with its opposite, whilst the two in combination produce a metaphysical third which is their synthesis and perfect balance. Thus we have good and evil; light and darkness (and one of the pillars was always white and the other black); active and passive; positive and negative; yes and no; outside and inside: man and woman.

The imagery of this philosophy in Hindu art, as also in the art of the pagan mysteries from which Masons derive many of their emblems, is of course explicitly sexual.

I

One curious parallel between The Moonstone and Drood concerns the sexual symbolism—conscious or unconscious—associated with Rachel Verinder and Rosa Bud. In itself, Rosa's full name seems too whimsical to raise even a suspicion of conscious double entendre. But in conjunction with her often-reiterated nickname, Pussy, even Rosa, and Rosebud become suspect. And the utterly gratuitous mention of John Thomas in Chapter 11, soon followed by a long, blush-filled dialogue on the importance of not calling one’s sweetheart Pussy in casual conversation, raises doubts held at bay only by Victorian acclaim for the purity of Dickens’ humor.

The analogous case in The Moonstone concerns the theft of Rachel's diamond. Twice enacted by her lover and future husband, this bizarre charade has attracted much speculation about the author’s unconscious concerns. Sue Lonoff gives the Freudian approach sympathetic attention in Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers. “Recalling the Victorian maxim that a young girl's virginity is her most precious possession.” she writes, “and the statement in the Prologue that the diamond's luster waxes and wanes on a lunar cycle, l am inclined to agree with Charles Rycroft that the theft is a symbolic defloration." Although finding that this interpretation accords well with the violence of Rachel's initial rage, followed by the warmth of her forgiveness when she realizes that her lover-thief meant no harm, Lonoff questions the extent of conscious design: “For all his boldness, Collins could hardly have meant to imply what post-Freudian critics discern, nor would his readers have fathomed the sexual implications of the theft, let alone a nightgown stained as its owner passed through his sweetheart’s doorway." But then, resisting the tendency to credit Collins’s unconscious with the whole symbolic resonance of the action, Lonoff suggests that he may have deliberately altered his original design in response to a detail of his reading:

Collins was sexually one of the more sophisticated men of his era, and he would have realized that the moon and precious gems have been female symbols since antiquity. On one of the pages that he read in [C. W.] King's [Natural History of Precious Stones] there is a description of a diamond that the Indians had tried to fashion in the shape of a Yoni, the symbol of the female genitalia; it was broken in two in the year of the Sepoy mutiny. We shall never know whether this description affected his plans. But we do know that he originally intended to call his novel The Serpents Eye and to make the lndian priests worshipers of snakes, and that in the planning stages he altered the title to one more emblematic of his purposes. The theft is perpetrated, traced, and solved by men: but at the heart of the story is a “young girl“ who inherits and perpetuates the domestic values dear lo the hearts of the Victorians—after she has lost her Moonstone.

The statue said by C. W. King to have borne the diamond yoni depicted Parvati. Siva‘s consort seen in her benign aspect. This detail strengthens the sense of a possible correspondence between Rachel's jewel and Rosa's nicknames, since the same Hindu goddess plays a central role in a second problem posed by Drood, the question of whether John Jasper worships the consort of Siva in her alternative, ferocious aspect as Kali, goddess of Destruction and patroness of Thugs.

The inference that Collins, at least, had Hindu symbolism consciously in mind gains support from his contemporaries’ opinion that he had modeled a charming eccentric in The Moonstone on a well-known writer named Hargrave Jennings. When this earnest publicist of Masonic and Rosicrucian "secrets" died in 1390, obituaries in both the Times and the Athenaeum remarked that he was considered the original of Collins‘s Ezra Jennings. Wilmshurst's twentieth-century guide to The Meaning of Masonry explains the function of the name “Ezra” in the Royal Arch Ceremony by treating it as a Hebrew derivative of “Osiris,” and a sign of advanced progress “from West to East,” or in other words towards the regeneration symbolized by dawn. Appropriately, Ezra Jennings dies facing the dawn, with the word “Peace” on his lips.

There is indeed a great deal about Osiris in Hargrave Jennings‘s exposition of such subjects as The Indian Religions; or, Results of the Mysterious Buddhism, “by an Indian Missionary" (1858), The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries (1870), The Obelisk (1873), and Phallism: A Description of the Worship of Lingam-Yoni in Various Parts of the World and in Different Ages (1889). We shall shortly have a chance to examine Ezra Jennings’s services in bringing about the marriage of Rachel and her lover. But first it will be useful to take a closer look at the history and special properties of the diamond left her by her uncle.

The Moonstone at first adorns the forehead of the God of the Moon in the temple of Siva Somanatha, Siva the Lord of Soma. Soma denotes both a sacramental, Hindu drug (probably hallucinogenic) and its heavenly counterpart, the amrita or elixir of immortality. It also means the moon, since the crescent moon is the cup from which the thirsty gods drink. The emptying of this cup, as the moon wanes, and its regular refilling by the sun (of which Siva is also lord), defines the monthly cycles that measure the giant cycles of time. Hence the crescent in Siva's forehead, just beneath the solar tire of his third eye: he is preeminently a god of time; and of the destruction wrought by time; and he is a god of justice. His temple at Somnauth (Moon's Lord) was unsurpassed by any in India until Sultan Mahmoud of Ghizni sacked it in 1024.

As the first narrator of The Moonstone explains, it is to keep the God of the Moon out of the hands of the Sultan and his followers that three Brahmins remove it from the temple just before the attack. They take it to Benares, where Vishnu the Preserver appears to them in a dream, commanding that the Moonstone be watched night and day, and prophesying ruin for anyone who steals it. The idol now has a temple of its own. But it falls victim to a second Mohammedan raid at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the followers of Aurungzebe destroy the shrines at Benares. The idol is “broken in pieces,“ and in due course the stone from its forehead becomes an ornament in the handle of Sultan Tippoo’s dagger. Bearing out Vishnu's prophecy, Tippoo is killed in 1799, during the British assault on his fortress at Seringapatam. But the Moonstone is stolen yet again, this time by John Herncastle, a British officer who murders one of its guards to get it, and who later wills it to his niece, Rachel Verinder, thus precipitating the events of the detective story. The last chapter of the novel shows us the diamond restored to the forehead of the Moon God. He is seated on “his typical antelope,” above a crowd of worshippers. From this vantage point, his diamond “looks forth“ over the city of Somnauth bathed in moonlight, and the novel closes with the words: “So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell!”

Since the diamond in that final scene “looks forth” from the god’s forehead, and since Siva‘s third eye sometimes functions as a solar flamethrower, it is tempting (and, I think, faithful to Collins’s intention) to identify the stone with Siva’s embodiment of destruction as well as time. At the literal level, however, there is a hitch. In Indian painting and sculpture, Siva holds his typical antelope with one hand, as we might hold a tame bird or squirrel; he does not — and for reasons of scale could not — ride it. The discrepancy between Collins‘s imagery and traditional portrayals of Siva is clarified in a classic, early-nineteenth-century study, Edward Moor‘s Hindu Pantheon. Chandra, a relatively unimportant deity, is God of the Moon, and rides an antelope; but he is closely associated with Siva, who in fact is sometimes known as Siva Chandrasekra, Siva “moon-crowned.” The mightier god “is also frequently seen with Chandra's emblem, the antelope,” and “is, indeed, in one of his forms, expressly called the Moon“. ln short, Collins does something very odd. Choosing for his locale the home of Siva as Lord of the Moon, he refrains from ever speaking Siva‘s name, and places within the temple a statue of a far less powerful moon god — adorned with a jewel strongly suggestive of Siva‘s most distinctive attribute. Writing in 1832, Charles Coleman calls attentions to the “resplendent gem" sometimes placed “in the centre of [Siva's] forehead” to represent his third eye.

Now, Moor comments that Chandra is linked with Vishnu, though still more closely with Siva. But the placement of the stone in the forehead of an idol at one of Siva's best-known temples seems deft rather than fortuitous. For the total absence of Siva‘s name from the text accompanies a close, emblematic fit between his peculiar nature and the events of the story. Just as he is a god not only of destruction but of generation (hence the dualism of his consort, Kali/Parvati), so Collins closes the main action of the novel by having pious Brahmins smother the last of the Moonstone‘s many thieves, and by having Rachel's husband announce that she is pregnant. With concrete enactments of Destruction, Generation, and Justice neatly in place, it remains only to return the stone to moonlit Somnauth, with a final, poetic flourish on the cyclical nature of Time. But why hide so much light under a bushel?

The first answer that comes to mind — and a true one as far as it goes — is that Siva is not mentioned because he is unmentionable. At the center of all his temples stands his chief emblem, the lingo or phallus. Inevitably, he and his consort dominate the exposition of sexual symbolism in Moor's Hindu Pantheon; and although Moor identifies the third eye with solar fire, he also suggests that “it is the symbol ... of the sacred Yoni," and that certain positions of the pupil indicate differing phases of the moon. In Oriental Fragments, he repeats the lunar, female interpretation with emphasis.

Moor's reputation as a knowledgeable guide is not the only reason for suspecting that Collins read him. The chapter on “Linga and Yoni“ in The Hindu Pantheon closes with a story about two Brahmins, whose patriotic willingness to serve as ambassadors to England exacts a temporary loss of caste, a fate strikingly similar to that of the Brahmins in The Moonstone. And Oriental Fragments offers minute descriptions of Sultan Tippoo‘s treasures, together with vivid anecdotes of British plunder after the fall of Seringapatam (a good friend of Moor‘s, charged with evaluating the jewelry for legal distribution among officers of the conquering army, witnessed much selling and receiving of stolen goods, as did Moor himself).

ln The Gnostic: and Their Remains, C. W. King follows Moor in terming the eye painted by Saivites on their foreheads “the most expressive symbol of passive nature”, and discovers a more obvious version of that symbol in “the Nizam‘s“ diamond. This is the gem identified by Sue Lonoff as a possible model for the Moonstone, and King describes it in language he will repeat almost word for word the following year, when discoursing on diamonds at large in his Natural History of Precious Stones. Parvati, the Hindu version of Isis, he writes,

still bears in her hand ... the yoni, or bagha, as her distinctive symbol. Similarly her consort, Siva, wields the phallus. Thus, the Nizam's Diamond — the largest known for certain to exist, weighing 340 carats — exibits the evident attempt of the unskilful native lapidary to reduce it into such a form, and to mark the longitudinal orifice.

Thomas Inman reads the third eye as an image of sexual union—pupil is to eye as linga to yoni — in his Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Nantes. The first volume of this anti-clerical fantasia on the phallic basis of all religious rites appeared some time in I868 (the serialization of The Moonstone began in January of that year) and was followed in 1869 both by a second volume, and by Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism Exposed and Explained, a concisely annotated gathering of plates from the larger work. Inman's illustrator, who bases the cover design for Volume Two on an engraving of Siva in The Hindu Pantheon, is so bent on enhancing the female reference of the third eye that he replaces the pupil with a single line down the center of the oval, as though punning on the most blatant yani in Moor.

Inman, a doctor rather than a linguist or historian by profession, says that Ancient Faiths began in an effort to explain why “John and Jack are synonymous.” John, behind which he detects yoni as well as Jehova, tums out to mean “the Androgynous Sun.” Another god associated with the sun is Bacchus, whose name perhaps derives from Hebrew Pachaz (“to be jolly"); Bacchus is also known as Jacchus, from Hebrew achaz (“the one who conjoins”), or perhaps yakash (“to ensnare”). Hence Jack. Inman thinks that the secret of reading names lies in religious “paronomasia,” and his lists of erotic, visual puns sound like notes for The interpretation of Dreams. The “Mother of gods and men,” he tells us, may be indicated by “a door, a ring, a myrtle leaf, a lozenge, a fish of oval form, a fruit cleft like the apricot, a cavern, a fissure, a spring of water, a ship, an ark, a dish or plate of certain form, a cup, a half moon, an eye, a systrum, a speculum, a barley-corn, a wheatear, a fig, a pomegranate".

Inman comments appreciatively on the likeness between a particular Hindu symbol — grouped with a number of forehead eyes — and a comparably female Assyrian door. He may have been one reader who did fathom “the sexual implications of ... a nightgown stained as its owner passed through his sweetheart’s doorway. “ After stressing the importance of the triangle “in the mysteries of India, and amongst the Freemasons generally,” he explains that “with its apex uppermost, it typifies the phallic triad,” while “with its base upwards, it typifies what is known to anatomists as the Mons Veneris, the Delta, or the door through which all come into the world”. The two figures together — familiar as the Shield of David or Seal of Solomon — prove to have a place in the imagery of the Royal Masonic Arch, and of the “celebrated gates of Somnauth”.

The meaning of Somnauth for Victorians is ultimately traceable to the smashing of its temple lingo by Mahmoud. This Islamic insult to Siva‘s votaries received an extra measure of attention from nineteenth-century scholars, because James Mill happened to have gotten the facts wrong in his History of India. His successors took pains to set the record straight. But the Somnauth gates were “celebrated” because of a much greater blunder than Mill's. During the Afghan Campaign of 1842, Lord Ellenborough, the Governor General of India, decided to restore to Somnauth the temple gates that Mahmoud had carried off to Ghizni. The gesture was meant to rally loyal Hindus to the crown, while impressing Mahmoud’s rebellious descendants with the power of British rule. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that the gates torn from the sultan's tomb by Ellenborough‘s general in the field were mere copies of the originals, and that the temple at Somnauth would have to be built from scratch to receive them, having been razed and replaced over four hundred years earlier. Resolutions condemning the Governor General for lack of judgment were moved in both houses of Parliament. The ensuing debate brought the vanished temple to life in the imaginations of many Victorians.

Ellenborough's parliamentary critics accused him of making the government in India ridiculous, of fostering enmity between Moslems and Hindus, and above all of sponsoring idolatry. The missionary societies presented angry petitions. Macaulay stressed that the god in question was “Siva the destroyer” not “Vishnu the Presenter,” and that worship of Siva gave rise to “the very worst forms of prostitution". In the House of Lords, the Marquis of Clanricarde took a more lighthearted approach:

If the Government intended to act upon the proclamation — if the gates of Somnauth were to be applied as the Governor-General had proposed, of course the temple must be rebuilt — a body of Brahmins must be established therein — a corps of priestesses must be forthwith engaged, and an idol must, with all due diligence, be manufactured. (Laughter.) Their lordships, of course, knew what would be the character of the idol. What he, as an economist, should like to be informed of was, whether the Government intended to advertise for designs and estimates (renewed laughter), for, in that case, he thought he might promise to the house that there would speedily be laid on the table one of the most curious documents that had ever been presented to Parliament by a Government. (“Hear,” and laughter.)

Punch responded with a satire titled “The Gates of Somnauth," in which Ellenborough puts his trophies up for auction in London. “Time, the Great Leveller” has destroyed their first home. An allegorical drawing shows Time at work, silhouetted against a toppling dome; fragments of pillars fly through the air, but one tall column in the background remains intact. The auctioneer’s advertisement evokes “The Temple of Siva" and its “Two Thousand Hindoo Maidens. ... With gazelle eyes, and cheeks ‘crimson as cleft pomegranates‘ “ (the phrase in single quotation marks is from Byron's Don Juan). Punch thinks that such historic associations should appeal to a buyer like "the late lamented Marquis of Hertford" (soon to be resurrected as Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair). The illustrator shows a “lodge-keeper," in profile closely resembling Time, opening his newly-acquired Park Gates to a woman wearing a large, plumed hat.

Wilkie Collins’s neatly labeled packet of notes on the Indian background of The Moonstone — now in the Morris L. Parrish Collection at Princeton University — is as silent as his fictional text on the subject of Siva. One hesitates to suggest that he “withheld evidence" from posterity, while apparently going out of his way to be helpful. But that conclusion is hard to avoid, and in the long rim the contents of the packet actually support it. For they make explicit the link between Somnauth and the imperial scandal we have just examined. In recommending Somnauth as a possible setting for the forthcoming novel, a foreign office expert whom Collins credits with having supplied useful details for the ending of the story comments parenthetically, “you know the Lord Ellenborough story about the gates from Ghazni.” The same informant deals at length with the question of foreign spectators’ access to ritual “abominations” in Hindu temples. An Englishman might look on at any “ordinary religious ceremony ... with tolerable safety, if he were civil and fair-spoken.“ But although “obscene orgies” still occur, the participants are unlikely to perform in front of anyone they recognize as an outsider, and a foreigner would have little hope of passing for a native (“Burton's pilgrimage to Mecca would be a joke to it”). Nevertheless, if Collins wants “hints on some very atrocious Hindoo orgies,” he will find them in “a collection of Wheelers letters or articles in the Englishman about 1862 or 1863, on the trial at Bombay known as the case of the Maharajs“.

Rather than try to devise an orgy fit for All the Year Round, Collins quietly begins the diamond's career with an allusion sure to offend no one, while reminding a few insiders of “the linga of historical celebrity.” That phrase is from an article on “Somnauth" in the I857 edition of Edward Thornton's Indian Gazetteer. No doubt the place-name and the reference to Sultan Mahmoud meant little to most members of the crowd who lined up weekly to buy fresh installments of The Moonstone, a quarter of a century after the uproar about Lord Ellenborough. Even in 1843 there must have been many readers of “The Gates of Somnauth” who failed to recognize a linga in the standing column, or yonis in the cleft pomegranates. But Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, and Douglas Jerrold, his leading humorist, were Freemasons, and as such they encountered precisely this symbolism every time they entered a temple.

In an essay on Rosicrucianism and Masonry published in I824, Thomas De Quincey mentions that Jachin and Boaz “have an occult meaning to the Free-masons,” which he declines “publicly to explain.” His accompanying footnote refers to “the account of these pillars in the 1st Book of Kings. vii. I4-22, where it is said — ‘And there stood upon the pillars as it were Roses‘.” De Quincey adds: “This may be taken as a free translation of the first passage in verse 20. Compare 2d Book of Chron., iii. 17”. The King James Bible specifies “pomegranates” in both places.

The reason for De Quincey's circumlocution surfaces in F.-T. B.-Clavel's Histoire Pittoresque de la Franc-Maconnerie et Des Sociérés Secrétes, Anciennes er Modernes (1843). Glossing his allegorical frontispiece, Clavel explains that the columns “B” and “J” “figurent les deux phallus, générateurs, l‘un de la lumiere, de la vie et du bien, l'autre, des ténebres, de la mort et du mal, qui entretiennent l'équilibre du monde." At the top of each pillar is a pomegranate, emblem of “l'organe féminin, qui recoil et feconde le germe hon ou mauvais qu'y depose l‘un des deux principes.” The joining of male column and female capital — in white and black pillar alike — expresses the union of Nature active and passive. “a l’exemple du lingam des lndiens”.

The architectural features called “roses” by De Quincey and “pommes de grenade” by Clavel are known in Masonic ritual — and, l believe, normally displayed in Masonic décor — as “pommels or globes". When John Herncastle‘s cousin catches him in the act of murder and theft, the bloody dagger in his hand flashes fire from the stone Set “like a pummel” in the end of the handle. The fire here is pure destruction. But in due course the diamond will shed a gentler, lifegiving light as well.

The figure in the Masonic carpet is not a particular image but a cosmic, sexual metaphor, endlessly varied in its riddling incarnations. Analyzing the most famous of Masonic emblems, the compass joined with a carpenter's square, Jean-Pierre Bayard first touches on the oriental contrast of heavenly circle, earthly square, and then invokes the androgynous figure in a seventeenth-century, hermetic engraving, where the male, right side holds a compass, while the female, left side holds a square. Clavel‘s pomegranates on pillars reflect the same dualism; and they resemble Collins's pommel on a dagger, just as De Quincey’s roses on pillars resemble Hargrave Jennings's rose on a cross. According to Edward Moor, the union of male and female underlies the Royal Arch jewel of the Triple Tau, “the monogram of Thoth, or Taaut, the symbolical and mystical name of hidden wisdom, and of the Supreme Being among the ancient Egyptians". It will be recalled that Royal Arch imagery also includes the Seal of Solomon. In a second, Masonic version of that figure, the “male” triangle is white, the “female” black, with values corresponding to those of Clavel‘s black and white pillars.

In its contrasting roles and its various disguises, the Iingo-yoni combination presides over Collins‘s emblematic program. Rosanna Spearman lives and dies in the shadow of the destructive principle (indeed her name, disfigurement, and hopeless passion recall the name and fate of Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield). On the other hand, Rosanna‘s rival in love gains the unclouded light of good fortune by assisting at the simulated theft of her own jewel.

Rachel's triumph furnishes the climax of a charade already under way by the end of the first weekly installment. As Penelope Betteredge tells her father what she has just overheard between the Brahmin “jugglers” and their clairvoyant boy, she pauses over their reference to some unnamed "It": “Has the English gentleman got It about him?” She quotes the phrase a second time, then asks her father, “What does ‘It’ mean?” Treating her question as a joke, Betteredge proposes with a wink that they wait and ask Franklin Blake. But he ends the chapter by warning his readers, “you won't find the ghost of a joke in our conversation on the subject of the jugglers,” since Franklin Blake “took the thing seriously,” and believed that “ ‘It’ meant the Moonstone”.

According to Eric Pantidge, both “it” and “thing” served in the nineteenth century as euphemisms for “pudend,” and in literature this usage of “it” goes back at least to Elizabethan drama. James T. Henke cites an instance from Marlowe's Jew of Malta, in which Barabas tells Lodowicke: “Win it and wear it”. Here, the antecedent of “it” is a metaphorical “diamond,” which Lodowicke now understands to be the Jew’s daughter, having previously thought that the stone was a literal gem for sale. In the earlier exchange — which is relevant not so much because of “it” as because of a female diamond that rivals the moon — “foiled” means “placed against a dull background,” and also “deflowered”:

Lodowicke. What sparklle does it give without a foile?

Barabas. The Diamond that I talk of, ne'er was foiled:

But when he touches it, it will be foild: [Aside.]

Lord Lodowicke, it sparkles bright and faire. ...

Lodowicke. How shows it by night?

Barabas. Outshines Cinthia’s rayes:

You'll like it better farre a nights than dayes. [Aside.]”

The first time the Verinders' butler, Betteredge, describes the Moonstone in his narrative, he recalls how Rachel and her guests first “set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room,“ admiring how “it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark.” Collins‘s extracts from C. W. King authorize this display of mineral magic, which muses Betteredge to exclaim that “I burst out with as large an ‘O’ as the Bouncers themselves“. Partridge attests the female character of the letter “O” in Shakespeare’s Bawdy, while Hargrave Jennings assigns the same meaning to “the Egg, O,” carried in Greek mysteries.

True to the conception of cyclical time, the denouement of The Moonstone features an artificial reenactment of the theft, which turns out to have resulted from Franklin Blake‘s morally innocent sleepwalking under a heavy dose of opium, a form of soma dear to Collins himself. Ezra Jennings bills the reenactment in advance as art “experiment.” Rachel's aunt, Mrs. Merridew, (another punning reference to some) thinks it would be “an outrage on propriety“ for her to allow her niece “to be present (without a ‘chaperone‘) in a house full of men among whom a medical experiment is being carried on“. She also believes that experiments always end in “explosions" and that she must take special precautions in Rachel's behalf. Rachel promises her aunt not to stir from her own part of the house when the experiment takes place at nine o'clock. At eight o'clock, Ezra Jennings observes Rachel tenderly hovering over Franklin, who will soon wake up from his trance, on a sofa in the sitting-room adjoining her bedroom. She is so rapt that she is “not even able to look away from him long enough to thread her needle.” Pleased at having made this reconciliation possible, Jennings departs, closing the outer door. Mrs. Merridew would have discovered the couple together, but for Rachel's hearing the sound of the old lady's dress in the hall, and rushing to intercept her with a warning of “the explosion!” Mrs. Merridew allows herself to be led into the garden, and afterwards felicitates Franklin on “the truly considerate manner in which the explosion had conducted itself,” explosions having become “infinitely milder” than they were when she was a child.

In retrospect, we notice a rich grouping of allusions to Siva at the birthday dinner before the first. opium-induced theft. Franklin Blake manifests his overdosed condition by a flood of almost manic wit, including advice to a cattle-raiser that “the proper way to breed bulls [is] to look deep in your own mind, evolve out of it the idea of a perfect bull, and produce hint." A member of Siva's retinue more important than the antelope is Nandi, the wonderful bull, an embodiment of justice and fertility, regularly placed at the entrance to the shrine, facing the linga within. The table conversation veers embarrassingly to the subject of the dead in their graves — Siva has charge of cemeteries. The Indian drum heard during dinner affords another, more urgent reminder of this invisible guest: the sound of the drum beats out the rhythm of his cosmic dance. The pretended Indian jugglers are simulating the behavior of Saivite mendicants, who make their way by begging in imitation of their lord, recommending themselves through feats of juggling, fortune telling, and the like, supposedly made possible by yogic aspiration to his divine powers. As Rachel's hectic party nears its end, and the theft of the diamond approaches, Betteredge takes comfort in the thought that “Old Father Time” will sooner or later bring the carriages round.

In light of this density and consistency of cryptic reference, it seems reasonable to give a bawdy rather than a Freudian reading to certain alternations in Franklin Blake's demeanor — “The prospect of doing something — and what is more, of doing that something on a horse — brought Mr. Franklin up like lightning from the flat of his back.” Franklin asks to have the best horse in the stable saddled at once. Not long afterwards, we are told that “he had left us at a gallop; he came back to us at a walk. When he went away, he was made of iron. When he returned, he was stuffed with cotton, as limp as limp could be." A few pages later we find “the resolute side of him uppermost once more. The man of cotton had disappeared; and the man of iron sat before me again.”

By no means all of the sexual symbolism in The Moonstone is distinctively Indian. As expounded by Hargrave Jennings, the phallic fire-worship at the core of occult tradition expresses itself in innumerable forms, on every continent and in every age. For example, he gives rather unexpected grounds for identifying the Moonstone with the kind of rose garden dear to Sergeant Cuff:

ln the “tables” alternating with tying-knots, of the Order of the Garter, — which “Most Noble Order” was originally dedicated, be it remembered, to the Blessed Lady, or to the Virgin Mary, — the microcosmical, miniature "King Arthur's Round Table“ becomes the individual female discus, or organ, waxing and waning, negative or in flower, positive or natural, alternately red and white, as the Rose of the World, Rosamond, Rosa mundi.

Jennings finds in the motto of the Order a meaning that he puts unforgettably, if a little obscurely: “‘Yoni’ soit qui mal y pense.” A later edition of The Rosicrucians contains a diagram of “The Round Table of King Arthur. From the Original, preserved in the Court-House of the Castle at Winchester.” The seats at the table are correlated with thirteen “lunations,” two seats apiece, except for a “Royal Seat. / Sun. / Phallos," which counts for two, and appears to be directly united with the large rose at the center of the table. The inner petals of the rose are white, the outer ones red.”

One thinks at once of the white roses, blush roses, and dog roses that engage Sergeant Cuff whenever he turns from solving crimes to raising flowers. Collins marks this imagery the moment it enters the novel. “This is the shape for a rosery,” says Cuff on seeing the Verinders’ garden: “nothing like a circle set in a square.” As a symbol for the meeting of heaven and earth, the shape Cuff admires is reproduced and analyzed in E. C. Ravenshaw‘s paper on two Hindu jantras or “pocket altars,” which he presented to the Royal Asiatic Society in I849. This was only six years after the Ellenborough fiasco, and Ravenshaw devotes the rest of his talk to exploring the historical connection between Hindu and Royal Arch uses of the Double Equilateral Triangle or Seal of Solomon, “the chief ornament of the celebrated so-called gates of Somnath, taken from the tomb of Mahmud at Ghazni.” More generally, the circle in a square is implicit in the juncture of compass and square as interpreted by Bayard, and explicit in much hermetic and Rosicrucian literature. While it is hard to know how seriously Collins intends the transcendent reference of such figures, there is no mistaking his intent to show vigorous, unashamed sexuality allied with goodness and justice, or to base fictional form on the idea of a pattern underlying the apparent chaos of human fates.

Collins's interest in hidden pattern takes many forms, including a recognizably Masonic habit of orienting dramatic action to the solstices. The two main festivals of Freemasonry are those of St. John the Baptist on June 24 (Midsummer Day], and St. John the Evangelist on December 27. Clavel refers to “St. Jean d’été” and “St. Jean d‘hiver.“ He also links Jachin and Boaz with these seasonal opposites, and so with the central myth of Freemasonry: the murder, burial, and exhumation of Hiram Abif, architect of Solomon's temple. Clavel sees this tale, and its ritual enactment in the initiation of a Master Mason, as an allegory of “la mort fictive du soleil” at the winter solstice. His frontispiece shows the murder of Hiram flanked by the deaths of Balder and Osiris, two other versions of the archetype on which he thinks all the great myths are based. And Charles William Heckethorn explains that despite the honor paid to John the Baptist as a herald of “light,” the sign of the zodiac entered by the sun at the summer solstice may mark a time of troubles, since “Egypt at this period is enveloped in clouds and dust, by which means the sun, which figuratively may be called truth, is obscured or disguised.”

Anyone who doubts that Collins constructed plots with this symbolism in mind has only to cheek the dates in two of his earlier novels, The Woman in White and Armadale. In the former, the villainous Sir Percival Glyde marries Laura Fairlie on December 22, the precise date of the winter solstice. The following summer, on June 21, the precise date of the summer solstice, the equally villainous Count Fosco, who lives in St. Johns Mood, and who lists among his titles “Perpetual Arch-Master of the Rosicrucian Masons of Mesopotamia,” takes advantage of Marian Halcombe’s illness to read her diary, and to make his own, exultantly evil entry in it.

In Armadale, the owner and devoted repairman of an elaborate clock prepares a guest for its wonders by advising him —

At the first stroke of twelve, Mr. Midwinter ... keep your eye on the figure of Time: he will move his scythe, and point it downwards. You will next see a little printed card appear behind the glass, which will tell you the day of the month and the day of the week.

Readers who take the hint will discover, by lining up various dates and days of the week, that on Midsummer Day the murderous Lydia Gwilt is first seen in the flesh by the two Allan Armadales. She will later hoodwink and betray both of them. One of them has already seen her in a dream, which the Midsummer scene precisely reenacts; the other, who alone takes the dream seriously, is generally known by the name of the gypsy who rears him. “Ozias Midwinter.”

In The Moonstone, Rachel Verinder's birthday occurs on June 21. On that day in 1846, her uncle meets with the rebuff that causes him to will bet the diamond. He dies “about a year and a half" later — or in other words at or near the winter solstice — having arranged for the jewel to pass to Rachel on her next birthday. So the catastrophe occurs at the summer solstice of 1848, when Franklin Blake innocently takes the diamond from its cabinet, due to the heavy dose of opium slipped him by Dr. Candy. The artificial birthday party, staged by Ezra Jennings, takes place a year and four days later. The additional four days allow for the experiment to begin on a Monday (Somvar, which is Chandra’s day as well as Luna's), and also for the correlation of the happy outcome with retribution for the true thief. Godfrey Ablewhite.

Twice yearly — at Christmas (Midwinter Day), and at Midsummer Day — Godfrey Ablewhite must pay three hundred pounds to the beneficiary of a trust fund in his care; having squandered the principal, he steals the Moonstone on June 22, and pawns it on Midsummer Eve to meet his obligation. He arranges to redeem his pledge at the end of one year. Collins explains the three-day interval between the payment on Midsummer Eve, 1849, and the actual transfer of the stone into Godfrey’s hands, as a futile scheme to elude his Brahmin pursuers. He is killed less than twenty-four hours after the reconciliation of Rachel and Franklin.

II

Dickens uses the same seasonal polarity as Collins. Edwin Drood intends setting out at Midsummer “to wake up Egypt a little.” He never makes the journey, but instead disappears shortly after midnight of Christmas Eve. No trace of him afterwards “revisit[s] the light of the sun,” a phrase emphasized by repetition. Two nights later, on December 26 (the Feast of Stephen, patron saint of stonecutters), Canon Crisparkle walks to Cloisterham Weir, where he is troubled by his memory of a passage from his reading, “about airy tongues that syllable men's names.” This memory arises so “unbidden” that he tries to “put it from him with his hand, as though it were tangible.” In Milton’s Comus, the character troubled by remembered fantasies “Of calling shapes, and beck‘ning shadows dire, / And airy tongues, that syllable men’s names / On Shores and desert Wildemesses” is that “misled and lonely Traveller,” the Lady. A moment before, she has heard the revelry of Comus and his band. Now she finds only silent darkness in the place where she had imagined them to be.

Unable to locate the source of his uneasiness, Crisparkle returns the next morning, the Feast of St. John the Evangelist. He now spots Drood‘s gold watch, caught in the timbers of the weir, and swims through the icy waters to recover both it and the stick-pin lodged nearby in the mud at the bottom. Without speculating on the turns of plot by which Dickens would finally have integrated this baptism into the solution of the crime, we may gloss its likely, pivotal importance by means of another quotation from Comus. The lndian word “Thug” means “deceiver,” and the first, official, nineteenth-century British report on Thuggee likens the typical Strangler to Circe's child, Comus, who says of himself,

I under fair pretence of friendly ends.

And well plac't words of glozing courtesy.

Baited with reasons not unplausible.

Wind me into the easy-hearted man.

And hug him into snares.

In the text of Comus the Lady's lines about “airy tongues” follow almost at once. They show that she intuits the nature of the deceit she must fight, though her immediate situation puzzles her. Her words thus form an apt. Providential warning for Mr. Crisparkle. I am not suggesting that he had been reading reports about Thuggee — but Dickens certainly had! The dating of Crisparkle‘s adventure to coincide with the feasts of Stephen and John will prove equally deliberate, as we explore the whole network of Masonic allusions in Drood.

The name “Jennings" appears once in that novel, when Miss Twinkleton, the schoolmistress of the Nuns‘ House, interrupts her own lecture on the evils of Rumour to chastize one of her students: “Miss Jennings will please stand upright.” Dickens' reputation as a humorist who scorned indecency has gone almost unchallenged for so many years that a finding of bawdy intention in this line will seem over-eager, especially since upright in its normal, complimentary sense is an expression dear to Masons. But Drood appeared in the same year with The Rosicrucians, and the phallic “upright” appears with great frequency in that work. Jennings has a habit of reinforcing its mystic significance with quotation marks: “the succeeding array of phallic figures will he found interesting, as tracing out to its progenitor or prototype that symbol which we call the 'upright' "; “the Architectural Genealogy of the ‘Tower’ or ‘Steeple’ displays other phases of the alterations of the ‘upright’”. Sometimes the quotation marks change partners:

There seems little or no reason to doubt that the much disputed origin of the pointed Gothic arch, or lancet-shaped arch, and the Saracenic or Moorish horseshoe arch, is the union and blending of the two generative figures, namely, the “discus” or round, and the upright and vertical, or “phallic,” shape, as indicated in the diagrams on pp. 238. 239. These forms, in their infinite variety, are the parents of all architecture.

To compare Drood with The Rosicrucians is to be struck by an apparent overlapping of interest in a variety of subjects. Magnetism and mesmerism fascinate Jennings no less than Dickens. “A spark of that mysterious fire that lurks in everything" is a phrase from Drood, but in The Rosicrucians this notion of ubiquitous, latent fire is as important as the upright. Like Dickens, Jennings quotes from Milton's Comus, a poem cited by Heckethorn as an example of Rosicrucian influence in literature. We are told more than once that John Jasper leans against a sundial, “setting, as it were, his black mark upon the very face of day,” as he terrifies Rosa with his declaration of love. Jennings points out that there are few churchyards in England “without a phallus or obelisk,” on top of which “is usually now fixed a dial.” He touches more than once on the image of stars as letters in a mysterious alphabet. Spelling out the shape of things to come, an image Dickens uses in connection with Mr. Grewgious. Jennings discusses a number of classical deities whose names appear in Drood — Apollo, Diana, Minerva, and Venus — and expatiates at length on the Wandering Jew (Dickens describes Miss Twinkleton as “a sort of Wandering Jewess”), on the gypsies (Dickens likens Helena Landless to a gipsy), on the Tartars (Rosa Bud falls in love with Mr. Tartar), and on Egypt, Isis, and the Great Pyramid of Cheops, all of which come up in connection with Drood’s proposal to serve the Empire as an engineer. If Dickens has a heroine named Rosa Bud, the author of The Rosicrucians can match him with Rosa mundi, and with Bhudd. In a moment we shall consider Jennings's interest in both Jack and jasper. Since his true quarry in The Rosicrucians is the union of male and female darkly coded in every alphabet, language, legend, religious belief, philosophical concept, architectural style, heraldic device, nursery rhyme, or fashion in hats, caps, and helmets since the beginning of history (with cosmic analogues predating the Creation), we may finish Dickens‘ side of the list with Pussy, and with some throwaway lines about the mysterious P J T, whose initials adorn a lintel in Staple Inn. The narrator speculates that this inscription may signify, “Perhaps John Thomas,” later adding that this “tinderous and touch-woody” individual must have been “Pretty Jolly Too."

In a passage of dialogue running six pages, Dickens manages to include Rosa Bud’s nickname, Pussy, nineteen times, though it refers to an absent person, and to match this with thirty-five repetitions of John Jasper's nickname, Jack, which can double in slang as a bawdy abbreviation of Jock-in-the-Box (Hargrave Jennings derives the phallic meaning of Jack from Iacc and Bacchus, presumably echoing Thomas Inman, whose teaming he admires. Drood‘s toast, "Pussy, Jack, and many of ‘em! Happy Returns, I mean,” recalls Partridge‘s sample of poetic bawdy, “Aeneas, here's a health to thee, / To Pusse and to good company!” (Dictionary). On a single one of the six pages, the repetitions of Pussy and Jack are interspersed with eight repetitions of Crack, ostensibly a sound effect for a nutcracker — nutcracker being a Victorian slang equivalent of both pussy and crack. As noted earlier, the name John Thomas is soon followed in the text by Mr. Grewgious's speech admonishing Edwin Drood not to refer to Rosebud as Pussy." The whole dialogue could be excerpted and reprinted under the heading, “Homage to Laurence Sterne.“

The best external warrant for these inferences of double entendre lies in yet another grouping of parallels with the names of the cast in Drood. The villain of that novel is John or Jack Jasper. Describing a Gnostic gem bearing the image of a “Cynocephalus, crowned, with baton erect, adoring the first appearance of the new moon,” Jennings states that it is made of yellow jasper, and refers interested readers to a line drawing in C. W. King's Gnostics and Their Remains. In writing about the Gnostics, King deals at length with mystery religions and secret societies. He undertakes to show the causal basis for the many correspondences between Freemasonry and the mysteries of antiquity — a basis that makes nonsense of claims alleging a secret, unbroken tradition of Masonry, starting in the days of Noah. But King shows considerable respect for Rosicrucian as well as more ancient sources of modem Masonry. He asserts that the whole tradition springs from India, and he treats its symbols with less excitement and greater frankness than Jennings.

It must be said in fairness to Jennings and King that neither would enjoy being classed with the other. Jennings considers King a dry-as-dust antiquarian, full of useful information but without a glimmer of insight into the wonders in his care. King sees in Jennings a “masonic” vulgarian whose research is a farce. Theirs is the mutual scorn that pits scholarship at its most lucid against occultism at its most portentous. As probable readers of both, however, Collins and Dickens are harder to place, especially in view of their role as pioneers of detective fiction. Detective stories normally demand little learning, and ignore the unseen. Yet these early practitioners build whole novels as extended puns on two meanings of “mystery”: “secret rite” and “puzzle.” The mysteries of Parvati and Siva, lsis and Osiris, lie embedded in the mysteries of the stolen jewel and the vanished engineer. And whatever may have been the social matrix of this game — which does have a decidedly “Masonic” look about it — the aloof, anti-Masonic King seems to have been as important to Dickens as to Collins.

To begin with, King mentions jasper some sixty times, because the supposed magical properties of the stone appealed to the makers of amulets. Ln addition to jasper, and to every one of the classical and Egyptian gods already cited in connection with The Rosicrucians, King's anticipations of names in Drood include Helena, tiler, and tope. An edition of The Gnostics that came out seventeen years after Drood enables us to add Hiram and Constantia to the list of matching pairs, a possibility that cautions us against assuming that Dickens took the other names from King, and at the same time rules out casual explanations for the cluster as a whole. Since King cannot very well have arranged his historical facts to fit the names of a detective story, the historical Constantia, granddaughter of the historical Helena, must have something to do with Dickens‘ Constantia; and Dickens‘ Constantia must, in tum, have something to do with his Helena, a name he gives his dark-skinned heroine from Ceylon. Moreover, this last connection must belong to a semaphore untrammeled by narrative logic. For Constantia in Drood is not a person but a wine from the Cape of Good Hope, forced by Mrs. Crisparkle down the throat of her son, whenever that kindly and submissive clergyman seems to her in need of a pick-me-up.

The grandmother of the historical Constantia was the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine. She and her granddaughter figure in The Gnostics and Their Remains as elements of an argument concerning the derivation of the round form of the Temple Church in London. The design of this “Templar” monument recalls the form of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — built in Jerusalem to commemorate Helena's finding of the True Cross — and also the form of Constantia's tomb. King's point is that the circular shape characterizes a number of early Christian buildings quite lacking in Gnostic associations, and need not be assumed to have an occult meaning in London. The example happens to illustrate his preference for common sense over mystic “keys.” But the more likely source of Helena’s role in Drood is the legend that she found the True Cross, and commemorated the event by building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site of a pagan temple. Helena‘s legend — eked out by a stage prop representing “a cathedral” — figures in the ceremony of initiation into the Masonic degree, “Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.” The setting of Drood also centers on a cathedral, and especially on the accompanying crypts and tombs, and one of the novel's major themes is the difference between true Christianity and various forms of pseudo-Christian, pseudo-civilized idolatry, from Jasper‘s double life to the Dean‘s bland hypocrisy. According to Arthur Waite's authoritative Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, the ritual for the “Knight of the Holy Sepulchre“ recalls that for the degree of “Rose Croix” strongly enough to suggest plagiarism.

The blend of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism in the Rose Croix degree seems in any case essential to Dickens‘ symbolic program. Following the initials “PJT” over the door leading to Hiram Grewgious‘s rooms is “1747,” the date of the founding of the “Rose Croix” under the sponsorship of the Stuart pretender, Prince Charles Edward, recently arrived in France after the collapse of his fortunes in the Rebellion of 1745. Clavel observes that “le premier centre d'administration des hauls grades fut établi at Arras en 1747, par Charles-Edouard Stuart lui-meme.” (His escape owed much to Flora Macdonald. stepdaughter of Hugh Macdonald of Armadale, Skye: such names and associations are plainly more in the nature of secret handshakes than political gestures.) Tiler, the word echoed in "Perhaps Joe Tyler" — a second attempt at guessing the name behind the initials — signifies the Masonic functionary charged with guarding the secrecy of a lodge meeting, and is used with that meaning in King. In addition to the congruence between roses as a “free translation” for pomegranates, and Pussy as a nickname for Rosa. Thomas De Quincey’s essay on Rosicrucians and Freemasons anticipates the Drood names of Neville — a Masonic partner of Oliver Cromwell's, according to a legend that De Quincey finds absurd — and Dachery, a scholarly editor (Dickens adds a “t” before the “ch”). De Quincey also anticipates Jennings and King in discussing “the holiest masonic name of Hiram,” the biblical architect revered by Masons as “a type of Christ.”

In real life, the letters over the door assigned by Dickens to Hiram Grewgious designated the president of Staple Inn in 1747, “Principal John Thompson.” Dickens takes pains to replicate the pattern of this black and white inscription, as follows:

P

J T

1747

A purported transcript of secret Masonic ceremonies states that during the initiation of a Mark Master Mason, the Master presents the candidate with a keystone bearing in circular form the letters:

H

T W

S S

T K

S

These initials stand for “Hiram Tyrjan, widow's Son, Sent To King Solomon,” and they mark “the stone which was set at naught by [the] builders, which is become the head of the comer.” The Masonic candidate who receives the keystone must beware of being rejected with better reason, “as unfit for that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” The manual’s instructions for the degree of Intimate Secretary include the further admonition, “Brother, the color of your ribbon is intended to remind you of the blood of Hiram Abif, the last drop of which he chose to spill, rather than betray his trust.” The first time Dickens shows Hiram Grewgious at home, he tells us, “The largest fidelity to a trust was the lifeblood of the man.”

A full list of counterparts to names in Drood, culled from three works dealing with the tradition of mystery religions and secret societies, will thus include Jennings, Apollo, Diana, Juno, Minerva, Venus, the Wandering Jew, Tartar, Isis, Cheops. Rosa, Bhudd, Jack, Jasper, Helena. Constantia, Hiram, tiler, tope, Neville, and Dachery. Moreover, Edwin Drood‘s first name is traditionally honored as that of the earliest titled patron of Freemasonry in England, and Dickens‘ preparatory notes show Edwyn, the old-fashioned spelling used in a classic, seventeenth-century source on this topic, coming in a close second behind Edwin, five trials to six.

Other details strongly suggestive of Masonry are Miss Twinkleton’s globes, terrestrial and celestial, Drood's present of gloves to Rosa, the two-foot rule and hammer of Cloisterham‘s literal stonemason, Durdles, and the scarf that suddenly forms part of Jasper's attire on the eve of his nephew’s disappearance. Celestial and terrestrial globes are “symbols of the universal extension of the Order“; it was the custom to give newly-initiated Masons white gloves to present to their sweethearts; the 24-inch gauge and the Mason’s gavel form part of the initiation of an “Entered Apprentice”; and a black scarf is featured in the first stage of initiation into the degree of Rose Croix. The last of these items is of particular interest. because Jasper‘s “great black scarf” has stirred more critical interest in the Hindu background of Drood than any other detail in the story.

The question of whether Jasper is a Thug has divided Drood-lovers since 1930, when Howard Duffield published an essay entitled, “John Jasper: Strangler.” Dickens‘ illustrator, Luke Fildes, had written that Jasper was to have used his scarf to strangle his nephew, and this disclosure, recalling the Thug practice of using sashes for the performance of their an. seemed to Duffield to impose vivid, logical coherence on a number of otherwise unrelated details, and so to establish that Dickens had Thuggee in mind. For example, Dickens pointedly associates the word “destruction” with Jasper, and shows him taking as much interest in burial sites as if he were a Thug planning to dispose of a corpse. Like the choirmaster, Thugs assiduously identify themselves with “the most respectable classes.” Thugs drug their victims before strangling them; Jasper shows his mastery of such tricks when he incites a violent quarrel between his nephew and Neville Landless, after serving them “mulled” wine, and again when he gains access to the locked cathedral at midnight by tempting the drunken verger with a specially prepared bottle. Thugs prey on travellers: Drood is about to set out on a journey, and seems to have disappeared just after midnight, a time favored by Thugs for murder. The cry of a rook in sight of a river was considered a favorable omen by Stranglers; Jasper hears such a cry a week before the crime.

Duffield points out that stranglers had turned up in such novels as Eugene Sue's Wandering Jew and Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug, as well as in Dickens‘ own periodicals. Numerous further facts attesting the topicality of Thuggee in journalism as well as fiction have come to light since I930. But Duffield‘s parallels were enough to convince Edmund Wilson, who added yet another of his own. According to John Forster, an essential clue in the solution of the mystery was to have been a gold ring that would resist dissolution in the quicklime used by the murderer to get rid of the body. Unknown to Jasper, Drood is carrying such a ring in his breast pocket on the night of their last encounter. Wilson found in a major, Victorian account of Thug superstitions the warning that evil would befall the expedition that selected for its first prey a man with gold on his person. Richard Baker, Philip Collins, and Wendy Jacobson are among the scholars who have faulted the Duflield/Wilson thesis for its disregard of plausibility Masonic Symbolism and consistency, values that mattered as much to Dickens as surprise. Jasper is violently jealous, and his behavior accords perfectly with what Dickens told Forster — that the killer was to realize the needlessness of the crime soon after committing it. When he learns that Drood and Rosa had broken their engagement, and agreed to be merely good friends to one another henceforth, the choirmaster clutches his hair, shrieks, and falls to the floor in a swoon, apparently unconsoled by thoughts of Kali. Why would Dickens carefully develop the psychology of this talented, sophisticated cynic, driven to ruin by desire for a woman, only to disclose at the end that the source of his violence is attachment to a naïve Hindu cult? On the other hand, if no such revelation lay in readiness for the climax, what is the meaning of the network of correspondences unearthed by Duffield and Wilson?

The simplest answer is that Dickens, like the author of The Moonstone, has fashioned two sets of clues — one set literal, the other emblematic. Collins arranges for Siva (“Old Father Time”) to attend Rachel’s birthday party, together with his bull, his graveyard, his mendicants, and his drum. Parvati‘s diamond is there too, disguised as Siva's yoni-like third eye. But Betteredge and Franklin Blake are not Hindus, nor has the Moonstone ever adorned a statue of Parvati or Siva.

The source cited by Edmund Wilson concerning a strangled victim with gold on his person also mentions the Thugs’ dread of beginning an expedition in December. Jasper‘s behavior during that month would be oddly reckless in a literal worshiper of Kali. But there is no evidence that he knows anything at all about Thug lore. What he (probably) knows is that a Christmas Eve party will serve admirably for framing Neville as Edwin's murderer, and that gold will resist dissolution in quicklime. Hence the December reconnaissance with Durdles, and the disposal of Drood's watch and pin. On the other hand, Jasper is decidedly a Thug in the eyes of Dickens, who shapes the action to fit a hidden, analogical pattern. As might be expected, The Gnostics and Their Remains features a lengthy discussion of Siva’s consort, Kali, pointing out her kinship with Hecate and Medusa, and touching on the ferocity of her votaries, the Thugs (a composite image of this female horror appears on the cover of the Drood monthly numbers, opposite Flora‘s).

A comparison of Hindu iconography in Brood and in Bulwer Lytton‘s Rosicrucian Strange Story shows that the choirmaster is even more a “Siva-figure” than he is a Thug. Jasper’s prototype in the earlier novel is Margrave, a singer, pianist, and dancer of charismatic powers, and also a mesmerist assassin: “the light of his wondrous eye seemed to rest upon us in one lengthened, steady ray through the limpid moonshine.” The narrator likens Margrave to “an incarnation of the blind powers of Nature, beautiful and joyous, wanton and terrible and destroying! Such as ancient myths have personified in the idols of Oriental creeds.“ The Thug who serves this villain‘s veiled mistress has no evident function beyond removing all doubt as to the identity of the idol chiefly concerned.”

Jasper is an avatar of the same god, more realistic than Margrave without being any less symbolic. Hence his musical genius (Siva is “Lord and Teacher of Music”); his complexion “pale as gentlemanly ashes” (Siva, “King of Dread,” is “often painted as if rubbed over with ashes”); his “almost womanish” ways (Siva “called Ardha Nari” is “half woman”); his lust coupled with a mania for destruction; his interest in tombs; his specters summoned at midnight; and his brooding on those vistas of time that sustain the ecstasy of murder in an opium dream, afterwards making — by their absence — a stale anti-climax of the actual experience of killing. Hence, too, Jasper‘s affinity with fire, and with the moon. Before setting out on his "night with Durdles,” the choirmaster sits at the piano “with no light but that of the fire ... until it has been for some time dark, and the moon is about to rise.” Within the cathedral, Dickens then evokes the white and black, good and evil, of Masonic pillars and temple floor:

They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and are down in the Crypt. The lantern is not wanted, for the moonlight strikes in at the groined windows, bare of glass, the broken frames for which cast patterns on the ground. The heavy pillars which support the roof engender masses of black shade, but between them there are lanes of light.

The mystery in such writing renders facile contrasts between “emblem” and “symbol” as irrelevant to Drood as to The Magic Flute.

III

Part of King’s usefulness for the student of Collins and Dickens lies in the attention he pays to the semantics as well as the imagery of his talismans. He discourses at length on the element of secrecy present in symbols that not only stand for concepts but serve as means of concealment and secret recognition. The Gnostics have their analogues of the “masonic grip.” Richardson's Monitor of Free-Masonry also affords some insight into possible forms of double talk. Masons wishing to warn a brother away from a poor bargain, and lacking the chance to slip him a word in private, are advised to tell him publicly it will be to his advantage to buy, using formulaic language already agreed on to mean the exact opposite of what it says.

Something similar happens often in The Moonstone. Betteredge tells us we won't find the ghost of a joke in his conversation with Penelope, because “It” means the Moonstone. But we do find the ghost oi a joke: we find that the Moonstone means “It.” As the moment of Franklin Blake's glad awakening draws near, Rachel Verinder does not look down to thread her needle: but her needle will be threaded by Franklin Blake. Partridge traces the bawdy use of this expression to the nineteenth century, and Edward Moor illustrates the kinship between British and Indian folklore by showing that just as the Hindus regard cleft rocks and trees as yonis, bringing luck to all who pass through them, so a recent book on Irish legends records the same superstition at Innisfallen, where squeezing through the hole in a certain tree is called “threading the needle.“

Collins never says that the idol serves Siva Somanatha, or that the diamond in its forehead marks this relationship; he tells us instead that the stone is under the protection of Siva‘s opposite, Vishnu. Unlike the diamond yoni described by King, the Moonstone never belongs to the Nizam. It belongs instead to the Nizam’s rival, Sultan Tippoo (the bitter conflict between these two Indian princes, including the Nizam's alliance with the British at the time of Tippoo‘s fall, is fully reported in a source Collins acknowledges having consulted for background on the storming of Seringapatam).

John Reed has shown the reversal in the Moonstone's relation to the Koh-l-Noor: the Brahmins recover the spoils of an imperialist thief — Rachel‘s uncle — and restore it to India at the very time when Queen Victoria receives a fabulous diamond commemorating the first two hundred and fifty years of the East India Company. To get the Moonstone, the Indians have smothered that pluperfect Victorian hypocrite, Godfrey Ablewhite, “in the near vicinity of Lime and Leadenhall streets where the House of the East India Company stood in I849.” It seems fitting that they should have returned the stone to the site of “the Lord Ellenborough story.”

Dickens enjoys reversals as much as Collins. Deputy, the urchin who catches sight of Jasper scouting the Cathedral and its precincts at night, pays for his indiscretion by being picked up, shaken, and nearly choked. In fact, he "forces his assailant to hang him, as it were.” But the nonsensical refrain of Deputy's song, “Widdy widdy wake-cock warning," suggests that one day the noose will be on the other neck. Widdy is slang for both widow (Masons are “Sons of the Widow”) and gallows. “Wen I ketches him out after ten,” though literally referring to Durdles, puns on Jack Ketch — slang for hangman — picking up a theme sounded at the beginning of the chapter in jokes about breaking “our worthy and respected choir-master's neck.”

Thugs often used a yellow garment to function as Kali's murderous “handkerchief,” and they always entrusted their most sacred emblem, the pickaxe, to the “cleanest, most sober and careful man” among them. Dickens entrusts it to the town drunk, Durdles, who is never clean, wears a yellow kerchief, and lives in company with “mechanical figures emblematical of Time and Death.” But that does not mean that Durdles himself is evil. Quite the contrary. One source of critical speculation that Jasper may have his good or “tragic” side is the fact that Dickens takes pains to show him looking devotedly at his nephew. Another is that St. John the Evangelist twice mentions jasper as a substance used in building the Heavenly City. For that matter, the Gnostics thought jasper would “drive away evil spirits, fevers and dropsies, check lust, prevent conception, render the wearer victorious and beloved, and stanch the flow of blood.” But Chesterton recognizes with his usual acuteness the double-take required of us by that line about the devoted look: the horror is that this “devotion” is lethal, not loving. And though we have no reason to think John Jasper begets children or suffers from dropsy, his name embodies in every other respect a reversal as crisp as the use of David to name a hero whose villainous rival is Uriah.

The basic metaphor of contrast in Drood is the mirror-image reversal of Thuggee and Masonry. Each group consists of a body of initiates into secret mysteries, who make known their membership through signs that only their fellows can recognize, and who communicate with one another in coded slang. Dickens suspends these good and evil versions of fraternity like masks flanking the stage of a drama that does not literally involve either one. The story at the core of Masonic legend and ritual tells that the master builder, Hiram Abif, was murdered by some of his workmen while the temple of Solomon was still being built. The temple, fated in due course to be destroyed entirely, was thus flawed from the outset by a tragedy of betrayal. But God's house — as the ceremony of the Mark Master Mason reminds us — is not made by hands, and the building of the true temple goes on, with human beings for stones. This metaphor of working among ruins to recover and complete what was lost in the murder of Christ underlies the image of Cloisterham, with its fragments of old wall and its fixation on the past, and above all its tendency to honor the wonderful monuments as tributes to itself.

Jane Vogel rightly stresses the Christian, allegorical thrust of some ostensibly jocular references to St. Stephen in this text. To her emphasis on martyrdom, l would add the theme of the spiritual church versus its material shell. Before he is put to death, charged with having claimed that Jesus would destroy the temple in Jerusalem, Stephen confronts his accusers with a brief history of the Jewish people, the point of which is that they have always mistaken prophets for troublemakers requiring to be ignored, exiled, or killed. When Moses led them out of slavery, they became nostalgic for Egypt and its idols. And when they replaced the movable tabernacle of their wanderings with a splendid, permanent building, they made an idol of that, forgetting that “the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands.“ In A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, Arthur Waite observes of the ritual of Helena's degree, “The Holy Sepulchre”:

It is testified in behalf of the Candidate that he has served the Church and its members, yet he says on his own part that for want of an abiding-place he and his fellow-servants in Christ can only build their Temples and Tabernacles in the heart. ... The Church is therefore within, and so is the ordained priest.

Keeping a round table in his rooms, living under the doorway commemorating John Thomas and the tiler and the union of the Rosy Cross with Freemasonry, Hiram Grewgious stands in the same figurative relationship to these insignia as John Jasper to his scarf, his mulled wine, his choir, his friend the mayor, and his Gate House (the name recalls that of Gatehouse Prison in London). Generation, re-generation, and brotherhood here struggle against their opposites. The two antagonists are metaphorically the Mason and the Thug, and it makes no more sense to ask whether Grewgious attends lodge meetings than to ask whether Jasper communicates with other Stranglers in slang. As Jacobson points out, one of the features of Jasper‘s situation that casts doubt on his (conscious) devotion to Thuggee is the fact that he has no accomplices. He is utterly alone. His success in drawing harmonious sounds out of his choir is purely mechanical — “l/lt,” never “l/Thou.” Mr. Grewgious, too, at first appears solitary, flinty, “angular.” But it soon becomes apparent that his somewhat dogged way of doing his duty builds community, kindness, the conspiracy of the good. Before long, he is working in real harmony with that other Cloisterham singer, the widow's Son, Mr. Crisparkle, and with Rosa, Helena, Neville, and Tartar. Not the least striking mark of his conspiratorial flare is his service to the plot, which for Dickens means service to Providence. It is Grewgious who brings Drood to the state of mind in which he leaves the gold ring in his pocket, rather than continue the pretence that he and Rosa are a promising couple for marriage.

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If Jasper is not literally a Thug, there is one less reason to think he is schizophrenic; if he is, however, a Thug emblematically, there is also one less reason to think he is innocent; and if widdy and ketch foretell his doom, he is going to hang. But it is hard to say how much these inferences may owe to my own, prior attachment to the view of the unwritten ending first sketched by Forster, and afterwards tentatively fleshed out by Philip Collins. Moreover, just as the study of Masonic echoes may yield highly debatable insights into the ending, so fixation on the ending may distract attention from the difference inescapably made by those echoes in our perception of the text. What they affect most deeply is not our guessing about the plot but our awareness of the kind of book we are reading. By the same token they radically alter our sense of Dickens‘ relation to his audience.

We tend to think of the Victorian period in literature as one in which the intellectual sport and learned allusiveness of earlier centuries were severely hampered by the aim to reach a large audience. But such a formula does not fit Dickens, who among great writers reached the largest audience of all. Nor does it fit Collins, who among popular writers comes closest to deserving the adjective, “great.” I don't think either man's pleasure in creating a sub-text for insiders disproves his sincerity as a friend of the many who had never read C. W. King. Still, the insiders‘ game does reveal the need felt by the two most popular of gifted writers for a freedom to invent, to joke, to be difficult and "shocking," that the mass of their readers would have neither understood nor forgiven.