The Old Testament villains were seen as heroes by the original Cainites, a Gnostic sect denounced circa AD 180 by Irenaeus of Lyons in Against Heresies (a work familiar to MRJ and mentioned by him in The Apocryphal New Testament).(5) Irenaeus writes of the Cainites:
"...others say that Cain came from the Absolute Sovereignty above, and Esau, Korah, and the men of Sodom, along with every person of this sort, have the same origin. They were hated by the Creator because though attacked they suffered no harm, for Sophia took to herself what was her own in them. The traitor Judas was the only one of the apostles who possessed this knowledge. For this reason he brought about the mystery of the betrayal; through him all things on earth and in heaven were destroyed. They provide a work to this effect called the 'Gospel of Judas.' I have collected writings of theirs in which they urge the destruction of the works of the Womb, calling the Creator of heaven and earth Womb." (Book 1,xxxi,1-2)(6)
Like most of these early Gnostic sects, we only have their details via the Christian Fathers, but James Wilson would also have got his information solely from these suspect sources. Many Gnostic groups held that the Creator God of the Old Testament, the Demiurge, was an abortion created by Sophia (Wisdom), the last Aeon. This flawed Demiurge, imagining it was the true God, made the material cosmos, the earth being the lowest and most inferior cosmological sphere of creation. The Old Testament God was thus seen as being either evil, degenerate or barbaric (i.e. in accepting blood sacrifices). The Cainites therefore believed in what could be seen as a reversal of Old Testament tenets. If the OT was a result of the flawed Demiurge, then it was a logical step to revere its villains as heroes, and to despise figures such as Moses as traitors to humanity.
The images on the copper globe containing James Wilson's ashes can be taken as an allegory of Gnosticism. The winged Prince of Darkness is the Creator God presiding over the "umbra mortis" (shadow of death) that he has created in the material world. Various interpretations can be placed upon the winged serpent encircling the globe. According to some Gnostic groups, particularly the Ophites and the Naassenes, the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve to disobey the Creator God and eat from the tree of knowledge was a symbol of true Gnosis, opposing the Demiurge who had tried to keep mankind in a state of ignorance. The winged serpent, thus interpreted, may be a guardian of the secret knowledge that Wilson possesses. On the other hand, in the Gnostic "Hymn of the Pearl", contained in the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas, the earth-encircling serpent is seen as a symbol of the evil principle. In the Acts (MRJ's translation), one of the serpent-dragon's sons says:
"I am a reptile of the reptile nature and noxious son of the noxious father...I am son to him that sitteth on a throne over all the earth...I am son to him that girdeth about the sphere...that is outside [around] the ocean, whose tail is set in his own mouth." (Acts of Thomas, 32)(7)
If James Wilson was a Cainite, how would it have manifested itself in his lifestyle? Martin Hughes does not really deal with this at all, but it would seem that here is the core of the secret which Wilson wished to pass on to those of his family with the wit and intelligence to act on his hints. The Cainites, along with their contemporaries the Carpocratians, were labelled by Irenaeus as "licentious heretics". In Against Heresies, Irenaeus writes:
"They cannot be saved unless they experience everything, as Carpocrates also taught. At each sinful and disgusting action an angel is present; the agent must act boldly and make the impurity fall upon the angel present in the act, saying to him, 'O angel, I use your work; O power, I perform your operation.' This is 'perfect knowledge,' to perform without fear such actions as may not even be named." (Book 1, xxxi,2)
So by experiencing all things, the Cainites believed that they would
be freed from an endless cycle of reincarnation, thus bringing the human
soul closer to true Gnosis or knowledge.
The sermon which Mr Humphreys discovers in the library at Wilsthorpe Hall
is of an earlier date than the maze, so presumably Wilson was inspired by
it. In the sermon, the labyrinth represents the pitfalls of a life spent
devoted to the "Jewel" of the pursuit of the "World's Pleasures".
Wilson would have seen this as yet another example of the mainstream Christian
theology he had rejected, so in characteristically Cainite inversion he
picked the maze as a suitable temple for his own religion. And in another
inversion, the OT inscription on the stones became not a warning but an
invitation. Wilson's theology combined license, including sexual license
judging from the context of that inscription, with aspects of Magianic magic
(the Magi may have shared the Cainites' opinion of the Old Testament God).
Unsurprisingly, therefore, instead of salvation he achieved a burning, agonising
life in death.
As with the whole story, the shape which Wilson's ghost takes when it appears
to Humphreys from a hole in the centre of the maze plan can be interpreted
in two ways. Superficially it is hideously burnt because his body was cremated,
but he is also burning deep in Hell (or Gehenna) for his sins. The 'Valley
of the Sons of Hinnom' (Gehenna), as depicted on the globe, was a rubbish
dump near Jerusalem. Formerly the site of human sacrifices to the pagan
Semitic god, Moloch, it was continually on fire and became synonymous with
Hell. More specifically, in the Jewish apocalyptic Book of Jubilees,
which was known to MRJ, it was to the Valley of Hinnom that Jews who had
been led by demons into worshipping false gods would be condemned forever
on the Day of Judgement. Many apocalyptic versions of Hell reserve the most
fiery tortures for those who have discarded the true God in favour of other
beliefs, such as the "men and women, burning and turning themselves
about and roasted as in a pan", because they "forsook the way
of God" in the Apocalypse of Peter (MRJ's translation).(8)
To James Wilson, in life the Valley of Hinnom was merely a symbol of everything
he despised about the Judaeo-Christian religion, but in death it was all
too real.
Mr Humphreys never learns Wilson's real secret, and it is perhaps just as
well for his sanity that he doesn't. The question remains as to precisely
how aware MRJ himself was of the implications of what he wrote. We must
not over-estimate the importance of his supposed haste to complete the tale
for More Ghost Stories. A likely scenario is that he started with
an existing story draft - the one which was eventually published as "John
Humphreys" in G&S 16 - but worked on it so extensively that
he ended up with something completely new and which reflected, perhaps,
his current research projects. As is made clear from his introduction to
The Apocryphal New Testament (p.xxii), he knew much about the Gnostic
gospels, although for various reasons he chose to exclude most of the then-available
texts from that volume. Of course, it remains possible that he just picked
a couple of good Latin quotes and a heresy at random, then tossed them into
"Mr Humphreys" for antiquarian effect. That seems very unlikely,
though - it was not the way he worked.
MRJ would have been amused if anyone had understood what James Wilson's
real secret was, but he was not going to make it easy for them to find out,
as a friend who asked him for an explanation of "Mr Humphreys"
discovered. MRJ's reply, in a letter of 3rd January 1912, made some obvious
points about Wilson's ghost taking the form of the Irish yew and the bush
before the final manifestation, but kept mum about the mystery at the heart
of the tale.(9) James Wilson's secret has remained MRJ's secret for
a long time!
Copyright © 1997 Rosemary Pardoe and Jane
Nicholls
Back to top
1. See
the Preface to Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James (Arnold, 1931).
2. S.T. Joshi, "M.R. James and The Limitations of The Ghost
Story" (Spectral Tales 1, June 1988), p.31.
3. Samuel D. Russell, "Irony
and Horror: The Art of M.R. James" (The Acolyte 12, Fall 1945);
reprinted as a Ghost Story Society booklet (1993), where the quotes are
on p.17.
4. Martin Hughes, "A Maze of
Secrets in a Story by M.R. James" (Durham University Journal,
Vol. 85, # 54/1, Jan 1993), pp.81-93.
5. M.R. James, The Apocryphal
New Testament (Oxford, 1924), p.xxii, etc.
6. The quotations from Against
Heresies are from the translation in Robert M. Grant, The Early Church
Fathers: Irenaeus of Lyons (Routledge, 1997), pp.104-105.
7. The Apocryphal New Testament, p.379.
8. Ibid, p.510. At around the same
time as MRJ wrote "Mr Humphreys", he was also working on two articles
about the Apocalypse of Peter, which appeared in 1911 in the Journal
of Theological Studies.
9. Quoted in Michael Cox (ed.),
M.R. James: Casting the Runes and Other Stories (Oxford, 1987), p.324.
October 1997
Back to Ghosts & Scholars Main Page
Bar by Syruss