Collected Works of Florence Nightingale : On Mysticism and Eastern Religions [1 ed.] 9780889205734, 9780889204133

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Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions

Volume 4 of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale

The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale List of Volumes Note: Short title denoted by bold Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Volume 8 Volume 9 Volumes 10-11 Volumes 12-13 Volume 14 Volume 15 Volume 16

Florence Nightingale: An Introduction to Her Life and Family Florence Nightingale’s Spiritual Journey: Biblical Annotations, Sermons and Journal Notes Florence Nightingale’s Theology: Essays, Letters and Journal Notes Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics, Philosophy, Science, Education and Literature Florence Nightingale on Public Health Care Florence Nightingale’s European Travels Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution Florence Nightingale and the Foundation of Professional Nursing Florence Nightingale and Public Health Care in India Florence Nightingale: The Crimean War and War Office Reform Florence Nightingale on War and Militarism Florence Nightingale and Hospital Reform

Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions

Gérard Vallée, editor

Volume 4 of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale

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Wilfrid Laurier University Press

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910. Florence Nightingale on mysticism and eastern religions / Gérard Vallée, editor. (Collected works of Florence Nightingale ; v. 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88920-413-6 1. Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910 — Religion. 2. Asia — Religion. 3. Mysticism. 4. Christianity and other religions. 5. Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910 — Journeys — Egypt. 6. Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910 — Diaries. 7. Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910 — Correspondence. I. Vallée, Gérard, 1933II. Title. III. Series: Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910. Collected works of Florence Nightingale ; v. 4. RT37.N5A2 2003 v. 4

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C2002-904601-7

© 2003 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Cover design by Leslie Macredie. Front cover photograph of Edfu: Temple of Hor us, Egypt by Gérard Vallée. ∞ Printed in Canada Ever y reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5 E-mail: [email protected] Web: http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca Collected Works of Florence Nightingale Web site: http://www.sociology.uoguelph.ca/fnightingale

Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................. Dramatis Personae ............................................................................ List of Illustrations ............................................................................ A Précis of the Collected Works ....................................................... Introduction to Volume 4 ................................................................. Key to Editing .................................................................................... Notes from Devotional Authors Notes from Devotional Authors ....................................................... Introduction ................................................................................... Nightingale’s Views According to the Notes ....................................... Why Nightingale Did Not Complete and Publish This Manuscript ................................................................................. Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen and Freely Translated by Florence Nightingale ................ Translations and Notes ....................................................................

vii ix x xi 1 3

9 9 12 16 17 59

Mysticism and The Imitation of Christ, edited by Lynn McDonald .. 81 Nightingale’s Annotations to The Imitation of Christ ........................... 82 Notes and Letters on Spirituality ..................................................... 105 On Ignatius Theophorus ................................................................. 105 Letters and Diaries from Egypt Letters and Diaries from Egypt ........................................................ Editor’s Introduction ....................................................................... En Route for Egypt (Letters 1-7) ...................................................... Alexandria and Cairo (Letters 8-12) ................................................. Sailing Southwards (Letters 13-31) ................................................... Sailing Northwards (Letters 31-47) ................................................... Cairo and Surroundings (Letters 48-51) ........................................... Alexandria and Off (Letters 52-54) .................................................. ‘‘Vision of Temples’’ (Letter 55) ...................................................... List of Emendations ..........................................................................

117 117 123 142 173 275 409 453 468 477

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vi / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Brief Chronology of Ancient Egypt and Some Important Kings and Pharaohs ...................................................................... 480 Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions, edited by Lynn McDonald ............................................................................ 483 Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale ........................... 509 Bibliography ...................................................................................... 529 Index .................................................................................................. 537

Acknowledgments

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cknowledgments are due first of all to the Henry Bonham Carter Will Trust for permission to publish Nightingale original manuscripts, and indeed for treating Nightingale material generally as being in the public domain. To the owners of Nightingale manuscripts thanks are due for their important role in conservation, for permitting scholarly access and for permitting copies to be made for this Collected Works. All sources actually used in this volume are indicated at the apropriate place. To the University of Guelph thanks are due for the provision of an extra faculty office to house the project, computers, technical and administrative support. Transcriptions were done by: Gwyneth Watkins, Lea Uotila, Maria Schneidersmann, Linda Quirke and Victoria Rea. Volunteer verifiers of texts were Cherry Ambrose and Linda Elliot. Thanks for assistance with proofreading go to Sandra Hunter, Cherry Ambrose and Aideen Nicholson. Dr Margaret Griffin as project manager oversaw transcriptions and research. At the Press thanks are due to Dr Brian Henderson, director; Carroll Klein, managing editor; Doreen Armbr uster, typesetter; Leslie Macredie and Penelope Grows, marketing; Elin Edwards, peer review; Steve Izma, production. The copy editing was done by Frances Rooney. Thanks for help with translation of Italian passages go to Professor Gabriele Erasmi; for identification of references to Lise Feit and Dr Charles G. Roland. Acknowledgments for photographs and other illustrations are given in the illustrations section. Thanks to Patricia Vinton of the Mediashop, McMaster University, for her generous help with the illustrations. In spite of the assistance of so many people undoubtedly errors remain, which are the responsibility of the editor and project director. / vii

viii / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions We would be grateful for notification of any errors, and for information on missing identifications. Corrections will be made in the electronic text and any other later publication. Gérard Vallée, editor Lynn McDonald, project director Januar y 2003

Dramatis Personae

Frances ‘‘Fanny’’ (Smith) Nightingale (1788-1880), mother William Edward Nightingale (1794-1874), father Parthenope, ‘‘Pop,’’ Nightingale, later Lady Verney (1819-90), sister Sir Harry Verney (1801-94), brother-in-law Mar y Shore Smith (1798-1889), ‘‘Aunt Mai’’ Samuel Smith (1794-1880), ‘‘Uncle Sam’’ William Shore Smith (1831-94), ‘‘Shore,’’ cousin, Nightingale heir Henr y Bonham Carter (1827-1921), cousin, secretar y, Nightingale Fund Selina Bracebridge (1800-74), ‘‘spiritual mother,’’ family friend Charles Holte Bracebridge (1799-1872), family friend Julius Mohl (1800-76), Orientalist, friend Mar y Clarke Mohl (1793-1883), friend, ‘‘Mme Mohl’’ Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), Master of Balliol College, priest, friend

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List of Illustrations

Illustrations begin facing page 274. 1. Florence Nightingale, about 1845, from a drawing by Hilary Bonham Carter 2. Assyrian sculptures (Letter 1): ‘‘Hero Overpowering a Lion’’; ‘‘Hero Holding a Lion’’; Androcephelos Winged Bull’’ 3. Map of Egypt 4. Abu Simbel. The temple of Ramesses II (in the guise of Osiris) 5. Abu Simbel. The temple of Hothor, where Nefertari is dressed as Hothor (Letter 31) 6. Vignette from the funerary papyr us, illustrating the performance of correct ritual in the afterlife 7. Osiris, king of the underworld, bearing royal regalia (crown, flail and sceptre), shown in tomb as he prepares to receive the dead 8. Karnak, ‘‘ . . . always to be seen by the shadow of night’’ (Claydon Diar y 31 December 1849)

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A Précis of the Collected Works

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lorence Nightingale (1820-1910) is best known as the heroine of the Crimean War (1854-56), the chief founder of the modern profession of nursing and a hospital reformer. Her work in those respects will be reported later in this Collected Works. The introductor y volume, Life and Family, gives an overview of Nightingale’s life and extensive correspondence with family members. The next three volumes relate her contribution as a religious thinker and the role of her faith in grounding her years of practical activity as a social reformer. The volumes on religion begin with Spiritual Journe y, which introduces the main themes of her spirituality and theology and gives her biblical annotations, sermons and journal notes. Theology reports her essays, a great deal of correspondence and some of her devotional reading. This volume, Mysticism and Eastern Religions, relates her translations of the medieval mystics, her letters and diaries from Egypt and correspondence and notes on Eastern religions. A later volume gives the first full publication of her Suggestions for Thought. Nightingale was born in Florence, Italy, and was baptized as an infant there. (Her parents took a two-year trip to Europe after their wedding; her older sister, Parthenope, was born in Naples and given the Greek name for that city.) The family returned to England in 1821, to live initially in Derbyshire, later to spend the great part of the year at a large home, Embley, in Hampshire, and several months of the year at Lea Hurst, Derbyshire (with shorter periods in London). W.E. Nightingale was enormously wealthy thanks to inheritance from a childless great-uncle. Nightingale was then raised with great privilege but, as a daughter, owned nothing on her own and was financially dependent on her father. She was conventional also in being an obedient daughter, thus accepting her parents’ refusal to permit her to nurse as being beneath her station in life. / xi

xii / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Nightingale was raised in the Church of England and remained within that church throughout her long life, although she disagreed with many of its doctrines (especially on hellfire and damnation) and thoroughly disliked its conservative, complacent social policy and its undemanding approach to its members. Like St Catherine of Siena she sought reform of her church, but did not expect it to happen in her lifetime. As a young woman Nightingale considered converting to Roman Catholicism, but did not. Basically liberal in her approach to life, she became more hostile to Catholicism when Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of infallibility in 1870. Her faith was influenced strongly by the Wesleyan movement and chapels of their neighbourhood at Lea Hurst, Derbyshire (the family attended the Church of England in Hampshire but continued to support the Methodist chapels in Derbyshire). Late in life she acknowledged an experience of ‘‘conversion’’ in 1836, guided by the reading of Jacob Abbott’s Corner-stone.1 Her ‘‘call to service’’ is precisely dated and frequently referred to, 7 Februar y 1837. There were as well other ‘‘calls’’ refining it, and Spiritual Journey recounts later experiences of ‘‘voices’’ and ‘‘impressions’’ which also gave her direction. Nightingale soon understood her calling being to nurse, and sought to obtain training and experience to pursue it, but was not permitted to by her family (her sister especially was opposed; her father was the most willing). Later she saw her calling more broadly being to save lives, including by measures of administrative reform. She was permitted to visit charitable institutions and hospitals and hence gained considerable knowledge before she was permitted to nurse. She was also taken on lengthy and exotic trips, to Rome in 1847-48 and Egypt 1849-50. The former is reported, along with a family trip to Europe 1837-39, in European Travels, while the latter is reported in this volume. The Egypt trip was followed by travels in Greece and northern Europe, including her first trip to the Lutheran Deaconess Institution at Kaiserswerth, Germany, also reported in European Travels. A second, longer stay at Kaiserswerth was permitted in 1851 (also reported there). As a result of these experiences there are important and lasting Lutheran influences as well as Wesleyan in Nightingale’s life, notably from Pastor Theodor Fliedner, who revived the diaconate for 1 The reference occurs only once in surviving correspondence, in a letter to Maude Verney 10 December 1895, Add Mss 68888 ff137-38 (see Women). The book is by an American Congregational minister, Jacob Abbott, The Corner-stone, or, A Familiar Illustration of the Principles of Christian Truth, 1834.

A Précis of the Collected Works / xiii

women at Kaiserswerth. Nightingale was also permitted to spend several months in 1852 in Paris hospitals, run by various religious orders. In 1853 her father settled £500 a year on her so that she could superintend the Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness, in Harley St. After only a little more than a year’s experience there she was invited by Sidney Herbert, her friend and the secretar y of state at war, to head the team of women to nurse in the British hospitals in the Crimean War, the first women to serve with the British Army in wartime. Nightingale returned as a national heroine, August 1856, from the Crimean War. Her social reform career began effectively then, starting with work to establish a royal commission to inquire into the poor sanitar y conditions that had led to such a high mortality rate (from preventible diseases) in that war. She soon went on to the establishment of nursing training and the provision of public health care measures more broadly. This included reforms both in Britain (especially the introduction of professional nursing in the workhouse infirmaries) and the export of the Nightingale method of nursing training and administration in many parts of the world. Her work on public health care, the prevention of famine and other social reforms in India began also then, to be carried on for more than forty years into her old age. All this post-Crimea work is reported in the next two volumes of the Collected Works: Society and Politics and Public Health Care, two volumes each on nursing, war and India, and one on hospital reform. There is social reform work also reported in Women, especially on midwifery practice, women in medicine and the regulation of prostitution. In all this work we see the practical expression of Nightingale’s faith, the fulfillment of her ‘‘calling’’ to be ‘‘handmaid of the Lord’’ or God’s ‘‘co-worker,’’ as she variously called it. Society and Politics as well reports material on her methodology of social science, science and literature, and proposals for income security for ordinar y people. Public Health Care shows her great emphasis on health promotion (especially better nutrition and decent housing) and disease prevention as the basis for a system of health care. A range of measures to treat disease, when it occurs, in the least harmful manner, is superimposed on that foundation. To sustain all this work Nightingale evolved a highly personal devotional life, reading the medieval mystics, Catholic and Protestant theologians (liberal and conservative) and devotional writers. Too ill for

xiv / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions most of her working life to go out, for many years she received communion at home, thanks to visits from a priest-friend, Benjamin Jowett, a leading ‘‘broad church’’ divine with whose tolerant theology she agreed, and later from other priests. Her heterodox theological views mellowed with age, so that she became doctrinally more conventional in her old age. She was utterly consistent throughout her life in believing that, since faith is the basis of practical activity in the world, we are called to co-operate with God by studying His world, social and physical, to discover its laws and then intervene for good.

Introduction to Volume 4

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ysticism and Eastern Religions1 is the third volume on religion in the Collected Works. It reports material from diverse periods of Nightingale’s life and on a considerable range of subjects. The substantial Part 2, Letters and Diaries from Egypt, dates from 1849-50, a period of considerable anxiety, if not mild depression, for her. Nightingale was clearly frustrated by having experienced that clear ‘‘call to service’’ in 1837 and yet not be allowed to act on it. The trip to Egypt, with respectable family friends, Selina and Charles Bracebridge, with whom she had earlier spent a winter in Rome, was a welcome diversion. She was approaching her thirtieth birthday, 12 May 1850, while on that trip, and was aware that Jesus had begun his public ministry by that age while she was far from doing anything. The Egyptian trip was succeeded by time spent in Greece and travels in northern Europe, in both of which she met Protestant clergy, deaconesses and missionaries and saw work that encouraged her. In Greece she met an Episcopalian missionary couple, the Hills, who ran a school, and in Berlin and Hamburg she visited the Waisenhaus (Orphanage) of Pastor Wichern and the Bethanien Institution of Amelie Sieveking respectively (see European Travels). Nightingale’s spirits rose and the two weeks she spent at Kaiserswerth in the summer further convinced her of the possibility of a role for dedicated women to serve practically in the Protestant Church. 1 Secondar y literature relevant to this theme includes: the best biography of Nightingale, by Edward T. Cook, Life of Florence Nightingale; Barbara M. Dossey, Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionar y and Healer; Debra Jensen, ‘‘Florence Nightingale’s Mystical Vision and Social Action’’; Joan Rees, ‘‘Florence Nightingale: ‘God Spoke to me at Karnak’ ’’; Anthony Sattin, ed., Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-1850; Michael D. Calabria, ed., Florence Nightingale in Egypt and Greece: Her Diary and ‘‘Visions,’’ which offer precious clarifications on Egyptian context, history and archeology.

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2 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Part 1, Nightingale’s work on Christian mystics, stems from a later period of life, indeed one of intense accomplishment. Her interest in the medieval mystics predated the Crimea experience, was encouraged there by a nursing colleague, Rev Mother Mary Clare Moore, and practically aided by Moore after wards. The writing dates from the early 1870s, when Nightingale was hard at work on reforms in India and Britain. The annotations from devotional reading are also largely postCrimean. Her first use of the Imitation of Christ predates Crimea (indeed one annotation is on the eve of her departure), but most annotations are later. Some coincide with a period of unhappy losses in 1861 and 1862. More indicate that she returned to that book when doing the translations and comments on the medieval mystics in 1873. The annotations on Ignatius Theophorus from Charlotte Yonge’s Pupils of St John the Divine are also of this later period. Nightingale was then at her prime in terms of work and real opportunities for reform, but she was often fatigued and sometimes painfully ill. She also experienced serious losses by death in 1874 (her father, Selina Bracebridge, her ‘‘spiritual mother,’’ other mentors and Moore herself late in 1874). The material on Eastern religions ranges from early to late in her life. It reflects an ongoing interest in other faiths, certainly strengthened by the Egyptian trip, and further prompted by her work on India, and is not obviously connected to personal life experiences.

Key to Editing

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ll the manuscript material in the Collected Works has been carefully transcribed and verified (see the electronic text for a full description of the process). Remaining illegible words and passages are so indicated, with [illeg] or [?] inserted to indicate our best reading of the word or words in question. Dates for material cited or reproduced are given wherever possible, in square brackets if they are estimates only (by an archivist, previous scholar or the editor). Any controversy about date is indicated. The type of material, whether a note, actual letter, draft or copy is given as precisely as possible. Designations of letter/draft/copy signify that the source was Nightingale’s own files, given to the British Library or to St Thomas’ Hospital and then the London Metropolitan Archives, and are probably drafts or copies kept by her. The designation of ‘‘letter’’ is used only when there is good reason to believe that it was actually sent and received (a postmarked envelope, for example, or the archive source being other than Nightingale’s own files). In some cases both the original letter is extant and Nightingale’s draft or copy, and these show that the copies she kept are reliable. We do not use the convention of als (autograph letter signed), but our ‘‘letter’’ is close to it, bearing in mind that Nightingale often used initials rather than her signature. The electronic I-text (that is, the transcriptions as ‘‘input,’’ before editing) gives full information on supporting material (envelopes, postmarks), whether in pen, pencil, dictated, typed, etc. The practice was naturally to use the best source possible, the original letter where available. Where a draft or copy was also available this is noted. Sometimes the original was no longer available so that a typed or a published source copy had to be used. All sources indicated as ‘‘Add Mss’’ (Additional Manuscripts) are British Library, the largest source of Nightingale material. The Wellcome Trust History of Medicine Library is abbreviated ‘‘Wellcome.’’ / 3

4 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Most of those materials are copies of correspondence at Claydon House, indicated as (Claydon copy). If not so indicated they are originals. Where only short excerpts from a letter (or note) are used (because the rest is on another subject) these are indicated ‘‘From a letter’’ and the address and ellipses at the beginning and end are omitted. Postscripts that do not add new information, or are on another subject, are normally omitted without ellipses. To avoid use of ‘‘ibid.’’ and ‘‘op. cit.,’’ and to reduce the number of footnotes generally, citations are given at the end of a sequence, if the same source is cited more than once. Subsequent citations are noted in the text with the new page or folio number given in parentheses. The term ‘‘folio’’ (abbreviated as f, or ff in the plural) is used for reference to manuscript pages, p and pp for printed pages, where needed, or page numbers are given after the date or volume number without p or pp. References to material in volumes already published in the Collected Works are given by volume and page number. British spellings have generally been maintained and standardized (honour, labour). Modern spellings have been used for Muhammad, Buddha and Hindu (in place of Mahomet, Bouddha and Hindoo respectively). To make the text as accessible as possible spelling, punctuation and capitalization have been modernized and standardized, and most abbreviations replaced with full words. Roman numerals are replaced with Arabic (except for royalty, popes and the citation of classical texts). We have left Nightingale’s use of masculine generics as they are, hence ‘‘man,’’ ‘‘men,’’ ‘‘he,’’ etc., referring to human beings generally. Some, but not all, excessive ‘‘ands,’’ ‘‘buts’’ and ‘‘the’s’’ have been excised. Nightingale’s ‘‘Esq.’’ titles for men have been omitted. Any words added by the editor to make sense (usually in the case of rough notes or faint writing) are indicated in square brackets. Italics are used to indicate underlining and small capitals for double (or more) underlining. Indications of emphasis in texts are Nightingale’s (or that of her correspondent or source), never the editor’s, except that we italicize the names of books, journals, plays, operas and ships. Any use of (sic) also is Nightingale’s, never the editor’s. When taking excerpts from written material Nightingale indicated ellipses with x x and we have kept these. Ellipses for editorial purposes are indicated with . . . for skipped material within a sentence . . . . if to the end of the sentence or more than a sentence has been dropped. Passages that break off abruptly (or folios are missing) are so indicated.

Key to Editing / 5

In addition to editorial introductions, notes are given in footnotes or, if ver y brief, in square brackets in the text. Articles (the, a, an) and the verb to be have been supplied where appropriate to make sense. Persons who changed their names (usually from marriage or the acquisition of a title, sometimes for purposes of inheritance) are referred to by the more commonly used one, cross-referenced in the index to the other. Dates to identify people are given where that person is discussed (place of identification is indicated by italics in the index), not where there is only passing mention of the person, or the name appears on a list or in a footnote. Of course for many people, notably servants and acquaintances, identifying information is not available. Nightingale was not consistent in the use of capitals or lower case for God and Jesus. We standardize her most common usage (He and Him, Thy and Thine, for God), and reproduce without change her various references to Jesus. We do not capitalize Me or Mine in references to God, following Nightingale’s view that God would be too polite to wish this. In editorial comments pronoun references to God are all upper case, to Jesus lower case. A bibliography is provided with full information on most books and articles cited. Newspaper references are given in footnotes only. References to classical and other works available in many editions (and now often on the Internet) are given by book, chapter, canto, scene, line, etc., as appropriate.

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Notes from Devotional Authors

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Notes from Devotional Authors

Introduction

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lorence Nightingale became acquainted with mystical writings as a young woman, certainly before the Crimean War.1 Her interest was then fostered by a fellow nurse in Crimea, Mary Clare Moore, Reverend Mother of the Convent of Mercy at Bermondsey, who became a lifelong friend and lender of books on spiritual and mystical matters. Nightingale conveyed her interest to her friend Benjamin Jowett,2 a broad church leader who had before then never been exposed to such ideas. We know that Nightingale was reading the mystic Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ the day before she left for the Crimean War (her annotations follow the Notes from Devotional Authors). The British Library’s Additional Manuscripts 45841 contains material and ideas dear to Nightingale in the 1870s. Editing the manuscript, however, presents problems that cannot all be solved satisfactorily. First, we find notes left unfinished and, as it were, abandoned in flight, never to be resumed. Second, it seems that important sections of the manuscript—above all, the translated texts—were destroyed. Third, there are many repetitions, overlaps, struck passages, incomplete sentences and an abrupt end of the manuscript, all indications of the tentative nature of the writing. This accounts for the high number of editorial decisions were the text to be made understandable 1 Thanks to Michael D. Calabria for giving us the benefit of all his work on Notes from Devotional Authors, his transcription and some identifications of sources. 2 Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), Anglican priest, professor of Greek, then master of Balliol College, Oxford. He saw his role, in part, as one of training young men to run the country and the empire. See Theology for a biographical sketch.

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10 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions and fairly to represent Nightingale’s views at this point of her religious evolution. But even as unfinished at it is, the manuscript contains rich and original ideas that contribute to the total conspectus of Nightingale’s thought. The full title of the text edited here is: Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen and Freely Translated by Florence Nightingale. The handwriting of the title and of the inscribed dates ‘‘1872 and 1873’’ is possibly not Nightingale’s; here and there the manuscript itself also shows different hands. Yet allowing for these reser vations, the writing is mostly in Nightingale’s own hand. The manuscript consists of eighty-seven folios,3 often written on both sides. Folios 1 and 85-87 are not by Nightingale, as is explained below. The remaining ff2-84 can be safely attributed to her. Much was first written with pencil, then traced over with pen. Several passages were crossed out, presumably by Nightingale herself. The pages are abundantly provided with diverse numberings and cross-references. Identification of sources for quotations and translated texts is virtually nonexistent. The handwriting is generally neat and quite readable. Roughly, the manuscript consists of introductor y notes and of translations with comments. Here and there Nightingale gives notations as to the organization of the material: ‘‘Introduction’’ is written over several passages (which have been collected here into one section). Numbering, both continuous and discontinuous, brief titles and indications of type size are found. Those notations are useful and present a sound basis for the editing of the text. Thus it has been possible to group notes that belong together but are dispersed in the manuscript (for instance, two sketches of a ‘‘Preface’’); to eliminate repetitions and incomprehensible sentences; to restore some crossed-out sections that seem typical, though not intended for the final draft; and finally to propose several subtitles to facilitate reading. Above all, reflecting and incorporating the notations found in the text, a general plan for the entire manuscript can be presented, which will be used in the edited text. It runs as follows: 1. Nightingale’s Introduction 2. Religion of the Mystics 3. Prayer of the Mystics 4. Spirituality of the Active Life 3 The term ‘‘folio’’ is used for a manuscript page, abbreviated f and ff for the plural.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 11

5. God’s ‘‘Mysteries’’ 6. Law and Theology 7. Laws of Nature and God’s Laws 8. ‘‘Spiritual Exercises’’ 9. Secular Activity and Religious Passivity 10. John 17:1-26, Text and Comments 11. Addenda to the Spirituality of the Active Life Translations and Notes Nightingale’s notes, contained in her Introduction or accompanying the translated texts, are of greater interest than the translations themselves. The notes convey remarkably well Nightingale’s views on what can be called her spirituality of the active life; they bear her personal stamp and can be corroborated by other of her writings that shall be mentioned below. While her views might have changed over the years, those here represent her thinking in the years 1872-73. Not all the translated texts come from the ‘‘Middle Ages’’ as the title page has it. The title refers to ‘‘devotional’’ authors, not all of whom were ‘‘mystical.’’ Many are from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a few even later. We must also recognize that this manuscript is only a part of what Nightingale translated: it seems (ff1 and 87) that the bulk of her work was destroyed. In fact there is some discrepancy between Barbara Stephen on f1 (in a Note added on 14 September 1941) and Rosalind Nash on f87 (in a Note of 10 November 1937, referring to W.I. Clark’s letter, of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, to whom Nash had sent a selection from the Notes for assessment) as to this destruction of texts; Stephen says that the translations were destroyed, but Nash declares: ‘‘I destroyed them’’ (the translations or the notes?). In the final analysis, it seems that only the translations were meant, not the notes, and not all the translations. The destroyed translations probably included further texts from Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Bernard of Clair vaux, probably also texts by Francis of Assisi, Peter of Alcantara, François de Sales, Jeanne de Chantal, Surin, Ravignan, Rigoleuc and others. The editing had to pay attention to the method Nightingale adopted in relation to the texts upon which she chose to comment. She emphasizes that her translations are free; that they are mostly made from the French (mainly French versions of Spanish or Italian writers); she repeats that the names of the authors are kept in the dark in order not to reinforce readers’ prejudices. All this makes the identification

12 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions of quoted and translated material hazardous. I have done my best to trace texts to their authors, but the hunt remains only partially successful. Other factors doubtless further complicate the task: Nightingale seems to have taken some of her material from biographies (she was an ardent reader of biographies), from books quoting the devotional writers or from some anthology. When identification of the source has been possible, Nightingale’s wording often largely diverges from recent translations of the same texts. However, although difficult to trace to their source and often different from modern renderings, Nightingale’s translations remain of interest: they certainly convey what she perceived as important and what she wished to say.

Nightingale’s Views According to the Notes Nightingale was in her early fifties when she drafted these Notes. Her life had been a succession of trials and tensions, spiritual search, active work, illness and involvement in government affairs. All those aspects are reflected in the present text. It is arguable that in the Notes Nightingale was wrestling with one central problem: that of linking active life and union with God. I chose to call Nightingale’s goal ‘‘a spirituality of the active life.’’ Others would prefer to call it the proper relationship of contemplation and action. Whatever the formulation, there is no real need to take a stand on whether Nightingale was or was not a mystic:4 her being a mystic is a moot question and it is not necessary to answer it one way or another when attention is given to her spiritual quest. A ‘‘call to the service of God’’ certainly is an important moment in the spiritual development of a person concerned with religious quest. By itself, however, even such a moment does not rank as a mystical experience. In fact, Nightingale liked to identify herself simply as a religious person, ‘‘we, the religious’’ (see p 32 below). How then to outline Nightingale’s ‘‘spirituality of the active life’’? In looking at ‘‘devotional’’ writings of the past, she voices her ambivalent feeling toward mysticism as usually understood: mysticism is often wrongly confused with ecstasy; mystics did not care enough about changing this world; too often prayer and contemplation made them withdraw from the world and its problems, made them pray ‘‘against 4 For an affirmative statement to that effect and relevant references, see Barbara M. Dossey, ‘‘Florence Nightingale: A Nineteenth-Century Mystic’’ and Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionar y and Healer.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 13

plague, pestilence and famine’’ (see p 29 below) instead of fighting them, or made them ‘‘pray against railway accidents’’ instead of doing all in our power to prevent them. The view she opposes to this inadequate notion is encapsulated in her formula: ‘‘He who cleans out a drain is serving God.’’ True mystical religion declares that all our actions should be performed with the consciousness of ‘‘the indwelling presence of God [and] of union with’’ Him and His will; union with God is not separated from or prior to action but penetrates action as its motivation.5 Tr ue mystical religion is a permanent state and should be confused with neither sporadic flares of devotion encountered in ecstasy nor the episodic events of specific ‘‘calls.’’ In order to spell out this view, Nightingale typically insists on the unity of ‘‘positivism and idealism,’’ to use the wording she found in a contemporar y article (see p 25 below). Positivism stands for the evidence and force of moral and physical laws that people of science show to be immutable and reliable; idealism stands for the perfect God whose will is also immutable. This unity indicates that God works by laws and rules the universe according to immutable laws. The laws of nature rest upon an eternal order which God wills and the sciences investigate. In other words, to find natural laws is to find God’s will and His mind, His fixed and immutable plan: the laws of nature show us God’s manner of activity, His ‘‘character.’’ This conception of God as the Lord of universal law who does not change His mind, any more than physical laws are liable to fluctuations, conditions Nightingale’s understanding of prayer: prayer does not try to change God’s will but aims to cause our will to become like His. ‘‘Prayer: not to ask what we wish of God, but what God wishes of us’’ (see p 23 below). Along this line, Nightingale is led to exalt the ‘‘prayer without petition’’ that brings her close to the seventeenthcentur y quietists, while her linking of God with natural order takes her close to Spinoza. Indeed the expression ‘‘prayer without petition’’ evokes the seventeenth-centur y controversy on quietism. In many writings occasioned by the controversy, Bossuet6 attacked those he called ‘‘false mystics’’ 5 We may recognize here ideas later developed by Teilhard de Chardin in The Divine Milieu and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison. 6 Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), French prelate, preacher and writer. He fought Protestantism as well as quietism (under the label of ‘‘false mystics’’), especially in his Instr uction sur les états d’oraison, books III and IV of Oeuvres complètes de Bossuet.

14 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions (Molinos, Madame Guyon, Falconi, Malaval, La Combe) for putting for ward a theor y of spiritual life, and especially of prayer, which he judged unacceptable for its splendid but unrealistic disinterestedness: that the spiritual person had so surrendered her will to God that she was indifferent to everything but God’s will passively espoused; that such indifference was so total as to include her absence of interest in personal salvation; that authentic prayer should contain no petition, which, being an act of the will, would betray an imperfect surrender to God’s will.7 Nightingale’s theology of the active life sees conscientious action as intimate co-operation with God because it is performed in conformity with the universal laws of nature, which are God’s laws. Action is thereby ‘‘sacralized,’’ be it in science, technology, politics, finance or whatnot. Particularly in her exaltation of scientists, Nightingale somewhat echoes the science-worshipping visionaries of the nineteenth century who saw happiness, scientific knowledge, virtue and liberty bound together by an indissoluble link. There is no final demarcation between the sacred and the secular, so that the election of a bishop may be a secular thing, while that of a political representative may be religious. Yet at the same time, Nightingale’s views mirror the authentic stand of the ‘‘old mystics.’’ Teresa of Avila, the great mystic and contemplative, was able to see action in the same glorified light Nightingale did. For Teresa the purpose of prayer was to produce action and, conversely, selfless action was true ‘‘orison’’ (prayer). For both, the simple union of passive and active life, of contemplation and action, is not enough: contemplation and action are one. Going beyond Dominic’s ‘‘contemplation for action,’’ they both come close to Ignatius of Loyola’s ‘‘contemplation in action.’’ At any rate Nightingale seems to have no patience with prayer that would not result in action and would not be penetrated by concern for the world, its maladies, its remedies. That is why, for instance, her concerns for sanitation naturally find expression in the very middle of these notes on devotional authors. There is such practical advice as, for example, not to waste time and strength in considering whether or not our intentions are 7 The ‘‘false mystics’’ claimed François de Sales for their views. In reclaiming François for the orthodox doctrine, Bossuet rejected the new mystics’ extreme interpretation of François and accused them of propounding a presumptuous form of indifference and self-forgetfulness. In the course of the controversy Bossuet harshly criticized Fénelon for what he considered his dangerous proximity to the ‘‘false mystics.’’

Notes from Devotional Authors / 15

pure (in accordance with God’s will) but to get on with the action (assuming it is based on good scientific research). When obstacles arise in our reforming work we must discern which of them we must simply bear, and which were put in our way expressly as a challenge, the removal of which will bring greater good. Thus understood, Nightingale’s theology of the active life includes the cross8 as central to her spirituality and essentially implied in her life and work: to work out our perfection through God’s laws cannot bypass trouble, suffering and evil; only at that cost can we prepare this world (see pp 47-50 below). Thus elements of a ‘‘theology of the cross,’’ as it originated in Paul and Martin Luther and found eminent developments in the twentieth century, increasingly move to the centre of Nightingale’s reflections, with the conviction that active life cannot circumvent the cross. In that context it becomes clear that, when Nightingale laments: ‘‘Ever ybody believed in my philanthropy and no one in my Christianity’’ (see p 31 below), it is not her theology of the active life that she felt was being resisted. Rather, it seems that her ‘‘low Christology’’ was intended and perhaps also her unconventional manner of relating to church life. Rooted in highly commendable authors, her theology of the active life merely represented a searching attempt to coincide with the best of Western spiritual tradition. Besides the authors she translated in the Notes, Nightingale demonstrates an amazing range of reading. Ancient and modern authors appear throughout her writings and particularly here. She read, mostly in the original, such authors as Erasmus, Spinoza, Lessing,9 Fénelon, Bossuet, Saint-Cyran,10 J.S. Mill, Newman and F.W. Robertson. Her classical education is reflected in her references to Plato and Augustine. She eagerly read treatises on the spiritual life as well as biographies of great masters of spirituality. Many other texts Nightingale wrote deal with themes and topics similar to those encountered in the present Notes. ‘‘What Is Theology?,’‘ ‘‘The Character of God,’’ ‘‘The New Moral World’’ (especially con8 ‘‘Three times He has called me: once to His service (7 Februar y 1837), once to be a Deliverer (7 May 1852), once to the cross (28 July 1865), to suffer more even than I have hitherto done and put out more. For on the cross I shall see His face.’’ See Spiritual Journey 2:405. 9 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), German dramatist, critic and philosopher. 10 Jean Du Vergier de Hauranne, known as Saint-Cyran (1581-1643), French theologian close to Jansenism.

16 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions cer ning the relationship of faith to works, and the moral laws of nature as leading to the knowledge of God’s character), the sermons and ‘‘Notes on Religion’’ appear in the volume Theology of this series. A final interpretation of the present Notes will have to draw on those texts. It will also have to take her correspondence into consideration.

Why Nightingale Did Not Complete and Publish This Manuscript Barbara Stephen wrote on 14 September 1941, in the note referred to (on p 11 above), that Nightingale ‘‘apparently intended [these Notes] for publication.’’ She based her opinion on the manuscript’s references to specifics such as flyleaf, preface and type size instructions as well as sections crossed out but brought back with the printer’s instruction ‘‘stet’’ (‘‘print in the original form, without any marked changes or omissions’’). With that hypothesis in mind, but without much expectation, Rosalind Nash, her own note tells us, had already in 1937 approached the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to inquire about possible publication. The response was that Nightingale’s translations seemed inadequate given the availability of direct translations from the Spanish (where Nightingale had used French texts). Further, doubts were raised (against the opinion of her biographer, E.T. Cook) as to Nightingale’s real intention to publish. Thus the Society thought that ‘‘no service would be rendered to the memory of the author’’ by the publication of this unfinished manuscript,11 and dismissed the project. Is it possible to go further back and discern in Nightingale herself reasons for refraining from publication? Any answer here ought to remain speculative. Biographical data might provide elements of an answer: the death of her father early in January 1874, the death of her ‘‘spiritual mother’’ Selina Bracebridge only weeks later, the death of her mentor Quetelet in Februar y, as well as the demands of other urgent work, her persistent ill health, etc. It is possible that she was not satisfied with what she had started to write, although she really

11 See further Vincent Quinn and John Prest, eds., Dear Miss Nightingale: A Selection of Benjamin Jowett’s Letters to Florence Nightingale, 1860-1893, letters of 3 October 1872, #293, 233, and 18 April 1873, #303, 238.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 17

intended a book.12 She could see that she had not been able to outline a coherent and comprehensive view of what a spirituality of the active life should be; too many remaining loose ends prevented such a view. It is also possible that she did not find in the tradition enough illustrations of the spirituality she was seeking. Or even that, on important points (the question of evil, atonement, even prayer), she had not (yet) got it right. One can give more or less value to such speculations, realizing that the real reason why she did not revisit this essay in the next decades of her life remains her secret and cannot be fully ascertained.

Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen and Freely Translated by Florence Nightingale 1. Nightingale’s Introduction Source: Add Mss 45841 ff3-6, 8-10, 13-14, 19, 27

Flyleaf These Notes have been translated, some of them for the first time, into English from Spanish and other mystical writers. It has been thought that they might have a fairer chance of acceptance now if the names of their authors were not at first given. I will translate some passages ‘‘freely,’’ of course, without giving the name of the authors, because no one would believe it, and because attention would be constantly distracted by thinking whether their meaning had not been strained.13 Motto: ‘‘Let us not lose time in bringing indictments against such or such religious doctrines. There is but one true, that which shows and gives us God. The problem is to enlarge and raise the notion of God, which for so many ages religious dogmas were furiously raging 12 This might be pointed out, too, in her entry of 24 October 1872: ‘‘Thou knowest that through all these twenty horrible years I have been supported . . . by the belief . . . that I was working with Thee, who wert bringing everyone, even our poor nurses, to perfection. I always thought that at last I should write a book . . . putting this forth. . . . ’’ See Spiritual Journey 2:422. However, those lines can also refer to Suggestions for Thought. 13 Nightingale crossed out: I do not dare to mention the names of the works from which these extracts are taken. But, if anyone reads them, and anyone wishes to know the authors, I shall be happy to publish a key.

18 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions to shut up in the narrow limits of symbolism. Exactly in the measure in which, for half a century, philosophy has spiritualized herself, religion has visibly materialized herself. Philosophy is no longer occupied now in contesting, or making a jest of the legendary sides of Christianity.’’ (Nineteenth century [unidentified author]) All prayer (and this book) tends to one point only: the giving ourselves up entirely to our Creator, the having no other will but His will and the detaching ourselves from creatures (from the things of this earth and from ourselves). It may seem a strange thing to begin a book with: This book is not for anyone who has time to read it.14 But the meaning of it is: this reading is good only as a preparation for work. If it is not to inspire life and work it is bad. Just as the end of food is to enable us to live and work (and not to live and eat), so the end of (most reading perhaps, but certainly of) mystical reading is (not to read but) to work. Nobody who has time to read it must read this book. To anybody who has time to read it this book is poison. Mystical books are for hardworked people like you and me who have not time to read them, not for young ladies and old gentlemen who have nothing else to do. Are not ‘‘mystical’’ books for hardworking people to inspire their daily work, not for ‘‘mystical’’ people, contemplative people, ‘‘religious’’ people, unoccupied people, excitable young ladies? And therefore, if this be true, this book is not for anyone who has time to read it (especially not for idle girls: they will find poison in it). What is mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward dispositions? Is it not merely a ‘‘hard word’’ for ‘‘the kingdom of heaven is within.’’15 Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a heaven not only here but now. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body but health of mind (or peace) in the interest of God; that is, we must sacrifice heaven. But ‘‘thou shalt be like God, for thou shalt see Him as He is’’:16 this may be here and now, as well as there and then. And it may be for a time then lost, then recovered, both here and there (both in this world and ‘‘the other world’’), both now and then (both in what we call ‘‘time’’ and in what we call ‘‘eternity’’). Mysticism [is] 14 Several ideas of Nightingale’s ‘‘Introduction’’ reappear in the texts collected as ‘‘The Place of Mysticism’’ in Theology. 15 Luke 17:21. 16 A paraphrase of 1 John 3:2.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 19

not to be the whole of life, rather [it is] to inspire the whole of life; to inspire and not to interfere with the search for knowledge; and to lead to (not to be instead of) right practice in the world. What is true in the idea [of mysticism is] not what is geographical or historical in it, what can be got out of it of truth or progress. Persevere and be great unto the end. Is there any such thing as ‘‘heaven’’ (or ‘‘salvation’’) as an event in place or in time? As a fact it may be. (It is singular that the greatest mystical authors, some of whom were women, thought and wrote during times when the Roman Catholic Church was most dominant and most worldly, and though among her most fervent votaries, seemed as it were like a kind of reaction against her.) (The mechanism by which the human organization cures itself or kills itself is quite different from the chemical action of medicine. Men have died and worms have eaten them, and then have got well and lived, but not from the science or want of science of medicine.) A strong objection is now felt to the very name of mystical religion, even by the most religious persons of this day and by those who thoroughly accept the Saviour’s words, ‘‘And my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.’’17 But this is the essence of all mystical theology, namely, that in all we do the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son shall be our inspiration and the motive of our action, our motive-action. ‘‘My meat is to do the will of the Father who sent me.’’18 What is this but putting in the fewest and most striking words the basis (meaning, foundation) of all real mystical religion, which is that in all our actions, all our words, all our thoughts, the food, the life in which we are to have our being, upon which we are to live, is to be the indwelling presence of God, the union with God, that is, with the Spirit of Goodness, Wisdom and Supreme Power in performing ever y act of our lives, from the highest prayer to the most everyday need, such as cleaning out a drain. All I mean by mystical theology is what Christ meant: he was at once the greatest mystic yet the most active reformer that ever lived. The real essence of all true mysticism lies in his words, ‘‘And my Father will come unto him and we will, etc.’’ For to him God was everything, while to us God is often nothing. This is the real essence of all true mysticism: God being everything to us, God as the Supreme Spirit of Goodness, Wisdom and Power. It is the use of the Ideal and especially 17 John 14:23. 18 A paraphrase of John 4:34.

20 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions of the spiritual Ideal at every moment, in every act of our lives: which is, of course, the essence also of common sense. (Dr Andrew Combe19)

2. Religion of the Mystics Source: Add Mss 45841 ff7-11, 12-18

Religion is not devotion but work and suffering for the love of God: this is the true doctrine of mystics. The idea [of] God (or at least the most practical way of living with God is living with ideas) [is] not merely thinking about ideals, but doing and suffering for ideals. It is more particularly set forth in an ‘‘Essay’’ of the sixteenth century [that says:] ‘‘True religion is to have no other will but God’s.’’20 Compare this with the definition of religion in Johnson’s Dictionar y: ‘‘Virtue founded upon reverence of God and expectation of future rewards and punishments.’’21 In other words, on respect and self-interest. Not a word of love. And imagine the religion which inspired Christ’s own life ‘‘founded’’ on the motives given by Dr Johnson. This is the true mystical doctrine: where shall I find God? In myself. But then I myself must be in a state for Him to come and dwell in me. This is the whole aim of the mystical life, and all mystical rules in all times and countries have been laid down for putting the soul into such a state. That the soul herself should be heaven, that our Father who is in heaven should dwell in her, that there is something within us infinitely more estimable than often comes out, that God enlarges this ‘‘palace of our soul’’22 by degrees so as to enable her to receive Himself, that thus He gives her liberty, but that the soul must give herself up absolutely to Him for Him. To do this (the incalculable benefit of 19 Andrew Combe (1797-1847), physiologist and phrenologist. Eager to improve both knowledge and practice in regard to health, he believed that the laws of nature were the expression of divine wisdom, and ought to be studied by every human being. 20 Not identified, but Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531) has a similar idea: ‘‘Vera religio, vel pietas, haec est quae uni solique deo haeret’’ [Tr ue religion or piety is the one that adheres to God alone], in Commentar y on True and False Religion in Corpus reformatorum 90:638-40, 669. If ‘‘religion’’ is taken to mean ‘‘religious life,’’ the quotation is essentially found in Alfonso Rodriguez (1526-1616), Practice of Perfection and Christian Vir tues (original Spanish 1610) 1:490 and 535. 21 Samuel Johnson, Dictionar y of the English Language, has this very formulation. 22 This expression may be a reference to Teresa of Avila (1515-82), Interior Castle I.1, in vol. 1 of The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila. Teresa talks of the ‘‘castle of the soul.’’ See further Way of Perfection 28, also in vol. 1.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 21

the occasional but frequent intercourse with the Perfect) is the conclusion and sum of the whole matter put into the beautiful language of the mystics. And of this process they actually describe the steps and assign periods of months and years during which the steps, they say, are commonly made by those who make them at all. (There is often a most striking similarity with the language of Plato in the words of these writers who certainly were guiltless of Greek.) Tr ue mysticism: Robinson Crusoe, p x of Clark’s [1866] edition23 in that he finds himself led into solitude and God’s presence found in [that solitude] rewarding him for, more than compensating, that solitude. An eminent religious writer of the present day24 tells us that fashionable young ladies may read and really taste and enjoy and shed tears over Thomas à Kempis, St François de Sales, etc. and not be a bit the better for it but the worse. They will be just as idle, as frivolous, as flirting and useless as ever, yet think themselves ‘‘religious.’’ He means no doubt that they will have their feelings as one part, and their life another part, of their being, the life and the feelings not inspiring one another. One of the greatest religious founders of any age says: ‘‘I am convinced that preaching like an apostle without joining together those that are awakened and training them up in the ways of God, is only begetting children for the murderer.’’25 In other words if, as Christ said [that] he was the ‘‘bread of life,’’ our religious feelings are not ‘‘bread’’ for our lives, they had better not be there at all. If we make no ‘‘provision for the permanence,’’ or the embodying in real actual life of our spiritual Ideal, we had better have none. If we live our lives apart from our spiritual Ideal, and keep the spiritual Ideal for Sundays or for prayers, it is like people who go to hear Bach’s Passion music at Westminster Abbey and think their enjoyment devotional feeling. Is it not Erasmus26 who said of St Augustine and his 23 24 25 26

Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Too vague to be identified; possibly F.W. Robertson (see p 24 below). John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley 4:424. Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), Dutch humanist. The statement is found in ‘‘Des. Erasmi censura in libros Retractationum et Confessionum divi Augustini,’’ in D. Aurelii Augustini opera omnia 1:15: ‘‘Porro confessionum libri, quos et ociosus et ociosis scripsisse videtur, habent quiddam peculiaris molestiae’’ [The books of Confessions, which a person of leisure seems to have written for persons of leisure, have a kind of peculiar tediousness].

22 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions followers: They were people who did nothing, writing for people who had nothing to do? And is this not the real reason why the mystical authors did so little for their own generation, so much, or might do so much, for ours? If these mystical feelings are true, must we not have them always, inspiring all our work? An ‘‘Ideal’’ is a poor thing unless it be the Ideal of every minute. [Otherwise] it breeds only discontent. Suppose Phidias27 working at his statue, or Michelangelo28 at his cathedral, or Turgot29 at his statesmanship, or Moltke30 at his campaigning, sometimes with and sometimes without their Ideals in their heads, what would be the result? And how much more must this be the case with the spiritual Ideal! People who have not the courage or the perseverance of their Ideal end by having no Ideal at all. Those who have to work on men and women must, above all, have their spiritual Ideal, their purpose always present. In thinking that the ‘‘mystical’’ state should be permanent, if at all, it is needless to say that this does not mean the ecstatic state. It is very plain how ‘‘ecstasies’’ were bred in people half-starved by long fastings and long watchings. So far from wondering that these half-starved people believed in their visions, we wonder that they had not more. The ‘‘mystical’’ state (by which we understand the drawing near to God by means of, not church or ceremony, but the state in which we keep, through God’s laws, our own soul) is real and should be permanent. The ‘‘ecstatic’’ state is unreal, and should not be at all. The ‘‘mystical’’ state is the essence of common sense if it be real, that is, if God be a reality. For we can only act and speak and think through Him; and what we need is to discover such laws of His as will enable us to be always acting and thinking in conscious concert or cooperation with Him. We cannot conceive that this, the very best gift we can have, can be the gift of arbitrary caprice on the part of our Almighty Father. But if we find out that He gives us ‘‘grace,’’ i.e., the ‘‘mystical’’ state, in accordance with certain laws which we can discover and use, is not that a truth and common sense? These old mystics, whom we call superstitious, were far before us in their ideas of God and of prayer, that is, of our communion with God, 27 28 29 30

Phidias, Greek sculptor of the fifth century bce. Michelangelo (1475-1564), Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-81), French economist and statesman. Helmut von Moltke (1800-91), Prussian marshal who led important campaigns during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 23

in their knowledge of who God is, in their understanding of His character, in short. Where they failed was in supposing this world not to be what God has given us to work upon. There will be no heaven unless we make it. And it is a very poor theodikè31 which teaches that we are not to ‘‘prepare’’ this world, but only to ‘‘prepare for’’ another. Must we not ‘‘possess’’ God here if we wish to ‘‘possess’’ Him hereafter?

3. Prayer of the Mystics Source: Add Mss 45841 ff20-26

Prayer: not to ask what we wish of God, but what God wishes of us.32 The old mystics seem to have been beyond us in their understanding of prayer and of God, ‘‘the good Master x x [oh good Master] who hast made and formed the vessel of the body and of Thy creature and hast put within so great a treasure the soul, which bears the image of Thee, eternal God’’ (1380). This dying prayer [of Catherine of Siena] (which will be translated and given entire [below]) and most of the prayers which follow seem to come as near to the truth of prayer as can be. And, alas! nearer than we do now. There is scarcely a petition in them. . . . There is little mention of heaven for self, of desire of happiness for self none. ‘‘Desire for personal salvation is not religion,’’

31 Nightingale first wrote ‘‘theology’’ but then deleted it in favour of ‘‘theodikè’’: theodicy conveys the idea of justifying God’s ways with human beings. For her ideas of theodikè, see Theology and Suggestions for Thought. 32 Nightingale writes ‘‘1580 about’’ beside this statement, which could suggest Teresa of Avila as source, but the idea does not seem to be Teresian: Teresa asked for favours and trials all the time. This might be Nightingale’s own formulation inspired by her readings of various spiritual writers. Rodriguez, for example, quotes Augustine (‘‘He is Thy good servant, Lord, who makes no account of Thy command falling in with his will, but of his willing that which Thou commandest’’) and commenting: ‘‘I have no mind to draw plans for God; I have no mind to ask that He should fall in with my views and with my likings; I am minded to follow the plans of God and fall in with what He wants of me’’ (Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues 535). What is possibly the original French formulation of this idea appears in Nightingale’s entr y of 20 October 1867 (2:407): ‘‘Ce qui nous est nécessaire, c’est de mettre toute la force de notre prière à ne pas lui demander ce que nous souhaitons mais ce qu’il souhaite de nous.’’ Finally, in a letter to Frederick Verney (1:714), Nightingale attributes the following, ver y similar statement to John of the Cross: ‘‘Prayer is not to ask God to do what we want, but to ask Him what He wants us to do.’’

24 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions says a great preacher, lately dead.33 ‘‘Anxiety for one’s own soul is not the healthiest symptom. Of course everyone wishes to be safe.’’ It is singular how little mention there is either of ‘‘intercession’’ or of ‘‘atonement by another’s merits.’’ True it is that we can only create a heaven for ourselves and others ‘‘by the merits of another’’ since it is only by working in accordance with God’s laws that we can do anything. But there is nothing at all in these prayers as if God’s anger had been bought off, as if God had been bribed into giving us heaven (a fancy place which we had done nothing to create) by sufferings merely ‘‘to satisfy God’s justice.’’ (The whole structure of this doctrine seems to have been the invention of the last three centuries34 and to have been founded upon a few almost casual, figurative words in the New Testament, otherwise to be interpreted perhaps, and not written at all by their supposed author.) In these prayers there is often scarcely a word of self all through, in the dying prayers, nothing of the ‘‘egotism of death.’’ It is all the reformation of God’s church, that is, God’s children, for whom self would give itself, its soul, that occupies the dying thoughts. There is not even a desire to be released from trouble and suffering. On the contrar y, there is often desire to suffer the greatest suffering and to offer the greatest offering, with ever greater pain, if so any work can be done. And still this, and all is ascribed to God’s goodness. The offering is not to buy anything by suffering but . . . if only the suppliant can do anything for God’s children! These suppliants did not live to see ‘‘the reformation’’ of God’s children. No more will any who now offer these prayers. But at least we can all work towards such practical ‘‘reformation.’’ 33 This is evidently Frederick W. Robertson (1816-53), well-known and influential Anglican preacher who served at Trinity Chapel, Brighton, from 1847 until his death, and a correspondent of Nightingale’s. His Sermons Preached at Brighton were published in five series. The quotation is found in Sermon 5 of the 4th series (1863), titled ‘‘Selfishness, as Shown in Balaam’s Character’’ and reproduced in the people’s edition of the Sermons, 4th series 49. The exact text is: ‘‘Desire for personal salvation is not religion. It may go with it, but it is not religion. Anxiety for the state of one’s own soul is not the healthiest or best symptom. Of course everyone wishes, ‘Let me die the death of the righteous.’ But it is one thing to wish to be saved, another to wish God’s right to triumph; one thing to wish to die safe, another to wish to live holily.’’ 34 In fact the doctrine goes at least as far back as Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109).

Notes from Devotional Authors / 25

4. Spirituality of the Active Life Source: Add Mss 45841 ff23-2435

Seeing an article headed ‘‘Positivism and Idealism,’’36 representing these as two opposite philosophies (and certainly representing neither of them in our sense), I thought: Are not the two one? or rather is not the one a necessar y precursor and foundation to the other? For example, positivism lays down that all things, moral as well as physical, are subject to law. Now indeed the tendency of this truth is to substitute the idea of law for that of a personal God, to extinguish all possibility of a personal relation with the God (if there is one) of law, and more or less to do away with the hope that we can alter anything much, since all is subject to law. But, on the contrary, is not positivism, rightly understood, the only way to idealism, the only way by which we can alter or improve anything? by which we can work out the ‘‘feeling of what is best’’ (so strong especially in the Englishman) for ourselves and for others? Is not the conception of universal law the only way by which we can reach the conception of a perfect God, and therefore of our true relation, our personal connection with a perfect God? It is said, even by the wisest, that the theodicy of universal law can never be a religion, it can only be a school of philosophy. Why so? Because (quoting the prevailing Christian idea) if you cannot ‘‘pray’’ to God, in the sense of asking something and being able to believe that He is ‘‘moved’’ to do that instead of something else by what you say to Him, there is no religion. But this is certainly not so. The mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, than whose, as no one denies, no more fer vent religion ever existed in time, held much the same as what we do, viz., that to ask anything of God is blasphemous, that the object of ‘‘prayer’’ is rather to give to Him, to give our will to Him, than to ask Him to give His will to us, i.e., to bring our wills to be like His, not to bring His will to be like ours. Yet their whole life was prayer. We blame them (and justly) that they left active life for prayer. How then can we say in the same breath that there is no ‘‘prayer’’ and no religion, if we believe this, viz., that God cannot alter His will, cannot change His mind and that, if He could, we should not wish it? 35 Since Nightingale gives ff23 to 44 a continuous numbering as pp 1-39 (skipping p 12), these folios are kept together here. 36 Paul-Alexandre Janet, ‘‘La crise philosophique et les idées spiritualistes. II: Le positivisme et l’idéalisme’’ 718-46; this follows a first article subtitled ‘‘L’école critique.’’

26 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions A per fect God cannot change His mind. Positivism says the latter half of this, idealism the former half, that is, positivism says that universal law, or the mind of God, is never altered. Idealism says that He would not be a perfect God who could alter His mind and that we should expect to see working as the only way a perfect Being could work, by universal law. Are not positivism and idealism then the same, not opposite, philosophies? And do they not then together show what ‘‘prayer,’’ offered to a perfect God, is: working out His object, by His law, in a spirit (or will) one with His?37 To try to stimulate God to do His own work, to try to alter the will of perfect Wisdom, perfect Goodness, perfect Power: if this be prayer, it is of course simply absurd. But the mystics, who did not know of universal law, prayed their whole lives through, but did not pray thus. Let us add to their prayer the active life, we who know that God always acts by law, and that we have to find out what these laws are. (There is scarcely an educated man of the present day who really denies universal law. A ‘‘fixed immutable plan’’ all educated religious men attribute to God. But they object to the word ‘‘law.’’ I would gladly alter the word, if I could. A ‘‘fixed immutable plan’’ by God is what we call ‘‘law.’’ We are agreed.) The old Puritan word ‘‘religious exercises’’ suits us well. It is said the theodicy of a law, instead of a God, is so dull. But the law is not instead of a God. Law is only a word, a word expressing the way in which a perfect Will works. It does not take away God. It only shows us, in our imperfect thought, how He works. If we had ‘‘exercises,’’ to consider what God’s end is in His laws, to propose to ourselves the same end He proposes to Himself, to bring our will to enter into His designs, not only mystically but actively, then we should have a ‘‘worship,’’ a ‘‘ser vice’’ just as devout as that of any evangelical or Roman Catholic, with this advantage, that it would be true. 37 The train of thought in this section strikingly parallels ideas found in F.W. Robertson’s Sermons, 4th series, referred to here and there by Nightingale. Sermon 3 states: Our prayer does not determine the will of God (26); the opposite would be incompatible with the fact that this universe is a system of laws (26), of divine laws (27); to think that prayer changes God’s will gives unworthy ideas of God (29); all prayer is to change the will human into submission to the will divine (30). Prayer is one thing, petition is quite another (31-32). In a further sermon we find the idea of bribing God through offerings and sacrifices, of coaxing God (44). And ‘‘the laws of God and the penalties of God are not miracles’’ (191); ‘‘the natural laws of God’’ (192); Christ’s ‘‘submission to the laws of nature. He did not suspend those laws’’ (283). Finally, a statement particularly pleasing to Nightingale, that sanitary regulations are as religious as a miracle (283).

Notes from Devotional Authors / 27

5. God’s ‘‘Mysteries’’ Source: Add Mss 45841 ff24-26

‘‘Philosophy as well as religion must have her mysteries.’’ Yes, but she does not think so.38 On the contrary, all German theology, all religious inquiry now tends towards searching into one of philosophy’s apparently unsearchable mysteries [who is God in Himself], while those [mysteries] which, one would have thought, it was our life’s whole business to find out [i.e., God in His relation to us], are left untouched, for example, what the nature of God is (His character is left untouched), what is the relation of God to the world. And very justly rejecting the idea of an outward creation, these inquirers [theologians] have invented the formula that God is ‘‘immanent,’’ viz., living in the creation, yet they are not pantheists. But what are the relations of God to the world is less or not at all inquired into. It is as if a newly married wife, consulting her husband’s mother about him, were to be answered: take all the trouble you can to understand the relation of soul to body, of soul to mind; never mind about his character, his qualities, his likes, his dislikes, what you can do to help him on his way; never mind about his relations to your active life with him. We do not even know how our soul is ‘‘immanent’’ in our own body. How can we know how God is ‘‘immanent’’ in creation? Yet we do not on that account feel we can know nothing of each other or of ourselves. If ‘‘God’s ways are past finding out,’’ certainly man’s are. Or rather it is not ‘‘God’s ways’’ or man’s ways which may not be perfectly made out, if we will but examine them. But it is God’s nature and man’s nature which are ‘‘past finding out.’’ Fénelon39 says: One can only represent God ‘‘according to the different relations which He has to His works’’; these ‘‘relations’’ are all that we call perfections or attributes. But we do not express thereby dif38 The point in this section remains obscure. It seem that Nightingale is contrasting two approaches to the problem of God: one that aims to know God in Himself and one that inquires how God relates to us. She dismisses the former approach because that aspect of God is ‘‘past finding out’’; she prefers the latter approach whereby God’s ways and character ‘‘may be made out.’’ 39 François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715), French prelate and writer, preceptor of the Duke of Burgundy in 1681. He espoused the quietist doctrine of spiritual passivity. Especially in his Explication des maximes des saints sur la vie intérieure, he intended to systematize mystical theology around the idea of pure love, claiming that disinterested love, a totally passive state, corresponded to the ideal of perfection. His position was attacked by Bossuet and censored.

28 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ferent things, we only give to the same thing different names ‘‘according to its external relations.’’ Yes: these ‘‘attributes’’ are God’s character. This we must labour to understand. The essence of God is incomprehensible. What His relation is to the world, this is philosophy, her myster y. But what His relations are to us, what His laws are, this is what we all of us can, what nobody does, find out every day and all day. The Trinity: this is religion, her mystery,40 an effort to represent God in action: God at work, as the Son; God in law, God at will, as the Father. We always feel a difficulty in conceiving of God willing, God law-ing, in finding anything for Him to do. The new German school justly reject the idea of an outward creation, as if so God were dead. But when they say God is ‘‘immanent’’ in the creation, in order to show He is alive, have they given any real information? Let us not shirk these ‘‘mysteries’’ in finding out our theodicy. I thank theology for the word. While striving, as we never yet have striven, to understand God’s character as we see it shown forth every day of our lives, in the ‘‘different relations which He has to His works,’’ let us not shirk the fact that we cannot understand God’s relation to the world, God existing as willing laws, that we cannot conceive of the Perfect, the Infinite. Bossuet even asks: Is perfection an obstacle to being? And Leibniz41 answers No. Vacherot42 says: the Perfect can only exist in thought, not in reality. Guizot43 says: the existence of God is the first of miracles. Certain it is that we really can not only form no idea of the One Perfect Being, but we can form no idea of what will become of us when we become perfect, as we are promised. Are there to be many perfects? Or, as Bossuet seems to imply, is the moment of perfection to be the moment of extinction? The idea is absurd. But ‘‘we must not confound the question of the nature of God with that of the relations of God and the world.’’ Yet many who will not 40 Nightingale moves here from two levels of mystery to three levels: the levels found in philosophy (God’s relation to the world), in everyday life (God’s relation to us) and in religion (God in Himself, the Trinity). 41 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), German philosopher and mathematician and author of Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, published in 1710. 42 Étienne Vacherot (1809-97), French philosopher and politician. A Protestant idealist à la Hegel, he opposed positivist and materialistic tendencies of the day. 43 François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874), French historian and statesman. As a Protestant champion of conservative monarchy, he supported the Restoration.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 29

allow that the former is an ‘‘inscr utable myster y’’ freely tell us that the latter are ‘‘past finding out.’’ For example, Bossuet and Milton:44 they say that the compatibility of God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will is an ‘‘inscr utable myster y,’’ though we must believe both: that God foresees everything man will will and that man is free to will anything. The wiser Stuart Mill shows us not only that there is no myster y at all in it, but that we are even angry if our fellow creatures know us so little that they cannot foresee what we shall do. Now God’s per fection of foreknowledge does not make a mystery where there is none with imper fect foreknowledge. Again, there is probably no more universal assertion than that the existence of evil under a good God is an ‘‘inscr utable myster y’’ to the human understanding. Various hypotheses, all more monstrous and unintelligible than the original problem, have been put forward about it, among which the most common is that there are two Gods, an Ormuzd [Ormazd] and an Arimanes [Ahriman],45 a Jehovah and a Satan,46 a good God and a bad God.47 But this kind of assertion is no more than the assertion of our own laziness. It would not be difficult to show that we really find it much more dif ficult to conceive of perfection without evil (witness all the utterly wearisome pictures of ennui, called heaven, which we loathe and where we would not live if we could, by all poets and ‘‘inspired’’ writers) than of evil as, so to speak, a necessary part of per fection.

6. Law and Theology Source: Add Mss 45841 ff27-32

It is said, even by the friends of God, that the thoughts appertaining to a religion of law do not assimilate themselves with, scarcely even allude to, any thoughts or doctrines of the past, that, consequently, there are no convictions (at all widespread) which law-theodicy can possibly make its own, that so new a doctrine as this, viz., that he who cleans out a drain is serving God more than he who prays to Him ‘‘against plague, pestilence and famine,’’ can scarcely be expected to 44 45 46 47

John Milton (1608-74), English poet, discussed in Society and Politics. As in Zoroastrianism. As in the Hebrew Bible. As in Manicheism.

30 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions gain any hold at all. The theory of cleaning out the drain as a service to God would be looked upon as the most arrant ‘‘positivism’’ or rationalism, as irreconcilable in the highest degree with mystical religion or idealism, i.e., the attempt to approach God by means of an ‘‘interior’’ state within the soul. (Though, I believe, if cleaning out the drain were done by way of ‘‘mortification,’’ it would be accepted by the Roman Catholics as a religious act.) But so far from there being no thoughts in the past so reconciled with the law-theodicy, to lean it upon, I find almost the whole of its feeling, though not of its practice, in religious writers who at one time swayed half the mind of Europe and, what is most curious, who could have no knowledge at all that there was such a thing as law. ‘‘We have not so much as heard whether there be any ‘law.’ ’’ I will translate some passages ‘‘freely,’’ of course, without giving the name of the authors, because no one would believe it, and because attention would be constantly distracted by thinking whether their meaning had not been strained. (I will give a key separately and anybody may then see for himself.48) My object is now not to discuss whether so and so did or did not mean or say so and so, but to show that there is absolutely nothing new to the human mind in the doctrine put forth of what is the right thing to say to God, except insofar as science had not then shown the constancy of law in the times of the authors named and that writers, justly considered in more than half the Christian world as the quintessence of Christianity, held just the same thoughts and principles as to the communication we should have with God, arrived at actually by the force of their devotion to God, while in ignorance of the fact that He acts by universal law. In other words, what law-theology says now is only a development, made necessary by the discovery of law, of what was said by mystical theologians hundreds of years ago. I hope thus to put forms of thought now considered so strange by churches in more familiar form. (I must testify to not having read these mystical works with any intention of hunting out opinions to support those of ‘‘law.’’ On the contrar y, the passages ‘‘jumped into my eyes.’’ The authors were always my study, ‘‘copied by me from time to time for my own ‘exercises,’ ’’ never thinking of putting them to the present use.) 48 Such a key is not available, but we have been able to identify most of those authors.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 31

In doing this, what to say by way of preface? What the liberal President of a Roman Catholic Congress in Germany49 says this very year, which we may re-echo with the tears of our hearts: I remember a time when there prevailed amongst theologians x x a brotherly striving after a common end x x each endeavouring to interpret the other’s expressions from the other’s circle of thought x x. From their natural want of spiritual and mental elasticity, this may seem an impossible demand.

(Does anyone do so now? How sure one feels—at least everyone who has the ordinar y amount of human modesty and who has no pretension to found any new doctrine or discover any new thing—that one’s ‘‘thoughts’’ and ‘‘expressions’’ will be ‘‘misinterpreted,’’ that one will be called bad names, worse names than any convict was ever called by his inspectors.) Now every attempt to handle x x principles of knowledge in theological matters immediately provokes x x a mania for denunciations and censures which must fill the quiet observer who cares only for the welfare of the church and of science with grief and disgust: Qui pauca considerat facile pronunciat [He who little inquires judges with ease] [Döllinger]. Alas! How true! Have I not been told, even when I had never said or written a word of opinion, that everybody believed in my philanthropy and no one in my Christianity, that my name, which had been a household word (sic)50 would be banished from every hearth? Aye, and much worse things. And don’t I know what hard words will be my share now? But what does it matter to us personally? None who knows even a little of this world can care much as to what is said of them personally. But we do care for the right, do care for the truth being evil spoken 49 Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890), Roman Catholic theologian and historian. The ‘‘Congress’’ referred to was a conference of German theologians in Munich in 1863 (although ‘‘this very year’’ would point to 1873), summoned by Döllinger. Speaking for a liberal form of Catholicism, Döllinger accused German theologians of having caused and fueled divisions among Christians; he called upon them to work now for reunion, as he himself did throughout his career. Döllinger later rejected the dogma of papal infallibility and was excommunicated in 1871; he then identified himself with the Old Catholics. The address mentioned here cannot be precisely located; it was doubtless published in Allgemeine Zeitung (Munich). The present translation seems to be Nightingale’s. 50 An allusion to Dickens’s popular journal, Household Words.

32 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions of, and this without the least inquir y, without people even taking the trouble to read what they abuse. Nay, they often make a boast that they have not read it and will not read it. The Roman Catholic divine above quoted [Döllinger] even goes so far as to say that ‘‘in the present day, people’s natural want of spiritual and mental elasticity is such as to make it an impossibility’’ (viz., for them to interpret or understand each other), ‘‘qui pauca considerat facile pronunciat.’’ ‘‘The quiet obser ver who cares only for the welfare of the church and of science is filled with grief and disgust.’’ And this man’s mouth was stopped! Certainly the ‘‘quiet observer’’ who ‘‘cares only’’ that the character of God shall be known ‘‘is filled with grief’’ that those who are all pursuing the same noble single end, and could help each other so well, are engaged solely in hindering each other. And I would pray, as has been prayed before: ‘‘Lord, give Thyself to be known by all, that all may love Thee: permit not that souls should be ignorant who Thou art. I know, Lord, that if Thou discoverest Thyself and givest Thyself to be known, all will love Thee!’’51 Erasmus says (of St Augustine) that his is the work of one who had nothing to do, writing for those who, like him, had nothing to do. Should not the whole religious work of the present day be to preach a tr ue religion for those who have something to do? The mystics all suppose us to have nothing to do, nay more, we the religious are to live, though with as little as possible, on the produce of others’ doings. One indeed recapitulates what we, the religious, have ordinarily to do as follows: to get up, to converse, to pray, to go to bed, to read, to eat, to write. Now those who have led the busiest lives, especially in the care of others, can truly say that not one of those actions, nor all put together, made up their ordinar y lives or even a regular portion of their ordinar y lives. In active life, no one reads, writes or converses, except in order to bring about something, i.e., not for the sake of reading, writing or conversing, any more than cats mew for the sake of mewing. Getting up, going to bed, eating are, in the life of the really busy, only intermediate actions, which can no more be called a part of their life than going from one room to another is. And happy too if they can per form them at all regularly or ‘‘ordinarily’’! Would it not be a true gospel to preach the true meaning of work being prayer? For example, the Bengal sanitary commissioners are act51 Passages (see p 66 below) identify Teresa of Avila as the author.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 33

ing according to God’s laws and may be called God’s great missionaries in India, much more truly than Saint Francis Xavier.52 Now how comes it that one always united with God in spirit like St Francis Xavier should have done His work less well than those who perhaps never think of Him? The noble task (and what a noble task) of the present day would be to show the religious truth that these two are one or at least twins, viz., uniting oneself in spirit with God (so-called ‘‘mystical religion’’) and uniting oneself with His work by observing what His universal laws are, as the only means of carrying out His work. Of these laws we know something, the early Christians knew nothing. To revert to the ‘‘new and strange’’ truth that cleaning out a drain is doing God’s will while it is against God’s will to pray that the typhus, caused by the foul drain, should be removed without the drain being removed. This is what, it is said, must shock all religious people and repel them at once. Then is it not the religious work of the present day to present the truth (if it is a truth) so that people need not be shocked by it, that we are just as much bound by one of God’s laws to clean out a drain as by another of His laws ‘‘not to steal’’? Here are these poor men, or rather these great men, the Indian Presidency Sanitary Commissioners, exposing their lives every day in a most disgusting duty and wanting perhaps the most inspiring truth of all, viz., that they are doing it in God’s ser vice, that they are His missionaries, as much as Moses (who by the way combined the two) or more than St Francis Xavier (who did not) or Henry Martyn53 ever were. But so far from religion giving men this inspiring truth, how often does it not even call them away from the physical active work and bid them take care of their souls? Cannot we fancy how the gardening soldiers may have been preached to, that they ought to submit to God’s inscrutable will as to cholera, no one ever giving them the higher truth that it was God’s will they should not submit to cholera, although they did it without knowing it?

52 Francis Xavier (1506-52), born in Navarre, Jesuit missionary to India and Japan. 53 Henry Martyn (1781-1812), Anglican missionary to India, Persia and Arabia, who translated biblical and devotional writings into various languages. Nightingale took extracts from his posthumous Journals and Letters (1837) when travelling in Egypt and Greece 1849-50.

34 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Sir John Lawrence54 has this inspiring truth. He went out as governor general to India willingly, though against his will, because he knew it to be God’s will, because he thought, like Moses, he was sent of God. But who else of all our public men has this truth? (On the contrary, one of the most disinterested and useful statesmen that ever lived, Lord Althorp,55 tells us himself that he thought it right to retire from public life in order to prepare for eternity, he who never did anything in life but what in our work we have to do for eternity.) Or is the House of Commons much inspired by the idea that they are God’s missionaries (which they undoubtedly are) when passing ‘‘Local Government Acts,’’ or the repeal of the Corn Laws, etc.? Here is a legislature doing God’s will without knowing it while saints and missionaries, who are always thinking of God’s will, from not knowing what it is, never do it. Oh that men would preach the word (or character) of the Lord in this, not new, fashion. (For it is a fashion as old as God Himself) and teach men to unite themselves to God, not by asking but by acting. Positivism is thus the handmaid of mysticism, by positivism meaning the truth that God acts by universal law, by mysticism meaning personal communication with God. For we do not wish for a false communication with God but a true one. And the true one must be based on the manner of His acting, i.e., on His character. In this sense, therefore, positivism is an initiatory doctrine, not an antagonistic one, to true religion. The most entire absorption in the perfect Being that ever was preached (in Christianity) was by the mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet they say exactly what positivism says, which is supposed to preclude the idea of a personal communication with God; [they say] that we have no business to ask God to alter His perfect will; our business is to find out what His perfect will is and to do it. And their religion was not dull. On the contrary, they are reproached for 54 After having held a number of offices in India 1830-59, Sir John Laird Mair Lawrence (1811-79) came out of retirement in 1863 to become the first viceroy of India. He worked with Nightingale on sanitation and irrigation reforms. 55 John Charles Spencer, Viscount Althorp and 3rd Earl Spencer (1782-1845), was a member of Parliament in 1806-34 and for a while led the Whig opposition in Commons, supporting working-class grievances. After a term as chancellor of the Exchequer, he retired to enjoy the country pursuits of his estate.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 35

being always in an ‘‘ecstasy.’’ We are told that the religion of law must be dull. Why? Because its idea of prayer is the same as that of the highest Christians, viz., that it is to be a means of bringing our will to God’s, not His to ours? Litanies (did we know more, should we not call them irreligious?) are to tell God what to do, to teach God. Whereas we think prayer is for God to tell us what to do, to teach us what He does by His laws. The reason why rationalism is dull is that it is tacitly thought, not openly said, that we can study His laws as well without Him. The reason why mysticism is not dull is that it prescribes so many ‘‘spiritual exercises.’’ We are going to try if we cannot have spiritual exercises too, founded in truth. (How much better and more inspiring to do this consciously!) To show that this is eternal life,56 viz., to know Him (and His character) not only in finding out His laws about the weight and strength of materials, etc., about the government of nations, whether He wishes them to be governed like children or like men, etc., but in doing all these things for His sake in His service. It seems such a waste, when we are really doing His will, not to know it is His. But nobody now refers the laws of God to God, except in petty compliments at British Associations. The early Christians did not know God worked by law; they thought He worked by miracle. Yet the knowledge of His ‘‘fixed immutable plan’’ is as old as Christianity, and older. (It is found in Egyptian theology. Yet the very same epistle which says this, says we are to try to turn Him.)

7. Laws of Nature and God’s Laws Source: Add Mss 45841 ff32-39

I look in the Times of this day and I see, as one may see in every Times of every day, this truth: ‘‘The laws of nature and of society teach us that labour is as essential to human life as air, shelter, food.’’ Why not call these God’s laws, as they are in truth? We were once told that God’s curse was labour. Now we are told it is nature’s blessing. Another step in truth will be to call it God’s blessing. For each one of God’s laws is His blessing. Another illustration: the Sheffield engineers did not find out what were His laws in making a reser voir and Sheffield was drowned. Was this a ‘‘mysterious providence’’? Rather, would it not have been a ‘‘mysterious’’—what must we call it, not ‘‘providence’’? if Sheffield had not been drowned? 56 An allusion to John 17:3.

36 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Yet I find in one of the ablest (so-called) novels of the day, by a man,57 too—such is the amazing vagueness or ignorance among the most highly educated literary men from our universities—words to this effect: rather ask me to see God’s goodness in the Great Plague of London58 than in the murder of innocent women and children by Indian mutineers.59 It does seem the most extravagant assumption to make of God that He is to perform contradictions. He is to put man’s health under certain conditions, which man is perfectly capable of finding out and fulfilling. Yet, when man does not fulfill those conditions, he is not to suffer in health. Yes: the Great Plague of London was a proof of God’s goodness. We ourselves killed more Englishwomen and children at Dum Dum60 by sanitary neglect than the mutineers did at Cawnpore.61 And those women might die with the feeling of martyrdom, while in the slow deterioration of a race, or in death by disease of an individual there is no such inspiring feeling. We ourselves kill more ‘‘innocent children’’ ever y month at Liverpool than were killed in all the Indian Mutiny. Yet every one of these terrible facts is a proof of God’s goodness, God’s goodness in making us reasonable beings, to work out our own salvation, instead of brutes. Does this author really not know that sanitar y neglects always fall most heavily on infants, who certainly cannot get their own streets drained or houses whitewashed? And yet would he call this law a proof of God’s badness? Surely the gospel is now (writing for those who have something to do) to show that every action is really based on finding out God’s laws and shaping our conduct accordingly. . . . In these days when science has given to us so much new knowledge, cannot religion put a soul into it, as it were? Cannot we show that there is no trade or profession (which ought to be at all) that is not a 57 Unidentified source. 58 In 1664-65 the so-called ‘‘Great Plague of London’’ killed some 70,000 persons; it was most destructive in squalid neighbourhoods and among the poor, hence it was called the ‘‘poor’s plague.’’ 59 In 1857-58 Indian troops serving under British officers mutinied; both sides committed acts of extreme atrocity. The ‘‘mutiny’’ came to be termed the First War of Independence by nationalist historians. 60 The Indian city of Dum Dum, near Calcutta. 61 It was at Cawnpore that, reportedly, British soldiers and civilians were murdered and their bodies thrown into a well; those who died having been promised safe-conduct, the rebels’ ‘‘treacher y’’ was seen as justifying British vengeance.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 37

religious work? Of these, politics (including political and social economy) and education are the highest of all. Yet the political economist is generally supposed a ‘‘hard man,’’ rather going against religion, while almsgiving to the sick poor is supposed to be the religious action. The removing [of] the cesspool, which made them sick, by the officer of health is not considered a religious action. Nor is it, for God is not supposed to have any interest in that kind of thing, and this although it is all His doing, viz., that this invariable law should be that cesspools produce disease. And few have any conscious idea of working this kind of work for His sake. ‘‘He taught me that all that is done for His love is a true orison,’’ says a poor servant-girl 250 years ago.62 Yes, but we must strain every power of mind we have, too, to find out that what we are doing for His love is done according to His intentions, His laws. People always separate the two. The scientific man, the engineer, do really think about His laws. They are obliged to do so because everything exists but by His laws. But then the engineer’s engineering life is not his religion. His religion, if he has any, is to do nothing on Sundays that he would do on the weekday, and to prepare for death by leaving off all he did in life. (‘‘It never seems to occur to him [the engineer, etc.] that men can honestly believe that God sent them into the world expressly for the purpose of doing the business of the world; that the objects of the statesman, the lawyer, the doctor, the merchant, the shopkeeper, the day labourer, are as sacred as those of the priest; that when the scavenger cleans the street, or the stockbroker sells shares, or the publican serves his customers, he is discharging a divinely imposed duty and playing his part, and an essential part too, in a divine scheme as much as a priest administering the sacrament to a dying man. More or less consciously this sort of theor y has a deep influence on English society. Much of that gravity and pertinacious energy, which x x seems to be mere systematic greediness, springs from it.’’)63 On the other hand, religious people, both Roman Catholic and evangelical, suppose that, whether in education or in anything else (except scientific professional work, but then scientific professional work is not religious work, according to them), provided your intention is right with God, you have nothing at all to do with using all your 62 ‘‘250 years ago’’ points to c1623; possibly Jeanne de Chantal (1572-1641) is meant? 63 Before this text in parentheses, which according to a notation was to form a footnote, Nightingale deleted ‘‘from a contemporary magazine.’’

38 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions faculties to find out what are God’s laws as to man’s health, moral and physical, as to free trade, political economy, legislation. It is a very common mistake to suppose that if you do a thing ‘‘for His love,’’ it does not signify whether you have understood or not God’s laws, and an equally common mistake to suppose that nothing is done for His service but what is done ‘‘for His love.’’ Surely it is a matter far more important than staying the Great Plague or the Great Fire of London that error shall be stayed, that tr uth should be preached: that is, religion, which shall take up and inspire the intellectual work of the present day at the intellectual level of the present day, inspire the practical intellectual work of all of us, which shall settle the point whether it is God’s will for us to pray, e.g., against railway accidents or to prevent them; the point whether God cares nothing at all about those things being done which make railway accidents rare or impossible, wishing to do it all Himself by miracle. Instead of this the good think only of building new churches. They never think, is that the thing to say to God which is said in church? But if anyone is engaged in ‘‘finding’’ [providing] people with good moral work, let him not leave this to preach a truth by words which he is really preaching by act. It is more of a religious act to ‘‘find’’ [provide] the soldiers with workshops than it is even to preach to them that ‘‘work is prayer.’’ It is more of a religious act to employ the distressed cotton spinners on the Local Government Act works than to preach to them the principles of God’s government by law. It is more of a religious act to help the embryo statesmen, clergymen, professional men at our universities to go straight in moral ways than to preach to them the ‘‘reformation of the church.’’ But why not do both? Can a state be reached in which ‘‘persons have so strong a sense of the identity of their own actions with the will of God as to exclude ever y other feeling, in which they neither wish to live nor wish to die except as they fulfill His will’’?64 Indeed this is the whole problem of religious life. But it is much more difficult to solve it practically, when the life is action, than when it is merely endurance. The mystics lay down the rule of passive conformity with the will of God in the most absolute beauty. And, what is more, they practically lived up to it in the most complete perfection. But then, they did nothing; they made it a rule to do nothing; they did a few little manual works just as we take exercise, because they were wise enough to see 64 Possibly from the same ‘‘contemporar y magazine.’’

Notes from Devotional Authors / 39

the necessity of keeping the physical part of their spirit, so to speak, in order. But one of them65 expressly assumes that ‘‘works of charity’’ are to be resorted to as a kind of pis-aller [makeshift], when the soul is incapable of contemplating God, or as an act of self-mortification. On one occasion this mystic is residing in a hospital, waiting for her own Carmelite house to be ready. And she gives an orange, the only thing she can eat, to the patients, not for their sakes but for her own. (Compare this with Sir Philip Sidney66 giving up his drink of water to a soldier who wanted it more.) For the same end, namely, self-mortification, one of the most promising of the early Spanish Jesuits dies of fever, from carrying to college from market, in the sun, a pig, which the pig merchants were waiting to carry. And he and all the Jesuits think it not a great waste but a great act, a worthy martyrdom. St Catherine of Genoa67 thinks it a better act to submit to nurses’ ill treatment of their patients and malversations in the Genoese hospital (of which she is afterwards made superintendent) in her own cause than to reform and manage the nursing establishment in her patients’ cause. Lord Althorp thinks it a better act to withdraw from the ministry in order to prepare for death than to administer his office in his countr y’s cause. Fénelon says that he would not have lifted a finger if, by so doing, he could have saved the life of his admirable pupil [the Duke of Burgundy68] who, had he lived, would have been King of France. (Perhaps if he had not died the whole political history of the French nation had been different.) For the most opposite reasons Cavour69 65 Nightingale wrote, then deleted ‘‘St Teresa,’’ one of the most active of the mystics! 66 Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), poet, statesman and patron of scholars. The stor y has it that he refused a cup of water in favour of a wounded soldier with the words: ‘‘Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.’’ 67 Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510). With her husband she worked in a hospital for the poor in Genoa; she experienced mystical states throughout her active life. Events similar to those Nightingale alludes to are related in Marie Théodore de Bussierre, Les oeuvres de sainte Catherine de Gênes, précédées de sa vie 40-41. Nightingale’s information might come from an English edition of Life and Doctrine of Saint Catherine of Genoa. See also Catherine of Genoa, Catherine of Genoa, Purgation and Purgator y: The Spiritual Dialogue. 68 Grandson of Louis XIV (1638-1715), he died in 1712. 69 Camilo Benso Cavour (1810-61), Italian statesman who fought for Italian independence and unity. See Society and Politics and European Travels.

40 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions and the Duke of Burgundy both die for want of the most ordinar y knowledge of the laws of God in those about them. And each all but drags the kingdom with him to its fall. What is the moral? To unite the active life of absolute conformity with God’s will with the passive, to unite what we have to do for Him with what He has to do for us: this is the whole end of life. It was said, with praise, of a man that with him endurance never took the place of action. This is high praise. For even when we are ready and resolved to suffer everything, it is not so easy as it sounds to feel active conformity. To take the most homely of all instances, it is not for a nurse to be always striving to maintain in herself a state of absolute ‘‘indifference,’’ in neither wishing her patient to live nor wishing him to die except as fulfilling God’s will. On the contrary, ever y action must be per formed as if the patient’s life depended on it, yet without anxiety, anxiety of course defeating its own end. I had always held that it was better for both nurse and patient to be told the exact truth as to the probable prospect of recover y. But I have had many severe lessons to the contrary. An excellent old nurse, when told by the doctor that the case of the child-patient was hopeless, burst out: ‘‘Oh! He should not have told me. I shan’t be able now to go on till the end as if the child might be made to live.’’ She did go on till the end as if the child might be made to live. But for all that it was a lesson.70 The hope of living may give a sick man years of life. Here conformity with God’s will as it were may prevent God’s design. On the whole, in critical and important action, of which life is full, never more so than now (however much it may be said that there is no room now for heroic action; there never was more room), on the whole, it is not a good plan to be always thinking whether the intention is right with God; it adds an additional element of anxiety to the anxious, [i.e.,] whether the will is absolutely annihilated before His. In active life, the whole attention must be fixed on the action, it must not wander to the intention. One might even go farther and say, an action is not complete and efficient if room be left for the actor to be diving into his intention. In times past, it was reckoned a great virtue for men of mental power to perform acts below their own powers, such as sweeping out their cells, leaving the statesman’s life for the 70 Here Nightingale struck out: The death of a man important to his countr y’s cause [presumably Sidney Herbert] was hastened by being told that he had a fatal disease. . . .

Notes from Devotional Authors / 41

hermitage. Then of course it was their only mental occupation to think about their intentions. But may one not say that this was just the test that it was not according to God’s will that they should perform those actions? How is this active life to be connected with the absolute union with God, which all agree is necessary to carry out His designs, is now the problem. Union with God? What an object for our endeavour. But is God ever ill? Is God ever in doubt? God has never to think of Himself. He is never doubtful as to the course He has to take. This doubt is the chief cause which compels us to think of ourselves. ‘‘In doubt abstain,’’ says the wise man. And the mystics say: ‘‘When things present themselves in tumult to your thought, remit them into the hands of God. When you want counsel in any affair, humble your heart before God, recommending to Him the matter in question and awaiting His light in peace.’’ Now, who that is engaged in real work can do this? Twenty times a day, ever y person engaged in administration, whether of an institution or of an office, or of an army or of a ship, must give a decision at once upon a matter in which he is necessarily and rightly in doubt. And as to ‘‘awaiting’’ the result of consideration ‘‘in peace,’’ thousands of lives may depend upon his being as instant and immediate as if in time of war. In fact, want of promptitude in government offices has been the main cause of fatal failures. Again, God is never ill. When the mind is overtasked, either by the object being too great for our powers or by the body giving way and being ill, then it is we [that] are obliged to think of ourselves, which is the greatest drawback to being absolutely absorbed in God’s will. Then, with regard to external oppositions: what would Christ have done if he had had to work through Pilate? It is impossible for anyone not employed in active administrative life to know how often one has to ask oneself that question, and also how would an excellent Being have worked, being ill? being overtasked? being in doubt? the subject being beyond his powers? It appears that, in most of the actions we have to do at the present time, we cannot find an example in what Christ would have done. For he never thought himself mistaken, never hesitated as to his decision, as to the means to be taken, as far as we can tell. Now, in all these states of mind, people who undertake anything in God’s ser vice beyond their own powers find the absolute passive union with God to be hindered. ‘‘If God charges you with a weight superior to your powers, He charges Himself, for He must supply the inefficiency of His servant.

42 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions That is why, Lord, far from fearing lest Thou shouldst impose upon me some office which surpasses my faculties, I desire it on the contrar y, in order to have Thee as the companion of my labours.’’71 Here was the union with God indeed. Here is a tr ue state of mind. Could it be constantly maintained? ‘‘To have God always present to one’s thought in all one’s actions’’ ought to be ‘‘no more difficult than respiration,’’72 that is to say, unconscious, going on of itself and impeding as little or rather helping as much one’s actions as respiration. But in an active struggling life, although entirely in God’s ser vice, how often is ‘‘respiration’’ ‘‘difficult,’’ how often one is entirely out of breath, every day one has to run oneself out of breath. If illness or feebleness come then one is always out of breath bodily and mentally. How often one is obliged to stop and arrange how to get back one’s breath. Indeed, it often comes to this, that nothing is so ‘‘difficult’’ as ‘‘respiration,’’ and that this difficulty has sometimes to absorb all one’s attention. The immense tension of mind felt by honest doers of the world’s (God’s) work now, in solving administrative questions, scientific questions, questions how to govern, whether educationally, politically, economically, judicially, this is entirely ignored by all religious writers, of whatever church or age. ‘‘You will do more by the union you contract with our Lord than by your great application in seeking expedients to arrive at the end of your designs.’’73 Is that true? Have not greater mistakes been made by concluding that God exempts us from ‘‘seeking expedients,’’ provided our intention be right with Him, that He exempts us from using, nay even abusing, our powers (using them to their destruction) in order to find out the means He has appointed to carry on His work, the laws, in fact, by which He governs persons and kingdoms? Have not greater mistakes been made in this way than by concluding that God means us to employ, to strain if need be, all our own powers to find out what He wants, even should we strain these till they give way? (All Roman Catholic orders have, more or less, this radical defect: there is no exertion of mental power to find out what is best for these children, for these sick, what would prevent this or that disease, how could this administration be improved. The occasion where one sees 71 A more complete version of this text is given (see p 60 below) as related to Balthazar Alvarez. 72 Probably from the same author. 73 Author unknown.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 43

this defect least is at the present time in missions among the aborigines, where labour is taken now to find out what is best.) To return: How is this earnest inquiry after means to be reconciled with absolute acquiescence in God’s will? Surely it is to be done. But how? Now for the ‘‘Exercises’’ to bring us to this.

8. ‘‘Spiritual Exercises’’ Source: Add Mss 45841 ff39-41

One of the ‘‘exercises’’ by which the early Jesuits say that they brought themselves ‘‘to the perfection of God’s ser vice’’ in two years is: after (1) forming a resolution to be God’s entirely, and (2) studying what is the particular path He inspires: 1. to propose in the morning to regulate every action by His spirit, 2. to foresee and prevent occasions for our ordinar y faults, 3. to hold firm when occasions come, 4. to receive His spirit or inspirations without reser ve, 5. to re-enter oneself ever y time the clock strikes, or the action changes.74 Now, not from theory but from practice, actual and laborious, it will be found this does not answer [apply] in real work. I know one who, in daily administrative struggles with government offices, has done this exercise for two hours before beginning work and repeated it through the working day. In vain. It only makes the state of mind more anxious. It is a positive fact that to be thinking too much of God’s will prevents one from doing His will; that to be thinking of the action itself prescribed by His will, and of that only, is the way to do His will in real work. Returning to our homely illustration, it certainly would not do for a nurse to be always examining herself to see whether, in nursing her patients, she thought of nothing but God’s will. She must be thinking of them. 74 By ‘‘exercises’’ (ff 23, 31) Nightingale means practical methods for discerning God’s will or plan, and for actively conforming to it. The early Jesuits practised the Spiritual Exercises as devised by their founder, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), who described them as follows: ‘‘Any means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disorderly affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God’s will in the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul’’ (Spiritual Exercises n. 1). Nightingale is using here a paraphrase of notes 24-26 that is not found as such in Ignatius’ text. See Ignatius of Loyola: The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works. The ‘‘particular examen’’ outlined here by Nightingale is found in The Spiritual Exercises notes 24-31 and explained in A. Rodriguez, Practice 445-48, 456-57, 460 (‘‘ever y time the clock strikes . . . ’’).

44 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions In each action one must, as it were, stake one’s existence in carrying out that action. And if the action is not important enough for that, it had better not be done at all. To practise the exercise given above is to create in oneself an additional anxious turn of mind, a fear lest one should not be quite one with God and lest, the action failing, this should be due to a flaw in one’s unity with God. For those who are, e.g., engaged in a mathematical calculation, in a great scientific problem, it is obviously impossible to be stopping ‘‘ever y time the clock strikes’’ to see if they are doing it solely for God’s sake. Then there are those who are mentally tasked beyond their strength; for these, feverish exhaustion, ‘‘when the action is over,’’ makes it impossible to ‘‘re-enter and re-examine themselves.’’ The healthy thing is to be so absorbed in God’s ser vice as not to need all these exercises to see if one is so. But for this, it must be an employment where powers of body and mind are healthily balanced, so that each is exercised, an employment with visible action on outward things and men, not only writing. And who can always command this? The mystics or quietists75 expressly lay down that a multiplicity of occupations is incompatible with perfection in God’s ser vice, that there must be plenty of time not required for the duties of one’s charge. But how can anyone, who ever had anything really to do for God, lay down such a rule? For peace of mind it is certainly necessary. But we ought to be ready to go down ‘‘into hell’’ for God’s ser vice. ‘‘He descended into hell’’; scarcely any words in the creed are more striking than these. And certainly a ‘‘multiplicity of occupations’’ overtasking one’s powers is going down ‘‘into hell’’ for God’s sake. The ‘‘peace of a good conscience’’: how vain are those words! Conscience is a coward (someone truly says) who attacks the weak and well-intentioned and lets the strong sinners alone. Feverish exhaustion, morbid retrospection as to whether one has not said or done something to defeat His end (and this is what ‘‘re-entering oneself’’ comes to) are really what constitutes the mental alternations with active work of those who do work in His service, if it is beyond their powers; not to speak of the good people disapproving, of those one would so fain agree with, disagreeing, all which one feels the more acutely, the more one’s own powers decline. But let us serve God for His own interest, not for our own. 75 This quick identification, questionable as it is, accounts for Nightingale’s partly negative view of mysticism.

Notes from Devotional Authors / 45

To return, how can people choose between a ‘‘multiplicity of occupations’’ all belonging to their charge? Is one to leave this? Is one to leave that? No one who has had real work to do will say this. One must do the ‘‘duties of one’s charge’’ till they are done. Can any other rule be laid down? How is one to do this and not that duty? I don’t know. To conclude: the passive and the active life can be united, of that we may be sure. But it never has been done, or even taught, because the active life is quite a product of modern science.76 How to unite the two? Neither Roman Catholic nor evangelical world has ever accepted, at all broadly or distinctly, that, in such and such a measure, God’s will is indeed to be suffered; but in such and such a measure, God’s will is that we are to find out and work out exemption (for mankind) from what, if we don’t, He has willed shall be suffered. Our business is to find out where these measures begin and end.77 Both religious worlds have hitherto taken for granted that there is not much we can do to improve the world. Nobody thinks that God is answering, as loud as He can speak, to every prayer in the litany, ‘‘You men are yourselves to remove the occasion for this and for this, not to ask me to remove it, much less to submit to it.’’ Instead of saying, ‘‘We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord,’’ we might, if we really listened, hear the goodness of the Lord saying, ‘‘Oh men, the perfection of your service to me lies in your doing the thing yourselves.’’

9. Secular Activity and Religious Passivity Source: Add Mss 45841 ff41-42

But now the time has come. Scientific men, without thinking it, are acting it. Practical men and political men and money-making men and life insurance officers, etc. are really, though unconsciously, acting out these designs of God, are really doing for Him what the churches are praying Him to do for us. Is it not the time to tell men so, to tell them: you are really acting God’s will though you don’t know it, and why will you lack the most inspiring motive of all? Would you rather act out God’s will unconsciously than consciously? In other 76 Like so many people in the nineteenth century, Nightingale often enthused over ‘‘science’’ as promising a bright future. She both read contemporar y science and history of science. See Society and Politics. 77 Nightingale seems to be inviting people to discern what in life must be suffered passively as willed by God and what must be resisted actively because intended by God as an obstacle to be overcome by us in the duty of improving the world; thus to distinguish between two kinds of evil.

46 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions words, is not the time come to teach men how to add passive union with God’s will to active union with it? All that is said about following the ‘‘cross of Christ’’ may be adopted to the fullest extent, nothing changed but this: people do not distinguish between the ‘‘cross’’ we have to bear and the ‘‘cross’’ we are put here expressly to remove. (It is indeed much more difficult to conceive of the Perfect as not bearing the cross than of the Imperfect as having to bear it, notwithstanding all that is said as to the irreconcilableness of the existence of God and evil.) ‘‘Preaching the cross’’ is really preaching this truth, viz., that we must suffer all the consequences of our mistakes in finding out God’s universal laws (‘‘nature’s laws’’); so only can mankind be created by mankind, which is the greatest of God’s laws.78 This involves a degree of suffering and sin, which those only who have gone forth and seen it and worked into it can conceive. People may talk of it in their studies and say that the existence of evil is the one inscrutable mystery. But if they knew what it really is, if they knew what it was to be on the rack, instead of looking at pictures of men on the rack, then they could never rest till they had ascertained that God (Goodness) Himself is the author of evil—not for eternity, that makes all the difference. But the curious thing is that people recoil from thinking that God is the author of temporary evil, but believe that almighty God permits or ordains an evil which is to last for eternity. To say that God ordains a hell for eternity is making Him the devil. We must love what is loveable. To preach a religion of love must certainly include to explain how God’s character is loveable, to show God’s providence (a word I would willingly substitute for God’s laws, or say God’s providence by law, meaning an universal providence, the only one we can imagine worthy of a perfect God, not ‘‘special providenceS,’’ not a putting in of His fingers here and there to counteract the devil) provides an universal rule (evil itself a part of it, infinite love the author) by which man cannot condemn (‘‘damn’’) himself but save himself. (St Augustine: ‘‘For although I have created you without you, and without your having ever asked me’’ (why?) ‘‘because I loved you before you were at all, nevertheless I shall not save you without you.’’79) 78 Nightingale’s meaning here remains obscure because undeveloped. 79 One of Augustine’s statements that comes close to this is found in his Commentar y on Psalms Ps 118, sermon 27:6-8: ‘‘You first loved me so that I might love you.’’ 1 John 4:10 has: ‘‘Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us. . . . ’’

Notes from Devotional Authors / 47

Centrality of the Cross Source: Add Mss 45841 ff42-44

That Christ on the cross is the highest expression hitherto of God, not in the vulgar meaning of the atonement, is most exact truth. God does hang on the cross ever y day in ever y one of us. (St Vincent de Paul80 sends his missionaries to the galleys ‘‘to visit the Son of God suffering for our crimes, in the person of these men who suffer for their own disorderly life.’’) God’s providence, God’s laws, the cross: these are identical terms. 1. Christ preaches the cross (as does all mystical theology); 2. God educates the world by His laws, i.e., by sin; 3. Man must create mankind; 4. All this evil, i.e., the cross, is the proof of God’s goodness, the only way by which God could, without a contradiction, work out man’s salvation, i.e., by which God could make man work out man’s salvation. These four are identical propositions. But the advocates of the devil say: ‘‘There is too much evil to attribute to God.’’ There is just enough (not a millionth part of a grain more), just enough to teach man by his own mistakes, by his sins, the way to perfection, to perfection in eternity, this being the only good. This is the doctrine of ‘‘the cross.’’ In this sense Christ is ‘‘the way.’’ He was the one (though not the first) who voluntarily, eagerly, in his own person, not for his own perfection but for that of others, embraced the cross, taught us each the practice, the feeling of the cross, to live the practical life of the cross, each one of us for oneself. (Buddha was the first to do this. But the whole theory of Buddhism, leaving out the perfect God, the perfect Plan, by which ‘‘the cross’’ is seen to emanate from Perfect and Almighty Goodness, is like the watch without the mainspring.) ‘‘The cross’’ is God’s working out of man’s salvation by evil, the identity of God’s providence and God’s (‘‘nature’s’’) laws. But all we do now is to go on repeating that the co-existence of evil with a good God is an ‘‘impenetrable myster y.’’ Whereas, if we were to look, we should see that it is much more difficult to conceive of a good God, a perfect Being without evil, or who has not passed through evil, or even of our own future happi80 Vincent de Paul (1581-1660), French priest, who worked among poor and prisoners; he founded several communities dedicated to works of charity, including the Lazarists and Filles de la Charité, known as Sisters of Charity. Nightingale met the Filles de la Charité in Alexandria in 1849-50 and visited them in Paris later.

48 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ness without work (and how can there be work without evil? i.e., if everything is perfect) than to understand how Perfection can permit evil. (For how can man be perfected without sin, without evil, without ‘‘the cross’’?) But none affirm, none construct now, none affirm a perfect God working out by law, through sin, through evil, the eternal perfection and happiness of ever y one of us. And yet, ‘‘greater things than these shall ye do,’’81 so said Christ himself. Is not the ‘‘greater thing’’ that someone should show how ‘‘nature’s laws,’’ now being discovered for the first time, are in effect but a part of a working out of the doctrine of the cross? ‘‘I may compass earth and heaven,’’ says St Bernard,82 ‘‘the sea and the dry land, and nowhere shall I find Thee, save in the cross. There Thou restest, there Thou feedest Thy flock and makest them to rest at noon. In that cross ar t Thou found, of whomsoever findeth Thee.’’ This is literal truth. ‘‘God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,’’ says St Paul83 in one of those grand bursts of heroic enthusiasm which there is nothing in all history to compare to. ‘‘I offer myself to God,’’ says Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi,84 in a humbler strain, ‘‘that I may never seek anything but Him crucified, but to keep my soul united to Him’’ (that is, ‘‘in that cross’’ where Bernard truly says He is alone to be found) ‘‘and to do my utmost to qualify myself for His service.’’ In the cross of Christ I glory, Towering o’er the wrecks of time, All the lights of sacred story Gather round its head sublime. This rather vulgar little hymn,85 again, expresses the exact truth: ‘‘the lights of sacred story’’ (for all stor y is ‘‘sacred’’; is it not all subject to the laws of God? Has God created one nation and not another?). All histor y then does but teach us the way of God through ‘‘the cross’’ to bring man to the perfection He has created him for, because, before man was, God loved him, as Augustine says. 81 A paraphrase of John 14:12. 82 Bernard of Clair vaux (1090-1153), Cistercian monk and one of the great mystics of the West. 83 A paraphrase of Gal 6:14. 1 Cor 2:2 has the same idea. 84 Maria Magdalena de’ Pazzi (1566-1607), Carmelite mystic. Her works are collected under the title Tutte le opere dai manoscritti originali. See Salvatore Thor-Salviat, Secrets of a Seraph: The Spiritual Doctrine of St Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi. 85 Words by John Bowring, music by Ithamar Conkey, hymn no. 113 of The Church Hymnary.

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Besides this historical meaning, preaching the ‘‘cross of Christ’’ has another, a practical meaning: the uniting oneself with Christ, who never ceases to love God the Father in the name of all men. And this in the most perfect manner that can be imagined, that is to say, as a victim, voluntarily giving himself, offering himself up, not, again, in the vulgar sense, as if it were to appease the anger of a perfect Being, but in the sense of willingly incurring any and all sufferings which come in the way of helping on men and carrying out God’s will and work. In this sense, the ‘‘victim’’ is to God as another Himself, another Jesus Christ. In it, i.e., in us, the ‘‘victim,’’ God sees His son and loves him. To do this, for each one to do this in his or her own person, for me to do it myself, to be always pleased with God and His cross, to have as my sole object that He should be always pleased with me: this is indeed the cross of Christ, bearing the cross of Christ, not his bearing it for me.

Notes Source: Add Mss 45841 ff45-47

Drains. It is not the occupation but the spirit which makes the difference. The election of a bishop may be a most secular thing. The election of a representative may be a religious thing. It is not the preluding such an election with public prayer that would make it a religious act. It is religious so far as each man discharges his part as a duty and solemn responsibility. Not the question whether it is done for the state or the church, but whether with God or without God. Forgiving and forgetting. You cannot give yourself a bad memory if you have a good one. To forget is a foolish way of talking. No mere maxims got by heart about forgiveness of injuries, God alone can teach it: by experience, by a sense of human frailty, by a perception of ‘‘the soul of goodness in things evil,’’ by a cheer ful tr ust in human nature, by a strong sense of God’s love, by long and disciplined realization of the love of Christ; only thus can we get that free, manly, large, princely spirit of matured manhood ( Joseph). There is no blindness greater than that of those who think that the panacea for the evils of a country is to be found in ecclesiastical union. Madness lies that way. An injur y received, a wrong suffered at the hands of one loved and trusted, may well unsettle reason on its throne; the mere suspicion of it makes strange havoc in the brain when we rest on the wretched pinnacle we raise for ourselves, the false gods of our worship. There is but one remedy for that parching fever of the soul: to bow down lower than men would thrust us, to fall down at His

50 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions feet who knelt at the feet of Peter and even of Judas, who would have knelt at our feet, had we been there. This is the thought that leaves no room for pride, scarcely for indignation, as far as we are ourselves concerned. What was she that she should resent neglect? [She] strained to the highest stretch of endurance; endurance had never taken the place of action, never been the fruit of easy weakness but the concentration of power, the pain of being forced to pity where we meant to reverence, or was it pity more angelic than human? At times our souls will fall sick; does God desert us then? And must we not try to love as God does? [She] tried to shut all the world out from her consciousness and be alone with God. But through all and everything those words echoed. The earliest: ‘‘I have a baptism to be baptized with.’’86 The latest: ‘‘It is finished.’’87 ‘‘I have finished the work Thou gavest me to do.’’88 He looked upon it, now that life was closed, chiefly as a duty that was fulfilled. The duty is done, the work is finished. The dark night settles down on each day. What will then be finished? When it is finished, what will it be? Will it be, I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do?

10. John 17:1-26, Text and Comments Editor: These folios reproduce the text of John 17:1-26, partly in Nightingale’s own rendering with her divisions indicated in parentheses A-K (she omits J), followed by Nightingale’s comments on the text. Her text closely follows the King James version, but it seems that she consulted a Greek New Testament and gave her own translation in places. Where there is a difference Nightingale has often used a simpler word, for example, where the King James translates πα´ ντα ‘‘all things whatsoever,’’ Nightingale says ‘‘all.’’ Her major disagreement was with the conventional translation of δοξα´ σω and its various forms for glory or glorify, substituting variously ‘‘magnificence, manifest, brighten.’’ Where the King James translates ο‘ υι‘ ο` ς τη
ς α’ πωλε´ιας ‘‘son of perdition,’’ Nightingale has it the ‘‘lost child.’’ Source: Add Mss 45841 ff48-52

‘‘Father, the hour is come; declare (explain) thy Son, that thy son may also declare thee; as thou hast given him power over all flesh, (A) that 86 Luke 12:50. 87 John 19:30. 88 John 17:4.

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he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. (B) And this is life eternal, that they might know thee (C) the only true God and him whom thou hast sent. I have declared (explained) thee on earth: (D) I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. (E) And now, O Father, explain thou me, by thyself, with the clearness (the manifestation) which I had by thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name to people whom thou gavest me from the world; (F) thine they were and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they know that all thou hast given me is from thee. For I have given them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received it and recognized really that I went out from thee, and believe that thou hast sent me. I pray for them; I pray not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all that is mine is thine; and what is thine is mine; and I am manifested in them (G). And I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name. Those thou hast given me I have preser ved; and not one of them is lost, except the lost child; (and so the writing was fulfilled). But now I come to thee; and speak such things in the world, (H) that they may have my joy perfect in themselves. I have given them thy word, and the world hates them; for they are not of the world, as then I too am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world but that thou shouldest preser ve them from the evil. They are not of the world, as I too am not of the world (I). Make them holy in thy truth; thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, so I send them also into the world. I devote myself for them in order that they also may be devoted in (for) the truth. But I pray not for these alone, but also for those who through their word will believe on me, that they all may be one, as thou, Father, in me and I in thee; that they also may be one in us; that so the world may believe thou hast sent me. (K) And I have given them the magnificence (master y or brightness) which thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are one, I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfect in one, and the world may discern that thou hast sent me, and lovest them as thou lovest me. Father, I will that, where I am, they too may be with me, who thou hast given me, that they may see my mastery (or brightness) which thou hast given me, (I) for thou hast loved me before the world was founded. Just Father, the world knows thee not; but I know thee, and these discern that thou hast sent me. (F) And I have made known

52 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions to them thy name and will make it known to them; that the love, with which thou lovest me, may be in them, and I in them’’ (C). Why do these expressions appear like self-assertions? Do they not on the contrary come particularly home to ourselves? Though I am sure we have no overweening idea of our own doings. First of all, it is evident from the perpetual repetition (just what takes place when one, at the crisis of his fate, but the moment of action not yet come, pours out his soul) that the prayer was made, and probably heard, under great agitation, and that we cannot be sure that we have it exactly as it was said at all. The first sentence bears no sign that he was asking God to declare him the Messiah by a coup d’état, but just the contrary. In Ewald’s interpretation of Isaiah 53,89 we see what Christ did echo (not the common Jewish idea of a kingdom of glory upon earth but) the ‘‘good man’’ manifested through suffering and in contempt, his ‘‘kingdom’’ one of ‘‘sorrows’’ freely accepted, not one of triumph. And what gives a higher ‘‘kingdom’’ (greater power) than to accept every struggle, ever y grief, every calumny gladly, while going the road of God’s will? This is freedom or power. (A) and (B) seem rather inconsistent. But to accept suffering freely in the course of doing God’s will is, as just said, to acquire almost unlimited power over all flesh. (C) is surely no more than what we all say, viz., that to ‘‘know God,’’ all His laws, His character is the way which mankind is to create mankind. For what is to ‘‘create’’ but to give ‘‘life’’? True, it must be the work of ages for mankind to do to ‘‘find out God’’; but Christ too says this; in this very prayer, he perpetually refers to what those who follow him will do, and elsewhere he says ‘‘And greater works than these (his own) shall ye do.’’90 (C) in the last sentence of the prayer repeats this and also sets aside any idea as if the object were to manifest himself. He tells what the object is, viz., that they may all feel the same love, they for God, God for them, he for God and them. (D) This phrase repels many. But many have said it themselves. Ever yone does who believes he has a mission and who has not? The wonder is that I have found two eminent men, Sidney Herbert and Sir John Lawrence, who believed ‘‘my word,’’ i.e., believed I was ‘‘declaring’’ God’s ‘‘word,’’ one of His laws. (E) is always what I am striving to be able to say myself. It is evident that God has not given to me to persuade Lord de Grey or Sir C. Wood, 89 Georg Heinrich von Ewald, Die Propheten des alten Bundes 3:89-95. 90 A paraphrase of John 14:12.

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or even Mrs Shaw Stewart or Colonel Wilbraham.91 Why should I be cast down because it is so? Let me only think of that work which He has given me and admire that He should have given to such as I am His own power of convincing such as Sir John Lawrence is. (F) Do these expressions surprise? All the arguments for an eternity before us apply equally to an eternity behind us. Plato and St Augustine say almost the same. (G) I always feel that Sidney Herbert and Sir John Lawrence were God’s, not mine (it is not my dear Clough, but God’s dear Clough), that He gave them to me, not that I took them. It is obvious that I could not have convinced these great men unless God had given them me (given them, that is, through the working of their own faculties, which enabled them to understand that law of God’s which I was ‘‘declaring’’) since I cannot convince a very little one, Lord de Grey. And so on to (H). From this point the prayer is more applicable to one who has formed a great following; Fliedner92 could say it on his deathbed. It applies not to me, for whom have I who is ‘‘one with me’’ now? But what a strength it would be to me if I had? Only one, but only one, I say to God, but I have not one. One I had, but she would have it no longer. One I might have had, but she would not have it. How often I have longed to say, I and Papa ‘‘are one,’’ ‘‘as thou, Father, in me and I in thee.’’ (As for — [her sister?] I suppose it is scarcely possible for any two to be more two than we are.) But then we must remark how wonderful that Christ could say that he was ‘‘one with’’ such unpromising people as the disciples had shown themselves to be. And yet it turned out that it was so. (I) That a man betrayed, tracked, hunted, with all his hopes blasted and all his plans destroyed, should yet be able to speak of his ‘‘joy,’’ to wish his friends to feel his joy, should speak of sharing, not in time to come but now, his ‘‘master y’’ (brightness) with his friends: would that I could feel this, as the rest! But I, I shrink at the bare idea of anyone suffering what I have done, living the life I have done. Ever ything is spoiled, however, by considering him [Jesus] not a man. If he is to be Almighty God, then all this becomes without a meaning, 91 These are all people Nightingale worked with on army or India matters. 92 Rev Theodor Fliedner (1800-64), founder of the Kaiserswerth Deaconess Institution in 1836, a society devoted to the care of the sick and the education of neglected children. Branches were founded in Jerusalem, Cairo and Alexandria. Nightingale visited Kaiserswerth in 1850 and spent several months of training there in 1851. See Life and Family and European Travels.

54 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions his example is nothing to us. And the horrible inconsistency of every Christian sect lies in this; they tell us to make Christ an example in ever ything. And if we do, if, e.g., I try to apply this prayer of his to my own use, they are shocked, you are shocked, nay I am shocked myself. In the sense in which there is the Divine in every man, I indeed believe that Christ is the highest example of the ideal struggling in the Actual, of how, that is, the Divine in man acts in the highest (best) possible way under the circumstances which every reformer must encounter in ‘‘the world.’’ But mark how he always recurs to this: they are to work ‘‘in the world,’’ he was to work ‘‘in the world’’; to wish to be taken out of ‘‘the world’’ is a coward’s wish. To grapple hand to hand with ‘‘the world,’’ to make the whole of life action, never to retire in contemplative ease: if there be one thing he inculcates over and over again, this is it. (K) And how he dwells upon (not this or that theological system but) God’s words, His laws, being ‘‘tr uth.’’ Newman’s Apologia93 tells us that ‘‘Justin, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius, Sulpicius, Ambrose, Nazianzen’’ are truth. Elsewhere, that ‘‘St Leo’’ ‘‘shows’’ him the truth. J.S. Mill implies that Zoroaster’s theor y is ‘‘tr uth.’’94 Many quote what Plato says. No one but Christ ever asks what God says, ever tells us to listen to what God says, because what God says is ‘‘tr uth.’’ And if he does, people immediately think that he means, by God’s ‘‘word,’’ the Bible, though the most important part of ‘‘the Bible’’ certainly did not exist at all in his time, and what did exist he frequently tells us is incomplete. There are a few expressions which do not seem true, e.g., the object certainly was not for them ‘‘to believe on him’’ but for them to ‘‘know God,’’ to feel God’s love ‘‘in them’’-selves, to ‘‘be one’’ in God, as God in him, as he says himself. ‘‘Il (le Christ) ne nous révèle donc pas Dieu sous tous les aspects [He (the Christ) does not reveal all aspects of God to us].’’95 Does not Christ say so himself? 93 John Henr y Newman (1801-90), Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions, first published in 1864, definitive text 1886. The enumeration of the Fathers, in the order given here by Nightingale, is found on p 38. Then on p 138: ‘‘St Leo showed me . . . part of revealed truth.’’ 94 Nightingale was vexed with Mill’s statement of the Zoroastrian ‘‘two principles.’’ See his letter of 23 September 1860, Add Mss 45787 f15, in Society and Politics. Mill never used the name Zoroaster, but Nightingale continued to refer to him as subscribing to Zoroastrian principles. 95 Unidentified source.

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11. Addenda to the Spirituality of the Active Life Source: Add Mss 45841 ff53-58

Traces of the truth about God’s laws are ever ywhere to be found. This is from a little evangelical book:96 ‘‘It could scarcely be expected, however, that the operations of nature were to be suspended because of the unprepared condition of this vessel.’’ Why not call them God’s operations? And why not extend it to everything? If we substitute ‘‘God’s laws’’ or ‘‘God’s plan’’ for the word ‘‘grace,’’ which has always been misunderstood to mean an arbitrary will, almost a caprice of God, this is quite true. The laws by which He regulates our moral being are as per fectly invariable as those by which He regulates or directs our physical being. If ‘‘grace,’’ acknowledged to be His direct agency, were acknowledged to be given by laws, invariable like Him, the Giver, the passage would be perfect. His laws, that is, His plan, His order or government are admitted to be invariable, but are not admitted to be His direct agency. ‘‘The unvarying tendency of my mind is to regard the whole laws of the animal economy and of the universe as the direct dictates of the Deity, and in urging x x them, it is with the earnestness and reverence due to a Divine command that I do it. There is scarcely a single page in all my x x physiological works in which such a feeling was not active as I wrote. I almost lose the consciousness of self in the anxiety to attain the end; and where I see clearly a law of God in our own nature, I rely upon its efficiency for good with a faith and peace which no storm can shake, and feel pity for those who remain blind to its origin, wisdom and beneficence. I therefore say it solemnly x x that I experienced great delight, when writing my books, in the consciousness that I was, to the best of my ability, expounding ‘the ways of God to man,’ and insofar fulfilling one of the highest objects of human existence. God was, indeed, ever present to my thoughts.’’97 This was a man who was considered almost an unbeliever. If I may refer this once to myself, I can truly say that the feeling he describes has been ever present to my mind. Whether in having a drain cleaned out, or in ventilating a hospital ward, or in urging the principles of healthy construction of buildings, or of temperance and useful occu96 Unidentified source. 97 This is a quotation from the physiologist Andrew Combe; see George Combe, ed., Life and Correspondence of Andrew Combe 401. See also entry of March 1865 in Spiritual Journey 2:399-400.

56 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions pation, or of sewerage and water supply, I always considered myself as obeying a direct command of God, and it was ‘‘with the earnestness and reverence due to’’ God’s laws that I urged them. Nothing else could have carried me through my years of weariness. To work at the improvement of mankind, without regarding these laws, as so many churches have done, is to try and ‘‘prevent the night from coming.’’98 For example, we in vain labour at the moral progress of a population, if we leave it festering in unhealthy dwellings. Probably there is no influence stronger than the buildings they live in, for bad or for good, upon the inhabitants. If there are no means for decency, for cleanliness, no safeguard for morality in their dwellings, the population will, as a general rule, be indecent, unclean, immoral, drunken. A government would say that it exists for the good and improvement of the nation which it governs. Yet the government seems to be there to hang and imprison people, not to help in providing them with proper dwellings. It is vain to teach and to preach to a population under such circumstances. It is trying to ‘‘prevent the night from coming.’’ In lesser things, people struggle with themselves a whole life through, spend their efforts in telling themselves to be good, with circumstances under which they cannot ‘‘be good.’’ They take no pains to alter these circumstances. And no one takes pains to alter the circumstances for them. It is true that often they [the circumstances] cannot rightly be altered. We must sometimes go to Sierra Leone and lose our health. So with moral Sierra Leones. But always we can bring in counteracting circumstances for ourselves or for others. We can light the candles at midnight, though we cannot ‘‘prevent the night from coming.’’ Sometimes we can alter circumstances altogether. In 1857, nine miles of country in India, with twenty-five villages, were laid waste by fever. Death sometimes came in three hours. Of 600 inhabitants in a village, only a few in the centre houses lived. All the others died or fled. All the other houses were unroofed and tenantless. In the other villages, nothing was left but pariah dogs. The crops were uncut. The dead lay about in the hollows unburied and unburnt. For there was nobody left to bury them. When the people did live, they degenerated, mentally and physically. The cause of all this was a screw turned by a coolee (at 4 rupees a month) which flooded the lowlands from the Ganges Canal faster than the water could be carried off. The man at the screw ruled the destinies 98 From Teresa of Avila’s ‘‘Spiritual Testimonies’’ #24.

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of a large population, not only as to health and life but as to soul and mind, according as the screw turned to the right or to the left. Thus the cause was only found out some years after by an inquiry made by Sir John Lawrence. And all the time the people were going on degenerating. And then we talk of an ‘‘inscrutable Providence’’ when to scrutinize and find out the ‘‘ways of God,’’ and for mankind to create the circumstances which create mankind through these, His laws, is the ‘‘way of God,’’ not to storm God by prayer into granting a life or restoring health. What a misconception that is of the character of God. What a God that must be, who would take a life upon which perhaps hang the moral destinies of many, merely because He has not been asked not to do it. A tigress would not be such a brute. She defends the lives of her cubs, not because they cry and growl, but because they are her cubs. People go to God in prayer, ‘‘not to be taught by Him but to teach Him.’’ But what is real prayer? It is an actual communion (or ‘‘conversation’’) ‘‘of the soul with God.’’ It is ‘‘the anticipated image of the superior world, whither it carries us for a few moments. However well we may know God, we shall not love Him till our whole soul springs towards Him, contracts the habit of going out of the world, to converse with Him, and is full of the thought that God answers our love.’’99 One who died almost a boy wrote these words: ‘‘The tendency of love is towards a union so intimate as virtually to amount to identification’’; ‘‘equally inseparable are the notions of opposition to love and opposition to bliss. Unless therefore the heart of a created being is at one with the heart of God, it cannot but be miserable.’’ Is not this another definition of prayer? The same boy goes on to say that Christ came ‘‘to render human love for the Most High a possible thing,’’ that is to say, ‘‘redemption, what Christ has done and suffered for mankind.’’100 The former writer quoted says: ‘‘The greatest effects of prayer are promised to the intercession of Jesus Christ.’’ This is a fine illustration of the true meaning of ‘‘intercession.’’ The same writer goes on to say: ‘‘If, in these destinies of mankind which we might be tempted to consider as a tissue of accidents, an order, a plan, a direction is to be found, as constant as it is firm, mankind is not forsaken. Even if Christianity were not there to furnish undeniable proof of it, all history testifies to it. Now this general, undoubted action, being composed of that multitude of particular actions which we expe99 Unidentified source. 100 Unidentified source.

58 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions rience without ceasing and of which the tissue of our life is in some sort formed, how can we doubt that these are not themselves comprised in the plan which presides over the whole, although we cannot yet understand the place they occupy in it,’’ especially not ‘‘when we obstinately fix our looks upon an isolated feature close at hand?’’ God’s ‘‘direction’’ is the very word used by an illustrious (so-called) pantheist of several centuries ago.101 ‘‘The direction of God,’’ he says, is ‘‘the fixed and immutable order of nature, or concatenation of natural things.’’ ‘‘The universal laws of nature, according to which all things are and are determined, are nothing else but God’s eternal decrees, which involve always eternal truth and necessity.’’ So that ‘‘whether we say all things are according to the laws of nature or are ordered by God’s decree and direction, we say the same thing.’’102 But if these things are true, then the whole human race is ‘‘inspired,’’ as has been said. And so it is. ‘‘And the human race is worth it.’’ ‘‘Destiny,’’ someone says, ‘‘I like the word destiny. It means destined by God.’’103 ‘‘Fortune,’’ says my pantheist. ‘‘By for tune I understand nothing but God’s direction, as far as He directs human things by external and unexpected causes.’’ Certainly and so He ‘‘inspires’’ the human race, ‘‘inspires’’ them to find out ‘‘His ways,’’ ‘‘directing them by His laws.’’104 But there are ‘‘prophets’’ or ‘‘interpreters of God’’ from time to time, who interpret the ways of God thus ‘‘revealed’’ to man, more clearly if, says the pantheist, a prophet is ‘‘one who interprets revealed things to those who can have no certain knowledge of them, and who therefore can only embrace revealed things by faith.’’105 In prayer:106 I have no occasion either to stimulate His will, for He desires more than I do my good and the work I can do for Him by my ser vices and my obedience. Besides, since He is my guide in the way I pursue, what can I do better than follow Him in peace, resting upon the truth of His word? If I do not obtain what I seek and desire, I obtain then a greater good, namely, conformity of my will with His 101 The Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-77) is meant. Nightingale’s extensive excerpts from Spinoza are reproduced in Society and Politics. 102 All these quotations, probably from Spinoza, cannot be precisely located. 103 Unidentified source. 104 Unidentified source. 105 Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, ch 1. 106 The following is preceded by the notation, ‘‘1550,’’ which indicates that the paragraph is either inspired by Teresa of Avila or even excerpted from one of her works.

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good pleasure, and it is this which is the aim of my life and the goal towards which I am never to cease to tend. Why should I want to know what He hides from me, why should I want to walk by a way which He does not open to me, or to advance more quickly than he chooses? In speaking of the ideas of one’s own mind, ‘‘I blush with shame when I think that these nothings put obstacles in the way of such great things.’’ My defects—instead of being a burden to me, they rejoice me after a fashion, because they humiliate me by discovering to me what is in me, and force me to put my confidence in God, by making me aware of my own impotence. They are, in my sense, like so many windows of my soul, through which the light reaches me and makes me see that faults not voluntary cannot put obstacles in the way of my perfection.107 To make a promise, after not less than ten years in God’s ser vice and a second ‘‘probation’’108 begun seven years after the first, viz., to go to ser ve God everywhere, wherever it may please Him to send me. ‘‘Evangelical workers: God sends them where He wills without finding in them any resistance; they return alike at His call, glorifying Him and giving thanks to Him for the successes they have obtained; they say to Him: here we are ready to set off again to go where seemeth to Thee well.’’109 It may seem that there is no necessity to make a ‘‘promise,’’ after ‘‘ten years in God’s ser vice,’’ to go wherever it calls. Pastor Fliedner did it and needed no vow. But in the discipline of life, without any promise making, most people seriously engaged in God’s ser vice will remember epochs corresponding, though not exactly, with ‘‘first and second’’ probations, when they were once called.

Translations and Notes Source: Add Mss 45841 ff59-84

Balthazar Alvarez:110 Exercise 2. 107 Louis Du Pont, La vie du Père Balthazar Alvarez ch 13, has: ‘‘Ses fautes deviennent les fenêtres de l’âme par où la Lumière de Dieu entre [His defects become the windows of the soul through which the Light of God enters.]’’ 108 Nightingale seems to be referring to the training in some religious orders (similar to that of the Jesuits) where ‘‘first probation’’ means ‘‘novitiate’’ and ‘‘second probation’’ the last stage of training, also improperly called ‘‘second novitiate.’’ 109 Unidentified source. 110 Nightingale prefaces this text with ‘‘P. Balthazar Alvarez. 16th century.’’ Between 1559 and 1564 Fr Balthazar Alvarez, Jesuit, was the confessor of

60 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Evening (say to your soul) ‘‘What is the good of all this useless thinking? What comfor t will it be to thee to know beforehand what God will ask of thee in the course of time? Or else, why make thyself anxious about the wants of thy body? Has not God charged Himself with these cares when He took thee into His service? It is losing very unnecessarily the advantages of thy happy position, throwing them away on purpose, as it were. Do thy duty, and the divine goodness will take care of the rest. My duty in fact is to content God, to satisfy and please Him.’’ FN: Indeed all religion is in these two things, viz., that I should be always pleased with God, and that He should be pleased with me, I always satisfied with what He does, He content with what I do. Alvarez: ‘‘Order, O Lord, order whatever Thou wilt. Turn me this way, turn me that way; put my body to the torture; all is the same to me in Thy holy will. It is not for one that is religious to be in pain as to what he shall do tomorrow. Besides, if an evil spirit addresses this question to me, the answer is easy: I shall do what I find is ordered me.’’ FN: But I must take every pain to find out what is ordered me. Alvarez: ‘‘I make it my prayer, and that daily, that I may have done all that God’s will requires of me.’’ FN: What an awful thing to think, that there may be aught God has asked of me and which I have not done, have not even heard Him ask. Alvarez: ‘‘When a master takes a servant, he contracts an obligation to acknowledge his services. Can one conceive an honour fitter to fill and to satisfy a soul than that God should seek her services, or than the obligation which God contracts towards her? If God charges you with a weight greater than your powers, He charges Himself, for He must supply the insufficiency of His servant. That is why, Lord, very far from fearing that Thou shouldst impose upon me some charge which is beyond my faculties, I desire it, on the contrary, in order to have Thee for the companion of my work.’’

Teresa of Avila; he was only twenty-five years old when he became her confessor. Teresa mentions him in The Book of Her Life 26.3 and 28.14, now in volume 1 of The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila. The present text could not be located.

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Jean-Joseph Surin:111 Tr ue Prayer. ‘‘One of our great misfortunes is not to make good use of our sufferings and infirmities of the body, in which God has great designs for us, uniting Himself with the soul much more per fectly by pain and grief than by great consolations. Tr ue prayer consists not so much in receiving from God as in giving to Him, and after having accepted from Him His gifts, in returning them to Him by love. At first this interior exercise is to accept the gifts which God offers, but afterwards it is to refer and return them to Him, and to disengage oneself continually from all things, whether of the earth or above the earth, to stop and stay oneself in God alone and acquiesce solely in His good pleasure.’’ n.b. We ought to prefer fulfilling God’s will even to rejoicing in God.

Jean-Jacques Olier Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of St Sulpice, 1608-57. ‘‘When struck with death, his first thought was then to offer himself to God as a sacrifice, according to his promise made long ago, and to give himself up without reserve, in union with Jesus Christ dying on Calvary, to receive the stroke of death in the way and at the time that it should please the Divine Majesty, content to be forsaken and neglected even until death, for the end of honouring that of Jesus Christ, who was forsaken by almost all his friends; in so much calm and peace did he keep his soul. He bore all, not only with patience but with joy; his soul exulted in the Lord.’’ Catherine of Siena:112 Orison of a dying Italian in the early Middle Ages. ‘‘O Dieu éternel! O bon maistre qui avez faict et formé le vaisseau du corps de vostre créature et y avez mis dedans un si grand thresor qu’est l’ame, laquelle porte l’image de vous Dieu eternel. Vous, mon bon 111 Nightingale writes, then deletes ‘‘P. Surin 1661’’ but she leaves ‘‘1630.’’ Jean-Joseph Surin (1600-65) was a well-known spiritual Jesuit, author of Guide spirituel pour la perfection, Catéchisme spirituel de la perfection chrétienne, Fondements de la vie spirituelle, etc. His important Cor respondance has been edited by M. de Certeau. 112 Catherine of Siena (1347-80), Italian nun, known for her mystical experiences, ecstasies and revelations. She became active in calling for the reform of the church and in the termination of the Great Western Schism. This prayer is translated by Nightingale on f65 and attributed there to Catherine of Siena. For a recent translation of this prayer see Suzanne Noffke, ed., The Prayers of Catherine of Siena 225-26. The date given is 30 January 1380. Compared with this recent translation, the French version Nightingale used is slightly abbreviated. See Mary O’Driscoll, Catherine of Siena: Passion for the Truth, Compassion for Humanity 84-85.

62 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions maistre, et mon doux amour, estes ce maistre qui deffaictes et refaictes, rompez et refondez ce vaisseau selon qu’il plaist à votre bonté. A vous, père eternel, moy miserable offre de nouveau ma propre vie pour vos enfans: que toutes fois et quantes qu’il plaira à vostre bonté vous me retiriez du corps et me rendiez au corps tousiours avec plus grande peine une fois que l’autre, pourveu que je voye la reformation de la saincte Eglise. Je vous recommande encores mes enfans très-aymez: et vous prie, souverain et eternel pere, que s’il plaisoit à vostre bonté et misericorde de me tirer de ce vaisseau et ne m’y faire plus retourner que vous ne les laissiez orphelins; mais visitez les avec vostre grace et les faictes vivre morts avec une vraye et tres-par faicte lumiere: liez-les ensemble au doux lien de charité. Et vous prie, Dieu eternel que aucun ne me soit osté des mains: et me pardonnez la grande ignorance et grande negligence que j’ay commise en vostre Eglise de n’y avoir pas faict ce que j’eusse peu et voulu et deu. Je vous offre et vous recommande mes enfans tres-aymez, car ils sont mon ame. Et s’il plaist à vostre bonté de me faire encores demeurer en ce vaisseau, vous souverain medecin guerissez le et luy pourvoyez, car il est tout deschiré. Donnez nous, pere eternel, donnez nous votre douce benediction. Amen.’’ [Nightingale note and translation] Orison, in which are certain words this blessed soul said in praying, after the terrible accident of the night of Monday after Septuagesima, when bitterly mourned as dead and never again sound of body, death became the only release from continual suffering. ‘‘Oh eternal God! oh good Master who hast made and formed the vessel of the body of Thy creature, and hast put within so great a treasure, the soul, which bears the image of Thee, eternal God. Thou, my good Master and my love, art that master who undoest and re-doest, breakest and re-castest this vessel according as it pleases Thy goodness. To Thee, eternal Father, I, miserable, offer anew my own life for Thy children, that every time and as many times as it may please Thy goodness, Thou mayest withdraw me from the body and restore me to the body, always with greater pain each time, provided I see the reformation of thy church. I commend to Thee once more my children so beloved and pray Thee, sovereign and eternal Father, if it pleases Thy goodness and mercy, to take me out of this vessel and make me no more return into it, that Thou shouldst not leave them orphans, but visit them with Thy grace and make them live, though dead, with a true and very per fect light; bind them together with the sweet tie of charity. And I pray Thee, eternal God,

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that none be taken from my hand, and pardon me the great ignorances and great negligences I have committed in Thy fold, not having done in it what I could and would and ought. I offer to Thee and I commend to Thee my children dearly beloved, for they are my soul. And if it please Thy goodness to make me still remain in this vessel, do Thou, sovereign Physician, cure and provide for it, for it is all torn and broken. Give us, eternal Father, give us Thy sweet blessing. Amen.’’ [English resumes] It appears to me that this beautiful dying prayer is as near the truth of prayer as it is possible for us, with all our present knowledge, to come. There is scarcely a petition in it. You observe she says that all God’s operations in the body are ‘‘as it pleases His goodness.’’ Not a word about His power. No thought of that abominable doctrine that His dealings with us are to show ‘‘His power’’ or His ‘‘glor y,’’ or of that still more frightful evangelical doctrine that ‘‘of his own good pleasure’’ He has predestined any souls to eternal damnation. None of that cowardly, slavish begging for heaven for oneself ‘‘by another’s merits.’’ None of the desire of happiness for oneself. None of ‘‘intercession,’’ of ‘‘atonement by another’s merits.’’ It is true that we can only create a heaven for ourselves and others ‘‘by the merits of Another’’ since it is only by working in accordance with God’s laws that we can do anything; but the vulgar meaning of the atonement is that ‘‘Another’’ has positively bought off God’s anger, or bribed God into giving us heaven, and this by going through unheard-of sufferings ‘‘to satisfy God’s justice’’ as though I, who am innocent of Mr Briggs’s murder, by offering myself to be hung for Müller, could let him off. There is scarcely a word of herself all through in this dying prayer; there is no ‘‘egotism of death,’’ as someone so truly calls it, and which reigns almost unmixed in all the deathbed prayers which people think so beautiful. Here it is, all the ‘‘reformation of God’s church,’’ it is God’s ‘‘children,’’ for whom she would give ‘‘her soul,’’ which occupy her dying thoughts. There is not even a desire for release (which is more than I can say for myself) but on the contrary she offers to suffer the pains of continually rallying from a dying state (and how great an offering that is none can tell like me!) with ever greater pain ‘‘ever y time,’’ and still she ascribes this to God’s goodness, if only she can do anything for God’s children. She did not live to see ‘‘la réformation’’ of God’s church; no more shall I. But at least we can all work towards it.

64 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions One more quotation113 and I have done: ‘‘Or comment est-ce qu’on dit que l’amour est si fort qu’il peut tout, qu’il embrasse tout, qu’il endure tout, puisque de luy seul il ne peut connoistre Dieu, sans que l’entendement luy porte le flambeau? Cela est véritable, mais quand une fois l’entendement a cogneu l’objet de son amour, après il passe outre et n’en tient conte, parce que c’est un inquiet: ou toutefois la condition ou bien l’honneur de l’amour est de s’occuper tout à aymer ce qu’il ayme.’’ [Editor’s translation: ‘‘How can we say that love is so strong that it is capable of everything, encompasses everything, suffers ever ything, if by itself it cannot know God without being preceded by knowledge? This is true; but once understanding has known the object of its love, then it carries on regardless because it is restless: love’s condition or point of honour is to be entirely engaged in loving what it loves.’’] St Catherine of Siena: There Christ appeared to her and gave her his own heart. There he administered to her the sacrament with his own hands. There she assumed the robe of poverty and gave her Lord the silver cross and took from him the crown of thorns. Stigmata: it was regarded as the sign of fellowship with Christ, of worthiness to drink his cup and to be baptized with his baptism. Gertrude of Helfta:114 Exercises in Illness. ‘‘Our Lord: ‘It has been with joy unspeakable that I have expected this hour to conduct my chosen and my beloved into solitude, there to speak heart to heart, and I have not been deceived in my expectation, for in all things she con113 Unidentified source. 114 Gertr ude of Helfta, called Gertr ude the Great (1256-1301/2), German Benedictine nun. Until recently she was often confused with her abbess, Gertrude of Hackeborn (1222-91). Nightingale is not victim of that confusion, though she does preface this section with ‘‘1222-92 S Gertrude,’’ which are indeed the dates of Gertr ude of Hackeborn. But the fact is that we have here a report of revelations made to Gertr ude of Helfta concerning the merits of Gertr ude of Hackeborn. The selection is taken from Book V of Ger trude of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love, which, however, only gives Books 1-3 of the five books; for our passage see Ger trude d’Helfta: Oeuvres spirituelles: Le Héraut, Sources chrétiennes 331:21-23. See also The Life and Revelations of St Gertr ude (1992), which seems to be a reprint of the London edition of 1865 or the Kenmare edition of 1870 (by Sr M.F. Cusak). Nightingale probably used a French edition of Gertr ude’s writings, Insinuations de la divine piété or La vie et les révélations de Sainte Gertr ude (1858, of which an English edition was published in 1865) or some anthology.

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forms herself to my will and obeys me in the way I have most pleasure in.’ This solitude is nothing else than the state of infirmity and illness when our Lord speaks to the heart and not to the ear of His beloved. The secret words He says to the soul whom He has honoured by His election and His choice are nothing else than the afflictions and pains of mind which she feels when she thinks that she is useless and imagines that she is losing all her time and is a burden to others who strive in vain to relieve her. And this soul answers as is intended to these divine words, when she keeps her heart in humble and generous patience and, with faithful resignation, desires that the will and the eternal designs of God upon her shall be entirely executed and accomplished.’’ Gertrude of Helfta:115 ‘‘Our Lord: ‘Say for the sick two words only: (1) that I may keep his soul in patience, (2) that I may make every moment of his suffering to serve for his advancement and for my own work, according as my love has ordered in myself from all eternity for his salvation. So is he indifferent whether God takes him out of his present life or no, because, being full of confidence, he gives himself up to his Father’s cares for him.’ ’’ (The injuries which we receive from a friend cost us far more deeply than those which we receive from an enemy.) ‘‘Be not sad because I permitted this to happen for thy eternal good; desiring always to have thee near me, I permit thy friends to contradict thee, so that, finding no true faithfulness in any human creature, thou mightest have recourse to me with the more earnestness, the more thou recognizest me to possess the fulness of faithfulness and of all kinds of contentments, with the most stability.’’ Gertrude of Helfta: ‘‘En quoi ferais-je éclater ma toute puissance si elle n’avait pas le pouvoir de me renfermer moi-même en moi-même dans quelque endroit que je me trouve, en sorte que je ne sois connu ni aperçu qu’autant qu’il est à propos selon la circonstance des lieux, des temps et des personnes? Car depuis le commencement de la création du ciel et de la terre, je me suis bien plus servi, dans tout l’ouvrage de la Rédemption, de l’adresse de mon amour que de la force de ma puissance; et c’est encore la conduite de ce même amour 115 What follows is probably also from Gertr ude of Helfta, perhaps a paraphrase of Héraut V:1.5. We read further in V:29.1: ‘‘ . . . si tel était votre bon plaisir, je choisirais de demeurer ici-bas jusqu’au jour du jugement et d’y mener, pour votre gloire, une vie très misérable.’’

66 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions qui éclate particulièrement dans la patience que j’ai à souffrir les impar faits, jusque à ce que je les conduise, en ménageant leur libre arbitre, dans le chemin de la perfection.’’116 [Nightingale translation] ‘‘The Lord: How should I show myself almighty save by the power of hiding myself in myself wherever I am, so that I be neither known nor perceived, except inasfar as is convenient according to the circumstances of place and time and person? For since the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth until now in the whole work of redemption, I have used far more the cunning of my love than the power of my might. And it is still the guidance of this same love which is shown particularly in my patience, bearing with the imper fect until I bring them, still keeping intact their free will, into the way of perfection.’’117 [English resumes] It seems that, in a few words, the ways of God in histor y could not be better indicated. That was said by an old despised German Benedictine nun [Gertr ude] many hundred years ago and appears to me to come as near the truth as can be in a very few lines. I do not quote her as authority, you may be sure, but because I think her words express the truth. What truth? Not what follows: Teresa of Avila: ‘‘Lord, give Thyself to be known by all, that all may love Thee; permit no soul to be ignorant who Thou art. I know, Lord, that, if Thou discoverest Thyself and givest Thyself to be known, all will love Thee.’’118 FN: This truly beautiful prayer, which is by a Spanish nun of the sixteenth century [Teresa], is impossible of realization, except as the world goes on. How can we know God perfectly except by discovering all His laws? How can any one being, in a century in which mankind knows hardly one of God’s laws, by himself find Him out? [As] at the time of Christ, [so] in the Middle Ages, it was hardly known that God had laws

116 See Gertrude d’Helfta, Héraut II:17.1, Sources chrétiennes 139:299-301. 117 See Gertrude of Helfta, Herald II:17, Classics of Western Spirituality 118. 118 While this quotation has not been located, its content is typical of Teresa and, it can be added, of the scholastic view of the relationship between knowledge and love, intellect and will. Similar statements of Teresa’s are found in The Book of Her Life 37:2: ‘‘Whoever understands Him more loves and praises Him more,’’ and in Soliloquies (also known as Meditations or Exclamations of the Soul to God) #14: ‘‘Whoever does not know you does not love you,’’ both in The Collected Works 1.

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or a plan at all. The wisest believed (as Newman in his Apologia119) that the laws of motion, light and life, cause and effect, the laws of nature, etc., were due to angelic spirits; that diseases, madness, etc., were due to angels or devils (which Christ, also, seems to have believed, or at least his disciples represent him as having believed, for on certain occasions, apparently, they have put these beliefs into his mouth; on others, it is obvious from these very matters that they were not of a capacity to invent what he did say; certainly that book represents him as little as most books of men’s sayings and doings represent them). Others believed (as also did Father Newman) that ‘‘the action of bodies politic and associations’’ is due to a kind of ‘‘middle spirits’’ capriciously ‘‘animating principles of certain institutions’’ (38). In these days we acknowledge and have discovered many of God’s physical laws; we believe, as Stephen120 says, that houses are built and don’t fly, we know that diseases are to be cured by therapeutics (if at all) and not by exorcism or by miracle. So far we have learnt of God’s ways. But we scarcely admit even now that God has historical or spiritual or mental laws as unchangeable as His physical laws, and certainly we can scarcely point out a single one of these that we have definitely, accurately discovered. (Buckle121 made a great attempt. But everyone was dissatisfied. And probably everyone will allow that he was unsuccessful in showing forth accurately any one single law.) We may perhaps know generally that, if families intermarry in and in, the race degenerates. We may believe generally that the production of such a character as Socrates is regulated (or preceded) by laws as minute as those which Dalton’s122 discover y shows as regulating the chemical combinations by which oxygen unites in exact multiples of numbers with mineral substances. But what these laws are we know scarcely at all. And men and women are marrying every minute without so much as asking what they are. Now, one person cannot find out all these laws. Mankind must find them out. One century cannot find them out, even were all mankind 119 Newman, Apologia 37, relating his earlier religious opinions. 120 Sir James Stephen (1789-1859), colonial under secretar y and historian. He was accused of heresy for suggesting doubts as to the eternity of hellfire. He worked for the abolition of slavery in the empire. 121 Henr y Thomas Buckle (1821-62), historian of civilization, believed in applying scientific treatment to historical problems. 122 John Dalton (1766-1844), English physicist and chemist, initiator of the atomic theory.

68 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions intent on the study, instead of only one here, one there, occupying himself about it at all. It must take all mankind all ages to find them out. How then can they know God? And is not this exactly what the Benedictine [Gertr ude] says has been God’s course in history since the beginning? His plan is not to reveal Himself suddenly and completely by the ‘‘force of His power.’’ Indeed one may say that this would be a contradiction. For how could men understand Him, men who had as yet found out little or nothing for themselves? Perhaps indeed He already stands revealed. And to mankind ages hence the present revelation of Him will be complete revelation when they have learnt to understand it. But to us at present, it is as though I were to read this page to my kittens. They understand much, indeed they understand the expression of my face, the tone of my voice, much better than human beings do. If I but look sorrowful, they come and look up wistfully in my eyes and put up their mouths to lick my face. Thus men are far from being unable even now to recognize the love of God, to try to imitate His goodness as far as they can, but to understand him entirely? Not yet. People often wonder how such and such a wise and good man, or period in history, could have so completely misunderstood the ways of God, or have denied Him altogether, could have conscientiously instituted in His name such a form of government, or created such an organization, as directly cut across the most manifest intentions of God with regard to men. Despotic governments, religious persecutions, foundling hospitals, Jesuit colleges, may be cited as instances, great and small, of the latter; while, of the former, the notions that Christian churches have taught of God, little less extraordinar y than those of tribes we call savage, may be safely given as examples. But the Benedictine [Gertr ude] is wiser than we are who wonder at these things. She says: How can God reveal Himself except according to the times and to the men? And how marked it is that the attribute of a perfect God is to reveal Himself, not by His power but by His love, that is, conducting men by their own powers or ‘‘free will’’ (as it is commonly called), to discover God, no matter how slowly (God has eternity before Him and them), rather than to reveal Himself by force, as it were (which is really what the wonderers seem to expect of Him). Then the beautiful Carmelite [Teresa’s] prayer will come to have a tr ue sense, viz., that, if God is but known, all who know Him must love Him. But to ‘‘discover Himself,’’ as it were by a flash of lightning, is (not unworthy of Him—such is not a true word—but) impossible,

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having regard to man’s state and the plan for his perfection, impossible, that is, in the sense that it would be a contradiction. The perfect God (in whom there can be no contradiction ‘‘neither shadow of turning’’123) is educating man to be able to ‘‘see Him as He is.’’124 Teresa of Avila: The Cross.125 ‘‘Believe me, my daughter, those whom my Father loves most are they whom He causes to suffer most, when He sees their love to be equal to their suffering. How can I better testify that I love you than by desiring for you what I desired for myself? x x There is the way of truth; and when you have found it, you will help me to mourn the loss of those who have no other end in all their desires, in all their cares, and in all their thoughts, but to follow quite the opposite way.’’ 1572. FN: How often in the highest Christian poetry and literature has the way of ‘‘the cross,’’ the truth of the servant of God, conquering through suffering, been set forth since the Jewish prophet126 told it! Yet has there ever been anything to compare with this noblest, highest expression of the old truth? Teresa of Avila: The Lord.127 (Day and night depending on His word) ‘‘No man can of himself stay in the light any more than he can prevent the night from coming, because this depends on my grace/laws. Thus the best means of staying in the light is to know that you can contribute nothing to it without my grace/laws, but that it proceeds from me alone, and that even were you in the light, the night cometh as soon as I withdraw myself.’’ 1572. Meditation.128 ‘‘Consider, Lord, the great progress which evils are making ever y day. Have pity on those who have no pity on themselves. And since they are in so fatal a state that they will not go to Thee, go Thou Thyself to them, my God. I ask it in their name, sure that these who are dead will rise again as soon as they begin to re-enter into themselves, to know their misery, and to taste the sweetness of Thy laws. O life that givest life to all, refuse me not this living water promised to all them that seek it. I seek it, my Saviour, I ask for it, and I come to Thee 123 124 125 126 127 128

An allusion to James 1:17. 1 John 3:2. Spiritual Testimonies #32 in The Collected Works 1:403. Isaiah. See Nightingale’s rendering of Isa 53 below. Spiritual Testimonies #24 in The Collected Works 1:397. Soliloquies #24 in The Collected Works 1:451.

70 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions to receive it from Thee. Refuse me not, my God, for Thou knowest my extreme need of it x x and that it is the only true remedy. Lord, what cause to fear during this life, with its different fires! Some corrupt the soul and bring her, as it were, to dust, and some purify her so as to make her able to live and to possess Thee eternally. But they who drink Thy divine water shall walk without fear among the troubles and dangers of this miserable life.’’ Teresa of Avila: Prayer to God that He may make us regain the time which we have not used in loving Him and serving Him.129 ‘‘My God, my soul seems to untire herself and to find rest in thinking what, if Thy mercy should render her so happy as to possess Thee some day, that joy will be, but I should wish her to have ser ved Thee first, since it has been in serving us that Thou hast won the happiness she presumes upon enjoying. What shall I do, my God? O how late I have waited before inspiring myself with the desire of loving Thee, and how hast Thou made haste on the contrary to give Thy gifts and to call me to Thee that I might employ all myself wholly in Thy service! O my Lord, can it be that Thou shouldst forsake a miserable being, can it be that Thou shouldst reject a poor beggar when he comes to give himself to Thee? Thy greatness, has it bounds? Thy goodness, has it limits? ‘‘O my God and my mercy! How canst Thou show better what Thou art than by giving Thy knowledge to Thy servant? Great God, signalize Thy almightiness; cause it to be understood in my soul by making me regain, through loving Thee, all the time I have lost in failing to love Thee. But is this not an extravagance which I am saying, since all the world says that time lost can never be regained? My God, may all Thy creatures bless Thee! ‘‘Lord, I recognize the greatness of Thy power. If then Thou canst do all, as indeed Thou canst, what is there impossible for Him who is almighty? It is enough, my God, that Thou shouldst will it, and, however miserable I am, I firmly believe that Thou canst do it. The greater the marvels of Thy laws, the more I consider that, the more I feel Thou canst do still greater things than these; my faith grows strong and the more certainly I believe that Thou wilt do this thing I ask, for who can wonder at extraordinar y things being done by Him who can do all things? Thou knowest, my God, that in my greatest misery I have never ceased to know the greatness of Thy power and Thy mercy. Lord, have regard to the grace which Thou hast done me not to err on this point! 129 Soliloquies #4 in The Collected Works 1:446.

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Make me repair lost time by doubling Thy gifts for the time present and future, since Thou canst if Thou wilt and Thou dost will.’’ FN: This seems to be the very meaning of the word ‘‘per fect,’’ ‘‘made per fect through suffering,’’ completed, working out, and even the only idea we can form of the perfect perfect. We cannot really attach any meaning to perfect thought and feeling unless its perfection has been attained by life and work, unless it is being realized in life and work. It is in fact a contradiction to suppose perfection to exist except at work, to exist without exercise, without ‘‘working out,’’ i.e., we cannot conceive of perfect wisdom, perfect happiness except as having attained, attained perfection through work. The ideas of the impossible and of perfection are contradictions. ‘‘God in us,’’ ‘‘grieving the Holy Spirit of God,’’130 ‘‘My Father worketh and I work’’:131 these seem all indications of this truth. Indeed it is rather that we cannot explain or conceive of perfection, except as having worked through imperfection or sin, than that we cannot conceive or explain how there can be sin if there is a per fect Being. The eternal Per fect almost presupposes the eternal Imperfect. Persian Prayer: Four things, O God, I have to offer Thee Which Thou hast not in all Thy treasur y: My nothingness, my sad necessity, My fatal sin and earnest penitence. Receive these gifts and take the giver hence.132 This is the prayer of a Persian soul of a different age, sex and race, but of a like way of thinking, both quite unlike the souls who pray for rain and against cholera, etc. Samuel Vincent:133 ‘‘la prière.’’ Equally inseparable are the notions of opposition to love and opposition to bliss. Unless therefore the heart of a created being is at one with the heart of God, it cannot but be miserable x x. For in the eternal Idea of God a created spirit is perhaps not seen, as a series of successive states. The tendency of love is towards a union so intimate as virtually to amount to identification. 130 A paraphrase of Eph 4:30. 131 John 5:17. 132 Nightingale copied out this same prayer in her Bible. She also inscribed it in the album of her friend, Luise Fliedner, at Kaiserswerth, 1850. 133 Samuel Vincent (1749-1821), mathematician and astronomer. It is not clear whether what follows is to be attributed to Vincent or to Nightingale.

72 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Arthur Hallam:134 ‘‘Redemption: What Christ has done and suffered for mankind.’’ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing:135 [§1] ‘‘Erziehung bei dem einzeln Menschen, Offenbar ung bei dem ganzen Menschengeschlechte.’’ [What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the whole human race.] [§100] ‘‘Oder, weil so zu viel Zeit für mich verloren gehen würde?— Verloren?—Und was habe ich denn zu versäumen? Ist nicht die ganze Ewigkeit mein?’’ [Or is it a reason against the hypothesis that so much time would have been lost to me? Lost? What then have I to lose? Is not the whole of eternity mine?] [§91] ‘‘Geh deinen unmerklichen Schritt, ewige Vorsehung! Nur lass mich dieser Unmerklichkeit wegen an dir nicht verzweifeln.’’ [Go Thine inscrutable way, eternal Providence! Only let me not despair of Thee because of this inscrutableness.]

A Translation of Isaiah 53 Editor: Pencil notations in the manuscript indicate that the translation of Isaiah 53 (and the last portion of Isaiah 52)136 and appended comments were intended to go with Teresa’s Spiritual Testimonies #32, which Nightingale titled ‘‘The Cross.’’ It is not altogether clear if Nightingale did her own rough translation from the Hebrew, used the Greek Septuagint, with which she was quite familiar, or used another translation. There is another rough translation of this passage, dated 9 Februar y 1864, said to have been done from the Hebrew.137 [FN translation/paraphrase] God’s servant conquering through suffering. 52:13-15 ‘‘Behold, my servant shall deal prudently. (Nightingale: What is ‘‘pr udence’’? Aiming at the most perfect.) He shall be sublime and holy and be very high. As many were horrified at thee, so marred is his visage as to be unlike a man, and his form before the sons of men, 134 Arthur Henry Hallam (1777-1859), historian, author of A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages 1818 and The Introduction to the Literature of Europe during the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries 1837-38. 135 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts §§1, 91 and 100 in Werke 8:489-510; Lessing’s Theological Writings 82-98. 136 Nightingale may have transcribed an existing translation or done her own translation with the help of Ewald, Die Propheten des alten Bundes 3:91-92. She seems to offer this translation as an aid to interpret the texts of the mystics just presented. 137 Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9001/11.

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so will many nations start up, kings will shut their mouth before him; for they saw what never had been told them, and learnt what they never had heard. 53:1-12 ‘‘Who hath believed our preaching? And Jehovah’s arm, to whom became it evident? For he sprung up like a plant before him and like a germ out of dry land, having no form nor comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him; he is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hide as it were our faces before him; he was despised and we esteemed him not. ‘‘But it was our griefs he hath borne, and our sorrows, these he laid upon himself, while we did esteem him stricken of God, smitten and humbled. Yet he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace came upon him and through his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way: yet Jehovah hath made the iniquity of us all to meet on (strike) him. ‘‘He was oppressed, although he humbled himself, and opened not his mouth, as a lamb is brought to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. (Nightingale: The repetition expresses continuance.) By distress (oppression) and by judgment (punishment) was he snatched away (and among his generation who thought that he was cut off out of the land of the living, on account of my people’s sin, of chastisement for them?) and his grave was put with the wicked, and his tomb with the evildoer, although he had done no wrong, neither was any deceit in his mouth. ‘‘Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him with grief: if he made his soul an offering for sin, he shall see seed live long, and the purpose of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail (service) of his soul and shall be satisfied (shall satisfy his eyes); through his wisdom shall my servant as the Just make many just; and their iniquities shall he lay upon himself. Therefore will I share with him among many, and he shall conquer with numbers; because he poured out his soul unto death, and he was counted with the transgressors, since he bore the sins of many, and for sinners interfered.’’ FN: As a successful accomplisher of the divine will and purpose, he shall live again in a successful multitude of those who have become just and blessed through him. How often in the highest Christian poetr y and literature has the way of ‘‘the cross,’’ the truth of the servant of God conquering through suffering, been set forth since this

74 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Jewish prophet told it! Yet has there ever been anything to compare with this noblest, highest expression of the old truth? The real Jew (and not only the Jew) is grossly optimist: the Messiah, being ‘‘the Just’’ pre-eminently, must therefore be clothed with power and glory. Nevertheless, side by side with optimism, with the br utal faith in success, we find, in some of the prophets, a breath of spiritualism, that they conceive no beauty more divine than the just man crushed by fate, the servant of Jehovah despised and rejected, who carries the burden of his brothers. The prophet shows what power rests in grief when freely accepted. No idea is more familiar to Jesus. It is pre-eminently the evangelical idea. Happy the afflicted! Happy the oppressed! Happy the persecuted! for in affliction there is joy, in oppression there is a power which makes us masters of the earth, in persecution there is victor y for the good cause. The whole gospel shows Christ’s contempt for material force, for success, for triumph (Matt 5:39,138 etc.). It was with him the deepest conviction that it is by suffering and resignation we are all powerful, that it is by purity of heart we overcome. It pleased him to be only a ‘‘son of man,’’ even as so many pious men have rejoiced in their poverty, in their infirmity, in their powerlessness. Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, etc.139 Jesus never intended by this to attract compassion; he wishes to describe his normal position. Who cannot enter into this? mystic or philosopher? This is philosophy, this is religion. ‘‘The cross’’ is the way in which all fellow workers with God must work! ‘‘The cross’’ is the way of God Himself. In all ages there has been an inkling of this: God descending into hell, Christ carrying his cross, ourselves to help him in carrying his cross. And is it not a ‘‘cross’’ to God, speaking humanly, that we cannot be made perfect all at once, but that we must work through all this sin and suffering to per fection and happiness? (There is, of course, no ‘‘must’’ with God, except in the sense that there can be no contradiction with Him.) We cannot understand it, we say. How can God suffer? How can God ‘‘descend into hell’’? But can we understand the existence of God at all? Do we not conceive it rather as the lesser of two difficulties? It is more difficult to conceive of all these laws without a Law-Giver than to conceive of the existence of God. And is it not more difficult to conceive 138 ‘‘But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whomsoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’’ 139 An allusion to Luke 9:58.

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of the good God living up there in heaven by Himself, while we, His children, are suffering all this, than to conceive of Him ‘‘bearing His cross’’? But to the practical part of it.140 Ever y word that is said about the cross may be used almost literally to signify what we mean by the way God intends (‘‘directs’’) us to work out perfection, for ourselves and mankind, by His laws. In every newspaper we open we may see illustrations of this. One returning from a war, for instance (where thousands are thinking of nothing but duty or ‘‘the cross,’’ are suffering, are dying for it), is forcibly struck at home to find ‘‘what I like’’ made a reason for doing everything or anything, or for not doing anything or ever ything, instead of duty, or ‘‘the cross.’’ And how literally true it is that nothing can be done in God’s kingdom in that way? We read the account of the burning of one of Her Majesty’s ships. In twenty minutes the fire had overcome. But every man stood to his work and when all was over, there was no selfish flying from danger. The sick were put into the boats first. And back and back came the boats, under the falling burning spars and melting lead, till all the men but ninety-one were saved. The master stood on deck till the last, actually minuting by his watch the progress of the fire, the going overboard of the masts, and saved his log. Now these men were probably not better than other men. But they were in the daily habit of thinking, not of ‘‘what I like’’ as a reason, a motive for action, but of duty. Had it been otherwise, instead of ninety-one being lost, probably not ninety-one, perhaps not ten would have been saved in the sudden catastrophe. Brave captain, brave master, brave men! Now take the burning of a theatre. Who behaved like a hero here? The clown, the pantaloon, the carpenter. Yes, the poor clown and the pantaloon were there for duty. The audience were there for ‘‘what I like.’’ That makes the difference. We are told that, notwithstanding the presence of mind of the manager, there was ‘‘a perfect stampede’’ among the audience. Each rushed to overpower the other. Had nine tenths not been already gone, it being almost midnight, there would have been no chance but of a catastrophe as frightful as that of Santiago.141 140 Nightingale str uck out: (We have ceased so long really to believe in the miracles that we hardly feel any interest in controversies about them. But), then she left in: there is nothing very inspiring in (denying the miracles. Nor is there in anything) that is simply negative. Let us press on to the things which are before, which are positive. 141 Possibly Santiago de los Cabelleros in the Dominican Republic, devastated by an earthquake in 1562.

76 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Meanwhile, what were the clown and pantaloon doing? Bringing all the ballet girls safe out of the blazing theatre, though there was not time to take a coat or a shawl to cover up their gauze. Every kind of property was lost, even the money taken at the doors. But like the noble captain who is the last to leave his sinking ship, the clown and the pantaloon actually carried all these gauze-dressed women, whom a spark would have put into a blaze, safe out into the street and into the snow. Not one was lost. And the carpenter it was who mustered the whole troop of dancing children. And, just as they were, in their pantomime-dresses, he marched them out over the slush and snow to his own house and sheltered them there. Brave clown, brave pantaloon, brave carpenter! Were they not standing by their Master, by ‘‘the cross’’? Yet probably they were not different, as men, from those in the theatre. It is only the difference of whether I am there for ‘‘the cross’’ or for ‘‘what I like.’’ O my God, give me (I offer myself for it) the greatest bitterness in my connections with the War Office, and with all, provided Thy work be done. Unidentified source [Surin? Ravignan? Fénelon? John of the Cross?] ‘‘Se dépouiller ainsi de tout, c’est suivre Jésus-Christ; il nous présente le calice qu’il devait boire lui-même. Se rechercher soi-même en Dieu, c’est s’attacher aux plaisirs qu’il répand dans les âmes; ce qui est assurément fort contraire au pur amour. Mais chercher Dieu en lui-même, c’est vouloir et choisir, à cause de notre Sauveur, tout ce qu’il y a de plus désolant dans la vie intérieure, soit qu’il vienne de Dieu, soit qu’il vienne des créatures: et c’est là sans doute un véritable amour pour Dieu. Si quelqu’un s’était résolu avec beaucoup de courage de porter la croix de Jésus-Christ, c’est-à-dire de souffrir pour Dieu toutes sortes de peines sans avoir égard à soi-même, il trouverait dans ses souffrances une solide nourriture d’esprit. Les voies qui nous conduisent à Dieu ne consistent pas à faire beaucoup de méditations ni à sentir du goût dans la piété, mais à s’exposer pour Jésus-Christ à toutes sortes de douleurs, à embrasser ce qui est plus conforme à sa croix x x. S’ils s’y comportent lâchement, de quelque manière qu’ils agissent, jamais, quelque sublimes que soient leurs communications avec Dieu, ils n’avanceront beaucoup en cette perfection.’’ [Editor’s translation: ‘‘To cast aside everything is to follow Jesus Christ; he presents us with the chalice he himself was to drink. To seek oneself in God is to become attached to the pleasures He pours into the soul, which is certainly quite contrary to pure love. But to seek

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God in Himself, is to wish and chose, because of our Saviour, all that is most saddening in interior life, either coming from God or from creatures: that is doubtless true love of God. If someone had courageously resolved to bear the cross of Jesus Christ, i.e., to suffer for God all kinds of troubles without regard to self, he would find in his suffering solid spiritual nourishment. The ways leading to God do not consist in performing numerous meditations nor in experiencing enjoyment in prayer, but in taking upon oneself, for the sake of Jesus Christ, all sorts of pains, in embracing what is more in accordance with his cross. If one is a coward in this matter, in whatever way he behaves, he will never make much progress toward per fection, however sublime one’s communications with God may be.] Ravignan142 mourant: ‘‘Je ne m’ennuye jamais, le temps ne me paraît pas long. Je prie, je pense que notre Seigneur est bon et qu’il est heureux dans le ciel, et cela me console d’être mauvais et d’être malheureux sur la terre.’’ [Editor’s translation: ‘‘I am never bored, time does not seem too long to me. I pray, I think that Our Lord is good and happy in heaven, and this comforts me for being wicked and unhappy on earth.’’] Mère Favre:143 ‘‘Les pensées vagabondes de toutes sortes la pressaient si vivement et si continuellement x x qu’elle fit un voeu de se s’arrêter jamais volontairement et délibérément (c’est-à-dire avec une pleine attention, connoissance, délibération et entière volonté) à aucune pensée que de Dieu ou tendante à Dieu, ou de son obligation et de ses devoirs, ou de la charité.’’ [Editor’s translation: ‘‘So vividly and so constantly was she assailed by all kinds of wretched thoughts that she vowed never voluntarily and willingly (i.e., with full attention, knowledge, deliberation and full consent) to entertain any thought but of God or conducive to God, of her obligation, of her duties, or of charity.’’]

St John of the Cross Editor: John of the Cross ( Juan de Yepes, 1542-91, friend and disciple of Teresa of Avila) was a favourite author of Nightingale’s, so one suspects that there must have been much more from here in her original 142 Gustave-Xavier Lacroix de Ravignan (1795-1859), popular Jesuit orator, preacher and retreat director. 143 Probably Marie-Jacqueline Favre (1589-1637), nun of the Order of the Visitation and close associate of Jeanne de Chantal (1572-1641).

78 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions notes and translations than the two short items that follow. She evidently read him both in French and English.144 She had to apologize for keeping the borrowed material too long. ‘‘I read over and over again your little St John of the Cross, and many extracts which I made from your books.’’145 St John of the Cross: ‘‘Le second degré de l’amour de Dieu, cherchant Dieu sans interruption, inspire à l’âme des soins si empressés pour son Dieu qu’elle le cherche partout, et que toutes ses pensées, toutes ses paroles, toutes ses actions ne tendent qu’à lui: soit qu’elle mange, soit qu’elle se dispose à prendre le repos du sommeil, soit qu’elle soit éveillée, soit qu’elle forme quelque dessein et quelque entreprise, elle ne songe, elle ne s’applique qu’à l’objet de son amour.’’146 [Editor’s translation: ‘‘The second step in the love of God, seeking God without interruption, inspires the soul to zealous care for its God. The soul goes about so solicitously on this step that it looks for its Beloved in all things. In all its thoughts it turns immediately to the Beloved; in all converse and business it at once speaks about the Beloved; when eating, sleeping, keeping vigil or doing anything else, it centres all its care on the Beloved.’’] John of the Cross: ‘‘ ‘Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.’147 Verily he has overcome all things in whom the pleasures of them excite no joy, and the bitterness of them no sadness.’’

Angela of Foligno Angela of Foligno:148 ‘‘Voici maintenant les qualités d’une âme dont la transformation en l’amour de Dieu est parfaite. La première est l’amour de la pauvreté par lequel une âme se dépouille de toute affection pour la créature; en sorte qu’elle ne veut de place dans nul autre coeur que dans celui de Jésus-Christ qui seul est tout son bien, toute son espérance; ce qu’elle prouve par sa conduite, ajoutant à l’amour affectueux l’amour effectif. La seconde est le désir d’être insultée, méprisée, 144 Letter to Mary Clare Moore 23 Januar y 1865, Convent of Mercy, Bermondsey. 145 Letter to Mary Clare Moore 1 March 1867, Convent of Mercy, Bermondsey. 146 ‘‘The Dark Night’’ in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross 19:2 (373-74). The present passage develops the second of ‘‘ten steps on the mystical ladder of divine love.’’ The translation given here is from The Collected Works; it roughly corresponds to Nightingale’s French text. 147 An allusion to John 16:33. 148 Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), Italian mystic, associated with the Franciscan Order.

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baffouée par toute créature, sans trouver aucun coeur qui la plaigne et qui compatisse à sa douleur. La troisième est le désir de partager tous les tourments de Jésus-Christ, non d’une manière passagère mais durant toute sa vie. ‘‘Toute âme qui ne veut pas ces trois choses, la pauvreté, l’humiliation et la souffrance, peut être sûre qu’elle est encore loin de la bienheureuse ressemblance avec Jésus-Christ. Le première propriété d’un ami est la transformation dans la volonté de celui qu’il aime. Or la volonté de Jésus-Christ, objet de notre amour, me paraît être une vie pauvre, humiliée, douloureuse. Je ne crois pas qu’il puisse y avoir un amour parfait entre un riche et un pauvre, entre un homme honoré et un homme méprisé, entre celui qui vit dans la douleur et celui qui vit dans les délices. La distance est trop grande entre ces conditions, et pour qu’il puisse y avoir entre deux êtres une perfection d’amour, il faut que l’un participe à la condition de l’autre; l’amour n’est pas seulement une vertu qui assimile, mais qui unit.’’149 [Editor’s translation: ‘‘Now here are the qualities of a soul whose transformation into the love of God is perfect. The first quality is the love of poverty, through which the soul sheds all affection for creatures, so that she desires a place in no other heart than in the heart of Jesus Christ who alone is her good, her hope, which she demonstrates by her behaviour, adding effective love to affectionate love. The second quality is the desire to be insulted, despised, ridiculed by every creature, without finding anybody to pity her and to sympathize with her suffering. The third quality is the desire to share Jesus Christ’s torments, not for a while only but during her entire life. ‘‘The soul that does not wish those three things: poverty, humiliation and suffering, can be assured to stand far from the blessed resemblance with Jesus Christ. The first characteristic of a friend is the transformation into the will of the beloved. But the will of Jesus Christ, object of our love, seems to me to be a life in poverty, humiliation and suffering. I do not think that there can be a perfect love between a rich person and a poor one, between a respected person and a despised one, between one living in suffering and one living in enjoyment. The distance is too wide between those states; one ought to share the other’s condition. Love is not only a virtue that makes similar, but one that makes one.’’] 149 Angela of Foligno: Complete Works passim. Compared with this recent English translation, the French text used by Nightingale appears to be a rough paraphrase, even a free assembling of ‘‘Instr uctions’’ 27:285, 34:303-08, 7:261, etc. The last paragraph could be by a commentator.

80 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions [English resumes] That is indifference, not overcoming. Overcoming is when you extract the good out of all things, evil as well as joyful, as he did. Overcoming evil with good. [Nightingale comment on a passage from the Communion Service, Book of Common Prayer] ‘‘Holy Communion, only a remembrance? But a remembrance of what? A remembrance that we are pledged to give our body and blood for God and man as he did. And do you call that only a remembrance?’’ Editor: For reasons noted in the Introduction above, Nightingale did not complete her work on devotional authors and gave up her project. Hence it is not surprising that the Notes end abruptly here and that we are thus left with those final disparate comments and quotations.

Mysticism and The Imitation of Christ edited by Lynn McDonald

Source: Unsigned note, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9023/47-48

[c1863] St Teresa, in the sixteenth century, says that ‘‘Christ said’’ to her (metaphorically of course): Don’t distress yourself about my wounds (you know Roman Catholics are always ‘‘meditating’’ on the crucifixion) 1600 years ago—rather concern yourself about the wounds which are inflicted upon me now every day. Do you know I think this is very apposite? . . . You continually object to the extent of the suffering of the ‘‘cross,’’ which God’s laws entail? But I think you would find that you have a much greater difficulty in conceiving even of a Being being per fect, living as God is generally supposed to live, without a ‘‘cross,’’ and that in fact the only conception of goodness, of perfection, we have is in struggling out perfection through the ‘‘crosses’’ (I like the word). One thing more, St Teresa says: Notre âme est si accoutumée à se laisser emporter à tous ses plaisirs ou pour mieux dire, à toutes ses peines, que x x pour faire qu’elle veuille retourner en sa maison [Our soul is so accustomed to being carried away by ever y pleasure, or rather, by ever y pain, that x x in order to make it wish to return to itself . . . ] (i.e., to ‘‘listen’’ to the ‘‘seule parole’’) she (l’âme) must etc. And then St Teresa shows how ‘‘ceux qui n’ont pour but de tous leurs désirs, de tous leurs soins, de toutes leurs pensées que de suivre une voie toute contraire’’ [those whose only goal in all their desires, in all their worries, in all their thoughts, is to follow a path utterly contrary] (i.e., ‘‘contraire’’ to the ‘‘cross,’’ to ‘‘payant de sa personne’’ [paying in his person] in making one’s way through the laws of God) never can ‘‘listen’’ to the ‘‘seule parole.’’ In fact, they are listening to so many other ‘‘paroles’’ that they can’t. St Jean de la Croix, the same Spanish monk (of the time of the Reformation) says (translation of the famous Arnauld): ‘‘parce qu’elles (les / 81

82 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions âmes) ne se sont pas abandonnées à la conduite de Dieu (i.e., they have not been listening to the ‘‘seule parole’’) et qu’elles n’ont pas souffert qu’il les ait mises dans la voie pure et certaine de l’union divine, elles n’y arrivent qu’après un long temps. x x La résistance qu’elles font à ses impressions intérieures (impressions made by His laws, His ‘‘seule parole’’) étouffe la co-opération qu’elles devraient apporter aux desseins de Dieu et les rend semblables aux enfants qui ne veulent pas que leurs mères les portent x x qui ne marchent qu’à pas d’enfants et ne font presque point de chemin.’’ [Because the souls have not surrendered themselves to God’s guidance and because they have not accepted being put by Him on the pure and certain path of divine union, they reach it only after a long time. x x The resistance they make to His interior impressions chokes the co-operation they should bring to God’s design and makes them like children who do not want their mother to carry them x x who walk only in children’s steps and hardly make progress.]1 Oh how the churches only ‘‘marchent à pas d’enfants,’’ if they ‘‘march’’ at all, because they won’t ask what God says but only what the Council of Trent (Roman Catholic) or the Privy Council (Anglican) says.

Nightingale’s Annotations to The Imitation of Christ Editor: A large number of Christians, Roman Catholic and Protestant, shared Nightingale’s fondness for Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, also translated as the Following of Christ. Thomas (1380-1471), born at Kempen, near Düsseldorf, at age thirteen followed his older brother into a monastery of the Brethren of the Common Life. He spent the rest of his life as a cloistered monk, serving variously as sub-prior and director of novices, copying out manuscripts and writing other works (sermons, devotional books and a biography) as well as his most influential book, The Imitation of Christ, completed in 1441. It was first translated into English in 1503 and numerous editions have followed. The one Nightingale used was a ‘‘new translation’’ in 1851. (There have been several subsequent editions, including a Penguin paperback.) That Nightingale turned to The Imitation of Christ at critical moments of her life can be seen in the dating, indicated in bold, of many of her 1 John of the Cross, Prologue to The Ascent of Mount Carmel in Selected Writings 58.

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annotations. She notably copied out a prayer, in French, in it the day before she left for the Crimean War, 20 October 1854, which Mme Elisabeth, sister of Louis XVI, had written shortly before her own execution in the French Revolution. The prayer, not at all incidentally, affirms that nothing happens that God has not seen and ordered from ‘‘all eternity.’’ Mme Elisabeth was herself a very devout woman, exceptionally so for the court of the day, unmarried, and similar in age to Nightingale. Annotations in 1862 reflect probably the ongoing sense of loss of her two closest collaborators, Sidney Herbert and A.H. Clough in 1861, and the more immediate loss of her Aunt Mai’s support and practical assistance in 1862, and indeed perceived desertion. Her aunt at that time returned to her own family after staying for long periods with Nightingale to assist with her work. A visit her aunt made 27 October 1862 included words which were still hurting Nightingale years later, in 1877, as she recalled them.2 There are numerous entries for October, November and December 1862 prompted by ‘‘calumny,’’ ‘‘estrangement,’’ ‘‘conflict,’’ ‘‘pain’’ and even ‘‘idols’’ falling. Another French prayer (source unidentified), copied out in November 1862, is noted as being ‘‘before the sacrament,’’ in a chapter on Holy Communion. Nightingale had only just resumed receiving communion in October 1862; her friend Benjamin Jowett held services for her at her home. Naturally enough she returned to The Imitation of Christ also in 1873 while working on her translations and introductions to the medieval mystics. She did not include it in her translations of devotional authors since it was available so widely already in translation. Thomas’s advice is that of a devout ascetic, counselling submission, self-mortification and patience in adversity, illness and instances of humiliation. Nightingale clearly agreed with most of this. She drew the line, however, at his remonstrations against ‘‘sensuality’’ (see p 99 below) and ‘‘alluring concupiscences’’ (see p 92 below), striking out the words and substituting her own failing, ‘‘temper’’ (see p 99 below). There is much on preparation for death, which clearly struck a chord with Nightingale, and elicited musings about her own unreadiness if she could not forgive and be faithful here on earth. Perhaps Thomas’s most central message was on reliance on God alone, who would be faithful throughout the worst circumstances of one’s life, when friends 2 Spiritual Journe y 2:452, 478.

84 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions were lost or failed one. Nightingale underlined or highlighted many such passages (shown in italics, small capitals for double underlining), and often added sad remarks, as the excerpts below show. Brief comments by Nightingale are incorporated into the text in bold, set off with //. Longer comments are indicated FN:. Source: The Following of Christ in Four Books: A New Translation (London: Burns & Lambert 1851), Florence Nightingale Museum, London

Florence Nightingale/20 October 18543 20 October 1854 [trans. from French] What will happen to her, O God, I do not know; all I know is that nothing will happen that You have not ruled, foreseen and ordained from all eternity. That is sufficient for me, my God, that is sufficient for me. I adore Your eternal designs; I submit myself to them with all my heart, for Your love. I will everything, I accept ever ything, I offer You everything and I make my sacrifice one with that of Jesus Christ my Saviour. In his name I ask You for perfect submission to all that You will and permit to happen. May the most just, the most high and the most lovable will of God be accomplished in all things. (Mme Elisabeth in the tower of the Temple4) BOOK ONE Chapter 16 Of Bearing the Defects of Others pp 32-34 Whatever a man cannot amend in himself or in others, he ought to bear with patiently, until God ordain it otherwise. . . . /20 January 1863/ Never theless, it behoveth thee to make supplication under such hindrances, that God would vouchsafe to come and help thee, and that thou mayst be able to bear them in good part. If anyone once or twice admonished doth not comply, contend not with him; but leave it all to God, that His will may be done, who knoweth how to turn evil into good, and that He may be honoured in all His servants. 3 Nightingale left for the Crimean War with her party of nurses 21 October 1854. 4 Elisabeth Capet (c1763-93), sister of Louis XVI. Mme Elisabeth, who had a strong sense of submission to the will of God, was imprisoned more than a year in the Temple, then executed along with her brother at the guillotine in 1793. Both were of the Bourbon line but were tried as descendants of the first French King, Hugh Capet (elected king in 987), so as to damn all French monarchs. The excerpt is from Antoine Ferrand, ed., Eloge historique de Madame Elisabeth de France 190-91.

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Study to be patient in bearing the defects of others and their infirmities, be they what they may, for thou hast many things, which others must bear withal. If thou canst not make thyself what thou wouldst be, how canst thou expect to have another so exactly to thy mind? We would fain see others perfect, and yet our own faults we amend not. . . . For the occasions do not make the frailty of a man, but they show what he is. Chapter 19 Of the Exercises of a Good Religious pp 39-41 And with good reason ought he to be much more within than he appears outwardly. . . . And to say, Help me, O Lord God, in my good purpose and in Thy holy service, and grant I may this day begin indeed, since what I have hitherto done is nothing./13 December 1862/ . . . Never be wholly idle, but either reading or writing or praying or meditating, or labouring at something for the common good. Chapter 20 Of the Love of Solitude and Silence pp 43-44 As often as I have been amongst men, said one, I have returned less a man. . . . It is easier to keep retired at home than to be enough upon one’s guard abroad. He, therefore, who aims at inward and spiritual things, must, with Jesus, turn aside from the crowd. Chapter 21 Of Compunction of Heart p 49 If thou canst let men alone, they will let thee alone to do whatever thou hast to do. Busy not thyself in matters which appertain to others . . . and admonish thyself preferably to all thy dearest friends. FN: p 50 How can I tell that, in another world, I can look with gentleness on injustices, if I cannot in this? Chapter 22 Of the Consideration of Human Misery pp 51-55 Wretched art thou, wheresoever thou be and whithersoever thou turn thee, unless thou turn thyself unto God. Why art thou troubled that things go not with thee as thou wishest and desirest? Who is there that hath all things according to his will? . . . Who, then, is the best off? Truly he that is able to suffer something for the sake of God . . . . For to eat,/or not to eat/ to watch,/or not to sleep/ to rest and to sleep and to labour. . . . But woe to them that know not their own misery, and still more woe to them that make this wretched and perishable life the object of their love. . . . /or hate/ Miserable men! yet a while, and in the end they will feel bitterly what a worthless thing and nothing it was that they have been loving./or fearing or hating, 17 December/ But the saints of God, and all devoted friends of Christ, looked not to what pleased/or displeased/

86 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions the flesh. . . . Lose not, brother, thy confidence of making spiritual progress; thou has yet time, the hour is not yet passed./19 November 1862/ Why wilt thou put off thy purpose from day to day? Arise and begin this ver y instant and say, Now is the time to do, now is the time to fight, now is the proper time to amend my life. When thou art troubled and afflicted, then is the time of merit . Thou must pass through fire and water before thou come to refreshment. Except thou do violence to thyself, thou wilt not overcome vice. As long as we carry about this frail body we cannot be free from sin, nor live without weariness and sorrow. Fain would we be at rest from all misery. . . . We must therefore have patience and wait God’s mercy, till iniquity pass away, and this mortality be swallowed up in life. Oh, how great is human frailty, which is ever prone to vice! Today thou confessest thy sins, and tomorrow thou again committest what thou didst confess. Now thou purposest to be upon thy guard and an hour after thou art acting as if thou hadst made no resolution. Justly then may we humble ourselves and never think anything great of ourselves, since we are so frail and unstable. And even what we have at last just acquired through grace and with great labour may soon be lost through negligence. What will become of us in the end if we begin so early to grow lukewarm? Woe to us if we thus wish to turn aside to rest as if there were already peace and security, when there does not as yet appear a trace of true holiness in our deportment! FN: p 55 Woe to me if I so long for death, when I have not yet learnt the first lesson of forgiveness and long suffering. Chapter 23 Of the Thoughts of Death p 56 If thou art not prepared today, how wilt thou be tomorrow? FN: If I cannot overcome evil here, how do I know that I shall be able to overcome it there in another world? pp 57-58 When it is morning, think thou wilt not live till evening./Oh how glad I should be/. . . . For it will give great confidence of dying happily to have a perfect contempt of the world . . . and patience to bear any kind of adversity for the love of Christ./(not a desire to escape from it)/. . . . Few are improved by sickness. . . . Trust not in thy friends and neighbours . . . for men will forget thee sooner than thou thinkest./I only wish to be forgotten./ Chapter 24 Of Judgment, and the Punishments of Sinners p 63 There will be no rest, no consolation for the damned, but here we sometimes cease from labour, and enjoy the consolation of our friends./Do we?/

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Chapter 25 Of the Fervent Amendment of Our Whole Life pp 71-73 When a man hath arrived so far that he seeks his consolation from no created thing, then first doth he begin truly to taste what God is: then, too, will he be well content with everything that happens. Then will he neither rejoice for much nor be sorrowful for little, but will commit himself wholly and confidingly to God, who is to him all in all, to whom nothing is lost or dieth, but for whom all things live. . . . BOOK TWO Chapter 1 Of Interior Conversation p 78 Christ will come to thee, and discover His consolation to thee, if thou wilt prepare for Him a fit dwelling within thee. . . . Many are His visits to the man of interior life, and sweet the conversation that He holdeth with him. . . . My Father will love him; ‘‘we will come to him and make our abode with him.’’ Give admittance, therefore, to Christ, and refuse entrance to all beside. When thou hast Christ, thou art rich, and He is sufficient for thee . . . so that thou needest not to trust in men. For men soon change and they quickly fail, but Christ abideth forever and standeth by us firmly to the end. pp 79-80 He will answer for thee . . . nor wilt thou ever have rest except thou be interiorly united with Christ. . . . If thou wilt suffer no contradiction, how canst thou be the friend of Christ? pp 81-82 He whose taste discerneth all things as they are, and not as they are said or accounted to be, is truly a wise man, and taught rather of God than of men . . . . He who is well disposed and orderly in his interior is not concerned about the strange and perverse doings of men. Chapter 2 Of Humble Submission p 83 He knoweth the time and the manner of thy deliverance and therefore it is thy part to resign thyself into His hands. It belongs to God to help us and deliver us from all confusion. p 86 Never theless, all our peace in this miserable life must be placed rather in humble endurance than in not experiencing oppositions. Chapter 12 Of the Royal Road of the Holy Cross pp 111-14 Dispose and order all things according as thou wilt and as seems best to thee, and thou wilt still find something to suffer, either willingly or unwillingly, and so thou shalt always find the Cross. For either thou shalt feel pain in the body or sustain in thy soul tribulation of spirit./or both/ Sometimes thou shalt be deserted by God; at other times thou shalt be

88 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions afflicted by thy neighbour; and, what is more, thou shalt often be a trouble to thyself. . . . For God willeth that thou learn to suffer tribulation without comfort and wholly submit thyself to Him, and become more humble by tribulation . . . . Thou canst not escape it, whithersoever thou runnest, for wheresoever thou goest thou carriest thyself with thee, and shalt always find thyself. . . . Turn thyself inward or turn thyself outward; everywhere thou shalt find the Cross. . . . If thou carry the Cross willingly, it will carry thee. . . . If thou carry it unwillingly, thou makest it a burden to thee and loadest thyself the more, and nevertheless thou must bear it. If thou fling away one cross, without doubt thou wilt find another, and perhaps a heavier. . . . For even our Lord Jesus Christ Himself was not for one hour of His life without the anguish of His Passion. . . . The whole life of Christ was a cross and a martyrdom, and dost thou seek for thyself rest and joy? . . . And the higher a person is advanced in spirit, the heavier crosses shall he often meet with. pp 116-17 Drink of the chalice of thy Lord lovingly if thou desirest to be His friend and to have part with Him. Leave consolations to God, to do with them as best pleaseth Him . . . . If thou set thyself to what thou oughtest, that is, to suffer and to die, it will quickly be better with thee and thou shalt find peace. . . . ‘‘I,’’ said Jesus, ‘‘will show him how great things he must suffer for my name.’’ To suffer, therefore, is what awaits thee, if thou art resolved to love Jesus and constantly to serve Him. p 119 [at end of Book 2] FN: Because mankind has to create mankind—has to learn by his own mistakes for which he suffers bitterly. God truly has said, there is no other way for man to attain perfection. This is the way—the way of the cross. BOOK THREE Chapter 1 Of the Internal Discourse of Christ to a Faithful Soul pp 123-24 I will hear what the Lord God will speak unto me. Happy is the soul which heareth the Lord speaking within her and receiveth from His mouth the word of comfor t. Happy ears, which receive the breathings of the divine whisper, and take no notice of the whisperings of this world. Happy ears, indeed, which hearken not to the voice that soundeth without, but to Truth itself teaching within. Happy eyes, which are shut to outward things, but intent on things internal. Happy they who penetrate into internal things and endeavour to prepare themselves more and more by daily exercises for the receiving of heavenly secrets. Happy they who rejoice to be wholly intent on God and who shake off ever y worldly impediment.

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Consider these things, O my soul, and close up the doors of thy sensual desires, that thou mayest hear what the Lord thy God speaketh within thee. Chapter 2 That Truth Speaketh Within Us Without Noise of Words pp 125-26 Heretofore the children of Israel said to Moses, Speak Thou to us and we will hear; let not the Lord speak to us, lest we die. They give the letter, but Thou disclosest the sense. FN: That is, the ‘‘inspired writers’’ lead one to God, but God Himself is teaching us every day by His laws what He is. His ways, both in natural and moral philosophy, teach us every day His character. The others only show the way imperfectly. So I too was afraid of hearing what the Lord said to me—what He said through the dreadful afflictions He has laid upon me—all, all, gone, lost either by death or estrangement. I said, if He speak to me thus, I shall die. October 1862.5 Chapter 3 That the Words of God Are to Be Heard with Humility, and that Many Weigh Them Not p 127 My son, hear my words, words most sweet, excelling all the learning of philosophers and of the wise men of this world. My words are spirit and life, and not to be estimated according to human perception. . . . /words not only touching the heart but teaching the intelligence. I (saith the Lord) have taught the prophets from the beginning/ and even till now I cease not to speak at all. pp 128-29 Blush, then, thou slothful, querulous servant, that they are actually more ready to labour for death than thou for life. . . . Write my words in thy heart, and think diligently on them, for they will be very necessar y in the time of temptation. What thou understandest not when thou readest, thou shalt know in the day of visitation. . . . And I daily read to them two lessons: one to rebuke their vices, the other to exhort them to the increase of virtue. FN: In fact the whole scheme of God’s ‘‘creation’’ is to bring each man to perfection by means and inducements. And this is God speaking to man.

5 This seems to be a reference to a wrenching visit of her Aunt Mai, recounted in the 1877 diary (2:478). Nightingale’s sense of despair can be seen also from an annotation in her Bible at Ps 18:4, ‘‘the sorrows of hell compassed me . . . ,’’ where she added: ‘‘This world is hell’’ 2:138.

90 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Chapter 5 Of the Wonder ful Effect of Divine Love pp 135-36 Wherefore do Thou visit me often, and instruct me in Thy holy discipline. . . . For love is born of God, and cannot rest but in God, above all created things. . . . It can achieve anything; and it doth perform and effect many things, where he that loveth not fainteth and falleth prostrate. p 138 Love is submissive and obedient to superiors, in its own eyes mean and contemptible, devout and thankful to God, always trusting and hoping in Him, even then when it tasteth not the relish of God’s sweetness, for there is no living in love without some sorrow. Whosoever is not ready to suffer all things and to stand resigned to the will of his Beloved is not wor thy to be called a lover. He that loveth must willingly embrace all that is hard and bitter for the sake of his Beloved, and never suffer himself to be turned away from Him by any contrary occur rences whatsoever. Chapter 15 How We Are to Be Disposed, and What We Are to Say, When We Desire Anything p 164 A prayer for fulfilling the will of God: Grant me Thy grace, most merciful Jesus, that it may be with me, and labour with me, and continue with me unto the end. Grant me always to will and desire that which is most acceptable to Thee and which pleaseth Thee best. Let Thy will be mine and let my will always follow Thine and agree perfectly with it. Let me always will or not will the same with Thee, and let me not be able to will or not to will otherwise than as Thou willest or willest not. p 165 Grant unto me, above all things to be desired, that I may rest in Thee, and that my heart may be at peace in Thee. Thou art the true peace of the heart; Thou art its only rest; out of Thee all things are hard and restless. In this peace, in the selfsame, that is, in Thee, the one sovereign eternal Good, I will sleep and take my rest. Chapter 16 That the True Consolation Is to Be Sought in God Alone pp 165-67 Wherefore thou canst not, O my soul, be fully comforted nor perfectly refreshed except in God, the Comforter of the poor and the receiver of the humble. . . . Use temporal things, but desire eternal. . . . Let this be my consolation, to be freely willing to forego all human comfort. And if Thy comfort be withdrawn, let Thy will and just trial be to me as the greatest of comforts. Chapter 17 That All Solicitude Must Be Placed in God p 167 Son, suffer me to do with thee what I will; I know what is expedient for thee. Thou thinkest as man; thou judgest in many things as human affection suggesteth. Lord, what Thou sayest is true. Greater is Thy care

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for me than all the care I can take of myself. For at too great a hazard doth he stand who casteth not his whole care on Thee. Lord, provided that my will remain true and firm towards Thee, do with me whatsoever it shall please Thee. For it cannot but be good, whatever Thou shalt do with me. Chapter 19 Of Supporting Injuries; and Who Is Proved to Be Truly Patient pp 172-73 Do not say, I cannot endure these things from such a man, and things of this kind are not to be suffered by me, for he hath done me a great injur y and he upbraideth me with things I never thought of; but I will suffer willingly from another, and as far as I shall judge fitting for me to suffer. . . . The truly patient man mindeth not by what manner of man it is he is exercised, whether by his own superior, whether by an equal, or an inferior, whether by a good and holy man or by one that is perverse and unworthy. But how much soever and how often soever any adversity happeneth to him from any creature, he taketh it all equally with thanksgiving as from the hand of God, and esteemeth it a great gain. . . . Make, O Lord, that possible to me by grace, which seemeth impossible to me by nature. Thou knowest how little I can bear, and that I am soon dejected when a small adversity ariseth. Chapter 20 Of the Confession of Our Own Infirmity, and of the Miseries of this Life pp 174-76 I purpose to behave myself valiantly, but when a small temptation cometh I am brought into great straits. It is sometimes a very trifling thing whence a grievous temptation proceedeth. And when I think myself somewhat safe, when I least apprehend it, I find myself sometimes almost overcome by a light blast. . . . Have pity on me and draw me out of the mire, that I stick not fast therein, that I may not be utterly cast down forever. This it is which often drives me back and confounds me in Thy sight, that I am so subject to fall and so powerless to resist my passions . . . . And I am weary of thus always living in conflict./November 1862/ 30 January 1873/ Oh, that Thou, most mighty God of Israel, zealous Lover of faithful souls, wouldst regard the labour and sorrow of Thy servant, and stand by him in all his undertakings! . . . For when one tribulation or temptation is gone, another approacheth; yea, and whilst the first conflict still lasteth, many others come on, and those unexpected. Chapter 21 That We Are to Rest in God Above All Goods and Gifts pp 178-80 When shall I fully collect myself in Thee, that through Thy love I may not feel myself, but Thee alone, above all feeling and measure,

92 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions in a manner not known to all? . . . [Many evils] . . . allure and entangle me, so that I can neither have free access to Thee, nor enjoy Thy sweet embraces, which are ever present to blessed spirits. Oh, let my sighs move Thee, and this my manifold desolation upon earth . . . . Behold, here I am; behold, I come to thee, because thou hast called me. Thy tears, and the desire of thy soul, thy humiliation and contrition of heart, have inclined and brought me to thee. Chapter 23 Of Four Things which Bring Much Peace pp 186-87 A prayer for the enlightening of the mind: Fight strongly for me, and overcome these evil beasts—I mean, these alluring concupiscences ,/vexing thoughts/—that peace may be made in Thy power. . . . Send forth Thy light and Thy truth, that they may shine upon the earth, for I am an earth that is empty and void, till Thou enlightenest me . . . . Snatch me away, and rescue me from all unstable comfort of creatures./He has done this already. And yet, though having no other comfort, I cannot fully turn to Him./ Chapter 24 Of Avoiding Curious Inquiry Respecting the Life of Others p 188 What is this or that to thee? follow thou me. Chapter 25 In What Firm Peace of the Heart and True Progress Doth Consist p 189 Peace all desire, but all care not for those things which appertain to true peace. My peace is with the humble and meek of heart: thy peace shall be in much patience. Chapter 27 That Self-Love Chiefly Keepeth Us Back from the Sovereign Good pp 194-96 It is wonderful that thou wilt not, from the very bottom of thy heart, commit thyself wholly to me, with all things that thou canst desire or have. Why dost thou pine away with vain grief? Why art thou so worn with superfluous cares? . . . For in everything there will be found some defect, and in ever y place there will be someone that will cross thee. . . . Grant me, O Lord, celestial wisdom, that I may learn above all things to seek Thee and to find Thee; above all things to relish Thee and to love Thee, and to understand all other things as they are according to the order of Thy wisdom./Not according to the order of my changing sensitiveness to pain./ Chapter 28 Against the Tongues of Detractors p 197 If thou walkest interiorly, thou wilt make small account of flying words from without. It is no small prudence to be silent in the evil time, and to turn

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within to me, and not to be disturbed with the judgment of man. Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men, for whether they put a good or bad constr uction on what thou dost, thou art still what thou art. Chapter 30 Of Asking the Divine Assistance, and of Confidence of Recovering Grace pp 200-02 Come to me when it is not well with thee. . . . For before thou earnestly prayest to me, thou seekest in the meantime many comforts, and delightest thyself in outward things. . . . Nor is there out of me any powerful help, nor profitable counsel, nor lasting remedy. . . . Is anything difficult to me? Or shall I be like to one promising and not performing? Where is thy faith? Stand firmly and perseveringly; practise endurance and manly courage; comfor t will come to thee in due season. Wait for me, wait; I will come and cure thee. It is a temptation that troubleth thee, and a vain fear that affrighteth thee. What doth the solicitude about future contingencies bring thee, but only sorrow upon sorrow? Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. It is vain and useless to conceive either grief or joy for future things, which perhaps shall never come to pass. . . . When thou thinkest I am far from thee, I am often nearest to thee. . . . All is not lost when anything falls out contrar y to what thou wouldst have it. Thou must not judge according to thy present feeling, nor give thyself up in such manner to any trouble, whencesoever it comes, nor take it so as if all hope of deliverance were gone. Think not thyself wholly forsaken though for a time I have sent thee some tribulation, or withdrawn from thee thy wished-for consolation, for this is the way to the kingdom of heaven. Chapter 31 Of the Contempt of Everything Created, in Order to Find the Creator p 204 What can be more at rest than a simple eye? And what can be more free than he who desires nothing upon earth? . . . For this a great grace is required, such as may elevate the soul and lift her above herself. Chapter 37 Of a Pure and Entire Resignation of Ourselves for the Obtaining Freedom of Heart pp 218-19 Son, relinquish thyself, and thou shalt find me . . . . Then all vain imaginations shall vanish, all evil disturbances and superfluous cares. Chapter 38 Of the Good Government of Ourselves in Outward Things, and of Having Recourse to God in Dangers pp 220-21 Son, thou oughtest diligently to aim at this, that in every place and in every action or external occupation thou be inwardly free and master of thy-

94 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions self; and that all things be under thee, and not thou under them. . . . Whom things temporal draw not away to adhere to them, but they rather draw these things to subserve well the end for which they were ordained by God, and appointed by that sovereign Artist, who has left nothing disordered in His whole creation. If, likewise, in all events, thou depend not upon things as they appear outwardly, nor regard with a carnal eye things seen and heard, but if instantly, on ever y occasion, thou enter, like Moses, into the tabernacle to consult the Lord, thou shalt sometimes hear the divine answer and shalt return instr ucted about many things present and future. Chapter 39 That a Man Must Not Be too Anxious about His Affairs p 222 Son, commit thy cause to me always: I will dispose of it well in its due season. Await my appointment, and thence thou shalt experience success therefrom. Lord, most willingly do I commit all things to Thee, for but little can my own device avail. Would that I might not be too much set upon future events, but unhesitatingly offer myself to Thy good pleasure. Chapter 42 That Peace Is Not to Be Placed in Men pp 227-28 Son, if thou placest thy peace in any person for thy own gratification, and for the sake of his society, thou shalt be unsettled and entangled. But if thou hast recourse to the ever-living and abiding Truth, thou wilt not be greatly grieved if a friend forsake thee or die. In me the love of thy friend ought to stand, and for me is he to be loved, whoever he be, that appeareth to thee good and much to be loved in this life. Without me friendship can neither profit nor endure, nor is that love true and pure which I do not bind together. Thou oughtest to be so dead towards persons beloved as to wish, as far as thou art concerned, to be altogether without any human fellowship./Since I am perforce and not per choice altogether without any human fellowship, I will try./ So much the nearer doth man approach to God, as he withdraweth himself the farther from all earthly consolation./And as God has withdrawn me and not I myself by any act of mine, I am the better subject to try./ When thou lookest towards creatures, the sight of the Creator is withdrawn from thee. FN: And I to whom every human friendship is now a pain and not a pleasure, whose temptation it is, not to dwell with any earthly consolation upon anything, but rather to go over and over again with pain the painful things that have been said to me, the painful intercourse I have had with human beings and wonder why it should be so and if I

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could not have made it otherwise. Yet I find it more difficult to withdraw myself from this pain to the love of God than others do from comfort, of which I have none. October 1862. Chapter 45 That We May Not Believe All, and How Easily We Err in Speech p 234 If things foreseen do yet often hurt us, how can things unlooked for otherwise than grievously wound us? But/why/ have I not better provided, for my wretched self? /that I am?/ . . . How wisely didst Thou forewarn us to take heed of men, and that a man’s enemies are those of his own household. pp 235-36 I have been taught to my cost, and I wish it may serve to make me more cautious, and not increase my folly. . . . And whilst I keep silence, and believe the matter to be secret, he himself cannot keep the secret which he desireth me to keep, but presently betrayeth both me and himself, and goeth his way. From such foolish speech and such unwary people defend me, O Lord, that I may not fall into their hands, nor ever commit the like. . . . What I am not willing to suffer I ought by all means to shun. Oh, how good and how peaceful is it to be silent about others, and not to believe all that is said, nor easily to repor t what one has heard: to lay oneself open to few, always to seek Thee, the Beholder of the heart, and not to be carried about with every wind of words, but to wish that all things, both within and without us, may be accomplished according to the pleasure of Thy will! . . . To how many hath it been hurtful to have their virtue known, and overhastily praised! FN: Not because it blows them up to vain glory, but because they who have made them into idols, always fall, sooner or later, into the other extreme and break them in pieces. 7 December 1862. Chapter 46 Of Having Confidence in God, when Arrows of Words Are Aimed Against Us pp 236-40 /27 October 1862/ If thou art guilty, think that thou wilt willingly amend thyself; if thou art not conscious to thyself of anything, think that thou wilt willingly suffer this for God’s sake. For because thou art afraid of being despised, thou art not willing to be reprehended for thy faults and seekest shelter in excuses. But look better into thyself and thou shalt find that the world is still within thee and a vain fondness for pleasing men. But give ear to my word, and thou shalt not value ten thousand words of men. . . . But he who keepeth not his heart interiorly, nor God before his eyes, is easily moved with a word of dispraise. Whereas he that

96 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions tr usteth in me, and desireth not to stand by his own judgment, will be void of human fear. For I am the Judge and Discerner of all secrets; I know how the matter passeth; I know both him that inflicteth the injury and him that suffereth it. From me went forth this word, by my permission it happened, that the thoughts out of many hearts might be revealed. . . . The testimony of men oftentimes deceiveth: my judgment is true; it shall stand and not be overthrown. . . . To me, therefore, must thou run in every decision and not depend upon thy own judgment. For the just man will not be troubled, whatever happeneth to him from God. And should even some unjust charge be prefer red against him, he will not much care; yet neither will he vainly rejoice, if he be reasonably acquitted by others. For he considereth that I am He who searcheth the heart and the reins; who judgeth not according to the face, nor according to human appearance. For oftentimes that is found blameworthy in my eyes which in the judgment of men is esteemed commendable. O Lord God, the just Judge, strong and patient, who knowest the frailty and depravity of men, be Thou my strength and my entire confidence, for my own conscience sufficeth me not. Thou knowest that which I know not, and therefore under every reprehension I ought to humble myself, and bear it with meekness. Pardon me, therefore, propitiously, as often as I have not done thus, and give me in future the grace of greater longsuffering. For better to me is Thy abundant mercy, for the obtaining of pardon, than my own imaginary justice for the defending of my hidden conscience. And although I am not conscious to myself of anything, yet I cannot hereby justify myself, for Thy mercy apart, no man living shall in Thy sight be justified. Chapter 48 Of the Day of Eternity, and of the Distresses of this Life p 244 When shall I contemplate the glory of Thy kingdom? . . . Oh, when shall I be with Thee in Thy kingdom, which Thou hast prepared for Thy beloved from all eternity? I am left poor and an exile in an enemy’s country, where there are daily wars and grievous misfortunes. Solace my banishment, assuage my sorrow, for my every desire aspireth unto Thee, for whatever this world offereth for my comfort is all burdensome to me. I long to enjoy Thee intimately, but cannot attain unto it. I desire to cleave to heavenly things, but things temporal and my unmortified passions weigh me down.

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FN: Thy Kingdom—Thy laws—This world is Thy kingdom, as well as any other. Here are Thy laws. Let me see their glory—their perfectness. I may be with Thee in Thy kingdom now—I shall be with Thee in Thy kingdom here, if Thou art ‘‘all in all’’ to me. p 245 Come to my aid, O eternal Truth, that no vanity /er ror/ may move me. Come, heavenly sweetness, and let all impurity /anger/ fly from before Thy face. Pardon me also and mercifully forgive /help/ me. Chapter 50 How a Desolate Person Ought to Offer Himself into the Hands of God p 254 /November 1862/ O just Father, holy and ever to be praised, the hour is come for Thy servant to be tried. O Father worthy of all love, it is fitting that Thy servant should at this hour suffer something for Thee. O Father always to be honoured, the hour is come which from all eternity Thou didst foresee would arrive, that Thy servant for a short time should be oppressed exteriorly, but interiorly should ever live unto Thee, that he should be for a little slighted and humbled and should fail in the sight of men. Then he should be severely afflicted with sufferings and languors that so he may rise again with Thee in the dawning of a new light, and be glorified in heaven. pp 255-56 For this is a favour to Thy friend that he should suffer and be afflicted in this world for the love of Thee, how often soever, by whomsoever and in what manner soever Thou permittest it to befall him./Januar y 1873/ . . . It is profitable for me that shame hath covered my face, that I may rather seek my comfort from Thee than from men. I have also hereby learned to fear Thy inscrutable judgment, who afflictest the just with the impious, but not without equity and justice. I return Thee thanks that Thou hast not spared my evil ways, but hast bruised me with bitter stripes, inflicting anguish and sending distress both within and without. Of all the things under heaven there is none that can comfort me but Thou, O Lord my God, the heavenly Physician of souls, who woundest and healest, bringest down to hell and leadest back again. Thy discipline is upon me and Thy rod itself shall instruct me. . . . Strike Thou my back and my neck that I may bend my perversity to Thy will. Make me a pious and humble disciple as Thou in Thy goodness art wont to do, that I may walk according to every indication of Thy will.

98 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Chapter 51 That We Must Exercise Ourselves in Humble Works When We Cannot Attain to the Highest p 258 It must needs be that thou sometimes, by reason of original corruption, descend to low things and bear the burden of this corruptible life, even against thy will and with weariness. Chapter 52 That a Man Ought Not to Esteem Himself Worthy of Consolation, but Rather Deserving of Chastisement p 261 My mouth can utter nothing but only this one word: I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned; have mercy on me and pardon me. Chapter 53 That the Grace of God Is Not Communicated to the EarthlyMinded pp 262-63 /7 November 1862/ Son, my grace is precious; it separeth not itself to be mingled with external things nor with earthly consolations . . . . Choose for thyself a retired place; love to dwell with thyself alone; seek not to be talking with anyone, but rather pour forth devout prayer to God that thou mayest keep thy mind in compunction, and thy conscience pure. Esteem the whole world as nothing; prefer attendance on God before all external occupations. Thou must be sequestered from thy acquaintance and from thy dearest friends, and keep thy mind disengaged from all temporal consolation./He has done it for me./ So the blessed apostle Peter beseeches the faithful of Christ to keep themselves as strangers and pilgrims in this world./I am a stranger perforce and ‘‘estranged.’’/ p 264 But because few labour to die perfectly to themselves, or fully to aim out of themselves, therefore do they remain entangled in themselves nor can they be elevated in spirit above themselves. But whoever desireth to walk freely with me, it is necessary that he mortify all his perverse and inordinate affections and not cleave with particular love or concupiscence to anything created. Chapter 54 Of the Different Motions of Nature and Grace pp 265-66 All men indeed desire good and pretend to something good in what they say and do; therefore, under the appearance of good, many are deceived. Nature is crafty and draweth away many, ensnareth them and deceiveth them and always proposeth self as her end. But grace walketh in simplicity, turneth aside from all appearance of evil, offereth no deceits, and doth all things purely for God, in whom also it resteth as its last end. Nature is neither willing to be mortified, to be restrained, to be overcome, nor to be subject, neither of its own accord to be brought under obedience.

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But grace studieth the mortification of self, resisteth sensuality, seeketh to be subject, coveteth to be overcome, aimeth not at enjoying its own liberty, loveth to be kept under discipline and desireth not to have the command over anyone, but under God ever to live, stand and be, and for God’s sake is ever ready humbly to bow down unto every human creature. pp 267-69 Nature hath regard to temporal things, rejoiceth at earthly gains, is troubled at losses and is irritated at every slight injurious word. But grace attendeth to things eternal and cleaveth not to temporal things, neither is disturbed at the loss of things, nor exasperated with hard words, for it placeth its treasure and its joy in heaven, where nothing perisheth . . . . But grace seeketh to be comforted in God alone and beyond all things visible to be delighted in the Sovereign Good. . . . But grace seeketh nothing temporal nor requireth any other recompense but God alone for its reward, nor desireth anything more of the necessaries of this life than may serve her to obtain things eternal . . . . Grace doth not contend nor prefer her own opinion to others; but in every feeling and understanding submitteth herself to the eternal Wisdom and to the Divine scrutiny. p 270 [Grace teacheth to hide those things worthy of praise] and from ever ything and in every knowledge to seek the fruit of utility and the praise and honour of God. She desireth not to have self, or what belongeth to self, exalted, but wisheth that God may be blessed in His gifts, who bestoweth all things through mere love . . . . Wherefore, as nature is the more kept down and subdued, with so much the greater abundance is grace infused, and ever y day by new visitations the interior man is reformed according to the image of God. Chapter 55 Of the Corruption of Nature, and of the Efficacy of Divine Grace pp 270-73 O Lord my God, who hast created me to Thine own image and likeness, grant me this grace . . . that I may overcome my most corrupt nature. . . . For I perceive in my flesh the law of sin contradicting the law of my mind, and leading me captive to obey sensuality /temper/ in many things. . . . [Grace], though it be unable to fulfill all that it approves, neither doth it now enjoy the full light of truth. . . . Yet in the flesh I ser ve the law of sin, while I obey sensuality /temper/ rather than reason. Hence it is that to will that which is good is present with me, but how to accomplish it I find not . . . . This grace is so excellent that neither the gift of prophecy, nor the working of miracles, nor any speculation, how sublime soever, is of any value without it./It is light without food./

100 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions p 274 I beseech Thee, O Lord, that I may find grace in Thine eyes, for sufficient for me is Thy grace, though I obtain none of those things which nature desires. . . . This alone is my strength, this alone giveth counsel and help. Chapter 56 That We Ought to Deny Ourselves, and Imitate Christ by the Cross p 275 Son, as much as thou canst go out of thyself, so much wilt thou be able to enter into me. . . . I will have thee learn the perfect renunciation of thyself, according to my will, without contradiction or complaint./14 December 1862/ p 276 If thou wilt be my disciple, deny thyself. . . . /I have nothing to give up. For everything has given up me. Everyone has ‘‘denied’’ me./If thou wilt possess a blessed life, despise this present life./I hate it too much./ Chapter 59 That All Hope and Confidence Is to Be Fixed in God Alone pp 288-89 Where Thou art there is heaven, and there is death and hell where Thou art not. . . . In short, I cannot fully confide in anyone to bring me seasonable help in my necessities, save only in Thee, my God. . . . All seek the things that are their own; Thou designest only my salvation and profit, and turnest all things to my good . . . . In Thee, therefore, O Lord God, do I place all my hope and refuge, on Thee I cast all my tribulation and anguish, for I find all to be weak and inconstant whatever I behold out of Thee. For neither will many friends be of service to me, nor can powerful auxiliaries assist me, nor wise counsellors give me a profitable reply . . . nor any secret place secure me, if Thou Thyself do not assist, help, strengthen, comfor t, instr uct and guard me . . . . According to the greatness of Thy goodness . . . look down upon me and give ear to the prayer of Thy poor servant, a far-distant exile in the region of the shadow of death. BOOK FOUR [on title page for Book 4, p 291 and following pp 292-93]: FN: Before the sacrament November 1862 [trans. from French] O my God and my All, I wish to be an instrument of Your majesty; I know that all I can accomplish till death is nothing, so I beseech You with all my heart: glorify Yourself through me, according to what You will find most expedient and in the manner You

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prefer. Here you expect the inspiration or action of this sovereign Lord in relation to Him. [English resumes] 30 January 1873 FN: [trans. from French] Alas! my beloved God, if You wish that I look at You, look first at me; by Your Spirit attract mine, which is so unworthy of Your presence that I dare not show it to You. That is why here I stand in deep reverence and the utmost recognition of my own nothingness. I am nothing, I can do nothing, I know nothing; that is why I beseech You, do not leave me here alone, without the knowledge and acknowledgment of so many gifts and favours that it has pleased You to grant me. I offer myself to You. I offer myself to You and resign myself to be by Your love, for Your love, to be totally deprived of all consolations not necessary for my salvation, in order voluntarily to suffer all kinds of adversities, illnesses, confusion, pain, tribulations, injuries of the heart and generally all You may want to send me in time and eternity. Nevertheless, my God, I am all Yours, so I dare ask You not only for Your gifts and favours but also for Yourself, especially when I receive Your precious body and blood, which I wish to receive in order to be more perfectly one with You. Alas! my God and my Saviour, how unworthy my sins make me, You know better than I. Look! my God, I take all my sins, neglects, ingratitudes and other disorders innumerable in me, and I put them into your honoured wounds, so that they are lost and consumed. I throw them into the wonderful fire of Your love so that You may consume and destroy them. I cast them into the infinite abyss of Your mercy, so that You may cover them and make them invisible forever. I give You infinite thanks, o my beloved Jesus, for the excessive love you showed in coming down from heaven to earth for me, and for me accepted to lie in the crib, suffer poverty and deprivation, undergo innumerable pains, and to add to your anguish by being covered with sweat and blood, ignominiously arrested, shamefully bound, unjustly condemned, clothed with the white dress of a fool, cruelly mutilated by lashes, crowned with thorns, nailed to the cross and inhumanly made to drink loathsome vinegar. It was for me, miserable being, that you were stretched out on the holy cross, for me that you suffered such an ignominious death.6 November 1862 p 293 [FN added the biblical references to the texts] Come to me all you that labour and are burdened, and I will refresh you. . . . /Matt 11:28/ 6 Unidentified source.

102 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions The bread that I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world./John 6:51/ Take ye and eat; this is my body, which shall be delivered for you; this do for the commemoration of me./Luke 22:19/ He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him./John 6:56/ The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life./John 6:63/ Chapter 4 That Many Benefits Are Bestowed on Those Who Communicate Devoutly pp 313-14 I labour, indeed, in the sweat of my brow, I am tor tured with grief of heart, I am burdened with sins, I am troubled with temptations, I am entangled and oppressed with many evil passions; and there is no one to help me, no one to deliver and save me, but Thou, O Lord God, my Saviour, to whom I commit myself and all that is mine, that Thou mayest keep me and bring me to everlasting life. Chapter 7 Of the Examination of Our Own Conscience, and of a Resolution of Amendment pp 319-21 So inconsiderate in talking; so unobservant of silence, so disordered in thy manners, so overeager in thy actions. So immoderate in food; so deaf to the Word of God . . . . /speaking in events/ So hasty to finish thy devotions, so wandering in attention . . . . Then with an entire resignation, and with thy whole will, offer thyself up to the honour of my Name on the altar of thy heart, as a perpetual holocaust, faithfully committing to me both thy soul and body. For there is no oblation more worthy, nor satisfaction greater, for the washing away of sins, than to offer thyself purely and entirely to God . . . in the mass and in the communion. . . . Chapter 8 Of the Oblation of Christ on the Cross, and of the Resignation of Ourselves p 322 But if thou wilt stand upon self, and not offer thyself freely to my will, thy offering is not complete nor will there be an entire union between us. Chapter 10 That the Holy Communion Is Not Lightly to be Forborne p 330 And yet on certain days, and at appointed times, he ought to receive sacramentally, with an affectionate reverence, the Body of his Redeemer, and rather aim at the praise and honour of God than seek his own consolation.

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Chapter 11 That the Body of Christ and the Holy Scriptures are Most Necessar y to a Faithful Soul p 334 For in this life I find that there are two things especially necessar y for me, without which this miserable life would be to me insupportable. Whilst detained in the prison of this body, I acknowledge that I need two things, viz., food and light. FN: pp 334-35 Light is to consider the ways and character of God. But as man cannot live by light alone but perishes by want of food, he must also unite himself in heart to God’s ways, live in God and God in him, practically adopt the character of God. This is the food which nourishes him. Chapter 12 With How Great Diligence He Who Is to Communicate Ought to Prepare Himself for Christ p 338 I am He who hath invited thee; I have commanded it to be done; I will supply what is wanting to thee; come and receive me. p 340 I am He to whom thou oughtest to give thy whole self, so that henceforth thou mayest live not in thyself, but in me and free from all solicitude. Chapter 13 That a Devout Soul Ought to Desire, with the Whole Heart, to Be United to Christ in this Sacrament p 340 Who will give me, O Lord, to find Thee alone . . . but that Thou alone mayest speak to me, and I to Thee, as the beloved is wont to speak to his beloved, and a friend to be entertained with a friend? p 341 Thou art my Peacemaker, in whom is sovereign peace and true rest. Chapter 14 Of the Ardent Desire of Some Devout Persons towards the Body of Christ pp 344-45 For though I burn not with so great desire as Thy specially devout servants yet, by Thy grace, I have a desire of this same greatly inflamed desire, praying and wishing that I may be made partaker with all such fervent lovers and be numbered in their holy company. Chapter 15 That the Grace of Devotion Is Acquired by Humility and Self-Abnegation pp 346-47 For as soon as thou hast delivered thyself up to God with thy whole hear t, and neither seekest this nor that for thine own pleasure or will, but wholly placest thyself in Him, thou shalt find thyself united to Him and at peace, for nothing will be so grateful to thee and please thee so much as the good pleasure of the Divine will. Whatsoever therefore, with simplicity of heart shall

104 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions raise up his intention to God, and disengage himself from all inordinate love or dislike of any created being, he shall be the most apt to receive grace . . . . The more per fectly one forsaketh the things below . . . the more speedily grace cometh, entereth in more plentifully, and the higher it elevateth a hear t that is free . . . . Such a one, in receiving the holy eucharist, obtaineth the great grace of Divine union, because he doth not regard his own devotion and consolation but above all devotion and consolation he regardeth the honour and glory of God. Chapter 18 That a Man Should Not Be a Curious Searcher into this Sacrament, but a Humble Follower of Christ, Submitting His Sense to Holy Faith p 354 Be not thou anxious, nor stop to dispute with thy thoughts. Editor: A list of prayers for different occasions is given here, of which Nightingale circled or added the following notations: p 364 For a person in great affliction, Book 3 chapter 29 When attacked with calumny. Book 3 chapter 46 After Holy Communion [FN added:] Book 3 chapter 46 Book 1 chapter 19 13 December 1862.

Notes and Letters on Spirituality edited by Lynn McDonald

On Ignatius Theophorus Editor: Nightingale annotated a book about early saints, The Pupils of St John the Divine by Charlotte Yonge, although it is identified on the title page only as being by the author of The Heir of Redclyffe. The family gave the book to Sister Sophiea Collyer the year after Nightingale’s death: ‘‘In remembrance of her attendance upon Miss Florence Nightingale, January 1911.’’ Only one annotation is dated, 1873, the year of its publication, and there is a reference to the work also in May 1877 in Nightingale’s diar y (in Spiritual Journey). The annotations concern Ignatius of Antioch or Theophorus [Godbearer] (d. c110), who was believed by the Syriac Church to have been the child Jesus had in mind when he said that no one should hinder children from coming to him. Ignatius was said to have been always with the apostles, ‘‘nursed among them.’’ Ignatius was an early martyr, who indeed eagerly sought martyrdom. He was bishop of Antioch, Syria, the author of seven letters written en route to Rome as a prisoner. The letters themselves opposed the teachings of a sect that would have had Jesus’ sufferings to be apparent, not real. Ignatius taught that the perfect disciple imitated Jesus’ passion, or shared in his suffering. The last statement was a favourite thought of Ignatius Theophorus, made to Polycarp of Smyr na, one of the last survivors of the disciples of St John the Divine.

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106 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Annotations in Charlotte Yonge, The Pupils of St John the Divine, Florence Nightingale Museum

Chapter 8 Ignatius, the Childlike Saint p 103 But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. p 104 He was preparing the apostles for the tenderness, reverence and watchfulness that the presence of a young child among them would require. May Ignatius not, then, be reckoned as the first of the many orphan babes whom the church has received and bred up in her Master’s name, and for His sake? p 125 I am writing to all the churches, and telling them that I shall willingly die for God, if ye hinder me not. I beseech that you will not unseasonably love me. Suffer me to become food for wild beasts. I am God’s wheat, and need to be ground by the teeth of beasts to become a pure loaf of Jesus Christ. Caress the beasts in hopes that they may become my grave, leaving nothing of me to be a care to anyone. I shall be a disciple of Jesus Christ even when the world sees nothing of my body. Pray the Lord for me, that I may be a worthy victim. I command you not, like Peter and Paul; they were Apostles, I am but a convict; they were free, I am but a slave; but if I suffer I shall be set free by Jesus Christ, who will raise me up to perfect liberty. I am learning, in the chains I bear for Him, to desire nothing temporal or vain. p 126 Permit me to be a follower of the passion of my God./19 October 1873/ pp 132-33 Speak to each man separately, according to the grace that God giveth to thee. Bear the infirmities of all, as a good soldier. When the toil is great, the greater is the gain. If thou love only the good disciples, what thank hast thou? but rather endeavour that the refractor y be subdued by thy gentleness. Ever y wound cannot be healed by the same plaster; therefore pour water upon that which is inflamed. . . . For this cause art thou formed both of flesh and spirit; that thou mayest deal tenderly with that which comes visibly before thee. Stand firm as an anvil that is beaten. It beseemeth a good soldier to be wounded and to conquer; and we ought especially to bear all things for the sake of God, that He also may bear with us. . . .

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Labour together, str uggle together, run together, suffer together, sleep together, awake together, as the stewards and fellow soldiers and servants of God. Please Him under whom ye fight, and who giveth you your wages. Let none be found as a deserter. . . . A Christian hath no power over himself, but must always be at leisure for God’s ser vice. p 139 I am the Lord’s wheat. I must be ground by the teeth of beasts to become the pure bread of Jesus Christ. Source: Notes in a (missing) diary, as published in E.T. Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale 1:60, 82-83

22 June 1846 The longer I live, the more I feel as if all my being was gradually drawing to one point, and if I could be permitted to return and accomplish that in another being, if I may not in this, I should need no other heaven. I could give up the hope of meeting and living with those I have loved (and nobody knows how I love) and been separated from here, if it would please God to give me, with a nearer consciousness of His Presence, the task of doing this in the real life. 2 July 1849 Ought not one’s externals to be as nearly as possible an incarnation of what life really is? Life is not a green pasture and a still water, as our homes make it. Life is to some a forty days fasting, moral or physical, in the wilderness, to some it is a fainting under the carrying of the crop [cross], to some it is a crucifixion, to all a struggle for truth, for safety. Life is seen in a much truer form in London than in the country. In an English country place everything that is painful is so carefully removed out of sight, behind those fine trees, to a village three miles off. In London, at all events if you open your eyes, you cannot help seeing in the next street that life is not as it has been made to you. You cannot get out of a carriage at a party without seeing what is in the faces making the lane on either side and without feeling tempted to rush back and say, ‘‘Those are my brothers and sisters.’’ Source: Undated note on Lacordaire from a (missing) notebook, published in E.T. Cook, Life of Florence Nightingale 1:43

I desire for a considerable time only to lead a life of obscurity and toil, for the purpose of allowing whatever I may have received of God to

108 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ripen and turning it some day to the glory of His name. Nowadays people are too much in a hurry both to produce and consume themselves. It is only in retirement and in silence, in meditation, that are formed the men who are called to exercise an influence on society. Editor: Correspondence with Julius Mohl in the third part of this volume deals with Eastern religions. Here we reproduce two letters to Eleanor Martin, granddaughter of Mme Mohl’s sister; in them we find reference to M Mohl’s death in 1876 and to issues of a spiritual nature their friend’s death raised. Source: Letter, Leicestershire Record Office 718 DG6/D/218

35 South St. Park Lane, W. 8 Januar y 1876

Dear Eleanor Martin I cannot thank you enough for writing to me (I had only heard of M Mohl’s death from someone who saw it in the newspaper). Yours was almost greedily received by me; I have written to her, but what human tongue can comfort her? If you know whether he was sensible to the last, and whether he said anything those last days, will you kindly tell me? No one knows what the loss is to me, but God. Since I was eighteen he was my truest friend. The world was a different world to me because he was in it. But, because no one can know what it is to me, I am almost glad to be alone with my dead. As for him, what can one say? but ‘‘Glor y to God in the highest’’:1 he was the truest follower of Christ (by whatever name he called himself). He was the most enlightened and at the same time the lowliest and purest soul; he really tried to live as Christ did, and was the only man I have ever known who might have said, like Christ: ‘‘Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.’’2 Few knew him as he really was, though few will be more missed than he. I cannot speak of him (I think, if she has health, she may have a life in editing his papers. She asked him that she might do this and told me. Do not mention this to her.) . . . Please write again. ever your affectionate F. Nightingale My mother is eighty-eight in a month. 1 Luke 2:14. 2 Matt 11:29.

Notes and Letters on Spirituality / 109 Source: Letter, Leicestershire Record Office 718 DG6/D/219

35 South St. Park Lane, W. 27 January 1876

My dear Eleanor Martin I ought to have written to you long ago (but somehow I feel as if a spring of my earthly life were gone and I can scarcely do my daily work) and told you, as I feel, how thankful I was to you for these letters which I return. You may guess how eagerly I read them over and over again. As you say, we must not think of ‘‘second causes.’’ A ‘‘friend of God’’ is gone back to the bosom of his God. I think his life might have been prolonged some little time by what we call good hospital nursing, and it used to make me quite sick to think this but prolonged in the midst of suffering? Perhaps God saw it was not desirable; there was no possibility of restoration. French doctors are generally excellent nurses; they don’t write a prescription and go away, as London doctors. Perhaps they saw there was nothing to be done; there is no doubt the seat of the disease was the bladder and there was cancer. I wish they had not produced that hemorrhage on the Wednesday before the last; it weakened him and hastened his end, but even that we cannot be sure was not in mercy. It seems certain that he did not foresee the end was near, and yet I say ‘‘it seems certain,’’ but it would have been just like him, if he had known it, and not spoken of it, for fear of giving pain. . . . I return the Temps with many thanks. It is good—the articles upon him have been much better than newspaper articles in general, and the speeches at the funeral were good. But yet those articles (not the speeches) almost irritate me; they knew but the surface; they hardly knew the mine of pure gold that lay beneath, that mine of gold which will now be worked through eternity. Somehow I cannot help thinking that Mme Mohl will hardly leave Paris again, but I may be quite mistaken. God bless you. yours ever sincerely F. Nightingale Source: Advice for maid at confirmation and first communion, Add Mss 52427 f13-15, almost certainly by Nightingale

March 1877 Almighty and merciful Father, grant that this day (the time of my confirmation, communion) may be the beginning of a new life to me,

110 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions that I may not forget the good lessons I have learnt, to be thoughtful and not hasty, to be as kind to all as if they were Jesus Christ himself, to be in submission to all that are in any authority over me, remembering that to resist them in anything that is right is resisting God, to prefer others in honour, to be as glad that they should be praised or happy as oneself, to listen to what is told me, to be modest in every look and word, to have no jealousy or dislike, especially not against any who have offended me if any such there be, remembering that if I love not my neighbour I am a murderer in my heart3 and even that if I love not my enemy or anyone that I dislike or that has done me hurt I am a murderer in my heart, to do everything in my daily work in God’s name and particularly my housemaid’s or cook’s work as Christ would have done it and did do it when He was here as a village workman, to do God divine service ever y day and not only at church, thinking of Him in everything as the handmaid of the Lord4 and doing ever ything as Christ would have it done, making it my Father’s business5 as He did and commending my mind and spirit,6 my whole life into my Father’s hands as He did. Grant me to renew these resolutions this day and that they may be a guide and help to me through life and at last bring me home to Thine everlasting kingdom, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. A prayer to be used particularly before ever y communion, as a reminder of the resolutions I made at my first communion. ‘‘You have taken pains and given thought to your preparation. It will be well for you to write out a prayer for your own use. God grant you grace to fulfill all that you have learnt.’’ W.H.F[remantle]. Editor: The following note properly belongs with others in Spiritual Journey, but was discovered too late for inclusion there; it was written on the back of a note on nursing for the secretar y of the Nightingale Fund Council (Nightingale was presumably re-using paper). ‘‘Impression’’ was a term she used to denote an experience less precise than one indicated ‘‘voice.’’ The impression evidently occurred at the time of the death of George Verney, son of Harry Verney, but relates also to Nightingale’s reflections on the sixtieth anniversary of her own conversion experi3 4 5 6

An allusion to 1 John 3:15. An allusion to Luke 1:38. An allusion to Luke 2:49. An allusion to Luke 23:46.

Notes and Letters on Spirituality / 111

ence. That itself was recounted only very late in life, in a letter to Maude Verney the previous year, in which Nightingale stated that she wished she had ‘‘an American book which converted me in 1836—alas! that I should so little have lived up to my conversion—The Corner-stone. There was such a striking chapter: Pharisees, Peter and Judas even, all live now.’’7 No exact date is available for the ‘‘conversion’’ experience, while Nightingale’s ‘‘call to service’’ is precisely dated, 7 Febr uary 1837, and referred to in many notes. Source: Note on death of treasurer and loss of matron of St Thomas’ Hospital, London Metropolitan Archives H1/ST/NC1/90

27 Februar y 1890 To lose treasurer and matron at once, both so favourable to us, and begin again with two new strangers. What a good thing it is that God is never new, always the same! Or rather always new in love. . . . The penitent thief saw the Lord in the degraded dying criminal on the cross. Do I see Him in our little crosses? Have I any of that thief’s faith? Source: Note, Add Mss 47727 f123

18-19 June 1896 G. Verney’s death Impression: Love is stronger than death, therefore give us love. 20-21 June 1896 Father to me Thou art and mother dear, And brother too, kind husband of my heart. Presence of God, as if there were none but Him and I in the world.8 [Charles] Gordon. Brother Lawrence.9

7 By Jacob Abbott. Letter 10 December 1895, Add Mss 68888 ff137-38. 8 After quoting the two lines from Andromache’s speech on the death of her husband Hector (Iliad VI.429), John Keble (in the entry for the Monday before Easter in Christian Year) went on with a Christian sentiment: Thou art as much His care, as if than thee Nor man nor angel lived upon this earth. 9 Brother Lawrence (c1605-91), former soldier, Carmelite monk who worked in the kitchen, recommended meditative prayer imagining the presence of God.

112 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 23 June 1896 Da quod jubes et jube quod vis [Command what you will and give what you command].10 Stronger His love than death or hell. Its riches are unspeakable.11 Source: Undated note, Add Mss 45845 f185

Devotion may even prevent religion. To be like Jesus Christ our end and aim. Irreligion is to be so in love with one’s own satisfaction that we have no other end in religion but ourselves. We are to have as the end of all our actions the imitation of Jesus Christ, our Master, who began, continued and ended his life in love of the cross alone. Source: Note, Add Mss 45845 f1

Crede ut intelligas [Believe in order to understand12], rather intelligo ut credas [Understand in order to believe]: the faith which tells you that the greatest faithlessness is to refuse to inquire. The end of Lecky’s book13 is striking. If we could suppose all the upper classes denying themselves for the sake of the lower for one generation only, then the reign of Christ might begin in a sense which Christianity has never yet known. Grace abounding. Source: Undated note, Add Mss 47765 ff1-2

[1900] Lord’s Prayer. Mr Jowett. These few words have probably had a greater influence on the world than all the writings of theologians put together. Docology [doxology], probably a later edition. Truth does not descend from heaven, like a stone dropped out of another world, about the origin of which men would vainly dispute, but is the good word, the good thought, the good action that is in the heart of ever y man. ‘‘The word is ver y nigh, etc.’’ And the divine teacher does not present novelties to mankind—rather he tells them what they all know or ought to know: he draws out what is latent in them; he finds a witness to his teaching in their hearts and consciences. Any vital sense of a Christian virtue is of infinitely more value than the latest discoveries refuting the Pentateuch. They may help or free 10 11 12 13

Augustine, Confessions X.29. From the hymn by Charles Wesley, ‘‘O Love Divine.’’ A medieval axiom from Augustine to Anselm. Unidentified, probably a history by W.E.H. Lecky.

Notes and Letters on Spirituality / 113

er ror but they will not guide us into truth when that is all over. The work of fashioning the Christian life has to begin for the student or scholar just as much as for the poor and ignorant, and we shall find our souls poor and wasted if in the process of inquiry and criticism we have left behind us the faith in Christ and in goodness. Can we imagine our Lord raising such a question as ‘‘Who wrote the Lord’s Prayer?’’ Nay, does not Christ repeatedly call upon us to identify his teaching with that of the prophets and ancient teachers: ‘‘Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me.’’ The words are like the words of children addressed to the Father who is listening to them and recognizes them. They neither contain nor imply any statement of doctrine. ‘‘Our Father.’’ We mean that He loves us, that He educates us for all mankind (nurses), that He provides laws for us, that He recognizes like the prodigal. We mean that He knows what is for our good far better than we know ourselves and is able (and loves) to do for us above all that we can ask or think. We mean that in His hands we are children, whose work and pleasure is to do His will, whose duty is to trust in Him in all the accidents of their lives. We destroy religion if we set up faith against universal experiences. He of whom Christ says ‘‘are not two sparrows’’ and ‘‘the very hairs on your head’’ is also the universal law, the mind or reason which contains all laws, as much above the world of which he is the Author as our souls are above our bodies. In prayer we desire to approach that which is highest in the world with that which is highest in His. The beginning of true prayer, to second the divine will.

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Letters and Diaries from Egypt

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Letters and Diaries from Egypt

Editor’s Introduction

F

lorence Nightingale’s journey to Egypt (November 1849-April 1850) took place at a decisive time in her life. It was framed, so to speak, by her searching for and her finding a place in life. Long and painful years of search for a meaningful active life followed her first ‘‘call to service’’ in 1837. Her efforts to escape a conventional life were constantly frustrated by her family’s expectations, while the appeal of a life of service to the afflicted became ever more pressing. In 1846, through Christian von Bunsen, Prussian ambassador to England and renowned Egyptologist, she had heard of the Institution for Deaconesses with its hospital and school, established by Pastor Theodor Fliedner in Kaiserswerth am Rhein; she read its reports and planned to visit Kaiserswerth. In the winter of 1847-48 she spent six months in Rome during which she became acquainted with the convent of the Dames du Sacré-Coeur attached to the church of Trinità de’ Monti; she was especially impressed by the sisters’ work at a school for girls and at an orphanage. On her way to Egypt she met sisters of St-Vincent-de-Paul who gave her an introduction to the sisters (in Alexandria); she wrote that she ‘‘spent a great deal of time with them in their beautiful schools and Miséricorde [in Alexandria]. There are only nineteen of them, but they seem to do the work of ninety’’ (Letter 8 below). After her travels in Egypt and Greece, Nightingale made her way to Berlin and Hamburg, where she visited hospitals and other similar institutions, and finally to Kaiserswerth at the end of July 1850. She stayed two weeks at the institution and ‘‘returned home more than ever resolved to consecrate her life to the service of the sick and sor-

/ 117

118 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions rowful.’’1 She paid a second visit to Kaiserswerth in 1851. She visited hospitals in Ireland in 1852, and in Paris in 1853. Thus the journey to Egypt was framed, on the one hand, by intimations of service to the sick and, on the other hand, by experiences with institutions for the sick, both about to result in her entering the hospital on Harley Street as superintendent in July of 1853 and her leading a party of nurses to Scutari and the war-torn Crimea in November 1854. The twenty-nine-year-old Nightingale travelled to Egypt with Selina (referred to as Σ) and Charles Bracebridge (Mr B.), who had already taken her to Italy in 1847 and were to accompany her to the Crimea in 1854. Both were close friends of the Nightingale family and enthusiastic travellers. Before leaving for Egypt Nightingale met with ‘‘the Bunsens to receive the dernier mot [last word] on Egyptology’’ (1:84); she collected and studied works on Egyptian history and religion (Letter 1 and the diaries indicate the sources used). She made the practical preparations so that the party was ready to leave England on 1 October 1849. It is important to keep in mind that this trip to Egypt predated the mature study of Egyptian antiquities as well as the era of modern tourism; people and animals were living among ruins, monuments and in temples. Few Europeans, besides archeologists and soldiers, had travelled along the Nile. Visitors like Nightingale’s party were a rare curiosity to the Egyptians who wondered why Upper Egypt was of any interest to them, especially to a white woman; the travellers were themselves stunned at the discovery of a different humanity, of different customs and beliefs. At times Nightingale was not quite able to hide a sense of astonishment that could border on disconcertedness, even offence; she could not always avoid a tone of (British) superiority; her Victorian sense of propriety was often confused by what she saw; here and there her prejudices came through: on modern Egyptians (like ‘‘reptiles’’ and ‘‘beasts’’), on Arabs, Nubians (‘‘like animals’’), Indians (meaning Englishmen going to India), Copts, Jesuits. Many things shocked her. She had to make a considerable effort to understand alien life and was quick to talk about degradation and debasement: how could one be Egyptian? how could one tolerate so much dirt and dust? how could one live in a mud and straw house? how could one be a Muslim (Muhammadan)? How could women live such unworthy lives? 1 E.T. Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale 1:93.

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But those negative impressions are bound to mislead us on Nightingale’s deeper feelings. The letters increasingly witness her warming to Egyptian life, people and customs. ‘‘Egypt is beginning to speak a language to me’’ (Letter 31). She was eager to learn more about life in villages, to see more of the daily life and she was more and more able to perceive the dignity of people living in poverty. She even came to value the contrast with England and never ceased to admire the Egyptian light, sun and colours as well as the splendid Nile; for all those aspects of life she made generous use of superlatives; she devoted her most acute sense of observation and interpretation to describing Egypt’s breathtaking monuments. The letters make it clear that Nightingale’s interests went both to Egypt’s antiquities and to its religious expressions, past and present. Her appreciation of Egyptian monuments was channelled by her knowledge of Greek art and mythology, to which she regularly appealed; Greek culture and her familiarity with it served as point of reference to enter Egyptian culture. The religious facts expressed on the monuments constantly fed her reflections, while their comparison with contemporar y phenomena left her rather nostalgic. Furthermore, the letters contain many themes that were to be developed in later works. For example, she regularly expresses sharp criticisms of received Christian representations; despite her mystical tendencies, she favours active life over contemplation (‘‘Politics are to me the most real incarnation of religion’’ Letter 7); she sees the will of God embodied in immutable laws; she believes evil to be a necessary part of God’s plan, His ‘‘left hand, as the good is His right’’ (Letter 31); she downplays the prayer of demand. Egypt’s past was for Nightingale an invitation to deepen her own faith (‘‘I never understood the Bible till I came to Egypt’’ Letter 31) and to reassess her own religious views (‘‘One wonders that people come back from Egypt and live lives as they did before’’ Letter 26). She is constantly aware of the wealth of Egypt’s religious past (‘‘Egypt, where religion was the basis of everything’’ Letter 43). The journey to Egypt was neither planned as a religious activity nor lived as a pilgrimage. It is all the more astounding, then, that it became the occasion for Nightingale to gain clarity on the direction her life should take and to intensify her dialogue with God. In that respect she seems to have gone through an especially intense experience in Philae during the days she spent there (21-28 January), which she liked to call her ‘‘Holy Week’’ (experience reflected in her long Let-

120 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ter 35), in Abu Simbel and in Thebes. Her diary (entr y of 22 Febr uar y 1850) is explicit: in Thebes ‘‘God spoke to me once again.’’ Similar words are recorded on her way back to Cairo and in the following weeks. Calabria’s edition of the British Library Diar y (see below) is therefore helpful to an understanding of her spiritual evolution at that time and of her hope to reconcile her obligation to her family with her call from God. In his introduction to the Letters from Egypt,2 A. Sattin describes the political context of Egypt of the time: In 1849, when Florence arrived in Egypt, the country was again suffering from political instability. The relatively settled years of Muhammad Ali were over. Nominally part of the Turkish empire, Egypt had been governed by the autocratic Viceroy since the British had defeated Napoleon’s expedition and opposed the re-establishment of Mameluke rule. Muhammad Ali was a soldier of Albanian descent who was the most likely leader for the Egyptians and his successful, if unscrupulous, disposal of his Mameluke adversaries secured for him the backing of the British, who wished to guarantee a safe passage through Egypt to the Red Sea and India. Muhammad Ali’s later successful campaign against the Turks led to his family being granted the right to hereditar y rule over Egypt. When Muhammad Ali abdicated in 1848, with his mind failing, he was succeeded by his son Ibrahim. He, however, died within four months of his accession and power passed to his nephew, Abbas, a grandson of Muhammad Ali. He was Viceroy when Florence arrived in Egypt and in several letters she expressed her disgust at the cruel and avaricious way he exercised his power—she was unimpressed with many aspects of Egyptian politics which, in her view, consisted of an unhealthy mix of bastinado and hareem intrigue. She pointed to Said, another son of Muhammad Ali and heir to the throne, as a man of greater compassion and integrity, and she visited his wife on her last day in Egypt. Subsequent events showed that she was accurate in her opinion, for Abbas was murdered by his own slaves in 1854 and Said, who ruled for nine years, proved to be a strong and enlightened leader.

The journey up and down the Nile took place in a dahabieh, a large sailboat with inside cabins, rented in Cairo; it could be rowed or pulled up the river in windless weather or to pass rapids. It offered only narrow quarters for a person used to a protected life as Nightin2 Anthony Sattin, ed., Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-1850 16.

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gale was. Beside the crew and helpers along the river, other companions limited her privacy: the Bracebridges, an Egyptian attendant (her efreet or demon, as she calls him) and her maid, Trautwein, called Traut (consistently spelled Trout by Nightingale), who is seldom mentioned in the letters but who doubtless was a continual presence during the journey. The letters are edited here on the basis of five sources: – Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017. Handwritten, mainly by Nightingale. Its content goes from 27 November 1849 to 6 April 1850. – Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9018. Handwritten, mainly copied by Selina Bracebridge but also by Nightingale and other hands. It was produced as a clean copy after the journey to Egypt, upon return to England. Its content covers the period from 19 November 1849 to 2 May 1850. Some passages were copied twice. – Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9019. Handwritten by Nightingale. Its content covers the period from 4 November 1849 to 24 November 1849, therefore prior to arrival in Cairo. – Add Mss 45846. Contains Nightingale’s diar y from 1 Januar y to 23 August 1850. Hereafter ‘‘British Library Diar y.’’ – Nightingale’s diar y from 1 November 1849 to 15 July 1850. Recovered in 2000 and kept at Claydon House. Hereafter ‘‘Claydon Diary.’’ The letters, in part, were first printed soon after the journey, with her sister as editor. Nightingale herself reviewed and corrected the copy: – Parthenope Nightingale, ed. Letters from Egypt. For private circulation only. London 1854. 334 pages. It substantially follows Ms 9017 and 9018 but omits 9019; it contains about 75 percent of the entire material. Hereafter ‘‘1854 ed.’’ There is an excellent 1987 edition (223 pages) of a selection of letters: – Anthony Sattin, ed. Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-1850. It contains about 60 percent of the material. It has a rich and useful introduction, appendices on gods, kings and characters mentioned in the letters, a glossary and bibliography. The visual presentation with its reproductions of paintings and lithographs is of high quality, graphically handsome and helpful in making understandable the fascination of the travellers. While some minor errors of transcription are found in the text, Sattin’s selection remains eminently valid. What in his edition is left out is justified by the author as follows: ‘‘I have included all the letters from the original edition [1854], but I have edited some of the longer passages where Florence discusses philosophical and theosophical issues. A portentous

122 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ‘meditation’ entitled ‘Vision of Temples,’ which was inserted at the end of the final letter, has also been omitted’’ (9). Finally we have now: – Michael D. Calabria. Florence Nightingale in Egypt and Greece: Her Diary and ‘‘Visions.’’ 1997. Here are found: British Library Diar y (Add Mss 45846); the ‘‘Vision of Temples’’ left out by Sattin; and an allegorical essay titled by Calabria ‘‘A Greek Vision.’’ Calabria’s commentaries are particularly helpful to understand the characters and the context; he also offers precise information on the Egyptological sites mentioned in Nightingale’s Diar y; hence I refer the reader to Calabria’s explanations for details on most monuments. The present edition republishes all the letters printed in the 1854 edition, numbered and grouped by the editor, with the letters and parts of letters that were omitted from that edition and diary entries interspersed. The 1854 edition was printed and distributed at the instigation of Nightingale’s sister Parthenope, to Nightingale’s ‘‘dismay,‘‘ according to Calabria (8). But it seems Nightingale did acquiesce although she objected to some of the editing.3 See also the comments by novelist Elizabeth C. Gaskell, family friend and visitor to Lea Hurst during the editing process.4 Letters and parts of letters omitted by the 1854 edition are incorporated here where they seem most likely to belong. Whole letters are identified in the heading as not being in the 1854 edition. Passages that were dropped are indicated with < > for those from Ms 9017 (in Nightingale’s hand) and > and > for Mss 9018 and 9019 respectively (largely copies). Variants between these manuscripts and the 1854 edition are shown by footnotes. Many people were involved in the transcription and editing apart from Parthenope Nightingale 3 See letters April 1854 and summer 1854, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 8994/100 and pp 493-94 below. 4 A witness to the elaboration of the letters is found in the novelist Elizabeth C. Gaskell, family friend and visitor to Lea Hurst. See The Letters of Mrs Gaskell 11 October 1854, #211, 307: ‘‘ . . . I have been listening to her letters from Egypt this morning, yet not attending to them, I was all along so anxious to remember enough out of them to tell you [Katie Winkworth] and Emily [Shaen] expressions, thoughts, and you know I don’t care for travels—I never cared for Egypt much before, but at last I heard they were to be printed and I might have a copy, only ‘not to circulate—not to be talked about. . . . ’ ’’ 27 October 1854, #217, 316-21: ‘‘ . . . The Egyptian letters are to be printed, only not some bits, which I thought specially beautiful and touching, and telling of individual character.’’

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(their names are found here and there in the manuscripts); hence it is not clear who was responsible for particular deletions and alterations. Some passages were obviously omitted simply because they identified people met on the trip, dealt with mundane arrangements or sent messages to people back in England. Discussions relating to European events or people were largely omitted. Some of the more academic discussions of Egypt, especially those reviewing sources, were omitted. More intriguing are the omitted passages with controversial material, notably comparisons between Judaism and Christianity with the ancient Egyptian religion (see especially pp 226-28, 245, 264-65, 332-33, 348, 359, 370 and 413 below). Briefer passages with favourable remarks on Roman Catholicism (405) and negative on the Church of England (411) were also omitted. Spellings of names and places have been modernized and made to conform to today’s practice. A ‘‘List of Emendations’’ is provided at the end of the Letters. I have decided to follow recent scholarship for the spelling of ‘‘Ramesses’’ instead of the traditional Ramses and Rameses. The chronology of Egyptian history, a particularly vexing problem, has been revisited several times since the mid-eighteenth century; the dates commonly agreed today, in contrast with Nightingale’s received ones, appear in [ ] or in a footnote. A ‘‘Brief Chronology of Ancient Egypt’’ is given at the end of the Letters. The letters have been grouped as follows: Letters 1-7 En route for Egypt Letters 8-12 Alexandria and Cairo Letters 13-31 Sailing Southwards Letters 32-47 Sailing Northwards Letters 48-51 Cairo and Surroundings Letters 52-54 Alexandria and Off Letter 55 Vision of Temples

En route for Egypt Ms 9019 contains material dealing with Nightingale’s preparations prior to the Egypt journey and letters written on her way between London and Cairo from 4 November on. Ff1-2 present lists of practical reminders concerning clothes to take or purchase (hat, cap, shawl, gown, stockings, skirts, boots . . . ), accessories (dingy or little boat to land with, candles, oil lamp, essence of lavender, camphor, mattress,

124 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions sheets, blankets, medicines, soap, oil for bites . . . ), readings: Wilkinson on ancient Egyptian; Sharpe’s Histor y of Egypt; McCracken on Old Jewr y; Bunsen’s book and Lane’s two volumes on modern Egyptians; Gliddon’s two volumes; Moore on Epicureanism; Herodotus; Ewald’s biblical studies;5 F. Nightingale’s Bible and prayer book . . . ); preparation (learn the names of the kings, things to buy in Cairo, remember to make bargain with men to go on at night . . . ).

5 See Bibliography for details of those works and works used by Nightingale during the journey. ‘‘McCracken’’ does not refer to a book but to an acquaintance, mentioned in Letter 21 below. ‘‘Moore’’ could not be further identified. Nightingale took along two of Gliddon’s three volumes, but it is unclear which ones. Nightingale referred, sometimes critically, to some of those books in a letter written 8 December 1858 apparently to Louisa Ashburton (a family friend and wife of the wealthy 2nd Baron Ashburton), Add Mss 45797 ff 45-57: I sent last night to Bath Hospital a box directed to you containing Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, 5 volumes, [illeg] 1 vol. 1, Bunsen’s first three volumes in German, first two volumes in English; Rawlinson’s Herodotus, 1858, vol. 2. I send today (to Bath Hospital) a Herodotus for Lord Ashburton, in case he should not have one with him (it belongs to Mr Clough, who is known to Lord Ashburton), also Sale’s Horace for you. I would recommend Kingsley’s Hypatia, which I detest, and Miss Martineau’s Eastern Life: Past and Present, which I don’t detest only because I don’t object to misinforming myself. Champollion I would have (as per advertisement enclosed), also the fourth and fifth volumes of Bunsen as per advertisement also (out last year only), Brugsch’s Map of Ancient Egypt as per advertisement also and certainly the two last of the three Gliddons, vide M.S. memorandum enclosed. All these books I have on hand and found very useful (but Mother could not find them at Embley, when I sent down). Also I found it useful having both German and English editions of Bunsen, which are different. And therefore I have sent both. But if you are too loaded, leave behind one of these. I should have ordered the books (recommended above) for you, but thought your maid might be coming as you mentioned. I sent into the city for two, but they have not come. Please to return all the old books to my father, when you come home; he values them on account of me. God bless you, my dearest. ever yours

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 125 Source: Letter 1, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9019/3 (not in 1854 ed.) Postmarked Tonnerre (Yonne, southeast of Paris) Addressed to her mother at Great Malvern, Worcestershire

[Sunday] 4 November [1849] My dearest people We had the most lovely morning for our passage to Boulogne, a beautiful ‘‘opal morn,’’6 with nothing like a wave. We could not get our baggage through the Custom house for the next train, though we got to Boulogne before 12 o’clock, but we were rather glad of this as Σ was not well; she had a rest while Mr B. and I went and took a walk. The new church is almost finished (Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer) and will be a magnificent Pharos,7 to be seen all round. Its great white dome seemed to me to be singularly without support, but it is a fine object; round the top are inscribed the several titles of Notre Dame with an ora pro nobis [pray for us] under each, thus offering up perpetual prayer; even when men are silent, the stones are not. The crypts underneath are almost as large as the catacombs and very interesting. We groped through them, painted all in large black and white patterns. We could not get farther than Amiens that night, which we reached at 10 o’clock. As far as I could see of the country, it was bleak and desert as though desert itself, with large pools of water in which the full moon, just risen, shone red in patches across the desert. We were off again from Amiens at 6 o’clock and in Paris by 9 o’clock. The gay little gem of a city looked as inviting as ever and I was sorry not to stay in it very [long]. But as we had been so hindered and lost two days, we were obliged to leave it the same afternoon (by the 1:30 train, which brought us in here at 7). So we gave up all our shopping at Paris and devoted ourselves instead to the bulls8 at the Louvre, 6 Probably a reference to a Celtic poem, ‘‘Reullura,’’ by Thomas Campbell. 7 An allusion to the famous ‘‘lighthouse’’ built by Ptolemy I in Alexandria in 283 bce but destroyed by an earthquake in 1303 ce. 8 The bulls are Assyrian sculptures of the reign of Sargon II (721- 705 bce), taken to the Louvre from the Iraqi city of Khorsabad (ancient Dur-Sharrukîn). They used to ornate the throne hall of the royal palace. The Louvre has the following pieces, to which Nightingale seems to be referring: ‘‘Hero Holding a Lion’’ (Ancient Orient 19861a); ‘‘Hero Overpowering a Lion’’ (AO 19862b); and possibly also ‘‘Hero Overpowering a Lion and Androcephalous Bull with Wings’’ (AO 19859 and 19861), ‘‘Winged Genius’’ (AO 19865) standing along winged androcephalous bulls, as well as ‘‘Winged Bulls’’ with human heads (AO 19857) guarding the gates of the palace.

126 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions which we were so anxious to see again and to compare with the Egyptian. I was ten times more str uck with them than I was the first time. Certainly we have nothing like them in the British Museum: the great man squeezing the lion I discovered new excellencies in. The lion is evidently setting its claws into him, it is very angr y and clenching its teeth. But the man holds it fast and his expression of perfect peace is meant, I suppose, for the type of endurance. I wish we had him. I think to study such a piece of art ever y day for a week would infuse some of the spirit of it into our lives. In one hand he holds an instrument apparently to chastise the lion which, I suppose, is meant to represent rebellious nature. The other man, the pair to this one (they are about four feet high) has apparently gone still farther; the lion is quiet, he is now sulky, the first was struggling and violent; but the man holds him firm as before, still with the same expression of grace in strength, perfect repose. The first is asceticism, no doubt, still str uggling with the world; the second is the Overcomer, he hath overcome the world.9 The second is remarkable from having no ears, and barefoot. He can no longer even hear the disturbing voices; he can no longer be travel-stained by the dust he picks up; he needs no sandals to protect him from the dirt. Nothing I have ever seen has struck me so much as these sublime visions of an earlier world after an Overcomer. It is true, there is nothing Christian about them, they are simply material—it is the overcoming of material hindrances—but they are sublime. The gods are also evidently the embodiment of material power; they bear the bucket to represent water, the cone to represent fire, wings (and in some cases the bird’s head and beak) to represent The ‘‘Hero’’ might have been inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh. Identification and information were provided by Lise Feit. The identity of the bulls is confirmed by the Claydon Diary, entr y of 3 November, and by the letter of 1 November 1847 written en route to Italy: see Mary Keele, Florence Nightingale in Rome, Letter 3 pp 8-10. Finally, in a letter to her sister written from Paris, 1 July [1853] (Wellcome, Claydon copy Ms 8994/29) Nightingale states: ‘‘Botta [Paul-Emile Botta (1802-70), French archeologist, main archeologist of Niniveh] gave Layard [Austen Henr y Layard (1817-92), first met in Rome, then in Paris in 1853, involved in the archeology of Niniveh] the best thing we have in the British Museum, the horse’s head. Otherwise, Layard is quite aware that Botta’s things here, which come from Khorsabad, are far better (belonging to the best time of Assyrian art) than what we have, which came from Roseyunjik. The real Niniveh, Khorsabad was a country (palace of the kings).’’ 9 An allusion to John 16:33.

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air, and feet to represent the earth. They are all material. But the great wings are quite Ezekiel-like. The bulls (we have nothing like them) are wonder ful. The mouth somewhat good and weak, redeemed by the nose, full of character. The wings to represent agility, the gigantic size forming [?] the beard perhaps human experience. It is a fine type of a material god. They are probably Nebuchadnezzar divinized, as the Jewish authors represented Nebuchadnezzar as grazing for his sins. It is hoped that they, in their desire to turn the Jewish nation from idolatry, may have seized upon the very legacy under which the Assyrians deified him, to turn him into ridicule and make him contemptible in the eyes of the Jews. If so, it was very acute of them and it struck me as likely because these noble bulls are so worshipable, even to us. There are many processions and sacrifices not interesting to me. But that very god of the four elements appears on Sesostris’ obelisk (probably borrowed from Egypt this Assyrian one). We had to hurry through the halls to the bulls, not having a moment to spare, grieved not to see the Spanish galler y, but we would not look at anything else. Paris looks comfortable again, but oh the bother at the railways: punctuality put under the safeguard of a paternal government. How much better to let people be unpunctual and lose their train if they choose. But you are to be trained to your own good by the government, you are locked up in a pen for half an hour with a turnkey to prevent you jumping through the windows or breaking the glass, then let out one by one like sheep to be a sheep shearing. We travel second class as ever ybody here does; they are as comfortable as our first class. And we see the world. The new ministry10 is essentially conservative, much more so than the last which was only half and half. They are none of them men of any reputation and it is said that the President is aiming at absolute power. The second of November being the day of their installation, it was said that ‘‘on les installa [illeg]’’ his mouth and it is just, I believe. Everybody is furious about the Roman expedition,11 10 The new ministry: the Second Republic lasted from 1848 to 1851 with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as President; he dissolved the Second Republic in December 1851 and proclaimed himself ‘‘Emperor of the French’’ as Napoleon III. 11 The Roman expedition: French military inter vention in 1848-49 to dislodge the republican regime installed in the church states and to restore Pope Pius IX.

128 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions and nobody can see the way out of it. M Thiers’s12 [?] object was to bring the pope back and the pope says he won’t come back till they are gone. What is to be done? You cannot withdraw with honour. The last ministr y was at their wits’ ends about it and this one, which is still more high conservative, is still more so. People talk of the duc d’Aumale13 as of another Henri V who has no [?] children with the [whole of] Paris after him. But it is said the President plans to have first try. Nobody cares a rush [?] about him. The Chamber consists of garçons et commères [boys and gossips], but all conservative. Commerce is taking off, taxes horrible, worse than in Louis-Philippe’s time and in Louis-Philippe’s time worse than in Charles X’s. I have no time, dearest people, to reread my letter. Source: Claydon Diary

1 November 1849 London 1:30 p.m.-Folkstone (by rail) 5:30 p.m. 2 November 1849 Folkstone 9:30 a.m.-Boulogne 11:50 a.m. (steamer). Went to the crypt of Notre-Dame. p.m. Boulogne 5:00 p.m.-Amiens (rail) 9:30 p.m. 3 November 1849 Amiens 6:00 a.m.-Paris (rail) 9:00 a.m. Niniveh bulls at the Louvre. Giants, types of asceticism. Travelled with four soeurs de St-Vincentde-Paul. Paris 1:30 p.m.-Tonnerre (rail) 6:30 p.m. 4 November 1848 Un-Presbyterian occupation of saving Mr B. the seeing his ladies dressed in castor oil. Tonnerre (diligence) 7:00 p.m. Exceedingly moonlight third quarter.

12 Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), French historian and statesman, representative of the conservative branch under the Second Republic. 13 Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale (1822-97), French general and historian, fourth son of Louis-Philippe.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 129 Source: Letter 2, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9019/4-5 (not in 1854 ed.)

In the Lyons boat [Wednesday] 7 November 1849

My dearest people I had not time to write from Lyons as I wanted to have a good day at the Hôtel-Dieu [hospital] which is, as you know, the model establishment of the world. It is served by two hundred sisters and dates from 600 ce. Above 1200 years of priority. It gives it almost the dignity of a little empire. Venice herself can hardly say as much. And certainly I never saw anything so perfect as the government and the ministry thereof, as far as I could judge. It is quite a little principality and the expenses are actually less than the funds. Please, tell Mr Coventry14 with my blessing that we are not likely to have any dealings with him again in a hurry. As regularly as we send to the washerwoman to wash us up, at each town I run to the watchmaker to do up my watch. We were hardly out of London before it stopped. At Paris and Lyons both, it has been set to rights for two paralytic strokes. One thing I should like to have seen at Lyons, of which I spied out the affiche: a ‘‘grande représentation religieuse,’’ to which the attention of ‘‘pères de famille’’ was invited, in which tableaux ‘‘from the Passion of Notre Seigneur were represented by M—prestidigitateur’’ [conjurer]! These ‘‘inspirations grandioses’’ [grand inspirations] to be ‘‘given (by him) with a vérité and an art’’ ‘‘qui en rehaussent encore le mérite’’ [which increase its merit], N.B., of la Passion! Then followed a list of the subjects: ‘‘Jésus trahi par Judas,’’ ‘‘Jésus devant Pilate’’ [Jesus betrayed by Judas, Jesus before Pilatus], etc. ‘‘Pour alterner le spectacle, on donnera des représentations de magie blanche et noire; [de] plus pour varier le charme de cette chaste soirée, il y aura tombola ou loterie.’’ ‘‘Il y aura des prix pour tout le monde. Grande distribution de bonbons [To give variety to the entertainment, representations of white and black magic will be offered; moreover, to var y the appeal of this innocent evening show, there will be tombola or lotter y. There will be prizes for everyone. Large giving out of candy].’’ De Falloux15 is gone to Nice ill, of consumption or of the Roman expedition, I can’t say.

14 Apparently a watchmaker. 15 Frédéric Count de Falloux (1811-86), French statesman, one of the main representatives of liberal Catholicism; he was responsible for the 1850 law that granted the Catholic Church greater control of education in the countr y.

130 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Claydon Diary

5 November 1849 Dijon 7:30 a.m.-Châlon (rail) 8:00 a.m.—Lyon 10:15 a.m. (steamboat) 6:30 p.m. 6 November 1849 Lyon: Hôtel-Dieu morning and afternoon and benediction in their church at 6:00 p.m.; all the soeurs there. 7 November 1849 Hôtel-Dieu at 7:00 a.m. Salle Clinique: 200 soeurs, 1250 patients; followed the visit in the Salle Clinique with Soeur Léla, pharmacie. Lyon 11:00 a.m.-Valence (steamer) 6:00 p.m. Source: Letter 3, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9019/4-6 (not in 1854 ed.)

Arles Friday 9 November 1849 Our last night in Christian lands. We are laying in a store of room, looking at our large space, our fire, our looking glasses, our tables and tubs, that we may take away a provision of Christian comfort for the many months we shall have none. Tomorrow we go to Marseilles and embark directly, the cholera being very bad there. This was a tribute we paid to our anxious friends. We had two nice easy days, Wednesday and Thursday, by the boat down from Lyons to Avignon, cold but sunny, sleeping at Valence because of the morning fogs and dark. We reached Avignon on Thursday at 2 o’clock; Σ and I ran up as hard as we could to the Couvent de la Miséricorde to see our beloved crucifix (of which I have the cast). We dined at Avignon and came on by rail to Arles the same night, only an hour, that we might have a whole rest day here today to wash us up, go on to Marseilles tomorrow morning, [in] time to ship us off at 12 noon. I am so glad to have seen that crucifix. You know the story of it. It is in ivory. Jean Guillermin,16 of whom no other works are known, made it in one night as a bribe to the Couvent de la Miséricorde, which from time immemorial has had the privilege of asking the grâce of a supplicié [condemned] yearly; [he made it] to save his Khnumew from death, in the sixteenth century. The convent is an establishment of aliénés [mental patients], kept by the sisters of St-Charles. (Mariette’s17 16 Jean-Baptiste Guillermin (1622-99), French ivory sculptor. 17 Mariette was Nightingale’s maid who travelled with her in France and Italy in 1847-48.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 131

cousin is a soeur de Saint-Charles.) The convent has been offered since appreciable sums for it and has constantly refused them. I believe there to be nothing like it in the world. It is an ivory crucifix about two feet long. But the curious part of it is that, while the right side of the face is in mortal agony, the cheek drawn and the eye almost extinguished in death, the other side is that of a God triumphing over death or rather resigned to die, but lifting up his soul to life, strong in this living strength, sure that he will overcome, that he will not sink nor murmur. He seems to be breathing out his whole soul for men to God. It is the Overcomer, but not as in the Egyptian sense, by material force, hardening himself against the enemy and beating it down till he has subdued it. That is, as it were, conquering it from without, a species of conquest which must always remain imperfect; this is going through it, himself making it his own, as it were, making it a friend, out of a destroyer into a comforter, so that the ‘‘power of death’’18 shall become the ‘‘spirit sent by the Father.’’19 This is the Christian view of endurance, of overcoming: overcoming from within by ‘‘subduing it unto himself’’ and how much more successful and complete; this takes away the sting, [while] the other only conquers it. This seems to me to be the difference between this sublime crucifix, the Christian bravery and the noble Egyptian, the first material idea of the same. The extraordinar y part of the art of the crucifix is the marked difference between the two sides of the face. The human and the divine does not injure the full front in its effect in the least. The mouth is sublime; it is the last expiring cry of the spirit laying aside forever its necessity to cry and strive, to live without effort in future. The nun who showed us was obliged to go to attend one of her mad patients (as there are but fifteen sisters to two hundred thirty patients) so that we could not stay so long as we should have liked. We came on to Arles by rail. Really the paternal government takes such care of us, I’ll not be satisfied till we’re had up to the Ministère de l’Intérieur to teach us to pack our bags. Every man’s luggage is numbered and he is not allowed to come out of his pen till his baggage is called. We shall soon have our number pasted on our backs as well as on our boxes; I wonder it is not done already.

18 An allusion to Heb 2:14. 19 An allusion to John 16:7-15.

132 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Claydon Diary

8 November 1849 Valence 7:00 a.m.-Avignon 2:00 p.m. (steamer). Ivory cr ucifix at the Couvent de la Miséricorde (des Aliénés); soeurs de St-Charles. Contrast between this type of Christian endurance and Egyptian. Avignon 6:30 p.m.-Arles (rail) 7:25 p.m.. 9 November 1849 Arles: amphitheatre, Notre-Dame-des-Grâces, theatre. Source: Letter 4, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9019/6 (not in 1854 ed.) Postmarked Marseilles 13 November 1849 but written on 10 or 11 November, addressed to her sister Parthenope

[Tuesday] 13 November 1849 Today we have been cleaning ourselves, repacking ourselves for the voyage, as you can’t get anything up out of the hold, and sauntering about Arles, which looked gold against the blue sky, and sunning ourselves. Tomorrow I shall get my letters from you, dear people, at Marseilles and embark. If I can write from Malta I will. But we shall be in quarantine there, so I don’t expect it. Keep my little steel ‘‘pus’’ [purse?] safe, with [illeg] hawthorn in it, that I had on my châtelaine, and don’t let her see it, as I promised her that I would take it with me. I hope I have it, however, somewhere. Did I leave my Venetian chain behind? I don’t mind if I did, except that I am short of pencil cases. Pop’s [Parthenope’s] little old one did not come and the one in the Lady’s Companion turns out a sham one. Perhaps I may ask you to send a few of these articles to meet us on our way back from the Nile. But lucky that you made my outfit so splendid as we stopped neither at Paris nor Marseilles. I went at Lyons to the foreign bookseller’s to buy Trautwein [Nightingale’s female servant, usually called Trout] a German Testament. He said: ‘‘Ah! Pour les classiques, Goethe, Schiller, Dictionnaires, etc. nous les tenons, mais’’ [If you ask for classics, Goethe, Schiller, dictionaries, etc. we have them, but] shrugging his shoulders, ‘‘quant aux Testaments et tout ce genre d’ouvrages, nous ne les tenons guère [the Testaments and that kind of works, we seldom have them].’’ Dearest people, I have not a moment to look over a confusion of a letter as it is half past 10. yours ever lovingly F.N. I will explain it when I come home.20 20 Michael D. Calabria, Nightingale 5 n.12, quotes from a letter to her mother written 10 or 11 November from Marseilles: ‘‘I hope I shall come back to be more a comfort to you than ever I have been.’’

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 133 Source: Claydon Diary

10 November 1849 Arles 8:15 a.m.-Marseilles 11:00 a.m. (rail). Shopped and dined in deliquescent haste. Went on board at 4:00 p.m.; mail not arrived. Marseilles 12:00 p.m. Per HM’s mail packet Medina. 650 miles to Malta. 11 November 1849 On board Medina, sighted Corsica before dusk; sunset, a sea of crimson; made Straits of Bonifacio at midnight. Source: Letter 5, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9019/7 (not in 1854 ed.). Apparently addressed to her mother

On board of the Medina, just through the Straits of Bonifacio [Monday] 12 November 1849 My dearest people Here we are with the most wonderful heavenly weather you ever saw, as warm as June, as calm as a lake. Instead of getting off at 2:00 from Marseilles on Saturday, the hour of sailing, our Indian mail which we bring got upset between Calais and Paris, going by a special train which broke down; owing to this delay, which obliged us to wait for it, we were not off till 12 on the night of Saturday. This was provoking as it brought the ends of our twenty-four hours all wrong. The first twenty-four brings you to the Straits [of Bonifacio] between Corsica and Sardinia; the second twenty-four to the coast of Sicily off Marettimo (between which and Marsala our course goes); the third twentyfour to Malta. Now all these will fall in the dark and as there is no moon, we thus lose all the land and shall probably not be able to land at Malta (where we find the quarantine is at an end). However, we have no business to complain of anything with such weather, in November too, the worst month for the Mediterranean. We have on board two Corfiot ladies; Lord and Lady Hamilton Chichester, harmless people; Lord Nugent, entertaining; an Indian bride, the type of her race; another horrid Indian female; some Puseyite clergy, etc.21 Our cabin is chuck-full and we were obliged to take up with what berths we could get. But nobody has been ill, a great comfort which we cannot be thankful enough for. We were glad enough when the lying in Marseilles harbour was over as the water there is so 21 Followers of Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-82), who led the high church movement within the Church of England. Pusey was to accuse B. Jowett of heresy for the latter’s essay in Essays and Reviews. See Theology.

134 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions pestilential: one of our crew who fell overboard while the Medina was lying there, though picked up in less than three minutes, was dead— not drowned but suffocated. No wonder Marseilles is the city of plagues. We hove anchor about 12 when the mail came on board, and were out of sight of land when we came on deck in the morning. At 10 all hands were piped on deck, reviewed and we had ‘‘Divine Service’’ on deck: a very pretty sight with the Mediterranean sky above and sea all round, the sea, the type of restlessness and change (as the Revelations say, ‘‘there shall be no more sea’’22 to symbolize eternity). To see the British thought, man’s thought, which usually reckoned the most variable of all things (not true), preser ving its form of love and devotion amid all this change, was very touching to me. About midday we took an observation and sighted the snowy peaks of Corsica; towards dusk we could see the light off the place where the arch fiend23 was born, near Ajaccio. But I would not go on deck to see the place, which is accursed. The night was so fine that the captain made the Straits of Bonifacio, the first time the Medina has done it since it was on this station: the Admiralty recommendations are, if after dark, to make for the South of Sardinia, between Sardinia and Cape Bon (where the poor Avenger was lost) and so to Malta. However, we passed the Straits in perfect safety. This morning I made haste to get up that I might have the cabin to myself before the other womankind got up, and ran on deck where I saw the bald and rocky coast of Sardinia behind us, just tipped by the morning sun. We shall see the northwest point of Sicily before dark but shall not make it till after sunset, a great pity, as we pass Marettimo so close we could see the people’s faces. Today we are making sail. From Malta to Alexandria you see no land. We go on board the Merlin at Malta six hours after our arrival so that, if night, we shall not be able to land (but we had time to do a little shopping at Marseilles before we set off). We are expected to reach Alexandria on Monday this day week. The passage from Malta to Alexandria is properly ninety-six hours, from Marseilles to Malta seventy-two. Etna is not visible if we make a straight course. I got your letter at Marseilles, dearest people, which rejoiced the cockles of my heart. Σ and I rejoiced that Papa is so warm about 22 A paraphrase of Rev 21:1. 23 Napoleon Bonaparte.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 135

Gully24 and I feel so confident. I am sure it is the very thing for him. I wish Parthenope would try it; I am quite merry about his enthusiastic No to foot- and sitzbaths. Don’t forget to tell me exactly the treatment followed, and tell me about the Marchioness and poor little Tunzelmann.25 I am sorry the Woodstock gloves are left behind, but I am too well provided for. I think Papa in the Roman Catholic gig must be capital. I am sorry not to perfect my religious education among the Maltese knights by seeing St John’s at Malta, which I believe is the most beautiful church in the world. We shall be in a scrimmage at Malta as we have to take up the herd of Indians gone out in the boat of the 29th, who are now waiting at Malta to pounce upon our Merlin. So I thought it best to write now. I am sorry to say that the cry against our friend of Corfu26 is universal. Zalignani calls him ‘‘macellaio’’ [butcher]; you have no idea what is thought of him. My Corfiot countess is so cautious that I cannot get her to say much, but she let fall this morning that if Lord Nugent27 ‘‘had been there, it would never have happened. He would have gone in among them and would have asked Che volete, che domandate? [What do you want, what are you asking for?] And it would all have been settled, whereas all these executions will alienate the hearts of the Ionians forever.’’ They have given themselves to a liberal country, says she, and they expect to be governed liberally. The flogging of the priest is the gravest point of accusation. The Ionians are so attached to their religion that it was holding it up to scorn and wounding them in their tenderest point. The joke is (and a joke kills a man after all more than anything) what do you think of this, flogging of priests and martial law? I call it (Hayman’s) heinous policy. The reward offered for the ringleaders dead or alive is, tout bonnement [quite simply], it is said, a premium upon assassination, and so it is. Then people say it would have been much better with a good steady commander, who has his troops well in hand, to fire among the ringleaders, frighten them and have done with it. That all this execution work afterwards is the worst policy in the world, for people say, ‘‘A whom you have executed is not so guilty as B whom you have let escape.’’ Whereas a man killed in a 24 A reference to Dr James Mandy Gully, at Malvern, who had recommended a water cure. 25 Elise von Tunzelmann, a friend Nightingale helped emigrate to New Zealand. 26 Hayman, a British official in Corfu. 27 Perhaps one of the parliamentary representatives of Aylesbur y.

136 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions scuffle doesn’t make half such bad blood. All this sounds very low and I am afraid we have made a bad job of it. But this is always the upshot of all that radical slang Mr Ward28 used to talk [about]. The Corfiot woman has the saddest countenance I ever saw. But she is terribly cautious, and I can’t make much of her. We had such a sunset last night, the sea was crimson as far as you could see, but it faded very soon, the twilight is short. When you write to the Stanleys,29 say how we admired the epitaph out here under the blue sky of the east, which is our best type of the eternity which he has entered, the omnipresence which he now shares as a spirit must, and give them my best love. Give my love to Fanny Flood’s baby. I do hope you won’t hurry away from Malvern. You heard what Chapman said about not doing the water cure at home, and I know, by my experience, it is impossible, quite. I think Papa is very well off in his heterogeneous company and I am quite sure it will be all thrown away, if he goes home, fancying he can go on there. Source: Claydon Diary

12 November 1849 On board Medina. Sardinia still in sight at sunrise. Starlight night, breeze as soft as summer. Made Marettimo at midnight; outside passage. 13 November 1849 On board Medina. Southwest coast of Sicily in sight all the morning. Agrigentum on her height; glorious sunrise, sea without a ripple, sky without a cloud all day. Malta at midnight.

28 Sir Henr y George Ward (1797-1860), liberal diplomat and colonial governor; he was high commissioner of the Ionian Islands in Corfu 1849-55. 29 Nightingale was a friend of the Stanleys, later especially Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815-81). The reference is to the recent death of his father Edward Stanley (1779-1849), whose epitaph Nightingale copied out: In the faith of Christ here rests from his labours Edward Stanley, 32 years Rector of Alderley, 12 years Bishop of Norwich, buried amidst the mourning of the diocese which he had animated, of the city which he had served, of the poor whom he had visited, of the schools which he had fostered, of the family which he had loved, of all Christian people with whomsoever divided he was joined in whatsoever things were true and honest and just and pure and lovely and of good report (Claydon House Bundle 323).

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 137 Source: Letter 6, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9019/8 (not in 1854 ed.)

Valetta [Malta] [Wednesday] 14 November 1849

My dearest Mother We arrived last night at Malta about 12 o’clock, but owing to vexatious harbour orders were obliged to change our harbour and did not cast anchor till 2. We were not able to go ashore, therefore, but landed by 6 this morning. Valetta so picturesque. We have got Paolo, their [the Bracebridges’] old servant who travelled with them in Syria fifteen years ago and has been up the Nile almost every winter since. By great good luck he is disengaged and going with us. We have found berths in the Merlin, which we expected to be crowded with Indians,30 another piece of fortune; she sails at 10 and we are going aboard as soon as we have breakfasted. There is ever y prospect of a fine passage. We shall be at Alexandria on Sunday or Monday. Our only misfortune has been as yet the delay of the packet at Marseilles, which prevented our sleeping ashore last night. But for such weather as we have had we cannot be too thankful. I should have finished my letter yesterday but for the heavy ground swell, which there always is before reaching Malta, which kept us all in our berths. But no one was sick. We are so lucky to be able to get on directly by the Merlin, [we] profit by this beautiful weather. I am sitting now in our room looking into the narrow street with four windows and two doors open; before sunrise the morn it was as warm as June. Source: Claydon Diary

14 November 1849 Came on shore at 6:00 a.m. Went to St John’s. Left Malta at noon per Merlin. Source: Letter 7, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9019/7 (not in 1854 ed.)

On board the Merlin, off Alexandria [Saturday] 17 November 1849 [written between 14 and 17 November]

My dearest people I meant to have finished my last letter ages ago, but seagoing is not favourable to literary pursuits. We did not come in sight of Sicily on Monday, as we expected, but passed Marettimo in the night though not near, and in the morning we coasted the whole southwest of Sicily 30 British people going to India.

138 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions from Marsala and Mazzara. We could see the temples of Girgenti quite plain on their heighth, that is, those of Venus and Isis [with] Agrigentum below. There was a glorious sunrise. But after sunset there came on a heavy ground swell and we made no way at all; the vessel was so light, having exhausted her coal and water, that she rolled tremendously and it was 12 o’clock on Tuesday night before we fired our signal gun to the Knights of Malta. A large French frigate too coming out almost ran us down. And when we got into the Great Harbour, we were ordered out, though just alongside the Merlin by which we were to sail next morning, into the harbour of Marsamxett; it was 2 o’clock before we got pratique [permission to proceed after inspection] and anchored. It was out of the question then landing, so we lay down for three hours and got ashore the first thing in the morning. Then began my first initiation into Arab life. Certainly the gay little Valetta, busily piled up on her barren mound, is as great a contrast to the cities of Sicily, lazily stretched out along the shore, the houses as far apart as possible as one could see. The one island with its beautiful soft blue heights, its olive groves from which the breeze came to us laden with all sorts of odours; the other [island] bare and flat and yellow as a gravel walk, with a few miserable vines cultivated in terraces on soil brought from Sicily, without a tree, without a height, nothing which could tempt any race conceivable by the human imagination to settle there, yet busy, gay and clean, its little streets like a scarf of many colours, its houses stuck all over with coloured boxes for balconies, as clean as a Mussulman [Muslim]. It is stepping from the West to the East at a stride. As to Morris O’Ferrall,31 he has completely fallen into the hands of the Jesuits. You see nothing else at the levees but Jesuits, monks, Ignorantius, and he goes to long Maltese sermons of which he does not understand a word, as if that could impose upon anybody. Better have sent the cholera morbus there, said one person to us, for that injures only the body, but his Jesuits injure body and soul. His excuse for not admitting the refugees [from Italy] was quite preposterous for, with a garrison of three thousand English and our fleet in the harbour, I ask you what mischief could they have done? If he had said the island was too poor to support them, that would have been something like a reason, but the real fact is that his wife’s brother 31 Richard Mor ris O’Fer rall (1797-1880), governor of Malta, 1847-51. After 1815 the British kept Malta as a strategic relay to their Empire in India.

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is a Jesuit, that he had opened the island to all the Jesuit refugees and to none others. But the most melancholy part of the history is still to come: the unfortunate Romans went to Algiers—there they were of course rejected. Thirteen of them died on the passage which was long— they were two months at sea. They returned to Malta in a state of disease so dreadful that Colonel Johns, the deputy governor (Morris O’Ferrall being then in England) received them, visited them and at his own expense sent down twelve hundred mattresses to the lazzaretto [establishment used for quarantine] for them, food, medicine, clothes, and played the Frère de la Charité while the Jesuit was away. I am glad there was someone to redeem our name. Finally the Greek consul, whom we know, shipped them off to Greece without taking anything from them when a subscription was made for them. So much for this disastrous history. You will not be surprised that I could not make up my mind to send my letter of introduction to Morris O’Ferrall for the love of lucre, of what he could do for us. We got all our boxes (shipped from England on the 29th) quite safe, you will be glad to hear, without his assistance. I rather give the Maltese, who are fanatical Catholics, credit for not being taken in by him. He has curried favour with them in vain. As to Ward, if he had treated the Cephaloniots ‘‘colle buono’’ [gently], he might have done anything with them. As it is, he can do nothing. What they wanted was to be delivered from certain feudal oppressions, which they certainly did not take the way to set about. But Ward accused them of being in complicity with the King of Greece (such an idea) and here is the result. Now, do you want to know what Valetta is like? We went to St John’s, which is beautiful: a row of chapels on either side, each belonging to one of the ‘‘lingue,’’ auberges of the Knights, most of them exceedingly rich, in blue and brown and gold, very Arabian colouring. In a vault below, all the tombs of the Grand Masters from La Vallette downwards, of whom Morris O’Ferrall is the worthy representative, lie. The palace and loggia of the Grand Masters (now our government palace) you know by prints and the palaces/auberges scattered about the town belonging to the different tongues (of Knights). We were delighted at having secured our passage by the Merlin, of which we were doubtful. This reconciled me to not seeing more of Malta. We went into the Greek consul’s house (built all for heat, with thick stone walls), Phorion Rogue, an old friend of Σ’s, who gave us pomegranates, bright, ripe pomegranates in a dish. Then [he] took us down to embark on the Nix Mangiare [nothing to eat] stairs (so-called from time immemo-

140 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions rial, because of the beggars who call, in beautiful English, ‘‘Nix Mangiare for four days’’). The Maltese Arabs are an ugly race, beautiful divers (there they were tempted in one way [illeg]), for a halfpenny diving for minutes together, while the lazy Italians will do nothing for gain. The change from Europe to Africa was complete; just passing over from Sicily to Malta had done it; one was evidently detached from the West, the other from the East. Captain Arkwright called upon me at Valetta, so queer; I saw young Guthrie whom I thought uncommon cool, and gave up the keys. Now we were off on the Merlin. We weighed anchor at 12 exactly and sailed out of the most beautiful harbour in the world. The vessel was cram full of Indians, male and female, every berth in our cabin occupied by young aspirantes to marriage. Did you ever see a cargo of Indians, a more painful and humiliating spectacle, I imagine, does not exist. And people wonder that the Anglo-Indian is such a race, when it consists of men who go out to trade upon India for fortune and women for marriage. This most disgusting and revolting of English customs bears the fruits one would expect. If these poor girls (the best of whom go out from the dread of a life without love and activity without an aim, the worst from the dread of want of consequence and comfort) were told, there is a vocation which you might have at home, which would fill all your aspirations, satisfy all your fears, if we could offer them such a home and such an occupation as the Puseyites have attempted to do (which, dearly as I love their cheerful and genial spirit, I must confess is pure dilettantism) and as St-Vincent-de-Paul [the community of the Sisters of Charity] has done: how many would never be tempted to the degrading shift I see all round me at this moment? They say the debarking of a cargo of their girls at Bombay in their best bonnets and the young officers coming down to look at them is revolting. I can believe anything from what I see. The [slave] market at Alexandria is less painful because there the [people] sold are not voluntarily sold. The drinking of the men from 9 o’clock in the morning till 10 o’clock at night is dreadful; incessant cardplaying and punch and sherry. Seventeen females in a little tiny cabin are we, and to see us in the morning crawling dirty and deliquescent out of our holes like worms from their crannies is the ridiculous sight; I descending from my upper berth like the gentleman you may remember in the Incendio del Borgo. As to ablution, it is out of the question; Σ and I have invented a new method of washing in the berth, which is little inferior to the Compton bonnet in genius.

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All our fellow passengers on board the Medina forsook us at Malta. I like Lord Nugent exceedingly; he has il cuore ben fatto [well-disposed heart] and his feeling for his fellow creatures is beautiful. Politics are to me the most real incarnation of religion, more true than the embracing of any sect or dogma. He told me many things. The punishment of death and the experiments at Norfolk Island32 [are] his great subjects now; but he is full of art besides. I was sorry when we parted. He says that the two architectures of Greece and Egypt originate from the tent and the pine forest. All the lines of the Egyptian temple tend inwards towards the top showing the nation that has lived in tents. Take the Greek temple and you see first fluted columns; those were faggots bound together, bowing out a little at the top for better support to the roof: that was the Doric capital. Then cross faggots, the triglyphs being where they were bound together, and so on, you know. The first day from Malta we had sea; at noon on Thursday (twentyfour hours), we had made 208 miles but nobody was very bad; on Friday morning we could see the Libyan coast: Ras el Tin (Cape of Figs), the old Cyrene, a long dull line on the horizon. That day was calm and we made 236 miles. On Saturday began the undercurrent of the Mediter ranean running out towards Gibraltar, which, though not a breath of wind is stirring and not a sea rolling, makes a terrible rock, though one can see nothing to make it. But at sunset it ceased, and such a sunset, with Isis rising to welcome us, and such a starlight night and soft wind, the breeze of Africa already blowing on our faces. I know nothing more curious than standing on the deck of a steamer on a starlight night on the broad sea. It is so like human life: the dark, mysterious, boundless black sea all round you, trackless, limitless except where your eye can reach no further; no road opens itself before you, no end to your journey. But above you the sky is full of stars and lights, not light enough to illuminate you but enough to cheer you; and the dark boat, all glared over with bursts of lurid flame from the chimney like a bark of hell, its inhabitants showing like imps by the blaze, plunges along its desperate course. Still a way opens before it, you know not how, and still it goes its steady course home even out of hell, though it has no path, no light. He makes a way for it that it has not known. 32 In May 1840 the penal reformer, Alexander Maconochie arrived at Norfolk Island to start his experiment: taking prisoners to the island and giving them education and productive work.

142 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions I have heard people say that it was worthwhile to have an inflammation of the brain for the sake of the rapidity of thought with which it begins. It is worthwhile to be seasick for the feeling with which it begins. You feel as if you were released from earth, no longer there but in the arms of the Father, riding upon the winds with the sound of rushing waters. There is no feeling like it. Do you know the Maltese dress? A black silk thing like a skirt put over the head where the gathers are, as if you had not unfolded the skirt to get in; very pretty. On Saturday at noon we had made 226 miles; only 168 left and these we might do in sixteen hours, but must put off our steam because it is not safe to arrive at night. Source: Claydon Diary

15 November 1849 On board Merlin. Made 208 miles. 16 November 1849 Libyan coast in sight, Cyrene (Ras el Tin), Cape of Figs. Made 236 miles. 17 November 1849 Made 226 miles. At noon 168 miles to Alexandria. Isis gave us her welcome @.

Alexandria and Cairo Source: Letter 8, 1854 ed. 1-8, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9018/3 and 9019/9, 10

Alexandria [Monday] 19 November 1849 Yes, my dear people, I have set my first footfall in the East and oh! that I could tell you the new world of old poetry, of Bible images, of light and life and beauty which that word opens. My first day in the East, and it has been one of the most striking, I am sure: one I can never forget through eternity.33 33 Indeed the impression remained with Nightingale through her life. See passage from a letter to Frederick Verney, 11 October 1897, Add Mss 68889 ff27-28: It makes me young again to think of the ecstacy of a voyage from ‘Marseilles’ to Alexandria and my first sight of the rising of the sun from an eastern sea, not rising rather pale, as he does here, and shivery, but leaping like a bridegroom out of the sea with a flood of light and

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I am writing by candlelight on Monday morning because I had not a moment yesterday, the day we landed; and one is quite surprised to find darkness at all in this land of warmth and light and life. We had a splendid run of ninety hours from Malta and should have had less, but that we were obliged to put off our steam in order not to arrive at those dangerous old Syrtes till daylight. Isis welcomed us to her country with the most delicate and silvery of crescents and at half-past four we went on deck, on the purest and mildest of starlight nights, watching Venus rising so large that the captain mistook her for the Pharos and brought the vessel to a stand. Then came up the rose-coloured clouds of dawn, like Guido’s Aurora:34 he must have seen an eastern sunrise for the colours of his Hours are exactly those of the early dawn here, and not the least those of an Italian sunrise. It looks not lurid and thick, as very brilliant colours in an English sky sometimes do, but so transparent and pure that one really believes oneself looking into a heaven beyond, and feels a little shy of penetrating into the mysteries of God’s throne. The Pharos and masts of Alexandria, and Pompey’s pillar, and a long low line of coast now appeared against the crimson clouds, and from his own Morgenland, his own East, the sun sprang up as he ought to do. I cannot describe the initiation into old poetry he gives you on his first rising in the east. He does not come up slowly and solemnly, and rather sadly, as he does in the chill dawn in England, while one is feeling a sinking and a trembling and a shivering from having been up in the cold to see him; but he leaps from the horizon into the sky, whips his fiery steeds, shouts for joy and brings in brilliant day immediately; it is his ‘‘glad’’ course here and the flood he pours forth is ‘‘living’’ light. One never understood the word ‘‘living’’ before. It is as if each ray was a messenger, alive. The northern sunlight is like lamplight. I shall never forget my first sight of him.35 warmth. And beautiful Cairo, but first the little group of solemn, dignified Easterns of two and three years, sitting on the ground eating their breakfasts. All blessings on your journey. Ever your affectionate Aunt Florence. Do you remember the Persian’s answer to some Englishman’s stupid remark about the sun: ‘‘But that’s because you have never seen it.’’ 34 Guido Reni (1575-1642), Italian painter; the fresco ceiling, Aurora, is found in the Palace Pallavicini Rospigliosi in Rome; Nightingale saw it in 1847-48. See European Travels. 35 Ms 9019/9: The sun behind the masts of Alexandria, taking possession of his own land of the east; even the captain said he had never seen such a sunrise.

144 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Now we crowded on all our steam and came gallantly into the old port, only stopping to pick up an Arab pilot and perpetually throwing the lead, which showed us to be in only four fathom[s] water. The crescent and the star was floating idly on the morning breeze, but a crowd of Arabs—the busiest and the noisiest people in the world—came immediately on board, frantically gesticulating, kicking and dancing: an intermediate race, they appeared to me, between the monkey and the man, the ugliest, most slavish countenances, . Before nine we had landed and were on our way to the Frank Square36 in the omnibus, for it was already too hot to walk. Before ten Mr Gilbert37 had called upon us in our inn-yard,38 and he has already placed a janissary [Turkish soldier] at our disposition (who does everything for us) and given us everything we could want. The first thing, after we had saved our baggage from the hurrying Indians, was to ask our janissary, Alee, who walks before us and is the most gentle, yet most dignified being I ever saw (I am quite afraid to speak to him), to show us the way to the baths. After a longish walk we came to a gateway and, through an avenue of date palms, bananas and petunias, trellised overhead, to a long, low building with Pompeian baths in red and green and blue squares, and with low archways (against the heat) leading from one to the other. Egyptians sitting about at their dinner of fruits. They gave us a tangle of palm tendrils to wash ourselves with, with a lump of beautiful Egyptian soap in the middle of the nest: all European appliances are vile compared to those palm tendrils. When we came out again into that enchanted garden it was like an Arabian night. I thought we were in the Chatsworth39 conser vatory and should come out40 into the chill air from all that radiant vegetation and find it was a dream. But we did not. And when we returned, luncheon was spread at the table-d’hôte; bananas and dates and oranges and citrons (such a beautiful table I never saw) and the stately Egyptian to serve us; women we did not see.41 36 Ms 9019/9: where we did not expect to get rooms till the Indians were off by the transit affair. 37 Mr Gilbert, the brother of Lady D’Oyley mentioned in the next note. 38 Ms 9019/9: pray tell Lady D’Oyley this; his sister had been so kind as to write to him. 39 In Derbyshire, owned by the Duke of Devonshire, one of the grandest countr y houses in Britain. 40 Ms 9019/9: when we had passed the gates. 41 Ms 9019/9: After luncheon Mr Gilbert called again and.

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Then we went to church—a little, quiet, solemn, English church— and afterwards Mr Winden, the clergyman,42 took us to the garden of the Armenians. Those Armenians have always something so poetic and mysterious about them. Fancy a church in the middle of alleys and tangles of palms, loaded with bunches of golden fruit, stretching ever y way into a forest, so that you lose the enclosure; daturas, bignonias, oleanders, cactuses and bananas making the underwood; a great well in the midst, upon the edge of which sat the most beautiful group of Egyptian and Smyrniot women, and the radiant sunset behind. So ended my first day in the East—a true Sunday of rest and joy.

Of course there are drawbacks to all this light and beauty; the mosquitoes are at this moment (6 o’clock in the morning) so bad that I am surrounded by the dead bodies of those slain43 in single combat. The heavy dew drove us home last night before sunset. But what is that to pay for the joy of the East? I wish I could describe the groups in the Armenian garden: a little triangle of children at the gate, eating their dinner out of a porringer of beans, not gobbling or messing, as European children do, but like little gods, with infant dignity slowly and majestically dipping their sop in the dish and conversing. One, a magnificent, broad-shouldered boy of four, resting his little paw upon his knee, with one single loose shirt on, looking up at us undisturbed, with an attitude like an Apollo at rest; another, a little coquette of three, with her hand and wrist loaded with bracelets and rings, but not a vulgar coquette: she had the airs of a Juno; and the third, a thing of eighteen months, with its leg stuck straight out and quite as stately as the other two. We did so wish for Parthe to draw it. Then the group on the well, three Egyptian ladies in their black silk mantles, which shroud them entirely except the blue or white pendant in front, which hangs from their foreheads, only letting their eyes be seen. A tall, graceful Nubian behind, entirely robed and shrouded in white, who is not so particular about her black face, which looks so well in that white Westall draper y; and two Smyrniots with their hair dressed à la grecque, large bunches of flowers in it, and 42 Ms 9018/3: whom they know. Ms 9019/9: as they know everybody. 43 Ms 9019/9: killed.

146 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Guercino44 colours of blue and red and brown, made, with a yellow woman, the most oriental group. The Egyptian costume (of the highborn lady), the enormous black mantle, is not graceful, but here you see all costumes, from the Ethiopian to the Waldense. We saw a funeral procession, too, halloaing45 like forçats [galley slaves]. The sun has now risen as pure and bright as yesterday and I am sitting on my divan with a stone floor and the window wide open, the donkeys and Arabs and those hideous camels setting up the most frightful noise.46

This place is full of Roman Catholic sisters and Lazarists, Greek church, Armenian church, Mussulman [Muslim] mullahs, Protestant Waldenses: Alexandria the Cosmopolite. There is nothing to say about its architecture. 44 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666), Italian painter also known as Il Guercino. 45 Ms 9019/9: holloaing. Ms 9018/3: hollowing. 46 Ms 9019/9: row. 47 Nightingale’s cousin Hilary Bonham Carter.

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The state of things here is horrible. Ever y man48 is a conscript for the army and mothers put out their children’s right eye, cut off their forefingers or lamed them to save them from conscription, till Muhammad Ali, who was too clever49 for them, had a one-eyed regiment who carry the musket on the left shoulder.50 The number of one-eyed men you see is frightful. My time has been spent much to my satisfaction, as I travelled from Paris to Auxerre51 with two sisters of St-Vincent-de-Paul, who gave me an introduction to the sisters here I have spent a great deal of time with them in their beautiful schools and miséricorde [hospital for the poor]. There are only nineteen of them but they seem to do the work of ninety. They bleed, dress wounds and dispense medicines; the Arabs come to them by hundreds for advice.52 Today I saw there a little orphan girl of nine years who had found, some months ago, a deserted baby in the streets and had adopted it! The baby is now ill and the little foster mother brings it daily to the convent for medicine: the sisters said the care and love she showed for it was marvellous. They gave her a para (a farthing) a week for it and the neighbours added dates or rice, and so the little creatures live. In this climate life is supported on so little, and for clothing a rag suffices. The sisters give a fearful account of the debasement and ignorance of the women; they have no religion and are mere beasts, they say.

There is not much to see here, nothing but the perpetual feeling of being in the East, the eastern colouring and eastern atmosphere. On the day of the Presentation of the Virgin all the children of the StVincent sisters go to a children’s mass and sing—so pretty it was—all costumes, the Levantine, the Smyrniot, the Maltese, the Egyptian, people of all nations and tongues uniting in the worship of one God. Many of the mothers were there. The lands are of course untilled in this, the richest country in the world. If the Nile did not do all the work, the poverty, which is only extreme, would be at extremity. Yet the Egyptian is an excellent workman, and most industrious:54 he lives, too, upon nothing. If they were not the most peaceable nation existing, the government could not go on a moment.55 Ever y cadi [Muslim judge] gives the sentence to the highest bidder: everybody seems to be allowed to bastinado [to strike the soles of the feet with a stick as a form of punishment] everybody else; and no consul who has any humanity sends a criminal before the police, for nobody there counts the lashes; if there are fifty ordered, there are several at once to give them, and he may just as well receive two hundred as fifty, and die.56 54 Ms 9018/3: And yet the Egyptian is the finest workman, the most industrious labourer in the world. He longs for work. To give you an instance: Mr Gilbert’s gardener comes to him for 40 piastres a month, 8d/ and a bit, gladly and supports his wife and children on it, and works like a trooper. They live upon nothing. 55 Ms 9018/3: Every single functionary is to be bought from the highest to the lowest. 56 Ms 9019/9: Artim Bey, an Armenian who is the real head of the government, is so clever that he overreaches everybody and even himself. To support this enormous army, the taxes are of course awful. Every single man is taxed and even servants in the service of our consuls must pay up all their arrears when they leave the service.

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The taxation is enormous. Every guild or trade, grooms, gardeners, etc., elects its sheikh and these sheikhs are a sort of odious middlemen or publicans who have to pay the whole amount due by their guild to government; so of course they exact it to the uttermost farthing;57 and more, for Hassan’s sieve58 is buttered and the piece of gold sticks there for him, as it does for every functionar y in the land. He may use the bastinado at pleasure to exact the tax, and the moment he is elected he becomes a tyrant.59 How difficult it is to believe that this race is also on its progress to per fect life! as difficult as the Jewish populace found it to believe that the Son of Man, whom they had all worshipped on the previous Sunday, was on the Friday morning covered with dirt and rags, and mocked and scourged, the Son of God. Yet these dirty sons of men are all, too, the sons of God, all on their way to perfect truth. The Jews doubted his word and crucified him; if we doubt his word about these poor degraded Arabs, being, as he said, sons of God, we crucify him afresh. It was Pilate’s doubt that there was a truth which wrecked him: from the moment a man asks, what is tr uth?60 he must stagger and fall. Pilate could not know, it is true, whether Christ were divine or a popular ringleader, but he might have known that he was not to execute an innocent man. I think those words so beautiful when Christ declared the Son of Man was the Son of God, and ‘‘hereafter thou shalt see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of God, of the power of God.’’ Yes, each son of man shall be one day at the right hand of God and receive of His goodness.61 Meantime, Ibrahim Pacha62 died here the death of a dog, on his way to eternal truth. No one wore mourning for him, ugh! The poli-

57 An allusion to Matt 5:26. 58 Ver 9019/9: palm. 59 Ms 9019/9: If you want justice, on the other hand: e.g., Mr Winden the other day was pelted; Mr Gilbert sent for the sheikh of the district, though he knew he [the man] had nothing to do with it, tied him up for the bastinado and then let him go. The man kissed his very feet and vowed it should never happen again. And it did not. 60 An allusion to John 18:38. 61 Ms 9019/9: power and of everything He has. All that He has to give He will give to the Son of Man some day. 62 Ibrahim Pacha was the son of Muhammad Ali; he governed only four months.

150 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions tics of this country are worse even than those of Europe, but I suppose we shall have none at Philae, ‘‘with him who sleeps in Philae.’’63 Source: Claydon Diary

18 November 1849 800 miles from Malta. Alexandria at 7:00 a.m. Sun just rising behind her, out of his own East, his Morgenland Bath (through an alley of palms, bananas and petunias). English church and Armenian church in the middle of a garden and a forest of dates. Our first day in the East. 19 November 1849 Alexandria. Hôtel d’Europe very good. Arabic bath. Visited dahabiehs64 on Mahmoudieh Canal. Source: Letter 9, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9019/10 (not in 1854 ed.)

Alexandria, Hôtel d’Europe [Wednesday] 21 November 1849

My dearest people Yesterday we spent rather a tiresome day in looking after dahabiehs, in which we were not successful; one, which was beautiful, was rather too large and cost £60 a month! That wretch of a Milord (Northampton)65 has raised all the prices; the only others were too dirty and too small. Except the 60 pounder, which had four, they have all but two cabins. As Σ and I have set our hearts upon the second cataract, we must not have too large a boat, the difficulty of changing at the first cataract is so great. At Cairo there is a still greater competition for boats. 63 Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 1:27. Ms 9019/9: Dearest Papa, I have just got all my letters, but must put this up before reading them through. Please, send my dearest love to Aunt Mai and dearest thanks for her letter just received, so full of all that interests me, and please, send her this letter as I have not time to write to her by this post. Ever dear Papa, your loving child. 64 The dahabieh was a large sailing boat on the Nile, usually with two or more inside cabins. It could be rowed or pulled up river if there was no wind. Travelling by dahabieh was considered the most stylish way to see the Nile, although, with the introduction of steamers, it also became one of the slower means of travel (after Sattin, Letters 215). 65 The Northamptons were travelling in Egypt at the same time as Nightingale and her companions; they repeatedly met on the Nile. The ‘‘Milord’’ is probably the 2nd Marquess of Northampton (1790-1851), president of the Royal Archeological Institute.

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Besides we took an Arabic bath which but for the locale would have been pleasant. You come into an enormous square hall, lined with marble, where you are divested of your clothes; then you walk through passages of marble, all lighted from above, into another octagonal vaulted court lined, floor and roof, with marble or stone, except where the roof is pierced with holes to let in spots and trails of brilliant sunlight. At the four corners are smaller halls of immense height, where the process is performed: marble basins in every one, the floor slippery with water, the whole is like an Arabian night. . . . [Friday] 23 November 1849 We leave Alexandria on Sunday for Cairo by the steamer; we have not been able to leave before as there was no intermediate steamer and we have not been able to get a dahabieh at Alexandria for the voyage up the Nile as we intended. . . . Mr Bracebridge has, I am afraid, got very tired of Alexandria in his week. It is true, there is not much to see here, nothing but the perpetual feeling of being in the East, the Eastern colouring and Eastern atmosphere; one day we went to the bazaars and bought some things for our prospective boat. . . . Talking of clothes, when I look, in the tin box, at the stores of ribbons for my hats, of veils and collars, and every sort of thing I can want, so that I have nothing to buy here, my heart swells with gratitude to you, my dearest people, for the trouble you were at. I do not like to ask you to write anything, but I wish you would take an opportunity of sending my best love to Aunt Hannah66 and telling her that I should write now and should have written to her before I left England, but that I really thought it wrong to sacrifice those ragged school67 lectures for letter writing, even to such a friend as she is, and that now I could not make it worth the postage to her. Please, tell Aunt Mai that her letter told me everything I wanted most to know, that I hope she will write again, if she can and will, please. Our direction will be while in Egypt: Messrs Brigg’s, Alexandria. Remember that, my dear people, as there is but one foreign p.o. in Egypt, viz., Alexandria. 66 Nightingale’s evangelical honorary ‘‘Aunt Hannah’’ (Nicholson). See Theology (3:337-55). 67 The ragged schools were schools maintained through charity for the education and promotion of poor children.

152 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Claydon Diary

20 November 1849 Alexandria bazaar. Convent of Figlie de S Vincenze de’ Paoli with Mr B. 21 November 1849 Alexandria. Mass at Lazarist church to see the children of St-Vincentde-Paul. Hospital of St-Vincent-de-Paul with Trautwein; five sisters. Source: Letter 10, 1854 ed. 8-15, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9018/8 and 9019/10

[Alexandria] [Saturday] 24 November [1849] Yesterday we took our first donkey ride to the catacombs; but donkey riding in Egypt is a very different thing from donkey riding elsewhere. The donkey is very small and you are ver y large (the Egyptian is a very tall race), and you sit upon his tail; and as he holds his head very high, you look like a balance to his head. After mounting—a feat which is effected by curling your right leg round your saddle bow (the saddles are men’s) —you set off full gallop, running over everything in your way, and the merry little thing runs and runs and runs like a velocipede. There is nothing in Alexandria but the Frank Square, which is larger than any square in London, and the huts of the Alexandrians, which look more like a vast settlement of white ants than anything else. The hut is always but one room, about eight or nine feet square (the walls prolonged in front to make a sort of alcove), about68 six feet high, made of plastered white mud, with or without windows,69 which are furnished with shutters; no chimney, nothing inside but one pot and sometimes a box. They seldom adjoin, but a space is left between each. The first70 effect is that of a vast collection of ovens. You can hardly believe they are human dwellings. Some, I should think, were altogether but a cube of five feet. We went to the catacombs which, after those of Rome, are rather a farce; to Pompey’s Pillar, through a great dismal cemetery: I thought we were coming to the end of the world. The earth was strewed, not 68 Ms 9018/8: not. 69 Ms 9018/8: with holes for windows. 70 Ms 9018/8: final.

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planted, with little white round mounds of mud, a stone stuck in it and a dry aloe in the middle; not one bit of green, often the grave only a heap of stones, the best, two white slabs. A single figure stood, clasping her hands, her black robe over her head, in the middle of all this desolation. There being no enclosure, but the tombs stretching ever y way, makes it so striking, and Pompey throws his immeasurable shadow across the plain. One day we drove to the site of the Battle of Aboukir:71 a drear y plain of white sand covered with white stones, a scanty fringe of palm trees in the distance, the broken wall of Nicopolis, built by Augustus; in the foreground, a road, many inches deep in sand, through which we waded—it looked like the shroud of an empire’s body, the ghastly tale of a kingdom’s whitening bones. I went down to the seashore, not being able to bear the abomination of desolation,72 and walked along the beach, where the breakers were rolling and tossing in. The sun was setting exactly behind the Pharos of Alexandria in all the triumphal march of an eastern sunset, with the green transparent caves of the sea beyond, not like the funeral pomp of that white winding sheet behind, but like a patriot hero going home, full of light and love. On our way home we saw our first Egyptian monument: the colossal head and bust of a queen, as Isis (the rest of the body at some distance), in granite, lying in a marsh, half covered with water; a companion Ptolemy, also broken, as Osiris, lying near, the features very beautiful but blackened with the water; bulrushes growing about. A running footman always precedes you here, running before the horses and clacking his whip. What on earth is the use of the poor wretch I cannot divine; the horses could fray their way of themselves. But he looks like an evil spirit, always accompanying you, prompting you, appearing and disappearing, but always there. The working Egyptian woman here looks for all the world like an elephant; her hideous black veil fastened on the top of her nose is just like a trunk and his rusty black clothes are just the colour of hers. I and the gnats have so many ways of outwitting each other. Σ and Mr Bracebridge look as if they had had the smallpox; but I, who would sleep in an Indian rubber tub with a tallow candle in my mouth if it were suggested, shut my windows before sundown; then I hear 71 In 1798 the British navy under Horatio Nelson defeated and destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir Bay. 72 An allusion to Jesus quoting Daniel in Matt 24:15.

154 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions those that are in furling their wings and uttering little infernal cries of triumph. Then I set my door open and put a light in the passage; they think I am there and follow, but I am not—don’t tell them. Then, when night comes,73 I take out a large sheet of paper and begin to write. They believe I am not thinking of sleep. But I leave off in the middle of a word, run with all my might at the Levinge,74 where I insert myself by so small a hole that you would say a camel could get through the eye of a needle;75 then I clap my hands and sing a little ode in honour of Mercur y, the god of theft, because I have stolen myself from the hands of the gnats. Meanwhile I hear their whistle of rage and disappointment and I see their proboscises coming through the curtains, as if they would fly away with the whole concern.76 I won’t deny that some do get in by ways unknown to me; they have either subterranean passages or latchkeys. An Arabian bath is not pleasant but for the locale. You come into an enormous square hall lined with marble, then through marble passages into another octagonal vaulted court, lined, floor and roof, with marble, except where the roof is pierced with holes to let in spots and trails of brilliant sunlight. At the four corners are smaller halls, of immense height, with marble basins in each, the floors slippery with water—the whole like an Arabian Night’s description. We have a roof to our house; a real Eastern roof with little houses upon it and a beautiful view of the sea, which has been so high since we came that we cannot be thankful enough for our beautiful passage.

I was so very anxious to see the inside of a mosque, to see where my fellow creatures worshipped, that Mr Gilbert good-naturedly compassed it, although he said it was an unprecedented act in Alexandria, where they are fanatical Muslims. I am very glad to have done it, though I never felt so uncomfortable in all my life. We had to put on the Egyptian dress: first, an immense blue silk sheet (the head comes through a hole in the middle); then a white stripe of muslin which comes over your nose like a horse’s nose bag, and is fastened by a stiff passementerie band which passes between your eyes and over and behind your head like a halter; then a white veil; and lastly, the black silk balloon, which is pinned on the top of your head, has two loops at the two ends through which you put your wrists in order to keep the whole together. You only breathe through your eyes: half an hour more and a brain fever would have been the consequence. With strict injunctions not to show our hands, we set forth in this gear with the consul’s janissar y, whom he had denuded of his robes of office that he might not be known. The consul followed at a little distance but would not let Mr Bracebridge speak to us in the streets, and hovered round the mosque all the while we were there, for fear of a disturbance. Up the steep stairs we went, past the great stone pool of Bethesda where all the Muslims were kneeling round, washing their arms and faces for prayer, for it was just midday, past a school where the boys were learning the Qur’an (see-sawing backwards and forwards the whole time), into the mosque. You know pretty well what a mosque is: arcades, floors lined with matting, a niche towards Mecca, towards which the worshippers turn their faces; a pulpit beautifully car ved in network, archway at the bottom of the pulpit, straight stairs to the top; a gallery out of sight where women are allowed, but only

156 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions on the evenings of the feasts, and only old women. The mosque was full; the people crowded round us, laughing and pointing. I felt so degraded, knowing what they took us for, what they felt towards us. I felt like the hypocrite in Dante’s hell, with the leaden cap on; it was a hell to me. I began to be uncertain whether I was a Christian woman, and have never been so thankful for being so as since that moment. That quarter of an hour seemed to reveal to one what it is to be a woman in these countries where Christ has not been to raise us. God save them, for it is a hopeless life. I was so glad when it was over. Still the mosque struck me with a pleasant feeling; Σ was struck with its irreverence: some were at their prayers, but one was making baskets, another was telling Arabian Night stories to a whole group of listeners sitting round him, others were asleep. I am much more str uck with the irreverence of a London church. It is so pleasant to see a place where any man may go for a moment’s quiet, and there is none to find fault with him nor make him afraid. Here the homeless finds a home, the weary repose, the busy leisure; if I could have said where any woman may go for an hour’s rest, to me the feeling would have been perfect, perfect at least compared with the streets of London and Edinburgh where there is not a spot on earth a poor woman may call her own to find repose in. The mosque leaves the more religious impression of the two, it is the better place of worship, not than St Peter’s, perhaps, but better than St Paul’s. We mounted the minaret; the muezzin was just there, calling to prayers in a loud monotonous recitative.77 The abstraction of a Muslim at his prayers is quite inconceivable: on board boat, in a storm, it is just the same. The hour comes, the Muslim falls on his knees and for five minutes the world is nothing to him; death may come but it cannot interrupt him; even gain [rain] may come but it will not disturb him. Christians say this here and laugh at it, but you cannot laugh. The Muslim religion takes man on the side of his passions; it gratifies all these; it offers him enjoyment as his reward. The Christian religion takes him on the side of penitence and self-denial. This seems the fundamental difference: otherwise there is much good in the Muslim religion. Charity is unbounded and it is not the charity of 77 Ms 9018/8: I hear the muezzin calling to prayers, now at sunrise from his minaret—Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar—which he does five times a day and ever ybody falls on their knees.

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patronage but the charity of fellowship. If any man says to another ‘‘Inshallah,’’ In the name of God, he may sit down at his table and partake of anything that he has, and no man will refuse. The beggar will do this with the greatest dignity. There is no greediness, no rapacity. Nothing of any value is ever stolen from you; there is no need to shut the door: they will take a trifle, but nothing else. Still, what chance is there for a nation whose religion is enjoyment? Then, the woman. In the large hareem there are two or three hundred wives, and four or five children. But she is not a wife nor a mother: she cannot sit down in the presence of her son, her husband is her master, and her only occupation that of beautifying herself and surpassing the others in his eyes. She becomes his real wife only at his caprice, by a paper given to her, which paper bears that for a certain sum, a few piastres, he may send her away. Then she is satisfied to believe that she will stay at the gate of paradise, she, the woman, who has more to suffer here than the man, both in heart and in spirit and in body. Their sole occupation in the hareem is politics, and all politics are conducted by their intrigues. Every man goes to them with presents. But from Artim Bey down to the lowest cadi, everything is conducted by money. The cadi (the magistrate) pays the government for his place; the defendant pays the cadi for his justice; the mufti (the lawyer) pays the government for his and is paid again. English officials are always offered presents, and to make a cadi understand that in England magistrates are paid by government to administer justice would be not a difficulty but an impossibility. As to property, ever ybody knows that to appear to have any is to secure being taxed and robbed by government; an Arab will endure any amount of bastinadoing rather than confess to having anything. The man who is decently dressed in his tent will come into the city like a beggar. If he is suspected of having property, he is bastinadoed; and I know it has often happened that a master has said to his servant, ‘‘Why did you not come to me to pay your tax? I would have done it rather than you be bastinadoed.’’ And the man has lifted up his tongue and shown his money concealed in his mouth: he had endured the beating rather than give it up. The Arab would be the most thriving man in the world under any government but this. He will be beaten almost to death, as they constantly are, rather than give up. In the slave market here, full-grown Nubians are sold at from £2 to £9; they are kidnapped when girls. The Arab sometimes beats his wife till she dies. The Sisters of St-Vincent-de-Paul have had such cases.

158 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions But the Bedouin is a much finer man. He drinks neither coffee nor spirits, he never smokes, milk is his only drink. Attempt to beat him, and he will resent it to the last man of your family. (The Arab here would not even run away.) Call the Bedouin a fellah and he would say, ‘‘You had better not say that again.’’ A black man said to us yesterday, ‘‘Son Berber io’’ [I am Berber], as a reason for a greater baksheesh [tip]. Muhammad Ali always carried through his measures, whatever the wise men or expounders of the Qur’an said. ‘‘I am very sorry,’’ he used to say, ‘‘if they are not content, but it must be done.’’ Abbas is a slave to his superstitions and the mullahs or priests now reign supreme. Source: Claydon Diary

22 November 1849 Schools and Miséricorde of St-Vincent-de-Paul with Σ. Nineteen sisters: (1) classes externes; (2) orphans; (3) pensionnat; (4) Miséricorde. Isis and Osiris broken in a marsh. Battle of Aboukir, ‘‘abomination of desolation’’; white plain strewed with white stones like an empire’s shroud, a kingdom’s whitening bones escaped to the sunset on the seashore. 23 November 1849 Alexandria. Saw 300 Arabs medicated and their wounds dressed at the Miséricorde of St-Vincent-de-Paul by three sisters, the superior and an Arab doctor, between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m. Ophthalmia, fever, dysenter y (all the cases were of these three kinds). Catacombs on donkey back with Mr B. Pompey’s Pillar at the end of a great Muslim burying ground: like the end of the world, so lonely it looked. 24 November 1849 8:00 a.m. to the Miséricorde; the 300 patients this time served by the three sisters alone: discipline, quickness and kindness; beautiful. To the mosque in Levantine dress. Came at the time for the muezzin into the minaret. Cleopatra’s needle with the consul.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 159 Source: Letter 11, 1854 ed. 16-19, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/3 and 9018/8

Cairo [Tuesday] 27 November 1849

My dearest people Here we are, our second step in the East. We left Alexandria on the 25th at 7 o’clock a.m., were towed up the Mahmoudieh Canal by a little steam-tug to Atfih, which we reached at 5 p.m. The canal perfectly uninteresting, the day gloomy. I was not very well, so I stayed below from Alexandria to Cairo. At Atfih, as we were seventy people on board a boat built for twenty-five, Mrs Bracebridge and I plunged out, without a plank, upon the bank and ran across the neck of land which still separated us from the river, to secure places in the Marchioness of Breadalbane, which was waiting to take us to Cairo. Then first I saw the solemn Nile, flowing gloomily, a ray just shining out of the cloudy horizon from the setting sun upon him. He was still very high, the current rapid. The solemnity is not produced by sluggishness but by the dark colour of the water, the enormous unvarying character of the flat plain, a fringe of date trees here and there, nothing else. By 6 o’clock p.m. we were off, the moon shining and the stars all out. Atfih, heavens! what a place! If you can imagine a parcel of mud cones, about five feet high, thatched with straw, instead of tapering to a point, a few round holes in them for windows, one cone a little larger than the rest, most of them grovelling up the bank and built in holes: that is Atfih, and the large anthill is the governor’s house. On board our steamer, where there is no sleeping place but a ladies’ cabin, where you sit round all night, nine to the square yard, we have hardly any English, no Indians, for luckily it is not the transit week. Our condition is not improved physically, for the boat is equally full of children, screaming all night, and the children are much fuller of vermin; but mentally it is, for the screams are Egyptian, Greek, Italian and Turkish screams, and the fleas, etc. are Circassian, Chinese and Coptic fleas. Mr Bracebridge comes down into the cabin and immediately from off the floor a Turkish woman rose in her wrath, adjusted her black silk veil and with her three slaves, who all put on theirs which were white, sailed out of the cabin like a Juno in her majestic indignation and actually went for the night on board the baggage steamer which followed us. She was the prettiest woman I ever saw, more like a sylph than a Juno, except on that occasion, and sat in her close jacket and trousers, with a

160 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions sash round her waist, when with us. The women who stood the onset were a bride from the island of Lemnos, a fat ugly woman who had been married at eleven and was being brought up by two duennas [governesses], rather nice old hags in turbans, to Cairo to her husband. The bride was magnificently dressed and would have been handsome if she had not looked such an animal and so old. Her duennas always sat on either side of her, like tame elephants, and let her speak to none. She was covered with diamonds and pearls, had one jacket on, of blue velvet trimmed with fur, over another of yellow silk, etc. Most of the women crouched on the floor all night and talked the whole time. They were amazingly78 puzzled by us, and I was asked some fifty times if I were married. This redoubled the difficulty; I could not conceive why one said to me so often, ‘‘But you did go to the opera at Alexandria,’’ and would believe no denial. What we could be going to do in Upper Egypt was another difficulty, and that we should not travel by a caravan. At last we heard them settling in Greek that we were the singing people of the opera at Alexandria, but what could we be going to sing at Dongola for? Another woman was explaining her views on marriage. English, she said, married late, and fifteen was late. She never would marry her daughter later than ten or twelve and when you began to think of it, the man ought not to be more than seven. (By the bye, we saw a marriage at Alexandria: one horse bore the wedded couple, of six and seven, the lady riding behind her bridegroom and preceded by men playing single stick.) At 2 o’clock the moon set and the stars shone out. At 6 the bright and morning star Venus rose, presently the pyramids appeared, three, against the sky, but I could not muster a single sensation. Before 10 we were anchored at Boulaq; and before 11, with our baggage on camels, ourselves with the efreet80 running before us, the kourbash cracking 78 Ms 9018/8: excessively puzzled with us. 79 An allusion to Matt 10:42. 80 Efreet: Nightingale’s attendant or guard. Originally it means a demon or an evil genie, also the spirit of the dead.

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in his hand (it is impossible to conceive anything so graceful as an Arab’s run), we had driven up the great alley of acacias from Boulaq to Cairo to the Ezbekeeyeh and the Hôtel de l’Europe. I would not have missed that night for the world; it was the most amusing time I ever passed, and the most picturesque. Source: Claydon Diary

25 November 1849 Nile. Alexandria 8:00 a.m. By Mahmoudieh Canal. Atfih arrival 4:30 p.m. Depart 5:30 p.m. by Nile. Came upon the solemn Nile with the last ray of sunset. Amusing sight with Greeks, Turks, Levantines, Italians all over the floor. 26 November 1849 Made the Consulessa’s acquaintance. Cairo, 166 miles from Alexandria 10:00 a.m. Landed at Boulaq, drive through acacias to Hôtel d’Europe on the Ezbekeeyeh. 27 November 1849 Mme Rosetti called. Consul’s garden. Sat there on sofas under palm trees with [?] and coffee. Tame hippopotamus baby of five months playing in pool with giraffe and pelican. Dined at consul’s with M Legros. Source: Letter 12, 1854 ed. 19-25, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/2-4 and 9018/4, 19

Cairo [Thursday] 29 November 1849

My dearest people No one ever talks about the beauty of Cairo, ever gives you the least idea of this surpassing city. I thought it was a place to buy stores at and pass through on one’s way to India, instead of its being the rose of cities, the garden of the desert, the pearl of Moorish architecture, the fairest, really the fairest, place of earth below. It reminds me always of Sirius—I cannot tell why—except that Sirius has the silveriest light in heaven above, and Cairo has the same radiant look on earth below and I shall never look at Sirius in future years without thinking of her. Oh could I but describe those Moorish streets, in red and white stripes of marble, the latticed balconies with little octagonal shrines, also latticed, sticking out of them, for the ladies to look straight down through, the innumerable mosques and minarets, the arcades in the insides of houses you peep into, the first storeys meeting almost overhead—and yet the air

162 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions with nothing but fragrance on it, in these narrowest of narrow wynds!81 But there are no words to describe an Arabian city, no European words at least: for that one day yesterday you would have thought it worthwhile to make a voyage three times as long, and ten times as disagreeable, as the one we made, and go back again content, and well content. After threading these streets for miles we came out upon the square where stands the magnificent mosque of Sultan Hassan, and above it the citadel, up which we wound, passing the palaces of Ibrahim Pacha, Nezleh Hanum, the widow of the Defterdar, till we came to the mosque built by Muhammad Ali, and not yet finished, though in it lie his bones. It is of splendid size, but tawdrily ornamented, and looks better now with the scaffolding supporting those lofty domes than ever it will do when decorated like Dr ury Lane. The obnoxious female is still admitted. Muhammad Ali’s tomb is covered with shawls and carpets. I have heard people express the wish that he had lived to see his mosque finished, so much do people’s ideas get corrupted here. And within a stone’s throw of his splendid tomb is the court where the Mamelukes died;82 he counted them at break of day, and when the sun set where were they? He sleeps now close to the murdered chiefs and people can forget that murder, and laud Muhammad Ali! From the terrace of the mosque is what I should imagine the finest view in the whole world. Cairo, which is immense, lies at the feet, a forest of minarets and domes and towers. The Nile flows his solemn course beyond, the waters being still out (it is now high Nile), and the three pyramids stand sharp against the sky. Here Osiris and his worshippers lived; here Abraham and Moses walked; here Aristotle came; here later Muhammad learnt the best of his religion and studied Christianity; here, perhaps, our Saviour’s mother brought her little son to open his eyes to the light. They are all gone from the body, but the Nile flows and the pyramids stand there still. We rode down again into the city swarming with life, for the Arab is the busiest person in the world. You cannot imagine how you will get 81 Wynds are narrow, dark alleys in very poor, often criminal, districts. 82 On 1 March 1811 Muhammad Ali had some 500 Mameluke leaders treacherously killed at the Citadel of Cairo.

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through the streets; you expect to run over every child and to be run over by every camel who, gigantic animals! loom round every sharp corner just as you are coming to it, and are the tallest creatures I ever saw—there does not appear standing room for a fly. You address your ass in the tenderest terms and in the purest Arabic; you adjure him by all the names of friendship to stop, but he understands no Arabic except his driver’s and on he goes full trot while you are making hairbreadth escapes at every corner, yet receiving hardly a knock. Out of this city of noise and bustle and confusion you pass through the gate and come, oh change! oh wondrous change! from the city of the living into the city of the dead. I never saw anything so wonderful as this: as far as the eye can reach you see nothing but tombs, and from these streets of tombs where you walk, and walk, and walk, till you fancy Amina,83 the ghoul, sitting on one particular tomb (you see her making her repast); there is nothing to be seen beyond but the desert— nothing but the sky and the lifeless earth—it is the union with another world, the ‘‘land beyond.’’ Here I must recant all that I have said against the worship of the body, the fanatical care of the dead, as I have always thought it. I do see the use of taking care of the lifeless body, of exhibiting it, if you will, making it conspicuous. If it were not for this material mode of making another world visible, we should forget it. To our sensuous natures it is necessary to make the unseen seen, the spiritual perceptible to the senses:84 the more notorious and conspicuous the dead are made, the better, i.e., without becoming injurious to their still living fellow creatures (you know, the plague never appeared till we began to bury). I certainly never saw anything so striking as this passage from the garden of cities, the buzz of nations, to the city of tombs and the desert. You have read descriptions of the desert till you fancy you had imagined it exactly; ride out into it and you find that nothing had given or could give you the least idea of it. A curse, a curse, is the only feeling which still moves in your mind; every other feeling is dead, ever y other idea extinguished but this, which goes wandering up and 83 Ms 9018/4: Amnia; usually spelled ‘‘Ummina,’’ this ghoul was used as a ‘‘bogeyman’’ to frighten naughty children. 84 Ms 9017/2: henceforth bury your dead on trays, if you like it, I have nothing to say against it. 85 Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), French Egyptologist who first deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs. He published his Précis du système hiéroglyphique in 1824.

164 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions down your vacant brain till even the tombs are a relief from it.86 The desert you fancy a great plain, in which there is always something soothing, with a golden sky and opal horizon. You see an earth tumbled up and down, not as if Providence had made it so, but as if it had been created otherwise, and clouds of sand, the whirlwind, and the curse had passed over it and unmade it, and tossed and gashed and scathed it till they had made it what you see. Oedipus scorched with the lightning, rayless and sightless, is what it reminds you of, and we first saw it with the sun ‘‘veiling his burning brow,’’ and the sunset dull and glazed, and the moon not silvery but dead and white, and a range of black hills beyond, and everything in unison with it. It is not the desolation: there may be the solitude of desolation, but this is the abomination of desolation.87 No! no one ever conveys an idea of what the desert is; and no more shall I, nor have I. A curse! a curse! is all you cry. And you think of that great city, that fair city where scarcely any man knows ‘‘what he was put into the world for’’ (there are a few people in Europe who know); you think of the pharaohs and their mighty power, of Alexander and his, and later of Muhammad Ali and his, how he arose and reigned and thought that he would be called the Civilizer of the East, a greater name than the conquerors of the East, and now, not six months dead and scarcely a trace of his institutions remains, because none of these tried to find out what man was put into the world for. And the words ‘‘the vanity of human greatness’’ press into your mind with a force a sermon never gave them: mind, not the vanity of divine greatness. St-Vincent-de-Paul’s sisters still walk unharmed by all, and blessed even by Muhammadans, through the city. Moses’ influence is still felt, even in Wellow churchyard.88 The infant which sat in its mother’s arms 1849 years ago, perhaps at that very Heliopolis we are now near, has revolutionized89 the world. Divine greatness always endures, but what is human greatness when you look at this desolation of the finest country in the world? There were twenty millions of Egyptians; there are now not two. Well, we rode on into the desert, occasionally meeting a mounted Arab or string of camels coming from Suez, till we reached the tombs 86 Ms 9017/2: There at least is Thalaba watching the night through, in an empty sepulchre, till the evil spirit appears to him in the form of his mother; to be alone in that desert would well give an evil spirit all its power. 87 An allusion to Jesus quoting Daniel in Matt 24:15. 88 The Nightingale home at Embley Park was located in the parish of Wellow. 89 Ms 9018/9: regenerated.

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of the caliphs. Imagine yourself in a wilderness of (someone said) four hundred mosques—for every tomb is a mosque—falling to decay but beautiful in their ruin, every one with a dome sculptured all over with vines or foliage, and round the base of the dome an Arabic inscription on a blue ground. Countless in variety, per fect in beauty, these Moorish monuments (I believe they are Circassian and belong to the Mameluke sultans of the Circassian dynasty) strike one as the most unearthly records of ‘‘earth gone to the earth’’ one had ever seen. One can hardly believe one’s self in broad daylight! Out of these falling ruins come crawling houseless wanderers, like ghouls or lepers who have there taken up their abode, their unhired and unpaid-for dwelling. And a miserable little garden of one palm and a rose tree, in the middle of one of the mosques, was almost affecting, as the last clinging of one of these unnatural and degraded creatures to nature and beauty, which he showed in his watering of the one rose tree and his training the palm. Just then came, like the wind across the desert (the Arabs really run like the wind), an armed Arab, a police officer who seized a miserable boy, threw him down and dragged him away. The boy’s white turban came undone and streamed upon the wind; the bastinado stick appeared—the secretar y (our friend) tried to inter fere but could do nothing. It made one quite sick, as all the details of government do in this horrid country. Our priceless cicerone [guide] dragged me up through a hole in the wall some feet from the ground into some of the tombs: a square court with arched cloisters around, two minarets at the two corners and two domes at the other two; under the domes the tombs, along the cloisters cells, probably for the priests, now for the wild savages, the court open to the sky: this was the distribution of the largest. The tomb had the turban at one end, an inscription, of which Allah was alone decipherable, at the other. In a few years all will be gone, but the blue phylacteries of tiles round the domes are as fresh as ever, a dome to every tomb. Oh, wonderful! and the names even of these sultans are forgotten! We rode home through the desert by the gate of Bab-el-Nusr, the gate of victory, then through the streets of Cairo in the dusk, repeating the wonderful experiment of riding over every man and being ridden over by every camel, yet without hurting or being hurt. Oh, those curious figures, those wild unearthly figures (in the dusk), of Arab women in their great black shrouds, twining their wild arms about, till they look like everything but a human being!

166 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions We have taken our dahabieh, and tomorrow the bey,90 whose property it is and who has behaved very ‘‘handsome,’’ comes to smoke the pipe of peace with us after his mosque (it being Friday, his Sunday) and drink coffee, in order to conclude the bargain. I have not yet seen the boat, which is to be called the Par thenope [after Nightingale’s sister], the name being executed in Greek letters in white tape on a blue pennant. It has never carried Europeans, being built for his hareem; we give him 30 pounds a month. It has two sleeping cabins and a sitting one We shall not be off before Monday, however; still we trust it will not be low Nile before we reach the first cataract. It is much the best boat they have seen and is to be our home for the next three months. Source: Claydon Diary

28 November 1849 Engaged our dahabieh from the bey Hasan. Sat in consul’s room. Rode with M Legros on asses through the Moorish streets of Cairo to citadel, then out of the crowded city to City of the Dead and tombs of the Mameluke sultans. Our first view of the desert, tumbled and tossed and scathed. Decaying mosques, beautiful in their decay. Wonder ful ride. 29 November 1849 Called on Mrs Lieder. Rode with M Legros on asses to Island of Rhoda where the bulrushes of Moses grow; ferried over. Sun setting behind the pyramids. [1854 ed. 26-32 resumes] [Monday 3 December 1849]91 Monday we were tired and contented ourselves with sauntering about the consul-general’s garden, dining with him, making faces at his hippopotamus of five months old. Mr Murray’s92 kindness to us has been beyond everything. He has put a room, where I am now writing (which is fifty feet long), and his garden, at our disposition, lent us an Arabic library to take with us,93 begun our collection of Egyptian 90 91 92 93

A Turkish title of rank, usually governor. Claydon Diar y places this event on 27 November. Charles Augustus Murray, British consul-general in Egypt 1846-63. Ms 9017/2: grammar, vocabular y, and has given me a lesson in Arabic, all on the ‘‘kindliest’’ way.

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antiquities, given us shells from the Red Sea, etc. He evidently does the consul with a conscience: has learnt Turkish, Arabic and Persian, the first for diplomatic, the second for common, the third for literary business, and has just given me a most philosophic lesson in Arabic. The Hôtel de l’Europe, where we are, is on the Ezbekeeyeh, the finest promenade in - - Europe, I was going to say. We crossed it this morning to call on Mrs Lieder (Lieder, unfortunately, is ill), then through streets to which the wynds of Edinburgh are Bond Streets, opening upon other streets, of which the first are to the second as the Bond Streets are to the first, but all fragrant with sweet oriental smells—no dirt or car rion, nothing but fine white sand. This sand is the nuisance of Cairo: everything is covered with it, clothes, paper, hands, table—if one leaves the window open for a moment, it becomes a cloud—it is hopeless to keep one’s self clean. Latticed balconies looked down upon us; here was only walking room, and up a narrow winding stair we went into Lieder’s house.94 They have an invaluable head of Cleopatra, evidently a portrait, not beautiful—she squints—but very sweet; another, of Berenice. In the afternoon our faithful cicerone, M Legros, took us out on those warhorses, the donkeys, to the ferry and we were ferried over to the island of Rhoda, Ibrahim Pacha’s garden, in the Nile. It is not much of a garden, except that the bamboo grows gloriously, but the palm tree and banana are not half so luxuriant as at Alexandria. But he brought us, just at setting sun, to the other side of the island, and there, on the three pyramids and the lateen sails and the solemn Nile, was shed the orange light. It was a dull evening—we have seen none but such since we have been at Cairo—and if there is not a great change, I shall think the fuss people make about the glare quite inconceivable. We never go out, of course, without a veil and an ugly [rough cape?], but that is as much because of the Muslim’s horror of us as for our eyes. But the evening was in harmony with the view. It would sound very ugly if I were to describe it: the brown Nile, which takes the lights so 94 Ms 9017/2: We do not particularly take to Mrs Lieder, though she has been ver y kind to us. She has an invaluable head of Cleopatra. . . . Ms 9018/9: Today we sallied out on those warhorses, the donkeys, to call on the sisters [of St-Vincent-de-Paul]; they have an invaluable head of Cleopatra. . . .

168 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions well, the brown houses and the brown desert, and the orange lights in such perfect keeping, all such rich shades of brown—the whole is beautiful. The blue and arrowy rivers of Europe would not do here. The Nile would not be the solemn god if he were any other. It is beautiful, beautiful though one can hardly tell why. I am afraid, though, Cairo will be very different at low Nile when we return. Home we rode again by moonlight, and you have no idea what an eastern moonlight is: it is exactly like snow and the shadows look as if there the snow has been swept up; it is too peculiar, too colourless, to be beautiful. I have been copying plans of Egyptian temples at the consular library (Mr Murray’s).95 Sometimes we go and sit on sofas in his garden, and a little Greek slave brings us pure coffee in little silver filigree cups, which he carries with one hand at the top and the other at bottom, that his may not touch ours, and a low bow: the consul claps his hands and in it comes. Don’t wonder at the illegibility of my letters; I had a pen, a steel pen, one pen; I took it to the consul’s house to write to you—it lay upon the table—no writing materials were there, so that it could not possibly be mistaken for anybody’s pen but mine. Mr Murray comes into the room, he sees the pen, he seizes upon it, carries it off into his own room, secures it there and returns. Our pen is gone. The ambassador of Great Britain was not proof against a pen in Egypt. There was no asking him for it without insulting him, for a more manifest act of theft, a falling under temptation, was never committed. For this ambassadorial deed of dishonesty he has since sought to propitiate me by shells from the Red Sea, flowers from Arabia, etc., but it is no use. It rains! oh heavens it rains! this unprecedented fact in Cairo has this morning occurred. Will you tell Mr Mackenzie, when you write, how kind Mr Murray has been to us? You need not make a history of it, for she, good soul, is a gossip, you know—give both my best love. 95 Ms 9017/2: I can’t find many Egyptian books in the consular library (Mr Mur ray’s) which is at our disposition. When I say consul, I mean him, he is our consul-general; Mr Warne is only our consul, we don’t know him.

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The beasts here are far better than at Alexandria. I am so glad Alexandria came first, for no one can imagine what it is to sleep three hundred in a bed, nor the repose afterwards of sleeping but three. I am executing a curious zoological collection of biting beasts which will be of great value when concluded. The designs are by Σ, of each bite with its varieties, to be attached to each biter. We have had a delightful week at Cairo. I wish we were going to stay longer.96 It is the riding in the streets, above all, which is so delightful, of which one never wearies: the latticed windows meeting overhead, the pearls of Moorish architecture at ever y corner, the looking up to the blue sky and golden sunlight from the wells of streets and in the bazaars, the streets entirely roofed in. And, as you stand bargaining for a pair of yellow slippers, you see the corner of a street with the spring of an arch covered with Moorish network, and the sunlight pouring through the square holes left in the roof which shuts in the street, or you look into a courtyard—if you want a carpet—and see the men tailoring upon inlaid tables, with the richest fretwork all over the walls. In riding home by moonlight, the Turk sitting cross-legged smoking under a low vaulted arch, there is not a corner which is not a picture, and no picture can give an idea of the colouring. But you don’t enjoy all this for nothing. A Christian female dog has two titles of dishonour here, and she cannot stir out without her ass, her running ass driver and at least one gentleman or a dragoman. À la longue this dependence becomes tiresome beyond what a European can conceive. It is not that one minds being spat at (which I have been) for a religion which one loves, but one is so afraid of the gentlemen of one’s party noticing any insult, as an Englishman’s complaint would bring a bastinado upon the poor wretch, which has often ended in death.97 Abbas Pacha is so 96 Ms 9017/2: till the next mail came in, but we could not; the mail comes here by a rowing boat from Alexandria: [what] comes of putting our transit into the hands of the pacha. Your letters, which I got at Alexandria, we brought with us by our own boat from Markilla [?]. Tell me all about the water cure. Meanwhile think of us as sailing up the Nile in a fine boat with lots of comfort. This will just wish you a happy Christmas. You must write many things to dear Aunt Evans and Grandmama for me. I really have been afraid to write: can I tell them that I am in Egypt? 97 Ms 9017/2: No respectable woman walks here except in the Coptic quarter. It is ver y disagreeable besides to think of what the Turks are thinking of one. We have had a real Turkish bath here; delightful it was and so picturesque: the marble halls, the inlaid floors, swimming with water (and with beetles), the mysterious light from above.

170 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions furiously Muslim that he has just dismissed all Christians from his service, all that he could do without, besides nine hundred Coptic scribes who are fallen into the lowest poverty thereby. Yesterday [2 December] we went to our own little church in the Coptic quarter. Kruse preached a very good sermon and gave us the sacrament. One’s feelings towards the Anglican Church are ver y different when she is hiding in corners, struggling with the devil and still adhering to her own beloved ritual, to [from] when she is stretched out in fatness, with the millstone of the richest hierarchy in the world about her neck98 and the lust of the world tempting people to make her a profession and not a vocation. I feel a very warm attachment to her here, though I suspect the good she is doing, with her translations of the prayer book into Arabic, is next to nothing. You cannot conceive the painfulness of the impression made upon one by the population here. It really seems to matter so little whether an Abbas or an Ibrahim reigns, a swine or a jackal, the only difference being that Muhammad Ali would as soon order a murder as eat his breakfast—it did not spoil his appetite—while Ibrahim very much preferred it—it increased his zest for the meal—and Abbas, being of weaker stuff, does not order a man to death but to be bastinadoed, upon which death ensues. One can take so little interest in politics when it seems to matter so little. The sooner people are put out of their pain the better. One goes riding out, and one really feels inclined to believe that this is the kingdom of the devil, and to shudder under this glorious sun, for ‘‘this is his hour and the power of darkness.’’99 In Italy one felt they were children, and their dawn was coming; here one feels as if they were demons, and their sun was set. One rides out to see the sunset but, between you and the sun, you see, crouching in a ditch, lumps of low huts, not even pretending to keep out the weather; the bulrushes which grow in the swamps round them droop over them and try to do for them what the industry of man will not. The best have, instead of a round hole in the clay for a window, a pot without a bottom let into the hole. There is hardly any attempt at thatch, and out of these come crawling creatures, half-clothed, even in this country where it is a shame for a woman to show her face. They do not strike one as halfformed beings,100 who will grow up and grow more complete, but as 98 An allusion to Matt 18:6. 99 A paraphrase of Luke 22:53. 100 Ms 9018/9: creatures.

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evil, degraded101 creatures. I have never seen misery before but I felt, Oh, how I should like to live here! what would I give to take this field!102 Never before, but here one turns away one’s face and ‘‘passes by on the other side,’’103 thanking God that here one is not to stay.104 I don’t think one could live here. And over all hangs the glorious golden and purple vault of heaven and ‘‘all save the spirit of man is divine.’’105 In Cairo itself, exquisite as is the architecture, everything is undone: either it has been begun and never finished, or it is falling to decay, but you never see anything complete, though the pacha does not mind what money he spends. Abbas Pacha goes up the river today, Pruner (Mr Mohl’s friend) with him; his only pleasure is to dismiss Christians from his service. We have dined three times with Mr Murray: one day [1 December] he had a bey and his wife to meet us, Europeans, of course, by birth— she enormously dressed in jacket and trousers of white and gold tissue, and in her turban a splendid diamond crescent as big as two of the moon, and two Brobdignag diamond stars—so much pomp and ugliness I never saw. She sat smoking after dinner, like a child sucking its bottle, in the most masterly manner, and they gave us all pipes (oh, if you had seen us!) ten feet long, with beautiful petticoats on, the end resting in little trays on the ground, and Arabic coffee out of filigree cups. The female bey, Mr Mur ray and I talked Italian, but she took ver y little part. The male bey, who piques himself on his English and practises a sentence in the morning to M Legros, the secretar y, débita [spouted] after this manner a long-practised phrase: ‘‘Miss, I have the honneur to present to you a gentleman who fizzles a great sympathie for your beauté.’’ We have not yet seen a hareem for all the pachas are in disgrace and everybody is in disgrace and obliged to shut up their hareems. Mme Rosetti was to have taken us to see her friend Nezleh Hanum, the eldest daughter of Muhammad Ali, but she is under arrest. Some intrigue or other. Yesterday Dr Abbott showed us his antiquities; he has adopted the Turkish dress and married an Armenian wife. I hate a collection but I 101 Ms 9017/2: corrupted. 102 Ms 9018/9: I never saw misery before that I did not feel how one would like to stay and help. 103 An allusion to Luke 10:31-32. 104 Ms 9017/2: live. 105 Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos canto 1, stanza 1.

172 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions suppose this is quite priceless: Cheops’ ring, Menes I’s necklace, etc. Only one thing I should very much like to have understood, a funeral papyrus, but it has never been read. An Egyptian novel apparently begins with a man’s death, and accordingly he dies, as you see by the vignettes, and there are the sacrifices for his burial. Then he is standing before Osiris, who sits with his whip in his hand and the dog Cerberus opposite him, and Truth writing down his deeds (with an ostrich feather which is her emblem) and the forty assessors or judges, all ranged on a shelf above him, each with a different beast’s head; another God is holding the scales, and his good deeds look very light. Then come different stages of purgator y which he is enduring, different Hercules’ labours, of killing this or that beast, which he is to perform. In the last vignette you see him face to face with Osiris, but whether to be condemned or justified I could not make out. But I never saw anything more interesting than this supernatural novel, this romance beyond the tombs; I wish people would write novels so. We are glad enough we did not take our dahabieh at Alexandria, for yesterday arrived people who had been twelve days on the road—I mean, on the river—while we have had our lovely week at Cairo. She is worthy of all Eastern metaphors, a bride adorned for the marriage, so sunny yet so retiring, so gay and yet not glaring.106 And the donkeys! one rides along in such ease and luxury on one’s ass, like a caliph, if it were not for that creature running by the side; but you have a splendid man in front, a sais or groom, with a noble presence, who runs like a river, so grandly yet so gracefully, and he girds up his garments like a man in the Bible, and runs without moving his arms, carrying things, too, in his bosom. Oh, if one could either forget or believe that the people here were one’s fellow creatures, what a country this would be!

106 Ms 9018/9: gaudy.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 173 Source: Claydon diary

30 November 1849 Grand feast day, mar riage and other processions. Wrote letters and copied plans of temples. Little ride towards Heliopolis and by the transit road to Suez, to see the sunset, with M Legros. Arab women like efreets; country like kingdom of the devil, huts in the ditch. 1 December 1849 Dr Abbott’s museum; Cheops’ ring, IVth dynasty; Menes’ necklace, Ist Dynasty; funeral papyrus. Called on Mrs Lieder. Bazaar to buy a carpet in a Moorish courtyard. Turkish bath. Bird man’s collection. Dined at consul’s to meet the female bey of the diamond crescent K and ✩ and smoke with her. 2 December 1849 Church at the Prussian Mission and received the sacrament. Looked out birds in Buffon107 (at consul’s) for Shore. Saw the sunset exactly behind the pyramids on the citadel. Dined at consul’s. Met the Hungarian [Count Benczik] who sided with the Austrians108 and was served right. 3 December 1849 Dr Abbott’s museum. Wrote home. M Legros dined with us and took us on board our dahabieh at the island of Rhoda, with a twilight walk on the island wall and a nosegay of roses. Settled ourselves a little and put up my Levinge.

Sailing Southwards Source: Letter 13, 1854 ed. 33-34, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/4 and 9018/8

From the Par thenope, floating up the Nile [Tuesday] 4 December 1849

My dearest people We are really off in our dahabieh; they say it is the best boat on the river. The sitting cabin is quite a pretty little room, painted with green panels, and a divan all round it. The Bs. are in the second cabin, then 107 George Louis Leclerc Buffon, comte de (1707-88), French naturalist, author of The Natural History of Birds, vol. 11 of his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. 108 Nightingale herself sided with the Hungarians in their struggle to end Austrian domination, as she did with Italy against its Austrian domination. See European Travels.

174 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions comes a passage with large closets; the third is mine. The Levinge mosquito net is put up and is a capital invention—as to being chokey, the cabin of a dahabieh at night runs no risk of being too warm. With regard to beasts, you must renounce all expeditions if you have set it down as a first principle to keep free from them; it is impossible. The men are rowing to the sound of that indescribable roar or recitative they make. M Legros, our faithful old friend, put us on board last night. He is quite our Colyar II109 and I thought that dynasty was extinct. He ordered our dahabieh away from Boulaq, where the Arabs and the fleas are dreadful, to the island of Rhoda, where he took us a twilight walk. The moon rising behind the trees on the Nile bank and shining through them and the tall bulrushes on the lonely waters was the most striking thing I have seen. We started from Cairo upon six donkeys, which carried ourselves and our mattresses, amid the furious din of the Arabs, whose noise and confusion is inconceivable (while the stately Turk never says an unnecessary word) and had a beautiful sunset ride through the alleys of tall bulrushes, out of which you can see nothing but the sky, down to Ibrahim Pacha’s new palace, by the riverside, where Mr L. had moored our boat to be out of the way. The pyramids loomed large in the twilight—the frog sang—and the deep quiet of those solemn waters was so soothing. I gathered a nosegay of roses on the island of Rhoda (Moses’ island) to take with us—the last rose of Egypt. Now we are floating up so gently, so smoothly, that you can hardly perceive the motion. Source: Claydon Diary

4 December 1849 Wrote home and landed at old Cairo to buy a lantern. Did not leave Rhoda till 3:00 o’clock. Rowed or tracked all day. Old Cairo 3:00 p.m. Left by dahabieh, the Par thenope. Source: Letter 14, 1854 ed. 34-36, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/4 and 9018/8

off Abu-Girgeh [Sunday] 9 December 1849 We shall have been on board a week tomorrow, and are now throughly settled in our house: all our gimlets up, our divans out, our Turkish 109 Henry Colyar assisted Nightingale and the Bracebridges with arrangements for visits in Rome 1847-48. See European Travels.

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slippers (mezd) provided, and everything on its own hook, as befits such close quarters. Now, if you ask how I like the dahabieh life, I must say I am no dahabieh bird, no divan incumbent. I do long to be wandering about the desert by myself, poking my own nose into all the villages and running hither and thither, and making acquaintances où bon me semble. I long to be riding on my ass across the plain, I rejoice when the wind is foul and I can get ashore. They call me ‘‘the wild ass of the wilderness, snuffing up the wind,’’110 because I am so fond of getting away. I dearly love our dahabieh as my home, but if it is to stay in it the whole day, as we are fain to do when the wind is fair, that is not in my way at all. However, I must tell you what walks I have had. This morning I went ashore with one of the crew at sunrise; it was cold, as cold as an English morning in October, and there was even a touch of hoarfrost. But when I got under the shelter of the palm trees it was warmer. We went inland to a village, the situation of which was marked to us by its fringe of palms. Whenever you see these, you are sure of finding houses. We met a woman leading out her flock to water at a pool left by the inundation of the Nile, her black goats and white sheep. A little further on we came to a brick field, mud bricks laid out to bake in the sun, and full of chopped straw to make them adhere. It made one think of Rebekah111 and the Hebrews’ task at every turn. Then we walked round the village. But no European can have the least idea of the misery of an African village; if he has not seen it, no description brings it home. I saw a door about three feet high, of a mud hut, and peeping in saw in the darkness nothing but a white-horned sheep and a white hen. But something else was moving, and presently crawled out four human beings, three women and a child. They made a miserable pretence of veiling their faces before my efreet. The only reason why they had not their camel with them was because he could not get in. Next door was a maize enclosure which differed from the first only by being cleaner and having no roof; I looked112 over and saw him. My efreet is so careful of me that he won’t let anybody come near me. If they do, he utters some dreadful form of words which I don’t understand, and they instantly fall back. 110 A paraphrase of Jer 2:24. 111 An allusion to Gen 24:45. 112 Ms 9017/4: peeped.

176 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions All the houses in the village were exactly like this, the mud walls ver y thick, nearly three feet. There appeared to me to be only one den inside, but I did not go in because I had promised not. Some little things were setting out to fetch water from the Nile, each with his amphora on the head, each with a rag which scarcely descended over the body but shrouded the head (the Arab always covers his head). The dogs, who are like foxes, descended from the roofs at sight of me and my efreet but, awed by a similar charm, fell back. The village, which seemed a considerable place, with a governor and a governor’s house, possessed a khan [shelter for travellers]. I peeped in. Strings of camels lay round the walls; a few inner cells behind them, roofless and floorless, showed tokens of travellers. But I was afraid of a commotion, so veiled my face and passed on. A tray covered with the Turkish thimblefuls of coffee (which we also drink) was coming out, the only refinement the Arab possesses. In every village you see a coffee house: generally a roofless cabin built of maize stalks with mud benches round the inside, but always the thimblefuls of coffee, made, not like ours, but pounded, boiled for a moment and poured off directly and drunk black. You cannot drink our coffee in this climate with impunity; it is too heating. We walked round the village, the huts all tumbled together up and down, as animals build their nests, without regularity or plan. The pigeons seemed better lodged: they had round mud cones provided for them, taller than the houses, stuck full of pots at the top for them to build in, and sticks for them to perch on. There was not much curiosity about me, though they (the Arabs, not the pigeons) could never have seen a European woman before; but they looked on with the same interest which the dogs did, no more. By the time I came back and overtook the dahabieh, which had been tracked meanwhile for some distance (there was little wind, and that was south), the sun was high, but it was still too cold to breakfast on deck, as we have done once. After breakfast we all five went ashore again together for the first time, Paolo and Mr B. with their guns to shoot us our dinner; they soon killed seven quails. We meanwhile wandered about in a desert place, or sat under what shelter we could find beneath a tuft of grass (the grasses grow as high as reeds), for the sun had by this time risen with a burning heat. A troop of mounted police, fine-looking fellows, rode past us, turbaned and trousered, with guns and pistols—the police which Muhammad Ali instituted, ruffianlike Arnaouts, but they have effectually cleared the country and secured the safety of Euro-

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peans. No pains is taken to investigate who is the offender, but when an offence occurs, the whole village suffers to save the trouble of inquiring who’s who. Five years ago, a dahabieh was ordered to meet the governor of India and was coming down the river. Some Arabs went on board and committed a murder and theft. The village was burnt to the ground and not one living soul spared, not even the child in its mother’s arms. If you miss a pin now, the whole village is made responsible for it and the whole village bastinadoed. When we stop at night, the village is answerable for us, and men relieve each other on guard the whole night round our boat.113 We came on board again and114 read the English service. Last night I went ashore at sunset with Paolo. We killed nothing but a little owl. While he was doing this I found quite an European lane— only it lay between palm trees with nice tufts of grass and hard walking, and camels and buffaloes were winding their way home to their rest with an old man, who told us he was of ‘‘the first times,’’ Arabicè for very old. It was my first walk under palm trees, for the groves are at great distances from one another sometimes, and you cannot go ashore where you please. The sun was just setting behind them. But there are no words to describe an African sunset. A pillar of fire ascended from where the sun, so sorry to go, had first slowly disappeared, like that which guided Moses in the desert,115 yet not of fire either: it was most like a precious stone, transparent, and yet deep. All the colours of Africa are those of precious stones, the colours of the Revelations, while those of Europe are like flowers. The Nile was of molten gold, and over against the west was a long line of purest blue, extending all along the east, sapphire blue, and over it a band of the most delicate rose colour, and the whole sky was ‘‘so cloudless, clear and purely beautiful that God alone was to be seen in heaven.’’116 The whole Nile is so unnatural—if one may use the expression—so unlike nature. The descriptions of the gardens in the Arabian Nights, with the precious stones, seem no longer here fantastic or exaggerated: it is the description of the country. Flowers or gardens, it is true, there are none; trees there are still less, except the palm; but the Arabian Nights give quite the character of the scenery. 113 Ms 9018/8: the mounted troops were beautiful fellows, turbaned and trousered with guns and pistols. 114 Ms 9018/8: there caught a few fleas till dinnertime, which is at 3 o’clock. 115 An allusion to Exod 13:21-22. 116 Byron, ‘‘The Dream,’’ stanza 4.

178 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions At sunset this evening we had a real specimen of the desert: long, low level lines on every side; one solitary palm seemed the last remnant of vegetation; one solitary sheikh’s tomb, the grave of the last man. The breeze died away as if it was too weary and worn-out to blow on these ends of the earth. The only sound was the distant bay of jackals, who did not approach because there were no bodies here for them to eat, and remained where there still were dead. All nature seemed worn-out and dying, and the Nile flowed lazily along like Cocytus [river in the mythological nether world]. It was the outer desolation, and the sun went down as if he too had not even strength to colour the clouds.

Two mornings this week the Nile has been covered with a truly English fog, so thick that no one could go ashore. After breakfast yesterday, however, we went and were spoken to by an Armenian in English. He turned out to be the governor of the villages round. I had a great deal of talk with him and he invited me to go to his village—he would show all the houses of the Arabs, etc. I longed to go but the wind was just springing up and Mr B. did not like to lose it, which was a pity, as we might never find another governor among these Turks willing to patronize us. He told me he was the governor of I forget how many villages, that his people had to pay a tax of two dollars upon every acre, and 30 to 50 piastres upon every man. For this he is responsible to the government and he has to get it out of the people as he can. He has to employ the whole population at a piastre a day, 2½d. He generally pays them in beans, as there is no bazaar near, and only at this season in money. The population consists of himself, one mullah (priest) who comes from Cairo and does not even teach the people their prayers, one cadi (magistrate) who can hardly write his own name, and the fellahs (peasants) who are perfectly fallow. He complained of his utter inability to improve them in any way, said he only lived with his books, that Ibrahim Pacha had schools but Abbas Pacha had shut them all up (of this he seemed unwilling to speak), that the great vice of his fellahs was dishonesty, stealing from 117 In 1848-49 Hungarians rose almost to a person against the Habsburgs.

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one another—he had just ‘‘bet’’ 500 ‘‘flying’’ for petty thefts. If he said to them, ‘‘Why did you not come to me, I would have given you beans, you need not have stolen,’’ they say no, they were accustomed to steal. He was very anxious not to be taken for a Turk. He said they began sowing the moment the inundation began to subside; harvest begins in four months from this time. The whole of the land is in the hands of the pacha: he gives lands by favour and lets them by favour; the district under this governor had been let to his dragoman. The people live on beans and dates; they have not the least motive118 for gain and accordingly they do as little as they can; if they have not beans for tomorrow, they say God will provide. If the governor has not enough fellahs to cultivate the land, he borrows from another village. I assure you, one never goes ashore without being sick with this state of things. It would be a thousand times better if the people were dissatisfied and turbulent. It is their content which is shocking. A contented mind is a perpetual curse. This man told me that he had not the heart to do as other governors did when the people were in arrears with their taxes: stop the whole at once out of the wages and leave them to starve, but he had made them bring him half a piastre at a time. He said they had no religion but to think Christians dogs. Mr Murray told us at Cairo that Abbas has just issued an edict that, if all arrears of taxes are not paid up within two months, every man who has hired land is to be dispossessed. The result they expect to be that the greater part will be ousted and the land revert to the pacha, who will put it into the hands of agents who, having no interest in it but to grind the people, will let shadoofs, barns and ever ything go to ruin. So the pacha will find an increase of revenue at first, but afterwards the last state of that man will be worse than the first.119 ‘‘Woe unto them that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.’’120 Alas, alas, poor Egypt! The governors have great difficulty in keeping the fellahs from running away from their villages. Our crew are a most courteous and quiet set, they are just like children. Whenever they are not tracking they sit in a circle with two water jars which they strike like tambourines, singing a sort of recitative or rather shouting it, for hours together and laughing immoder118 Ms 9017/4: notion. 119 An allusion to Matt 12:45. 120 A paraphrase of Isa 5:8.

180 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ately. ‘‘Hunt the slipper’’ is an intellectual entertainment in comparison. The reis [captain of the boat] is a dignified old man and sits apart. On the poop, atop of the cabins, stands the black steersman, who never moves day or night. They cook their mess of the thinnest broth and bread in the little boat and eat it there. No one is ever allowed to enter our cabin; Paolo washes us out ever y day. Mustafa with his cookery is at the prow, and a little Mustafet, his son, we have taken in for charity. I am not allowed to walk the deck for fear of bringing in fleas from the crew’s territory. On Friday night Mr B. and I went ashore at sunset and walked to a village inland with a minaret, the only one we have seen since we left old Cairo. He shot a crow, nothing else. We took an efreet with us.121 I was so delighted to get ashore that I could have run all over the maize fields. The maize is already three feet high, though so lately put into the ground. On the 7th122 we made Beni Suef, 77 miles from Cairo, in three days. It is a large town, which means a large misery and we all went on shore to buy some pots and pans and a pipe for the reis who had broken his. But I cannot describe it. The glorious golden sun poured down through holes in the wretched mud bazaar (in crannies on each side of which the merchants live), and the sunlight looked like a precious stone in a pewter setting. People too miserable even to drive the flies from their faces and, therefore, covered with them, lay about. The usual khan was the only variety to the mud cages, which consist of four mud walls for the camels, with little compartments, also in mud, all round inside for the men! The perpetual contrast between the jewels of silver and jewels of gold which the moon and the sun are scattering all around them, the precious stones which deck the heavens above and the hill123 below at night, nature dressed out not as a bride in flowers and gauzy veils, but as an oriental queen in gorgeous jeweller y and wrought gold, with the sordid mud and clay of human nature and human life, is perpetually before one’s imagination. At this moment our crew have kindled a great fire by night on land and are jumping through it like devils, child-devils. It is rather tiresome always to have an efreet with one on land, which I am never allowed to go without, and to be dogged by him 121 Ms 9017/4: Fesha was the name of the village, he told us. 122 Ms 9017/4: Oh! if on the 7th [of December] you could have looked out from your library breakfast table, in a clairvoyant state, and seen me! 123 Ms 9017/4: Nile.

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ever ywhere, but it is a most courteous efreet and almost too afraid of my coming to harm. It will not let me even climb the dyke without helping me.124 All my work since I came on board has been making the pennant (the flag and name of every boat are obliged to be registered at Cairo), blue bunting with swallowtails, a Latin red cross upon it and ΠΑΡΘΕΝΟΠΗ [PARTHENOPE] in white tape. It was hoisted this morning at the yardarm and looks beautiful. It has taken all my tape and a vast amount of stitches, but it will be the finest pennant on the river, and my petticoats will joyfully acknowledge the tribute to sisterly affection, for sisterly affection in tape in Lower Egypt, let me observe, is worth having. The Union Jack flies at the stern, Mr B.’s colours halfway up the rigging, all made by ourselves. For two days we had no wind, and tracked or rowed or pushed all day. On the third day the north wind rose and we stood away for Beni Suef. That day we did not land at all; sometimes, when you could land, the shores are too high. The last view of old Cairo was most beautiful, the island of Rhoda terminated by the Nilometer a headland running far into the river with a minaret at the utmost end of a long avenue of caroubas. In front there was a little group on the bank, of ladies shovelling up dirt with their hands. Then the father came and caressed his child, then the ladies fell out and one assisted her conversation with gesticulator y motions. Then they appeased themselves and fell to, with the same fingers, upon the doura mess which by this time was ready under the carouba, and which they all dipped into with their hands. For two days we did not lose sight of Cairo, but her glorious citadel, spectral in colour, still towered over everything. I cannot describe the unnatural colouring, a bright line of yellow green bordering the Nile, barley or lupins, the hard brown of the desert behind, a white ghastly Cairo in the background, dabs of Prussian-blue-and-gamboge 124 Ms 9017/4: We have not seen any other European dahabieh since we left Cairo, only a steamer passing to and fro to the pacha who is a little before us. Did I tell you that all our crew have been presented with a pair of drawers which they are forbidden ever to be without under pain of death. But they have other clothes, a great blue shirt with large sleeves, which hangs down to the knees. But I must make some sort of a journal.

182 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions trees stuck about. It looked as if a child had painted it and did not know how, and had made it unlike nature. We clung to dear old Cairo however in the distance. We passed groups of ugly pyramids, the two at Giza still kept their pertinacious points up, on the horizon; then came a group of three, those of Abu Sir, rough and shabby; then another group of three, those of Saqqara, one, the largest, in steps, having been stripped of its filling-up stones; then the two at Dahshur, scarcely smaller they are than the great Giza fellows, stood out like overgrown extinguishers. I could not get up a single feeling about these objects from first to last. There is nothing beautiful about them, nothing picturesque; the ruinous ones of Abu Sir and Saqqara look like exaggerated beehives, the others, like stray tents. There can be no enthusiasm about any of their recollections or associations. Pazienza! We have made a little sail twice in the night, but not much. Sirius shines like a little moon along the water. The moon is now too late for us to see her rise, but we see her in the night shining through the dahabieh windows. The Nile, when125 he makes a reach, looks like a great sea, he is so wide, and when the wind freshens, you see a fleet of little cangias coming out like water lilies upon the river (you don’t know from where), or like fairy boats, a fleet of efreets coming up the Nile, doubling a cape, cutting in among each other. There are islands and headlands and creeks, just like a sea, and sometimes, when the wind blows against the current, it is no longer the solemn Nile but a most tempestuous lake with white horses and turbulent little waves. But he is always beautiful. And, in general, the solemnity is given by all the colouring being of two or three shades of brown, there being however always sufficient variety of tint not to be tiresome: the brown desert, the brown pyramids, the brown Nile. There seems to be little grown but maize, as yet. This is a very stupid letter, my dear friends. But a sort of torpor crawls over one in a dahabieh. You feel, as you lie on the divan and float slowly along and the shores pass you gently by, as if you were being carried along some unknown river to some unknown shore, leaving forever all you had ever known before. A mysterious feeling creeps over you as if it were the passage to some other world: the invisible journey through the valley, not of death, but as the ancients imagined death, a shore where all you have known appear as shades. You 125 Ms 9018/2: where.

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feel as if in the power of some unseen spirits who are wafting you away from all you have ever seen to the far-off land. Since Cairo we have seen no one house or decent building. The strange effect of the atmosphere makes the figures on the shore appear gigantic. You lose all feeling of distance. You seem to lose all feeling of identity too, and everything becomes supernatural. But I must put up this letter for an opportunity. Dearest people, farewell. your ‘‘Wild Ass of the Wilderness’’ but always yours The definement of the shapes is what strikes one above all in Egypt; even the clouds have defined forms and the birds, instead of having round heads, have little aigrettes at the top to make them square. Second Sunday in Advent. 20 miles below Minya. Source: Claydon Diary

5 December 1849 Nile. Little hot walk on the naked desert. Passed pyramids of the IIIrd Dynasty: Abu Sir 3, Saqqara 3, Dahshur 2. Those of Giza in the distance. Citadel of Cairo spectral and white, still in sight. 6 December 1849 Fair wind all day and night. No going ashore. 7 December 1849 Nile. Beni Suef 77 miles from Cairo. 12:00 went ashore to buy a tin. Bunsen’s Arabic Grammar. Trout read to me Joseph [biblical account]. Arabian Nights. My first African walk. Mr Bracebridge with his gun. To Fesha 6:00. 8 December 1849 Latif the Armenian governor at Malalia, swore eternal friendship. Walked with us on the shore. My first walk under palm trees. Paolo shooting an owl. Effendi,126

9 December 1849 Nile. Went ashore at sunrise with an efreet to a village inland. Undescribed misery of an African village. All went ashore, sat down in the shade of a tuft of grass. Mounted police passed us. Stopped for the night at a solitary place. Crew made a fire. Cry of the jackals.

126 Effendi is a title of respect in Turkish, meaning ‘‘master.’’

184 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Letter 15, 1854 ed. 46-54, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/5

Off the desert of Sheikh Hassan [Tuesday] 11 December [1849]

I always keep a letter ready and sealed in case of accidents, one of which has just occurred in the person of our friend Hassan Effendi, who boarded us on his way back to Cairo, from attending the pacha at Minya and partook of brandy! Yesterday and today, having no wind, we have taken long walks into the Eastern (Arabian) Desert to look at quarries and catacombs. The impression which the desert makes is ever new, ever inconceivable: the oftener you are astonished at it, the more like a stranger, a mysterious power it seems. If I were to attempt to describe it, you would not feel the more acquainted with it. I myself, now while I am floating along in our smooth Par thenope by the soft twilight, can hardly conceive it. It is not the absence of life but the death of life which makes it so terrible, of life which has been, as the solitary catacomb, the painted rock temple and the distant strip of green along the Nile testify. A lifeless desert would be far less frightful than this dead desert, the idea perpetually recurring of an awful devil at work, making this kingdom his own, overwhelming everything by some monstrous convulsion. Perhaps it is the contrast of the sky with the earth which makes the terror of the desert; if it were overspread with a dull, lifeless sky like ours, it would seem less unnatural, at least one would not see its terrors so plainly as when glared upon by such a light as this. But while the earth in our country is rich and variegated with light and crowded with animation, the sky above contrasts by its deadness. Here, on the other hand, the sky is radiant, the light is living, the golden light which seems to pour not only from the sun, but from all the points of the transparent blue heavens. One looks down, and the ungrateful earth lies there, hopeless and helpless, a dying, withered desert: one almost fancies one hears the devil laughing as he dares even Almighty power to bring forth bread.127 This is what gives one a supernatural, mysterious feeling in Egypt; the looks naturally turn to the sky when the earth has no beauty that

127 Ms 9017/5: [last sentence differed from 1854 ed.] one hears the devil saying, ‘‘Command that these stones be made bread’’ [Matt 4:3], as he looks upon his kingdom and laughs at the almighty power of God saying, ‘‘Here even that power cannot bring forth bread.’’

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one should desire it128 and the heavens have all beauty. The struggle between God and the devil is perpetually visible before one’s thoughts, for the earth seems the abode of the devil; the heavens, of God; and you do not wonder at the orientals being the mystical people they have become, nor at the Europeans, where all beauty is of the earth and the thoughts turn to the earth, becoming a practical, active people. But to return to our walk. It was Monday morning; we landed about sunrise on the eastern coast and went up towards some limestone cliffs we saw about a mile inland, standing high against the sky. The only living traces we saw were a pair of vultures sitting on the topmost heights and the tracks of jackals returning at daybreak from their feast in a little Muslim burying ground, like ghouls. We had heard their bay at night and thought what they were doing. The sand was not sand but entirely composed of a little fossil Cornu Ammonis [fossil shell curved like a ram’s horn], the relics of a former world, older even than the Egyptian world, lying strewed as thick as dust. Through this we travelled up towards the quarries, the enormous size of which, in former times, was testified by a gigantic propylaeum (hewn out of the rock and left standing against the sky), which is now several hundred yards from the quarries. The stone is not a bit of it honest limestone but a Cornu Ammonis conglomerate. I brought away specimens—as it was so brittle, I could dig with my fingers into it like a jackal. I climbed up to the top of the quarry and had a view of the desert on the other side. Nothing, nothing but tumbled waves of sand as far as you could see. Round an isolated rock I found fragments of pottery, and a square hewn hole in the rock showed the entrance of a tomb, but I had not time to go in. We returned home through the miserable little plundered burying ground near the shore. A santon’s [Muslim hermit’s] tomb was by the landing place and a mat where someone had once prayed, and a ruined Arab fortress. It was quite a relief to pick up a freshwater shell by the riverside as something that was alive. We expected to reach Minya that day, but there was a dead calm and we anchored that night a little short of Samalut, on the western bank, which is the one generally chosen for the night. The next day was our first introduction to a rock temple. About midday we found ourselves opposite some catacombs, so took the little felucca and rowed across to the eastern bank and, taking the boat’s crew with us and the sheikh of the village, went about two miles into the desert to where 128 An allusion to Isa 53:2.

186 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions the quarries stood, shadowless and golden against the blue sky. We found an intaglio [fine stone carved in relief ], larger than life, of Ramesses III (of the XIX [XXth] Dynasty), about sixty years before Samuel, between two hideous gods, probably Hathor and Osiris, with his cartouche by the side. Round the corner a smaller chamber in the rock, dedicated to Hathor, to put the quarries under her protection, the painted ceiling almost blotted out, the pillars in antis broken, but a figure of Rhaebenaen, the son of Ramesses the Great (of the XVIII [XIXth] Dynasty), with two gods still remaining in bas-relief over the altar. The view of the Nile was magnificently ugly from this height: yellowish-green fields on the western bank, desert on the east, nothing beautiful but the sky. There was something touching in this only trace of life which had here sur vived, being the Egyptians’ tribute to a supernatural influence. When we returned, we found two effendis we knew on board our boat, waiting for us. They had devised this opportunity, as they were afraid of saluting Christians when with pachas, which would get them into trouble. One was a poor boy brought up by Ibrahim Pacha and sent to England to learn shipbuilding. He is now head of that department at Boulaq; he took our letters to Cairo for us. A little wind had now sprung up and we took advantage of it to make sail, and got to Minya, which we were to have reached on Sunday, at eight o’clock that night. We were sorry for this delay because the pacha had just had a review of all those beautiful oriental troops there and had left Minya immediately after. Directly after we began to make sail, the rocks on the east side became steep and we could see staircases down into the water. Presently we saw one of our crew, who is the buffoon of the party, rigged out in a pair of white duck English trousers, and waistcoat and straw-hat, crushed in at the crown (where he got them and where he kept them the pharaohs only know), and armed with a mallet. What this joke could be we had not the least idea, till we saw what looked like a line of the archbishop’s rats swimming towards us across the river, which is here remarkably broad. The black objects approached the side of the boat and ‘‘Bones’’ approached too, with his mallet. We saw the fun then. He was a Christian, preparing to receive his fellow Christians, and these were the monks, Copts, of Mariam el Adra (Mary the Virgin), swimming across for an alms. After a mock fight with the mallet, they opened their mouths to have the piece of five paras inserted under each tongue, which ‘‘Bones’’ did very skilfully, and then swam off,

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‘‘Bones’’ flying to our little felucca behind to prevent them from getting on board her. We saw them land and proceed stark-naked up the cliffs to the convent. Alas! when I first saw the position of that convent, high on the cliffs of an impassable desert and overlooking the valley of the dark and solemn Nile, it was such a situation for missionaries of the desert, ascetics of the Thebaid, and to see these wretched aquatic beggars who, I am sorry to say, bear a shocking character for robbing dahabiehs, was such a fall. I was hardly ever so much disappointed or disgusted. At sunrise [12 December] we found ourselves anchored off Minya. I went ashore with Mr B. to see the place: a miserable place, though a capital with a mosque, and the pacha has a palace there, but oh, the miser y! However, when you hear some things, you will only wonder that the Egyptians are alive at all, not that they are wretched: for, as Mr Lane says, they are as much oppressed as they can be and live. Our dahabieh had its berth among grain boats, bean boats, living boats, funeral boats, all clustered round us. At ten o’clock we were off. I saw one curious sight: a body on a bier, covered with a red shawl and followed by innumerable women in blue (their mourning), ferrying over the Nile to the burying place. The Egyptian burying places are invariably on the other side the Nile, and it is so evidently the original of Charon and the Styx129 that it seems the necessary step to set one back the 3000 years. I went ashore about noon and saw my first field of sugar canes and a splendid falcon, and watched some men working their shadoofs. The shadoof is nothing but two cross-poles with weights, working two rush baskets not even lined with clay, so that half the water dribbles through before it reaches its destination, which pour (or are meant to pour) the water of the Nile into a gutter made also of a rush mat, out of which a higher shadoof ladles it into another gutter, and so it reaches the sugar-cane fields. Anything so inartistic it is impossible to imagine. The men had been tracking all day (we were on the eastern side of the river) and the village we had meant to make was still three miles off. We could get no further and for the first time we anchored for the night on the eastern side. Paolo was in a terrible fright lest the Bedouin tribes (for the desert is here close to the shore) should come down upon us. We sent for a watch from the village and were ordered 129 Charon was the Greek mythological boatman who ferried the souls of the dead across the river Styx and on to the nether world.

188 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions to put out our lights and let as little be seen or heard of us as possible. I looked out upon the night and saw a fire lighted upon the high bank, and five old hags crouching and grinning round it: it was like an incantation in Macbeth. They were backed by the solemn depths of the dark blue starry sky (it was like an Etty’s ultramarine), and a tangled forest and underwood of palm trees. It was the first time we had seen palm trees really growing, not like a plantation, but like a cleared forest—I never saw such a wizard picture. Later that night I tried to look at it again, but Paolo had caught me there. I carefully put out my lights, opened my window softly, softly, and thrust forth my head. My eyes were instantly filled with dust and my forehead scratched against something. Paolo had put up a horrid mat the whole length of the boat to prevent anything from being seen from without, and taken up his own residence in the passage, carefully locking the cabin doors. In the morning, when we went ashore, I saw an old man sitting on the ground, contemplating with esteem and affection two serpents, about four feet long, who were sitting on their bottom rings, darting out their forked tongues, flat-headed, vicious-looking reptiles, but evidently intimate with him. He had two more in a bag, and then he thr ust the heads of these into the same bag and they went in quite contentedly. He was evidently a charmer, but if he had not taken out their teeth they would have been dangerous friends, charm he never so wisely. The two erect were Cobra di Capellos, the sacred asp, Thermuthis, which crowns the head of Isis and is the symbol of royalty, Cleopatra’s asp. The Egyptians call it Nashir, from its spreading out its breast. The other two were common harmless snakes. The man did not see me and evidently was communing with the serpents for his own recreation. We passed, coming back to the boat, a deserted Arab village, Metahara, with a Theban gateway and a village green of palm trees, where I saw a pair of beautiful green birds, like paroquets. There was a deserted mosque; all was unroofed and desolate. We had a charming walk that evening at Kôni, where we stopped for the night. Sugar canes grew up ten feet high among the wild palm trees, under which a young camel was grazing, and the acanthus was the underwood. Two men were at prayer, bowing their foreheads to the ground and perfectly abstracted, the first people I have seen praying since Cairo. The Christians bear a still worse character here. They are the scribes of the whole country and they are accused, like our lawyers, of multi-

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plying and complicating all sorts of difficulties to make themselves occupations: ‘‘they gain their livelihood thereby.’’ The Christian village, which surrounds the convent, is notorious for robbing boats; and Christianity, I am sor ry to say, has put itself in ill odour among the Muslims. The law of inheritance here (if there were but anything to inherit) is fairer than you would expect. There is no primogeniture, and the female has half the share of the male. A man has only power over one third of his property, and that he may not leave to an heir unless with the consent of all the others. An only daughter (if there is no son) may inherit half the whole property by the Qur’an, and the other half by common usage. The wife seems, wonderful to believe, to have entire command of her own property, and the husband inherits but a fourth if she have children; and the wife or wives inherit a fourth of their husband’s property, independently and over and above their dowry, if he have no children. With regard to children, the child of the slave wife inherits equally with the child of the real wife! This sounds much better than one expected. If I were to begin now to tell you the infamies in the way of bribery which are committed every day in the chief court at Cairo, you would not believe them, but you can imagine them from the fact that the chief judge (or cadi) of Cairo arrives yearly from Constantinople. He buys the place there and may be grossly ignorant of everything, as he always is of Arabic, being by law a Turk, no regard being paid to any qualification but his pecuniary one. He of course depends entirely upon his dragoman who, being permanent, is well versed in the corruptions of the court, which is the word en petit for its ‘‘usages and traditions.’’ Ever y member of every council in Egypt is named by the pacha, and the ulema (or learned men) who used to exercise a traditionar y influence over the government had their authority entirely annihilated by Muhammad Ali. Source: Claydon Diary

10 December 1849 Walk before breakfast with Σ and Mr B. through the Arabian desert to quarries and catacombs and where the vulture and the jackal lived. Nothing but a burial ground (and tracks of jackals) digging up the bodies to show that human life had been here. (Desert of Sheikh Hassan.) Wrote up letters. Dead calm. Hassan could not reach Minya; stopped at Onase.

190 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 11 December 1849 Nile. Crossed the river opposite Samalut and went up to quarries. Our first rock temple, of Rhaebenaen son of Ramesses the Great (XVIII [XIXth] Dynasty). Gigantic propylaeum left when hewing the rock, shows how far the quarry once extended, now several hundred yards distant from rock. Visit from Hassan Effendi and monks of Coptic convent. Source: Letter 16, 1854 ed. 55-63, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/6 and 9018/9, 12

Beni Hasan [Friday] 14 December 1849 My first real Egyptian day. Oh my people—two years ago, all but a day, was the first time I saw the Sistine,130 my first initiation into the Michelangelo mysteries: today has been my first initiation into the Egyptian mysteries. I prayed for a contrary wind that we might not pass Beni Hasan without seeing the caves, whose pillared porticoes, far in the rock above, we had been looking at the whole day from the lazy dahabieh. We arrived opposite them at five o’clock, too late to make the ascent, so anchored at Kom, and I was promised that, if we had not a fair wind during the night, we should go up at sunrise the next day. In the morning, when I woke, we were going on though the morning star had scarcely risen in the east. I thought they were playing me false, but no, at sunrise we put off in the little boat, crossed the Nile and landed just below those magic holes—holes did I call them, with their square entrances as fresh as if they had been chiselled yesterday. They are all in one stratum about three fifths up the cliff, and up we scrambled. The two deserted villages of Beni Hasan lie a little to the south of the fort—what the desolation of an Arab village, when abandoned, is cannot be described. They were destroyed by Ibrahim Pacha, and ever y woman and child killed. The whole gave me the idea, not of an old town deserted, but of an old world deserted. We arrived at the mouth of the sepulchres, built certainly 4000 years ago, for the cartouche of Osirtasen I of the XVIth Dynasty is ever ywhere visible, in whose time Wilkinson131 puts Joseph; but Bunsen puts the Osirtasens at least four dynasties earlier, in the XIIth

130 The Sistine Chapel in Rome, decorated with frescoes by Michelangelo and other famous painters. 131 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians 1:14 and 30.

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Dynasty, 2801 [in current dating 1991]132 bce, and buries them in Beni Hasan. However that may be does not signify much to me; it is certain that, except the pyramids, the oldest monuments in Egypt, and probably in this world, these are the first in date of all ascertained antiquities—of all we have to see—so we very properly saw them first. The cliff is covered with large boulder stones which have rolled out of their places in the strata: the cliff itself is in ruins as well as its monuments. All, all the works of God, as well as the works of man, are tottering to their fall. Had St Paul and St John lived here, it would not have been wonderful that the Last Day and the Last Judgment, as instantly impending, should have been constantly in their minds. I should not have been surprised to have seen the angel with his last tr ump standing on the highest rock. There are thirty sepulchres; on most of them the paintings are gone, the columns broken, and nothing but the naked chamber hewn in the rock remaining. The columns must have been removed by main force, and there are marks, as of pistol balls, upon the hieroglyphs. But there are five still perfect with their pillared naves: the pillars are a nosegay of four lotus stalks just bound together under the chin, making thus the capitals of the four lotus buds. But this beautiful simple idea is spoilt by painting the abaci green, and the shafts banded with yellow and green, the earliest original, I should suppose,133 of that Lombard and Moorish architecture, of alternate layers of different-coloured marble. The rocky walls of four of the chambers are entirely covered with rows of small figures, representing the manners and customs of the day. The eastern sun did not shine into their doorways (looking west), still we could see plainly enough; all civilized trades were there—glass, iron—all the rest of it, also the trade—shall I call it civilized or not?—of opera dancing: Pierrot, making a jet d’homme, with extended leg, showing that precedent is not always good, we having so closely followed our Egyptian antecedents. Ships, with rudders exactly like those on Lago Maggiore, the men rowing standing. The colours and even drawing of these things showed them to be good chemists and good draughtsmen at this day. The dress of the women was civilized: the ornaments and bracelets were invariably red, green and white, the Italian colours. 132 Recent scholarship has considerably altered the chronology of Egyptian histor y since Nightingale’s time. Henceforth I indicate in brackets the dates according to T.G.H. James, An Introduction to Ancient Egypt, and N.-C. Grimal, A Histor y of Ancient Egypt. 133 Ms 9017/6: presume.

192 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions The only sign of barbarism was that the king was always five times as big as anybody else. The famous and much disputed procession is here, which Champollion134 makes that of Joseph’s brethren being presented to him, while H. Martineau135 and others scout the idea. It is certain that their dress is Syrian, not Egyptian, and that this tomb was of Joseph’s time, Wilkinson asserts. To me it seems a matter of ver y little consequence to decide the question whether or no. Joseph’s head is quite rubbed out and it signifies mighty little to have a portrait of Dan and Gad or of

and

.136 All that one wants to know is

that on this soil nearly137 4000 or 5000 years ago men stood who felt and thought like us, who cared for their brothers and mourned over their dead with an everlasting love and a preser ving memor y like us, that memorials of their love have remained while all remembrance of them has passed away and, while the sound of their names has died away into an hieroglyph, the sound of the beating of their hearts still echoes from under those dim lotus-leaved rocky chambers. They wished to have their dead continually before their eyes. The stone does find a voice, and the sand of the desert tongues, wherewith to speak to us. But the curious part of these painted grottoes is the literal matterof-fact delineation of all the details of everyday life: their dressing, eating, working, walking, writing, doctoring, talking, dancing, their sickness and their health, their indoors and their out-of-doors, their business and their play, without one attempt at composition, one feeling of the picturesque or of art, one idea, one aspiration after the ideal, the supernatural. I saw nothing but representations of the dead man during life, of his occupations and his circumstances;138 [nothing] of 134 J.-F. Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie en 1828 et 1829 434. 135 Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life: Past and Present 182. Martineau pointed out that the Egyptians had no reason to celebrate the Hebrews, who were merely workers; moreover Joseph’s brothers came as a family, not a nation. 136 The first hieroglyph means ‘‘Neferhotep,’’ a royal scribe showing the tomb owner the list of Semitic folks visiting the site of Beni Hasan; the second, ‘‘Ibi-shai,’’ a Semitic name connected with pedlars visiting Egypt. Thanks to Professor Ronald J. Leprohon for the interpretation. 137 Ms 9017/6: really. 138 Ms 9017/6: nothing of an afterlife, of where he was now; in one or two of the chambers were recesses with ugly gods, apparently to consult the oracle. But philosophy, metaphysics, ideas: nothing of that kind was here, nothing of the highest.

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the highest perfection of the civilization and organization of everyday life, of the mechanical arts and the arts of refinement. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the Sistine and the Egyptian artist: the one all ideal and aspiration, disdaining art and earth, and transporting even the prophets of the earth back to the heaven they came from, but wild, exaggerated and often unnatural; the other, adhering with the most scrupulous fidelity to tr uth and exactness in real life, so that, at the distance of 4000 years, it is of infinitely more value to us than if it had been less literal, as letting us into all his most private and everyday habits, while his ideal, when he does show it us, in his gods, is the most matter-of-fact reality possible, merely the magnified attributes of animals, their senses exaggerated. I think the Egyptian must have been very much like some of the English clergy wives of the present day, who preach out of the Old Testament and make muslin curtains. One of the ruined chambers, with its lotus-leaved pillars and aisles and dim vaults, was very mysterious and curious, more from what was not than from what was there. But I think the whole effect was more strange, more supernatural (upon one’s own mind) of this magic-lantern glimpse into the domestic economy of 4000 years ago than if it had been less real, petty life. After this, you will agree that you feel you would be very little the better for knowing whether those were Gad or Dag’s [Dan’s] features; all one wants to know is that Joseph did live, that he trod where you tread, that his boat floated many a time down that old river when he went to see his father-in-law at Heliopolis, and whether his tomb was a little more to the right or a little more to the left matters little. Coming out of the tombs into the broad sunlight, with a little knot of our red-tarbooshed, blue-robed sailors sitting in a group at the entrance (such as Europeans who sit on chairs and wear pantaloons can never form), was a pretty picture; and the whole valley of the Nile lay below. Σ said that the awkward architecture of the tombs was inconceivable with the perfection of the colouring. It and seemed to me that they attended much more to colour than to form. The architrave, which meant to be what we should call a pediment, had its lower line curved no part of the curve was any part of a circle. And if it meant to be an arch, just where the strongest part of the arch should be (the centre), there was a pillar, and of the three pillars none were equidistant and the middle was not in the middle.

194 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Even to my inexperienced eye the effect was painful, the highest part of the curve being on one side. But the sense of beauty in the Egyptian evidently was not, I mean in the Egyptian of that age: we shall see what a later era will produce. No beauty, however, can surpass in impression what this first day has made. Our dahabieh waddled slowly across to meet us; it had not been able to move a step without us and our reis, with his grizzled beard and his head swathed in shawls, looked like a Rembrandt, as he stood on deck waiting the arrival of the English sisters of Joseph and the pharaohs. The queerest contrast of all, however, was Trout sitting at the door of a tomb (for she went with us) crocheting a pattern in small of a new polka, with her back leaning against the hieroglyphs of Osirtasen, on the doorpost of the sepulchre. It was less painful, however, than the childishly ignorant Arab who stood degraded and brutified under the shadow of his magnificent ancestor’s tomb. Poor Arab! is it the end or the beginning of his civilization? and did God intend it so? is what one asks continually. Perhaps the thing which came most home to one was a Greek alphabet, sprinkled all over the wall, the letters all manner of ways. It was like surprising the man in the very act of teaching his little Greeks in this cool grot[to]. Another thing which struck one was the excessive prosaicness of the representations. Nothing was left to the imagination; probably they had none. You were to see it all. If a drapery over a chair was painted, the chair was painted through. Your Egyptian artist would not have trusted, as the Duke of Cambridge did to his duchess being behind the Duchess of Sutherland in Hayter’s139 picture of the Coronation, but would have painted her through. The home iness of the whole contrasted strangely with the wild scenery without. The bodies do not lie in the chambers but in pits in the rocky floor below; most of these now stand open, and you look down and see them running far into the rock. The place where the body lay is generally marked by a hieroglyphical tablet in the wall above. ‘‘His body shall be cast into the pit’’140 is literal. I must say that the Egyptian never seemed to have an idea but he spoilt it. The idea of those lotus was beautiful. They merely swelled 139 Sir George Hayter (1792-1871), portrait and historical painter. In 1838 he painted the ‘‘Coronation of Queen Victoria.’’ 140 Possibly an allusion to Matt 5:29.

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out a little at the bottom as if they were growing out of roots; their necks were first tied together by a fillet under the buds which made the capital, and if they could have let them alone, it would have looked like a river cave with natural pillars. What had they to do with painting them in stripes? Some of the painted processions were, however, beautifully done. One of a man doctoring a sick goat was in real perspective, done by an artist of genius, not of the usual Chinese fashion. So ends our Beni Hasan day, the first of many wonders but none more curious. We tracked but a little further that day and anchored for the night at Nezlet e Sheikh Timay. Now it happened that Nezlet e Sheikh Timay was at war with the village of the opposite bank, Sheikh Timay, on account of some palm trees for which N. e S.T. had killed a man of the other village, and though two men are now in prison at Minya for it, yet ‘‘blood for blood,’’ ‘‘an eye for an eye,’’ is the universal law here; and till every relation of the murderer is murdered, the villages are not at peace and the affair is not at an end. Now N. e S.T. would not let any boats anchor there for fear the inhabitants of the other village should take the opportunity and either do the boats a mischief, in order that it might be retaliated by government on the nearest village N. e S.T. (perhaps by extermination), or crawl upon the village itself, now all its male inhabitants but twelve are at Cairo. But we had seen the sheikh of N. e S.T. at Minya and treated him with coffee on board our boat, and his daughter had married, à la Capulet, the sheikh of the hostile village. So he gave us a letter to his village, ordering them to let us anchor there and give us three guards and two cats, which we wanted almost as much, for the rats in my cabin are so fierce and bold that I am obliged to get up at night to defend my dear boots . You cannot keep clear of rats with all your care when you are anchored near grain boats sometimes all night. Accordingly we received our three guards. The whole boat was packed up like a brown paper parcel, both sides, with mats, to protect us from both Timays; and we lay like birds in a nest all night. N. Timay is on an island, so we were cheated of a morning walk. It was the first cloudy day we have seen. Ever ybody knows that Muhammad Ali took possession of the whole property142 of Egypt, not only the land of the proprietors but the 141 Ms 9017/6: on the west bank. 142 Ms 9017/6: land.

196 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions income of all religious institutions. He levies, besides, two dollars on ever y acre, takes the whole of the produce of some things—cotton, flax, etc.—and buys the whole of the rest, the price being generally kept back to pay the taxes, and when one village cannot pay its taxes, the next is made to pay for two. The fellahs are obliged to steal their own produce to live. They may borrow seed from government, but if they do, half is stolen by the middlemen before it comes to them. In this ‘‘rabbia’’ of taxation, palm trees pay 1½ piastre each; grain, coming into town, pays a tax equal to its own price in a good harvest in the country. The income tax is one twelfth of a man’s income, and government makes a profit of 50 percent on the sale of all produce. When one hears all this one only wonders that the Egyptians work at all, not that they are idle, and one thinks it a proof of some civilization in them that they prefer their property to their flesh and boast of the bastinadoes they got before they gave up their money. Adding insult to injury, government makes them pay for the camels which carry their own grain to the government granary. No wonder Lane says they could not suffer more and live. Source: Claydon Diary

12 December 1849 Minya 82 miles from Beni Suef. 2:00 a.m. Went ashore, miserable town. Body ferrying across the river, living original of Charon. First sugar canes (Metahara); my Monday walk. Anchored east side at Nezlet [e Sheikh Timay]. Gharga, wild palm trees, fear of Bedouins with [watch] guards, night fire. 13 December 1849 Nile. Walk before breakfast with Σ and Mr B. to Metahara, an Arab village; deserted, empty mosque. Charmer with the cobra di papellos, an old man sitting on the ground. Slept at Kom el-Ahmar; boat packed up like a brown paper parcel. Walk under palms and sugar canes. Men at prayer. Sun setting. Young camels grazing, such an hour. 14 December 1849 Beni Hasan from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Thirty caves, tombs of the XIIth Dynasty (Bunsen). Procession of Joseph’s brethren (Champollion). Glorious day, a curious contrast to my first sight of Sistine Chapel, this day two years ago.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 197 Source: Letter 17, 1854 ed. 63-67, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/6-7

Off Manfaloot [Monday] 17 December [1849] We have not had a gasp of wind these two days and have made very little progress, about six or seven miles a day. Our crew are not very able-bodied fellows. Today we have had a sunrise breeze and went boldly in this morning under the grand cliffs of Gebel Abufeda. I went ashore on the other side when the crew stopped for breakfast and saw the Sheikh Jacob coming into Egypt with his flocks and herds: such droves of buffaloes, herds of camels and flocks of brown-horned sheep, with asses in abundance. This was quite a new sight: you forget in Egypt the existence of pastoral countries, ‘‘for every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians,’’143 so purely agricultural is the land. We had had heavy clouds for two days and yet no wind; the sailors did not know what to make of it, they had never seen such a sky before without a sirocco [hot wind originating in the Sahara]. At last a north wind brought us gallantly through the Straits of Gebel Abufeda, but towards noon, the river turning to the southeast, the crew were obliged to track; soon the wind increased so much that they could not pull against it. We got into a little bay where the eddy became quite a whirlpool . Five times we tried to tow out of this corner, and five times we were swung round and back again by the whirlpool till we were obliged to give it up. This we thought the more provoking as five dahabiehs, which kept in the middle of the stream, passed us, going ver y near the wind, and one with her sail flapping. About three, the khamsin [sand wind] increased; it was a wind like this which destroyed six years ago a caravan of 300 camels belonging to Muhammad Ali. The air became filled with sand. The river seemed turned upside down and flowing bottom upwards, the whirlwind of sand from the desert literally covering it. We could not see across the river, and when we could stand upon deck, which was not often, our eyes were completely filled and our faces covered with sand. As to the Critic making Thames not to walk between his banks, he does not deser ve the credit of originality for that idea, for Nile invented the plan first and today, instead of walking between his banks, his banks walked between him. I saw the sand blown up into a ridge upon the water and it looked as if you could have passed the river on dry ground, 143 Gen 46:34.

198 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions only the dry ground was on the top. I am glad to have seen it, for I should never have believed in it if I had not, and I give you leave not to believe. By this time Nile seemed to be walking with his bed144 on his head, but it was no beneficent miracle, like the paralytic man’s, for it looked as if earth, air and water had been blasted together into one whirlwind of sand. We could not wash for it was no use fishing for water in the Nile: instead of water he gave us a stone,145 i.e., a sandbank. The waves were as high as when there is a moderate sea in the channel and the wind was hot. It grew dark and the blast increased so that we drove a stake into the bank and fastened a rope to it for the night. Presently Paolo rushed in for one of the guns, which was always kept loaded. He said he saw a strange boat coming in sight. I ran out on deck after him and, sure enough, in the pitchy darkness, I saw one of the dahabiehs which had overtaken us in the afternoon floating past us, bottom upwards—nothing to be seen of her passengers. She str uck in the sand just astern of us and remained fast there. By this time the wind had increased so much and we bumped so incessantly, that we were afraid the rope would not hold, and we put out another. I could not help laughing, in the middle of all this, at the figure of our reis, who had squatted himself at the bottom of our little boat (which was between the dahabieh and the bank) and sat there smoking his pipe and taking no further interest in the question. If the rope wouldn’t hold it wouldn’t, and why should he be disturbed? I did not go to bed. We bumped incessantly and, at the stern, especially so hard that we thought we must spring a leak. It was so dark that we could see nothing, but in the morning we found that our boat had been astride of the poor wreck all night, which had been whirled round by the eddy under us. At dawn I looked out: she had entirely gone to pieces. Nothing was left of her but a few of the cabin planks, which our boat picked up, a chest of clothes, which we saved, and her oranges floating in the whirlpool. I never saw anything more affecting than those poor oranges—the last luxury of their life in the midst of death. Torrents of rain were falling—our cabin roof was completely soaked through—the sky was still one heavy mass, but the wind had a little fallen and we struggled on, towed by the wretched crew, their teeth chattering, dripping with wet, and evidently thinking the Day of 144 Ms 9017/6: feet. An allusion to Matt 9:1-8. 145 An allusion to Matt 7:9.

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Judgment, the end of the world, was come (for to them rain is much what to us English an earthquake might be) to Manfaloot, which we reached about twelve. There we learnt that of the five boats which passed us yesterday to windward four had gone down, and of their passengers twenty (including women and children) had been lost. Almost all their relations were in Manfaloot. We gave up the chest of clothes to the governor, to the great displeasure of our crew, who fully intended to keep it for themselves. At Manfaloot the miserable crew went on shore and baked themselves, literally dried themselves in an oven. Such a storm had not been known since 1839, when half the houses in Manfaloot were washed down by the rain. The heavens had rained first sand, and then water, for the last twenty-four hours. Our hold was full of bilge water, other wise we had no hurt. ‘‘If Nile do this,’’ said Paolo, ‘‘him see me no more.’’ Paolo had been up and down the Nile fifteen years and never seen such a storm, and our reis, who looks like Abraham, never but once. We began to think that old Nile had got it up as a little gentillesse for us (as Italians prepare halfraw roast beef and plum pudding for English), thinking to please us by a specimen of our own climate, and gratify us by a thought of home. But if he knew what a figure he made of himself, he would not have done it. The consternation of the Arabs seemed quite to stun and palsy them; they were incapable of doing anything. Four days of storm we had before the sky righted itself. Whoever has seen a Nile khamsin will hope never to see one again. The poor wretched boat which passed us so gaily in the afternoon and came back, four hours after, a mere hulk, her mast and yardarm just appearing above the water, had been in company with us for two days, and we had seen her merry Nubians and some of her passengers, fifty times a day, in racing with one another. They had evidently broken open the cabin in their efforts to escape, but how, even in that pitchy darkness, they could not have waded to the shoal, we could not conceive.146 146 Ms 9017/6: [has a second, slightly different version of Letter 17] We have had four days of stormy weather and made no way at all, the khamsin blowing so strong from the southeast that the crew could not pull against it and we were obliged to remain anchored under the shelter of a bank. Such storms of rain have not been seen in Egypt since 1839 when half Manfaloot was carried away; we thought we were back in England. We expected to have arrived at Asyut four days ago and were without milk or bread, and

200 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Claydon Diary

15 December 1849 Nile. Slept last night at Nezlet e Sheikh Timay, at war with Sheikh Timay; anchored by permission of sheikh who gave us eight guards and two cats. Wrote up letters. Began Wilkinson’s account of the gods of Egypt. Little evening walk. 16 December 1849 Walked to the dyke of entrance of canal of Bahr Jenvef [?] and saw from it great extent of cultivated country. Wilkinson’s gods with Σ and Mr B. on deck in the afternoon. 17 December 1849 Nile. Came with a fair wind through strait of Gebel Abufeda. Wrote up gods of ancient Egyptians. Walked on shore. Saw Sheikh Jacob moving with his flocks and herds; twisted round five times in an eddy and stopped. Khamsin blew. River began to run bottom upwards, i.e., with his bed on the head. Rained first sand, then water. Mr Bracebridge sadly annoyed by the delay. But I am glad to have seen a khamsin, for I should never have believed in it if I had not, and I give you leave not to believe. It was the same as destroyed a caravan of 300 camels belonging to Muhammad Ali six years ago. If you have ever seen a river turned upside down and flowing with its bottom upwards, you can fancy a khamsin; the river was literally covered with the sand, blowing from the desert. The spectacle of Thames not walking between his banks (in the Critic) would not astonish me at all, for I have seen Nile walking with his bed on his head. It was not a beneficent miracle, like the paralytic man’s, however, at all, for it is one of those things I am glad to have seen once and hope never to see again. Whenever we could stand upon deck, which was not often, our eyes were so completely filled with sand and our faces covered, that we could see nothing. We could not wash, for it was no use fishing water out of the Nile, for instead of water, he gave us a stone, i.e., a sandbank. We could not see across the river and, instead of his walking between his banks, his banks walked between him. This you may believe or not, as you like, but I saw through the window, i.e., when my eyes were not full of anything, a sandbank on the top of the river—the sand was blown up into a ridge upon the water . It was like passing the river on dry ground, only the dry ground was on the top. The waves were as high as when there is a little sea in the Channel. Five times we tried to get out of the corner where we were, and five times we were swung back by an eddy like a whirlpool till we were obliged to give it up. The air was one blast of sand. In a high wind one expects to be cold, but instead of that we were hot. When we struggled on with difficulty the next day (18th) to Manfaloot, the crew went ashore to bake themselves, literally to dry themselves in an oven after the rain.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 201 Source: Letter 18, 1854 ed. 67-68, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/7

Asyut [Thursday] 20 December [1849] Just arrived, for today the weather has gloriously cleared up and enabled us to reach this, the capital of Upper Egypt, which we had been in sight of for four days almost. With rapture I found myself upon an ass again, riding like a caliph into Asyut, a mile from the riverside, and after our return to the boat, on this the eve of the shortest day, sauntering like Pharaoh’s daughter along the river’s bank,147 to see the sun set behind the minarets, with the mountain beyond full of sepulchres in the rock. We must stay here two days, though the wind is fair at last, to let the crew bake. They take an oven for a day and night, go to the mill, buy the wheat, wash and grind it, knead it themselves with their feet and then bake it, spending the night at the oven and going into it with their own bread, I suppose to keep it warm. Such is the method of providing oneself with bread here! We had been without it for four days and could get no milk either. Source: Claydon Diary

18 December 1849 Air filled with sand. Could not wash for Nile, instead of water, gave us a stone, i.e., a sandbank. ‘‘If old Nile do this, him see me no more,’’ see [said] Paolo. Struggled on to Manfaloot where our crew dried themselves in an oven. Such rain not been seen there for ten years, when it washed down half Manfaloot. Sun recovered himself in the evening and we left Manfaloot. 19 December 1849 Nile. Saw a fair wind blowing a little before us. Could not get to it all day because of a bend in the river. Walked ashore on a desert island which even the Nile could not cause to fructify. Stopped at moon rise at a palm village. Sirius and Proeym [?] rising in the river. 20 December 1849 After an astonishing run of twenty-five miles in four days, fairly made Asyut, 94 miles from Minya, 12:00. Rode into the town like caliphs on our asses, the Mustafet before us on an ass. Sauntered like Pharaoh’s daughter by the river’s side to look at the sun setting behind the minarets. 147 An allusion to Exod 2:5.

202 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Letter 19, 1854 ed. 68-74, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/8 and 9018/12

Lycopolis [Saturday 22 December] 1849, the shortest day We have been spending the day in the caves of Lycopolis, above Asyut. There is nothing in them so interesting as in Beni Hasan—no cartouches sufficiently legible to determine their date—everything destroyed, defaced, plundered. But the position, the associations, the picturesqueness, mental and moral as well as physical, made them to me, if possible, more striking. For here the anchorites of the Thebaid [solitar y monks living around Thebes] clustered (John of Lycopolis,148 of course, and many others) and the religious plays of the nun Hrosvita,149 which I used to devour in the Revue des deux mondes, all came before one’s imagination. I had that strange feeling as if I had been here before—it was so exactly what I had imagined—a coincidence between the reality and the previous fancy, which never comes true with me. Twice I have had that feeling: once here and once in finding the chapel of Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s. Below you, far below you, lies the city of Asyut, the capital of Upper Egypt, looking like the sort of city the animals might have built when they had possession of the earth, as we are told, before man was created: a collection of mud-heaps, except where its thirteen minarets cut the sky. I had read Mungo Park’s150 descriptions of an African village, and Bruce’s,151 and had fancied I understood them, but no description gives the idea of the debasement and misery. This was the type of the savage life, while, in those caves of the rock, the saints of the Thebaid stood each before one’s imagination, at the door of his narrow cell, as the types of the spiritual life. And Alexandria stood afar where, in the neo-Platonist school, these men, the Platonist Christians, had probably been nourished, as the type of the intellectual life. There they had seen the extreme152 of Epicurean refinement, of intel148 John of Lycopolis, a fourth-centur y ascetic. 149 The eleventh-centur y nun Hrosvita of Gandersheim wrote pious tales of saints and martyrs. 150 Mungo Park (1771-1806), one of Britain’s first great African explorers. 151 James Br uce (1730-94), African traveller, author of Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1768-73). 152 Ms 9018/12: extremeness.

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lectual luxury, where enjoyment became a science, and one sees how naturally the feelings of these men sprung out of such a past as that: how they came to think prayer and meditation and self-denial the only good, after having been told that pleasure was the supreme end. (An immense cone of clay, into which the wild bee was flying, hung close to the door of one of the tombs. ‘‘His meat was locusts and wild honey.’’153) Alexandria, Asyut and the Thebaid—what a picture it was! Numbers of heads and tails of mummy jackals were lying about in their rags, for Lycopolis was sacred to Anubis, a jackal-headed god, who was the god of Death in its good sense, death in the sense of regeneration and resurrection. It was his office to preside over the dying moments, to carry away the escaping psyche [soul] from the bed of death to the presence of his father Osiris, whose name the newborn ψυχη´ [soul] then took and under which name it entered paradise. Anubis was, in the same sense, the god of Time. But Time itself now lay dead, and the mummies, so carefully put under his protection, all lay tumbled about among the rocks. It was curious to see these things, to which a reverence for life, or even for where life had been, under any form, had given birth, a reverence so great that, even in the animal, life was sacred; to see now, not only the mummy animals, but even the skeleton of a human being, a young woman, 5000 years ago so reverentially cared for, now handled by our childish Arabs, pulled to pieces and thrown at one another’s heads. Little would she care for it now; still I could not bear it, more for the feelings of those who had cared for her 5000 years ago than for her own. We buried her decently out of sight, the sand with a heap of stones covering. It was little good, for five minutes afterwards we found the skeleton of her husband. But there is nothing painful in all this—the ideas of the old Egyptians about death were so cheer ful. It was so completely to them the portal of life that one felt as if the god of Death must have rejoiced over his own death, now that he is gone to join his worshippers. I shall not describe the caves—whoever imagined anything from description? The atmosphere within is not chill or damp, like vaults or churchyards, but warm and genial and dry, to the last and farthest chamber in the rock. Little remains to tell their story but some beautiful blue scrolls still covering the rocky ceiling: blue, the old Egyptian type of wisdom, because sapphire, its favourite stone, means, as in Hebrew, to write. So the Hebrews still call their Bible Sephir, the book, 153 Matt 3:4.

204 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions and the Egyptian priests wore (like the ‘‘Urim and Thummim’’154) on their breasts a blue stone, a sapphire, with Truth engraven on it. The two breastplates appear to have been exactly similar. Mr B. and I climbed the mountain, through a cleft, in search of the site of the old Lycopolis and found on the very summit the place cleared—no doubt the acropolis—and a smaller round space, the acropolis of the acropolis. And such a view! not beautiful—bird’s-eye views never are—but all Egypt, all the windings of the Nile seemed to lie at our feet like a map. And the great Libyan desert here approached the cultivated land, not, as before, rising up from it, with a difference of level which accounted for the change and seemed to make it natural, as being where the Nile could not reach, but level with the valley, like a great dragon putting out his fiery tongue and licking up the green, fertile plain, biting into it and threatening to encroach still more. You have no idea how frightful it looked. I had never seen this effect lower down the Nile, and the desert seemed to me more ter rible than before. On the Arabian side as well the plain was bounded with desert. That view I never shall forget. It is good for a man to be here, good for British pride to think: Here was a nation more power ful than we are, and almost as civilized, 4000 years ago. For 2000 years already they have been a nation of slaves; in 2000 years where shall we be? Shall we be like them? It is good for Christian pride, too, to be called ‘‘dog’’ in the street, pointed at, spat at, as we are here. No one looks at us with respect, hardly with curiosity; we are too low. They take our money and have done with us. It is good for British exclusiveness, too, to become so completely inhabitants of another age as we are here. Till I caught myself rejecting a Roman temple as uninteresting and modern, I had no idea how completely we were living in the time of 4000 years ago. There is no affectation in it. One says, ‘‘We will not go to that place, it is only Roman,’’ or ‘‘The Romans have spoilt that tomb.’’ One learns to distinguish the antiquity of the cartouches by their simplicity, as in heraldr y. Those of the Ptolemies are overladen and complicated, those of the earliest dynasties have but three or four figures, and [one learns] to go to those tombs where the cartouches are the simplest. But I like the chambers best where there is nothing to learn, nothing but pure plaster for the imagination! The mountain here is literally riddled with tombs and chambers. We crawled from one into the other. We rode home through the mod154 An allusion to Exod 28:30.

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ern burial ground, a city without the walls, rows and rows of square, whitewashed, ogived enclosures, with divans round them, under which the inhabitants of the living city, which is much less handsome, lie. Beautiful palms, acacias, caroubas, filled it, while the living city, base and dirty, with its houses windowless, of sunburnt bricks, looked degraded and hopeless. How can it be otherwise, when government fixes the price of produce, buys it, compels work by bastinado, and not by the natural incentive, interest, and leaves the wretched fellah nothing but taxes to live upon? The women, dirty beyond description, use their one veil for a basket. And yet they are a noble-looking race. I have never seen so many tall men, noble presences, stately heads, as in this wretched Asyut and miserable bazaar, where the shopkeepers sit, keep their goods and work at their trade in holes, four feet by five, raised on either side the narrow street. The only whitewashed house is the pacha’s palace just inside the gate. A number of people were crouching at the door, waiting for audience. ‘‘He sits and judges in the gate.’’155 The ride into Asyut is really through quite a wooded country, with yellow flowering mimosas and ponds, and white ibises in them. And at the corner of every road is that beautiful observance of Muslim hospitality, the covered water tank, long and narrow, with three little starry openings and three little dome-lings like a holy water vessel, which is always kept filled with water for the traveller arriving at the city to refresh himself, even before he enters it. I have drunk there myself and blest the observance towards the stranger. Tomorrow we leave Asyut and set our sails to Thebes, but shall not, we now fear, spend our Christmas Day there as we had intended. Our bread is baked and we are off. The day was from about ten minutes to seven to ten minutes past five, about ten hours and twenty minutes from sunrise to sunset today. In the middle of the day it was hot, nights cold as usual. In a garden in Asyut the trellis was covered with vines in leaf, castor-oil plant in flower, but no attempt at flowers anywhere.156 155 An allusion to Prov 31:23. 156 Ms 9017/8: This is a sorry letter from Upper Egypt, my peoples. But I had hopes to have heard from you before this time. I thought that, by stopping here two days, the Nicholsons, who were to bring our letters from Cairo, would have overtaken us. But they have not. You should take advantage of the French mails as well as the English. That is the reason that I have been so long without letters. Since those we brought with us ourselves to Alexandria, I

206 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions a noble cat has come aboard of its own accord and killed two rats: I believe it is a god! But now farewell, dearest people.157 And now that Nile has got up this little divertissement in our honour as English people, to remind us of our own climate, I hope he will give us fine weather.158 God bless, and He will bless you. My Christmas love to all. Source: Claydon Diary

22 December 1849 Nile. Shortest day. Up to the tombs [illeg] of Lycopolis above Asyut. There lay Asyut, type of savage or sensual life; there in the caves lived the anchorites of the Thebaid, type of spiritual life. Children of the Alexandrian school, type of intellectual life and the reaction of it. Desert biting into valley like a great dragon with fiery tongue, licking it up. Skeletons of women mummies all lying about there where reverence for life so great that even animals preser ved. Wrote home by the Mediah (vice-governor). Left Asyut at 12:00 with a fair wind and made sail for twelve hours. Bunsen: [Manetho’s?] dynasties not successive but some contemporary. 23 December 1849 Opposite Antaeopolis viewed the site of the battlefield between Horus and Typhon, 15,571 bce, vide Herodotus. Fair wind. Sat under the tamarisks in the heat of the day. Moon in her first quarter again brilliant every night. Source: Letter 20, 1854 ed. 74-76, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/9 and 9018/8, 13

On board the Par thenope, halfway between Asyut and Girgeh [Monday 24 Decembre 1849] Christmas Eve I must write to you all, my dear ones, this holy day, and think of you with your holly boughs, as you will of us with our palm branches—your Yule log in the drawing-room chimney and our hot sun overhead. have not heard from England. But I almost hope now we shall have contrary winds so that the Nicholson boat may overtake ours, for while we have been here, she must have been profiting by the fair wind and be now near us. 157 Ms 9017/8: I shall write again from Qena. 158 Ms 9017/8: Your ‘‘wild ass in the wilderness’’ but ever yours.

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Tell M.S.159 with my love that I walked alone at sunset one eastern evening on the seashore near Alexandria, on the very spot as I like to believe where Justin Martyr met his old man,160 and as I thought of their meeting I thought of ours, made under auspices almost as holy. I wish she could have seen the sunset which glorified that spot, the sands of gold, the transparent green caves of the sea. Till you see an eastern sea you never understand the Homeric idea of Thetis and the nymphs living in its caves. In our dull green and blue waves there seems no inducement to live, but in the transparent green caves of the east, the colour of that green fluorspar,161 or of chr ysolite, and of nothing else that I have ever seen, you can hardly fancy that something blessed does not dwell.162 But I must come back to Christmas. We breakfasted out of doors and walked slowly under a hot sun on Christmas Eve, and what a sunset! The Nile was like the colour of copper pyrites or of mica when the sun is making prismatic colours on it, not the colours of a rainbow— those are too faint—but of metal suddenly cooled, an ore run out of the furnace. Then we have had the strangest scenery since Asyut. Those expressions ‘‘the ends of the earth,’’ ‘‘from the corners of the world,’’ come here quite natural. The mountains either form squares going off at a right angle, or make quite a sharp corner, so that the general ground plan of the valley is this: A , A is Antaeopolis. I assure you this is not in the least exaggerated. Last night when we ar rived at Akhmim, the ancient Chemmis or Panopolis, the whole river was shut in by a square of cliffs and turned into a square lake, so that it looked like the corner of the world finished off in that way! This division of the river into lakes gives one continually the feeling of some Sinbad-the-Sailor or Rasselas valley, not in our sense of valley but shut up and made up at both ends from the rest of the world.163 ♦♦♦♦

159 Ms 9017/9: pray tell Catherine Stanley when you see her. 160 In his search for the true way of life, Justin (100-65), Christian philosopher and apologist, says he encountered an old man who initiated him to the Hebrew scriptures and was thus instrumental in guiding him to faith. See Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew 3-7. 161 Ms 9018/3: stalactite. 162 Ms 9017/9: What an evening that was at Alexandria. 163 Ms 9017/9: This is the plan of the river at Akhmim you approach from it looks quite fastened off.

Nile

, so that when

208 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions The hills are sometimes pyramids, but oftener164 square-headed: not one blade of vegetation, not one cliff from the top to the bottom, but all blown over with sand. You cannot conceive the strange effect of this nature, unnatural to us. As to drawing, Σ declares it impossible. And when in the evening a spectral bark with its glassy white sails comes standing in silently like a phantom ship upon this molten sea, you fancy yourself anywhere but in this world. We have the lovely moon again in her first quarter, and she has brought us a fair wind. This morning I went ashore at a village more miserable than anything we have seen. The people here did not live in huts but in half a hut, just a mere semicircular screen of mud put up with a penthouse of sugar-cane stalks at the top, and underneath it squatted, half naked, eating with their hands, the whole family in the mud, with a sheep, a dog and a hen, their two or three pots round them, their shelf a scoop in the mud wall. The cliffs are now all blown over with hills of sand rising at their bases. I liked Asyut much better than Beni Hasan. Beni Hasan is of infinitely more value to the chronologist and, if the XIIth Dynasty lies buried there, as Bunsen says, it is unique. (It seems strange,165 for the twelfth was the conquering dynasty, and the pictures on these tombs are all of peaceful arts and sciences, and matter-of-fact, jog-trot amusements.) Still it is only an isolated fact of chronology, while the long train of associations at Asyut is much more interesting.166 Source: Claydon Diary

24 December 1849 Fair wind all day. River turned square, mountains all in huge squares or angles. Corner of the world, came to one of these corners just before Akhmim where river disappeared, earth turned up by the cliffs and finished off in that way. River the colours of copper pyrites or some metallic ore suddenly cooled in the evening light.

164 Ms 9017/9: this shape . 165 Ms 9017/9: It does not seem probable. 166 Ms 9017/9: But I believe I have said this before.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 209 Source: Letter 21, 1854 ed. 76-82, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/9 and 9018/13

Nearing Girgeh [Tuesday] 25 December 1849 Christmas Day You are just going to church, my dear people, in the close carriage, and we are holding our church on deck, where the thermometer (your thermometer) stands at 101 and 75 in the cabin. This morning, however, it was so cold that the windows were all crusted over with vapour; the dew was like rain at the dawn. Christmas Night Many boats passed us today of pilgrims coming back from Mecca, and holy women squatting in the boat like old hags: boats, too, of slaves from Ethiopia, where you can buy one for a pocket handkerchief or a looking glass. At the first cataract a slave costs three hundred piastres (three pounds), at the second a woman costs six dollars (about one pound) and a man eight, less than a horse. The wind was so fair that we did not stop at Girgeh, the second great town in Upper Egypt,167 but sailed on, doing as much in an hour as the men can track in a day. Just before Girgeh, as the sun was going down, we came to another of those great squares shutting in the river, which disappears at [a] right angle. The sun came back again and again, and once again, to give his last farewell and say a few words more, not like a child at play,168 but like a dying Socrates, going to his rest and unveiling his head from under his mantle once more to give his one more word of comfort to his followers. Everything in Egypt is so inexpressibly solemn; nothing ever laughs or plays here; the moon is like a melancholy sun, and the sun is like a Jupiter Capitolinus, not an Apollo. Everything is grown up and grown old. One never sees creatures at play here as in other countries; the camel is so solemn that when he stands idle against the sky you might mistake him for a stone camel. Nothing is pretty. I have seen nothing pretty since we left Cairo: yes, once, two little kids which skipped; otherwise the young creatures are as solemn as their fathers. I think no greater contrast could the world afford than England, busy England and Egypt, solemn, melancholy, splendid Egypt. At last the sun was dead and Girgeh with her minarets passed in the dusk, and the moon rose, such a moon. Σ and I sat on deck till late at 167 Ms 9017/9: where we were to have laid in a fresh store of biscuits. 168 Ms 9018/13: which peeps out again and again from its hiding place.

210 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions night, ‘‘sunning’’ ourselves in her warm beams (think of that, my people), on Christmas Day. Not one touch of damp, not one breath of chill in the air, though the wind was high. We glided along in a supernatural stillness, for the wind being, as usual, dead fair, we were sheltered from it by the cabin behind us, and every little wave was ridden by its own silvery jinn,169 like a fleet of jinnee come out suddenly in the moonlight. Night lets her footsteps here fall so gently, one fluttering shadow on the water was all that we could see of her, while in Europe she comes on with such a heavy tread. The fire was lighted at the bows and the glare from it fell upon the sail, but the moonlight was brighter and held its own, undisputed. It was like Raphael’s Deliverance of St Peter: there was the torchlight and there was the moonlight, but where was the angel with his supernatural light, come to deliver us from the bonds of earthly error?170 I do not doubt but that He was there. I never wanted his presence so much, but his light is not so visible as in the days of Peter. The river got wider and wider, and we seemed floating out upon an immeasurable sea, the flood of golden moonlight over everything, for so near the tropic as we now are the colours by moonlight are as bright as by day and the sky, instead of being only light round the moon and getting misty towards the horizon as in Europe, in the east is deep blue about the Lady of the Night and gets lighter and lighter to the horizon, all round which there is a bright band of light. Let natural philosophers contradict me and say it is impossible when the sun is so low beneath the horizon—I say it is. We seemed to go on and on to unknown shores. We have long since passed the lands of civilization and have come to the countries of the savage. Now it seems as if we must be coming to the countries of the jinn which, as we all know, encircle the earth at the distance of 200 days’ journey; and they were there already, the little jinn[ee], each riding on his wave, his green chrysolite wave, in his little silver chariot. The eastern moonlight looks so supernatural because one is accustomed in Europe to see the moon low in summer and casting an 169 Jinn/jinnee: in Arab tradition a being or genie between humans and angels, able to assume a multiplicity of forms; invisible, they were created out of smokeless flame and constituted a world almost parallel to the human. 170 In the Stanze at the Vatican Museum; Nightingale described Peter ‘‘with his divine Angel’’ as surpassing her utmost expectation. Letter to Parthenope Nightingale 20 November 1847, in Mary Keele, Florence Nightingale in Rome 62 (see European Travels).

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immense shadow (and in spite of all one’s almanac, one always fancies this summer), so that seeing her above one’s head and the great sail casting not a bit of shadow on the water, one sits down resigned to the conviction that one is being carried away in a phantom ship to jinnee countries.171 The distant song of Arab boatmen, ending in a wild yell, sounds all supernatural. And if one of the crew rouses himself from the deck (where they either sit motionless in little heaps or lie covered up, heads and all, so that you tread upon them, mistaking them for a blanket172), he looks, in his striped brown-and-white African blanket, scattering fire upon the waves from his hand, like anything certainly but a man. We could not bear to go in, this our one173 real night of tropical moonlight. We have felt the difference of climate more these last few days than all the way south we had come before from Cairo. The days and nights are now really African, from daybreak till ten or eleven o’clock [when] it is cold. We have never had the slightest trouble with our crew—that odious word ‘‘baksheesh’’ [tip] has never come out of their mouths. Whether it is owing to our having that capital man Paolo with us, I do not know, but they are so agreeable that we are only sorry we do not get on with our Arabic; they are despairingly indifferent, that is all. If Paolo says, How far is it to Girgeh? God knows. But how soon shall we get there? When God pleases. But I ask you how many hours it is, because the master wants to put it down in his journal? God knows. One got drunk at Asyut and made a beast of himself with booza (whence our word ‘‘boozing’’!), upon his present of five pence. This is our only disaster, for the Arabs are temperate, oh! to a proverb: poor souls! the pleasures of the flesh, in one sense, are not their stumblingblock. The pacha only eats once a day and our Arabs are happy with brown bread, baked a month ago and quite as hard as brick, and a little thin broth. We gave them a fish on Sunday but have not yet gone the extent of a sheep. Our housekeeping is simple: our storeroom and pantry stand before us in the shape of two large chests on deck, which separate our domain from the crew’s; our larder hangs overhead in the shape of a basket full of bread, and two cages full of oranges and meat; our kitchen is immediately beyond, another box about six feet by four, and behind it 171 Ms 9018/13: to the far-off land. 172 Ms 9018/13: for a heap of clothes. 173 Ms 9018/13: first.

212 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions is our water goullel (where the water is filtered), so that we have kitchen, scullery, still room, larder, safe and pantry, all in a nutshell, or at least in a walnut. Ah! would that you could keep house in England so, my dearest mother. ‘‘Mustafa’s womans’’ (this is Paolo’s language) bought our provisions for us at Asyut and some tape! for me, which turned out a narrow muslin embroidered scarf. The Arabs are no sailors, only pilots—they cannot even rig their own vessel. When it is rigged for them they are as awkward about handling their own yards, though first-rate climbers, as I should be. They cannot tack and, unless the wind is dead fair, prefer tracking to sailing; the skill they show is in piloting, which is really wonderful, considering the ever-changing bed of the river. Our Nubian174 stands on the poop, robed in his majestic folds, never wearying nor stopping to rest; if the wind is fair, steering with his enormous rudder, hardly ever getting us aground, which in a distance of nearly 1000 miles from Cairo to the second cataract, with this bed, seems175 miraculous. He appears to have long since forgotten all human language in his sublime solitude up there, but when he is ver y anxious there issues forth a singular splutter from the poop which I long mistook for the turkeys, who live there too. The pigeons are not in a coop but never try to escape. We have now four cats, the god and three others. The god is the only one who does any work, but he has cleared us of rats, and with an ornamental border of boots all round the tops of our beds we do very well. My Levinge is without price, as much against draughts now as mosquitoes.176 Christmas Day produced us two ancient towns, Panopolis and Ptolemais, and our first crocodile—his great paws left heavy footmarks on the sand. We get milk now everywhere, and bread, which is a great luxury after we had been some time without either. Butter, too, we find now at most places. Source: Claydon Diary

25 December 1849 Nile. Akhmim (Panopolis) where we walked on shore at a great square in the rocks, like Jericho and the Mount of Temptation. El-Menshiyeh (Ptolemais) where Sabellius was bishop and was damned for teaching the unity of God while the Gnostics were extending the Trinity to thirty. Our first crocodile. Passed Girgeh with a fair wind. Sat late on deck in the moonlight. Girgeh 88 miles from Asyut. Source: Letter 22, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/10 and 9018/14 (not in 1854 ed.)

On the Nile, 50 miles below Thebes [Wednesday] 26 December 1849

My dear Dr Fowler I must write you a few words of Christmas greeting from these lands, to you and dear Mrs Fowler, in return for yours received at Alexandria. We took your kind advice about the chloride of lime, but Egypt is not the land of smells and we have as yet had little occasion for it. Whatever else are the miseries of the Arab population, it is certainly not want of drainage. The purity of the atmosphere of Cairo 177 In Rome in 1848 Nightingale arranged for five years’ board and schooling for this girl at the convent’s orphan school, to be paid out of her dress allowance. 178 Probably an early version of Margaret Gatty’s Parables from Nature, which had stories relating faith and nature Nightingale liked.

214 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions strikes everybody. The Arab system is to keep everything on the surface and carry it away. The regulations about this are enforced with all the resources and advantages of a despotism which defies all competition from any tyranny in the known world. No doubt the absolute dryness of the climate, where nothing corrupts, and the entire absence of rain second the intentions of the government. In streets in Cairo, the nar rowness and depth of which, in Edinburgh, would poison you with their stench, nothing is to be perceived but the fragrance of the mimosa from the distant garden. We keep wonderfully free from vermin, too, being careful to wash out the whole of our small space every morning with water from old Nile, and never indulging in mat or carpet or curtain. To describe the state of this horrible country would make your heart bleed too much for me to be so cruel: their minds kept in a state of worse than animal ignorance (for Abbas Pacha has wisely suppressed all Ibrahim’s schools—had he let them subsist, his government could not have done so), their bodies subjected to an alternate course of bastinado and starvation, robbed of the little the enormous taxation leaves them by the system, which the government has, of buying all the produce and therefore fixing all the prices of the country. Nothing but the animal submission of the Arabs could allow this state of things to continue one day. The sight of every village is a painful reason against travelling here and I cannot conceive a European, especially a Western European, ever finding a home in the East while a corner of Europe remains. The impossibility of doing the slightest good, the feeling of utter hopelessness for any future to these miserable Arabs: one cannot wonder at their recklessness of life (which is generally set down to Muhammadan [Muslim] fatalism) for, when a plague comes and sweeps away one third of the population, as the last did, it is impossible not to rejoice. [Ms 9018/14] Last night (Christmas Day) Mrs B. and I sat out late at night sunning ourselves in the warm moonlight. Dew never falls till morning and sunrise is the only cold and dangerous time. Just at sunset too it is cold but afterwards not a chill in the air. For the last hundred or two miles, the cliffs on either side the Nile have been lined the whole way with rows of tombs (chambers in the rock), riddled with caves. The kingdom of the dead is greater than that of the living. Abbas Pacha is at the 1st cataract and we have letters to his physician who is, as in older times, all-powerful in Egypt and has the key for strangers to all the hareems and everything else. But the pacha him-

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self is such a fanatical Mussulman [Muslim] that persecution of the Christians appears his only natural propensity besides the sensual ones. His death is much hoped for and poison from Constantinople, it is said, will hasten the fulfillment of the wishes and hopes of a grateful people. But I must say farewell, my dear and kind friends. Remember me sometimes till I come back and am able to say myself in person, as I now do in black and white, your ever grateful and loving F.N. I trust Mrs F. has quite recovered and that you, my dear Dr F. are as well as ever. I wish I could say as much for Mr Bracebridge but he appears to me much altered. Her health is quite restored. We have an invaluable dragoman, an old servant of theirs, and the best boat on the river, which is kept so clean that we are not troubled with beasts. I think Mrs B. wonderful, spirits, body, strength all restored by this lovely sunshine in which we roast ourselves, this moonlight in which we sun ourselves (literally). You know we are half-caste Persians. Source: Claydon Diary

26 December 1849 6:00 p.m. Passed through an artificial canal at sunset. Source: Letter 23, 1854 ed. 82-85, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/11 and 9018/15, 26

Near Qena [Friday] 28 December 1849

Dearest people I wish you could have seen the sunset last night, how the wilderness blossomed like the rose in the last crimson tints of the dying sun. I wish you could have seen the nosegay of the beautiful yellow cotton flower I gathered, our first cotton plants, as we passed the island of Tabenna, where once St Pachomius179 taught to pray twelve times a day, to labour and to deny the body. Now no one prays, no one labours and, if they deny the body, it is because they have nothing to give it. Then he had 1300 followers in the island of Tabenna alone, and 6000 in the Thebaid, besides monasteries in the Arsinoite (Suez) Nome and in the Nitria. Then, in the fourth century, all Egypt was Christian, 179 Pachomius (292-346), one of the great ascetics of Egypt at the origins of monasticism.

216 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions or almost all—now she is not even Muslim—and very zealous Christians too they must have been, to judge by the enormous percentage of religious orders to the population, and the first principle of these orders was to work. And, whatever my dear Protestants of the West may say, an anchorite now appears to me an angel in comparison with what we have daily before our eyes. In this whole wide waste of corruption, misery and sensualism, the Christians seem to use their residence in the East not for the sake of leavening the lump, nor for doing any earthly good, but merely for the sake of using the customs of the country to gratify their own vices and profiting by their sojourn among Mussulmen to live like Mussulmen (since we have been here, we have not been surprised at, but have heartily joined in, the Muslim contempt of Christians), so that when the only people whom we have seen in all this miserable land attempting to do it the slightest good, or to live for anything but their own gratification, are the Roman Catholic sisters, I assure you we do heartily wish for a sprinkling, a little city, only a very little one, of the monks of the Thebaid, that some incense of service may go up to God among all these people who know not what they are put into the world for. St Pachomius received my warmest sympathy as we went by the now utterly desolate island: no blade of grass, not even a stone remaining. I should think there were few instances in history of a countr y being so thoroughly de-Christianized as Egypt (the 20,000 Copts can hardly be considered as Christians) after having been entirely Christian, even pre-eminently so,180 if we are to judge by the Christian schisms which tore her in the fourth century—Athanasius181 five times an exile from Alexandria: (I suppose Christian discord and Christianity must be reckoned as synonymous). Has Islam usually obtained such complete possession of a formerly Christian country? But when one thinks of Egypt as the birthplace of monasticism, the mother of all religious orders, as I suppose she undoubtedly was unless one excepts the Essenes,182 it is a curious speculation to see the very 180 Ms 9018/15: a distinguished one even. 181 Athanasius (299-373), bishop of Alexandria; five times sent into exile, he exercised lasting influence on the development of Christian theology thanks to his commitment to the faith of the Council of Nicaea (325) and his rejection of Arianism. 182 The Essenes or Essenians were a Jewish community of the second century bce to the first century ce devoted to the ascetic life. Their importance and history have been revived by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran in 1947; see J.C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today.

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religion become an abomination. One solitary monk, a Franciscan, still exists in Asyut (whom Mr B. went to see), the sole successor of the Johns of Lycopolis and the legions of the Thebaid. There he said his solitar y mass and had done so for ten years, wearing the very disguise of a Muslim by special dispensation from his superiors. This in the land which, 1400 years ago, was the Rome of Christianity uniting like Rome the classic with the religious capital of the world. Unlike Rome, at the same period of time, Alexandria was then still the Queen of cities; the Serapeum, with its 700,000 volumes, was still the chief building in the world (excepting perhaps the Capitol). The Augustan age was hardly passed there; but she was also the place of all Christian learning, the arena of all Christian dispute, and the interior of her province the refuge for every man who retired from the intellectual str uggle to the spiritual solitude. How one would like to understand the law as one perceives the histor y of the succession of these periods of a nation’s mind, to find the thread on which to string these isolated beads! Now we have little more idea of the law than if they were really but so many unconnected facts,183 and painful it is that so much experience should be lost, that nations should fall and their successors see them fall, without knowing why. If you ask, people will tell you: it is prophecy, look at the fulfillment of prophecy, a convenient word which seems to save historians the trouble of all inquiry.

But the wind has arisen. After two delaying day[s] of tracking, we are at last approaching Qena. 193 In Christological debates of the fourth-fifth centuries ce. 194 Martineau’s views on religion were thoroughly agnostic: objective truth was a small matter and faith represented human aspirations. See especially Eastern Life: Present and Past 148, 262-64, 296-303 and 456.

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We have had a good voyage of a week from Asyut to Qena, 150 miles, with wind five days, which has greatly raised Mr Bracebridge’s spirits, but we think it all too fast. If the wind is good we shall scarcely stop at Thebes, but I hope that it will not be, that we may have just one moonlight walk there (for the moon is now full) as our first initiation to the hundred-gated city. Only imagine our being within fifty miles of Thebes: I can hardly believe it and feel almost afraid of first seeing those awful spectres of dead Time and Space. There is nothing beautiful in Egypt to lessen the awe which one feels before these ghastly shrouds: mere shrouds, as they are in Asyut, these bodies petrified, suddenly turned to stone in the midst of their daily occupations, as they seem in Beni Hasan, these gigantic phantoms, as I fancy they will be in Luxor, of a dead past. If you can imagine seeing an awful spectre under the broad radiance of a meridian sunlight, that is Egypt, my noble, melancholy, sublime, dead Egypt. Travelling here is nothing like the tourist seeing sights of beautiful art and sunny landscape in Italy or the south of France; it is like the ghoul haunting the tombs; that is, Lepsius195 was the ghoul,196 rifling and despoiling the monuments, stealing the bodies;197 we are the poor harmless phookas.198 We have come to the region of the Dom Palms which I think really ver y pretty; they remind me of my beloved stone pines of Rome and her gardens. 195 Carl Richard Lepsius (1810-84), German Egyptologist who in 1842 led the Pr ussian expedition to Egypt and Nubia, and collected, with the approval of Muhammad Ali, some 15,000 objects that were added to the Berlin Egyptian collection. In 1844-45 he explored the Valley of the Kings with a team of architects and draftsmen. His research resulted in 142 works to his credit. 196 The ghool/ghoul/gool is an evil jinn; the gooleh/ghooleh is a female ghool. They are frequently encountered in the Arabian Nights. 197 See passage from a letter to Mary Clarke Mohl 7 Februar y 1851, Add Mss 43397 f304: ‘‘Birch (at the British Museum) is doing wonders in hieroglyphs. I did not like Lepsius though he was very civil to us for your sake. But he has no enthusiasm for his trade (so unlike a German) and takes it much more as we do, like a trade. The Berlin Museum, fitted up like an Egyptian temple, is a little bit of stage effect and I cannot help believing the stories against him in Egypt of his destroying things for the sake of making his specimens unique. But then his master is such a quark. As you do not believe in Egypt, I shall spare my raptures.’’ 198 Phookas are Irish goblins that choose various animal forms: horse, goat, bull, dog and others. They are pranksters and appear to weary travellers as docile ponies but end up depositing their helpless riders into a ditch or a thornbush, and gallop away, laughing madly.

222 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions We saw the post last night, walking long the river bank on his ten toes, with a bell round his neck, but I hope you will get this before I come back. I have written all this in desperate haste, my people. I cannot make much of the goddesses at present but hope to do better, and am always, my beloved souls, your humble, loving Phooka Source: Claydon Diary

27 December 1849 Nile. Isle of Tabenna, birthplace of monastic institutions, where St Pachomius began with praying twelve times a day, labour and selfdenial. 1300 men joined him and 6000 in the Thebaid. Here in Egypt Christianity was nursed and flourished and fed with milk till she was ready for strong meat.199 Here Athanasius swore and Origen wrote, and what has become of her now? 28 December 1849 Two days waiting for a wind to take us in to Qena. Crew declared we had an efreet on board. Source: Letter 24, 1854 ed. 86-97, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/10-12 and 9018/4, 9, 14

Qena [Saturday] 29 December 1849 The Egyptian religion suffers cruelly by comparison with the Greek, when we think of the worshippers of cats in juxtaposition with the worshippers of the Jupiter Olympius.200 Yet one could even fancy, with those supernatural images before one’s eyes, that there was something nearer truth in the mind of the unartistic old Egyptian. There seems no doubt that the educated Egyptian believed in the ‘‘one God,’’ the Unapproachable, the Indivisible, the ‘‘One’’ that could neither be named nor represented, and that the different names and representations he used were to express the system of different relations under which the Creator appeared to His creatures, as in Khnum He is the intelligence working upon intelligences, willing for instance that mankind should be progressive; in Amun He is planning or arranging how this progression is to be secured; in Ptah He is executing His plans; 199 An allusion to 1 Cor 3:2. 200 Ms 9017/11: Capitolinus.

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and in Osiris he is adapting them to mankind. Their names for the one God might be substituted thus for ours: Khnum for the Divine Intelligence, Amun for the Almighty, Ptah [for] the Creator or the Almighty at work, Osiris for the Good Shepherd. We make a distinction almost similar between Father, Son and Holy Spirit when we call the Father the thought, the Son the word and the Holy Ghost, if I may so say, the hand, i.e., the worker, the communicating medium. As with us the First Person of the Trinity arranges, the Second commands, the Third actuates or vivifies; so with them Khnum was the Intellect, Amun the Will or the Active Energy, Ptah the Wisdom, i.e., the application of knowledge, the fitting it into form, the life. Hermes Trismegistos201 says expressly that ‘‘the One’’ by the Egyptians ‘‘was venerated in silence.’’202 And as, to apply the Christian Trinity to human ideas, the Father might be the Philosopher, the Son the Speaker and the Holy Spirit the Artist; so, clothing the Egyptian theology in human facts, Khnum was the thinker, the author of political theories; Amun the statesman who brought those theories into projects; Ptah the lawyer who framed them into laws; and Osiris the magistrate who adapted them to the particular case, or the schoolmaster who taught them: Ptah was the executive as Amun was the legislative power. There was yet another God, poor old Khem, whom I have left out all this while, although after him the land of Egypt (Chemi) was called, as it stands in all the sculptures—Chemi and the land of Ham are synonymous, Khem being identical with Ham. Upon Khem seems to have been put off the awkward and ungrateful task of framing man, and perhaps upon Khem devolved the relation of the human species with its creator. We may perhaps compare him to the Holy Ghost, the vivifier, so that, in English theology, Khnum would answer to the Father, Amun and Khem both to the Holy Ghost, Ptah to the Son, in his character of Wisdom, of the Creator of the world such as St John gives it (to him); and Osiris to his later character of bringing gifts to men and suffering for them. With regard to sacrifices, the temples of Jerusalem and of Thebes appear to have closely resembled each other, and the system of sacrificing to have been the same in both, except that there appears no 201 On Hermes Trismegistos, see Letter 33. 202 Ms 9018/15: Hermes Trismegistos, who wrote the sacred books, gives a most spiritual account of the One. ‘‘I am that I am,’’ he calls him, and the interpretation of him to the world ran in triads. For the quotation in the text, see Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 2:504.

224 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions trace of burnt offerings in Egypt. If we compare the Egyptian with the Greek, the metaphysical theor y of the Egyptian seems to have soared a higher flight towards tr uth. He cared little about his emblems, which were clumsy, ugly and often absolutely deformed; he had little idea of form, none of beauty; he had no Word but his thought was right. The Greek, when he made Amun into Jupiter, Ptah into Vulcan and Osiris into Pluto, and manifested them to himself in such wonderfully sublime and even spiritual forms, seems to have stopped there. Car ried away by his own love of beauty, bewitched by the glorious forms of his own creation, [he] believed these, the mere relations of God with mankind, to be themselves gods, the channels to be the sources. And while the Egyptian kept in mind the First Cause, undisturbed by his own ugly representations of its effects or workings, the Greek really believed that all those effects were in themselves causes, believed ‘‘in Nature, not the God of Nature.’’ Perplexed by his sensuous imagination, that perfect artist (the Greek) saw Apollo at work driving the chariot of the sun, Jupiter holding the scales of fate, Pluto judging the dead, while the clumsy philosopher (the Egyptian), with no imagination at all and no artistic hands but a metaphysical head, saw the First Cause throughout. When we say that the Egyptian had no hands, we should rather say, no ideal, for in the mechanical he was unrivalled. He was no ‘‘artist’’ but a first-rate ‘‘artisan.’’ He appears to have had no ideal, no poetry, no art, while the Greeks, overflowing with all three, erecting their poets into the place of even theologian, teacher and prophet, became idolaters of their own creations. Perhaps the difference between Egyptian, Jewish and Greek religion was this: that the Egyptian made the metaphysician his religious teacher, the Jew chose the statesman and afterwards the priest to be his, and the Greek elected the poet and the artist to the office. Hence the greater preponderance of ethics in the Jewish religion, which indeed eclipsed all theory, even concerning the most interesting subject to man, a future life. Hence the subtlety of metaphysics in the Egyptian, which necessitated the inordinate use of symbols to make it at all intelligible to the people and, having no talent for idealizing the symbolical, no artist mind, hence the proverbial ugliness of their sym-

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bols. The exquisite perception of beauty and form in the Greek organization explains the third religion and its results. Ethics, philosophy and art appear to have been the characteristics of the three. Perhaps we may say that the Greek deified the agent; the Egyptian saw the ‘‘One’’ working artificerlike, it is true, but always saw him through the agent. The Greek saw a ‘‘god in clouds,’’ not ‘‘heard him ever ywhere’’; the Egyptian saw him everywhere, working through the clouds, the sun, the river. Thus the Greek made a deity of the sun, the Egyptian made him only an emblem, which accounts for the sun having come forth from the Greek hand, the sublimest form of beauty the world has ever seen; from the Egyptian hand, a little round O. Had Raphael not deified the Virgin, he could never have produced the woman-goddess, equally divine, as the goddess of purity, with the Greek Juno (Ludovisi) as the goddess of liberty.203 The Egyptian is the old African Protestant. There is a strong likeness between Osiris, Isis and Horus, the triad of Philae, and Plato’s theor y of a Trinity in which the First was the intelligence working, the Second the matter by which it worked and the Third Cosmos, beauty or order, the result of the two.204 For, according to the Egyptians, Osiris was the intellect at work, forming; Isis, the matter being formed and Horus, composition or the effect of the two. The Trinity of Orpheus is: (1) Will or Counsel; (2) Light or Love; (3) Life or Life given. All these theories seem to agree with each other and, in some measure, with the Christian Trinity. Why should we use the obnoxious word ‘‘borrowed’’? What can be more natural if God inspires us as He is in all ages doing, through our reason, our feeling and our conscience than that the Egyptian reason, conscience, feeling should have borne a similar fruit to the Greek and the European Three, modified by the respective climates it grew in?205 203 Nightingale described the colossal head of Juno at the Ludovisi Gallery as the ‘‘only goddess I ever saw,’’ a goddess of liberty, and the manner she would represent ‘‘liberty, noble and calm, strong but not stern.’’ Letter to family 1 Februar y 1848, in Keele, ed., Nightingale in Rome 219. 204 See Timaeus 28a-29a , 50d, 52a-b. 205 At this place Ms 9017/11 has the following which relates to the present letter but might have been written a few days later: In great haste, yours and always yours F. I had not time to look over my letter (about the gods) from Qena so that you must wait till I come back to understand it. Perhaps I shall not understand it myself.

226 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Past and present are words which in Europe we are fond of using; to us they generally present a cheerful view of things, except when some rabid old Tor y comes and talks about the ‘‘golden days of good Queen Bess.’’ We read the third chapter of Macaulay206 and joyfully contrast our liberty and our luxuries with those of the times of Charles II [1660-85]; we look at our antiquities, the castles of chivalry and bless our good angels that we did not live in the ‘‘good’’ feudal times. Here the words Past and Present are, above all that you can conceive, strange and painful. You enter an Egyptian tomb of, at the ver y lowest computation, 4000 years ago and you see on the walls in the imperishable colours of this all-preser ving climate (colours, too, which themselves prove what a perfection of chemistry these Egyptians had attained), you see a nation possessed of almost all our civilization and our philosophy and, I believe, most of our art and science. For much of theirs, that, for instance, of quarrying and raising the enormous blocks of their architecture, is entirely lost; we have had no inheritance of their mechanical skill and but little, I suppose, of their chemical, mathematical and astronomical science.207 When you see, painted in the rock chambers of 3000 bce, all the amusements of what we call the last refinement of a nation—the dancing, music, painting of Paris and London—you cannot but imagine the beginning of this nation to have been long before our date for the creation of man, but when you find traces of a religion so enlightened as the worship of the one God,208 the distinct conception of a progression through eternity and a philosophy so deep that all which

Will you tell Aunt Mai and all my dear people there that I have obeyed their orders not to write because I sometimes refrain from going somewhere to write to you, my owns, which is a pleasure and a necessity to me. But I think it a duty not to stay in the boat for anything else, as the places where you have anything to see and to write about are always the places you have to put your letters in, and the uncertainty is so great that you cannot wait to write till the next place. Tell Uncle Sam I can explain his seal now, and give to all my best New Year’s love. We keep out of the way of the English famously and have the best boat on the river. 206 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Histor y of England 1848, vol. 1, chap 3. 207 Ms 9018/9: For we have only, I suppose, just now acquired the power of raising weights as common as theirs, and their chemical, mathematical and astronomical science was equal to ours. 208 Ms 9018/9: the future life.

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Solon209 knew of legislation, all that Pythagoras210 and Plato guessed211 of ethics and spiritual theories seems to have been borrowed from them, and at a time too (and for long after) when the Jews seemed to have worshipped God the Creator as the God of the Hebrews,212 when the Jews seem to have believed in their Creator God as the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the God of the whole world : one cannot but compare this Egyptian religion and philosophy with all others we have known.

As for their habits of daily life, their trades and arts, all before our eyes in a form which we cannot doubt (no false historian, no vanity of a biographer can here exaggerate or extenuate), they seem to have been on a par with the civilization of France and England. You see glass blowing thousands of years before the young Phoenicians were said to have discovered it; you see the pen and inkstand in the tombs 209 210 211 212

Solon (c638-558 bce), Athenian statesman and reformer. Pythagoras (c570-00 bce), Greek mystic and philosopher. Ms 9018/5: grasped. An allusion to Gen 22:1-19. Ms 9018/5: when Abraham, the most enlightened of a sister nation, tries to cut the throat of his only son and is only prevented by an accident, fancying that his God tells him to do it.

228 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions of the IVth Dynasty, which cannot be much less than 3500 years bce; but more, much more interesting than all, you see a nation so spiritualized213 that death was to them more interesting than life, or rather death, as they put it, did not differ from life. Life was so small a fragment of the whole to them, that the whole became of course of immeasurably more consequence, not as being different from the part but as the axiom, which nobody disputes, of the whole being greater than its part[s]. I have often thought that there was much more evidence for a future world than there is for this. For the existence of this, we can only draw evidence from our perceptions (which perceptions are often destroyed or blunted). For the existence of another, we can draw evidence from our reason, our feeling, our conscience, all that some shorthand writers include under the ill-used word faith, which means, I suppose, all that is not perception. But the Egyptians seem to have gone farther; they seem to have said: We will consider this life as interesting only in its connection with the whole of which it is part, I have often thought how dull214 we were not to see that Christ’s life showed us this more advanced stage of existence, which we call heaven, how we have persisted in calling him the ‘‘man of sorrows’’ instead of calling him the man who is already in the state of blessedness, the man who has progressed and succeeded. I have left my ‘‘past’’ and ‘‘present,’’ but it does not need my words to show what it is to look out from these tombs, this past of a spiritual and intellectual life and see the present, the savage, sensual, childish life. Why is there not national like individual progression? Does it not seem as if the greatest amount of progress would be secured by the same nation continuing to carry its own on, and profiting by its own experience? It cannot be a law that all nations shall fall after a certain number of years—God does not work in that sort of way—they must have broken some law of nature which has caused them to fall. But are all nations to sink in that way? As if national soil, like the soil of 213 Ms 9018/5: Then their theory of the resurrection seems to have been beautiful, that. . . . 214 Ms 9018/9: stupid.

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the earth, must lie fallow after a certain number of crops. And will England turn into Picts again after a certain number of harvest years, as Egypt has turned into Arabs? Or will a nation find out at last the laws of God by which she may make a steady progression? However that may be, I really think a traveller should consider the question, whether it is not less painful to him to travel in America, where there is no past, an ugly and prosperous present but such a future! or in the East, where there is such a past, no present and, for a future, one can only hope for extinction! For the last hundred miles the cliffs on either side the Nile have been lined the whole way with rows of tombs (chambers in the rock), riddled with caves. The kingdom of the dead is greater than that of the living. [continued 30 December 1849] The evening we left Asyut, with a splendid wind, we ran aground several times. The fact was that the modeer or vice-governor, who came to look at us, was so pleased with our boat (and it is indeed the best on the river, we have seen none at all like it) that he sent his four carpenters to measure it, which they did with their hands, and having carefully measured one side measured the other too: they admired the boat aloud. Now you know you must not admire anything among Muslims except by a pious ejaculation. You must not say to a mother, ‘‘What a pretty child!’’ but you must say, ‘‘Mashallah,’’ or what God wills (comes to pass); you must not praise the thing but the Creator. If you ever say, ‘‘How pretty!’’ you are desired to bless God; and if you don’t, you draw upon the thing the ‘‘evil eye.’’ This is so touching—I wish it would prevent us from spoiling children in England. If I take a child in my arms here I must say, ‘‘In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful,’’ and if I admire it, I must say, ‘‘I seek refuge with the Lord of the daybreak for thee.’’ Now, the carpenters had admired our boat, and the consequence was that we ran aground perpetually. The crew would not go on that night and, the night we were to have reached Qena, it was found impossible to move. The crew took

230 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions out the little boat, towed her a little ahead and then pulled up the dahabieh with the towing rope. In this way we made about half a mile and then it was found impossible to move the boat; the crew declared there was an efreet on board, or sheytan (a devil), and stopped. We reached Qena about nine the next morning. Mr B. and I rode up to the town directly: at high Nile you go up by water, but now it is a mile from the river. The road to this centre of the manufacturing interest, as Qena is, lies up steep banks, where my donkey boy held me on, through a water and over a ploughed field. We stopped at our consul’s house. His two sons stood at the door and ushered us into a square mud area, hypaethral [open to the sky], the walls two stories high and at the top of all a latticed cage, which I watched in vain; no faces were visible. In this mud well two chairs were placed for us and one for my parasol. We gave Mr Murray’s letter in Arabic, which the youths pressed to their foreheads and they then sat down upon a hen coop. They were splendidly dressed. A tall black slave brought me coffee and Mr B. pipes. Presently the old father came in, our consul, Sheikh Hoseyn, in four kaftans (or robes), one over the other (for the Muslims dress ver y warm) and three turbans; and ‘‘genteel’’ Muslims always wear the cloth outside and the beautiful silks within, which is very good taste. Our consul kissed the letter, asked us to eat bread and salt with him, repeated ‘‘Bracebridge’’ over some twenty times, saying ‘‘Taib’’ [or Taile] (good) at his own pronunciation every time, made his son write it down in Arabic and took our letters, which we took the precaution to enclose to Mr Murray.215 Then came in some turkeys into the consul’s drawing room for us to feel and buy, which we did, and then we rode away, I dying to dine with him, as he asked us, but we had no time: I never wanted to dine out before. We saw a dervish in the bazaar with his tall peaked felt cap. Abbas Pacha had just left Qena—he had had 101 guns fired for him—and had come on shore to visit a santon’s tomb, and then gone on board again. His steamer, followed by two others, passed us today on its way back to Cairo. This was all that that Prince of the Faithful thought it worthwhile to do among his loyal people. I went ashore at night in the most beautiful moonlight I ever saw, at the village where we stopped, and peeped into a santon’s tomb. You know that a santon or welee is an idiot and is sacred, because his spirit 215 Ms 9017/11: Alas! he had no letter for us.

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is in heaven while his body only is with us. Heaven keeps it there because he is a favourite. A saint may commit all sorts of enormities which are but the ‘‘abstraction of his soul from worldly things,’’ which is ‘‘absorbed in devotion while his body is left without control.’’ On Sunday the 29th [30th] we went ashore on the island of Metareh, where St Pachomius had another monastery. Here the Christian spirit of zeal and devotion was nurtured. Now nothing seemed to grow there but a little Indian corn. If the inhabitants were Copts, as most of the people are about there, they had not even a church, worse than the Muhammadans. The crew carried Mr B. ashore on their backs and us on their joined hands. We walked some distance, but could not even make the people understand that we wanted to see the ruins of a deir (monastery). And yet here Christianity grew up, nursed by the milk of these institutions till she was old enough to live on strong meat.216 If St Pachomius can look on his island now, is he sorry? The people were ploughing with the rudest possible plough, but the corn comes up here if you only scratch the earth. In the morning there was khamsin and we saw a sandbow. It was on a level with the sun, and not opposite it as in rainbows, but about 30° from it; not the shape of a rainbow but of a nebula; all the colours perfect. It had a most singular effect: it was about midday, so that the top of the pillar of sand must have reached to that height. Source: Claydon Diary

29 December 1849 Nile. Qena. Khama factory 9:00 a.m. 64 miles from Girgeh. 12:00. Mr B. and I rode up to call on our consul who, arrayed in four kaftans, asked us to bread and salt, seated us in his mud well upon three chairs, two for us and one for my parasol, and himself on a hen coop. Sheikh Hoseyn was his name. 30 December 1849 Went on shore at the isle of Metareh to seek for the remains of a Pachomian monastery, but found none. Walked on shore through cactuses, palms, vines and cotton plants to see the sun set behind the ‘‘Libyan suburb.’’

216 An allusion to 1 Cor 3:2.

232 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Letter 25, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9018/16 (not in 1854 ed.)

[Sunday] 30 December 1849 My dear people I can’t think what you have been about. Are you dead, or what has happened? I am quite sure you cannot have been careless about writing. But Σ has heard twice from Mrs Herbert since we left Cairo: of the illness and, next, the recover y of her child, and Mr Bracebridge has had three packets of English letters since Cairo, I, not one word since the letters we brought ourselves to Alexandria. You cannot conceive what the disappointment is in the Arabian Desert. Σ’s letters came by the French mails. I went ashore myself at Qena and rode to the town where our letters had been forwarded by the consul, to see that there was no mistake: no letters for me. All Sunday we were in a state of excitement because we received a message from the Nicholson boat in the morning, which was to bring another packet of letters for us from Cairo, that she was behind us and we were to wait for her, for she had letters. We got our service over at 9 o’clock because we were sure we could not attend to it after such game in sight. She did not overtake us till even after dark, and long after we had supposed there was some mistake and given her up. The Bracebridges had two packets from England, I, not a word. If you are dead, you had better have written and said so. Now I suppose I shall not hear till we come back from Nubia. After the disappointment at Qena I had quite made up my mind that something had happened and that we should have to turn back from Thebes. Now I don’t see how I am to hear. The English mail, I know, has been delayed (from Marseilles), but the Bs. have had letters, you see, by other means. Source: Letter 26, 1854 ed. 97-99, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/12 and 9018/17-18

Karnak [Monday 31 December 1849], the last night of 1849 Yes, my dear people, I think your imagination has hardly followed me through the place where I have been spending the last night of the old year. Did you listen to the old year passing away and think of me? Where do you think I heard it sigh out its soul? In the dim unearthly colonnades of Karnak, which stood and watched it, motionless, silent and awful as they had done for thousands of years, to whom, no doubt, thousands of years seem but as a day.217 Would that I could call up Karnak before 217 An allusion to Ps 90:4.

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your eyes for one moment, but it ‘‘is beyond expression.’’ No one could trust themselves with their imagination alone there. Gigantic shadows spring up on every side: ‘‘The dead are stirred up for thee to meet thee at thy coming, even the chief ones of the earth,’’218 and they look out from among the columns and you feel as terror-stricken to be there, miserable intruder, among these mighty dead as if you had awakened the angel of the Last Day. Imagine six columns on either side, of which the last is almost out of sight, though they stand very near each other, while you look up to the stars from between them, as you would from a deep, narrow gorge219 in the Alps, and then, passing through 160 of these, ranged in eight aisles on either side, the end choked up with heaps of rubbish—this rubbish consisting of stones twenty and thirty feet long, so that it looks like a mountain fallen to ruin, not a temple. How art thou fallen from heaven, oh Lucifer, son of the morning!220 He did exalt his throne above the stars of God, for I looked through a colonnade and under the roof saw the deep blue sky and a star shining brightly. As you look upon these mighty ruins, a voice seems continually saying to you, And seekest thou good things for thyself? Seek them not, for is there aught like this ruin? One wonders that people come back from Egypt and live lives as they did before. Yet Karnak by starlight is not to me painful: we had seen Luxor in the sunshine. I had expected the temples of Thebes to be solemn, but Luxor was fearful.221 Rows of painted columns, propylaea, colossi and, built up in the Holy Place, mud (not even huts, but) unroofed enclosures, chalked out, or rather mudded out, for families with their one oven and broken earthen vessel; and, squatting on the ground among the painted hieroglyphs, creatures with large nose rings, the children’s eyes streaming with matter, on which the mothers let the flies rest because ‘‘it is good for them,’’ without an attempt to drive them 218 219 220 221

Isa 14:9. Ms 9018/17: Hell from beneath is moved, it stirred up the dead. Ms 9018/17: deepest, narrowest gorge. Isa 14:12. Ms 9018/17: I had expected the temples of Thebes to be solemn, yet nothing so fearful, so terrible could one imagine as Luxor beforehand.

234 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions off; tattooed men on the ground with camels feeding out of their laps and nothing but a few doura stalks strewed for their beds. I cannot describe the impression it makes: it is as if one were steering towards the sun, the glorious eastern sun, arrayed in its golden clouds, and were to find, on nearing it, that it were full—instead of glorified beings as one expected—of a race of dwarf cannibals, stained with blood and dressed in bones. The contrast could not be more terrible than the savages of the present in the temples of the past at Luxor. But Karnak by starlight is peace: not peace and joy, but peace, solemn peace. You feel like spirits revisiting your former world, strange and fallen to ruins, but it has done its work and there is nothing agonizing about it. Egypt should have no sun and no day, no human beings. It should always be seen in solitude and by night: one eternal night it should have, like Job’s and let the stars of the twilight be its lamps.222 Neither let it see the dawning of the day. Source: Claydon Diary

31 December 1849 Last day of the year. About 12:00 the wind deadened to a calm, the river widened into a perfect lake, without a current or a ripple, the Arabian hills retired and hid themselves as if afraid to approach the bed of death. The sun veiled his light. The colonnades of Luxor and Karnak came in sight, the Ramesseum223 and the matchless pair. Thebes 4:00 p.m., 48 miles from Qena. There she lay, the glorious corpse of the spirit which had gone out and animated the world. Up to the temple of Luxor before dark. Rode to Karnak by starlight, gigantic phantoms seemed to lurk behind those forests of columns, ‘‘the dead to be stirred up for us, even all the chief ones of the earth.’’224 Let Karnak always be seen by the shadow of night and let that night be solitary.

222 Ms 9017/12: and let the day perish here! Let darkness and the shadow of night cover it and let that night be solitary and no voice come therein, and. . . . 223 The Ramesseum is the mortuar y temple of Ramesses II. 224 A paraphrase of Isa 14:9.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 235 Source: Letter 27, 1854 ed. 99-103, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/12 and 9018/17

[Thebes] [Tuesday 1 January 1850], New Year’s Day I open my eyes, my dear people, to wish you a happy New Year and my eyes look upon the obelisk and colonnade of Luxor, under which we lie at anchor, with the sun rising behind them. I have written in haste because we shall leave Thebes today if the wind be fair. We arrived here yesterday. As soon as we had passed the cliff which hid the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, I was on the roof of the cabin among the hens. The Nile was too low to see much, but what I did see! I could not believe that we should ever see Thebes—I was afraid to die225 before our eyes should have lighted upon her. I had a dream the night before that we had been obliged to turn back before we ar rived. I walked on the shore the evening before in a grove of palm trees, cactuses, vines and cotton plants, and saw the glorious sun set behind the hill which covers the Libyan suburb; the next day we were to see Thebes if we lived. And how she opened before us! The wind deadened to a perfect calm, the river spread out to a perfect lake: not, as before, with a current, but a glassy breathless lake. The Arabian hills retreated and hid themselves as if in terror to approach the bed of death. Karnak and Luxor came in sight on the eastern bank; the heads of the colossi and the Ramesseum appeared out of the Libyan suburbs; there lay the imperial corpse of the spirit which had gone out and animated the world. Hail to thee, poor glorious Egypt! Let our tears and our silence and our reverence be thine, for there are no words to celebrate such a death as this. There she lay, in the stillness of death (even the sun had veiled his light), and she looked, the metropolis of the world, as if herself ready to be ferried over that glassy lake to the Hades beyond. Nothing can equal the first impression of seeing Thebes. We landed and ran up to Luxor to see her temple before dark, her one226 obelisk, 225 Ms 9018/17: I thought that something would happen to turn us back. 226 Ms 9018/17: the widowed.

236 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions still standing fresh and unbroken as the day it was cut, before the propylaeum, at the gate of which sit two colossi of Ramesses II, but alas! the faces gone, the figures covered up to the elbows. A third colossus, a little farther, sat at the corner of the propylaeum; its crown now only marks the spot, projecting above the sand. There stands the colonnade of the seven lotus columns, immeasurably vast against the sky. The Holy Places are all blocked up, choked with huts and sand, but the cartouches, where you can see them, are all so fresh and sharp that even our inexperienced eyes could read the legends of the kings. In the evening we went to Karnak—the night was dark, the moon had betrayed us. No one can describe the desolation of riding over the desert by night; at home one’s imagination used to rest in a smooth desert: this was all, as usual, tumbled about, but we could see little. All I know is that one man held me on behind while another led my ass, and the blasts of sand in your face, though there was no breath of wind, were the only thing stirring beside ourselves and the howling of the wild dogs all round us, which sounded like the spirits of the old efreet Egyptians let loose. (With regard to danger, I must assure an anxious public that that was not the question; we had two mounted men with us, besides Paolo, and the numbers of running men I could not tell in the dark, except by their white staves. I only speak of the effect on the imagination.) In this silent procession we followed one the other for about a mile and a half till we passed under palm trees. And, a little farther, a gleam of moonlight shining out, we saw, on either side a ghostly avenue, gigantic sitting sphinxes with their faces toward us, nearly as close as they could be placed, but most of them headless, limbless or overthrown. The intellectual and physical force (there typified) lay in the dust. Its body, that is, lay there: its spirit had vivified the world. This dromos [a pathway lined with sculptures and leading to a temple or to a tomb] used to extend all the way from Karnak to Luxor. Then we stood under the pylon whose top reaches heaven, then passed between the propyla into the vast atrium. One single column still stood there, not wringing its hands but raising its unearthly head among the stars and watching calmly and ceaselessly the course, not of years, but of periods. Then, climbing over hills and valleys made of ruins, you enter the immeasurable forest of columns: one, which had fallen across its aisle, dragging with it the huge stone which bridged it to the next, was the first thing which gave me the least idea of its vastness. It was too sublime in its ruin for one to dare to give pity. Oppo-

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site it, two, which had fallen together, blocked up the space: they cannot, you know, fall to the ground—their weight makes no impression on their brother giants, but the shaken giant leans against his fellow and has probably leaned there for two thousand years and will for many more. But there is no helplessness in their fall, they still stand immovable; what could have produced it is the only question (still unanswered). We came out at the other end where stood the double pair of obelisks, one only left of each. Around on the horizon you see the distant pylae, the ‘‘gates’’ of the ‘‘hundred-gated’’ Thebes which had, you know, no wall. Mr B. and I mounted the towers of the propylaeum and looked abroad over the world and 227 the temple; it was too dark to see much but the vast stones which formed it. Every column, ever y stone, is loaded with sculpture, but it hardly attracts your eye in the overwhelming effect of the whole. Roberts’s Karnak 228 gives you not the slightest idea of it, and you know these things are buried almost up to the neck. At Luxor stands the widowed obelisk at the propylaeum gate. Its fellow, which stood over against it, has been carried off, you know by whom.229 This one is ours but, whether from feeling or want of feeling I cannot say, we have left it in its own rightful home. Abbas Pacha was here last week and left the place as he found it: he was below all sentiment, either for the glories of his temples or the miseries of his people. Two women sat grinding at the mill, when we were there, under the lotus capital; a calf was rubbing itself against the painted hieroglyphs; other enemies had been there: the Ptolemies had scratched out the name of the king in every one of the cartouches, leaving the rest; the Persians had been spoiling the temple, painting their red legs over it. I stood on the ground, which is about halfway above the elbow of the sitting Ramesses, and could hardly reach the shoulder. From the Luxor shore you can see the Pair, the two ‘‘Witnesses’’ sitting like spectres in the Libyan suburb, where we have not touched yet. We are just off, this New Year’s morning, off for the cataracts. yours, dearest people ever in this world or the next 227 Ms 9018/17: of. 228 David Roberts (1796-1864) illustrated William Brockedon’s Egypt and Nubia 1846-49, to which Nightingale seems to be referring here. 229 Napoleon; it is now in the Place de la Concorde, Paris.

238 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Claydon Diary

1 Januar y 1850 Thebes. New Year day. Went to Luxor again, but the present and the past make too painful a contrast on that score. Sent a letter by the Swans. Sailed without a wind to escape a dinner, which process we performed instead on deck. These savages (that is us) kindness cannot tame or suavity conciliate. Source: British Library Diar y

1 Januar y 1850 Thebes. 6½ Wrote home. 8½ Temple Luxor. 10 Wrote home. Breakfast. Stood on poop. 12 Left. Read to Σ, Wilkinson and Martineau (Karnak). 14 Dined on deck. Read Survey of Thebes and sat on deck. 6¼ Slept. 8½ Supper. 9½ Washing and dreaming. 10½ Bed. Source: Letter 28, 1854 ed. 103-11, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/12 and 9018/19

We left Thebes at twelve yesterday, after having stayed there a night. The view of the whole temple of Luxor from the poop, as you sail away, is beautiful, the plan of it being less disturbed by the mud huts. What the disturbance of these is, morally and physically, no one can describe. It is not the bodily misery which shocks one: I have seen greater than that in London. On the contrary, the huts in Luxor temple were each full of calves, turkeys, hens, goats, camels, together with their men and women; the corn which the women were grinding was excellent, the breads in the oven were of the whitest, finest flour, and as well baked as yours. If it had been physical misery, one could have borne it; it was the moral degradation, the voluntary debasement which was so hideous. To see those columns lifting their heads to the sky, even now, when half buried, and carrying one’s eyes naturally on high, and to see human beings voluntarily losing their prerogative as men of the ‘‘os sublime’’ [face erect in majesty],230 choosing darkness rather than light, building their doorways four feet high or less, choosing to crawl upon the ground like reptiles, to live in a place where they could not stand upright, when the temple roof above their heads was all they needed! In a cold climate, one could have understood it, but here it seemed as if they did it on purpose to be as like beasts as they could. There was no reason—there was plenty of room—but they chose to live all in a little yard (not even a hut to each family); pigsties and cowhouses were palaces to these. If they had been deserted, you would have thought it was the dwelling place of some wild animal. I never before saw any of my fellow creatures degraded (thieves, bad men, women and children) but I longed to have intercourse with 230 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.85-86: Os homini sublime dedit coelumque videre jussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus [He, Prometheus (?), gave man a face/head erect in majesty, he made him contemplate the sky and lift his sight toward the stars].

240 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions them, to stay with them and make plans for them, but here one gathered one’s clothes about one and felt as if one had trodden in a nest of reptiles. It sounds horrible to say so, but one cannot conceive how even Moses could set about his work of regeneration here, because they have plenty. Where would you find, in England, the people who had milk ever y day, who eat turkey and chicken? But these seem voluntarily to have abdicated their privilege as men. The thieves in London, the ragged scholars in Edinburgh, are still human beings, but the horror which the misery of Egypt excites cannot be expressed, for these are beasts. What can be the ideas of virtue or decency in a people who choose to live in this way? You never see an emaciated person in Upper Egypt; you always see them healthy and fat, their bones well covered and no signs of disease but in the eyes. The effect is all the more dreadful. Muhammad Ali was called an enlightened ruler! I assure you, no one can express the ‘‘baseness’’ of this kingdom, this land of slaves. A year ago they were all deprived of arms. No wonder. The colourlessness of Egypt strikes one more than anything. In Italy there are crimson lights and purple shadows; here there is nothing in earth, air, sky or water which one can compare in any way with Europe—but with regard to absence of colour it is striking. It was probably on account of this that the ancient Egyptians painted so much: one does not feel the colouring of the sculptures barbaric but necessar y, for everything: ground, rivers, houses, men, camels, asses, palm trees are the same dusty-brown ‘‘sad-colour.’’ The houses in Luxor are built of jars, the interstices filled with mud. We did not make much way on New Year’s Day, but I was so tired that I slept all the way, though I had only run up to Luxor before breakfast. But Thebes takes so much out of one. I fell asleep on my ass, riding home a mile and a half from Karnak. It was no use trying to think or to feel anything, I only managed to stick on. We looked Luxor thoroughly over twice and climbed up to peep into the dark sanctuary. The propylaeum is now a guardhouse. The nuisance of these places is that one must not leave one’s party a moment. On the towers of the propylaeum [entrance to a temple] are the most spirited chariot and horses, and king driving them to battle, that Homer ever sang. The king standing, as usual upright in his chariot (no charioteer), the reins tied round his waist, drawing his own bow, a noble fellow! I must now explain that I spell, whenever I can remember it, in accordance with British prejudices, but that, as El-Uksor only means

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‘‘the palaces,’’ it is always called so here, not Luxor; as Karnak is ‘‘ElKarnak’’ and Qena ‘‘Gheneh,’’ which occasions a pleasing variety in my orthography not always intelligible.231 Our steersman, Absheer, who had been absent at Coptos, on leave to see his friends (he is a freed slave), returned today with a sheep round his neck, a black hairy sheep, which he brought us as a present. The ‘‘two Witnesses,’’ the Pair at Thebes, sit with their faces to the river. There is something uncanny about these two portraits of Amenophis III, as about the two232 of Ramesses II at the propylaeum gate of Luxor Temple. It is a truly Egyptian idea and makes one creep as if one saw one’s own self sitting opposite to one. They must have looked still more curious when perfect and fresh but, even in their present disfigured state, one cannot get accustomed to the repetition. Egypt is like Shakespeare: we discover here whence come familiar household words of which we knew not before the origin,233 just as one opens Hamlet and says, ‘‘I did not know it came from there.’’ ‘‘It would not weigh a feather in the balance.’’ On the Egyptian walls we see the literal original of this: the good actions of men are weighed (in the funeral scenes) against a feather in the other balance. This feather is the ostrich feather, the symbol of Truth. No doubt it at first meant a 231 Here we use today’s ways of spelling for all names and places mentioned by Nightingale. See list of emendations at the end of the Letters. 232 Ms 9018/19: four. 233 Ms 901/198: familiar household words show their origin here, when one knew not where they were taken from.

242 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions record. Alas! it has come to mean lightness. So, when one sees the great wings over the doors of all the temples (the winged disk), one is no longer perplexed by our singular symbol of the Saviour, a winged sun, the Sun of Righteousness, arising with healing on his wings.234 I could not (between ourselves) get up a single feeling of enthusiasm about the Pair nor, indeed, about the pyramids, from first to last: bigness does not make greatness. The difference between Thebes and the pyramids seems to me the same as between Milton and Dante’s imaginations. When Dante wants to impress you, he gives an all-material measurement of the size of his spirit. His head is 72 by 35 by 19; and what idea of sublimity does that give you? So it is with the pyramids; there is nothing but size about them to make their ugliness great. Milton and Thebes knew better. But I dare say the impression will be quite different on a nearer acquaintance with the pyramids, recording, as they do, the most hideous oppression in the world: one of them having cost its builder his house and empire, the ashes of two never having been laid in their own pyramids for fear of the people. With nothing but horrible associations, it is no wonder that the first impression of them should be nothing but repulsive, not even interesting. [Hermonthis] We went on shore this morning while the moon was yet up to see the Temple of Hermonthis [Armant]. Before we came back to breakfast at half-past eight it was quite hot walking. The last few days have made such a difference in the climate that we dine on deck; even I hardly find the mornings cold, who the first month from Cairo could hardly keep myself alive till ten o’clock, and the days are really hot. There is nothing very striking about the temple: it was chiefly remarkable as the place where the goddess Reto gave birth to the god Hor-Pre. The sacred place, i.e., the adytum [sanctuary or innermost part of a temple] or sekos [part of a temple where statues of gods are displayed] was built over this, and great torches of palm leaves were lighted inside to show us the sculptures in the alto relievos, with which the sanctuary and an inner chamber for the oracle were covered, representing the birth and nurture of this deity. But it was to me very interesting. The triad of Hermonthis is Montu, Reto and Hor-Pre. Montu is sometimes called the Sun, but he appears rather to have been the metaphysical God of War, differing from the physical God of War, the mere destroyer or Mars, who occupies a very low place in the Egyptian theology, but representing the 234 An allusion to Mal 4:2.

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avenging principle, the Retribution of God, the divine attribute which attaches to evil its consequences. The name of Reto signifies the ‘‘Sun and the world’’ and in these triads the third member is always the result of the action of the first upon the second, generally the action of intellect upon matter, producing some created being. Hor-Pre signifies literally ‘‘Horus, the Sun’’ and seems to have been the same as Harpocrates or Horus, the symbol of the resuscitated soul, of youth, of the new birth, united with the idea of the Sun. The coincidence with our Sun of Righteousness, our type of Resurrection, is striking, and the birth of this god upon earth being produced by the retributive principle acting upon Earth (Reto) is also curious. People laugh when they look at this sanctuar y erected over the birthplace of the child-god, but why? The idea of the triad may have been one purely metaphysical, viz., that the suffering attached to sin upon earth, when united with light, produces the new birth—the springtime of life, repentance. Or it may have been a physical event, like the birth of our Saviour. Whichever it be, it is a most interesting place (though there is nothing beautiful about it), and made still more interesting by the succession of ruins, ending with a Christian church, which strew the ground. But the desire of the mind to find some law, to learn some reason for this rise and fall of nations, is almost painful in Egypt. We take little pains in Europe to seek for it, besides a few moral reflections or pious ejaculations which the fate of nations calls forth from us: a few ‘‘How wonderfuls,’’ in which the mind rests when it is oppressed by the feeling of seeking a law and finding none, a few references to the prophecies. Ezekiel and Isaiah do not seem to have done the same.235 When shall we, instead of quoting, imitate them as far as we can? When shall we be able to say: Such governments had such consequences in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, such governments will have such consequences in England, France, Germany? There never was such an opportunity as here, where the smallest details are laid open to us, for studying history in the future.236 I should fancy that the ideas about a future state of any nation would very much arise from the natural features of its territor y. The idea of a sleep after death, an intermediate state of repose, could only 235 Ms 9017/12: They appear to have studied the characters of nations and their consequences with so philosophical a spirit that they were actually able to write history beforehand in a measure. 236 Ms 9017/12: The government of Babylon and Assyria, I suppose, we shall never know enough to be able to be of much use in learning the plan of national history.

244 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions arise, for instance, in a northern nation. The expanse of snow, the sleep of seeds and of nature, naturally suggest the idea of repose before the resurrection; in Egypt there is nothing to give this feeling and accordingly we find no sleep after death in their theology. For the lifelessness of the desert does not give the idea of sleep or peace, but of the burning, forced tension of despair , not the silence of the grave but the silence of sullen endurance. The valley of the Nile, on the other hand, gave the idea of the Elysian fields, and all between was the progress or retrogression of one into the other, so that the ideas of suffering versus enjoyment— and both progressive, neither a fixed state but alterable—came naturally to the people of a country where too is no autumn or winter, where the leaves never fall and the frost never comes. If you ask me whether the desert has not greatness to redeem it: Yes, it is great. At least it has one of the elements of greatness—oneness—but not the most essential, i.e., to be without change, without unrest. It gives one the idea of being perpetually restless, of Milton’s Satan turning ceaselessly from side to side in his lake of fire.237 In the sanctuary is now the prison of the pachas. Armant (Hermonthis), not having paid its tribute a little time ago, the village was razed to the ground and the inhabitants had their ears and noses cut off. A few columns are left, nothing else. The place is now full of soldiers. Before the revolt Ibrahim Pacha had taken away all their lands: no wonder they would neither work nor pay tribute. That disgusting Cleopatra had been at work on the temple, making herself, Julius Caesar and their son into the triad of the place. The columns of the pronaos [vestibule leading to the naos, the central part of a temple] still stand before the sekos; the reser voir lined with stone for ablution is near; and just beyond, the columns of beautiful Egyptian granite, broken and overthrown, of a Christian church, built at a time when the established religion here was Christian. Many of the columns have been carried away and are now part of San Paolo in Rome. A Muslim burying ground is close to the temple portico and a pit with a mummy goat in it a little further on. Egyptian, Roman, Christian, Muslim: what is the law of their succession?

237 Paradise Lost I.43.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 245 Source: Claydon Diary

2 Januar y 1850 Hermonthis: walked to the temple before breakfast through the village. The temple is now a guardhouse and the village a flat destroyed by Ibrahim Pacha. Passed Esna with a fair wind, then waited till the moon rose, then ran aground and stuck till morning. Source: British Library Diar y

2 Januar y 1850 7 Temple of Armant (Hermonthis). 8½ Breakfast. 9½ Reading Wilkinson to Σ and Lepsius with Mr B. 1½ Wrote home. 2¼ Writing. 3 Dinner and wrote home till 7 Read Arabian Nights to Mr B. and supper till 10 Finished Epicurean till 12 Passed Esna with a fair wind, obliged to stop till moon rose; ran aground and stuck till morning. Source: Letter 29, 1854 ed. 111-19, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/13

[Elephantine] ‘‘Far off Syene’’ [Aswan] [Sunday 6 January 1850] Twelfth Night Here we are, my dearly beloved mother, at the island which was the birthplace and throne238 of dynasties; tomorrow we go up the cataracts and in the evening kiss the shores of Philae, and then Nubia, no longer Egypt, is to be our home. We have won the cup; we are to go up to the second cataract to see Abu Simbel and the Ethiopian kings. It was a chance but we have been successful. We sailed in this morning to Syene and sent for the reis of the cataracts. At first he pronounced the boat too large to go up; it was a cruel blow, but he was only making difficulties; and tomorrow, at dawn of day, with another English boat, we are to make the ascent. The wind is fair, the Nile not too low and all is favourable. Now, give us your blessing on our journey, dear Mother. We have had a splendid sail of five days from Thebes, which we left on New Year’s Day, and arrived here (without stopping anywhere but half an hour at the Temple of Hermonthis and another half hour at the quar238 Ms 9017/13: home.

246 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ries of Hagar Silsilis [Gebel el-Silsila]), with the hottest weather all the way, at twelve o’clock today. We came dancing in with a merry breeze, and whether it was that to see waves on that solemn old Nile is as unnatural as it would be to see the colossi dance, or whether it was that so much depends on the mood of mind, I was not at all so much struck with Syene as I expected. The boundary between Egypt and Nubia is well defined. The Nile closes up; the country alters all at once to black granite, sticking out of the river in a hundred little islands, hemming it in with cliffs on both sides, striped with sand drifts, but projecting out of them the blacker and the more frowning. Do you remember the island and burying place of the McNabs, and the river running into Loch Tay? It is exactly like that, with every feature magnified to a gigantic size: every stone a rock, the island of the McNabs, Elephantine, on which the palms grow very like firs. We anchored at Syene and while Paolo went up to the governor to see if there were any letters for us, rowed over to Elephantine and landed. Not one stone remains there upon another. Yes, there is the bit of a gateway, a quay and a hideous Syenite statue—otherwise it is one mountain of broken pottery, fragments of red granite, sand and mounds—there is not an inch of level walking. Troops of South Sea savages received us at the landing place, running away when we looked at them and then running back to look at us like a troop of jackals, with loud yells which continued all the while we were there. The island looks as if it were a world turned upside down and then stirred up, and that was the scum which had come to the surface. It was such a world as might have been turned out of the cauldron of Macbeth’s weird sisters. I am glad to have been there but hope never to see Elephantine again. It is impossible for anyone to come away except with an impression of horror; there is nothing on which one can rest for a moment. It was as if a devil had been there, heaving underneath, upturning, tossing and tumbling it till everything was in atoms and confusion. The yells of those children I never shall forget, as they threw up clouds of dust, not shiny as savages ought to be, but their black skins all dim and grimed with sand like dusty tables, their dirty hair plaited in rats’ tails close to their heads, naked all but a head veil. I heard some stones fall into the river and hoped it was they and that that debased life had finished—they were not thin or starved. I gave them all the pins I had; it was all one could do for them. The very granite rocks looked all grown old and were not sharp but rounded into huge boulders of fantastic shapes, as if they, too, were

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worn away and ruined and waiting for death, huge granite forms ground away like mortar. Here was the Elephantine which sent forth the Vth Dynasty, more than three thousand years before Christ, which ruled when Moeris Apappus239 was turning the Nile into the Fayium, a work the world has not seen the like of, turning a desert and a marsh into the garden of the world; a time of the highest art and science, when writing had already taken the place of mere hieroglyphs; when Ethiopia, instead of being, as now, a byword for slaves, was sending out civilized kings (instead of castor oil) to rule other parts of the world. And now to look at Elephantine and see her, not peacefully asleep, but the tumbled lair of a horde of savages. Nothing one reads of the South Sea Islanders is so bad as what we see here. We crossed over to the other shore where we saw, on a granite rock, the cartouche of a pharaoh, to show the place where he had been cutting hewn blocks for his temple. It was Amenophis III’s cartouche of the XVIIIth Dynasty, the Augustan age of Egypt, and the marks of the tools and the wedges by which they hewed out the huge granite blocks were still on the rock. A boat—such a boat as a South Sea cannibal would not have put together, so rude and leaky—with an old whitebearded black Charon and a half-naked woman carrying dust on her head, put to shore. Four Ethiopian women, perfectly black, were washing in the river, dancing on the clothes like imps, not with movements like human creatures. We returned to the boat and saw there the kings of the East, the three Magi sitting on our divan, talking to Paolo, with each an arm passed round his neck. They were the sheikhs of the cataract or, as he introduced them, ‘‘The Great Father is dead; the two bigs are brothers,’’ i.e., the two eldest; ‘‘I know them, ours mans, since so high.’’ The two ‘‘bigs’’ startled us at first and crushed our hopes about the boat, but they soon came to and promised to take us up the cataracts and on to the second and back, without scathe (as the pilot of Egypt does not know any further than this). This matter off our minds, we considered our great anxiety over and 239 The twentieth king in the list of kings of Thebes provided by Eratosthenes as found in Manetho Appendix 2:221. See C.R. Lepsius, Chronologie der Ägypter Part I:262-69 and 514n.3; see also I.P. Cor y, Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Chaldean, Egyptian, Tyrian, Carthaginian, Indian, Persian, and Other Writers 84-88. The work of regulating the flow of water was started, it is thought today, by Amenemhet III of the XIIth Dynasty (1844-1797), the ‘‘Moeris’’ of Herodotus, Histor y 2:149-50. See also James A.S. Evans, ‘‘The Fayium and the Lake Moeris.’’

248 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions our Twelfth Day most successful. (I have just bought some ostrich eggs for Twelfth Night.) A beautiful little ape came on board, not like our mangy zoological apes, but with a green head, a back of a chaste dove colour and a long yellow silky bib under his chin, and put his little paws on our knees. He looked so clean and so clever and, when I gave him one of my ‘‘paternal aunts’’ (Arabic for date), he smelt the European glove and satisfied his curiosity before his appetites. The followers of the three kings all sat round them in a circle on the ground. They are to manage our boat entirely tomorrow—our crew does nothing, not knowing the rapids. Before dark we went out to see Aswan (Syene); traders from Darfur [in Western Sudan] were passing through with skins and slaves, and stopping for the night. The skins were heaped up under the palms and so were the slaves, most of them girls of about ten or fifteen, with beautiful little hands, making ready measures of meal, kneading it and making cakes on the hearth, i.e., on an iron plate upon the smallest bit of fire on the ground. They took hardly any notice of us—they were sitting on their heels—some of them had three cuts on each cheek. The Ethiopian slaves are sold by their parents willingly, for a couple of handkerchiefs or a little box, and are often exposed and picked up. We passed a boatful yesterday, crammed together , all women half naked. The Abyssinian slaves are stolen by horsemen; they were quite black and very small—the washing imps on the shore were four of them. As we came back after dark they were sitting round their fire for the night; they came out to beg of us and, in the dusk, looked like skulls with their white teeth. They set up a horrid laugh when we gave them nothing. Our guide poked one with his stick when it was sitting down, as if it were a frog. We walked on through Syene: interminable mounds, as they seemed to us—its size must have been enormous, and nothing, not even a palm tree now—a village smaller and more scattered than any ever we have seen, not even a goat or anything that gives milk. The only living things we saw here were two camels, belonging to the traders from Dar fur, and among the tombs a bayadère [a dancing girl] finely dressed, the most painful-looking creature of all. That the only living thing now here, beside those poor slaves, should be a thing of vice! Of the old Egyptian and Roman buildings of this great capital, nothing but a few granite columns here and there, and mounds behind mounds, a perfect desert of them. Then we climbed up to the old

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Saracenic wall: another wilderness of mounds lay beyond the Saracenic city, and at the top a ruin which, by its pillars, had been a heathen temple, then a Christian church, then a Muslim mosque, then a ruin. We peeped through a gap in the wall, and on the other side what a scene! A vast Muslim burying ground, deserted these thousand years— and indeed there is nothing now to be buried there—and seeming to extend far into the desert: it is called the Valley of Martyrs. We had already passed through one where the graves were only three or four fragments of granite, heaped together. Then rocks and mounds and black stones tumbled together down to the Nile, an ‘‘universe of death,’’ not even the usual repose for the eye on the river bank, but the desolate islets of the cataracts closing it in. It was a place where a ghoul could not have lived. ‘‘Among the tombs’’240 receives for the first time here a horrible meaning. A ghost would have died terror-str uck here in a week. The stars seemed to refuse to give their light and it was like looking over the edge of the world. It is useless to try to describe these things, for European language has no words for them. How should it, when there is no such thing in Europe? All other nature raises one’s thoughts to heaven—this sends them to hell—it makes one think of a devil (not of God) who has been following his ways out, turning up ever ything till he has made it to his own destructive fancy. Oh! if this is hell we have seen (I am sure there can be no worse), it is a perfect one241 and enough to deter us, if fear could ever do so, from sin. We came back through a wilderness of stones and sand to the river, where the few poor creatures who inhabit Syene seemed to have congregated in boats, as shunning the land. Is the earth worn out, that she can no longer bear man? This earth which has nourished, after a dynasty of her own (the Elephantine in 3074 bce [current dating c2494]), the pharaohs, the Persians, the Greeks, Romans, Saracens, whose memorials strew the rocks, though not one of them is standing? I saw, on Elephantine, broken pottery with Greek inscriptions, a Ptolemaic quay made of pharaonic blocks, besides its more legitimate offspring. Is the earth sick, that she can no longer bear any but the distorted monsters she has now? Tomorrow we shall see ‘‘Him who sleeps in Philae,’’ and that will cure all. The gods of Elephantine are Khnum, ‘‘the Spirit of God that

240 An allusion to Mark 5:1-5. 241 Ms 9017/13: a fearfulness.

250 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions moves upon the waters,’’242 Satis and Anukis. Where is Khnum, that he has so deserted his charge? He, the Spirit who, when the earth was without form and void, called shape out of chaos; how curious and confounding it is, that there, in his very sanctuar y, in his own island, chaos should have come again in its most astounding, hideous formlessness! Oh, Khnum! why hast thou forsaken them? Is his spirit there, sitting among the ruins of his own island? Is he a fallen angel now whose rebellion has been punished by the ruin of that which his hand had made? Has he dragged down his own creation in his fall? or what is the reason of this horrible destruction? By the ruins of Elephantine I could have sat down today and cried,243 when I thought, on the wheel broken, lying among its own pottery, the potter prostrate. Poor fallen Khnum, will he rise again? The similarity to our traditions of the Creator is most striking. In Philae he appears in the form of a potter! with the wheel, making a figure of Osiris (the primitive soul), with this inscription, ‘‘Khnum who forms on his wheel the divine limbs (i.e., the soul) of Osiris, who is enthroned in the Great Hall of Life.’’ He is called too ‘‘Him who has made the sun and moon to revolve under the heaven and above the world, and who has made the world and all things in it.’’ He was worshipped in Elephantine as the ‘‘Lord of the Inundations’’ (whence the ruins of his temple have been just removed to make the governor of Aswan a house), and the boat or ark is his, a trace of the old Arkite worship and evidently connected (for he is ‘‘as without beginning, so without end,’’ therefore it cannot be a material symbol) with the ‘‘Spirit’’ brooding over the waters, making them fruitful and ‘‘gathering together the waters and making the earth bring forth.’’244 The name of Satis means ‘‘the ray,’’ as Khnum does ‘‘the Spirit’’: perhaps some idea of Light, of the Spirit producing, or acting upon Light, and both producing Anukis (or Vesta), the hidden fire, the animating soul. But I must put up, my friends, for I am weary and tomorrow is a great day, the day we touch the Holy Isle, the day of Philae. Philae and Iona!245 What a poem for him who could imagine it! What a year (for 242 243 244 245

A paraphrase of Gen 1:2. An allusion to Ps 137:1. In Genesis 1. An island off the west coast of Scotland, also famous for its light, and from which St Columba Christianized north Britain.

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me) which sees Philae and Iona, the Northern and the Southern worship, both! Yet it is the same God under the different forms. And I am, whether at Philae or at Iona, yours, and ever yours, my people Source: Claydon Diary

3 Januar y 1850 Nile. Anchored off Edfu. 4 Januar y 1850 Walk before breakfast in sight of the Edfu propylon. Weather gloriously hot. 5 Januar y 1850 Saw the little rock corridor. Pass of Hagar Silsilis before breakfast. Elephantine Dynasty (Vth) reigned as far as this pass bce 3074. 6 Januar y 1850 Came in sight of the strange rocks which start up out of the river and prepare the way for the ‘‘Gates’’ of Aswan. 125 miles from Thebes. Island of Elephantine: horrible desolation as if the earth had been boiled, stirred in a cauldron and this the scum which had come to the top. Children like troops of jackals. Evening walk in Syene, the ‘‘ver y abomination of desolation.’’246 Source: British Library Diar y

3 Januar y 1850 7½ Wrote letters. 9 Breakfast and making plans for journey. 12 Bunsen with Mr B. 3 Dinner. 4 Letters (¼) and journal. Anchored off Edfu. 4 Januar y 1850 Walked before breakfast. Bunsen all day, making an analysis of the dynasties. The hottest weather we have had.

246 Dan 11:31, 12:11.

252 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 5 Januar y 1850 Hagar Silsilis. Saw the little rock corridor before breakfast. Bunsen’s dynasties all day. 6 Januar y 1850 Aswan 12 noon. I[sland] of Elephantine. Evening walk in Syene. Wrote home. Source: Letter 30, 1854 ed. 119-26, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/14

Nubia [Monday] 7 January 1850 Well, my dears, the great feat is over: the British flag floated proudly up the last steps of the staircase at half-past one today and found herself in a position where she never had been before, and we came upstairs to another world. It was a grand sight—I would not have missed it for the world. Everybody at Cairo dissuaded us from it, but let nobody come to Egypt without going up the cataracts: they have never seen such an exhibition before and never will again. It is quite as interesting, in its way, as Karnak in another or Cairo in a third, as the most wonderful development of instinct I suppose the world contains. I thought it quite beautiful, and tears fill one’s eyes when one sees the provision of God for the preser vation of life, always answering exactly to its need in every countr y. In Europe the intellectual developments are quite enough to preser ve life and accordingly we see instinct undeveloped. In America the wild Indian tracks his way through a trackless forest by an instinct to us quite as miraculous as clairvoyance, or anything we are pleased to call impossible, and in Egypt the wild Nubian rides on the wave and treads upon the foam quite as securely as the Indian in his forest. The strife of man with the elements—wind, earth and water—and his overcoming was as grand an epic poem as any I ever read in Homer or Milton. I should have expected to find the triad of the cataracts: physical skill, strength and rapidity. Here the poor Arab is in his element and, instead of the sensual, debased creature you see him in his idle moments, he seems the god of the winds and the whirlpool. I think riding up the cataract was one of the most delightful moments of my life. The inward excitement of European life is so great, its outward excitement so small, that a violent external call upon our senses and instincts to us is luxury and peace. The sense of power over the elements—of danger successfully

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overcome—is (to us, at least,247 the excitement of whose inner life has been so great) one of the keenest delights and reliefs. We were four hours and a half surmounting the cataracts. We left Syene at nine o’clock this morning with all the ‘‘bigs’’ on board, viz., the sheikhs consisting of ‘‘Great Father,’’ his four sons, their children and their grandchildren, four generations, and passed through ‘‘the opening’’ (which the name means), i.e., the rocky portals of Nubia, formed by Elephantine and Aswan. The island of Sehel, the ancient Satis where was worshipped the ‘‘Ray’’ of the Elephantine triad in gorgeous temples and chapels, is now one heap of stones. We wound our way, with a fair wind, to the foot of the first rapid about a mile from Aswan. Here were men posted on every rock to receive us and we threw out our first rope. To me it would be the most interesting thing to go through every rapid with you: to describe the unerring aim with which the rope was thrown from the poop, the man on the rock standing in the attitude of an Apollo Belvedere,248 watching the direction of the arrow to receive it, his keen eye glistening with the eagerness of his watch. When a sunken rock came in view, twenty eyes had already seen it and a dozen men had thrown themselves out upon it and were pushing the boat off by main force, their feet only against the rock, their backs against the boat—or had plunged upon an opposite bank and, throwing themselves upon their backs, were pulling the rope towards them. On they sprang from rock to rock like chamois: I did not see one false step upon the shiny, slipper y Syenite—one expected them to be dashed to pieces every moment. So the boat surmounted the first rapid. Our rope was not strong enough and if it had not been for a sudden puff of wind, which came exactly at the right moment, we should not have got through with our large boat—so Mr B. said. At the second rapid more men came: the divers sprang into the water—not head foremost as ours do—but sitting or on their feet (for you must remember there is no question of sandbanks here but all hard granite), with the rope in their mouths, or under one shoulder and over the other, crossed a current which would have carried down an alligator, swam to a rock, made fast the rope round the rock, sitting on the noose and holding it with their feet while they kept their hands ready for action. Then all hands on board the boat pulled at the rope, and so we got through the second, third and fourth rapids, which are 247 Ms 9017/14: to me, at least, is all I can say. 248 A copy of a famous Greek sculpture at the Vatican Museum in Rome.

254 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions short and straight and the angle of pulling does not require altering. At dawn of day in the morning our decks had been cleared for action: ever ything car ried into the cabins which could be moved, to leave space for the men, and the pantry, larder, still room and scullery piled up in a heap on deck, on which we were made to stand. Between every rapid comes a dead millpond where old Nile rests from his labours and where all the men came on board. They sat (as birds stand) upon the gunwale, not holding on by their toes, but the whole weight resting upon the back sinews of their legs and balancing themselves by their ankles. They touch with nothing but their heels and seem perfectly comfortable. I never saw such a feat—they look exactly like cormorants. Our old reis perched in the flukes of the anchor which had been brought and laid on deck. They do not swim as we do but with their shoulders and arms out of the water, beating the water with their arms and, when they make a great effort, the head goes down underwater and they spring like porpoises. To see these men dive into the middle of a whirlpool and go down where the bottom of the river is all granite is to us like a feat of an Indian juggler going into the fire—almost incredible—or to see them come riding down a rapid upon a log with their clothes on their heads! They come on board trembling and their teeth chattering, where a companion receives them and wraps them in a sheet as tenderly as a bathing woman, gives them a rub and drags them to the fire kept burning on the bows, while Mr B. administers the brandy. To see them watching the exact moment at which, and at no other, it will do to let the rope go, with all their senses, eyes, ears, touch in a state as perfect as a dog’s, is the most beautiful instinct I ever saw at work. But there is a great deal beside this: the skill to seize the whirlpool exactly where, and as far as, it will carry the boat on, to profit by a countercurrent and, the moment it ceases to serve, and there is danger of the boat being whirled back, up with the sail, out with the ropes, forty hands overboard—an instant or, as Paolo calls it, a ‘‘lampo,’’ and it would be too late. We approached the fifth rapid and it seemed impossible that we could be going through that: the passage so narrow, the current so rapid, the rocks so sharp. We threw out two ropes, one on each side, for here our line of tactics altered: the rapid was too winding, the angles too numerous for us to pull to a stone. We had a line of men on each side to pull at us and, of course, the fixed point wanting, the difficulty was greater. Crash went something—the righthand rope had broke and the boat whirled round, but our bows

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caught upon the opposite rock. The other rope held, at which sixty men were pulling: the ‘‘bigs’’ worked like heroes, in the water, out of the water. It reminded one of the time when chiefs were chosen for their bodily prowess, their strength in throwing or swiftness in run´ κης ’Αχιλλευ´ ς[the swift-footed Achilles]249—and we ning—the ποδω pulled through. By this time the rocks were lined with natives, many carrying spears and clubs. The wildness of the place is beyond expression: not a palm, not a blade of grass, and expanse of heaps of Syenite with rapids between them—the rocks hollowed out into the most inconceivable shapes, some like bowls, some like boilers, some like bootjacks, some like Etruscan vases, where little whirlpools must have established themselves in inundations. It is the most beautiful red Syenite: veins of quartz running through, mica and hornblende sparkling, sometimes layers of pure red pebbles set in rows in the mixed granite. And here I must confess that the deafening, dizzying din of the crews takes away very much from the idea of the power. As for the ‘‘bigs’’ giving orders, it was out of the question: they were only understood by their gestures. One would have thought the consciousness of power would have been calm—one thinks of strength as so gentle— but I suppose it is only the intellectual that is still, and it is to remind us of the wide difference which lies between intellectual or moral power and physical, that the latter is made so turbulent. However that be, the wild cries of these gods of the waves make the scene more grotesque, but not more impressive. At the sixth rapid, which is a long winding bay where the wind fails in its help and nothing is to be done but by sheer strength, we were put ashore, partly to see the other English boat who, as Paolo said, ‘‘had got a stocked’’ (a stick, a blow) ‘‘and he leak.’’ At the last rapid our sheikh had got out his new, his best rope, when the other broke. And now, with 120 (!) men pulling at this and another rope to the stern to regulate the angle, slowly and steadily we saw her pulled up, and we floated into still water. A mile further down we had seen a boat lost, her back broken, her yard just out of the water. Abundance of salaams followed; we parted with our sheikhs of four generations and set our sail for Nubia. A mile further on we came in sight of Philae. There! there! look! it stole upon our sight gently and softly from behind its grey rocks—such a contrast to Elephantine! It was the sleep of calm and lovely death instead of the agony of convul249 Homer, Iliad 2.860 and passim.

256 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions sion. It was all that I had hoped and expected. The wind was not high and we stole upon the rest of ‘‘Him who sleeps in Philae’’ like whisperers, on tiptoe, just as one ought to do. But alas! the envious wind freshened and oh, we did not stop! I was so disappointed. But as we wore round her, for we took the eastern passage, I saw long trains of camels, asses and horses, with scarlet housings on the river banks, and on the river four great boats full of worshippers crossing over to carry these offerings, and high upon the island itself a long procession of gaily-coloured robes moving to the hypaethral temple. It was the worship of Osiris restored. We had come upstairs into the old world of 4000 years ago. It was the governor of Upper Egypt, transferred to the government of Ethiopia and on his way to Darfur, his seat of government, who had stopped here to visit Philae. One moment sooner or later, and we should not have seen this enchantment, charming back the old worship. How ungrateful of me to be disappointed. A mile further and we came to a ruined church where my Padre Ryllo250 said his last mass on his way to martyrdom in Abyssinia. Paolo knew him in Egypt. Not requiescat in pace [let him rest in peace], but let him work in glorious toil. Success, not rest be with him. Nubia (the golden, alas! now the stony and barren) is everything as a contrast to Egypt: the river running between two rocky steeps, the rim of verdure diminished to a thread. We have a pilot who has been up to the second cataract four times this winter already. A boat in sight! January 11th,251 near Derr, capital of Nubia. Source: Claydon Diary

7 Januar y 1850 Nubia. Sent our letters by the governor of Aswan. Ascent of the cataracts; came through the gates and up the stairs into another world (9:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.). Arabs in their glory: physical strength, skill and rapidity must have been the triad of the cataracts. Their unerring eye, their extraordinar y diving, swimming across a current which would have carried away a hippopotamus. Contrast of the holy Philae at the end. 250 Padre Ryllo, a priest of Santa Trinità de’ Monti in Rome, martyred in Abyssinia. 251 This date indicates that, begun on 7 January, this letter was completed on 11 January.

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7 Januar y 1850 Cataracts 9-½ p[ast] 1. Philae. Wrote home. Source: Letter 31, 1854 ed. 126-48, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/16 and 9018/10-11, 20

Abu Simbel [Thursday] 17 January 1850

My dearest people Here we are arrived at the last and greatest point of our voyage (greatest it is in all respects); I can fancy nothing greater. All that I have imagined has fallen short of Abu Simbel (of the great temple of the Osirides252) and thank God that we have come here. I can conceive nothing in Thebes to equal this and am well satisfied to turn back now, for we are to go no further. We arrived here on the 15th about 9:00 o’clock and climbed the bank immediately to the lesser temple to see that first. There is no effect about the exterior at all— you don’t know where the rock ends and the temple begins—the slanting lines of the face of the temple (none of them parallel) are ugly and the six colossal figures between the slants impossible to see as the bank slopes straight down from the temple door to the river. Yet I have a love for the place; it is so innocent, so childish, so simple, so like Hathor, ‘‘the Lady of Aboccis’’ (the old name of Abu Simbel) whom it represents. Hathor means the habitation of Horus and Hor us means god; therefore Hathor is nature, the world in which God dwells and which reveals Him. Her inscription calls her the ‘‘nurse who fills heaven and earth with her beneficent acts.’’ As such, she is identical with Isis. And her temple is so like nature, cheerful and simple and, to me at least, not very interesting, with her great broad innocent face and childlike expression, for it would not do if nature always kept us in a state of excitement. She is the same as the Grecian Aphrodite, yet how different (her simple, almost infantine beauty) to the more intellectual, yet at the same time more sensual, conscious beauty of the Greek Venus. It is the difference between Aspasia and Desdemona. She is also the goddess of joy, the lady of the dance and mirth, a sort of joy like that of children playing at daisy chains, not that of the feast of Epicurus. She is a secondary goddess and her connection with the earth is more intimate than that of the real goddesses; her expression 252 The Osirides are mummiform statues depicting rulers in the form of the god Osiris.

258 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions shows none of their supernatural serenity, but a simple enjoyment of her flowers and creatures. The temple is small, the first chamber hewn in the rock and supported by six pillars with the Hathor head upon each; then a vestibule or prosekos; then the sekos or sacred place with her image in it. It was built by the Great Ramesses of the XIXth Dynasty, who reigned thirteen centuries and a half before Christ, the conqueror and Sesostris of the Greeks. His figure, with those of his two queens, both evidently portraits, and one a most beautiful woman, are in ‘‘intaglio rilevato’’ [relief ] all over the walls. Everywhere Ramesses’ queens occupy as conspicuous a place as himself. One only of the representations interested me much. It was the Great Ramesses crowned by the good and the evil principle on either side. What a deep philosophy! what theory of the world has ever gone farther than this? The evil is not the opposer of the good but its collaborateur, the left hand of God, as the good is His right. I don’t think I ever saw anything which affected me much more than this (3000 years ago): the king at his entrance into life is initiated into the belief that what we call the evil was the giver of life and power as well as the good. Later, when the Egyptians fell off from their primitive philosophy, we find Seth or Ombte the evil spirit, once Nubi the golden, transformed into Typhon, the foe of the good, and carefully erased everywhere from the monuments. But here he is in his right place as one of the powers of God. And tell Aunt Mai [Mary Shore Smith] I thought of her when I looked at him, and of all she had taught me, and rejoiced to think how the same light dawns upon the wise from the two ends of space and of time. In these early temples the evil spirit is the brother, not the foe of Osiris, after wards he is carefully scratched out wherever he appears. But, in the early times of our own Bible, Satan was one of the servants of God, not His enemy (as we have made him), and comes with the other sons of God in Job253 to give account of what he has been about and to receive His commands. The Satan of Job seems to me to have been the evil spirit of the early Egyptians. Necessary to the system of divine Providence, his influence was considered a benefit. Nothing was put into us in vain, but everything in us which we consider bad was only an excess either of reason, feeling or conscience, and when properly balanced by the others would become good. That they considered the evil as not separate nor distinct from the good is evident from the union of the 253 An allusion to Job 2:1.

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good and the evil spirit, Seth and Horus in one figure, as we sometimes see it—and in their united office of giving life and purity to the king where, though they appear as two, they are occupied in the same end, working as one. Anaxagoras254 seems to have taken this idea when he says that the good spirit was Intelligence, the evil one Infinity, i.e., Undefinedness. I should call the good spirit Truth, not as opposed to Falsehood but as opposed to Indefiniteness, i.e., the good spirit is what is defined and ordered, the balanced powers of the soul and those of nature; the evil spirit is the yet-unordered passions of the soul and the irregular storms of nature, which yet we could not do without. In later times, whether the invasion of the Persians made the Egyptians begin to think the spirit of evil unmitigated evil, or whether an advanced state of civilization is, as in Europe, always literal, and what had been an abstract idea began to be treated in a matter-of-fact, positive way, as we treat things, I cannot tell; but it seems like being in actual everyday intercourse with the people, to see the angry scratches which blot out poor Ombte’s nose; they were so evidently done by the people in a passion, not by artists in a systematic way; and some have made a mistake and left him alone. But I must say it proves two things: one, that the people did understand the meaning of the sculptures before them; the other, that they acted without being absolutely under the thumb of the priesthood, for this is evidently done by no priestly order; and that they took a keen interest in their own temples (unless it was done afterwards by the Christians, which seems most unlikely, for they scratched everything alike). However that may be, the old Egyptians believed that out of good came forth evil, and out of evil came forth good; or, as I should translate it, out of the well-ordered comes forth the inharmonious, the passionate; and out of disorder again order; and both are a benefit. The Romans, who were a more literal people, and we their descendants, never understood this and have set our faces against evil, like the later Egyptians, and scratched his nose. Some people have seen a portrait of Joseph in the ass-headed god with square ears, Ombte. I myself incline to this opinion, considering him under the later idea, as I never could bear Joseph for making all the free property of Egypt into king’s property, the fee simple of all Egypt into leasehold, the cause of half the evil at this present day. 254 Anaxagoras (c500-430 bce), Greek philosopher and natural scientist who introduced a non-material entity, Mind, into cosmology.

260 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions But I am in a hurry to get on to the great temple, the Temple of the Sun, as he stands side by side with the modest little temple of his daughter, the mistress of the west, the lady of evening, of the morning star (Hathor) who receives him every night at the end of his course behind her mountain, when he sets into her resting place. We clambered and slid through the avalanche of sand which now separates the two temples. There they sit, the four mighty colossi, seventy feet high, facing the east, with the image of the sun between them, the sandhill sloping up to the chin of the northernmost colossus. Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty: intellect without effort, without suffering. I would not call it intellectual either, it is so entirely opposed to that of the Jupiter Capitolinus255—it is more the beauty of the soul—not a feature is correct but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man. Yet the figures are anything but beautiful—no anatomy, no proportion—it is a new language to learn and we have no language to express it. Here I have the advantage for, being equally ignorant of the language of any art, I was as open to impression from them as from Greek or any other art. The part of the rock smoothed for the temple face is about 100 feet to the highest row of ornament. Over the door is the image of the sun and on either side an intaglio figure of the Great Ramesses, offering, not burnt sacrifices, not even flowers, nor fruit, but a figure of Justice in his right hand. ‘‘Sacrifices and burnt offering thou hast not desired, else would I give it.’’256 ‘‘For what does the Lord require of thee but to do justly?’’257 What more refined idea of sacrifice could you have than this? Yet inside I was still more str uck by the king offering justice to the God who gives him in return life and purity in either hand. The door, which is about twenty feet high, does not reach nearly up to the knee of the colossus. Alas! the sand is now as high as three feet below the top of the door and into this magnificent temple you have to crawl on all fours. But I am not sure that the effect is not increased by it. When you have slipped down an inclined plane of sand twenty 255 Which Nightingale saw in Rome and discussed at length in letters home (Keele, Florence Nightingale in Rome 219-23). 256 A paraphrase of Ps 51:16. 257 Micah 6:8.

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feet high, which is like entering into the bowels of the earth, you find yourself in a gigantic hall, wrapped in eternal twilight, and you see nothing but eight colossal figures of Osiris standing against as many square pillars, which support the rocky roof, their arms crossed upon their breast, the shepherd’s crook and the flagellum in either hand: for he is here in his character of judge of the dead, lord of Amenti or the lower world of departed souls. And truly it looks like the lower world, the region of spirits; no light irritates your eyes, no sound annoys your ear, no breath of wind sets your teeth on edge. The atmosphere is much warmer than the outer air, this atmosphere, which is never stirred by anything but the beetle, the only creature light enough to tread this sand without being buried in it. ‘‘Full of grace and truth,’’258 as his inscription bears, indeed he looks.259 I waited for him to speak, but he did not. Through two other halls I passed, till at last I found myself in a chamber in the rock where sat, in the silence of an eternal night, four figures against the further end. I could see nothing more, yet I did not feel afraid as I did at Karnak—though I was quite alone in these subterraneous halls— for the sublime expression of that judge of the dead had looked down upon me, the incarnation of the goodness of the deity, as Osiris is. And I thought how beautiful the idea which placed him in the foremost hall, and then led the worshipper gradually on to the more awful attributes of the deity, for here, as I could dimly see through the darkness, sat the creative powers of the eternal mind, Khnum, ‘‘the intellect,’’ Amun the ‘‘concealed god,’’ Ptah ‘‘the creator of the visible world’’ and Ra, ‘‘the sustainer,’’ ‘‘the sun,’’ to whom the temple is dedicated. The heat was intense—it was as if this were the focus of the vivifying power of those attributes—and before them stood an altar, the first and last we shall see, the real old altar upon which stood the sacred ark. As to having had sacrifices here, it is physically impossible 258 Identical with John 1:14. 259 Later in her life, in a letter to Miss Munro departing for an ‘‘Egyptian expedition,’’ 21 May 1888 (Add Mss 45808 ff83-85) (a partial copy is found below in ‘‘Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions’’), Nightingale again referred to this aspect of the deity: ‘‘You feel yourself called to this Egyptian work, a great work it is. This is the accepted time when God will send His spirit. I pray for you hourly that He, full of grace and truth, will grant it abundantly. Do you know that in the most ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, we found those words, ‘God,’ ’full of grace and truth’? They are in some of the Thebes tombs and in some of the Nubian temples. There is as it were a foretaste of the Christian religion.’’

262 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions in any part of the temple; the door of the Osiris hall is the only outlet and there is no possibility of any others. I turned to go out and saw at the further end the golden sand glittering in the sunshine outside the top of the door, and the long sandhill, sloping down from it to the feet of the innermost Osirides, which are left quite free, all but their pedestals, looked like the waves of time, gradually flowing in and covering up these imperishable genii who have seen three thousand years pass over their heads and heed them not. In the holiest place, there where no sound ever reaches, it is as if you felt the sensible progress of time, not by the tick of a clock as we measure time, but by some spiritual pulse which marks to you its onward march, not by its second, nor its minute, nor its hour hand but by its century hand. I thought of the worshippers of 3000 years ago, how they by this time have reached the goal of spiritual ambition, have brought all their thoughts to serve God or the ideal of goodness, how we stand there with the same goal before us, only as distant as the star which, a little later, I saw rising exactly over that same sandhill in the centre of the top of the doorway, but as sure and fixed; how to them all other thoughts are now as nothing, and the ideal we all pursue of happiness is won, not because they have not probably sufferings, like ours, but because they no longer suggest any other thought but of doing God’s will, which is happiness. I thought how, 3000 years hence, we might perhaps have attained, and others would stand here, and still those old gods would be sitting in the eternal twilight. Silent they sat and stern and never moved; and I left them, . We shall never enjoy another place like Abu Simbel: the absolute solitude of it, the absence of a present, of any of one’s fellow creatures who contrast the past with that horrible Egyptian present. You look abroad and see no tokens of habitation. The power of leaving the boat and running up to the temple at any hour of the day or night, without a whole escort at your heels, the silence and stillness and freedom of it were what we shall never have again. At Luxor the present was such as to annihilate all pleasure in anything; and at Derr, where we stopped on the 13th for an hour, the cries and crowd were so insupportable that we saw the temple as quickly as we could, and I have no more idea of it at this moment than you have. I came out of the penetralia and looked again upon the glorious colossi. I wish all my friends could see them once in their lives, if only for a moment, or that I could describe to anyone the look of intense

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repose in those faces. I think Europeans are perhaps better able to judge of them than any others: to Europeans they must be always more peculiarly affecting, the revelation of an entirely new kind of life. To us toil and excitement and restless anxiety are so familiar that we have even consecrated them in Christianity.260 To the Greeks intellectual activity seemed the highest god they could frame. To the Egyptians calm of soul was the characteristic of a Divine Being. Their Osiris is never represented (at least nowhere that I have seen him) as sharing in the agitations of humanity, though he took upon him their nature. It is so touching to come thus to the ‘‘ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods,’’ and even ‘‘to the tender mother that dandled them to rest’’261—for here is Ramesses’ Queen, that beautiful tender face—to descend into the bowels of the earth and find this revelation fresh and new, of a nation 3000 years passed away, that at first one is quite overwhelmed. And, I assure you, one is surprised to find oneself thinking of nothing at all, mechanically reading the names which are alas! scrawled over every statue, or counting the footsteps of the scarab as he leaves his track upon the sand. It is like what one reads of people doing under a great blow, counting the fringe on the rug or some such thing, instead of thinking of the event. We went up to the top of the rock, under which the temple is quarried, to look up the Nile. It is separated from the next cliff by a sand slip. I sighed for a walk in the Alps, the tropical Alps, and I walked round the valley and to the next mountain, and took a long last look south into Abyssinia, for further we were not to go.262 I saw nothing, met nothing that had life, or had had life, but the whitened bones of a poor camel. I reached the top of the next cliff . Oh, would I could describe that, my last real African view! the golden sand, north, south, east and west, except where the blue Nile flowed, strewn with 260 Ms 9017/16: that we have even dragged down one of our gods to our life and supposed Him to feel it. Ms 9018/11: that our greatest comfort is in connecting our God with our life and believing Him to feel it. 261 A paraphrase of Isa 66:12. 262 See passage from a letter to Harry Verney 12 November 1867, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9002/184: I have often talked with German Egyptologists on the subject of antiquities (men of more precise notions than dear old Bunsen). There is but little to be had, nothing prior to Christianity, though Christian monuments have probably been raised on elder ones, nothing at all of the importance of Egyptian and Nubian antiquities.

264 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions bright purple granite stones, the black ridges of mountains east and west, volcanic rocks and gigantic jet-black wigwam-looking hills. If you can imagine the largest glaciers you ever saw, the Mer de Glace at Chamonix, with all the avalanches golden sand, and all the ridges purple granite, not one blade of green anywhere except where a sunk fence—for I can call it nothing else—bounds the river and is cultivated with lupins, that is Nubia. It reminded me perpetually of the philosopher’s stone. The people tried to make gold and prayed to the Deity that he would turn all their soil to gold, and this must be the consequence. The banks of the rivers look like a beetle’s back, green and gold, the rest of the country like one vast vein of metal ore. They sent our Nubian steersman after their ‘‘wild ass of the wilderness,’’263 but he found a nice bank of sand in the sun and lay down on his face to sleep. I thought he had had an apoplectic stroke (for you can see figures miles off, as large as life in this atmosphere) and hastened to his assistance—whereupon he got up and carried me down the next sand avalanche like a child. They help you so beautifully, these Nubians, that your feet hardly seem to touch the ground—the sand is so fine and soft that you sink at every step almost to your knees. We came back to the dahabieh for candles and went all over the great temple. Every inch of it is covered with sculptures, perfectly uninjured except the colouring, which is gone, but the outlines are as sharp as ever. But what is the good of attempting to describe that which is now as sharply cut in my memory as in the stone, but of which I shall give no idea to you? It seems to me as if I had never seen sculpture before, as if the Elgin marbles264 were tame beside them! as if I had now begun to live in heroic times. The great Ramesses [Ramesses II] holds by the hair of the head eleven captives kneeling before him, in the presence of the god Ra who decrees their destiny. Ever ything is done here in the presence of the gods. Ramesses receives life and power from his patron Ra (after whom he is named), dedicates to him his victories, receives from him commands how his defeated nations are to be disposed of. It reminds one of another nation and another leader whose name only differs by the omission of the first syllable from Ramesses >. But the most curious part of the thing is the sublime expression of this Ramesses: I never saw so beautiful a countenance. It is not a man murdering other men—it is the type of power. The captives too are not bound, but with their hands free and some even holding daggers, so that indeed everybody has seen in it only an allegory expressive of dominion over the enemies of his country. Three types of face in the captives are quite distinct: a Negro, an Ethiopian and an Eastern, showing that, at this early period of Ramesses’ reign, his conquests had extended into Asia and south[ern] Africa. If it is really a portrait of Ramesses he must have been a noble creature. His name means ‘‘tried’’ or ‘‘regenerated by Ra,’’ as Tuthmosis means ‘‘regenerate by Thoth.’’ The last two syllables mss (for in the old Egyptian, as in Arabic and Hebrew, there are no vowels) immediately recall another name, and Moses does mean ‘‘saved,’’ ‘‘regenerate,’’ ‘‘initiated’’ (initiated, i.e., into the Egyptian mysteries where a baptism of fire and water was one of the initiations). And ‘‘saved by water’’ is a better translation of that passage in Exodus, where his name is given him, than ‘‘saved from water.’’265 Indeed the phonetic sign which stands for M and which you see in Ramesses’ shield is dew, the symbol of baptism. Well, be that as it may, the ‘‘tried by Ra’’ is worthy of his name. And at the farther end of the Osiris hall (on each side of the door which goes into the pronaos) there is a representation of him entering the presence of a trinity of gods, I think, the sublimest ideal of prayer that ever entered the mind of man to conceive: not shrinking, not awe-struck—he is not even kneeling—not supplicating for forgiveness in that mean and selfish spirit which says, ‘‘Hide thy face from my sins,’’266 instead of saying, ‘‘Turn all the light of thy countenance upon my sins, that in that light I may see them and, accepting their consequences, take those consequences as the means to correct them.’’ But, raising one hand a little, he stands with face upturned and head uncovered, reverentially offering a reasonable service. Happy the man who has penetrated so deeply into the nature of God as to be able to offer such a worship. He looks as if no happiness could overpower him, being the natural consequence of the love of the Father; no 265 In Exod 2:10 Pharaoh’s daughter ‘‘called his name Moses, because I drew him out of the water.’’ 266 Ps 51:9.

266 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions adversity take[s] him by surprise, being as desirable an effect of His love whose left hand is evil as His right hand good. Would that I could have understood all that, that glorious yet perfectly human countenance conveyed: the entire trust which no breath of hope or fear ever stirred, the strong hold on invisible things which makes them seen and a substance, the something so much higher than mere repentance to which even the remembrance of its sins is sacred (not bitter) for out of these too comes the love of God working good; the mind which does not offer praise, tiresome praise to God but says, after its great prototype, ‘‘I and my Father are one,’’267 for His will is one with God, whatever may befall. He does not even ask for anything; he is not such a fool as to ask for what Wisdom Divine does not give. The Génie Adorant268 (which is Adam adoring) is the beautiful portraiture of the sinless new-created being, awakening to a knowledge of its Creator with all its faculties, but untaught by any experience. The St Jerome of Domenichino is that of a man laden with all the sins and toils and pains of the past, struggling into the presence of a hard-won Deity. The Ramesses is that of a perfect intellectual and spiritual man who feels his connection with that God, whose first and last lesson through His Christ has been, ‘‘Be one with me,’’ not be my instrument nor my worshipper nor my petitioner, but one with me. I am glad to have seen that representation of prayer; it has taught me more than all the sermons I ever read. The two long sides of the Osiris hall are taken up (strange contrast with this!) by the battle scenes, which make even an heroic age run round in a peaceful brain like mine: Ramesses in his chariot, hurried along by his galloping horses, the reins twisted round his waist, drawing his bow upon the foe, in full career, preceded by his constant lion; Ramesses dismounted and killing a chief whom he holds by the arm, in the exact altitude of the Paetus and Arria,269 so that one would think the artist of that must have seen this, Ramesses in his chariot commanding. These below, and a row of Ramesses in conference with different gods above, occupy all the south wall while the north is a series of small battle chariots standing on their heads, on their tails, in every possible position, while Ramesses sitting is receiving a deputation of 267 John 10:30. 268 Nightingale was much taken with a Génie Adorant which she saw in a Berlin museum (see European Travels). 269 Two heroic Roman couples of c42 and c66 ce. Here Nightingale seems to be referring to a painting of the couples.

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conquered nations. One king dismounts from his chariot and holds the reins with one hand while he makes an obeisance to Ramesses with the other. All this north wall relates to the first year of his reign. And the temple appears to have been finished early in his reign, as an inscription relating to the thirty-fifth [year] on the south wall was evidently added afterwards. He reigned from 1388 to 1322 [more likely 1304 to 1237] bce and Egypt is covered with his monuments, the Augustan age of Egyptian art. All these figures are in ‘‘intaglio rilevato,’’ ver y like Flaxman’s270 outlines, the Ramesses about ten feet high. But spirited as they are, I, for one, am very soon tired of them. I never made much hand of chivalr y or Homer, and I returned back to my beloved adytum where sits Khnum, the supreme Intellect, the fashioner of the soul of man, Amun the ‘‘Concealed God,’’ Ptah the framer of the visible universe and Ra its Sustainer, in solitar y and unapproachable holiness. In Abu Simbel you first know what solitude is. In England the utmost solitude you can obtain is surrounded by human beings, but there in the depths of the rock, in eternal darkness, where no sound ever reaches, solitude is no longer a name, it is a presence. In the evening we made a great fire upon the altar and, while our turbaned crew fed it, we sat in the entrance on the top of our hillock and enjoyed the sight and feeling of the ancient worship restored. But then I knew that I liked, yes, and appreciated the Egyptian worship much more now in its desolate grandeur than then in its pomp and show. I felt as if the temple was profaned and the solitude of the ‘‘Unutterable God’’ broken in upon, and I was glad when the blaze and glare were over. Before sunrise the next day [16 January] Σ and I were sitting on the soft warm fine sand, watching for the first rays of his own bright Egyptian sun to illuminate that glorious colossus. It was very cold, but oh! the luxury of that soft warm bed, without creatures, without damp, without dirt, which shakes off directly. When you are cold you bur y your feet in it and it warms them; when you are tired you lie down upon it; when your head aches with staring you sit and watch the scarabs with their pretty tracks; no cries for ‘‘Baksheesh’’ and ‘‘Ia Hawagee’’ (you merchant) pester you and you are as happy as the day is long. But the day broke, the top of the rock became golden, the golden rays crept down. One colossus gave a radiant smile as his own 270 John Flaxman (1755-1826), British sculptor and illustrator.

268 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions glorious sun reached him; he was bathed in living light, yes, really living, for it made him live while the other, still gray, shadowy and stern as a ghost, was unreached by the ‘‘Revealer of Life.’’ We watched him till he too was lighted up and then sat down over against the temple doors and looked in. The Maries could hardly have been more surprised when they saw the angel whose countenance was bright as snow and knew that He whom they sought was risen,271 than we were when we saw the resurrection which had taken place there. One spot of golden light on the third Osiris spread and spread till it lighted up the cheek of the second and first. They smiled in their solemn beauty but did not speak; a flush came over their faces for a moment—it was an awful moment, it was only a blast of sand stirring outside in the golden sunlight—but the reflection had lighted them up. And in this morning eastern light I could go over all the sculptures in the temple and see them quite plain, but still my heart yearned to the solitary four in the holy place whom no light ever approaches. I was surprised to find them still sitting there: they are so living, yet there they have sat for 3000 years. For 3000 years the Osirides have seen the sun rise as they saw it that morning and will for thousands of years more. In the afternoon it was announced, to my unspeakable delight, that we were to stay another day at Abu Simbel, another sun to see rise there, another evening to watch the stars—the only thing we wanted was a moonlight. I climbed up into the lap of one of the colossi, the southernmost, who is quite uncovered, his knee is considerably above the doorway top. To please them, I measured his middle finger, four feet. But to see my Hall of the Genii, my beloved Temple of Abu Simbel all upon paper with rule and line, brings it down to the level of Chatsworth in my imagination, and I won’t give you the measurements of one of the colossi—I am afraid of getting like Dante. What does it matter whether Ramesses’ ear is two or three feet long? Champollion has dreadfully spoilt one of the colossi by whitewashing its face. I never look at that one. Imagine painting one of the pinnacles of Westminster Abbey red. It is a dissight from afar off. All that day I spent wandering about within the temple and in the evening the new moon, like a silver boat, rested on the surface of the cliff for a moment and then set, leaving behind it the old moon, plainly visible upon the top 271 An allusion to Matt 28:3-6.

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of the rock, after the silver thread was gone, for some moments. I never saw that sight before. The next morning we were there again at dawn and again saw the wonder ful light, the resurrection of those colossi, their own eastern sun saluting them. In what their beauty consists, it requires a wiser eye than mine to tell you: their faces are rounded, their foreheads are low, their lips thick. Nothing which generally gives expression or saves from monotony is there; the figures are clumsy, the shoulders unmodelled, the hands resting on knees like flounders, excessively short from thigh to knee, the legs like posts. Yet no one would say that those faces were expressionless—no one that has seen them—but they will live in his memory as the sublimest expression of spiritual and intellectual repose he has ever seen. The ceiling of the great Osiris hall came out in the morning light, huge overshadowing wings crossed it from side to side. ‘‘He shall cover thee with his feathers and under the shadow of his wings shalt thou tr ust.’’272 I never understood the Bible till I came to Egypt. ‘‘The Almighty shall overshadow thee’’273 and ‘‘As a mother will I nurture thee.’’274 The vulture whose shadowy wings are here portrayed is the Egyptian symbol for a mother and in this position, as protectress of men, she becomes a sublime representation. The king never goes out to battle or ‘‘r uns’’ into the presence of the gods without this beautiful Eilethyia hovering over his head to protect him (though in a somewhat different form, with wings folded round her instead of outspread). When she is the protectress of the country, Eilethyia spreads her glorious wings and holds two ostrich feathers in her claws, as in this ceiling. She is the beautiful headdress of Ramesses’ queen whose portrait is all over the temple and who stands behind him in the captive picture, the most lovely countenance, her black hair gathered together with a golden fibula on the side of her forehead and then falling on her shoulders. The second queen, a somewhat pug-nosed female, is offering to Hathor in her temple where the first also appears. Ever ywhere she occupies the place which the most advanced Christian civilization gives to woman: always the one wife, nowhere the face veiled, often the regent, the sovereign or the co-ruler with a brother. Woman may be quite satisfied with her Christian position in old Egypt. 272 A paraphrase of Ps 91:4. 273 A paraphrase of Luke 1:35. 274 A possible allusion to Isa 66:12.

270 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions The tricolour border of red, blue and white runs round the ceiling, the sacred colours of light, wisdom and purity. Egypt is beginning to speak a language to me, even in the ugliest symbols of her gods, and I find there such pleasant talk: philosophy for the curious, comfort for the weary, amusement for the innocent. But there is another representation over the doorways of all the buildings, the good spirit (Agathodaemon) which bids you welcome as you enter in and under whose protection you are placed. It is the ‘‘Sun of righteousness with healing on his wings,’’275 a sun with two asps and outspread wings, uniting in a trinity the spirits of Ra the sun and nursing father of the world; Khnum the supreme intellect to whom the asp, emblem of wisdom, was sacred (wise as serpents276); and Maut the great mother with her vulture’s wings. This good genius, who is the same as Horus the son of Osiris and Isis, overshadows the doors of all the temples. The Apollo Belvedere is the Greek impersonation of him. The sovereign of Egypt really deserved to be a sovereign, for he appears to have been chief in every act, just as the superior of a religious order278 was, at first, intended to be the superior only in every act of difficulty, self-denial or active benevolence. The king hardly ever appears carried by his fellow men on an ignoble throne, but driving his own chariot, fighting the enemies of his country or running full tilt on his own feet into the presence of the assemblies of the gods. This is how one oftenest sees him. But a little representation of him there is on the side of one of the great Osiris pillars in Abu Simbel, which pleased me more than any. He is offering Truth to Mau, the son of the sun, who expresses the insight, light or pure intellect of God, and sometimes the world, the ‘‘tr ue image of God,’’ but always ‘‘the highest property of God in nature as well as [in] man.’’ He is that property, if we may so speak, ‘‘which proves the reality of God’s attributes by the truth’’ or definiteness of the manifestations he makes of himself in nature. It is a beautiful idea, is it not? this offering Ma’at (Truth) to the god, but more peculiarly interesting to us from its being the original 275 276 277 278

A paraphrase of Mal 4:2. An allusion to Matt 10:16. Wilkinson, Modern Egypt 2:420-559. Ms 9018/20: our religious orders.

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of the ‘‘Urim and Thummim.’’279 The Egyptian judges, who were all high priests, wore a breast plate with Ra and Ma’at (both in the dual lights and tr uths) upon it: Ra in his double capacity of physical and intellectual light, Ma’at perhaps as subjective and objective truth, i.e., tr uth as it appeared to the witness and truth in an absolute sense. Now Urim and Thummim mean light and truth, the two lights and the two tr uths. The judge gave judgment by touching one of the litigants with the figure as a token of the justice of his cause. I shall bring one home for Baron Rolfe. Dear Judge Coltman280 is gone where truths are no longer two (but all is one) and does not want it. The king is represented so often with truth (or justice) as a fit offering for the gods, because, said the old Egyptians, this benefits your neighbours, while those pitiful other three cardinal virtues—pr udence, temperance, fortitude—benefit only yourself. They knew a thing or two, those old Egyptians, don’t you think so? When they spoke of a dead friend, they did not say, as we do, the ‘‘lost’’ or the ‘‘deceased,’’ which is not true, as we all acknowledge in the prayer book, nor ‘‘poor so and so,’’ but the ‘‘justified’’ (matu), for the dead who were found worthy bore on their heads the feather of Truth or Justice and took her hieroglyph. I wish I could tell one half their philosophic ways. I must not forget the sacred boat in which people have seen Noah and his ark, the Arkite worship, and all sorts of things, but which seems to be only a ver y natural emblem for a country which lived by its inundations, whose god Khnum, ‘‘the Spirit of God which moved upon the face of the waters,’’ was called ‘‘Lord of the Inundations’’ and was very likely, with the Egyptian want of imagination, to do this in a boat. There are eight little chambers hewn in the rock, opening out of the Osiris hall and covered with sculptures of offerings, but as these must be gone through with a candle and it is impossible to enjoy anything in that way, I do not describe them. Some of them are left unfinished as the workmen left them 3000 years ago, the line drawn but not cut. The temple of Abu Simbel is the only thing which has ever made an impression upon me like that of St Peter’s, yet how different. We 279 In the Hebrew Bible the breastplate worn by the high priest to discern the will of God, often translated ‘‘light and truth.’’ 280 Baron Rolfe (1790-1880), lord chancellor; Justice Thomas Coltman (17811849), a family friend whose son later married Nightingale’s cousin Bertha Smith.

272 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions bade him adieu at nine o’clock that morning. I never thought I should have made a friend and a home for life of an Egyptian temple, nor been so sorry to look for the last time on that holiest place. We bade him goodbye and turned our prow northwards, for we were to go no further. Our poor yard had been already taken down and laid along from end to end. Our proud Par thenope no longer floated in the Nile breeze and we, our eyes full of sand and tears (which made mud), very hungr y, ver y sorry, ver y tired, watched from the deck the last of the colossi, which yet make no effect at all from the river, and the temple is positively ugly.281 Source: Claydon Diary

8 Januar y 1850 Procession of the pacha, restoring the ancient worship. Island high and safe and still above the river. Fit place for the tomb of ‘‘him who sleeps at Philae.’’ Passed it with a fair wind, alas! Entered the tropic at Kalabsha. 9-11 January 1850 Nubia. My first Nubian walk. We have come upstairs into a new countr y, all black and gold. The Nubians must have discovered the philosopher’s stone which, like Agrippa’s broomstick when one set to work, would not stop till it had turned all the soil of Nubia to gold. Except where a small sunk fence (on either side the Nile) is green, as far as you can see is golden sand, dazzling in the sunset with purple rocks sticking out of it, the Nile like a green beetle in the middle. The sand is like the colour of a ripe harvest field and hedges of sont [?] or mimosa make the river border. Nothing else to be seen. Country hardly inhabited, but the sprinkling of people on the riverside so industrious. I heard the melancholy sakia [water wheel] going all night, sometimes like a peal of bells upon the wind, sometimes like an organ and counted twenty-two this morning in sight from my window besides those indistinct from distance. Paolo gave me my poor chameleon. 12 January 1850 Korosko; pacha here on his way to Darfur, his tents look pretty. Here he takes to camels. My chameleon caught his first fly. He sees everything that is going on, watches not only what is of his own department 281 Ms 9017/16: Forgive repetition, dear people. I have not time to correct it if anything is told twice. Yours ever.

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(like another animal) but what he has nothing to do with. If we look at him he pretends to be dead. He speculates on everything we do with his long telescope eyes, which he can almost tie in a knot at the back of his head. 13 January 1850 Der r; walked on shore among the castor oils, human and vegetable. Der r, 3:00 p.m., 132 miles from Aswan, the capital of Nubia [of the] time of Gulliver’s travels, the Laputae,282 I should have thought. Rock temple of the great Ramesses, too much taken up with the Laputae to look at it. 14 January 1850 Asked the crew’s chameleon in to tea to keep ours company. But ours would have nothing to do with the vulgar chameleon. He bit and kicked whenever the other came between the sun and his gentility, and the other humbly retired. But when the other, who was twice as large and as strong, but not such a good shot at a fly, turned upon him at last, goaded to desperation, he hung himself up by his tail and pretended to be dead. 15 January 1850 Abu Simbel. Came in sight, with a fair wind, of Abu Simbel at 9:30 a.m., 47 miles from Derr. Walk on the cliff to take our long last look southwards over Abyssinia. Small temple dedicated to Hathor, large temple dedicated to Re, the great Ramesses bce 1388. Lighted a fire on the altar in the adytum. 16 January 1850 Before sunrise Σ and I were seated over against the door of the temple watching the sun giving life to the colossi and then creeping into the door and lighting up the Osiris till; they smiled but the adytum is wrapped in an eternal twilight. Sat in that supernaturally still hot atmosphere (like the focus of the vivifying power of the four creative deities in the adytum) till the stars rose; went over the sculptures with a lantern. Moon set with her silver boat behind the temple leaving the old moon like a copper globe, plainly visible. 17 January 1850 Nubia. Saw another sun rise at Abu Simbel and again the wonderful light making living the face of one colossus, while another was shadowy 282 The visionar y people in Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.

274 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions like a ghost. Saw the Osiris live again, one more farewell to the eternal darkness and silence of the adytum. With our eyes full of tears and sand at 9:00 a.m. we began our passage northwards, sorry enough to turn. Source: British Library Diar y

8 Januar y 1850 Began Bunsen again and his hard work. Kalabsha. Entered the tropic. 9 Januar y 1850 Bunsen all day. Paolo gave me my poor little chameleon; it slept on my bed. 10 January 1850 Bunsen. First walk in Nubia. Chameleon very miserable, would not eat. 11 January 1850 Bunsen. Chameleon caught his first fly. Korosko. Pacha’s tents there on his way to Darfur. 12 January 1850 Bunsen all day. Calm, towing, exceedingly warm; delightful weather, 110° on deck, 88° in cabin. 13 January 1850 Bunsen. Walk on shore among the castor oils, human and vegetable. Stopped at Derr; saw the temple in the rock; capital of the Laputae. 14 January 1850 Finished my history of the thirty-one dyn[astie]s for Mr Bracebridge. Began Lepsius. 15 January 1850 Came in sight of Abu Simbel with a fair wind soon after 9. Made up our minds to go no further. Walked a long way south to take my last look Abyssiniawards. Sacrifice in the temple. 16 January 1850 At sunrise before the colossi. Osirides lighted up. Made a vow in the sacred place. Dreadful fright283 with Trout. 17 January 1850 Sunrise in the Osiris halls. Sailed at 9. Wrote letters. Dreamed in the ver y face of God. 283 Calabria read: fights.

ghtingale, about 1845, from a drawing by Hilary Bonham Carter (in Ed lorence Nightingale [London: Macmillan, 1913]).

Assyrian sculptures (Letter 1): “Hero Overpowering a Lion”; “Hero Holding a Lion”; “Androcephelos Winged Bull.” Louvre, Paris. Photo: Lise Feit.

Abu Simbel. The temple of Ramesses II (in the guise of Osiris). Intended to honour the Sun God, the temple looks east so that the

Abu Simbel. The temple of Hothor, where Nefertari is dressed as Hothor (Letter 31). Photo: Gérard Vallée.

Vignette from a funerary papyrus, illustrating the performance of correct ritual in the afterlife: a priestess makes offerings to Osiris, behind whom stand his wife and sister Isis and their sister Nephthys. Photo: The Story of Egypt, 1979.

of the underworld, bearing royal regalia (crown, flail and sceptre), s prepares to receive the dead. Photo: The Story of Egypt, 1979.

Karnak, “… always to be seen by the shadow of night” (Claydon Diary 31 December 1989). Photo: Gérard Vallée.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 275 .

Sailing Northwards Source: Letter 32, 1854 ed. 148-59, Wellcome (Claydon Copy) Mss 9017/17 and 9018/21

[Kalabsha, Nubia Thursday-Friday 21 and 22 January 1850] Well, dearest people, at last I have a letter from you (dated 22 November), sent after me from Cairo and tumbled into our boat like one of Abraham’s messengers before the door of his tent. We went up [20 January] to Gerf Hossein with the whole village at our heels: a splendid position it is, high in the western rocks and overlooking the whole wide valley of the Nile, from which the sunlight had just disappeared and was kissing with its parting golden beam the eastern side. In the solemn twilight we entered the awful cave of Ptah, the God of Fire, the Creator. The sheikh of the village with his descendants walked before us, carrying great serpents of fire to light up the rude magnificence of this terrible place. The serpents were thick twisted coils of palm fibre set on fire, but they looked like Moses’ serpent set up in the wilderness;284 and twisted and flamed before this fire shrine, this God of the Hidden Fire who has his dwelling in the thick darkness. I never saw a wilder scene. Hephaistos, the degenerate Vulcan of the Greeks, is a corruption (his name evidently so) of Ptah. I should like to have seen this dwelling of the ‘‘Heavenly Fire’’ (who will some day welcome back the ‘‘tired spirit’’ to its ‘‘accustomed home’’ and refine away all but the pure ore) in silence and stillness, for I can tell you very little about the temple. With an Arab holding you under each arm for fear of your falling over the heaps of stones, a dozen oth284 An allusion to Exod 4:2-4.

276 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ers with torches, the temple perfectly chuck-full, the whole population being there to look at you and the din quite overpowering in that close cave, the whole population being there to hoot at you—it is impossible to have an idea under such circumstances; the very strangeness of the scene absorbs you. And, as to understanding the ideal of the sculptures, with the flickering light illuminating them at one moment and the next leaving them in total darkness, you might as well try to understand the poetry of the Bible when you were picking it out, for the first time, in Hebrew.285 All I saw was (on either side) three figures of Osiris so gigantic that they seemed to crowd you in, and you could not get far enough from them to look up at their faces. Their pedestals were per fect and uncovered, which we had never before seen, the depth of the square pillar against which they rested so great that it seemed a mass filling up the whole space: it was wider, indeed, than the width of the aisle they formed. The figures were so rude, the blocks so enormous, that the effect—though not so artistic as that of Abu Simbel—was infinitely wilder, more awful. It was like a Cyclopean cave or a western forest, not like the art of man. Beyond this great hall in the rock is another chamber, supported by two thick, square pillars and then the holy place with half-destroyed deities in the niche. This was the abode of Ptah, ‘‘who created all things in a perfect manner, not deceptively but artificially, according to, or together with tr uth.’’ ‘‘Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth’’; that is, he was not the opifex like the Greek Vulcan who made only the form, but he had the idea as well as the form, the essence as well as the manner. As a thing is not perfect unless it has both the spirit and the ‘‘modus,’’ so he created all things ‘‘perfectly,’’ not like a ghost or a shadow which is changeable, not like a perspective picture of which only the ‘‘modus’’ is per fect, but like a statue which seen from every side gives the same idea. I do not make myself intelligible but the Egyptian idea of the creation seems to me the reverse of Berkeley’s286 idea where ever ything is only in idea, only shadows—nothing ‘‘artificially’’ (that is, artistically) created—different again from the Greek idea, for Ptah had both the ‘‘tr uth’’ and the art, the truth of the essence and the art of the form, 285 Ms 9017/17: in Arabic. 286 George Berkeley (1685-1753), Irish bishop and philosopher, propounded the theory of immaterialism.

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whereas Vulcan was only a workman. He had only the art and might make a mistake, like a workman working after a drawing which he might do ‘‘artistically,’’ yet miss the idea (which would not be ‘‘according to truth’’); e.g., make a carnivorous animal with the organs of a granivorous one. Berkeley’s God, you see, had not the form, and the Greek God had not the idea. The only parallelism of a Creator is in our own ‘‘Father of lights,’’ in whom, as Mr Bracebridge says, is no ‘‘παραλλαγη` ’’ [variation], i.e., who makes a straight line (see the analogy with ‘‘in a perfect manner’’) and without a ‘‘shadow of turning’’; because there are two ways of spoiling the straight line, either by making others parallel to it, thus rendering it indistinct, or by making it to turn. To strengthen this, St James puts in that He makes it without even the ‘‘shadow’’ of a turn, i.e., He makes it ‘‘in a perfect manner, not deceptively,’’ i.e., not indistinctly. St James goes on, ‘‘Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth,’’ βουλευ´ θεις [willing], i.e., wishing, intending to do it, not doing it by accident.287 The Egyptian theologian seems to have wished to define three things in his creator, i.e., will, idea and form, viz., that he did it intentionally, that he had the essence and the manner. How these Egyptian priests seem to have foreseen all the errors that would arise and to have defined their creating god so as to keep equally clear of the god of Democritus288 who had no will, whose world came together by accident, by atoms; [of] the god of Berkeley who had no manner, whose world was shadows, like Macbeth’s dagger; and [of] the god of the Greeks who had no essence. Those words, ‘‘not deceptively,’’ seem to have agreed exactly with the God (in whom there was no parallax) of St James, i.e., the God who knew what He had to do and did it, in whom the thing appeared what it was. The appearance was the same as the identity; not as in parallax, where the apparent place is different from the real place, and you must allow for that difference. The scarab was sacred to Ptah because it signified the world, and the frog also because it was ‘‘the representative of man in embryo, who was the noblest production of his hands.’’ See how close the analogy again to our God, ‘‘Of His own will begat He us with the word of tr uth, wishing us to be an α’ παρχη` of His creatures,’’ which we have

287 James 1:17-18. 288 Democritus (c493-03 bce), Greek philosopher whose materialism led to the theory of atomism.

278 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions chosen to translate, ‘‘first fruits’’:289 i.e., we are the epitome of the creation as it were, as the frog epitomized Ptah’s creation. As Owen290 tells us that the brain of the human being goes through all the stages of the inferior animals and therefore encloses all the other animals in itself, so we are the perfect example or the ‘‘beginning’’ (α’ παρχη` ) of all the rest of the creation. I should like to have seen Ptah at work with the perfect eyes of the Egyptian priests in his rocky temple. Before it is an area with broken columns and Osirides, what we should call a portico, four figures deep. But how we appreciated here the perfect solitude of Abu Simbel, which we shall never have again! My dear Ma’at, the goddess of tr uth, was daughter of Ptah. I should not wish for a greater contrast than the four temples we have seen in two days: Dakka, Gerf Hossein, Kalabsha and Beit el-Wali; the philosophical minutiae and analytic subtleties of Hermes Trismegistos,291 the rude and awful grandeur of Ptah’s cave, the upstart magnificence and vulgar showiness of the terraces and buildings of Kalabsha and the exquisite little gem of art of Beit el-Wali! The first is Ethiopian, the third Roman, the second and fourth of the great Ramesses, though as distinct as possible. The first stands upon a sandy plain and looks out from the top of its propylon (as philosophy with her broad view and distant glance ought to do). The second with her savage, awful devotion is a cavern in the rock. The third has great stone Chatsworth terraces, almost like gardens, down to the river. A wilderness of hewn stones and elaborately carved capitals lies about, while the sacred place is unfinished. The fourth is a perfect little specimen of painting and sculpture, perched at the top of a rock. We went to see it [Beit el-Wali] first. I never saw anything so pretty: the colours are more per fect than any we have seen, and it does not give one in the least the effect of barbarism. Who calls the Loggie [in the Vatican Museum] barbaric? It is not at all more gay than those gems of Raphael’s art. It is true that here these are intaglios which are so coloured, but the distinction seems a fanciful one—why should not intaglios be coloured? The place is not at all darker than Raphael’s Stanze. There are but two chambers in the rock, the prosekos and adytum. The next is the area without. As we have the casts of the sculp289 James 1:18. 290 Probably Robert Owen, author of A New View of Society: or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character. 291 On Hermes Trismegistos see below, Letter 33.

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tures in the latter in the British Museum and as we mean, when we come back, to take a small lodging for six months over the greengrocer’s in Great Russell Street for the sake of studying these and others, I shall not trouble you with describing them now. On one side is the Great Ramesses receiving eastern captives from a nation, the Shorii, who rebelled during his father’s time and whom he reduced. Further on, he is beleaguering a Negro town and holding a captive Negro over the town, whose legs dangle high above it, Ramesses being a great deal bigger than the fortifications. On the other side he is receiving the prince of Cush (Ethiopia) who is bringing tribute, and further on himself, in a chariot, and two lesser sons behind, in chariots with charioteers (I like this so much; the king always does the most work, he never has a charioteer). He is pursuing the enemy into the woods of Lebanon where a wounded chief, leaning on his companions, is being taken home. A child runs to tell his mother, who is unconsciously cooking under a tree; another clings to its father’s knees and throws dust upon its head. The triad in the sacred place is Amun-Ra, Khnum and Anoukis. Ramesses is offering to Amun-Ra, who is blue to denote his heavenly nature. The cartouches are on a gold ground, with Ra the sun, Ramesses’ own deity (a red disk) upon it, and his favourite Ma’at, white, very pretty. Khnum in the adytum is giving Ramesses life and purity. But the jewel, the precious thing of the whole, is behind the door of the sacred place: Anoukis, the Egyptian Vesta and goddess of domestic purity, whispering advice into the ear of Ramesses. With one hand (the most delicate, beautiful hand) she takes him under the chin like a child, holding up his face. The other arm falls over his shoulder. She is considerably bigger than he is, yet anything like the per fect grace of the figure, the beautiful feminine grace, I never saw. The childlike attitude of the great hero as the goddess breathes her admonitions into his ear, the simplicity and humility of the conqueror, the youthful dignity of the virgin goddess—a more beautiful ideal never entered the mind of man. And a fond and a faithful husband it is evident he was, and in the next compartment—to show how he attended to the words of the goddess—his wife appears with him at sacrifice. They were happy women, those Egyptians of olden times, to be under the protection of such an admonitrix. We came down from Beit el-Wali (the ‘‘house of the saint’’: it was a Muhammadan hermit’s abode, Beit—the same as the Bible beth— meaning house) as soon as it was dusk, not because we had done with

280 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions it—but because we really could not stay in the press and the din and went to Kalabsha, which is just under the cliff, through a ruined town of heaps of stones, out of which the few remaining huts reared their low heads as if by mistake; sheep’s heads and cows’ heads and human heads were seen just sticking out of the stones. One could not divine what they were doing there. Kalabsha is the biggest temple in Nubia. I never saw anything so magnificent nor so vulgar. It must have been the work of some upstart nouveau riche, a Roman Hudson.292 The heaps of ruins have struck ever ybody as something incredible: arch, portico, pronaos, naos, adytum, all are full of enormous blocks of hewn stone. How they came there is the wonder or, if they were ever put up, how they ever came down. You climb up mountains of stone and down again, which is the only method of proceeding in this temple. One enormous block, which had roofed the adytum, was cracked (it must have been done by a tremendous blow from above) and now bent like a rotten beam. The ruins were like a stone builder’s yard. They did not strike one with wonder or awe, but with a feeling of drear y confusion and wasted expense. The adytum was unfinished; the gods were Roman soldiers with Egyptian animal heads on the top. Terrace upon terrace, and column upon column, lay in useless magnificence and extravagance, and a miserable Arab mud wall blocked up the entrance. Two of the crew dragged me up and down the ruins (which looked as if they had never been put up) in the moonlight, and we gladly came back to the boat, where we lay at anchor an hour, while Paolo bought a black sheep (who sits up on his hind legs like a dog), milk and eggs, and Mustafa bought henna with which he and two others of the crew dyed their beautiful hands red. Mustafa is the cook and came in this morning to show his hands. I bargained for some of the women’s ornaments, but they asked such an extravagant price that my mercantile British spirit forbade. I could not help thinking, had a third genus been by to have seen that deck full of Europeans and Nubians—not more separated perhaps are men and animals—with nothing to bridge over the impassable chasm between them, how melancholy it must have seemed. After this moonlight fair, we made for the rapids of Kalabsha, which are nearly as dangerous as those of the first cataract and can only be passed when there is absolutely no wind, as the slightest puff either 292 George Hudson, mayor of York, tried for corruption.

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way would drive you onto the rocks where the force of the rushing waters is tremendous. The river here is ver y narrow and hemmed in on both sides with great purple volcanic walls and islands standing piled up in the water, looking like great black monsters (crocodiles with their mouths open, etc.), the wildest scene I was ever in.293 We saw Beit elWali and Kalabsha very rapidly (as there was fear that the low Nile might catch us) and set off in a broad bright moonlight. The men were rowing vehemently as it requires all their skill to keep the boat straight. Mr B. was in the inner cabin, Σ and I sitting on the divan on deck, watching the descent. We were floating down into a deep, dark pool where the moonlight lay in great masses on the black waters, when we saw the whole crew start up, fling down their oars and begin to fight violently. A confused mass of arms and legs and African blankets lay all together in the hold, howling and screaming and kicking, the boat of course drifting down upon the rocks meantime. In a moment, however, out rushed Paolo with an ebony club—which I had bought from the Berber savages coming up the cataract and which hung in the cabin— fell upon the mass of struggling heads and began to belabour them with all his might, so that I thought he would have broken in their skulls. He was alone against the eleven, but he did not seem to think of it, though he was generally a great coward, nor they either, and by sheer battering he parted them and drove them back to their oars. It was all over in a moment, but anything like the total imprévoyance, the savage recklessness of their own lives I could not have conceived. We found afterwards that one of the crew (the best man among them) had accidently struck the rower before him with his oar; the Arabs are excessively fiery and the man chose to consider it an insult and returned the blow. The offender was a rather lonely man whom the crew disliked and therefore the whole body except one man (who stood by him manfully) took part against him. The next day there was a great begging pardon, plenty of bruises to be plastered and everybody friends with everybody. It was the most savage scene morally and naturally I certainly shall ever see. 293 Ms 9017/17: the wildest scene I ever saw (whether it is really wilder than the cataracts, I don’t know), with its black rocks piled up to the very water’s edge, shutting and hemming in the river, and sticking out in little islands with jetty shadows in the moonlight and the deep dark pools of the river. Here we had an adventure; remind me to tell you of that when I come home. I have not time now but there is no danger of my forgetting it, the most savage scene, morally and naturally I cer tainly shall ever see.

282 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Kalabsha is the ancient Salmis, Dakka the ancient Pselcis and, if I did my historical duty, I should tell you of the wars which the Romans and Queen Candace, who had but one eye, carried on here. But you know I like a law any day better than a war. Even the wars of my beloved hero, the great Ram, I have not patience to tell, though I hail his features wherever I see them. And I have never so much as mentioned his temple at Derr (the capital of Nubia),294 hewn in the rock, where he appears with his faithful lion. But I really don’t remember it; I only remember looking out between the portico columns and thinking that I was in the capital of the Laputae or of some other of Gulliver’s countries: so strange, so little like the dwellings of human beings did this capital look. A sycamore by the river’s shore, which was the coffee house, was the only thing human. The white domes or beehives, the mud walls without windows, which enclosed a yard, in the corners of which were the lairs of families, the nests of little naked children squatting between two stones (like nests of young foxes), running away when you looked at them and then baying like jackals after you and looking so happy and so fat, their costume combining lightness with elegance, a string of beads round the neck and another round the loins, small bones, well covered and well made. Things which looked about four months old, climbing about like lizards and never so much as scratching their little feet; the mothers carrying their babies across their hips, many with nose rings. Whether I was Gulliver or Captain Cook, I don’t know; but certainly all this was as much out of our common habits of thought as if I had been either. [Approaching Philae Tuesday 22 January 1850] Yesterday we left the tropics.295 Oh, how sorry I was! This morning I parted with my three pets, the chameleons, which I have had ever since we were in Nubia. I grandly sacrificed them and would not tear them from their beloved tropic as I was torn, so set them ashore this morning instead of going to see a temple. We bought them of some Arabs at Abu Simbel. Three belonged to me and one to the crew, who gave him to me to take care of. Mine were ver y aristocratic, however, and tormented him so dreadfully that he died: they were all sadly quarrelsome. One was a capital shot and shot all the flies, for his own use, at 294 Nightingale was at Derr on 13 Januar y. 295 Going north, the group passed from Abu Simbel to Dakka, then on to Kalabsha and the Kalabsha rapids by moonlight as just described.

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the first blow—he was slight and agile. The largest was very stupid and a bad shot besides. They were of a greenish yellow, the colour of the mimosa leaves. I used to sprinkle a mimosa bough with sugar, which brought the flies, and then the chameleons came round and shot them with their tongues. When they were angr y, they became bright yellow; and when afraid, brown with purple spots. Their use in the world is to free it from flies and they will kill fifteen in a quarter of an hour sometimes. They are three inches long as to the body, three inches as to the tail, three inches as to the tongue. They used to hang themselves up by their tail and pretend to be dead, that the flies might come and settle on them; and my three would do it in order to entice the one belonging to the crew close up to them and then beat him. Today we leave Nubia, where we have been just a fortnight; tonight we shall be at Philae . Source: Claydon Diary

19 January 1850 Nubia. Sabora a humbug. Sorry dromos of sphinxes. Adytum blocked up with sand. 20 January 1850 Dakka in the little boat to see the temple of Hermes Trismegistos, ugly but very interesting, built by Ergamenes, an Ethiopian king less than 300 bc. Letters from home. One chameleon died. Gerf Hossein by twilight. Ptah’s awful cave, lighted up by the people with flaming serpents of palm fibres. Source: British Library Diar y

18 January 1850 Long morning with Mr B. making out his notes of Abu Simbel and plan. Nicholsons came on board. Pleasant evening by myself, they all at Ibreem. Such a sunset. 19 January 1850 Wrote about Abu Simbel. Went on shore to see the dromos of sphinxes at Sabora. 20 January 1850 Rowed in the little boat to see the temple of Hermes Trismegistos. Letter from home. One of my three chameleons died I had got for the first two companions. Ptah’s temple cave at Gerf Hossein. Oh heavenly fire, purify me, free me from this slavery.

284 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 21 January 1850 Wrote Hermes Trismegistos letter. In the afternoon to Kalabsha and Beit el-Wali, a little gem of the great Ramesses. Kalabsha a vulgar extravagance of the Romans. Rapids of Kalabsha by moonlight; the wildest scene, battle of the crew. 22 January 1850 Put my two poor little chameleons ashore at Taphis; I was so afraid of their following their comrade’s example; so sorry to part with them, they were such nice companions. Went on shore at Dabed to see the three pylons. Only Roman. Sat long in the cold moonlight on deck watching our approach to Philae and preparing myself for it. Moonlight walk on the island. Sitting on Philae by the temple of Isis with the roar of the cataract. I thought I should see Him. His shadow in the moonlight in the propylaeum. Source: Letter 33,296 Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/17 (not in 1854 ed.)

[Monday 21 January 1850] Yesterday I spent in the temple of Hermes Trismegistos,297 my dear Pop, in Dakka, an ugly little temple and, if it were not for the ungovernable romance I have always had about that gentleman, uninteresting, the sculptures all of the time of the décadence, about 300 bce and ever ything shabby, still and rigid. Still the spirit of Hermes Trismegistos (the author of the Trinity) animated to me everything. ‘‘Thricegreatest’’ he was indeed; he was the first who imagined three powers, forms or virtues under one name and who gave that name, the Name which has stood unapproached ever since his time, a monument of his inspiration, ‘‘I am all that was and is and is to be,’’ as the inscription stood upon the temple of Neith at Sais. Oh how great is the spirit 296 The diaries indicate that Nightingale visited the temple of Dakka on 20 Januar y and wrote this part of the letter on Hermes Trismegistos on 21 January. 297 The Greeks identified the Egyptian god of wisdom Thoth with Hermes Trismegistos, the ‘‘thrice-greatest.’’ His ‘‘revelations’’ are found in the collection of Greek and Latin texts of Egyptian origin known as the Corpus Hermeticum (hereafter CH) of the second-third centur y ce. The first of the seventeen tractates in this collection, ‘‘Poimandres’’ (whom Nightingale calls Pimander after Marsilio Ficino), offers an example of non-Christian gnosis; several tractates also betray a gnostic inspiration. See Arthur Darby Nock and André-Jean Festugière, eds., Corpus hermeticum, and Walter Scott and Alexander Stewart Ferguson, eds., Hermetica. Through Wilkinson Nightingale might have known of Isaac Preston Cory, Ancient Fragments.

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of God in man how joyously I could have lifted up my voice and sung, ‘‘Glor y to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’’ in that place God and man and the spirit of God in man, how gladly I could have kissed the soil which bore such a manifestation of the Deity as that ‘‘thricegreatest Interpreter’’ Hermes Trismegistos. There is an inscription over King Ergamenes’ head who built this temple, calling him ‘‘the hand of God.’’298 Yes, man is the hand of God and even those hooting naked jackals, who trooped round me without one idea but that of baksheesh, as I sat, weary and dusty and giddy with the noise on a stone at the mouth of Hermes’s temple shall be one day the fingers of God. ‘‘For it is not the will of my Father which is in heaven,’’ as the 298 The following passage of Ms 9017/18 seems to belong here: That Ergamenes, a king of Ethiopia, was a funny fellow. He was the first to abolish suicide: according to Wilkinson [Manners and Customs 1:307], it had hitherto been the custom for the Ethiopian kings to receive word from the priests when the gods desired their presence, to which summons the kings immediately attended. But Wilkinson confines this custom to the Ethiopians, whereas the great Ramesses himself committed suicide, not, as it seems, from any disgust of life as ‘‘in the high Roman fashion’’ nor from vanity which the oftenest prompts it now, nor was it considered any extraordinar y event, but simply from impatience to enjoy the society of the gods and the rewards held out to men who love them. I confess, to me it seems more extraordinar y that it does not happen oftener than that it happens so often. It seems so natural to me that, if we really believed what we say, that the child should hasten into the presence of the Father whom it really loves and by whom it believes itself to be loved, in a childish impatience, not waiting for the bell to ring or for the Father to want it. It seems to me a later and more per fect development of the human understanding than we usually see, to perceive that the Father is everywhere, that we shall not be really nearer Him in another state than in this, that nearness is not in place but in the state of spirit and that the submissive mind, which seeks only to be one with the Father’s will and sees that will in its circumstances, is really nearest to the Father’s presence. Ramesses was a philosopher but not yet a faithful servant (oh dear! another digression). This Ergamenes is called ‘‘the hand of God.’’ Perhaps he was; not much remains to be seen of his handiworks here, from under the smoke of the Arabs and the saints of the Christians. I have a regard for Thoth and laboured hard to make him out. He has a tablet in his hand, for his business in the trial scene in the lower regions was to register the actions of the dead man and read them to Osiris the Judge. When without the tablet, he had a long palm branch with a frog at the end, emblematic of the years of men and of his business of overlooking their actions while on earth. nb: the frog is a man. If he had merited this office on account of his unique services, he had earned. . . .

286 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions greatest Interpreter of all has said, ‘‘that one of these little ones should perish.’’299 If it were not for this belief in Egypt, these countries would be insupportable. From my stone I could see the symbol of the Trinity, invented by Trismegistos, covering his temple, the globe, asp and wings which I described at Abu Simbel: the circle signifying the unity, eternity and conjunction of God, i.e., the undivided divine essence without beginning and without end (which was only after wards made to represent the sun). As the globe the unity of the essence, so the wings signify its omnipresence, vivifying and pervading the material world, i.e., the spirit of God, like our dove;300 the asp signifies the subtle efficacy and all-wise energy of the Deity (the serpent having always meant wisdom) or the divine Word (its only member being a mouth). So that in that symbol we have the Holy Trinity complete: the eternity, the Word, the Spirit; and the name, the great name as given by Plato (which Eusebius301 says he took from Hermes’s stela), ‘‘I am that I am’’ is the same as Moses says he found in Egypt.302 The very soil seems to me sacred; I put my shoes from off my feet where man first found these things. Inside the temple the sacred hawk, the sun, which typified the omniscience, the far-seeing Deity, is seen protecting. Do not imagine that I am inventing spiritual meanings to these emblems. Zoroaster says of it, ‘‘The God is represented having a hawk’s head. He is the best, incorruptible, eternal, unmade, indivisible, most unlike everything, the author of all good, the wisest of the wise.’’303 On Hermes’s imperishable stelae he, Hermes, calls Him ‘‘the nameless Being’’ and says, ‘‘This One is venerated in silence,’’304 ‘‘remaining in the solitude of his unity,’’305 as I have seen Him called somewhere der grosse Einsame 299 Matt 18:14. 300 Ms 9017/17: vivifying by its motion. 301 Perhaps Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 11.6 (519d-520a). Many references to ancient writings, in this and the next paragraphs, could have been provided to Nightingale by her reading of Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 2:503-05, based on Cory; but only Cory, Ancient Fragments 283, 286, has the precise wording used by Nightingale. Recent translations of CH differ from both Wilkinson and Cory. 302 Exod 3:14. 303 Eusebius, Preparation 1.10, in Cory, Ancient Fragments 239, under ‘‘Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster.’’ 304 Cory, Ancient Fragments 284. 305 Cor y, Ancient Fragments 283 under ‘‘Her metic Fragments’’ found in Iamblicus.

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[the great solitary]. For he is the only Father ‘‘who is truly Good,’’ continues Trismegistos, ‘‘the fountain of all things,’’ ‘‘he made himself shine forth’’ (here is our ‘‘glor y of God’’), ‘‘the self-ruling God.’’ ‘‘God of Gods’’ (our very expression) ‘‘before essence, yet the first principle of essence, for from him is entity and essence,’’306 ‘‘the glory of all things is God,’’ ‘‘the principle of all things existing is God,’’ ‘‘for these were boundless darkness in the abyss, and water and a subtle spirit, intellectual in power, existing in chaos: But the holy Light broke for th and the elements were produced from the watery essence.’’ The reason for choosing animal symbols seems to me to stare you in the face. The whole of the Greek religion in after times is enough of itself to justify their fear, the fear, that is, of human apotheoses, of taking men who had actually lived and making them gods, a mistake which afterwards filled the whole of Greek and Roman theology with deified human beings. The Egyptian, by representing, e.g., Thoth (or Hermes) with an ibis’s head effectually averted this danger; it mattered little to them in the choice of an emblem, whether it was ugly or not; they had succeeded, so they thought, in preventing people from imagining that a man’s body and an ibis’s head could be a real being or anything but a mere emblem; succeeded in expressing that all they meant by it was, in this case, the communicating medium between the Divine Intellect and that of man, (in others) some equally abstract conception. These emblems are only a continuation of their system of hieroglyphics and you are no more offended by their ugliness (at least I, who have no artist mind, am not). All this is Hermes, the ‘‘king, priest and physician,’’ and here perhaps he wrote his forty-two books,307 the sacred books of the Egyptians (how like our sacred books) which were carried in procession and which still existed in the time of Iamblichus,308 the tutor of Julian,309 and [in the time] of Clement of Alexandria.310 Oh call it holy ground, 306 Cory, Ancient Fragments 283. CH I.4-10; III.1; XI.3. 307 On the forty-two books and their divisions, see Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen, Egypt’s Place in Universal History 1:9-21. 308 Iamblicus (250-330), neo-Platonist philosopher, author of On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians. See Jamblique. Les mystères d’Egypte. 309 Julian ‘‘the Apostate’’ (331-63), Roman emperor (361-63). 310 Clement of Alexandria (150-215/231), Greek father of the church. Clement knew of ‘‘forty-two books of Hermes’’ which he described in a way very similar to Nightingale’s in Stromateis 6.4.35.2-37.3

288 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions the ground where first they trod, who won for us freedom and understanding to worship God in spirit and in truth!311 and let them all be holy to us, the Egyptian Trismegistos, the Persian Zoroaster, the Jewish Moses who have come into such close communion with the Father of Lights, by observing the laws according to which we are to receive light, that they have not only heard His words but have given unto men the words which ‘‘Thou gavest to them.’’312 They have received gifts for men and no doubt all purified themselves so as to reflect that light. Now about the taking their symbols from animals, I admit that it is a great want of imagination; the unimaginativeness of the Egyptians strikes you everywhere as much as their philosophy and their mechanical power. . . .

To complete the general survey of Egypt, which was the object of Hermes in these ten books, the last four were the basis of the registration of landed property and the estates of the priests, [and they included] a description of each temple. The next ten books contained all the regulations as to religious worship, the ‘‘Leviticus’’ of the Egyptians. The last ten books were called ‘‘Of the Prophets,’’ the sacerdotal books strictly speaking; they were carried by the prophets, the first order of priests who took precedence immediately after the high priests; 311 An allusion to John 4:24. 312 An allusion to John 17:8.

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they taught law and laid down the entire education of the priesthood and the regulation of their mode of life. In the books on the survey of Egypt was found the authority for the land tax, the priest tax or free gifts. This class of books contained the instructions as to the appor tionment of these taxes (one, alas! of the privileges of the priests); the civil and religious jurisprudence was in these books laid down. (Porphyr y,313 the tutor of Iamblichus, quotes his account from Chaeremon314 who, himself a sacred scribe, must have known all about every part.) The recognition of the sovereign even was the privilege of the priesthood. He was usually a priest but must, at least, be admitted a priest, before his coronation. The old constitution was an elective monarchy315 and it was not till Menes316 that it became hereditar y. In the second dynasty, it became hereditar y even to females—the privilege of election remained with the priests only where a dynasty became extinct. But the form still existed; the sovereign was formally elected by the priests on the Libyan mountain to the west of Thebes; the god was consulted and the king then went in procession to the temple of Karnak, and not till then. These were the Egyptian comitia; a curious hint for amending our franchise might be found in these old comitia held in the Libyan suburb. Around the candidates for the throne stood the electors; of these a prophet’s vote counted for 100, a priest’s for 20, a soldier’s only for 1. Why should not, says Mr Bracebridge, a similar scale, regulated by the respective education of the voters, be established as the first step for extending our franchise? We cannot stay where we are, now that all Europe has given universal franchise. As the Muhammadan laws to this day are founded on the Qur’an, so the eight books of Egyptian law were founded on these books of Hermes, i.e., extending them to every possible case and recording the judgment of the king in any particular case (by which a particular point of law had been established) or his enactment, with his name. 313 Porphyry (232-305), neo-Platonist philosopher, pupil of Plotinus (205-70), the founder of the new school. The reference here is to his De abstinentia IV.6-8; see Porphyry, De l’abstinence 3:9-13. 314 Chaeremon was a Greek author from Alexandria who wrote on Egypt and taught the young Nero. 315 See Bunsen, Egypt’s Place 1:20. 316 Menes is generally identified with King Narmer who unified Upper and Lower Egypt and inaugurated the Ist Dynasty c3100 bce.

290 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions The last six books were on medicine and anatomy. But oh! Hermes, I have gone adrift again. How it reminds one of the books of Moses! ‘‘Numbers’’ answering to the survey of Egypt, ‘‘Leviticus’’ to the ceremonial books, the ‘‘Prophets’’ to the sacerdotal, etc. ‘‘Genesis’’ alone does not find its prototype, for the strictly historical element seems wanting in the Hermetic books. They prove, it is true, the most difficult points of history but involuntarily. They prove how, in this narrow valley of the Nile, this strip of land between two boundless seas, the deserts, philosophy had come down from the gods and lived upon earth, how for many thousand years they had known how to calculate eclipses, the cycles of the sun and moon, the conjunctions of the planets. But alas! not only not the idea, the very word of ‘‘people’’ did not exist, not only not in their thoughts but not (or rather consequently not) in their language. Hence we have no history. The conceit of the Jews which made them conceive themselves, before all, a people, a people chosen of God, the exclusive and petted child of Him who has many children, as many as He had made (national conceit in general), has its good as well as its evil side. It gives us history; the Jews committed the most abominable crimes under the pleasing prejudice that they were set aside by God (to do so?), but they have left us the most curious and valuable history the world affords. The Egyptians have no histor y.317 But see how the historical element has flourished lately among us, with our strong and bigoted national feelings which bring us home from India and all parts of the world uninterested, untainted and uncosmopolitized as soon as we have made our fortunes. The Egyptians have lists; they have no narrative: lists of kings, not the histor y of a nation. They are punished by their own mistake, the ir reparable mistake which the valley of the Nile is still deploring literally in dust and sand, sand, not ashes, on her head. Ever ything in Egypt was swallowed up by the priests. Their very chronology was a religious, not civil, one kept a secret by the priests and regulated not, as in Greece, by a public festival (the Olympiads), but by an astronomical cycle of 1461 years, the divine year.318 317 For this paragraph see Bunsen, Egypt’s Place 1:23-25. 318 Perhaps the following passage of Ms 9018/23 could be placed here: I daresay, you know much more than I can tell you of the Dr Hales’s system of chronology [William Hales, A New Analysis of Chronology] which gives 600 years additional before the Flood and 700 more after it. As it is clear that Egypt was a great and powerful people when Abraham came amongst them and that the invasion of the Shepherd Kings was at an end (every

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But of these Hermetic books, one remains to us, the Book of the Dead,319 inestimable, one of the fourth class (the regulations of divine worship) and containing their belief about the existence of the dead and their future state. It has not nearly all been read, but if I could have chosen one to be preser ved, it would have been this one. It is the deceased himself speaking and telling his experiences, ‘‘through the sections, of the glorification in the light of Osiris,’’ and afterwards ‘‘of the deliverance in the hall of the twofold justice.’’ Lepsius320 has deciphered parts; he says, ‘‘The two [justices] mean reward and punishment,’’ but why, as Ma’at (or Truth or Justice) is always represented as the two Truths, should it not mean that? Perhaps, however, Truth in that region is no longer two. But more of this invaluable remnant afterwards. Where was I? On my stone at Dakka, and such a sharp one! I think it so beautiful that this temple was not dedicated to the man, Hermes Trismegistos, who was a real priest and philosopher—for the Egyptians never apotheosized men like the Greeks and Romans—but to the god Thoth, Hermes or Mercur y, who was only the abstract understanding, the means of communication from God to man, the cause therefore of all man’s success in intellectual subjects; the success and the discoveries were therefore ascribed to him, not to the man. The Egyptians were fond of calling themselves after the attributes of God, thus making a sort of dedication of themselves (this the Greek shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians and the land of Goshen was free for the Israelites), now Menes was before the Shepherd Kings about 900 years before Moses; these dates are settled by astronomical cycles which have been discovered in the temples. There is a ver y interesting chapter in Lord Lindsay’s Egypt and Holy Land about this, giving the hints merely for [it] in the last sixteen years [during which] the chief part of the discoveries in hieroglyphs have been made. After Ramesses the priests seem gradually to have lost their pure religion and to have degenerated gradually till the time of the later Ptolemies into all sorts of wickedness. 319 Thomas George Allen, The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Carol Andrews, ed., The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, Spells 125, 146, 182 and 183 have contents close to Nightingale’s ideas. See also Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife especially 13-22, 165-68. Nightingale incorrectly counts the Book of the Dead among the Hermetic literature (presumably because of the large part Thoth/Hermes plays in the book). The quotations in the rest of this paragraph are taken from Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 3:466 n.5 and 468. 320 C.R. Lepsius, Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter, quoted by Bunsen, Egypt’s Place 1:27. By 1848 little had been ‘‘deciphered’’ of the Book of the Dead, says Bunsen, Egypt’s Place 1:414.

292 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions incapacity of understanding the Egyptian mind has often confused); hence the mistake about Hermes Trismegistos and so many others by which the Egyptians were handed down as bringing gods upon earth and raising human beings to gods. But every day the reading of the hieroglyphs improves and clears up these mistakes. (Another digression, my last.) Thoth, then, the god of letters to whom the temple is dedicated, appears with Horus passing life over the king, a troublesome one for his pains. You know the pretty story of Thoth and Thamus in Plato’s Phaedr us,321 which I am afraid is but too true. (I wish nobody had ever invented letter writing. I have just upset my ink-pot in my lap.) Thoth wears the moon upon his head (the moon is masculine in Egyptian as in German) because he was the regulator of time, lunar months and years being the Egyptian calendar. He communicated mental gifts to man ‘‘car rying their prayers to heaven and bringing in return a communication of the will of God and all other blessings of life.’’ Is not that pretty? as if that was the greatest blessing. In other words, he taught men the way to approach God, this ‘‘thrice-greatest interpreter,’’ and dispensed intellectual gifts to men, giving things their names and teaching men language. I often wish that some of our dear good people who teach (and practise) that we must approach God only through our feeling would take a leaf out of Thoth’s palm branch and see that the intellect is also a method of approaching him, though not the only way—the Egyptians were certainly not wanting in feeling. The intellectual sort have often made another mistake and approached him not enough through the conscience, but that is not Thoth’s affair. Thoth has an intimate acquaintance and close relationship, through his ostrich feather, the symbol of truth, with my old friend Mau—insight—and through his staff entwined by a serpent, the emblem of wisdom, with the Greek caduceus.322 The distinctions were so subtle which this singular religion—more metaphysical than Plato, more acute than Aristotle—established between the separate attributes, that we shall probably never be able to understand them now, we to whom the intellect, the understanding, the reason are all one, while with them each had a separate deity (in their attempt to popularize this far-seeing spirit of analysis). . . . 321 Phaedr us 274c-275b. 322 In Greek mythology the caduceus is a winged staff with two serpents twined around it, carried by Hermes; today it is used as the symbol of the medical profession.

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It is very touching that, of all this ancient people, the only thing remaining should be their religion, that most impalpable: the only unseen part of them should be the most durable, the only visible to us. I am so sor ry, my dear Pop, I have all confused the rest of this letter by writing on the wrong sides, which will give you so much trouble to read it. But if you knew the hurry one sometimes writes in and the deficiency of paper, you would excuse. I have no time. Adieu. thine ever Source: Letter 34, 1854 ed. 159-69, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/14, 18 and 9018/20, 24, 28

24° 5’ N. Lat.323 [Monday] 28 January 1850 Goodbye, Philae, φι´λη [friend] indeed to me, goodbye, dear Philae, beautiful Philae, whose very name from this time has a magic in it to our ears, to make sad moments joyful, to people solitary moments, to make us young again when we are old. Oh, Philae, whom I shall never see again, may she be to many others what she has been to us during the happy, happy week which we have spent there, and may she live again some day herself when Egypt is a happier world. Fare thee very well, my dear and holy Philae. I never loved a place so much, never felt a place so homey—thank God for all we have felt and thought there. Ever y moment of that precious week, from before sunrise to long after moonlight had begun, I spent upon the Sacred Island, most of it in Osiris’s chamber. This morning we came away at daybreak, rushed down the cataracts and found ourselves again in the nether world after having been in a place so curiously raised up and bounded in by nature, that our three weeks in Nubia seem to us as if they had been spent in another star. Sor ry enough we were to leave her and to come down again, but there is a time for everything, as Solomon says.324 I cannot describe to you the feeling at Philae. The myths of Osiris are so typical of our Saviour325 that it seemed to me as if I were com323 French commissioners had inscribed on a wall at Philae the latitude and longitude of the place. See H. Martineau, Eastern Life: Past and Present 128. 324 A paraphrase of Eccl 3:1-8. 325 Ms 9018/24: symbolical of a Saviour.

294 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ing to a place where He had lived, like going to Jerusalem, and when I saw a shadow in the moonlight in326 the temple court, I thought, ‘‘perhaps I shall see him: now he is there.’’ The chamber of Osiris was like the place where He was buried327 and, after our little service on the Sunday morning, I went and sat there, and thought I had never sat in any place so sacred, nor ever could, except in Syria. The position of the island, high above the water (the Greeks called it abaton), the calm, shadowy lake around (which the Nile becomes there), the ‘‘Golden Mountains’’ (the Hemaceutae) which hem it in, the stillness, the tufts of wild palms which grow out of the cliffs of the rocks all round the island, the solitude—for all its Arab inhabitants have deserted it—there can be nothing like Philae in the world! The first moonlight night that I sat on a broken colonnade in Philae, by the temple of Isis, with the roar of the cataract, I kept repeating those words to myself that I might believe them, and felt how far the reality surpassed the words. Excepting a solitary sakia which often goes the whole night round, the cataract’s roar is the only sound which rocks the rest of Him who sleeps in Philae and none disturb his sleep. The full moon hangs her lamp over his solitary bier, but no other funeral lights are there. First of all I must prepare you for the fact that everything in Philae is ugly. The hypaethral temple is hideous: the sculptures (after what we have been accustomed to in Nubia, of the times of the great Ramesses) would disgrace a child: ill-drawn, ill-cut, ill-painted. Not a building remains excepting one pylon (the first) in the temple of Isis, of a time earlier than that of the degenerate Ptolemies, and everything is in as bad taste as all that the Ptolemies did. The Puritans—I mean the Persians—have destroyed every vestige of the old part. There is nothing left which the most enthusiastic lover of the Egyptians could call beautiful, but the spirit that reigns over all is divine, and I think that this ver y failing effort of the fading nation to embody their old spirit makes it the more affecting. It is like the last leaping up of the light in the socket which shows the dying face you loved, of which the spirit is still beautiful, though the body is disfigured and agonizing; it is like the last dying words, the farewell. I am not sure that I did not love Philae better for her struggle to say one thing more to our watching ears, 326 Ms 9018/23: behind. 327 Ms 9017/18: had died.

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to teach us the great truths she felt so deeply with her last failing breath. Now rest in peace, dear Philae. She has done her work, her mission is accomplished: it is finished. Many times the last night did I put my head out of the window and saw by the full moon the palm trees waving over the temples, the tomb of Osiris, till I knew every line by heart. Now our Passover is over, our Passion Week is at an end, but I shall always think of it as my Holy Week . But I must come to ‘‘meaner things, my St John.’’ We found the there. He328 is making a series of drawings of the temple of Isis,329 and is a picture himself—he always wears the Turkish dress: a blue gubbeh, white kaftan, red turban and a long white beard; his wife, a nice little woman, young and pretty, always sits by him. I like her and she took me into the huts at Bidji, the adjoining island where she has friends. One night [25 Januar y] in Philae we ‘‘dined out’’ in their princely tent at Mahatta. A dîner-en-ville in Nubia is charming. Car rying our chairs with us, our carpet and cushions, and having put on everything we had in this world , we went, about moonrise, in our little boat, threading our way through the defiles of the Nile, piles of rocks towering over us in grotesque shapes on every side, and with the current we floated down in about half an hour till we landed at a sandy place and, preceded by our Arabs carrying the furniture, we scrambled along Brook Street [a fashionable street in Mayfair], which was a bank of sand intermingled with very large stones, from the top of which a lady who wanted to sell her silver bracelets threw them down at us (which is the method of traffic in Nubia). I bought those same bracelets for thee, my dear P.—they came from Dar fur and are the only pretty things I have seen here. Then we went through some palm gardens, by some sleeping camels and were announced at Mr and Mrs by our Arab (with our two chairs on his back and our carpets wrapped round his head), crawling upon his face under the ropes of the tent and into the tent upon his knees. Mr came out, like a rather fine gentleman as

328 John Frederick Lewis (1805-76), British painter who lived in Egypt 1842-51. 329 Ms 9017/18: without a grain of imagination, but as correct as possible. He seems an artisan, not an artist.

296 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions he is330 and expanded himself in compliments. He had got a young Englishman to meet us: he was so happy, we were so kind, etc., and Mrs Lewis’s Cairene woman, trowsered and veiled, stood like an oriental slave331 while we took off some of our blankets. The tent was, however, bitterly cold—our dahabieh is more comfortable. I must tell you that the thermometer varies here 90° in 24 hours, from 30° at night— for it has actually frozen—to 120° in the sun; and this in a country where there is no possibility of protecting oneself artificially excepting by clothes. When one is cold in Egypt, one waits till the sun is hot. The dinner was very much like a London dinner: Mr was fine and courteous; Mr was stupid and silent; Mrs Lewis was nice and naïve. They have just had their house in Cairo burnt. The pacha next door wanted the ground for his garden and sent a slave to burn it, the method of purchase in Egypt. No drawings, however, luckily, were lost. His figures are beautiful, his buildings commonplace and literal. After having drunk as much coffee as we could, we walked down to the beach in preparation for going home: Mr shuffling first in Turkish slippers and losing one among the sand, his Nubians following with our chairs and carpet. We came home again by a countercurrent in ten minutes, cutting in through the rocks by the moonlight. But these late hours destroy one’s health: we were not home till nine o’clock. Another day [26 January] I went with Mrs to Bidji, the neighbouring island to see her little friend Zehnab, a child of four years old, the daughter of a widow of sixteen. Zehnab’s aunt, of ten, who is just married and who showed us her house with great pride, the nicest in the island, swam over to see Mrs at Mahatta this morning: ever ybody swims here. Bidji is almost entirely peopled with one family, the original grandfather and his posterity. We asked Zehnab’s mother how old she was. ‘‘How could she tell? Her mother knew.’’ They all slept out of doors in the summer, in the winter on the clay divan at the end of the hut. But everybody had their own hut , and Zehnab’s swimming aunt had two cushions!! There was no other article of furniture, however, but the clay divan and the jars, in hers or in any other house. They were 330 Ms 9018/24: means to be. 331 Ms 9018/24: Mrs Lewis’s little Berber slave (a pretty little dark brown girl) completely shrouded in pink muslin, stood by with her arms crossed on her breast, making salaams.

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swept out very clean; you could332 not stand upright in them; there was always, however, one room for the family and another for the chickens. But alas! the chickens and the eggs and the doura bread are all kept for the men; the women live on the leaves of the bean, raw and boiled, and on doura cakes. They wanted Mrs wedding ring and listened with great attention to her story of our marriage ceremony. Then they asked if her husband beat her and were astonished to hear he did not! next how much he had ‘‘given for her’’—as in Egypt the husband gives the dowry, not the father—and when she said thirty shillings, they said, ‘‘it was very cheap.’’ (The thirty shillings was tr ue for she was obliged to be married before the cadi, and Mr gave away thirty shillings to the poor to satisfy the cadi’s question.) That one man should keep faithful to one woman his whole life, and not send her back to her parents and marry another, is more unheard of among the poor than among the rich, because the rich man maintains all his wives by etiquette, the poor man just sends them back. Zehnab had a little row of beads round her neck and another round her waist, nothing else. I tried to persuade Mrs to take her and educate her and send her back to educate the island. The women never pray—no Muhammadan poor woman does, excepting the haggs or pilgrims. On the island was a little heap of stones where a man mounted (the elder of the village) to call to mosque on Fridays, in the open air. The belief among women in a future state seems to be ver y small; if they express any feeling about it at all, it is that they shall be servants there to the men. I walked across the island of Bidji, such a wild but not desolate walk, through a wilderness of rocks, to a solitary burial ground (each grave marked only by a little circle of stones), in a valley on the top of the island, and down to a deep green pool or tarn left by the Nile on the other side, with a tuft of palm trees, a hut or two and a little oasis of green in the middle of that chaos of piled rocks. Another day we walked along the eastern shore of the Nile to the ruined Christian church where Padre Ryllo said his last mass . The huts are not so sordid and the population not so ‘‘r ubbishy’’ near Philae as elsewhere. 332 Ms 9017/18: could not.

298 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Mr ,333 to whom we had a letter, came the evening [27 Januar y] before we left, with his Abyssinian daughter, the child of an Abyssinian woman. I liked her much, a really sensible nice girl, black. He is very learned and very queer. On Monday morning [28 January] we left our beloved mooring place. I cannot tell you why Philae is so dear. It is like a friend of whose face one does not think whether it is ugly or beautiful, one does not know. So different, too, from Abu Simbel with its depths of stillness, which I loved as much, in a different way. Philae is cheerful, living, sunny, compared with Abu Simbel, and yet the roar of the cataracts is not like life; it is like eternity and everything in Philae seems like another world. If the going up the cataracts was strange, it was nothing to the coming down. We set off before sunrise, as it is necessary to have no breath of wind, with the ‘‘bigs’’ and all their men on board. Our boat is the largest that has ever been up the cataracts and we came down a passage which is very rarely used, as the tossing rapid would swamp a smaller boat. It was widened for Ibrahim Pacha’s steamer. Σ went on shore but I stuck by the old boat, and truly it was a sight worth seeing 333 Anthony Charles Harris, a merchant based in Egypt and collector of antiquities which he left to his adopted Abyssinian daughter. Mr Harris, his collection and his daughter will be mentioned again by Nightingale in a letter to Emily Verney, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9005/103, 9 November 1871: ‘‘Sir Harry [Verney] was so good as to propose . . . to write to Lepsius at Berlin, telling him that the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities of the late Mr Harris of Alexandria in Egypt was for sale and had been offered to the British Museum by his daughter, who has brought them to England, and also to write to Dr S. Birch of the British Museum (to whom they have been offered) but who is haggling about price, telling him that he, Sir Harry, had written to Lepsius. . . . I wrote to the daughter, Miss Selima Harris . . . proposing these two things. She accepts both proposals with fervent thanks and desires me to give her gratitude to Sir Harry. She thinks it will determine Birch to purchase. Sir Harry desired me to ask her for a description. She sends me the enclosed. . . . It occurred to me to tell you that (1) the most valuable article of the collection, supposed to be the most perfect papyrus extant of any size (valued by Mr Harris at £10,000) is ‘Papyrus of the Annals of Ramesses II.’ . . . (2) And next . . . ‘Tr yphon’s grammar, with part of the Iliad written on the reverse. . . . ’ (Parthe will tell you about the little black girl, Selima Harris, copying, photographing inscriptions for her father at Philae and shooting jackals with him in the moonlight on the pyramids. She groped about for a week in a tomb behind Manfaloot for him to find ‘Tryphon’s grammar and the Iliad’ at the risk of her life.) She offers the whole collection for £10,000.’’

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how she gradually accelerated her speed as she approached the rapid which, foaming and tossing, with scarcely two feet on either side our oars, seemed as if no boat could live in it, then took the leap like a racehorse, so gallantly and went riding down the torrent as if she enjoyed it. Three times her bows dived under water (I don’t mean that the waves broke over the boat—that they did all the time and half filled her with water, and all our biscuit, too, which was of more consequence), but three times she dived under water up to the kitchen and rose again. Twice she struck but gallantly triumphed over all her enemies, and long before I have written this one line we were at the bottom and swung round at the end of the rapid, the first time this feat has been tried as boats are generally run ashore on the bank at the foot of the cataract, as the only alternative. Of course, everything depends on the steering, and the oldest ‘‘big’’ of all, the ‘‘Great Father,’’ mounted on the poop by his steersman, whence they did steer like masters. The boat obeyed and we verged not an inch to the right or the left. Σ, who watched us from the shore, thought that we could not be going down that place, that the boat had not minded its rudder and that they had run her down there as the only resource. I suppose such a feat of steering is without parallel in any other country. The cataract by which we came down runs into the main stream at right angles, like water out of a cock; we were steered on the edge of the gush, on the left edge, so that when we came to the bottom, by the motion of the rudder and a vigorous pull of the oars on one side (our men were rowing with their whole might all through the descent), the bows were got out of the current on the left, which caught the stern and the boat turned on her centre like a pivot and swung round into still water—this is a new feat. The N[orthampton] boat, which came down after us, was too short to try it and she struck upon a rock, swinging to the right upon her stern—we are the first to have done it. Mr B. and I sat on the pantry, embracing our water jar, on the top of which we received the congratulations of all the ‘‘bigs’’ and of all their men who all shook hands with us and cried Salaam! the moment it was over. There was but one more little rapid to pass and, when we arrived at Syene and were quietly at breakfast, the great ‘‘big’’ came in and then the pilots, and solemnly applied my hand to his lips and forehead, and kissed Mr B. on the top of his head and then asked for baksheesh. The dignity with which an Arab shakes hands with you and begs is charming.

300 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions The old sheikh ended by presenting me with his pillow, which I hope you will not mistake for a gigantic brown beetle with many legs. It was not, though, for its curiosity that he gave it but as a useful piece of furniture: a wonderfully large piece of hardwood such as could not be found nearer than Abyssinia. But the fun of funs was to see us riding up to Mahatta in the afternoon to pay a series of morning calls at the cataract. We came down the wildest of rocky passes, walking (it was too steep for the donkeys, who followed), and there lay the English fleet, six boats, in a little creek of the Nile below the cataracts. They had not been up—it was exactly like a woodcut in one of Captain Cook’s voyages—the savage scene, the neat English boats and flags in the little bay. So we scrambled down in company with three camels while the men of Mahatta pop out upon us, brandishing their spears right in our faces for fun and, like the Angel making Balaam’s ass to turn aside,334 making our asses to turn aside but we insist upon going on and so make our calls. We found Mr Murray at Aswan, just arrived. But there was such a ‘‘ruck’’ of English boats there (all the Northampton party and a thousand others—and nothing to eat, for they had devoured everything like locusts, even all the rice and milk of Syene—that we turned savage and sailed before sunrise. This animal (that’s us) it is impossible to tame; it can never be domesticated but remains in its savage state in spite of all the kindness (and constraint) that can be lavished upon it. I was glad enough to get away from Syene, which I cannot bear, and would not so much as go over again to Elephantine. I have seen the mirage once, and except that I knew it was impossible that the Nile could have got into the place where we saw it, should not have been much struck with the sight. I must not forget to record that we saw a few drops of rain on the sand one day in Nubia, preser ved by the sand as a curiosity in its natural museum in little round holes made for the purpose. Source: Claydon Diary

25 January 1850 Philae. Went to Bidji up the rocks to a little lonely burying ground in a hollow of the rocks and down to an oasis and deep green tara left by 334 An allusion to Num 22:21-41.

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the Nile on the other side. Dined out at Mahatta, dropped down the Nile at moonrise, announced by our Arab creeping into the tent on his face, with our carpet on his head and our chairs on his back, which we had brought with us. 26 January 1850 Mr Lewis fine and courteous. Mr Sutton stupid and silent. Mrs Lewis nice and naïve. Rowed home by a cold moonlight. Zehnab’s aunt swam over to see Mrs Lewis; went with her to Bidji to call on her. She was ten, just married, showed us her house with great pride. She had two cushions, no other furniture but the mud divan and the jars. ‘‘How much had Mr Lewis given for Mrs Lewis?’’ 30s. ‘‘That was very cheap.’’ 27 January 1850 Philae. Our last day at Philae in the Osiris chamber before breakfast. Mr Harris and his black daughter came. 28 January 1850 Spent the night in learning by heart ever y line of the temples under the palm trees and the moonlight facing the bed with our heads out of window. By sunrise ‘‘all the bigs’’ on board, down the cataract like a racehorse taking the leap. Three times she dived underwater with her bows, three times she rose and triumphantly finished her leap. Paid morning visits and left our cards at the cataracts. Guthries, Lewises, etc. Source: British Library Diar y

23 January 1850 At sunrise we were on Philae and discovered the chamber of Osiris. Lewises there. Went to Osiris chamber, stayed there till 3 o’clock. Mr and Mrs Lewis dined with us. Cold moonlight walk on Philae. 24 January 1850 While we were in the sacred chamber, Northampton party disturbed us, but we stuck to it and were there almost all day. Surprised there by the man asking for baksheesh. Our Passion Week. 25 January 1850 Went over to Bidji, up the rocks to a burying ground in a solitary basin at the top of the island, so wild but not desolate, and down to a palm-tree oasis, a happy valley and deep green tara [?] of the Nile on the other side. Walked to Padre Ryllo’s church on the mainland. Dinner at Lewises at Mahatta by moonlight.

302 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 26 January 1850 Went with Mrs Lewis to see Zehnab and her swimming aunt on Bidji; clean335 huts; walked over the island with a party; how different it looked. But yesterday I spoiled it all with dreaming. Disappointed with myself and the effect of Egypt on me. Rome was better. 27 January 1850 Took my crucifix up before breakfast to lay it in the sacred dust of the chamber of Osiris. Prayers. Scrambled round the rocks on a beautiful warm morning to the south: true Sunday morning. With Mr Harris all the afternoon and his black daughter, capital people. They drank tea with us. Farewell moonlight walk. All night with my head out of window, learning ever y line of the temples under the palms by heart. 28 January 1850 Sailed before sunrise. Down the cataract like a racehorse, only one and a little one. Aswan to breakfast. Rode up to Mahatta, paid visits along the cataract like a scene in Captain Cook. Bought my bracelets. Did not go to Elephantine. Mr Murray in the evening. Source: Letter 35, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/15, 28 and 9018/20, 25 (not in 1854 ed.)

Editor: This is Nightingale’s ‘‘account of Philae’’ or ‘‘Philae letter,’’ also called her summary of ‘‘Hermes for Σ’’ or her ‘‘account of Osiris chamber for Σ,’’ written between 29 January and 2 Februar y (see diaries). [Qena Thursday 31 January 1850] I never wished so much to understand anything as the old Egyptian idea of Osiris, Isis and Horus,336 this triad in itself embracing all the 335 Calabria read: dear. 336 The stor y of Osiris and Isis may have been based on actual events of an early period. It holds that Osiris was a just and benevolent king ruling over Egypt. His reign was brought to an end by Seth his brother, who slew him and cut his body into numerous pieces, which he scattered all over Egypt. Osiris’s wife Isis, with the help of her sister Nephthys, found the pieces and by magic reconstituted the body of Osiris. Isis then succeeded in conceiving and bearing a child called Horus, who eventually defeated Seth. The stor y experienced many developments and variations; it ended up constituting a powerful myth of death and resurrection, and gave rise to a cult offering hope for the afterlife.

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other gods (excepting Khnum, the spirit of God and Amun, the unknown or concealed God), Osiris takes the forms and attributes of all the others together with Isis, the ‘‘thousand named.’’ Osiris seems to be the Goodness of God,337 his inscription which you see everywhere (so that you learn hieroglyphics nolens volens [willy-nilly]) signifying the ‘‘Good Being,’’ the ‘‘Opener of Goodness.’’338 In this form it is beautiful to see him invested successively with the attributes of every other God in turn, the goodness being united (to speak humanly) with all his other powers: His omniscience, His omnipotence, His active energy. But the suffering and dying God comes the most home to our appreciation of all the representations in Philae; it requires a St John to record that part of the life of Osiris and I shall not try. Twenty-eight or it may be thirty lotus plants grow over His corpse in the sacred chamber, the number of the years He spent on earth where He went about doing good (though I felt, over every sculpture in that much-defaced dark chamber, with my hands, that what escaped the eye might not fail the touch, I could not make up my mind whether they were twentyeight or thirty; the last two might be defects in the wall—it does not matter much, the coincidence is near enough to be remarkable). Hours and hours I sat there wondering, to find almost all our Christian ideas among those old Egyptians (for the tombs of the IVth Dynasty in the field of the pyramids represent Osiris in exactly the same light that He is here), wondering at that irresistible, that evident instinct of man to adore his God more in His humiliation and selfdenial than in His majesty and transfiguration, to feel himself more drawn to his suffering God suffering for him, than to his glorified God! To admire str uggle and self-denial seems the impulse of man, to sympathize with it more than with calm and unconquerable strength. What was the early feeling of the Egyptians (before Evil became with them the enemy instead of the brother of Osiris) concerning the martyrdom and death of the ‘‘Goodness of God’’? I cannot guess whether there is truth in that idea (or not) of the suffering God. I think there is: that, without deifying the Evil Principle, as we have done into an anti-God and as the early Egyptians certainly did not do, but still considering it as the brother of the Good, there must yet be suffering in learning the laws of God. The final victory of Osiris seems rather to 337 See Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 2:486-87. 338 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 3:69-70, 83, 86, and Martineau, Eastern Life: Past and Present 120.

304 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions typify the spiritual parts of our nature bringing into subjection the grosser parts than any feud between Good and Evil. God must have laws and these laws, strange as it sounds, can be broken—nay must be broken because we do not know them and are not to know them except through experience. If we keep them, then Osiris, or what we call the Good Principle, takes us in his hand and leads us. If we break them the Evil Principle, or suffering, takes us in his hand and leads us—but it is still the hand of God, still the Goodness of God, still Osiris. The suffering is the direct consequence of the Goodness of God, you may say, pointing out His law, they are but two forms of the same thing, if you will. He is not angry but if you turn to the left, He must take you by the left hand to show you the way. This might still be typified by the victory, after struggle, of Osiris. The law is now learnt; the God has taught it. It could not be otherwise but that there should be struggle and suffering in learning it. Else we should either be animals acting from instinct or, if with free will, we should not know when we were lear ning the law, if there were not suf fering. Isis is evidently nature, the world: she may rightly therefore put on a thousand different shapes. The ‘‘Goodness of God’’ is her husband, her brother, her father. How true: Isaiah uses almost the same words.339 She appears as Neith, as Hathor, as Bubastis [lion-headed or cat-headed]. Instead of this being a confusion (the gods appearing with one another’s attributes), it seems the most beautiful and deepest part of the Egyptian philosophy, signifying that nature reveals God in all His forms, sometimes in one of His attributes,340 sometimes in another but always the wife of the Goodness of God, ‘‘for His goodness is in all His works’’;341 whatever else she is, she is always the handmaid of His goodness, of Osiris. Oh how beautiful that idea is, how far, far deeper and truer than looking upon this world as a ‘‘fallen world’’ ruined by the Evil Principle, dragged down by man in his fall, ‘‘child of wrath,’’ ‘‘born in sin.’’ I can see the truth in those words too; we are suffering, as we ought to do and as we are not such fools as to wish not to do, from the consequences of Adam’s mistakes and the mistakes of all those who have come before us. But that suffering comes from the Goodness of God. 339 See for example Isa 54:5, 63:15, 64:7. 340 On the idea of the many gods representing different attributes of the one God, see Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 2:480-81, 499-500. 341 A paraphrase of Ps 145:17.

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Yes, Isis is always the wife of Osiris. The world is not fallen but learning. Isis mourning, Isis protecting the body of her husband with her wings is the world justifying the Goodness of God, nature showing us that still He is good. I really have such comfort in that idea, when I look out on these dreadful deserts, that it seems to me as if Isis and Philae were placed in the midst of these barren wastes on purpose, as if for a ke y and an explanation. Osiris says to us, as his Prototype did to Peter, ‘‘Thou shalt be sifted as wheat but I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not.’’342 That even a whole nation of Arabs should be in the state these people are in now is a proof of the Goodness of God. Horus generally bears the title of ‘‘defender of the Father.’’ He seems to be the principle of the resurrection of life or new life or eternity, the ultimate justifier of the Goodness of God, the principle by which even these poor Arabs shall live again. The explanation of the myth of Osiris by the Nile and the inundation,343 which the German school and Wilkinson himself are so fond of, seems to me detestable. No doubt the Egyptians were provincial: it pierces through on every line they draw, in ever y conventionality which clothes or disguises their gods and men. But to imagine that even this provincial people could see no other proof of the Goodness of God than the yearly inundation could mean by the twenty-eight lotus plants on Osiris’s body only the twenty-eight cubits it rises at Elephantine, and this too when the Nile had a god of its own who occupies a very subordinate rank and is seen only on the dados or friezes of temples and on the pedestals of kings, binding up with his water plants their thrones or concocting an inundation under the rocks of the cataract, which looks half joke, half caricature, of which the Egyptians were evidently excessively fond, to imagine that Osiris was nothing more than the inundation and Isis the land seems to me little better than Strauss344 who sees no higher idea in the resurrection of Christ than a country apothecar y who teaches his pupils, lives in Bethany, disappears behind the Mount of Olives and reappears on the other side. What are the historical elements of the resurrection of our Saviour, as of the story of Osiris, I am sure I do not dare to say even to myself. 342 Luke 22:31-32. 343 Plutarch, Moralia V.38 ‘‘Isis and Osiris’’; Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 3:77, 79. 344 David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of a controversial Life of Jesus 1835. See Theology (3:71, 366) for Nightingale’s negative view of Strauss’s work.

306 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions He may have come twice as well as once. The one is not more difficult to believe than the other. He may not have come at all, not as a person of the Trinity. But such an interpretation as that of the twentyeight cubits, which I believe was originally Plutarch’s,345 seems to me the worst species of idolatry, far worse than that of which we accuse the old Egyptians, and impossible to them. Theirs was the worship of ideas, not of mud and doura. Let Osiris be to them as our Christ is to us,346 the life, the shepherd, the judge, not a watering pot. It is we who are provincial in putting this interpretation, as indeed we have been but too much in our interpretations of all religions. That an agricultural people whose existence depended on their river should see in its overflowing a proof of God’s goodness, that they should consecrate the bull, the Apis [sacred bull] as the ‘‘emblem of the most pure soul of Osiris,’’347 because it was the type of agriculture or prosperity and therefore of ‘‘good will to man,’’ of which Osiris was the abstract idea: this, however strange to our minds, is conceivable. But of the other [view] the only proof of it I could find was a little bad vignette over the door of Nilus’s little chapel at Philae, where Osiris lies on the bed of the Nile covered with lotus plants, under the rocks of the cataract where he was supposed to be buried, and Isis stands mourning at his feet. But even here the queer little figure of Nilus squats opposite in his river cave, cooking up an inundation with two jars. But go to the chamber of Osiris and see there what they did think of him; see him first in his dying moments: Isis stands at his feet and Khnum at his head, the beginning and the end, and he lies leaning on his elbows. See him in the next, supported on the knees of two women, then carried by the four spirits of Hades through the lower regions (‘‘he descended into hell’’); next, lying on his bier, tended by Anubis, the god of death, the conductor of souls who superintends the departure of life from its earthly case; two women mourn him, seated in the dust. Further, out of the body grow the twenty-eight (or it may be thirty) lotus plants, the number of the years he lived on earth. Below the bier are the symbols of life and purity, the life and purity he died to win for us. See him next where, rising from the tomb, he appears again: the hawk, the symbol of Horus, the resurrection, flying over the sepulchre. Then [see] where the soul is coming 345 Plutarch, Moralia V.43. 346 Ms 9018/20: Let Osiris be to them the anticipation of what the Saviour is to us. 347 Plutarch, Moralia V.29-30.

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forth from the trial of purification typified by ascending from the flames of an altar, for he was to pass through all the trials of Hades ‘‘to be in all things made like unto his brethren.’’348 See him lastly where, the sacred boat containing the bier having crossed the river, he rises again as judge of the dead, mourned by Isis and Khnum, the beginning and the end (‘‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and ending’’349) with Horus the resurrection seated before him (‘‘I am the resurrection and the life’’350). Anubis, the conductor of souls, is come to undertake his office in his presence (through death he has put under subjection him that had the power of death351) and he has sat down forevermore at the right hand of the ‘‘Unknown God’’352 who in the form of the three great attributes of Thebes is there. See him thus and you will find in Osiris the pure conception of the ‘‘glor y of God in the highest and good will towards men’’353 of Him who has said that His glory is His goodness.354 On the base of the wall is the tree of life, guarded by a serpent and watered by two spirits. On the side is the representation of Khnum at the potter’s wheel, the idea to which Isaiah so often recurs,355 with the inscription over him, ‘‘Khnum, the Creator, on his wheel moulds the divine limbs of Osiris in the shining house of life,’’ i.e., the sun. This meant the human frame in which Osiris was to appear upon earth (for he took not upon him the nature of angels356). When Isaiah says, ‘‘Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, what makest thou?’’ the word in the original is ‘‘the Adam’’ which we have translated sometimes by ‘‘the man,’’ sometimes by ‘‘the clay,’’ sometimes left the word ‘‘Adam.’’ Adam means ‘‘red earth’’ and the Egyptian on the monument is always coloured red, red being the honourable colour with all primitive nations. (The chamber of Osiris is not in the adytum but [is] a little retired nook in the roof.) You never see any representation of the abstract Deity in the Egyptian theology, but only of his relation with the creature. They appar348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356

An allusion to Phil 2:7. Rev 21:6. John 11:25. An allusion to Heb 2:14. An allusion to Acts 17:23. Luke 2:14. An allusion to Exod 33:18-19. Isa 29:16, 41:25, 45:9, 64:8. Heb 2:16.

308 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ently thought that that was all with which we had anything to do, all which we had any right to represent. He never appears as in the Jupiter Capitolinus or the Apollo Belvedere, in the abstract exercise of His powers, but always in some connection with the reverent worshipper. The rest of the wall in this wonderful room is taken up with figures of Isis protecting the body of her husband or brother with her wings, and with representations of different gods, I imagine, the different forms which Osiris assumes: Ptah with his frog (human nature) and scarab (the world) occurring almost every other figure, Ptah being of course identical with Osiris the creating God, with the Goodness of God, and wearing almost the same emblems. When one foolishly says different gods, one only means different attributes, the Egyptian belief in one God, whose attributes were classed in triads, being attested everywhere. The triad always means one attribute working upon another and the result [thereof ].357 . . . A little side temple, which forms the western side of the great propylaeum and is full of the birth and education of Horus, is the most interesting after the chamber of Osiris. At the end of the adytum he is enshrined as the emblem of the resurrection in a glory of water plants: on one side of him the asp as the type of death, the necessary step to the resurrection, on the other—believe it who will?—a cross with an asp twined round it like Moses’ golden serpent, and two women kneeling at the foot. Below is Isis, the great Goddess Nature, nursing Hor us who is welcomed by all the great gods standing round. Round the walls are Hor us in different stages of progression, taught by Isis, or Isis standing with her hand upon his head. One most interesting group is the king offering the sphinx (or his physical and intellectual power) to the triad of Osiris, Isis and Khnum. Khnum, whose name signifies the end, is always called in the inscriptions ‘‘the benevolent saving sister’’ for, to them, the end was victory as her name signifies τελευτη´ νι´κη [final victory]. She was the sister of Isis, who was the beginning, and in Philae the triad of Isis, Khnum and Horus, the beginning, the end and the reproduction, appears in almost every chamber. Later Khnum became the hated Goddess, as the Evil Principle became Satan, but here her legend still reads ‘‘the protecting sister,’’ and Isis often appears with her attributes and is identical with her. 357 See Plutarch, Moralia V.56, and Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 2:484, 488-89.

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Perhaps the most interesting and painful thing of all in this temple is to watch the gradual change and corruption of this religion, like the Roman Catholic, like the Anglican, as it became an instrument of temporal power. Outside this very temple of Horus is a sculpture of a priest carrying a little figure of Osiris on a tray, before which two men kneeling are scourging themselves. Nothing like this have we ever seen in the early temples. Ramesses’ devotion is as different from this as was the glad, calm and cheerful religion of the early Christians to the Roman Catholic scourging himself on Good Friday. So these Egyptians beat themselves for the death of Osiris; how invariably the decline of a religion is accompanied by the worshipper offering a tribute of pain to the Creator instead of service and happiness. The temple is full of secret chambers, walled-up passages, concealed trapdoors and places in the thick walls, so unlike the primitive simplicity of the early Egyptian temples, of which you can make a ground plan at a glance. Whether these chambers were only to conceal treasure in or to make noises from, or to get rid of unlucky heretics, no clue remains to prove. But it makes the temple of Isis like a feudal castle and reminds one that the fall of that religion is nigh. I saw Typhon, the destroyer of Osiris, however, twice enthroned in places of honour in Isis’s own temple, so that even then they could not have been very sure of his disgrace. There is a pretty sculpture of a king bringing his two sons to Isis on the outside of Horus’s temple. I suppose there is no need of my giving a description of the temple of Isis which nobody will understand. Σ made a panorama of Philae from the colonnade in front of the temple. There are the customary two towers of the propylaeum, the propylaeum, with Horus temple on one side, a colonnade on the other; then the two inner towers of the propylaeum; then the portico with the gigantic painted pillars—ten of them, and the whole of the walls covered with painted compartments of which the colours are tolerably fresh; then the transept and then the naos consisting of the prosekos, three chambers and three adyta. A pit close to the western adytum might possibly be the place shown by the priests in later times as the tomb of Osiris, for all round it are sculptures of a king carrying the sacred boat (or hearse) and a mummy cloth, and offering it to Isis on the one side for her husband, and to Osiris for himself (as a mummy) on the other. But I took such a dislike to the claptrap of this place, which Mr Harris, a great hieroglyph[ist] who arrived a few hours before we left, showed us, so like the church of the Holy Sepulchre

310 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions and such like things, that I would not stay in it. In the adyta is nothing ver y interesting. I wish I could give any idea of what Osiris appears to have been. Osiris, Isis and Horus were perhaps the basis of the whole religion of Egypt. The other gods were only the expression of her speculations about the manner of the creation, as Bunsen says. But Osiris and Isis united in themselves the attributes of all the rest, and there is ever y reason to believe that already in Menes’s time it was so. Just as we may say that the Goodness of God (or His relation to us) is the only thing we know of Him and that His other attributes are only the forms (or manifestations) in which His goodness appears, so Osiris, whose name was too sacred to be ever mentioned by these strong-faithed old Egyptians, was their one God and all the others were only manifestations of Him. There is nothing more revolting in their idea of the Goddess Isis than there is idolatrous in our calling Nature ‘‘she’’; and Horus was only Osiris in the new form, Osiris risen again. Isis is the same as the Neith of Sais, the Mut (mother) of Thebes, that is, the great mother of all life, nature which reveals God. For creation is only a revelation. God creating is only God revealing Himself and nature is properly the revelation of God. Isis is all nature, human nature as well as animal and inanimate nature. For in one place—where she is represented as releasing Typhon, in a myth of later date—it signifies ‘‘human nature’’ giving free scope to evil; in another where he gives her the forehead of a cow, it signifies her animal nature. Neith (Athena) means ‘‘to walk,’’ and the legend of Isis=Neith, enabling Zeus to walk, is the same thing as what we should call being the right hand (i.e., the manifestation) of God. Isis was also the Diana [goddess of hunt and nature, connected with the moon] of Bubastis [city in the Nile delta] in her character of Hecate [goddess of magic] or mistress of Amenti, the lower regions, where she goes as the defender of Osiris. She was Diana, too, as mistress of the moon. Isis was also Hathor as ‘‘the habitation of God’’ and appears with her attributes all over the temple of Philae. Or rather Hathor was only a little of Isis, in the sense of fullness or cause, i.e., the fullness of the earth (‘‘the earth is full of his glory’’).358 God is represented everywhere in the Bible as ‘‘fullness,’’ the causative, i.e., the good and well-ordered principle. Isis, the myrionomous (which indeed as nature she had a good right to be), manifesting as she does every attribute of God, that is, 358 Ps 72:19; Hab 3:3.

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any attribute of which we can have any cognizance from its coming into relation with us, must necessarily include within herself all the powers or personifications by which God works, as a book includes in its many pages the different qualities of its author. With their other gods the Egyptians seem to have meant to signify [the following].359 By the First Order [they seem to have meant] the attributes of the Deity himself: they were all cosmogonic, the principles by which He created or revealed Himself, which is the same thing. Though the whole philosophical system seems to have been completed long before the time of Menes, it is natural that this order should have come first into the heads of a young people, as creation must be the first subject which occupies their ideas, before they begin to feel the want of metaphysical attributes. By the Second Order they seem to have meant the institutions of God, the administrative, as by the first the creative principles: i.e., the powers of nature, second causes or physical agents, derivative from the attributes but not the attributes, emanations from the Deity but not the Deity, properties of nature on which their welfare depended, instr umental like the cabiri.360 In this there was nothing idolatrous, though it might become so; such were Ra, Hathor, Thoth, etc. The Third Order is more difficult to define and the distinction is arbitrar y, for everybody makes it different. But if it arose out of the wants of a later time, as seems most natural, it would not be the productions of nature, as some say, nor physical objects at all, but abstract ideas, metaphysical properties of God, after which we crave when, in our more advanced stage, we begin to want not only a creating God, not so much a cosmogonic Being, as a God who feels our griefs and carries our sorrows,361 a God who makes known the object for which he had brought us into the world, more than a God to bring us and the world about. How well we can sympathize with this stage of the old Egyptian development! We too have outlived the words which still we begin our prayers with, because David did, though we have ceased to feel them (praising God as the Creator, as the Giver of the light of another day, as the Maker of the sun and moon and the world, and all things in it). The world is grown old to us and it was so long ago since God had the trouble of making it that if we praise Him for it, it is only as a matter of form 359 On the three orders of gods, see Herodotus, Histor y 2:4, 43, 46, 145, 156, and Bunsen, Egypt’s Place 1:357-68. 360 Nature deities in ancient Middle Eastern religion. 361 An allusion to Isa 53:4.

312 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions and not because we think much about it now—it was so long ago. We want a God who will tell us what He is like and what His will is like, now: His present will and what ours is to be, what our connection with Him, our intercourse and what His qualities, that we may explain by them the puzzles we every day see. We want a God with ethical qualities, not with physical ones. The world can go twirling on, we say, let that alone: I must look nearer home, I must know what God is to me, not what He was to the universe, what He is doing in Egypt and Edinburgh, not what He was doing 6000 years ago362 or more at the sun and moon. Out of this craving arose, I imagine, our Saviour and their Osiris, a psychological, instead of material Father who should be ‘‘acquainted with grief,’’363 our griefs, who should be the Father of our souls (literally the name of Osiris) rather than the Creator of our world. That the attributes of the creative God became his was natural among a people who always set the ‘‘life’’ above the ‘‘raiment’’ and thought that the God who made the one could well make the other. The names of Osiris, which you see in the inscriptions of Philae, are: ‘‘the Lord of Life,’’ ‘‘the Ruler forever,’’ ‘‘the Lord of Eternity,’’ ‘‘the Good Being,’’ ‘‘the Revealer of the goods of truth,’’ ‘‘the Lord of the future state,’’ and many others, all signifying the spiritual more than the temporal goods. It was ‘‘the light of the glory of God in the face’’ of Osiris.364 Khnum (the end) in the court of Osiris’s chamber is with Isis the beginning, protecting Osiris with their wings, for the end of life justifies the goodness of God as much as the beginning. With them death was not the curse pronounced upon man for his disobedience365 as with us, but ‘‘death did not differ from life.’’ I thought there was nothing more beautiful than that. Death was not a good escape from the annoyances of life, but as the continuation of life, from which it differed only in the sense of regeneration. The ‘‘Devoted’’ is another of Osiris’s beautiful titles: the mind craves after the feeling of gratitude to God, which can only be excited in us humans by the idea of self-sacrifice on the part of the giver. The ‘‘devotion’’ of Osiris, in coming upon earth suffering and dying for men, is the idea the y cling to, as we do. 362 Possible reference to Ussher’s dating of the creation at 4004 bce. It seems that Nightingale then accepted the dating of Archbishop Ussher, based on the life span of the patriarchs. 363 Isa 53:3. 364 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 3:69-70. 365 An allusion to Gen 2:15-17.

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The myth of Typhon evidently did not arise till after the times of the great Ramesses, the XIXth Dynasty, the thirteenth century before Christ. It had its origin in lower Egypt. ‘‘Seth,’’ the name of Typhon in Asia, signifies something ‘‘forcible,’’ ‘‘acting violently,’’ for the hand of God which teaches us our mistakes may be said to act forcibly as by suffering, which to us never seems gentle. At Karnak he appears as the Great God pouring life and power over the hero, Ramesses, in the great days of Egypt. His name was then ‘‘Nubi,’’ the Golden, in Ethiopia, ‘‘Bal’’ (Lord) in northern Egypt. At Beit el-Wali Ramesses is called ‘‘like Bal’’ by a deputation of chiefs, therefore it was still in a good sense. You sometimes see the two heads of Seth and Horus (or Osiris) growing out of the same neck to prove their co-operation and co-origin. He is called ‘‘Lord of the world.’’ But later (how like us, who say that sin has become lord of the world, that Satan has got dominion over us, etc.), when Egypt suffered so cruelly from the Semitic tribes, the fearful shepherds, and remembered her sufferings during those long 900 years, the God of the Semitic [tribes] became to the Egyptians the father of Judaeus and Palaestinus, to them the name of all abomination. And later still he became Apophis ‘‘the Beast,’’ wanting nothing to be exactly similar to our Beast in the Revelations but his number 666.366 The Christians did foolishly in defacing the temple of Philae as they have done, for if they had looked closer they would have found all their own ideas there. However untrue this idea may be of a power acting in opposition to God, they did not handle it untruly. Seth, now become Typhon, is represented as the ravaging hippopotamus (oh! our dear little hippopotamus at Cairo) with on its back a hawk fighting with a serpent to typify the violence he uses to his own annoyance and others’. The hieroglyphic of the sacred name, Osiris, is an eye and Osiris signifies ‘‘many-eyed’’ because the Goodness of God is not blind but omniscient; most likely the hawk was sacred to him for this reason, because it is the symbol of vision. It is as God of the dead that he is called ‘‘the Good,’’ for their Hades means Good and nothing about their ideas ever suggests a sense of Uncheer in connection with death. Osiris is represented with the eye and the sceptre, for He sees what is good and what He sees He commands. He was the power which gave activity to the mind, the father of souls particularly. In later times when Typhon came into opposition 366 Rev 13:18.

314 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions with Osiris in everything, Osiris was the intelligence of the universal soul, Typhon the passions: Osiris the balanced powers of nature, Typhon the storms and eclipses. Osiris killed by Typhon was a man’s understanding destroyed by his ignorance and sin, or a difference between the magistrate and the people. Horus or Harpocrates (which only means Horus the child, Hor-Pre-khred), the child of Osiris and nature, was the principle of growth or reproduction, the idea of progress; he is always represented as ever young, beardless; the sun and moon are called his eyes; he is said to be ‘‘the Seen,’’ perhaps in antithesis to the Unseen, the Unknown, the Hidden God, Amun. He was the principle of resurrection, of rising up, not only rising again of the life and the new life, the triumphing over the grosser parts of our nature, the material parts. Now one can understand how Osiris, Isis and Horus (or Osiris again under the new form) are themselves all the other gods. Among the First Order are: Amun the concealed God, Khem the generative or continuing power of nature, Khnum the creative of the primitive soul, Ptah the creative of the visible world, Neith the creative of the visible world or nature in the female form (these two making the soul of the world), Ra her son, the father and nourisher of terrestrial things. Amun=Ra thus is the beginning and end of the creation, and he is Osiris. Now Osiris is the same as Ptah by his emblems, and Ptah’s boat is Osiris’s hearse in the sacred chamber, which gave this boat its peculiar sanctity. Osiris is also the same as Khem, for the ‘‘Goodness of God’’ shows itself in all those forms. Khem was afterwards Amun-Ra, therefore Amun-Ra is Osiris. Isis is the same as Neith, Mut-Hathor-Diana, and Anonke (Vesta) [the same] as his sister Khnum. For Khnum is called the ‘‘Mistress of the House’’ like Anonke, and Isis is the same as Khnum, for ‘‘death does not differ from life.’’ Hor us is, in the physical sense of growth, the same as Ra, the God of the natural sun, of physical life. And the hawk, the emblem of the sun because its eye seems to feel its affinity to the sun’s rays, is the emblem of Horus too. Hor us too is Thoth or Hermes, the conductor of souls (into his father’s presence), Anubis, who presided over the departure of the soul on its way to resurrection. Khonsu (or Hercules) the third member of the Theban triad, in his character of ‘‘created things,’’ [is] the representative of what is created, as Horus is (in physics) the world or composition, the effect of the active Principle (Osiris) on nature (Khonsu always wears the youthful hair of Harpocrates). The Egyptian Hercules was also the abstract idea of strength, and I like this so much

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because, taking this triad (in ethics), it becomes: intellect acting on will and producing (when the will and the intelligence are in union) concord or harmony. Now harmony or grace is strength. Champollion367 had the idea that all the triads were links in a chain, in the divine chain and could be traced in their connection as links. I wish I could detect it, but here it is obvious. Amun, Mut and Khonsu are the great Theban triad: Amun the creative intellect, Mut (mother) and Khonsu the force of nature are the same as Osiris, Isis and Horus. For the Egyptian Hercules is the power of the Deity and the force of the sun, the influence of the sun being universal. It is so pleasant to me now to see Osiris and Isis in everything (God and nature) that the Egyptian monuments have twice the interest for me that they had. And indeed there is a charm in them which you cannot explain to yourself, much less to others—they are so ugly, they are so conventional, they are so stiff and yet you would not exchange them for all the beauty of the whole world. But I have come far away from φι´λη, my Passover Week. Where was I? In the gorgeous portico of Isis. There was nothing violently interesting in the usual succession of offerers and triads, blue, green and red, in the painted compartments; you soon have them all by heart. Mr Harris told me by the bye that all the sacrifices were only typical to show the piety of the king, the majesty of the God. One, where he is offering a little kneeling figure with two palm branches (the years of his life) to Thoth, the god who registered man’s actions, as if to ask him to record them, was touching as being so different from the mean and shrinking feeling which cries out to God to ‘‘forget’’ instead of to remember and chasten. Over a door a man is offering to a long line of gods the emblem of a life spent in piety towards them, piety being to offer a suitable virtue to each as the most grateful sacrifice. On the ceiling is a representation of the Goddess of heaven which I had never seen before. Her long arms encircling heaven within herself, she occurs again of a dark colour, and within again of a light ditto, as if to say that heaven is over all the black and the white. The sign of the Trinity is upon her and her calm serene face is crowned with the Anonke (Vesta) crown, as if to say that earthly ties still exist in heaven but pure. A deep blue sky studded with stars is the background. The colouring of the Egyptian temples never annoys me in the least. I think it is beautiful. The hideousness of the hypaethral consists in 367 See J.-F. Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie 155-56.

316 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions tall oblong abaci being on the top of all the pillars under the architrave, which looks as if they had found out the temple was too short and put on their upper storey to heighten it. A niche to hold the sacrament has been cut by the Christians in the great portico of Isis, and an ancient pedestal appears, by the cross upon it, to have served them for an altar. For eight centuries Nubia was Christian; now not a Christian exists in Nubia nor has, I believe, since the twelfth century. The Arab invasion carried all before it. St Mark, who preached in Alexandria, must come again to Egypt. I do not know who else is to do it. With regard to the vehement indignation people express against the Christians for spoiling the sculptures, I think one feels more inclined to laugh. It is so childish. It is like inking a word in a book (one only feels ten times more curious to make it out). In Philae most of the faces have been scratched all over with a knife, nothing obliterated— one is of course only twice as anxious to make them out and one never can help laughing at those vicious little scratches. But the Christians have done us more good than harm, so much had been preser ved by their mud plasters. Well, I am sure you must be very tired of Philae, but it is the first and only time that is a comfort. The day before I went I scrambled (that lovely Sunday morning) all round the island to the great disgust of my clean things, round those inaccessible rocks, made out two landing places with great flights of steps, a state one and a private one, to the south of the island and crawled up a conduit in the stone sea wall which supports the west side of the island. Through this conduit, which comes up from the river bank to the great colonnade, I saw, the day before, the god Nilus himself appear with a heap of clothes on his head instead of his lotus, and a live fish in his hand. In the little chapel of Nilus is a very pretty group of Isis, Khnum and Horus, the beginning, the end and the resurrection, with Thoth on one side writing on a palm branch, registering, and the goddess Sothis, ‘‘the Lady of letters’’ (the abstract idea of language), is doing the same on the other. As Thoth is the god of wisdom and Sothis has a star upon her head, she may perhaps register the spiritual events, and he the intellectual or actual events. He may put together the practical wisdom or experience, and she the heavenly (would she had left us the record of the reason of the succession of events in this miserable land). Beyond is Osiris; on the other side, a figure of Mea (truth or insight) sitting with a sail in his hand, the emblem of the transmigration from the body. But who is the soul which has transmigrated remains in the oblivion of a broken sculpture (requiescat in pace).

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I saw today [31 January] at Edfu a potter at work with a wheel, exactly like Khnum. One proof of degeneracy about the temple of Philae, which I never saw in the earlier temples, was the strange factitious symbol of the goddess offering to herself. Seven provincial Hathors in a row; I saw offerings to ‘‘Hathor, Lady of Philae, Lady of the dead’’ (lower regions), and to another Hathor behind a general Hathor I suppose. Mr Harris showed us a curious palimpsest, an old enchorial [also called demotic] inscription (or hieratic, I don’t remember which it was) and figures and a hieroglyphic inscription cut mercilessly over it on the wall of the propylaeum of Isis. (The enchorial is of course the ordinar y popular old Egyptian writing: the hieratic, the sacred character shortened from the hieroglyphic.) He was going to copy the enchorial, which would take him four days. This is what Lepsius gave out, or Bunsen for him, as his grand discovery of a new Rosetta stone. Lepsius is in terrible disgrace here. He has been seen many times to read an inscription and then destroy it, that no one else might have the benefit of it. There is no end of stories of this sort against him, I am sorry to say, for one thought these tricks more French than German. My dear Pop, I am afraid you will be quite tired of this, even your long patience. But I am thine and all that I think is thine. Source: Claydon Diary

29 January 1850 Egypt. Left Aswan before sunrise because of the ruck of boats. This animal (that is us) is never domesticated and it has been found impossible to tame it either by kindness or constraint. 30 January 1850 Kom Ombo before breakfast. Uninteresting, Ptolemaic. Sobek the crocodile-headed, Arveris, a form of Horus, the two gods. Hagar Silsilis at noon. The enormous sandstone quarries are here, corridor in the rock of the time of Horus, last king of the XVIIIth Dynasty, 1445 bce. 31 January 1850 Edfu walk of a mile from the shore. Beautiful race of cows with heads like antelopes and brown sheep with ruffs round their necks and intelligent manners like dogs. Apollinopolis Magna. Triad: Har-Hat, Hathor and Horus [Har-semt-ta]—only Ptolemaic. Whirlwind of sand shut out the view.

318 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: British Library Diar y

29 January 1850 Sailed before sunrise from Aswan, such a beautiful calm morning as I lay in bed with my head out of window. Wrote my account of Philae. 30 January 1850 Kom Ombo before breakfast, rather stupid. Writing about Philae. Hagar Silsilis at noon; walked along the quarries, quite warm. Mr B. went to all on both sides; Σ and I stayed at home. Writing till late at night. 31 January 1850 Temple at Edfu early. Apollinopolis Magna, only Ptolemaic, some distance from shore. Saw the potter at his wheel (Khnum). Got ahead at last with my Philae letter. Osiris and scarab from Edfu. Source: Letter 36, 1854 ed. 169-75, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/18, 23

[Near Thebes] Sunday 3 Februar y 1850

My dearest Mother We have been a week coming from Aswan to Thebes, owing to a strong north wind against us and bitter weather, such as Paolo, who has been up the Nile twenty-five times, says he has never felt the like of. The wind is like March and the whirlwinds of sand such that you feel like a hippopotamus in your skin, and the air is nothing but a sand rain and the river a sandbank. We have been forty-eight hours at Esna [2 and 3 Febr uary] from sheer inability to get on, scarcely going on shore because of the blinding sand, though hardly able to keep ourselves alive in the boat. Everything in the boat looks as if it had not been dusted for a month, and my paper is so covered with sand that I am afraid you will hardly be able to read this. Tonight the wind a little fell and we immediately took advantage of it to pull all night, hoping to be at Thebes tomorrow. We have had twentyfour days of this wind, a thing quite unprecedented in the annals of Egypt, where three days’ wind is the calculation, and then calm. We have seen, on our way, Kom Ombo, a stupid temple and the quarries of Hagar Silsilis the same afternoon. They are sandstone like our own in Derbyshire. It was a beautiful day and a very pleasant walk. The next morning [31 Januar y] Edfu, a Ptolemaic temple; the people did not beg. The breed of cows with heads like antelopes was the most beautiful I ever saw and the brown sheep with large ruffs round their necks, holding their heads erect and with lively, intelligent manners like dogs, came to look at us

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and speak to us. A donkey on the roof of the temple must have walked upstairs. The whole roof was crowded with huts, the scale of the building magnificent: the propylaeum 120 feet high, but we did not even attempt going up, the atmosphere was in such a state with sand. The next morning [1 Februar y] we rose up early, saddled our ass, took our young men and rode three miles into the desert to Eilethyia [el-Kab], the oldest ruins in Egypt. The donkeys had no bridles but a cord round their necks. I could choke my donkey but I could not stop him. However, they knew their business much better than we did. The desert was not an ugly desert but a beautiful valley with isolated rocks standing up in it and rocky sides—no verdure, of course—it was like the gigantic bed of a dried-up pre-Adamite river, not like a crumbling desolation. In this vast valley we found a ‘‘lodge in the wilderness,’’ a little chapel built by Amenophis III, the last king but one of the XVIIIth Dynasty, 1638 [1467] bce, with the colours of the sculptures as fresh as if they had been just done. Here the people must have come out from Eilethyia for evening sacrifice, and it looked like a place of worship, so still and holy, sitting on its little stone platform. It is dedicated, of course, to Eilethyia and on the door is a little sculpture of the great Ramesses, attended by his son, a priest, in the office of fan bearer. His fan is a feather of the sort which Eilethyia, when she covers the roofs of temples with her wings, bears in her claws, meaning that with her fans she shall thoroughly purge her floor. In the northern hills are the famous painted tombs of Eilethyia, about one of which (that of the Admiral of Amosis, the restorer of the empire after the Shepherds, 1638 bce368) ever yone has heard . I think they are ver y curious but very tiresome. They give Sir Charles Grandison369 of old Egyptian life and it is such a bore going over all those details that one of them is quite enough, and that we had at Beni Hasan. There is one comfort, however, to be drawn from them, that the conventionalities of social life are the same in the two ends of time and space: the master and mistress sitting before dinner, with the company in rows, the ladies smelling at their nosegays and a little music to amuse them; [it] is exactly what 100 mistresses of 100 country houses endure ever y day in an island the Egyptians had never heard of and at a time near 4000 years off. 368 The dates for Amenophis III and Amosis I are confused here; they should be respectively c1417-1379 and 1570-46 bce. 369 Samuel Richardson, The History of Charles Grandison: In a Series of Letters.

320 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions The crude brick wall of the old town of Eilethyia, which lies below its tombs and at the mouth of its valley, is gigantic. Imagine a square of about a third of a mile to the side with walls thirty-five feet thick (Mr B. measured them) and inclined planes every twenty-five feet more, leading to the top , as is the case in the old Egyptian towns; the square seemed thoroughly cleared out, scarcely a vestige of a ruin in it, but these colossal walls, the colour of them, the awful size, make one think of a time before the Ichthyosauri. On the top of an isolated rock farther up the valley, which we passed, all the modern population of Eilethyia, women and children, collect on their New Year’s Day and spend the whole day there, taking their food with them, for prayer—those who can. Such a pleasant plan. The next day [2 Februar y] we were at Esna, the centre of the manufacturing interest, with a royal palace and gardens. We were astonished when we went ashore to see blue linen dyeing and hanging across the streets, so that the passengers had to lift it up as they went along. Shops and a marketplace and, passing into the bazaar, we saw, oh, what a moment! a bale of Manchester goods! Here we burst into tears, no, we ought to have done so, but didn’t—no emotion did the Manchester mark produce in my mercantile soul. But stop, do not condemn me, it was Sunday and my sabbatical habits forbade even to feel anything at the sight of cotton on the day of shop shutting. I thought of the streets of Manchester on a Sunday, made a rigid face and passed on. We went to the Pashalik garden—mint its only produce—into the Pashalik palace, a sarsenet French bed (of tawdr y gilding mixed with dirty blue, not so good as what you would see at a small theatre) its only furniture. The guide showed Mr B. what it was for and how to use it! as we had, of course, never seen a bed before! No other article of furniture was in the room but the wooden divan against the wall with a heap of cushions, and I suspect the pacha gets off his bed and sleeps there. No Arab can lie except in a heap. There was not a semblance, there was not even a possibility, of occupation all over the palace except in the bath, the ‘‘hama.’’ We went out upon the roof. It shook under our feet. The guide showed us a factory from the roof and made a Lord Burleigh nod,370 which Mr B. constr ued to mean ‘‘that it had been a flourishing manufactory of the finest Malta web, but that the workmen had been removed to Cairo 370 In a tragedy called Spanish Armada, Lord Burleigh is supposed to be too full of state affairs to utter a word; he simply shakes his head.

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and the place closed.’’ The poor gardener picked me a nosegay. I am glad to have seen a royal palace. This was the Esna where, as we came up the river at the same time as Abbas Pacha, he, finding something not to his liking in the preparations made for him, ordered the governor 500 lashes and displaced him. Who the new governor was I cannot say, but yesterday we saw him go on board his beautiful dahabieh for Cairo. The wind was so strong that his reis remonstrated. He ordered the reis to be bastinadoed and the boat to proceed; 500 yards further we saw him run aground and on the bank he beat about the whole night. And we gladly endured the worst night we have had for the pleasure of knowing that the same wind kept him there, stuck for twenty-four hours. Little beys have great beys upon their backs to beat them and great beys have greater beys, and so ad infinitum. But I am not sure how long this praiseworthy spirit of retribution would have kept us warm. We went to the temple. Muhammad Ali excavated the portico, which is like a great well; the rubbish cleared out was removed (apparently) into the interior of the temple itself. The consequence is that the portico, which is gigantic—three rows of six columns—is dark, dank and damp (I don’t know if the infernal regions have a portico but if they have, this is surely it; I never saw anything so Stygian). The earth in the temple looks ready to pour down upon you and overwhelm you. You go down to the portico by a formidable flight of narrow mud steps. The portico itself is black as Erebus;371 the ceiling is covered with infernal beasts. We walked through this extraordinar y centre of commerce and manufacture again today (the first town we have seen since Asyut) and felt shabby among genteel Arabs. I saw a school—the first time we have ever seen one—master, ushers and children, sitting in the dust in a yard, a tin plate their copybook, a page out of the Qur’an their reading book.They would not let us touch the sacred page but were not uncivil. In this great emporium we were actually able to buy candles. At Esna they burn lights—we had bought the whole stock of the town of Asyut (there were no more in the place) and they had long since come to an end. Tomorrow, dear people, please God, we mean to wake in Thebes and to wake there ever y morning for a fortnight (at least). Think of a 371 Erebus, the name of the infernal Shades, standing for the darkest depths of the underworld. See Aristophanes, The Birds 698: ‘‘First was Chaos and Night, and black Erebus and vast Tartarus’’; Cory, Ancient Fragments 293; and Eusebius, Preparation 1.10.

322 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions fortnight in Thebes! I am so glad I put my poor little chameleons on shore in Nubia, they would have died in this cold. The colour of Egypt strikes us so much after Nubia, or rather the no-colour; the difference between the two sands is that of a dusty, dirty floor and gold dust. The cultivation of Egypt looks like vast plains after the sunk fence of Nubia. I have been quite glad of this delay from the winds and this week’s rest to recover from the pleasure of Philae and prepare for that of Thebes.

Source: Claydon Diary

1 Febr uary 1850 Eilethyia. Rose up early and saddled our ass and took our young men and rode to Eilethyia, temple of Amenophis III, three miles in the desert, like a lodge in the wilderness. Here the people must have come out to evening sacrifice. Tombs. That of the Admiral of Amosis first king of XVIIIth Dynasty 1638 bce. Sir Charles Grandison receiving his company. Old walls (of the town) of crude brick, 35 feet thick and a square with inclined planes 25 feet more leading to the parapet. The most ancient remains of Egypt. 2 Febr uary 1850 Esna. (Latopolis). Triad: Khnum, Neith and Hakt. Walked to pacha’s garden. Mint its chief produce. Went over the palace and old silk French bed, of tawdry gilding mixed with dirty blue, its only furniture. Guide showed Mr B. how it was to be used. Temple dark, dusty and damp like the portico to the lower regions. 3 Febr uary 1850 Kept here two days by the storm of north wind. Whirlwind of sand filled the air and covered the river. Pacha insisted upon sailing, beat his reis and went aground. Esna, extraordinar y centre of the manufacturing interest; saw blue cloth dyeing, shops and felt shabby among genteel Arabs. Bitterest cold we have had.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 323 Source: British Library Diar y

1 Febr uary 1850 Rose up early in the morning, saddled our ass, took our young men and rode three miles along such a charming desert to a little lodge in the wilderness, a temple which did look like a place of worship. Tomb of the Admiral. Enormous wall of the old town, a square, 35 feet thick, cr ude brick. Row with Trout; but luckily she had a toothache, so I was spared saying anything that night. Finished at night ‘‘zusammengeschrumpft’’ [condensed] my Hermes for Σ. 2 Febr uary 1850 Esna. Walked to the temple, like the portico of the infernal regions, and to the pacha’s garden and to see the pacha’s blue silk bed. Storm of sand. Nile ran upside down, air a sand shower, could not move. Trout very poorly and nurse-able. Finished at night my account of Osiris chamber for Σ. 3 Febr uary 1850 Bitter night. Paolo: ‘‘Eighteen days north wind, him Nile never done this before. I freeze with cold before I warm.’’ Paolo meditating. Wind too high to let us go on. Walked round the town in a blinding whirlwind of sand and to the temple. Manufacturing centre of industr y; saw blue cloths. Source: Letter 37, 1854 ed. 175-76, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/19

[Luxor] Monday noon 4 Februar y 1850 Thebes! Thebes! We are just arrived, at twelve o’clock. We made no way in the night owing to the wind and so I got my wish of coming in by daylight, but the Nile is so low that there was nothing to be seen. Just as we were sending off a courier372 fifty miles to Qena to get our letters, we were told that the ‘‘lord lieutenant’’ here had them. We have spent this afternoon at Karnak reading them with a glorious sunset to do honour to this noble plain, the first real sunset we have seen for 372 Ms 9017/19: We are just going to send off a man to Qena to get our letters which the consul left there, and send these. Please God I may have some!

324 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions many weeks. While we were waiting at Luxor for the letters, with a crowd round us, who called us the Cabiri (the Great), a woman passed by with a fish on her head nearly as big as herself, which we stopped. Then the lord lieutenant, like a red flamingo, came out with the letters and we 373 Mary Stanley (1813-79) converted to Roman Catholicism.

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asked the lord lieutenant’s opinion about the fish, which he said was a good fish, so we bought it. Then he told us there was nothing to pay for the letters as he had made an Englishman, who came for his that morning, pay for the whole batch at once. Behind the lord lieutenant’s door was a post, and to the post was fixed a chain, and the chain went through a door by a hole, to which hole Mr B., applying his face to see what the chain was going to do, saw that it was fastened to the neck of a prisoner inside, who smiled, and Mr B. smiled to show that they were ver y glad to see one another. The prisoner had four friends to chat with him, who were seated on the ground round him.

Source: Claydon Diary

4 Febr uary 1850 Set off at sunset last night but did not make much way owing to the extraordinar y wind. No use however arriving at Thebes by daylight as Thebes from the river was not [to be seen], it was so low. Thebes at noon. Karnak in the afternoon with such a sunset. Luxor on the way for our letters. Source: British Library Diar y

4 Febr uary 1850 Thebes. Finished up all letters. Arrived at Thebes at 12. Karnak. Got our letters from the governor of Luxor. Source: Letter 38, 1854 ed., 176-83, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/21, 22 2/4

Thebes [Wednesday] 6 Februar y 1850 Well, dearest people, here is your daughter really in Thebes, though I can scarcely believe it. How beautiful it is, after the extreme ugliness

326 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions of Egypt and even of our beloved Nubia! How pleasant it is to find oneself in beautiful country once more, in this glorious plain, all surrounded by those violet-coloured hills with rich fields bordering the blue Nile and groves of palm trees and acacias and tamarisks (quite a new sight) overshadowing the ruins of a world. It is not the deathbed of a city which you come to visit here: it is the death of a world. And what a world! As we crossed the river yesterday morning and rode for the first time on the western bank, there she lay, the Libyan suburb; there stood the two colossi, her gigantic portal, there hung the frowning, overhanging cliffs which make the grand western barrier between her two worlds—her world of life and that of death. There is nothing melancholy about this great plain of death (excepting that miserable Luxor) as there is about the rest of Egypt. The people pasture their flocks and herds, and the women walk, spinning, at their heads, and it is more like the old life in the Bible than any very sordid life of poverty. As we sat on the pedestals of the colossi yesterday, they came and surrounded us with great flocks of sheep and goats and a few camels and oxen, but they did not beg or howl. And I heard a baby in a tomb afterwards (most of them live in the tombs) making a pretty little noise, the only pretty noise I have ever heard a human being make in Egypt. There is nothing horrid in this deathbed of Thebes. When I see the evening sun making golden the tips of her violet crown, her amethyst diadem of hills which sits so royally upon her noble brow, the words perpetually come into my head: Her destiny’s accomplished, her time of work is done, She dwelleth in the golden home, her faithful toil hath won. And the pastoral life of the few Arabs here looks more like a new world which is beginning, an infant world springing out of her ashes, than a dying and helpless old age. Well, we climbed up on the pedestals of the colossi and copied a few Greek and Latin inscriptions, which told how, in the times of this emperor or that Ptolemy, I ‘‘Camillus’’ or I ‘‘ΗΜΟ∆ΩΡΟΣ’’ heard the Memnon ‘‘once in the first hour.’’374 But as I am only writing my real and individual impressions, I must confess that I cannot understand people raving about these colossi. The faces are so utterly gone that to 374 It was believed that at sunrise the statue of Memnon, an Ethiopian king, emitted a haunting sound that the Greeks took to be the voice of Memnon, each day greeting his mother Eos, the dawn goddess.

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talk about any expression is absurd, and to compare them with the Ramesses colossi at Abu Simbel is to compare the Torso with the Apollo Belvedere. If size is the object, the Abu Simbel colossi are two feet the biggest, but I don’t see how an ugly thing put into a solar microscope is made handsome. At Thebes one can afford to be disappointed in one thing—even in a great thing—otherwise I should be mad with myself at having felt so little about these colossi. But they are such sightless, shapeless ruins—they look like sightless Lear after the storm, as if the lightning of heaven had rested upon them and made them the awful ruins you see, as if Amenophis had been the author of some fearful secret crime and this was the vengeance of God making all secret things manifest, blighting them with some Macbeth’s doom. However it may stand with poor Amenophis’s conscience, his colossi do not look at all colossal. On the contrary, they look quite in keeping with everything about them, as if they were the natural size of man and we were dwar fs, not they giants.375 One of our Arabs climbed up to the shoulder to take up our tape and looked like a fly perched upon him, a Lilliputian upon Gulliver. While we were pursuing these avocations a large circle of these grave Arabs collected and sat smoking their pipes at the bottom, while the women brought their flocks to come and look at us, walking at the heads of them with their distaffs, which Arab women in Egypt are not much given to. From the colossi we went up to the tombs of Sheikh Abd-el-Qurna376 and went into several. This is the place for fetishism, for visions of Domdaniel,377 of the road to the Città dolente [city of moaning], the gate of the gente perduta [lost people],378 the spot to see images of the dead rising up about you, to see ‘‘the possessed’’ inhabiting the tombs; and verily some of these poor Arab children do look like the possessed. When you have seen these places you no longer wonder that the Egyptian’s word for the Western Region and Hades was the same, that he believed these to be really doors into the next world. I could believe it myself? The private tombs are generally a transept for the entrance and a long narrow chamber running far into the rock 375 Ms 9017/22 2/4: colossal. 376 Calabria, Nightingale, provides historical and archeological information on the various sites described by Nightingale, especially those around Thebes. 377 Domdaniel, from Latin Domus Danielis (Daniel’s house), designates a hard-toned trumpet heard in that part of the underworld where punishment is meted out. 378 From Dante, Inferno Canto III, 1-9.

328 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions behind. The tombs of the kings are passage after chamber, and vaulted hall after chamber and passage, and then hall, chamber and passage over again, which we, who have pored379 over Belzoni in our youth, can well imagine, but which nobody who has not read Belzoni as a child can conceive. But these vaulted halls, deep in the rocky girdle of the earth, what are they like but the entrance to another world? And the heat, the intense heat of them, how unlike this, the stillness and heaviness. But to return to the private tombs in Sheikh Abd-el-Qurna. Every one of them is now inhabited, and you see a wild pair of Arab eyes with the blue whites peering out of the darkness at you. ‘‘Go not among the tombs, there is a wild man there,’’ while the transepts are full of the victories of Tuthmosis III over the Ethiopians, of doura jars and dovecotes, these poor people’s only furniture. You know I am no friend of these tiresome processions and banqueting feasts, the Grandisonian life of these tombs. A funeral procession here and there is most interesting, but you have to look at most of them with candles. Now you see a face, a sculptured face whose earnest expression of intense devotion startles you as the torch glimmers by. It is a king, perhaps, sacrificing, or a priest, or it is the dead man of the tomb in life, with his wife’s arms thrown round him. One tomb which has just been opened, and which Mr B. and I crawled into upon our hands and feet (it has not yet been blackened with torches or cut by names), looks as if it had been painted last week. The white ground with the gilding and colours looks like the most beautiful porcelain. It is too gay to be pretty. After the tombs we went up to Deir el-Bahri,380 the last temple at the foot of the cliff (where it joins the plain) and which even runs far into the cliff, and looked down upon this glorious bier. There were the two colossal ruins of Karnak and Deir el-Bahri on either side the solemn Nile, facing each other, probably connected by a dromos of sphinxes the whole way except where the river divided it: we saw traces of such an avenue for a long distance. If so, it must have been upwards of three miles long: on the Karnak bank, Luxor on its promontor y; on our side, the Ramesseum; below us in the plain, the two colossi; temples and palaces as far as the eye could reach and everywhere, in every 379 Ms 9017/21: gloated. 380 To the information provided by Calabria on all those sites, it may be of interest to add that Deir el-Bahri is the location of the temple of Queen Hatshepsut (1482 bce), discovered in the mid-nineteenth century by A. Mariette and not completely excavated until 1896.

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hill and mound, the square portals showing that it was riddled with tombs within, the worlds of life and death were here so near together. Then we rode town again to the little temple of Kasr e Rubahk near the river. The sculptures in its chambers are beautiful, but I was weary and, while they went over it, I sat down on the broken base of one of the columns in the colonnade in front and watched the sun set. Never did I see so beautiful, so poetic a scene, but no one could draw it, for when Martin or Danby try, how hard it looks. The beauty of it was all new to our Egyptian eyes. Imagine looking abroad through a grove of palm trees and acacias and seeing under them the temples of Luxor on their promontor y, brilliant with the setting sun (such a sun as only Egypt can show), so clear with gems of living light, and behind them those violet mountains (not purple) with a little border of gold, the whole western sky looking like a scene out of the Revelations, so bright with ‘‘celestial jewelry,’’ and the green plain, no longer hard and raw with this background, already in the darkness of twilight. No symptoms of ruin were here: Luxor looked as she might have looked the day she was finished. In that sunset light all signs of decay disappeared and in the stillness of that evening hour, with no sound but that of the flocks and herds going home, I felt like a Theban maiden sitting there in the colonnade of that solitary temple, where she had come for the evening benediction and looking out upon the glories of her native land, fair and fresh in the evening light, and yet sublime at the same time. There she sat, looking up to the attributes of the ‘‘Unknown God,’’ as I too saw them sculptured above me in the colonnade. And (it is astonishing how like the human heart is in all periods and climates—I see the same feelings we have in every sculpture and tomb and temple here), thinking probably very much like me. I felt quite friendly with her. We rode home—our asses took to the water without difficulty and landed us safely in the boat which took us to our own dahabieh. The guide here rides before us on a horse with scarlet housings and high Turkish saddle, carrying a spear. Now and then (all these Arabs, even our cook whom I saw prancing about this morning, ride like centaurs) he takes, partly because a wild fit seizes him, partly for our admiration, a gallop in the plain to the amazing discomfiture of our asses, who mistake him for Balaam’s angel381 and turn their faces out of the way. 381 An allusion to Num 22:23-27.

330 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions I wish I could give you the least idea of the situation of this city, unparallelled in the world, I should think. Imagine a plain about ten miles diameter, surrounded by these lovely hills, a river, at low Nile about twice as wide as the Thames at Westminster; the western mountains’ rocky cliffs with deep precipitous winding valleys, or rather ravines, between them, shaded by overhanging rocks, and without even the coloquintida, much less a blade of verdure among them, fit only for efreets and ghouls to live in the clefts of the rock. They look like the circle of mountains, the abode of the jinn which, we all know, sur rounds the earth, and this within a mile of the city of temples and palaces. In these they buried their kings: surely there never was such a spot by nature fitter for an imperial city. The ‘‘Valley of the Kings!’’ what a scene that name conjures up now in our minds of the great ones of the earth, not lying at rest but stirred up to meet another at his coming. There we spent yesterday in the tombs of Ramesses IV, Ramesses V and the Queen Tarsisi. But what can I compare the plain of Thebes to? The situation of London has a river but it has no hills—and then there are so few grand landmarks in its city, such as Karnak, Medinet Habu, Luxor and the Ramesseum make here. Rome is more like it for its plain and for its great monuments, but then these monuments are concealed from one another by the hills—while here the folds are all gathered up in the girdle and leave the plain smooth and spread out, so that, if it were not for the heaps of rubbish, almost every monument might be seen from every other and all at once from the hills. It is this, I believe, which makes the especial grandeur of the plain, that there is a place to stand from and see it near, and that all is to be seen. No wind visits this great bay; the hills are not near enough to make a draught and high enough to shut it out, and from the moment we came in here it was calm. The boat is going, which takes this letter. Farewell, dear people. 7 Februar y 1850. Source: Claydon Diary

5 Febr uary 1850 Sheikh Abd-el-Qurna all day. After a good look at the colossi and copying their inscriptions, saw tombs numbers 11, 35 (Tuthmosis III’s procession), 12 and the newly opened tomb like porcelain; sat for an hour in the heat of the day under Mr Hay’s mud portico. Rode up to

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Deir el-Bahri and down to temple of Qurna, where I sat looking at the sunset from the steps. 6 Febr uary 1850 Thebes. Tombs of the Kings. Up that narrow Valley of the Shadow of Death to the entrance of Hades. Ramesses IV, Ramesses V and Queen Tarsisi who are about returning at this time from their 3000 years. We visited. The cliff back to the shore over by Deir el-Bahri. Source: British Library Diar y

5 Febr uary 1850 Private tombs of Sheikh Abd-el-Qurna. 6 Febr uary 1850 Valley of the Kings. Source: Letter 39, 1854 ed., 183-89, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/22 1/4, 22 2/4

Thebes [Sunday] 10 Februar y 1850 The Queen’s wedding day, I think—what a long way I do seem from Victoria’s wedding day! Nefertari’s I feel much more at home with. Dearest people, we shall have been a week in Thebes tomorrow, a week of absolute despair, for to come to Thebes for a fortnight is what going to Rome for a fortnight would be. We feel at the end of a week that we know less about it than we did before we came—not that the individual things of Thebes require so much time for (said in the lowest whisper) there is nothing here to compare with Abu Simbel. The Osirides in the Ramesseum [the mortuar y temple of Ramesses II] have not a head among them all, while our Osirides at Abu Simbel had each a headpiece. The colossi are not to be named with the four Ramesses and the sculptures on the outside of Medinet Habu are small and confused. Karnak is such a mass that it perplexes me with its gigantic fall, but at Thebes one feels that detail matters little: it is the grave of a world that one has come to see. The Valley of the Kings seems, though within a mile of Thebes, as if one had arrived at the mountains of Kaf beyond which are only ‘‘creatures unknown to any but God,’’ so deep are the ravines, so high and blue the sky, so absolutely solitary and unearthly, so utterly uninhabitable the place.382 One look at that val382 Ms 9017/22 1/4: If I have told you this before, pardon.

332 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ley would give you more idea of the supernatural, the gate of Hades, than all the descriptions sacred or profane. What a moment it is, the entering that valley where, in those rocky caverns, the vastness and the gloomy darkness of which are equally awful, the kings of the earth lie—each in his huge sarcophagus, with the bodies of his chiefs, each in their chamber, about him—and where, about this time, they are to return to find their bodies (where are they now?) and resume their abode on earth, if purified by their 3000 years of probation, in a higher and better state, if degraded, in a lower. I thought I met them at every turn in those long subterraneous galleries, saw their shades rising from their shattered sarcophagi and advancing once more towards the light of day, which shone like a star, so distant and so faint, at the end of that opening. The dead were stirred up, the chief ones of the earth.383 If their belief is true,384 they are now returning, but they will find that they do not want their bodies (the destruction385 and ruin there will not be so terrible to them as they would have thought it beforehand), for God is able of these stones to raise up bodies386 for them. Well, these pharaohs are perhaps now here again in the body, their 3000 years having just elapsed to some of them, that is, if they have philosophized sincerely or, together with philosophy, have ‘‘loved beautiful forms’’; if not, they are, as we saw one of them, in the form of an animal. If they are but ordinar y beings, I believe Plato thinks that 10,000 years will be the time before they come again.387 But at the end of ever y 1000 years they will be able to choose what life they will have next, and upon this choice depends much of what they would become for, if they choose a philosophically virtuous life three times in succession, at the end of that time ‘‘they recover the use of their wings.’’ But the soul ‘‘which has never perceived the truth cannot pass into the human form.’’ But if I were a pharaoh now, I would choose the Arab form and come back to help these poor people, and I am going tomorrow to a tomb of a Ramesses, 1150 bce, to meet him and tell him so. In the tomb of Ramesses V (the second we went into) we met one who had not been able to choose: he was revisiting the earth in the form of a pig, having lived a sensual life and extinguished within himself the spark of eternal life. At one end of the wall he was slowly mounting into the presence of Osiris. Next, standing before him, himself weighing his own deeds and then being ‘‘found wanting,’’ he was leaving the divine presence in the form of a wretched pig driven by two monkeys. There was nothing ridiculous in this representation of the natural effect of sensuality—you could not laugh—you felt it as the inevitable necessity. If a man has allowed all that is divine (or human) within him to die out, how can it be otherwise? Poor pig! I shall always think of it, if I ever see another pig, which of course one does not here. In the same tomb of Ramesses V (who was one of the XXth Dynasty but not quite late enough for my purpose) there are the Hours, each with a star on her head, to signify the hourly review the deceased king ought to have taken of his life, and which—if he did not during his life—dedicating each hour to the deity, or the occupation, of the hour, he must do when he came to weigh his own deeds before Osiris. You never see these deities in the temples, which shows that they were not intended as divinities to be worshipped, but simply that these Egyptians thought that each hour was worth religiously consecrating to its object: each was a ‘‘genius in itself,’’ ‘‘a fraction of the divine essence which pervaded it.’’ The dead man makes an offering to each in succession. It is curious how entirely without effect the outsides of these tombs are; they are simply doors cut in the cliff, generally with an Isis and a Khnum, the Beginning and the End, cut on each side the cartouche, nothing else. But indeed in all Egyptian buildings you are not less str uck by this—they seem to have thought nothing about effect—their buildings are hardly meant to look at from the outside. The tomb of Ramesses V appears to go an interminable length in the rock, passage after passage, till at last you come to the strange vaulted chamber at the end where, gold and red and black, the ceiling

334 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions is covered with astronomical records, fresh as ever, bright as if just from the alchemist’s hand who seems to have made those magical characters on the roof, in this the centre of the earth, the farthest of Domdaniel’s caves. In the tomb of Ramesses IV the ceiling is painted with the goddess of heaven encircling the firmament with her arms; the figure of a man is upholding her with outstretched hands.388 The sarcophagus stands in the middle, broken and empty, but in this case not overthrown. In that of Ramesses V it lies on its side broken to pieces and the fragments strewn about: how such a block could be broken is the wonder. All these tombs slope rapidly downwards as you go in. I have never seen in all these representations any hint of a belief in repentance; it does not at all follow that it is not there—this language is so new to us. The pre-eminence of the schoolmaster, the spiritual and intellectual teacher, and of his trade above all others, is what recurs to one oftenest in these tombs. The king himself was scarcely equal to the teacher. It is what we have so often sighed for in England when we have said that, till the schoolmaster’s vocation was considered, as it is, the highest after the statesman’s, instead of being, as it is now with us, inconceivable as it sounds, almost infra dig [beneath one’s dignity], the training up the soul almost a lower profession than the curing of the body, education never could prosper in England. Here, in Egypt, the spiritual teachers were before ever ything and above everything. Nay, the king must himself be admitted as one before he could be the rightful monarch, and in their hands was evidently all the education in Egypt. It was a fatal error to these poor Egyptians, but surely it was a noble error. Surely they erred on the right side when they so ennobled their spiritual instructors instead of degrading them; experience only could teach how terrible would be the consequences. Meanwhile, those consequences almost reconcile one to the disrepute of the office of schoolmaster in the country which calls itself the most civilized in the world. We went into one other tomb, that of the last of the XIXth Dynasty, which seemed to have held two kings in succession, for it had two vaulted halls (the last unfinished) divided from one another by long suites of chambers. The first had a gallery round it, as most of them 388 Ms 9017/22 1/4: arms.

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have, divided by square pillars from the hall, the walls covered with sculptures: walking serpents, serpents in coils, covering a whole side, and now and then a funereal subject, the most interesting. All the furniture of the king was painted round this one, which was much less to my taste.389 After seeing three tombs, which was quite enough, we rode over the rock, or rather climbed, for the asses followed us, and down upon Thebes. One day [8 Februar y] we spent in the Ramesseum where lies the granite statue of Ramesses II, broken and overthrown, the wonder of the world and the largest colossus even in Egypt, larger than the Pair, larger than those at Abu Simbel. But here size has almost defeated itself, for it is too large to take in the whole of any part at one time and so destroys its own effect. The most extraordinar y thing in these temples is the union and representation, side by side, of the most vulgar warfare and of the highest state of civilization in private and religious life. After the temple we rode to the Valley of the tombs of the Queens. It is, if possible, more per fect, as a place set apart under the shadow of death, than the Valley of the Kings. It is much smaller, more compact, more shut in, so that you can take in the whole at once with the eye and see that there is no outlet. It is a complete chasm, more than a valley, for you do not enter by the mouth but climb over the sides. At the farthest end, a dark cleft in the rock looks like an entrance into Hades; other outlet you can see none. We were too tired to go into any of the tombs, which I am sorry for now, but they are not worth seeing and the view of the valley is enough. Source: Claydon Diary

7 Febr uary 1850 Medinet Habu. Great court with the coronation. ‘‘Elegant columns,’’ height one foot more than circumference. 8 Febr uary 1850 Thebes. Ramesseum with the Hungarian and the hieroglyphic Don Quixote. 9 Febr uary 1850 The turkey, our watchdog, paraded the beach the whole day in front of the boat keeping off strange dogs and bastinadoing the chickens when they made a noise. No man dared to put him into his coop. 389 Ms 9017/22 1/2: interesting.

336 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: British Library Diar y

7 Febr uary 1850 Wrote home by Howard Galtons. Medinet Habu. I was very poorly and could only sit about. 8 Febr uary 1850 Ramesseum. 9 Febr uary 1850 Trout had her tooth broken, poor soul! Sore throat prevented me [from] going out, but also from doing anything. But I had some pleasant company with Moses over Miss Martineau’s Sinai.390 I had no idea what a philosopher and sincere man he was. 10 Februar y 1850 In bed, but made some use of my day as a pause in this spiritual and intellectual whirlwind. Source: Letter 40, 1854 ed. 189-215, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/19, 21, 22 1/4, 2/4, 3/4

Thebes [Monday] 11 Februar y 1850 Do you want to know how we pass our days, dear people? We rise up early in the morning and are breakfasted perhaps by eight o’clock. Then we cross the water in the ‘‘sandal,’’ which is a small ‘‘dingee’’ [small rowboat], to western Thebes. The asses rush into the water to meet us or the crew carry us ashore; we mount the asses and with a great multitude (for in Egypt every attendant has his ass and every ass his attendant) we repair (preceded by a tall man with a spear, his wild turban coming undone in the wind) like a small army to a tomb. The tomb instantly fills; we suffocate for two or three hours, the guides having, besides, lighted fires and torches therein. When nature can sustain no more, we rush out and goollehs, bread and dates are laid upon a stone. Those who have strength then begin again, till dark, those who have not lie on stones in the valley. Then begins the delightful ride home: the quiet, the silence (except that no Arab is ever silent; the donkey men and the guides talk without one moment’s inter ruption, if it is ten miles or if it is one, the 390 H. Martineau, Eastern Life: Present and Past Pt 2, chap 5, where Moses is presented as a brilliant thinker adapting the best of the ancient Egyptian religion for Judaism.

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whole way home), the sunset tints, the goats coming home, the women spinning at the head, the gamous (the great Nile buffalo) crossing the little branches of the Nile in large herds on their way home, two little children perhaps riding on the neck of the largest, a stray jackal coming out and the Pair looking golden in the western sunlight: the evening picture is all beautiful. Our asses enter the river and slide us into the sandal and home we come to the little fleet of European boats moored under the colonnades of Luxor, which really from the river are almost beautiful. We dine and after dinner, when we are all hung up by the tails like the chameleons, pretending to be dead and waiting for half-past seven or at latest eight to bury us, lo! a dreadful plash of oars or Paolo puts in his head with an abominable grin at our mute misery and says, ‘‘The Hungarian count!’’ or ‘‘The German professor!’’ and so on. Mr B. immediately retires to his own room, whence he is generally heard to snore. Σ and I unwillingly but nobly sacrifice ourselves to our duty, sit up (in the brown Holland dressing gowns we are sure to have on, having been much too tired to dress) and talk. But we never give one drop of tea, which has greatly limited these visitations for, in our street, the doors stand always open and the people have nothing to do but to spend their evenings on board each other’s boat.391 One night, and one night only, we were got out. Captain [Murray], good-natured man, came himself in his sandal and positively392 carried us off; and one day the - - dined with us and, with all the devotion of Arab hospitality which distinguished us, we killed (was it not beautiful of us?) no, not our horse, we had none, but our dog for dinner. I think I told you of our dog: a turkey, ‘‘as big as donkey,’’ as Paolo said. Oh what a loss was there—how he used to walk majestically up and down the beach in front of the boat, which he believed it his duty to guard, bastinadoing the chickens when they made a noise. He killed two cocks the day he died. No man could get him into a coop (the crew were afraid to go near him), yet he never strayed. No dog ever ventured near our boat while he lived. The moment he was dead the hungry Luxor dogs used to come on board ever y night till Mustafa, like Cuddie’s lady, greeted them with boiling water. And, after his death, we never could keep a quail a single night, though our numerous acquaintances kept us well in quails, for our four cats had parties ever y night and bared the larder—and we killed him! 391 Ms 9017/22 1/4: they would do nothing else. 392 Ms 9017/22 1/4: wrapped us up and lifted us off our divan.

338 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions As soon as our guests were gone, sometimes before, we went to bed. Do not think us grown quite savage and uncivilized. It is very hard to be all day by the deathbed of the greatest of your race and to come home and talk about quails or London, What do people come to Egypt for? Without the past, I conceive Egypt to be utterly uninhabitable. Oh, if you were to see the people! No ideas that I had of polygamy come near the fact, and my wonder is now—not that Sarah and Rachel were so bad—but that they were not a great deal worse. Polygamy strikes at the root of everything in woman: she is not a wife, she is not a mother. And in these oriental countries,393 what is a woman if she is not that? In all other countries she has something else to fall back upon. The Roman Catholic woman has a religion, the Protestant has an intellect. In the early Christian, in the old Egyptian time, women had a vocation, a profession, provided for them in their religion, independent of their wifedom: here she is nothing but the ser vant of a man. No, I do assure you, the female elephant, the female eagle, has a higher idea of what she was put into the world to do than the human female has here. I never knew of a religion—ancient or modern—that I could not have some points of sympathy with, but with Islam, how few. As to the climate of Egypt, I don’t understand people raving about it: the excessive change—thermometer drops between 3 and 5 p.m. 393 Ms 9017/22 1/4: religions.

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sometimes 33°, in the twenty-four hours perhaps 70°, and the wind never warm though often hot, . I suppose you have some idea of Karnak—more at least than I can ever give you—of the vast propylaea, looking towards the river. Then the immense propylaeum area—so vast that a moderate-sized temple, built by Ramesses III into one side scarcely disturbs the eye—then two propylaea ruined from top to bottom, vast stone quarries, then the Hall of Columns, of which no one can speak: they are like him to whom they are dedicated, ‘‘ineffable.’’ Then comes a transept, gone all but394 one obelisk. The pair was placed there by Tuthmosis I, whose cartouche I saw upon it, every line as clear as the day it was cut. This part is much older than the Hall of Columns. Then comes another transept and another pair of obelisks; one is standing, raised by Queen Mephra (Amun neit gori, wrongly called) to the memory of her father Tuthmosis I and mother Amense. Mephra reigned successively for her two brothers, Tuthmosis II and III, who were successively engaged in driving out the Hyksos. The latter only finally expelled them from Egypt, whence they went to Palestine and were called Philistines. On the prostrate obelisk I could read the names of Mephra and her youngest brother Tuthmosis III (though it lies in fragments): perhaps it was a memorial of her gratitude for his success. She seems to have been a gallant regent and a loving sister. Then come the sanctuary and ruins innumerable, behind the sanctuar y, the oldest part of the temple, built by Osirtasen I of the old empire and the XIIth Dynasty, 2775 bce,395 carefully preser ved by the new empire, and older by more than 1000 years than all the rest of Karnak or Thebes. Then comes the columnar temple of Tuthmosis III, the place where his invaluable table of Karnak (now at Paris), which gives the lists of kings, his ancestors, was found. Pylons and accessor y temples, enough to make one desperate, extend beyond the temenos [the sacred enclosure]. I suppose you know that on [in] Karnak is the famous sculpture of Sheshonq, of the XXIInd Dynasty, opposite him the god holding Rehoboam by a string, among other prisoner kings. There could be no doubt of it, I could read the letters on his cartouche quite plain, 394 Ms 9017/22 1/4: the bases of its Osirides and. 395 Today the Old Kingdom is dated 2700-2190, the XIIth Dynasty 1991-1786 and the New Kingdom 1552-1069 bce.

340 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions iouda melek, King of Judah. Oh, I was so sick of it—people seemed to think it a holy pilgrimage, like a visit to Jerusalem, to go and look at it. I suppose I have been there fifty times with different people and we don’t know anything which makes Rehoboam so very interesting to us outside of the Bible except that he begat twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters, a wicked old pig, he and his father, both. But people seemed to think that Rehoboam was the only thing that was true and that all the rest of Karnak was the work of the Phookas or something worse, the devil perhaps. At last I hated Rehoboam as I did the devil and vowed I would go no more. Besides that Egyptian history, not396 religion, ceases to be interesting long before Sheshonq the Bubastite’s time. So enough of Rehoboam. I possess an antiquity, though, which I really do value, an official seal of the time of Ramesses the Great, my hero, with his cartouche upon it. An undoubted reality.397 Who will dare to open letters sealed with the great Ramesses’ own seal? Now I must go to délasser myself [relax] at his Ramesseum, which, not so overpowering as Karnak, is yet grand enough to be awful, beautiful enough to be pleasant and large enough to hide one. How many hours I have sat in that small hall of the eight columns, where the sacred library of Hermes’s books was laid up, and felt as much reverence as ever Egyptian did before those treasures, which trained the men who trained Moses, who trained the world: those books which taught us—us whom the Egyptians had never heard of—the name of God. On the walls are four sacred boats or shrines, familiar to us through Moses’ imitation of them in the Ark and Tabernacle. The two foremost are the shrines of Mut (mother) or Nature, and Khonsu (Hercules) or Strength; the two behind are of Ramesses II and his beloved Nefertari (the good Ari) his wife. They are all coming to do homage to Amun, the Unknown God. (Amun, as you know, only means ‘‘Come,’’ as Hecataeus398 tells us, and is therefore a mere name of entreaty or love for the God whose real name was too sacred to be pronounced, who was, as Manetho says, the ‘‘Concealed God.’’399) The shrines are 396 Ms 9017/19: art. 397 Ms 9017/19: antiquity. 398 Hecataeus (d. c476 bce), Greek historian and geographer, especially interested in tracing genealogies back to their mythical origins. 399 Plutarch, Moralia V.9, referring to Manetho, ‘‘The Sacred Book.’’

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distinguished by the heads of their respective masters at the prow, and each is making a prayer. Khonsu says, ‘‘We come towards thee to serve thee; grant a stable and pure life to thy son (Ramesses) who loves thee.’’ Having thus introduced the hero, Ramesses simply says, ‘‘I come to my father.’’ But his queen’s prayers for her hero are much longer. The good Ari says, ‘‘I come to do homage to my father; my heart is joyful with the love thou bearest me; I am in joy when I consider thy benefits. O, thou who establishest the seat of thy power in the dwelling of thy son (Ramesses), grant him purity and stability.’’ It is rare to see any but spiritual prayers on Egyptian walls. On the roof of the library is the celebrated astronomical ceiling which decides, by the Sothis cycle, the heliacal rising of the dog star, the date of the death of Ramesses, 1322 bce.400 I am not able to throw any increased light on that question to an inquiring British public. Having immolated myself for your instruction, I will therefore leave the broken fragments of my wretched neck on the spot and proceed to worship Thoth, my beloved Thoth, to whom the Egyptians religiously ascribed all their discoveries and all their writings, which the stupid vainglorious moderns have misinterpreted into worshipping a god Thoth and believing that he wrote books. Thoth was the Intellect of God, not as regards creation but ‘‘the arbiter of the human heart and intelligence.’’ As regards his intercourse with us, Amun calls him ‘‘Soul of my soul, sacred Intelligence of my intelligence.’’ How beautiful and how true then is the attributing by the Egyptians of all their books to Thoth. Socrates vowed a cock to Aesculapius at his death401 to explain to us that now he was well, and we have taken it for a truckling to the spirit of the times. The Egyptians called their writings the writings of Thoth, because they would take no honour for them to themselves, and we have accused them of the grossest idolatry. What they meant precisely by their triads and incarnations, I suppose our age is not metaphysical enough to find out; Champollion402 is too obscure about it but I believe he thinks that every attribute of the Deity, as it manifested itself in different relations or on different objects, may be said to put on different incarnations— 400 Ramesses I died in 1318, Ramesses II in 1237. 401 See Plato, Phaedo 115a-18a. 402 Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie 155-56.

342 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions that thus every divine quality passed through various ‘‘transformations.’’ Thoth, for instance, was the last incarnation of Hor-hat or Hor us, the Divine Wisdom. The first ‘‘transformation’’ was Pait noufi (the ‘‘good-hearted’’). This is very intelligible to us, that the first manifestation of wisdom should be goodness. Another was Mooi (thought or reason). This may perhaps mean that the greatest work ad extra of benevolent wisdom was our power of reasoning. The last was Thoth, or the intercourse of the divine reason with ours. This is beautiful, I think. So Osiris was the incarnation of Amun Ra, and Isis of Mut. All this was embodied in the myth that Osiris and Isis were sent to earth to civilize the human race after the ‘‘reorganization of the physical world,’’ i.e., the fall. Thoth was to assist them, to ‘‘teach men the way to return into the bosom of God.’’ He taught them to speak, to write; he promised ‘‘to make them gentle, to give mankind403 pr udence, temperance, obedience and love of truth.’’ (Did he?) On the door of the Ramesseum library is written the famous title, ‘‘Cure of the Soul.’’ But more philosophical than we, the myth does not make Thoth’s business to draw mankind out of a ‘‘fall’’ but out of an ‘‘infancy.’’ I have called it a fall, but the Egyptians believed the world not ‘‘fallen’’ but infant. Osiris, Isis and Horus (or Thoth404) were the representation of the Trinity in its connection with the human part of the creation. But you will wonder how Isis could be Mut and Neith too. Neith was the type of moral power, as Thoth was of intellectual power. The myth of her birth from Amun is that, before creation began, she was one with Amun: that then ‘‘God smiled and nature was, for immediately from his voice (what a beautiful idea! from the immaterial voice, the very echo of God’s soul) proceeded a being perfectly beautiful, Nature, and the Father of all things made her fruitful.’’ Some think that Mut (mother) was no individual goddess but the title of all. And now it is easy to understand Champollion’s idea that all the triads were but links in a chain. These triads had to explain all the phenomena of the moral, intellectual and physical worlds: they were to embrace, as it were, all that we perceive spiritually or naturally. The third member of each triad was the result, physical or spiritual. The two first members were the causes: the one the positive cause, the other the negative, so to speak. Of the different triads, one or two members were 403 Ms 9017/22 3/4: the humans. 404 Ms 9017/22 2/4: or Khonsu.

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often the same, because different attributes, working on the same negative substance, will produce different results. Hathor, the principle of beauty, is the second of more than one triad. Thus all the gods were but a circle of forms of Amun and Mut. These triads were linked together by metaphysical alliances, the last of one triad being often the first of the next or the result becoming a second cause, and the temple of the place was probably dedicated to that triad or to those distinct portions of the Divine Being which had had most effect upon it individually. Osiris, Isis and Horus, the triad manifested on earth, was the last of the chain, which then merges again with Amun, Mut and Khonsu. Horus, the ‘‘support of the world’’ (or ‘‘heavenly science’’), seems to be the origin of the Greek Eros or love. With him the chain was completed and Horus, by the triad of Kalabshah, of which he was the first, becomes Amun again, for Amun was the Α and Ω. But where was I? sitting on a stone in the eight-columned hall of the Ramesseum. There is a harmony in the Ramesseum, which you do not find anywhere else in Thebes: it is so compact, so well proportioned, so intelligible—it is the very image of grace in strength, and strength in harmony. I thought perpetually there of the ethical triad, the intellect acting on the will and the result being harmony. It is not that the intaglios are particularly beautiful—they are not—but the whole is so beautiful. At first you are rather disappointed: is that all that people have talked so much about? But every day you admire it more and more, while every day you like Medinet Habu less and less. It is just on the edge of the desert, the tombs being immediately behind, taking up no superfluous ground, not trenching on the cultivated land. Oh, bright Ramesseum, how like the spirit of thy builder thou art! He never spent time in superfluous words, I am sure, the compact, energetic, muscular-minded man—not an artist like his father—a warrior, a devout spirit and a philosopher, but not a mystical one—not such good company as his father—but a brave honest heart and a learned head. I feel more acquainted with him than I do with Seti, and he was so fond of his wife and his father and his grandfather, who no doubt deserved it well. He was a bit of a littérateur too, it is evident, as indeed all the kings were, for they were obliged to be skilled in all the wisdom of the priests (the most learned body of the world of any age), before they could become kings—it being the maxim of the Egyptians that the nation was not made for the king but the king for the nation. All the occupations of the king were therefore laid down by law. He was to

344 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions rise early, to per form all the business of the nation from daybreak till the third hour; then he proceeded to the temple and performed the sacrifice, when the high priest read him a sermon on the duties of kings, and so on. He was to have no servants about him, but only such sons of the priests as had profited the best by their education, that he might have none to minister to his caprices. The law was to will for him and he was to have no power but by the law. He was to drink no wine—his very diet was regulated for him by law and how long he was to sleep. Everything in Egypt, Diodorus says,405 was calculated and regulated for the public good. A little too much calculated and regulated, and a good deal too much done for them. However, it certainly was wonderful what kings they turned out—at their deaths any man might accuse them and deprive them of burial. As Diodorus says, the state never could have lasted so long, defying time and its usual regulations, if it had not been for these laws. In Egypt the law was king and the king was only the first subject of the law. Another digression from the Ramesseum: before the entrance into the Great Hall of Assembly sat the two small (or ‘‘young’’) black granite statues, now overthrown, of Ramesses (of which we have one head in the British Museum). I marked his tail and wished he had his head again. The other head stands broken off upon its chin. The wondrous colossus, which sat before the entrance into the inner propylaeum, the great (or old) granite statue, is nothing but a ruin. But how I have sat and peopled and rebuilt those ruins. How beautifully one evening the setting sun streamed in among those columns and the mound of Medinet Habu in the west looked like an acropolis or anything but the dirty ruined crowd of huts it is. And I saw Ramesses descending on the beams of his beloved Ra, now really the ‘‘tried’’ and purified ‘‘of Ra,’’ to see what his temple was doing after this long lapse of years. Those three kings, the grandfather, father and son—the poet, the artist, the philosopher—are at last returning now, their thirty hundred years of trial done. How altered they will find their Thebes, the Thebes they loved and dressed with the most precious things they had, the Thebes they worshipped with such true devotion, but with what various thoughts each will look upon her desolation. The poet will sit down at Karnak before those two long lines of propylaea, her outspread hands, and will say, Behold her stretching 405 Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library Book 1 ‘‘On Egypt,’’ chaps 43 and 70. See the new edition of Book 1 by E. Murphy, Diodor us on Egypt 58, 91.

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out her arms for pity, which there is none to give. Is there any desolation like unto her desolation?406 Look at her, the queen of the earth, the mother of philosophy, the mistress of learning. And look at her children now, naked and whooping in their brutal glee, and she, of mothers most forlorn and hopeless, must see them destroying the wisdom they cannot understand, stoning the mute teachers which fain would show them her lessons. Oh, my Thebes, he will cry, thy glory is set, thy sun of wisdom which seemed too high ever to set, too bright to be extinguished, too much thy own ever to fall out of thy sky—for it was not the glory of a few great men who lived by accident and died again—it was the glory of a wisdom which had stood the test of ages, which had civilized the world. The sun is setting now, but he will rise again tomorrow, but thy sun—when will he ever rise again? Thou art gone! thy sapphire crown of hills is still here, but where is the head it once encircled? Thou art no more! The voice of thy wise men is silent and the nations they have educated; are they who lend thee the falsest fables. I know thy face again, my Thebes, even in death, but thy eyes are closed, thy glorious eyes, Karnak and Deir el-Bahri, never to open more. Thy voice will be heard no more. My God! why didst Thou make aught so divine, so truly allied to Thee, subject to time? Thou takest away Thine own glory when Thou destroyest Thebes, for did we not ascribe all to Thee? The glory, philosophy, religion of Thy world, all in one, depart with her. Fair Thebes, old wisdom, but still ever young, canst thou have died? Thy beauty passed away to the dark long home? ‘‘Thou shouldst have died hereafter.’’407 Canst thou be, like thy kings, gone to the valley of the silent tombs? The men whom thou hast taught may pass away, but thou shouldst never die. Oh! that I could have died for thee, my Thebes, my beloved! We may die, but what hast thou to do with death? We were willing—we joyfully bowed our heads and were subject unto death—but thou, thou shouldst have been eternal, thou glorious Thebes. But no—to that destruction which sooner or later overtakes all, never again to enlighten the world by thy wisdom, never to see listening sages at thy feet again, thy glory is gone. Thy temples shall be lighted no more; thy words shall no more be read. The glory is departed from thee. Bow thy head in the dust, for dust doth cover thy most 406 A possible allusion to Isa 24:12 or Joel 3:19. 407 A paraphrase from Macbeth Act 5, scene 5.

346 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions beautiful forms and the canker doth eat away thy wisdom. Look up no more while there is a sun in heaven to see thy shame and light up thy nakedness, for there is no pity [that] can heal thy sorrows, nor compassion for griefs like thine. Tears do but mock a death like thine and there is no grave [that] can hide the corpse of a giant like thee. The artist sat down before Thebes and, seeing her still dressed in her amethyst crown and golden diadem, in her richest hues of even and her softest opal tints of morn, and perceiving her temples to be more beautiful far now in their ruins, when the sunlight streams in among their columns and the colours are softened by time, than when all was enclosed in wall and roof, bare unrelieved lengths of stone, unvaried except by sculpture, letting in no golden sunbeam nor deep shadow. He cried, Give me my Thebes as she is now, for she is lovelier far in her desolation than ever she was in her pomp and pride. I am glad that I see thee again and that I see thee thus, my noble Thebes. Last of all the three returned Ramesses the philosopher: he neither wept like the poet at the unparallelled ruin before him, the death of a world, nor sat down contented like the artist with the sunsets and the tints of a land which once spoke with the tongues of angels—which understood all mysteries408 and taught them to the universe. But he said: Her work is done on earth, her task is over; her heaven and her earth may pass away, the forms of her gods and the stones of her temples, but her words, her ideas, shall not pass away.409 She is gone to a purer sphere, to perfect the ideas she had here so well begun. She had gleaned all the experience this earth could give. She needed another: she must be adding memory to memor y now, she must be gleaning from the storehouse of the future as well as the past. And as thou lookest down upon the children of men, thy joy must be full, for thou seest Europe which knows not thee and countries which remember not thy name rich in the knowledge thou hast won for them. And where thy very existence is forgotten, thy inheritance still lives; thou seest of the travail of thy soul and art satisfied.410 Joy for thee! The Deity, which here thou didst represent under ugly forms which, with all thy care, were misunderstood and thy religion perverted, He now is present to thy soul without form, to thy thought without word. 408 An allusion to 1 Cor 13:1-2. 409 A paraphrase of Matt 24:35. 410 A paraphrase of Isa 53:11.

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Who shall presume to pity thee, who hast so well accomplished thy destiny? As well might we sit over against the tomb of Calvary and sigh, Pity He lived not longer! Would that we could all say as truly as thou, It is finished!411 Farewell! I am glad that I have seen thee, my beloved, my Thebes. I am content, my God. I thank thee for the law of change by which, while the first idea, the ideal of Divine goodness knows no variableness nor shadow of turning,412 the forms which manifest it know no continuance: they perpetually put on new shape. Would the eye perceive the ray except by the constant vibrations it causes on the air? Would the ideal be understood except by the various manifestations under which it shows itself? Even so, Thebes is no more, but her death is a step in progress. Would our old father Nile make fruitful the earth, would he know no stagnation, did he not flow on perpetually? Would not man cease to perceive, did not the variety of phenomena call forth his attention to the one idea? Lord, I thank Thee that we are forgotten and Thou remainest, and with Thee every good and ever y per fect thing. To Ramesses, I am sure, Karnak is neither a heart-rending thing of grief, nor a subject for an evening sketch, but a deep initiation into the manner by which the world progresses and learns. Probably Egypt will never rise again, what matter? Her ideas live in the meanest intellect for whom she has done her work in Europe. Greece has carried on her work better than she could have done it. Italy added her hand (in the cinque cento) [in the sixteenth century]. England gave another touch. Germany is perfecting it. America will some day take up the chisel. Egypt gave the philosophy, Greece the beauty, Italy the imagination, England the reasoning, Germany the love of truth to this matchless Promethean statue which America will one day animate with Promethean fire. Do not let us regret the fall of Egypt. She does not complain (the sun still shines bright through her roofless wall), why should we? She has taught the world the finest lesson the world could ever learn, that philosophy without a ‘‘res publica’’ [political order] was worth nothing, that the purest religion with priestcraft would corrupt—a lesson which Plato’s genius was not slow to learn, when he said that common sense was the sense of the common interest—a les411 An allusion to John 19:30. 412 An allusion to Jas. 1:17.

348 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions son which Moses had learnt before him and which, long ere this, the Egyptian priests who were sincere (at least) in their priestcraft have acknowledged.

One evening and one morning I have spent at that exquisite little temple of Qurna, and each time more in love with it. I cannot describe the beauty of its position, with its crown of palm trees, its long low portico, with lotus columns, with a few (not many, nor confused) of those beautiful simple bas-reliefs representing Seti I pouring libations before the gods of the future state in honour, no doubt, of his father, or the great Ramesses kneeling before the gods, his grandfather (‘‘justified’’) looking on at his reception among them—for this temple was built by Seti I to his father Ramesses I’s memor y and finished by his son Ramesses II to his. The names of Ramesses II and his father are lovingly enclosed in the same asp frame on the columns which I have never seen elsewhere. And the dedication says, ‘‘The friend of truth, the tried of Ra, has executed these works in honour of his father Amun Ra and completed the palace of his father Seti.’’ This palace temple, or rather the Great Hall (into which you enter from the portico), supported by its six lotus columns, served for popular purposes as well as religious and regal. Here the tribunals of justice sat, here the great assemblies were held, the object of which is unknown to us, but over which only the king could preside (and president of which was his highest title on earth), and here politics, the incarnation of religion, had her discussions. Upon the steps of that colonnade I have sat for hours, moving with the shadow of the columns as it turned with the sun and looking out upon that matchless view under the different lights: the distance to the west over the green cornfields, then the palm garden, then the eastern hills on the other side the river, then more palms and, between their stems, the great colonnade of Luxor on its promontor y, which 413 An allusion to John 3:31.

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becomes higher and higher as the Nile sinks rapidly, and which one night was like a colonnade of chrysophrast shafts in the sunset; then more grove and, under it, a tall black veiled figure moving among the palms with a vase upon her head, and here the birds sing—the first I have heard in Egypt—and there is water and sakias. This temple is the only place in Thebes I really cared for, for it is impossible to love Thebes: one stands in awe of her, one feels a wonder-stricken reverence before this marble headless statue of the philosopher of the world, but not a tender respect as for Philae and Abu Simbel. There is no place I wish to linger in, there nothing I can love, except perhaps this little temple of Qurna. We have been most unlucky in our weather at Thebes. The sunsets I can reckon up: one the first night at Karnak, one the second at Qurna, one at the Ramesseum, one more at Karnak and that is all in three weeks. And for the ugliness of a sandstorm give me the orangest fog in London, and I don’t think it is uglier.414 We have been anchored for three weeks within a hundred yards of Luxor and I have been up to the temple but once, it is such an odious place. We climbed into the adytum, which is like an oblong box set on end, and into a number of dark chambers. All the old part is built by that Amenophis III, the Memnon of the colossi, the great conqueror who carried his arms into Mesopotamia, during which time his mother Maut-m-Skoi was regent. The prettiest feature in the temple is the infinity of chambers dedicated to her and the number of times she occurs in the sculptures. Two figures of Nilus, one red to indicate the inundation, one blue the subsided river, present the infant Amenophis and the infant god Haska (one of the minor protecting triad of Thebes) to Amun, the mother being present. Everything about the temple seemed to speak of Amenophis’s devotion to nature, to the principles of nature and natural affection—you seldom see Nilus in so conspicuous a position—his immense conquests seem to contradict this, but I believe Alexander was a very similar character, or would 414 Ms 9017/22 2/4: My dear people, this is a very stupid letter, but if I had found a letter at Qena, it would have given me a fillip and, I am sure, it would have been much less stupid. Write next to Care of Rev John Hill, Athens, although I think it is only ‘‘for the honour of the thing’’ I give you a direction. We shall go to Syra, hear there from the consul whether the Athens row is quite over (probably it is so even by this time), if not, go to Marseilles or Trieste from Syra, which is the rendez-vous for all the steamers.

350 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions have been, if he had lived, like Amenophis, to be old. The sculptures are nothing—art had not yet reached its simplicity. Amenophis III was only the great-grandson of Tuthmosis III. The propylaea were added by the great Ramesses with the two obelisks and four colossal sitting statues of himself in front. One basrelief of the enemy’s camp, and him taking it, is curious, but those battle pieces are so tiresome. That the Egyptians believed, like the Jews, that they were really building a habitation for the Lord in a temple, is evident from the dedications where the king entreats the god to come and take up his abode in the house he has prepared for him. In that same chamber of Amenophis you see Thoth choosing his name for him, ‘‘Lord of Justice,’’ a mistake as old as the world and as young as our time, to suppose oneself called to a power one has not, to do a thing which is not one’s business.415 There is something in Karnak so expressive of him to whom it was dedicated (Amun, the ‘‘Concealed God’’) that one begins to think, as I have often thought in St Peter’s, that architecture is the only way to speak of Him, the best mode of religious expression. Hermes Trismegistos says, ‘‘It is difficult to thought to conceive God and to the tongue to speak of Him. One cannot describe by material means an immaterial thing and what is eternal can be allied but with difficulty to what is subject to time. The one passes, the other always exists. The one is a perception of the spirit; the other, which is known by the eyes and the senses as visible bodies, can be expressed by language. But what is incorporeal, invisible, immaterial, without form, God—I understand that God is ineffable.’’416 This is so true, yet less ‘‘ineffable’’ by 415 Ms 9017/22 1/2: There were seventeen boats at Thebes. European: three Northampton boats; one Mr Murray and his brother; one Hungarian; one Lord Lincoln; one Guthrie (odious woman!); one hawagee boat (Mr Feetham of the stoves, I think, I liked him much); etc. But we managed to steer clear of everybody—they troubled not us, nor we them. I attribute a great deal to not giving tea of an evening (we should have had a crowd ever y night), but as we never gave them anything to eat, they gradually fell off. The Murrays dined with us once and their boat was a perfect coffee room. We kept a watchdog too, in the form of a turkey, which terrified ever ybody. Farewell, dearest people. Let the letters to Athens be directed not to me but to C.H. Bracebridge Esq., care of Rev John Hill, with a little F. in the corner (for fear, with my name, there should be a mistake and me lose the letter). 416 Stobaeus, Anthologium: Hermetic Excerpts, Excerpt I in Scott and Ferguson, eds., Hermetica 1:380-81.

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architecture than by any other mode of expression. St Peter’s and Karnak are the only two worthy expressions of ‘‘Him that is ineffable’’ which I have ever seen, yet how different: Karnak, an expression of His thought, St Peter’s, of His action; Karnak, of the philosophizing appreciation of the Deity, St Peter’s, of the moral; Karnak leads to meditation, St Peter’s to emotion. Each so like its religion: Karnak, like the thoughtful metaphysical Egyptian faith; St Peter’s, like the fervent Roman Catholic. In Karnak you think; in St Peter’s you feel. In that intricate hall of columns you see how the Egyptian has thought out, through the mazes and difficulties and intricacies with which the government of the earth is full to our minds, the Deity who would answer to the phenomena he saw, the attributes which would explain those difficulties. In the long uninterrupted space through which the worshipper of St Peter’s looks from the door to the altar, from the altar up to heaven, you see how the feeling, unthinking, ardent heart has rushed at once to its Creator, careless of all problems which it has regarded as temptations to its faith and has left to a devil to solve. The Egyptian loved his God with all his mind, the Roman Catholic, with all his heart. The Egyptian would never have made a missionary, I suspect; the Roman Catholic has never made a philosopher. The Egyptian mind, with its satire and subtlety, reminds one of Pascal417 and shows, as he did, how truly earnestness may be allied with these. How Karnak contradicts all the tales that have been fabricated by Greeks and Romans about Egypt. ‘‘Oh, Egypt, Egypt,’’ says Hermes (in the prophetic spirit of Ezekiel), ‘‘a time will come when in the stead of a pure religion and a pure worship, thou shalt have no longer aught but foolish fables, incredible to posterity, and there shall remain to thee no more than words graven on stone, the only monuments which shall attest thy piety.’’418 But they do attest her piety. The very name of the king who built Karnak is unknown: one reads it Seti, another Osirei, a third Mernaptah; what does it signify to him now? The ideas she has left us are imperishable: on his monument alone remains, uninjured and legible, that much-denied truth, which he has embodied by causing himself to be represented with the Good and Evil alike pouring life upon him. I have never said anything about the private tombs. They are vexation of spirit, for they have been cruelly mauled. One in 417 Blaise Pascal (1623-62), French mathematician and religious thinker. 418 Asclepius III.25, in Scott and Ferguson, eds., Hermetica 1:342-43.

352 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Sheikh Abd el-Qurna had interminable processions of tribute bearers419 presenting themselves to Tuthmosis III, 1557 bce,420 the king of the Exodus, according to Bunsen. But, ‘‘caro Totmose, che fate là?’’ [dear Tuthmosis, what are you doing there]? I do not know what business he has there, as it is a private tomb, and I think the owner had much better have been engaged in saying his prayers than in thinking of his sovereign’s glories and his workmen and manufactories. But, as Lepsius says, what an irresistible ‘‘Trieb’’ [propensity] these Egyptians seem to have had to work for history, when they made their graves into a book of trades!

I bring home some little figures found in the tombs. Each carries a hoe in one hand and a bag of seed in the other, the arms are crossed on the breast, in imitation of Osiris, whose name the dead took. The old Egyptian idea of the resurrection of the body seems to have been ver y like St Paul’s. The body was the seed. The hieroglyphs on the little mummied figure are ‘‘Let all that the deceased has done be reckoned and told: how he has dug the fields, sown the fields, watered from the wells and brought the grain of the west to the east.’’423 This is a quotation from Hermes Trismegistos, out of the Book of the Dead, which gives the three parts of the dead man’s course: the first the poems, hymns and prayers offered for the departed in the stage before burial; the second, those offered by him in Hades, after his soul’s separation from the body, when he endures many trials and sufferings; the third after soul and body are reunited in heaven. One of the prayers of the dead is that his name may germinate in heaven by the divine sun. In one of the king’s tombs, Osiris is rising again out of a heap of corn seed. One of the last days of our Theban stay, Mr B. and I rode round the whole of the Libyan suburb past Medinet Habu, past a little Ptolemaic temple beyond and all round the site of the immense ancient lake [Birket Habu] over which the dead were fer ried and which is now only marked by the mounds which were once thrown up in its excavation. The distance was longer than we thought. The sun set, there was no moon and it became dark. But just at twilight we came to the most per fectly desolate spot I could have conceived: an utterly arid mound of sand, strewed with whitened bones of men, little depressions showing in the sand where once they had been buried. It looked like a cursed place, as if no foot but a vulture’s claw had pressed it for thousands of years and the dew of heaven had never visited it. These were the graves of those who had been refused burial for some act of violence or treacher y, some secret crime which had been brought to light against them, when the Forty-two sat in judgment by the shores of the Sacred Lake. There they were thrown into the ground and there they seemed to have lain whitening ever since. I am sure it never entered into the heart of man to conceive of so desolate a place, and if there their spirits were doomed to wander, it must have been a weary tramp. One or two of their bones we could not help bringing home. Deir el-Bahri is the most beautiful position in Thebes and the strongest, backed by the Libyan cliff and overlooking from its heights the whole plain and the river. It was built by Tuthmosis III, fifteen centuries and a half before Christ, that Tuthmosis who finally drove the Hyksos from Egypt and expelled them from Avario, their stronghold (which was twice as large as Aurelian Rome), out of which they marched 240,000 men into Syria with all that they had. This was the Tuthmosis, too, under whom the Israelites slaved and suffered. And curious similarities struck me at every turn between the doctrines they after wards professed and his, if we are to judge from the small remains left of his mighty temple: the glor y of God; God, a God of hosts and battles; His object to slay and exterminate His enemies, the only difference being that Tuthmosis exterminated the invaders of Egypt and the Israelites were themselves the invaders. The great and universal mistake about God seeking His own glory seemed to me to have inspired that temple, set out, as it were, upon a tray to make a show. The king’s name, regenerate of Thoth, who was ‘‘intellectual strength,’’ reminds one also of Khonsu who was the representative of created things, of strength in general, and Thoth and Khonsu were the same attributes; he seems, indeed, to have been a worshipper of physical and intellectual strength. In the old part of Karnak, next door to the sanctuary, he represents himself offering to the ‘‘unknown God’’ the two obelisks and all the ser vice of the temple, the number of each thing which he gives written under each (dishes 244, other ditto 300, rings 214, vessels 94), with the sign of gold over the gold ones, that the god might not mistake them for plated, and the number for fear he should not be able to count. A ground plan of the temple which he dedicates follows. Some of the vases are beautiful, quite classical. One hardly knows whether to admire or to smile: to admire the richness of the gift dedicated by the king not to making himself but the god a palace (in those days people built temples, not palaces. And I must say, if it is a mistake, it is a much finer mistake to beautify and magnify God’s house rather than your own), or to smile at the anxiety of Tuthmosis that the god should understand and value his gift. Thy glor y, O God, and a little of my own too, lo! a very little. I always think

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how abundant must be the vanity of those people who think God is so fond of His glory, but we all judge each his God by himself and think He likes what we like ourselves. The numbers I noted down on the spot for for the oddity of the thing . In the sanctuary of Deir el-Bahri (the only part which remains because hewn in the living rock), Tuthmosis is making an offering to his deceased ancestor Tuthmosis I. Another similarity with the Jews, who are always raving about their ancestors, the God of their ancestors, and indeed, before Christ, no nation seems to have risen to the idea of a God of the whole world. Have we now? Do we not still believe England to be His chosen nation? Tuthmosis has surpassed all the kings of Egypt in the multitude of his temples. One day we went through the huge fragments which lie prostrate and half buried behind the Pair. There are above eighteen colossi whose enormous limbs lie strewn about. In a direct line, some hundred yards behind the two, are two gigantic stelae, with their faces to the earth, some thirty feet long, covered with inscriptions, most delicately cut. Champollion424 says these were probably the backs of the seats of two other colossi now buried under the earth and that all these enormous fragments belonged to a building called the Amenophium, built by that Amenophis III whose portrait the Pair represents. These must have stood before the front propylaea as the four statues of Ramesses II before Abu Simbel. The deposits of the inundations are gradually immuring in muddy forgetfulness these consecrated fragments as effectually as ever nun was walled up in convent wall. By the space covered with these vast blocks the Amenophium must have been at least as large as Karnak. At the side of the Pair, in the same block, is the mother of Amenophis, the same representation that you see in the temple of Luxor.

424 Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie 305-12.

356 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions I wish you could see Lady M[arian] A[lford]’s drawings.425 She has made a sketch of the colossi by sunset, which is worthy of Amenophis himself; it is quite heroic. I never saw anything finer than her daring dashes of gamboge and vermilion; her genius is really Homeric.426 Source: British Library Diar y

11 Februar y 1850 Did not go out, but the demon of dreaming had possession of my weakened head all the morning. Wrote a little letter for the American boat, but could not do much. Source: Letter 41, 1854 ed. 215-21, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/20, 22 2/4, 22 3/4 and 9018/9

[Thebes] [Tuesday] 12 Februar y [1850] Ugly Medinet Habu, how I hate you with your gaudy colours, your squat columns as round as they were high, your coronation scenes more vulgar than Hayter’s,427 more profane than his ‘‘Communion of the Queen,’’ your modern-looking three-storeyed palace, not forming a part of the temple, as if it belonged to the king to live there as minister of the gods, but stuck up in front like an impudent Blenheim428 porter’s lodge—as if to say no one comes in here but by paying twentyfive shillings or three enemies’ heads—its very balconies made of captives’ heads, not like the work of the great Ramesses but that of a common pacha tyrant, his battle pieces represented in the very area of the temple, not decently exiled to the outer walls as at Karnak; the king’s chariot, with three prisoners tied under the axle, a piece of savage cr uelty you never see elsewhere, degrading the very sacred place. If Karnak is the St Peter’s of Egypt, Medinet Habu is its Madeleine.429 It is just such a temple as Napoleon would have built and the apotheosis of that vulgar tyrant in La Madeleine is not more indecent nor 425 Marian Alford (1817-88), artist and art patron. 426 Ms 9017/21: I wish you would write one line to William Evans and tell him what use his map has been to us at Thebes, unspeakable use. I do not know what we should have done without it. We could not have borrowed it, for of the seventeen boats at Thebes no one had one, but this of his. 427 An allusion to Hayter’s ‘‘Coronation of Queen Victoria.’’ See above. 428 Blenheim palace, home of the Duke of Marlborough, built in 1705-22. 429 The Madeleine is a massive neo-Greek temple in Paris, built by Napoleon in homage to his great army.

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inappropriate than the battle and coronation scenes of Ramesses III in Medinet Habu. It is the very sanctuar y of low oriental despotism, baseness and pomp. It reminded me of Napoleon throughout, with his Josephine and Marie-Louise, his notions of women and his coronation of his wife. You see Ramesses surrounded by his ladies (how unlike the loving Nefertari and her hero at the Ramesseum: ‘‘lovely in their lives and in their death they were not divided’’430). You see the queen put out of the way, on a shelf, in the coronation scene, like the miserable wife of a Louis Quatorze. The empire was falling and barbarism beginning, which could produce a Medinet Habu. The very shrines (in the sacred boats) at Medinet Habu seemed to me degraded. The cherubim were still the same, they could not be deprived of the crowns of light and life in their hands; but instead of the symbol of truth they held that of power and dominion, instead of the heavenly kingdom, which is truth, they held the earthly kingdom. A whole troop of gods were leading the king into the presence of the Great Triad, as if in a multitude there were safety, so unlike the simple group at Karnak of Isis leading Seti before Amun, i.e., the knowledge of nature bringing a man to the calm intellect, the serene will of the Deity—‘‘Come,’’ we will call him by no other name, that mysterious but loving title of a god whose real name was too sacred to be ever spoken and is now unknown. Khonsu, crowned with light, is waiting behind to full-fill the patient, humble but earnest learner of the ways431 with strength and harmony of will and [to] crown him with grace and Eros. So I understood that glorious procession. But here a crowd of second-rate deities (he did not ‘‘desire earnestly the best gifts’’), three jackals, three hawks (use not vain repetitions) and I don’t know what besides are trooping in, with the king among them, into the presence of the Deity. I thought he would say, ‘‘What a crowd!’’ when they came in, ‘‘and what a noise! My true worshippers come with the still small voice.’’432 From the time of Ramesses III (1290 bce)433 art and power suddenly declined and the glory of Egypt departed forever. It is no wonder: the connection between freedom and art, between purity of morals and religion, and a high state of national prosperity, seems ver y evident. 430 431 432 433

A paraphrase of 2 Sam 1:23. A paraphrase of 1 Cor 12:31. An allusion to 1 Kings 19:12. Today dated 1198-66 bce.

358 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions The ugly Gothic battlement of Medinet Habu is peculiar to the reign of Ramesses III and the whole affair looks more like the feudal castle of a savage chief than a temple of the philosophical Egyptian. If there is one thing that strikes you more than any other, it is what would be called ‘‘scriptural authority’’ for everything in the temples of Egypt. One seems to be positively reading the Old and some part of the New Testament, viz., the Book of Revelations. There is the tabernacle of the Jews carried by the priests along the wall in the inner pronaos [vestibule of a temple, leading to the naos or central part] of the Ramesseum, only that there are four tabernacles. There are the cher ubim of Ezekiel with two wings stretched upward and two covering their bodies,434 sitting upon the sacred ark at Medinet Habu, and as to the four evangelists, the Egyptian would not find himself as much at home under the dome of St Peter’s or in the Book of the Revelations than I do at Medinet Habu. There is the ox of St Luke, the lion of St Mark, the eagle, no, not the eagle, it is a vulture or a hawk, and the Egyptian might as well march into St Peter’s and, seeing the gigantic evangelists under the dome, pronounce the Christians guilty of the most dreadful idolatry, deifying four biographers under the symbols of beasts! as we utter the same accusation against the worshippers of Medinet Habu. there is nothing to rival the gorgeousness of its courts and colonnades, with their painted processions brighter than anything in Egypt except Karnak. It does not look like a place of worship, however, it is full of priests’ rooms and dark places. standing against its finest procession is a handsome Christian stone altar, as in a London church, which it reminded me of, though deserted these 1200 years. But it is ver y curious, very interesting to have seen [it], though never a place to become bewitched with, to have favourite corners to sit in and ruminate, like St Peter’s and Abu Simbel and my dear Philae. Its magnificence strikes one, not its devotion—its riches, not its religion. It is a place for kings and priests to worship in, not for philosophers and simple-hearted people. Ramesses the Great was magnificent but out of piety, this man out of ostentation. It was dedicated by Ramesses III (not the Great, not my Ramesses; how different was the spirit of his places of worship), the second king 434 An allusion to Ezek 1:11.

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of the XXth Dynasty, upon his return from his immense eastern conquests in Asia over nations whose names we scarcely know. He was the son of that Proteus or Nilus (the contemporary of Menelaus and the Trojan War) who gave a refuge to Helen and lived about 1290 bce. There is an enormous hieroglyphic inscription (not yet deciphered, I believe) relating to the conquests of the seventh year of his reign. Art was evidently already beginning to decline—though the sharpness of execution and the vigour of the drawing are still as great as ever, yet the composition is more laboured, the gods more pedantic, unlike the time of the great Ramesses. Already the coronation procession is curious for its magnificence, not interesting from any feeling it betrays. Thoth, the god of letters and Horus, binding up the king’s throne with water plants, is one of the prettiest representations, showing that he considered an intellectual support to his throne necessary as well as that of terrestrial prosperity. And a number of spirits of the earth, leading him into the presence of the great triad of Thebes, is interesting. If it were not for one’s familiarity from one’s youth (thanks to the Books of Leviticus and Chronicles) with every line and utensil of those processions, they would be tiresome beyond measure. But there is the tabernacle I used to fancy when I was a child; there are the mercy seat and cherubim, some crowned with Tr uth and others with Light, the feather and the disk (there is much that is beautiful in this, the spirits of light and the spirits of truth). Some kneel by the ark, some stand with protecting wings; one kneels without, with outstretched wings, ‘‘tr uth as a frontlet,’’ and life in her spread hands. A little figure of the king ministers before the sacred shrine; emblems of goodness form the pillars on either side. The battle scenes, I suppose, are splendid: the triumph afterwards, the appearance lastly of the king before the gods, presenting to them his conquests and his captives as a tribute. How many tributes equally unacceptable have been offered from times immemorial (and will be offered till the world grows wiser) in all sincerity and singleness of heart to God, like this of Ramesses! He has not, however, the expression of his great ancestor while doing this. In one battle piece, he sits after the heat of battle on the back of his car, while his chiefs lay at his feet thousands of hands. His four sons, who all succeeded him and reigned, successive Ramesses, attend him and carry him in the coronation procession: this is rather pretty, his children the support of his throne. Here, too, the good and evil spirit alike pour life and purity over him, the evil spirit being more carefully obliterated than I have

360 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ever seen it, and with those war scenes opposite I do not so much wonder at his exciting abhorrence. The columns of this court, which is the inner vestibulum or propylaeum, are gorgeous, eight square columns from which the Osirides are gone, on either side, and five round pillars at the two ends. On the north side is a splendid, or what Sir G. Wilkinson calls ‘‘an elegant portico, in which the circumference of the columns is 23 feet and the height 24 feet,’’ covered too with painting. From Medinet Habu you can see the whole circumference of the vast lake across which the bodies were formerly ferried on their way to burial, the judgment being previously held even in the case of a king, whether he was fit to pass over; many were ‘‘found wanting,’’435 even kings; and the desolate tombs are still visible where, on the shore of despair, the other side of the lake, across which there was no more passage, no more entrance, the miserable men were buried. Medinet is Arabic for city and Habu the old word for Thebes, so that Medeenet Haboo, as it is wrongly written, only means the ‘‘city of Thebes.’’ It is not a temple one cares to go back to . The beautiful little temple of Qurna, old and untouched, I long to see again; but the sacred place here is built up and covered up with the ruins of a deserted crude brick village. What sacred place shall we ever see again, though, like Abu Simbel? I am writing in the greatest possible haste for a steamer (!) which has just brought Mr Murray and is going on to Cairo I would not go in a steamer on the Nile if I were never to see the Nile without it.

Source: Claydon Diary

12 Februar y 1850 Thebes. Medinet Habu a vulgar place, coronation of Ramesses III emblazoned on the walls like Napoleon’s apotheosis in la Madeleine. Ramesses III seems to have been an old oriental tyrant and roué [cunning], very much after the type of Solomon. 435 An allusion to Dan 5:27.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 361 Source: British Library Diar y

12 Februar y 1850 Medinet Habu. Wrote by the steamer. Editor: On the basis of the British Library Diar y and in view of their context, Letters 42, 43 and 44 seem to have been written between 21 and 28 Februar y but not completed till 13-14 March (the entry on 28 Februar y has: ‘‘Hard work with Tombs of the Kings’’; then on 13 and 14 March: ‘‘Great way with my Theban letters. . . . Finished my letters home.’’). We place them here because of their essential reference to Thebes although Letters 45 and 46 were completed earlier, i.e., on 25 and 27 Februar y respectively. Source: Letter 42, 1854 ed. 221-30, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/22 2/4, 22 3/4

Thebes [21/28] Februar y 1850 One temple I have never mentioned because it was only Ptolemaic, though it deser ves to be of my beloved Ramesses: it is called Deir elMedina [visited 13 Febr uary] and belongs to Isis. It is built just under the western cliff, which is supported by a wall of layers of crude brick in wavy lines and has a little hidden nook of its own among the rocks. The way to it leads up behind what was the Amenophium. It is very small, has only a little area, a pronaos and the sekos, with side adyta, the one to the right consecrated to Hathor and the one to the left to Ma’at, the principle of beauty thus identified with that of truth—a new idea in this worship—to make the artist one with the philosopher: a most rare conjunction, for he who pursues truth generally despises beauty and the ordinar y followers of beauty find truth dry and ugly. But here Ma’at appears a second form of Hathor. Truth is herself beauty. In Hathor’s sanctuar y the king is offering to two figures of Isis or Hathor at once, the one as an animal (a cow’s head), the other as a woman. If this means animal and intellectual nature, the sense is very beautiful. How, in Europe, we have dwarfed instead of educated our animal nature and through it, perhaps, crippled our intellectual! The European has seldom fancied any other course of discipline for his body but that of indulging or tormenting it, poor thing! Ma’at’s sanctuar y is, of course, devoted to her functions in Amenti. And, as the doctrine of the future state was the foundation of all doc-

362 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions trines and all knowledge in Egypt, she revealed it to the ear of the wise and the eye of the foolish on every possible occasion. Why is the ear so much more noble and immaterial a sense than the eye? Why is the eye so much more liable to misunderstand and pervert what it perceives? The ear is not our leader, our misleader to idolatry—it is the eye. So, in this ancient Egypt, where the difficulty of her tremendous alphabet and the absence of printing made reading and writing accessible to few, as in all ancient nations, the teachers endeavoured to represent to every eye and send home to every heart, in visible symbols and dramatic scenes, the master-tr uth of eternal life and, above all, of consequences, which they could do in no other way. And we have accused them of teaching idolatry. Alas! idolatry followed in spite of them. But we might as well accuse the apostles of the abuses in the Sedia Apostolica [the Apostolic See, i.e., the Roman Catholic Church]. In Ma’at’s sanctuar y sits Osiris in the praetorium of Amenti, before him the lotus, the emblem of the material world and, standing on it, the four genii of Amenti, who were also the genii of the four cardinal points. Cerberus stands behind them, whose Egyptian name signifies ‘‘the Devourer.’’436 Then comes Harpocrates, sitting on his father’s crook and holding in his hands the flagellum and a kind of instrument (of which I bring home a bronze specimen). He sits there to show that the human being must pass through a regeneration before he can see God or the divine Goodness (Osiris). Behind him is Thoth, the ‘‘lord of the divine words,’’ the ‘‘colonel of the pure spirits,’’ noting down the result of the moral life of the tried. Then come the scales, in one of which is the feather of truth, in the other the heart of the dead man. Anubis and Horus watch the scales. The two Tr uths, or Truth and Justice (over Justice being written ‘‘Ma’at, who dwells in Amenti, where she weighs hearts in the balance; none of the wicked escape her!’’), appear behind, leading the dead man himself, in prayer, pressing the feather of Truth to his bosom as if to say that whether she condemned him or not, Truth was what he henceforth desired. Over him is written, ‘‘Ar rival of a soul in Amenti!’’ and in two rows above the heads of these sit the forty-two assessors, a figure of the dead man kneeling before each row. Over each assessor is written his name. But to figure them to the minds of those who could not read, they were necessarily represented with different heads, the heads of animals, to characterize to the eye of the foolish the different sins. 436 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 3:468.

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Diodor us Siculus says that in the Ramesseum the judgment of the hero Ramesses is represented and the appearance of his soul before these forty-two judges.437 I should like to have seen that. Alas! it is gone, but it shows how faithfully kings and citizens were alike brought to give this account of the motives of their actions. Ma’at too was the directress of the royal power, which thus invoked truth to preside: the greatest title of the kings on their obelisks was ‘‘Friend of Truth.’’ She was the protectress of Egypt, the first-born of Ra (light) and she was the president of Amenti, because there temporal appearances vanish and give place to eternal truths. In Egyptian the same word signified tr uth and justice, because to know truly and to act justly were, in their ideas, one. In this way the most metaphysical ideas of the Egyptians were made popular: the soul of the dead entered into Amenti, that is to say, into tr uth, the presence of truth. He examines the motives of his own actions; they are then weighed; Thoth (wisdom) writes the moral result. Osiris (the Goodness of God) calls the purified being into a higher vocation and the same Goodness sends back the impure to be purified under a new form, till it can present itself before him cleansed from every lower feeling. What is our own idea of the separation of the sheep and the goats,438 of the different places assigned to the good and the bad but another popularization of the same idea? In that dialogue of Hermes Trismegistos between Poimandres and Thoth, he says what truth is.439 The soul went through several mystic regions before it began again the course of its transformations, those transformations which only meant the trials, the stages which the divine emanation has to go through before arriving at perfection: [I.25-26]. One of Osiris’ names is ‘‘Lord of Life, Eternal Mediator.’’440 Thoth (divine wisdom) is said to have come to earth with him when he put on flesh to civilize the world and, in the same myth, never to have abandoned him, even when he took up his abode in Amenti as judge of souls. How beautiful is this idea: wisdom always attends the divine goodness, whether in judging or in mediating. ‘‘The body dies,’’ says Hermes Trismegistos, ‘‘because it can no longer carry the being. What you call death is only the dissolution of the 437 438 439 440

Diodor us on Egypt chap 92. See Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 3:468. An allusion to Matt 25:32. CH I.30; see XI.1b; XIII.6. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 3:70.

364 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions senses. The soul, the being, does not die.’’441 ‘‘Tr uth is what is eternal and unchangeable [XIII.6 and 9]; truth cannot be on the earth, though God may have given to some the faculty of thinking upon tr uth, but nothing is truth upon earth, because all is subject to change, to new combinations. Man is not truth because only that is tr ue which remains what it is. What changes so much that it cannot be recognized, how can that be truth? Truth is, then, what is immaterial, eternal. The earth is only corruption and generation. All generation proceeds out of corruption; the things of the earth are only appearances and imitations of truth, what painting is to reality.’’442 Thoth goes on: he hears ‘‘the voice of the Light’’ and ‘‘the word came forth from this voice of the light.’’443 ‘‘And the surface of the ear th was covered with water and the word of the spirit was borne upon the face of the water.444 Poimandres (i.e., the ‘‘Thought of the Divine Power’’ [I.3 and 30]) said, ‘‘I am the seed of Thought, the shining Word, the Son of God. Think that what hears and sees in thee is thought, which is God the Father and their union, that is life’’ [I.6]. Is not that wonderful? ‘‘God created, with His word or λο´ γος, a third intelligence; and He is the Spirit of God.’’ (What is this but ‘‘Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son’’?445) In this conversation, Thoth goes on to say that there are seven agents whose action is called destiny.446 That ‘‘the Father of all, who is the light and the life, created man after His likeness and received him as His son, and being pleased with man in His own image, gave him power over His works’’ [I.12; see III.3]. (And God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good; and He gave man to have dominion over the fish of the sea, etc.447) Man then ‘‘falls into slavery,’’ God warning him ‘‘that the love of the earthly part of himself shall be the cause of his death.’’448 ‘‘He then who knows himself wins the good superior to himself’’ [I.21] and ‘‘he who lets himself be deceived by the love of the body, is 441 See CH XI.14c; Asclepius III.27-28. 442 See Stobaeus, Excerpt IIA.5-10, in Scott and Ferguson, eds., Hermetica 1:384-85. 443 CH I.5. 444 A paraphrase of Gen 1:2. 445 From the Nicene Creed. 446 CH I.9. 447 Gen 1:31, 28. 448 CH I.19-20.

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thrown into the shadow of death’’ [I.18-21]. ‘‘God, who is wisdom, wills that every man, who has part in His wisdom, should know himself.’’ At the end Poimandres returns among the divine powers, and I (Thoth) apply myself to counsel men to seek knowledge and piety [I.27]. ‘‘O men! why will you hasten after death when you are capable of life?’’ etc. [I.28]. How like to one another are the highest beliefs of all spiritualized nations; and how much I find in Hermes Trismegistos of what - - used to say to me! To return to Hathor at Deir el-Medina, whom I had forgotten. At Edfu she appears in the triad of Horus or Hor-hat, i.e., divine light (Hor-hat was but the first form of Thoth, the Poimandres who speaks in the dialogue) and the child of Hor-hat and Hathor (which is but the same name reversed) is Hor-senedto, literally ‘‘Hor us, the support of the world,’’ or ‘‘Eros.’’ How beautiful this is, that the divine light, shining on beauty, makes us love. ‘‘Out of the perfection of beauty God hath shined,’’ in other words, that divine light showing us beauty (the beauty of God and nature), we cannot but love it. Hor-hat being here represented under the form of the sun proves, when compared with that prayer of the dead that the sun will cause his name to ‘‘germinate’’ in heaven, how little there was of astronomical, how much of symbolical in the Egyptian representations of the sun. At Esna, Khnum, the ‘‘soul of the world,’’ the ‘‘vital principle of divine essences,’’ the ‘‘Spirit, creator of all the worlds’’ (so he is called in his hieroglyphs) is the chief of the triad with Neith, moral and physical power , and with their child Hakè, i.e., a form of Horus, who is perhaps the most interesting of all the divine incarnations, as being the most nearly connected with man. At Dakka is another illustration, showing how Osiris, Isis and Horus embrace the whole of the triads in themselves. In the temple there, which is nominally dedicated to Thoth or Hermes, all his different transfigurations are put together in a series of bas-reliefs. His primeval form is Hor-hat, ‘‘the great Hermes Trismegistos,’’ ‘‘divine light’’ or ‘‘wisdom,’’ the ‘‘heavenly Hermes.’’ Then he becomes Paitnoffi ‘‘the good-hearted’’ as the first manifestation to us of the divine wisdom is in its goodness; in fact, we can hardly separate the two ideas. If we obser ve our thoughts, we shall find that we form no conception of what is perfectly wise but that of perfect goodness—we always think of

366 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Satan as having committed a great folly. The third incar nation is ‘‘Arihos Nofri’’ (the sweet singer). Pythagoras and Plato both learnt from the Egyptians to consider music of the greatest importance. And the music of Egypt was regulated by law as being one great means of educating the youth and as being also as great a leader to harm as to good. Musicians, as well as politicians, in Egypt were priests. Plato even says that his famous plan of education was borrowed from the Egyptians,449 in which his discipline is to teach the youth by beautiful forms and fine music, and having settled what those forms and what that music should be, to allow none other by law, the importance of such things being unspeakable in ‘‘rectifying the perverseness of nature.’’ He goes on to say that the Egyptians were so right in this that it must have been the work of the Deity, and that to be able to consider such things, so as to reduce them to law, was in the true spirit of policy. And in fact, he says, they ascribe the music they use and the poetr y likewise to Isis. So, you see, we have Plato’s authority for not considering Arihos Nofri as a trivial incarnation and the Greeks, in imitation, made their Mercur y the inventor of the lyre. The fourth incarnation is Mooi, thought or reason, which may perhaps mean that, as the first work of benevolent wisdom is directed to our emotions, which are the first things developed in the youth, both of nations and of men, so its second work is directed to our power of reasoning. The last incarnation is Thoth, or the intercourse of the Divine reason with ours. Having given us intellect, He does not leave it without inspiration, without communion with Himself. Thus Osiris, Isis and Thoth are the forms of Amun, Mut and Khonsu in their relation with man. The ark, or sacred boat of Thoth, is precisely similar to that of Khonsu, proving him to be but a secondar y form of Khonsu. A hawk’s head, crowned with the disk and crescent, surmounts the prow of each. These five transfigurations are represented in the bas-reliefs of Dakka to show how Thoth, in his different forms, accomplished the organization of human society, teaching man writing, ‘‘sacred things,’’ and then writing for him. In the triad, of which he is the head, a goddess accompanies him (Nehimeou), whose name means the ‘‘preser vation of seeds.’’ , how wise that is, for writing is evidently the great preser ver of the germs thrown out by human reason. She seems to be the same as the ‘‘Lady of Letters’’ ver y often seen at Philae with Thoth. 449 See Republic Book 7.

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I am afraid you must find my triads and my temples tiresome, dear people. One comfort is they are all coming to an end and you will not be troubled with them long. I bring home nothing pretty or curious for you. I thought in England one had nothing to do but walk into the tombs and dig out the newest jeweller y! Whereas there never was a place like Thebes for the impossibility of getting anything, unless one brings away the base of the young Memnon to unite it to the head we have. But I hope you have not found Thebes quite ‘‘flat, stale, dull and unprofitable.’’ I am afraid you have an ‘‘idiot’s tale.’’450 You do not know how difficult it is to write anything about such a subject—it is like getting a genie into a bottle—and when I have succeeded in getting him in, I could sit down and cry to see what I have made of him. It is not because I have failed that I cry, but because I have profaned Thebes, and I would so gladly do something to show you what a land you have sent me to, what recollections you have secured for my whole life. I have seen no book which has been worthy of Thebes, the primeval, the pre-Adamite world! How little idea I had of her, how little I have given you! Source: Claydon Diary

13 Februar y 1850 Deir el-Medina very interesting though Ptolemaic. Judgment scene before Osiris. Rode to the Valley of the Queens; the tombs seem truly placed under the protection of the shadow of death. Put our turkey with the Murrays: he killed the cock the day he died. 14 Februar y 1850 Thebes. Deir el-Bahri. Sanctuary in the rock, not arched but the arch hewn out of stones. Tomb in the Assasif spoiled. Hermes Meroe [?] procession. Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. Lepsius, one ‘‘Kalb’’ [calf ] one dog, destroyed it all. Lev 16 [?]. Setting sun through the columns of the Ramesseum. 15 Februar y 1850 Karnak. Found those sculptures on the propylon wall in Great Hall quite as perfect as those of Abu Simbel itself and as beautiful. Made at least three holy pilgrimages as if we were going to Jerusalem, to Rehoboam of whom the most interesting thing we know is that he begat twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters. 450 An allusion to either the legend of King Arthur or Macbeth Act 5, scene 5.

368 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 16 Februar y 1850 Thebes. Karnak. Went over those interminable battle sculptures outside the Grand Hall. Found Tuthmosis III, list of the presents he made the god in the sanctuary, numbers and names under each, that the god might not take the gold for plated goods nor have the trouble of counting them. 17 Februar y 1850 Thebes. The hawagee came and lent us Champollion. Lady Alford’s drawings, the poetry of Egypt, like and yet Egypt glorified, quite Homeric in their colouring and no more like Lewis than Homer is to Wordsworth. Amenophis himself might have come down and been proud to see himself in such a dress. 18 Februar y 1850 Thebes. Tombs of the Kings. Spent the whole day in tomb of Seti I; on that day one should see no other, not to disturb the impression. The art, the colouring, the expression of the figures so beautiful. Procession of the Hours, the explanation of the idea of Karnak. 19 Februar y 1850 Tombs of the Kings. Lay on our backs and slid down into Ramesses I’s, the earliest but the best in point of art. Refreshed our memories of Seti I and found Ramesses V [III] under the form of a pig at the end of his [Bruce’s] tomb.451 20 Februar y 1850 Thebes. Ramesseum. Rode round the lake of Medinet Habu (now a cornfield) and arrived at twilight at a perfectly desolate spot where, whitening on the sand, still lay the bones of those who, by the fortytwo Assessors, had been refused burial and left there. 21 Februar y 1850 Karnak. Our farewell day. Began with the three propyla. Rode round the whole, lingered in the Great Hall, found the best point of view from the temple of Sobek, went again and again to look at that divine head of Seti and saw the sunset from that last propylon.

451 The tomb of Ramesses III, more famous than that of Ramesses II, was known as ‘‘Br uce’s Tomb’’ after the Scottish explorer James Bruce who visited the Valley of the Kings in 1768; he copied and published scenes from the tomb of Ramesses III.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 369 Source: British Library Diar y

13 Februar y 1850 Deir el-Medina (little Ptolemaic temple) and Valley of the Queens. Two Murrays dined and Herr Koch came in. 14 Februar y 1850 Deir el-Bahri tombs: one Assafif, Qurna Murrace, Sheikh Abd el-Qurna (nos. 16, 17, destroyed by Lepsius). Ramesseum. Such a setting sun. Copied Koch’s book. Benczik came in for the evening. 15 Februar y 1850 Karnak. 16 Februar y 1850 Karnak. And where was I? All the while that I was on propylon and half the afternoon, dreaming. Karnak itself cannot save me now, it has no voice for me. 17 Februar y 1850 Saw Lady Alford’s drawings and climbed into the Luxor sacred place. 18 Februar y 1850 Tombs of the Kings with Σ. No. 17; Seti I. Ugly day. Did not stop at Qurna. 19 Februar y 1850 Tombs of the Kings without Σ with Trout. No. 1 Ramesses IX; 16 Ramesses I earliest, stopped-up; 17 Seti I (Belzoni’s); 11 Ramesses III (Bruce’s); 9 Ramesses V. Took up Σ at Qurna. 20 Februar y 1850 Ramesseum. A [tomb] in the Assasif, filled up. Sheikh Abd elQur na. Nos. 11, 35 again. Ramesseum. Rode to Ptolemaic temple of Medinet Habu and then all round the Lake of the Dead [so called because?] the unburied and rejected bodies lay on the other side. 21 Februar y 1850 Kar nak. Our last day. Three propyla. Great Hall. Rode round. View of the Great Hall from temple of Sobek. Rode round the little lake. Source: Letter 43, 1854 ed. 231-41, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/22 3/4

Karnak [21/28] Februar y 1850 Karnak is the history of a race, the greatest race perhaps that ever existed, a race of giants, who illustrated themselves in their successive generations

370 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions in this temple palace; it is the political, ethical and religious manifestation of the ‘‘Unknown God’’; it was the residence of his vice-gerents [regents] the kings, the sanctuary of his wise men the priests, the place of justice. In Egypt, where religion was the basis of everything, where politics were but one incarnation of it, science another: where the king really believed himself God’s vice-regent and submitted to have his very time and occupations laid out for him by what was conceived to be divine law—in the actual faith that he was a servant and not a master—where we know that these things really entered into the very belief of men’s minds, that they felt as well as knew them, there is nothing repulsive in finding the temples consecrated to ever y form in which God manifests himself. From the XIIth Dynasty, nearly 3000 [2000] years before Christ, to the Ptolemies, 300 years before Christ, you find in Karnak illustrations of the race. Those in the Great Hall, the Hall of Assembly, of the time of Seti, are the most beautiful in Egypt, quite equal to those of Abu Simbel itself. On the wall of the propylon, to the left, entering from the first area

[On the propylon wall], Seti is kneeling and offering himself in the form of a little figure which is eagerly bending forward on its knees. Immediately beyond this, as if in answer to this devoting of himself, the Good and Evil Spirit are pouring over him life, as if to say, Give me thyself, my son, and thou shalt learn to draw life out of evil as well as good, out of all experience; ‘‘all things work together for good to them that love God.’’452 The Agathodaemon or Trinity hovers overhead, not as usual with wings outspread, but a little depressed, as if to ‘‘cover him with its feathers.’’ The whole conception is beautiful.453 In the upper compartment his father Ramesses I is rushing into the presence of Amun, quite different in his expression and character; and even without the cartouche, which always gives the name of the man, you could not mistake the different kings, so different is the character of their devotions. 452 Rom 8:28. 453 Ms 9017/22 3/4: It is impossible to conceive anything more beautiful than this whole conception.

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Beyond is a bas-relief in the second row, which quite puzzled me. Seti is standing before Amun Khem, the union of the wisdom and creative power of the Deity. Between them is a sceptre standing erect, leaning against it, two other sceptres with little figures climbing up, some with two feathers, some with one on their heads. Whether this meant that the God gave the king undivided sovereignty and that the little fellows were climbing up and trying to take it, or whether they were aspiring sons or what, I cannot find out. Farther on Seti is sitting at the feet of Amun (with his back almost leaning against his knees) who is blessing him. Thoth stands in front recording. In the previous compartment Thoth and Atum are leading in the eager Seti, perhaps meaning that he has completed some business wisely, whom you see in the next, comfortably ensconced at the feet of the God. Succession was a great element in the Egyptian pictures. Alas! that all this is being corroded rapidly by the natron [soda] with which the soil is filled, which is heaped halfway up the wall. One hundred pounds would clear this magnificent hall, in this country where the people in the manufactories work for 30 paras (3/4 of a piastre, 2½ d.) a day, but the pacha spends his money in bribes at Constantinople and in the lowest sensuality. The monuments of Egypt are going fast—all that can go . One head of Seti is just above the heaped-up soil on that propylon wall—the rubbish reaches to the chin and soon will cover it entirely. It is not here as in the other monuments, where the sand is a preser ver; this natron soil is a corroder. This head is the most wonderful ideal of sublime serenity and childlike trust and confidence I ever saw. Σ went back to look at it, that last day, again and again. I tried to compare it454 with Guido’s Speranza; but it is too different from the Christian ideal, though one can hardly tell in what. There is a purity in these heathen (?) expressions which is not in the Christian; in the heathen it is the first fruits of a spirit soaring to God, in the Christian it is the returning spirit. There is that absence of the doctrine of repentance which has str uck me so much in these records of a nation’s religion. The Christian ideal has sinned and suffered, there has been struggle, asceticism, the cheek is pale with vigils, the eye stained with tears—it is resignation, not serenity—meekness, not trust—composure rather than happiness. The spirit has weaned itself after long effort and weary suffering from the love of sin and earth and placed its joy alone in the 454 Ms 9017/22 3/4: in my own mind.

372 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions beyond, in the faraway, in the future. The heathen ideal is quite different: it is purity, in opposition to repentance. There is always something of the Magdalen in Christian representations, there is always something of the Virgin in the heathen. It is the sinless soul which has never left the bosom of its God, which finds him, the Omnipresent, as near in one spot of His creation as in another, which does not wait for another world to enjoy his presence. The Christian looks for comfor t in His society hereafter, the Egyptian for happiness in it here. There is no asceticism in the Egyptian ideal: all the gifts of its Father it will accept from that Father’s hand. There is no str uggle, the soul has never loved anything better than its God—there is no hope, it is all trust— tr ust that the present is as much its Father’s blessing, its Father’s gift, as the future can be. There is no resignation, for where evil is to give life as well as good, it is absurd to talk of resigning oneself to a benefit. Then it is love, not resignation. I do not mean to say that the doctrine of repentance, in the sense of change of will, µετα´ νοια, found no place in the Egyptian theology. It is evident from their doctrine of transformations, stages of purification, that it did. I only mean that the ideal of their sculptures was purity, not remorse; that repentance, with them, did not signify pain; that, instead of looking upon God almost solely as we do, as a moral Deity, they looked upon him as an intellectual, moral and natural Deity, as the God of wisdom as well as of ethics, as the God of politics as well as of religion, as the God of animals as well as of man. And quer y whether we do not do much harm by looking upon him so exclusively as a moral God? If the intellectual man considered him as the God with whom he could commune about philosophy, as the God who inspired him with those philosophical thoughts, as well as a God of moral requirements, he would not feel so inclined to think of Him as calling him away from philosophy to do something else, as one who did not care about his discoveries, but only about his moralities.455 Of course we cannot conceive of God without his moral nature—it enters into all His attributes—therefore, man, to become ‘‘one with Him,’’ must always cultivate all parts of himself together. But I do think a fatal mistake in Christianity (certainly not to be found among the Egyptians) to approach God only morally. 455 Ms 9017/22 3/4: I don’t mean that one life was given us to improve our intellect, another to improve our moral nature and another, something in our feelings. I think that very unlikely because. . . .

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But I must go on to the side wall of the Great Hall of Assembly (on the northeast). Here Seti is kneeling before all the different deities, making the offering to each which to each will be acceptable. This sounds monotonous. But it is not. There is the greatest variety of attitude and expression—sometimes eager, sometimes devoted, sometimes submissive. To the lioness-headed Goddess Bubastis, he is offering a little Typhon. I cannot guess the meaning of this. Farther on enters Seti kneeling; he is evidently advancing upon his knees, and very fast—this is before Hor us. I do not know what he is in such a hurry about. I saw on this wall a very per fect sacred boat with the shrine in it, so per fect that I could write down every part, which I did for the curiosity of it. Over the shrine or ‘‘mercy seat’’ was the Agathodaemon or Trinity (the globe, asp and wings). Then came a hand pointing the way, a Ma’at and the symbol of life, ‘‘I am the way and the tr uth and the life’’;456 then the three emblems of stability, purity, light and a hand giving the sign of Seth, the Evil. Below these were two cherubim kneeling, crowned with Light and holding Life in their hands, with their wings (one stretching upwards and one covering their bodies, like Ezekiel’s cherubim) protecting a Horus, also crowned with Light and holding Truth. Upon the prow of the boat were Khnum (the spirit), the two figures of Truth and Light, a sphinx, or the union of physical and intellectual power, offering the hieroglyph of ‘‘chosen’’—i.e., its most chosen offerings—and the king kneeling. The rubbish being heaped up to nearly the top of the wall allowed me to examine this boat and help my eyes with my fingers, but it was so very plain that there was hardly any need. I was very glad to see it so distinctly because it explains many things in the Bible: ‘‘tr uth as his frontlet’’ and ‘‘life in his hands,’’ ‘‘righteousness’’ or truth ‘‘upon him for a garment,’’ etc. The form matters little, the shape of the shrine; it was these curious emblems which made it so interesting. The whole of the 134 columns which support this hall are covered with bas-reliefs, either simple intaglios or alto rilievos, as the light required, 456 John 14:6.

374 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions the effect being given, Σ said, by the varying depth of the cutting. They are by ver y different hands—it seemed to me that all those in relief were ver y inferior to the intaglios. One group of Amun-Khem and Tamun (the female Amun, a form of Neith, as peculiar protectrix of Thebes) I remember, which was quite beautiful. You know they are as simple as possible, a mere outline like Flaxman, very stiff but what expression in that mere outline! The ruin of these columns is something supernatural. Here and there it seems as if one of the millstones, of which they are formed, had been twisted out of its place by a jinn, while the one above and the one below it have not been disturbed, so that the parts of the figure no longer fit. In others the whole column has fallen bodily and leans against the next architrave, which yet it has not disturbed, dragging its own architrave with it. We climbed upon the roof and walked along the lines of architraves, most of which still remain in their places, looking down upon the forest of columns below. The construction of all the temple roofs is the same. The middle aisle of columns is nearly twice the height of the others: the two nearest aisles are raised by blocks to the same height and the stone beams laid across, so that the roof of the three middle aisles is level, and clerestor y windows are left, which lighted the hall. The blocks of stone are sometimes enormous, but measurements never give one any definite idea. On the roof are the remains of what must have been another storey, perhaps two, as no one could have carried the stones up there for purposes of warfare. The architraves which are fallen give the opportunity of studying the cartouches. There is as much variety in the execution of these as of anything else and, though, in a cartouche there does not seem much room for the imagination of the artist, yet there is variety: some seem to have taken the gods literally, others poetically, others artistically. Some set to work with earnest belief and you see their good faith in every line; others did not believe much in the gods but made them as pretty as possible. We crawled under one huge block to study the Evil Spirit (Seth) in Seti’s cartouche, after whom, of course, he was called. Sometimes it is drawn with life in its hands, sometimes with a shepherd’s crook—the expression of its ugly face is as various [varied] as possible. In one place Thoth is writing Seti’s cartouche. I must say Thoth made a good choice there. Of this Seti I, Lepsius thinks that Joseph was the premier. Bunsen puts him a great deal farther back in the Old Empire (XIIth Dynasty). I had rather it should be Seti because I feel so much more familiar

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with him than with the Osirtasens and I like to think of Joseph walking in the Great Hall of Karnak. The southwest wall of the Great Hall and propylon towers are so ruined and the rubbish so high that one cannot see much, but they belong to the reign of Ramesses II, who completed his father’s hall. As they are ver y inferior in point of art, it does not signify much. I was ver y glad, however, to find an old representation (of the time of Ramesses II) of what I had seen at Esna (but did not care about, as that is only Roman and therefore it was no proof ), of the ‘‘fishers of men.’’457 Here Hor us, Ramesses II and Khnum were drawing a net in which were enclosed a number of birds, ‘‘pure spirits.’’ Thoth stood behind with a pair of scales upon his shoulders. At Esna the net contained fish as well as birds. Ever ywhere in Karnak you can see old sculptured stones built into new walls by successive generations. How useless it is to try with words to give any idea of the ruins of that hundred-gated Karnak. I cannot even count its approaches. By one of the secondary entrances, but which I liked the best to come by, to the left of the great avenue from Luxor, you approach through a dromos of sphinxes and four great pairs of propyla, one after the other, three of which are standing, all with colossi sitting before their gates, each of them a moderate-sized temple. Then round all the plain, at every step, you stumble over a half-buried sphinx or a granite colossus or the substructions of some subsidiary pylon, or mount your ass upon a broken hand, gigantic enough to make a step. The view by this approach through the three pyla of the palms beyond, which now fill up the avenue of sphinxes, is beautiful.

Am I to tell of the two sacred lakes, their shores lined with quays and ruins, and their waters reflecting propyla and towers? of the great entrance from Luxor which leads to the mightiest pylon of all? This has a temple of its own, and a large one too, built by Ramesses VIII and Bocchoris, which you hardly notice as you approach the temple of Karnak itself. From the first propylon of the temple, which overlooks all the plain, you have a glorious view of the whole of the entrance from the river, of the plan of the ruins, of the pyla for miles round. You look across the river and on the highest summit of the Libyan ridge beyond you see the comitia being held for the election of the king, the God invoked under his blue canopy of heaven (they were always held in the open air) and then the whole train descending the steep cliff, winding its way by temple and palace, terraces and gardens, perhaps down the dromos, which led from the temple of Deir el-Bahri to the river, never resting till it had crossed the river, ascended the dromos on the other side and consecrated the king in the temple palace of the Unknown God. The train passes under the propylon on which you are standing, and fills the immense area within. I thought I heard their shouts, the triumphal march. I looked: alas! what do you think it was? An army of Arabs harnessed to an enormous stone and dragging it away to build the house of the governor. So is Egypt losing her ruins day by day, her temples, the only thing she has left. Muhammad Ali cleared out the two Roman temples of Esna and Dendera, and left Karnak to destruction. The temple of Karnak is entirely enclosed by a temenos wall. Near the sacred lake, where a little temple of Sabaco once stood, I had a glorious view of the Great Hall, with the light shining in between the seventeen aisles of columns and showing their shadows, and not looking down too much upon their tops . The whole of the outer walls of the Great Hall is covered with battle scenes out of the life of Seti on one side, and of Ramesses II on the other, tiresome beyond measure, I thought. Now I have ridden all round the temple and wish I could have taken you with me. I see the rich plain round the belts of palms, the narrower strip of cultivation, but very green, on the Libyan side. The Nile could never have come up higher on that side than it does now, as the tombs begin immediately behind the now-cultivated line and the Egyptians wasted no ground—besides which, they never allowed their tombs to get wet. I see the sun setting behind the mud village which, before his glory, itself looks glorious and seems to send up a cloud of incense to heaven in its evening smoke. I see the violet hills. But how can I make you see them, as I did on that last night, our farewell to Karnak? Source: Letter 44, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/22 4/4 (not in 1854 ed.)

[Thebes, Valley of the Tombs of the Kings] [21/28] Februar y 1850 How little I have ever said about the Tombs of the Kings, in which nevertheless we spent many days (of that long valley which leads up to it), where the bird does not sing, where even the coloquintida [coarse fr uit-bearing plant] never grows, where I never saw one single living thing, excepting a solitary jackal who trotted tamely across the road as if ‘‘unacquainted with man.’’ The rocks are all full of heat cracks: one juts across the valley like a great sphinx, others sit upon the ridge like a long line of vultures. The valley continually seems to close in as if you had come to the end of the world: to a faithful follower of Bunyan it seems the very original of the Pilgrim’s Progress.458 There was the place where in my childhood Christian fought with Apollyon; there was the place where lay giant Despair. At last you come to a point in the valley, really no wider than a cleft in the rock; scrambling in, you find yourself in a gorge or rather a small amphitheatre without any other outlet. This is the Valley of the 458 John Bunyan (1628-88) wrote Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678-84; see also 2:479-80.

378 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Tombs. Not the first time, not the second, but after you have become accustomed to it, a number of doors in the rock are perceptible. You enter them all by the same silent door—no statues mark it, no splendours attend it. No sign betrays the deeds, the last palace of the Great King. Upon all is the same tale, simply told: a disk, enclosing a scarab, the symbol of regeneration, or rather of successive resurrections; a Khnum, which here means the sun entering into the lower hemisphere; Isis, the beginning, kneels on the left, the west, of the disk; Khnum, on the right, the east. This is the summing up of the whole of the life of the being within. Like the sun in his course from the east to the west, the man was to be the vivifier and illuminator of Egypt, the source of good to her, physical and moral. His death was to be like the sun descending into the hemisphere of darkness, through which he passed to appear again in the east, either to continue his transformations or to return to the bosom of Amun, the universal father, according as his deeds had prepared him to do. (The beginning and the end, you see, have changed their places in this frontispiece of the tomb.) It may have peculiar reference to the life of the pharaoh, pharaoh being simply Pa ra, the sun (in the Egyptian, like the Hebrew, there are no vowels), the sun being the peculiar model of the pharaoh. But I like to think of it as the epitome of man’s life in general. Amun is the same as the Hebrew Amen, which signifies wisdom or tr uth and was no doubt derived from the Egyptian. The inscription over the tombs is said to show that the buried began them during their own lifetimes Osiris, Lord of Amenti, speaks and says, ‘‘I have granted to thee a dwelling, etc., to thee Osirian, etc., still living.’’ The kings generally began their tombs before any other work, but that ‘‘still living’’ might only mean the ‘‘immortal soul.’’ You enter the palace gate, the palace of death; temples and statues you can see elsewhere, palaces too of the living; but these palaces of the dead you can see nowhere but in Thebes, and no one can ever describe the feeling you have on entering them. It seemed as if you were really entering Hades, ‘‘descending into hell, the caves of Domdaniel, as if you had passed the gates of life and were coming to the abode of immortal spirits. Michelangelo’s terrible Sistine Chapel459 is the portal, this is the continuation—the tombs of Thebes are not in this world. The third time I went into Seti’s tomb (the father of the great Ramesses), it was alone with Paolo; he carried the light. In the 459 See European Travels.

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last room but one I was sure we should find a stair masked by a false floor, as Belzoni says he did. We found it, half filled with rubbish, and began to descend. The stair was covered with crumbling fragments. I told Paolo to go on and I would wait for him. I saw the torch grow smaller and smaller, and I sat down on the ground. He descended about 240 feet and the stair turned to the right, leaving me in total darkness and silence. I never felt a stranger feeling than at that moment, which is not wonderful, seeing that I never could have been in such a situation before, far below the surface of the earth. I am glad to have been in that tomb alone, though but for a moment. It is well to have seen the crowded den of Irish beggars at Edinburgh, the drawing room of a London party, the sepulchre vault of an Egyptian monarch, though none of these are the natural home of the spirit. But all are good as experience. As Paolo came up, the rock crumbled and fell in, and we scrambled out. To return to the door of the tomb, on the left as you enter there is always a bas-relief of the king presenting himself to Ra (i.e., the sun in the meridian, in the splendour of his course) who says to his representative upon earth, We grant thee a long series of days to exercise the attributes of Horus upon the earth. This is to signify to the angel of death that the king does not mean to die directly, for fear of some mistake. But now begin the symbols of death. On the ceiling in hieroglyphs are the details of celestial privileges: immediately after the last bas-relief comes the disk of the sun (with the same scarab and Khnum upon it) descending to the west, which is symbolized by a crocodile, the emblem of darkness into which the king is about to enter, and the head of Hathor, the daughter of the sun (or evening), who receives him when he descends behind the western mountain. By all this, of course, is typified the king’s death. The darkness here is not the primeval darkness or night, but the transitory darkness which precedes sunrise. Now follow long corridors with untranslatable emblems. The plan of Seti’s tomb, as well as I could see it, was this [see figure on p 380], which being interpreted is first a deep steep staircase, then an inclined plane, another staircase (3), another inclined plane (4), a small square hall (5), where ever ybody knows the story of Belzoni finding the pit (which seemed to signify it to be the end), of his filling up the pit, beating down the wall beyond and finding himself in a great hall, supported by four square pillars (6), which still is not the hall of the sarcophagus. In this hall we all agreed was the most beautiful group we

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have ever seen of Osiris, with Isis behind, receiving the king who is led lovingly in by another god. Beyond this hall is another [7] with the outlines only sketched in and left unfinished. Then you descend still lower by another steep stair [8], find yourself on another inclined plane [9], more steps [10], more inclined plane [11], then a small square hall [12] where the gods of Amenti are receiving the king; then by a few steps you descend into the mighty cave [13], the upper end supported by six square columns, small chambers branching out of it on every side; at the lower end the hall of the sarcophagus [14] with its mystic ceiling beyond, an unfinished hall [15] with four columns; beneath this is the half-closed stair which goes no one knows where. How anyone who has time and liberty, and has once begun the study of hieroglyphics, can leave it till he has made out every symbol in this tomb, I cannot conceive. Did I not hope my life would be spent in a very different way, no object would tempt me so much—there is such a rich reward. I never can help asking myself: Has the world been much the better for the pyramids, for the colossi, for this, for that? Would the world be much the worse if the pyramids were destroyed or had never existed? But the world would be very much the worse if the tombs of the kings, if the sculptures of Abu Simbel, had never existed. In fact, it seems to me as if out of the tombs of Thebes all the life of Europe had come, as if—without Thebes (or some other Thebes, which is the same thing)—we should have been nothing. And what is there is not yet half read. Then the beauty of the colouring of these intaglios no one can describe. All the rawness is gone which you see without. Here it is rich, subdued, gorgeous, softened by a golden brown ground. The first corridor represents (on the eastern wall) the march of the sun in the upper hemisphere; (on the western) in the lower, the images of man’s life after death in the two worlds, which he may have laid up for himself. Each compartment of life, or hour of the sun, is divided by a door, guarded by a serpent. At the third hour of the celestial, upper region, the sun comes to the zone where is decided what body the soul is to occupy during its new transformation—these transformations only meaning the successive trials the soul has to go through before arriving at perfection. Here is, in Ramesses V’s tomb, the pig scene with gluttony written over the victim. Cynocephali, Thoth’s emblem, types of celestial justice, conduct the criminal. At the fifth hour the sun passes through the region of repose where happy souls, crowned with ‘‘tr uth,’’ under the guidance of the ‘‘Lord of the joy of

382 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions the heart,’’ gather the fr uit of life or cultivate the ‘‘fields of truth.’’ Over them is written, ‘‘These reap the fields which are their portion,’’ etc. The sun says to them, ‘‘Take your sickles, reap your harvest, carry it to your dwellings, rejoice in it and present it as a pure offering to God.’’ In the lower hemisphere, the region of darkness (on the opposite wall), the sun, in mourning from head to foot, traverses seventy-five zones inhabited by souls in different stages of purification; each stage [is] presided over by a spirit of different form with a drawn sword. The souls are sometimes bound to stakes and the cherubim are bringing up to them their sins: sometimes head downcast, sometimes their hands bound and without their heads, sometimes dragging their hearts upon the ground. It is impossible to conceive the human stupidity which has seen nothing here but human sacrifices or the torturing of prisoners. Pythagoras says that these represented the conflicts of the intellect and soul. Champollion has read on each zone the stage of the patient.460 Upon the wall of the lower hemisphere is written, ‘‘These souls see not God, hear not the voice of the great God,’’ etc., and on the opposite wall, ‘‘These have found grace in the eyes of the great God; these inhabit the dwellings where they live upon life celestial; the bodies they have left will rest forever in their graves while they will rejoice in the presence of the supreme God.’’ Is not this a proof that the Egyptians did not believe in the purified soul taking up the same body? Perhaps they thought, as sounds very likely, that the degraded soul—after having passed through stages of purification—might ‘‘tr y again’’ in the same body, but not that all had the same round to make over again, which sounds such a useless repetition. Besides, Champollion believes he has found quite sufficient reason for the mummification of bodies in the fact that, till the pious and ignorant monks of the Thebaid forbade this ‘‘diabolical custom’’ under pain of damnation (which practice accordingly ceased about the fifth centur y), the plague was unknown. Immediately in the latter half of the sixth century Egypt gave the plague to Europe, which she had for fifty years. The Egyptian priests, like the Mosaic, made health a sacred care, and medicine a sacred science. Accordingly, when they found 460 Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubia 346-47; he sees in those scenes stages of a sacred function, that of Ramesses receiving the crown called ‘‘Pschent.’’ However, Pschent is also the name of a divinity.

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that every year, after the inundation, the heat corrupted the animal bodies which had been all that while in the water, and that after the highest inundation came the worse plague, they struck at once at the root of the cause by ordering and consecrating the mummification of men and animals, and by this great measure made Egypt the healthiest and finest country in the world. Now ever y plague which has ravaged Europe since the sixth century has been born and bred in Egypt—scarcely a year does she escape. Before, when the east was laid bare, it was unknown in Egypt and even now, in Upper Egypt, the hottest part, there is no plague because the Nile does not reach the burial grounds nor drown the animals, the valley being so deep and narrow. Elsewhere, after each inundation, there is a plague for Egypt and for her neighbours consequently in the Levant. Well, these two series then represent the soul’s progress in the different hemispheres. Hermes Trismegistos says what happened to the soul after its ascension towards the father. In the conversation between Poimandres, the divine thought, and Thoth, the divine thought communicating itself to man (for Socrates took his idea of the dialogue, the ‘‘Socratic method,’’ from Hermes), Thoth asks, What happens to the soul? and Poimandres answers, ‘‘The body is destroyed, the spirit ascending leaves in the first zone the liability to increase and decrease; in the second the power of evil and the deceptions of idleness; in the third earthly desire; in the fourth insatiable ambition; in the fifth arrogance and rash pride; in the sixth the love of ill-acquired good things; in the seventh falsehood—the last thing accomplished is the desire of truth. And the soul, thus purified and losing its passions and its desires, returns to the state so longed for and is placed among the powers and rejoices in God. Thus those to whom it is given to know God become God.’’461 Be like him for we shall know him as he is.462 After this entrance passage, which represents the two destinies of man after death, comes the small square hall where figures, as large as life, of the several deities of Amenti receive the king, Anubis with the jackal’s head, Ra with the hawk’s, etc. Do you laugh? Σ, with all her Grecian prejudices thick upon her, did not, but said she never saw any sculpture so expressive as this Anubis and hoped, when she died, she should see such a welcoming jackal coming to meet her. The Horus is equally beautiful in expression. We came out of those tombs fully con461 See CH I.24-26a; XIII.15. 462 An allusion to 1 John 3:2.

384 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions vinced that it was not only the best (to represent gods with animals’ heads) but the only way! Now with regard to the kings, it must be known that it was out of the souls which came forth victorious from all the stages of purification, out of those most purified, that God chose the soul of a king, the soul to fill so difficult and new a position, such a vocation. If the soul per formed it with piety towards God and man, if it made Egypt happy and kept itself pure, it reascended immediately to God and saw Him through eternity, because so trying a mission must have raised it towards Him. The king was constantly reminded of this in the daily sermon which was preached after the sacrifice: who he was, what was his calling and what its consequences, if not fulfilled. (There seems to me probably a great deal of truth in this idea.) Did he not fulfill it, anyone had a right to accuse him after death and deprive him thereby of burial, of which there are several instances. In the first square chamber of Ramesses III’s tomb (poor Bruce’s) the gods are each welcoming the king with the best celestial gifts: Ra gives him an emblem I was not able to make out, Thoth gives him purity, Anubis gives him stability and Nofri-Atum gives him life. Atum means to ‘‘complete’’ or to ‘‘per fect’’ and seems to have reference to the completion of time, the winding up perhaps of the dead man’s experience upon earth, the making up of his conclusions. Atum answers to Sol inferus or darkness, evidently not in the sense of an ending, since it is with life that he presents the king, but in the sense of an accomplishment (of that stage, that is). In the same sense he is called upon the obelisks the ‘‘Lord of Years.’’ For the obelisks, you know, were dedicated to Ra, the sun, who may be called the measurer of time and of whom Atum was but a form; the word obelisk means ‘‘sunbeam.’’ Atum is like the guardian genius of the tombs: he is seen there so often and generally as Nofri-Atum, ‘‘nofri’’ simply meaning ‘‘good,’’ and a ‘‘good completion’’ being certainly the idea which would be most likely to occur in the tombs. He is called, in his legend, ‘‘Defender of the World’’ in this sense. This mixture of two gods in one seems to be, instead of a confusion, the best defence of the Egyptians, as we should speak of two attributes being blended. So you see Amun-Khnum blended into one, Amun being wisdom and Khnum spirit: it means the ‘‘intelligent spirit’’ of the Creator. I wrote down all the illustrations of the three worlds painted on Seti’s tomb, on the spot with a farthing candle, but did not understand the half of them, so how shall I make a description of them? In

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the first great hall of the four pillars what struck us most was a procession of hours, holding Seti, as a mummy, by a chain. The hours were twelve, each with a star on its head; each was itself fastened by a link of the chain and the end of the chain was round Seti’s neck. How beautiful the idea: the king was bound to each hour for its occupation. He was not master of his hours, but they were masters of him (and indeed the kings in Egypt seem to have had less liberty than anyone else. Their very hours, private as well as public, were all regulated and the most extraordinar y thing is that Diodorus tells us that they adhered, in their private as well as public life, to these regulations of law, and that it was impossible for the king to give a hasty sentence, ‘‘one dictated by revenge or the impulse of anger.’’ Law seems to have been the deity of the Egyptians). This chain of Seti’s hours is a splendid idea: one hour the inevitable link to the next, the next following its predecessor and being the consequence of its predecessor as certainly as grains of sand in an hourglass. If one link is broken, all falls to the ground. Under this procession of hours is the beautiful group: Horus (or regeneration) leading the king lovingly into the presence of his father, Osiris the judge. Hor us has (I think) one hand on the king’s shoulder, the other holds his hand and thus, standing behind him, he seems to encourage him to go in with the most beautiful hopes or rather trusts. How cheerful were these old Egyptians’ views of death and progress! On the four square pillars of this hall are groups or rather dialogues (on each side one) the most different in execution, some masterly in expression, others by a mere workman’s hand, of Seti holding intercourse with diverse spirits of Amenti. One I remember with Anubis (opposite the hours) which in colouring, so rich and subdued, in expression and everything Σ admired as much as I did. (Wait till you have been in the tombs and you won’t laugh!) In the unfinished hall, beyond this, the outlines are merely sketched in and you see the corrections of the master. The tomb being closed up on the king’s burial, Seti died and this was left unfinished. But I think it is all the more interesting for that. Someday in my old age, when more Champollions have arisen and all the hieroglyphs have been read, I shall look back to the lists I have made of the figures in that room, of which I don’t understand one, and read them with a new mind. Serpents winged, legged (Champollion says the serpent with two human legs is Khnum), many-headed, erect, in all manner of attitudes; a procession of gods carrying the great serpent Apophis, which

386 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions I believe Champollion thinks to be the final victory over the great beast; a succession of doors with men lying between each, which Pythagoras says means the successive stages of progress, the successive lives through which we are to pass. How could we ever go back, after this wise belief, to imagining that the soul’s destiny was sealed (at the end of half an hour of existence) for good or for evil and its books made up forever? Annofre (the opener of good), the name of Pythagoras’s beloved Egyptian teacher (as also of Osiris), told him that the soul returned after 3000 or 10,000 years to the same position, and tried it over again, no doubt with the new powers for improving it which experience had given. By this, as Pythagoras (I think) says, we are not to understand the exact number of 10,000, for numbers with the Egyptians were all symbolical; 10 as the limit, meant ‘‘man, purified from sin and returning by a new birth to unity whence he proceeded,’’ as 9 meant ‘‘man not purified from sin’’ (being 4 and 5: 4 = intellect, 5 = sin and 9 = intellect united with sin), so that you see Plato’s ten thousand years (look at his Phaedr us), which he had from his teacher Chiusn (or Khnum), only meant completion or return to unity or harmony. I took particular notice of the numbers in the tombs (for the sake of future discoveries on this subject) and because, even in the Bible, 40, 70, 4, 7 are used in a way which can neither mean a matter of fact nor be accidental: everybody lives 40 years or reigns 40 years or a multiple of 40. In the tombs the numbers are almost invariably 4, 7 or 12. I have seen 3 and 13, but seldom. Now 4 means religion or wisdom, 3 action and 7, being 4 + 3, ‘‘intellectual agents.’’ In the Bible the candlesticks,463 the gifts of the Spirit,464 etc. are all seven. Plutarch says that Pythagoras got all his ideas about numbers from the Egyptian symbols. Pythagoras says, ‘‘Know God who is number and harmony.’’ How profound that idea is, not as if numbers had any mystical charm or power in themselves, but because number is the only certainty and God is certainty. We may get hold of the wrong number, but that is no disproof of the ultimate certainty. When once we have learnt the right one, we are admitted into the sanctuary of God, the only Invariable we may prophecy as Isaiah did,465 that is, we may write the history of 463 An allusion to Rev 1:12. 464 An allusion to 1 Cor 12:1-11. 465 Isa 6.

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the future as well as the past. For numbers, with God, can never alter. If such and such is the state of the soul now, it is written with as much certainty as that 4 + 3 = 7, what will be its state after a certain period. Pythagoras and his numbers had the deepest meaning we have ever reached—number is the nearest thing we know to inspiration. How comfortable is the trust which comes from this: number (or invariableness) and goodness is all we need to know of the Deity, and these are written all over the Egyptian tombs. Well, where was I? From the hall of the four columns you go down that steep stone stair, now broken, ruined and slippery, which every Belzoni devotee knows so well. He could not find it but, sounding the wall in the unfinished chamber and finding it hollow, he broke the hole into the stair, which still remains. On that descending passage you see Osiris with an altar and burning flame before him, which, Pythagoras was told by his teacher (Souchis the ‘‘animating,’’ this was the name of the Egyptian arch-prophet and Pythagoras’ other teacher), meant the aspirations of the intellect or the soul. Then, in the two long descending passages which follow, are painted the twelve divisions (of Amenti?), then nine more. Amenti has been supposed by Plutarch to mean ‘‘the giver and receiver,’’ as if it indicated succession, stages, the succession of spheres through which the spirit, rising in its progress to becoming ‘‘one with God,’’ has to enter and to leave. The Egyptians, and after them Pythagoras, have continually used the phrase in describing the course of the human soul, that it has to ‘‘return into the bosom of God,’’ that its long series of transformations are to qualify it to re-enter the ‘‘vital centre,’’ the ‘‘central unity,’’ to recover its wings that it may ‘‘fly away to its pristine abode,’’ to ‘‘unity whence it proceeded.’’ One cannot help thinking what is the good of all this bore and all this purifying if the spirit is only to be reabsorbed into the great centre, to return to Him who gave it? But now that I have seen the tombs, I am sure that that was not the meaning of these expressions, but that the great old truth, that the end of life is to become ‘‘one with a God,’’ was theirs as ours, that that was the sense of these doctrines, and that all these states of trial were but to compass this. Upon the wall of the descending passage (no. 4) in Seti’s tomb are painted successive inclined planes with doors, each guarded by a serpent, evidently the entrances into the successive stages. At the bottom of the second staircase (no. 3) flies with extended wings the goddess of truth into her domain the dead man has now come, for here there is no

388 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions deception. The favourite title of the king under all cartouches is the ‘‘friend of truth’’ or ‘‘speaker of truth.’’ But where were we? just entering the hall of the sarcophagus, the Great Hall. First you see a figure with a spear threatening a serpent, then a range of twelve mummy closets with open doors, which Pythagoras interprets (in the same way) as a succession of spheres, the whole series surmounted by a serpent; then . . . but they are innumerable. In a side chamber, no. 15, seemed to be bas-reliefs having reference to the great initiations. Ra was marshalling his twenty-four hours: those of the day, far apart, those of the night, near together. Two deities were capturing a serpent who was stuck full of knives. But those [basreliefs], which are supposed to have peculiar reference to the mysteries, are where a man holds three prostrate figures by a cord, which are seen farther on headless, a deity having cut off their heads (the hierophant held a knife over the necks of the neophytes at a particular stage to represent their regeneration). Of the grand vaulted hall of the sarcophagus no. 14, the upper part, is supported by the six square pillars; (no. 13), the lower, is one great painted space. When this is lighted up by a straw fire, you can conceive nothing so mystical, so strange, so gorgeous: Isis flies with outstretched wings over the whole of one end, Khnum over the other. The whole is as fresh as if it had been painted thirty days instead of thirty centuries [ago]. The hall is covered, ceiling and all, with ‘‘the whole cosmogonic system and physics of the Egyptians,’’ so Champollion says. Much has not been read, but what has shows some ‘‘old tr uths which we have thought very young.’’ Clothed ‘‘in mysticism the most refined,’’ Champollion calls it the most valuable astronomical science.466 Seti’s tomb surpasses all the others in point of art as much as Raphael surpasses Cimabue,467 the difference is very similar. But I confess some of the others interested me more. In all of them a basrelief (which, in Seti, is in the first great hall, no. 6) gives us the Egyptians’ ethnological ideas. It belongs to the third hour of the day, when the sun begins to warm all our countries, and shows the ethnography of the time. Four families, led by the shepherd of nations, Horus, are there distinctly drawn (four figures in each): the Egyptian, modestly called mankind, who is red, the colour of the heat of fire (the female 466 Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie 244. 467 Cimabue, Italian painter of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries.

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Egyptian is painted yellow, the colour of the light of fire. I think that is rather pretty, making the man the warmth and the woman the light of life. Fire, I suppose, of course means life). The Negro, the Asiatic and a fair tattooed savage clothed in skins, with the tail still on: who can that be, I wonder? You don’t expect to meet your Papa in an Egyptian tomb, who can he be? Alas! that is the European, my much-revered Grandpapa. Different types are taken for these four families in different tombs. In Ramesses V’s the third is an Assyrian with a magnificent dress, in this tomb of Seti a simple Arab—but our progenitors are always the same—there can be no mistake about them: the undressed skin for clothes, the tail, the tattoo, the savage feather headdress, the white complexion. Red is of course not because the Egyptian was red, but to give him ‘‘l’air noble.’’ Ramesses III’s tomb, though not to be compared with Seti I’s in point of art, is to me more interesting. In a small hall, before that of the sarcophagus (which is dedicated to the four genii of Amenti), are the forty-two divine assessors, each of whom was charged to examine the king upon one sin, the ‘‘accusing spirit’’ or the sins taking shape and form, and beginning to ask ‘‘Is it I?’’ or ‘‘Is it I?468 of which thou art guilty.’’ They have most of them animal heads, typifying what they are. In this tomb, the stag’s head is luxury, the tortoise sluggishness, the crocodile greediness (the tribunal which on earth, at the edge of the Sacred Lake, refused or granted burial to the dead soliciting it, was but an image of this supposed divine tribunal). Under each assessor you see written Ramesses III’s confession or justification: I have not got drunk, he says, I have not been lazy, I have told no lies, I have not stained myself with impurity, I have not shaken my head at hearing words of truth, I have not uselessly lengthened my words, I have not made slaves of the Egyptians, I have not devoured my heart—all the commentators, for fear of being immoral, qualify this with ‘‘have not had to repent,’’ but I think it means, have not weakened myself by ‘‘repentance unto death.’’ How many have followed (morally) the example of a great type of men, Judas, for want of Ramesses’ philosophical idea. The two tr uths (i.e., two Ma’at’s) head the assessors. In Ramesses III and Ramesses V’s tomb you see the king’s funereal boat pulled by men up a steep bridge. It won’t move. The scarab (regeneration) stoops from heaven, to which it clings with its hind legs, while 468 An allusion to Matt 26:22, 25.

390 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions with its forelegs it pulls up the boat. In that same tomb of Ramesses V are most plainly figured the successive stages of Amenti, each with a door or, as Champollion reads them, the ‘‘abodes of the sun.’’469 We went into the tomb of my beloved Ramesses I, more curious (as being the oldest in the valley and the best in point of art, except Seti) than from anything else, for it is small, only one chamber and a passage, which is entirely blocked up with fragments. You have to lie on your back and slide down in that attitude with your face against the roof. I saw in it the same succession of mummies in closets as in Seti’s, of which the last three only have always the ‘‘neter’’ (sign of the God). I thought this might mean that in the last three stages they were made ‘‘one with God.’’ In the hall of the sarcophagus of Seti’s tomb, a succession of squares contains first apes, then serpents, thirdly humans. Can this mean that we are at first no better than apes, then we get as clever but as wicked as serpents, and lastly only we become human? In my secret soul I believe that these wise Egyptians meant nothing more by their animal transformations than the animal vices we display—and that they believed this life to be one of them, not the first for all, nor that we return to a beast after being a man unless indeed we have qualified for such a descent—but that I, for instance, am an ape now— that being neither my first nor my last transformation. But I was Ramesses I, not an ape just now and in his tomb. There is a little niche in it where his mummy is treading on a serpent: Khnum on one side and the cobra Capello (the sacred asp Thermuthis, the giver of death) on the other. The asp was sacred to Khnum (in all the tombs he stands in his sacred boat with the asp over him) and is quite different from Apophis, the great serpent which the gods ‘‘put out under their feet.’’ Here it is evidently meant that death is lifting him up to another world. The asp was so different from the serpent in Egyptian estimation that it makes the king’s headdress and was therefore called by the Greeks βασιλ´ισκος and by us basilisk. In all the tombs is a curious bas-relief of two inclined planes (with figures climbing up), the two being separated by an abyss and serpent. In Ramesses V’s tomb, I saw the procession of the hours a little varied (it was on the left of the first passage). The foremost figure, the first of the day was a little bigger than the rest, as if to say that upon the first depended all the rest, that he led everything. Then come eleven hours, distinguished by a star and connected by a serpent; then 469 Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie 242-43.

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twelve other hours, in three companies of four, each four having a different head: a human, a hawk’s and another—whether this signifies the different occupations, intellectual, animal, etc. I cannot tell. This dozen is again closely tied by a serpent. I believe Pythagoras learnt from his friend Annofre that this procession of hours simply meant the chain of cause and effect, that, as 12 o’clock follows 11, so surely, so inevitably does effect follow cause. So certainly does one action proceed out of another, or, as he would put it, that number reigns in the moral kingdom as certainly as in the physical, so that if we would but study, instead of studiously avoiding to investigate the laws of inspiration or of thought or of influence, we should read them and find them as immoveable as the march of the sun. Instead of saying, as all sects, one and all, seem agreed in doing, ‘‘Oh! do good, have faith, do not look for the result, but believe that some good will come, say what you think right, liberate your conscience, and have faith.’’ Yes, you are quite right ‘‘not to look’’ for any result because you won’t see, and if you don’t see, you will leave off. But if you would but believe in Pythagoras’s numbers, you would see that, as surely as 10 follows 9, so exactly is the effect tied to every word you say, the result to every moral as well as physical cause. Instead of ‘‘casting your bread upon the water, hoping it will return after many days,’’470 instead of scattering your seed,471 tr usting that some will come up, study the laws of the human mind as you do those of the human body. You don’t give medicine in that way. But people would shrink from the idea of subjecting thought and inspiration to anything so formal, so material as law—and so they will go on to the end of the world, shooting in the dark, influencing each other and themselves by accident, hoping that something will hit. Oh! Pythagoras, what a wise man wert thou! how differently would the question of inspiration and education have been treated by him, which we shirk, one and all of us, and shall I suppose forevermore. Opposite the procession of hours in Ramesses V’s tomb are the chambers of the sun: divers compartments, with Ra in the top shelf, each guarded by a serpent putting out his tongue, a fiery tongue. But, my dear souls, I dare say I have told you all this before. Pray excuse my dreadful repetitions, for I sometimes write in such a hurry that I cannot tell what I have already said and what not. 470 A paraphrase of Eccl 11:1. 471 An allusion to Mark 4:3-8.

392 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions In Ramesses V’s tomb is the famous pig scene, the patient coming into Osiris’s presence in the form of a man and retiring in that of a pig, after having weighed his own deed and found himself wanting. In Ramesses III’s tomb this scene is in the place of honour, enshrined at the very extremity in what would be the sekos in a temple. I do hope it is the king himself. It is not impossible for, in Seti II’s tomb, his name is scratched out, an instance, Champollion thinks, of a king being refused the honour of burial and the tomb he had made before death having therefore his name removed from it after. It is quite evident, with Ramesses III’s pig, that it was not sculptured and painted like the rest of his splendours, but just cut in afterwards, as it were. If so, it would agree with the idea his temple of Medinet Habu gives of his character. So I shall call the pig Ramesses himself till further notice and I hope the grave was not to him what, in Egyptian, it is called, ‘‘beth-nofre,’’ the good house. In Seti’s tomb, a rocky divan runs all round the side chamber (no. 15) where perhaps the chiefs were laid about their king. The scarab is often seen connecting earth and heaven, in the sense of regeneration: hanging on to heaven, its head on earth. I don’t like coming to the astrology, I have such a ‘‘ribrezzo’’ [distaste] for it, though I do not know why, after all—as we find at least as much about it in the oldest book which gives us information about Egypt as we do in the tombs. Genesis tells us how Joseph was sent for by the pharaoh to explain his dream,472 Exodus how Aaron held the lists against the Egyptian astrologers in prodigies.473 It is not wonderful to us to find astrology mixed up with religion among the Egyptians as among the Hebrews; the ‘‘priests,’’ with both, meant not only the ministers of religion but the ministers of science. The same men taught the worship of God and the facts of nature; in the same hands was all spiritual and physical knowledge. One is not surprised therefore to find often a confusion. Astrology is perhaps the point where the two colours run into one another and make a blur. We find no fault with the Hebrews, why should we with the Egyptians? The most curious part of the story is that Manetho, the high priest and sacred scribe of Heliopolis, who wrote his histor y at the command of Ptolemy Philadelphus, appears not only to have given his sovereign an account of the past, but also some prophecies (out of the books of Hermes Trismegistos) about the future. 472 Gen 41:14. 473 Exod 7-8.

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That all early nations should be governed by great men, by monarchs, spiritual or military, seems the natural course of things. That a nation should think it safer to put the power into the hands of a spiritual than a military monarchy seems so tempting a mistake that one rather despises the Gothic nations for a want of spiritual feeling, that they should prefer chiefs where the more mystic and finer oriental organization preferred priests. In the Middle Ages, among the southern nations of Europe, perhaps owing to their Sanskrit origin, spiritual monarchies came in again in the form of the Jesuits. Of the two, the feudal system appears infinitely less respectable than the religious system in that the one appeals to an undoubtedly lower part of us than the other. The day of monarchies is over, heaven be thanked, but a little prestige, a ver y little one, let me have for Egyptian priests and Jesuit orders. That it is over, it seems to me, we owe mainly to Greece: what inestimable obligations we have to her. One cannot regret the fall of Egypt. Not even poetically can one mourn over the Greek conquest. That Greece misunderstood the religion of Egypt, that she palmed upon her elder sister, almost her foster mother, the most ridiculous fables, that she tried to ‘‘teach her grandmother to suck eggs,’’ all that is tr ue. But without Greece we should have had no Egyptian history, without her the Egyptian philosophy would never have benefited us. Europe seems to owe her philosophical existence mainly to the mixture of Greek and Egyptian genius. The Egyptian priest, like so many a learned man, seems to have had no power of imparting his knowledge, no idea of teaching us babies. He made, like [Francis] Bacon, a wretched schoolmaster. Without Greece we should have had no Manetho; without Pythagoras and Plato, Egyptian philosophy would have stayed where she was put, in the tombs. She had no active principle, no power of motion in her. She was like the first member of the triad, incomplete, unfertilizing, without the others. Greece came in and made the second, and Europe is the result as the third. Manetho, though an Egyptian, was the child of Greece, of Greek education and wrote in Greek. Only Plato’s transparent genius could have made Egyptian philosophy intelligible to us. Egypt gave the learning; Greece gave the form. But where was I? Apologizing for Egyptian astrology. What a ‘‘turn’’ it ‘‘giv’’ me when I first saw it in the tombs, because, among the Hebrews, it was only mixed with religion. In the Egyptian tombs one sees it mixed up with the purest metaphysics, which makes the confusion in one’s cranium still greater.

394 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Champollion474 says that in such a political system as that of Egypt, where religion entered into all ethics and all science, formed the base of all politics, social and foreign, of the whole organization in fact, civil and political—where religion was in their every thought, word and action—the flag was not ‘‘civil and religious liberty’’ but civil and political religion. Religion, like every sentiment which has been strong and lasting, took in the whole of the universe and pressed the study of every part of it into her ranks. In such a social organization every science must have two parts: one, the facts observed which, since our Bacon’s time, has alone been called science; the other, the speculative part, or the connection of the science with the faith. Out of this grew astrology, the ancient consecration of astronomy to religion: the dedication of every part of the body to a god (i.e., an attribute), as the head to Ra, the lips to Anubis, the feet to Ptah, etc., viz., out of the idea that every created thing was under the government of a god. Champollion475 gives an explanation of the astrological picture which covers the ceiling of two halls, and [of] one passage in Ramesses V’s tomb, which is not interesting but very queer, so I send it. I saw it, in part, on a ceiling at Dendera. The goddess of heaven surrounds the whole ceiling with her long arms and divides it in half. One half represents the march of the sun in the twelve hours of day; of night, the other. In the east the sun is being born under the form of a little child (with his fingers at his mouth), enclosed in a red disk. Mooi (Hercules or reason) standing in a boat, lifts in the child. Two goddesses nurse him. The boat sets sail upon the celestial ocean which, running from east to west, terminates in an immense lake and then returns. Each hour of the day is given by twelve disks on the body of the goddess, in the picture by twelve boats, in which the sun sails with a company which varies with every hour, standing upon both shores. In the first hour the spirits of the east present their homage to the newborn sun, standing in his naos [central part of temple]. Sori pushes off Seb with a hare’s head, stands with a sounding pole which he does not use, however, till the eighth hour. Hor us is the reis with Hakè as his lieutenant and three others. On the banks are the spirits who preside over each hour of the day. (The seven deities in the boat are supposed to represent the moon and planets.) 474 Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie 241. 475 Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie 240-44.

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In the second hour are the spirits of the kings, with Ramesses V at their head, meeting and adoring the God in his boat. In the fourth, fifth, sixth hours, Ramesses V assists the gods in their war against the great serpent Apophis, hidden in the ocean. In the seventh, eighth hours, the boat sails by the Elysian fields where, under the trees, are walking the ‘‘pure spirits.’’ When the sun approaches the west, Seb sounds incessantly with his pole. Gods upon the bank carefully direct the boat, which turns the great basin and reappears in the stream which flows from west to east. But the company has disappeared. No one is left on the bark but the pilot who stands motionless and silent before the naos; Ma’at (who presided over Amenti) is consoling the sun in his hole. During these twelve hours of night the boat is towed as at the present day. Genii are the ‘‘tow’’ers. (A table of the influences of the constellations for every hour is below.) [Table not available.] In these tombs the kings are all undoubted portraits and the countenances vary excessively. Seti has much the best. But Ramesses III, I am sorry to say, has not a bad countenance, in a beautiful group, where he stands before Osiris, whom Isis is protecting with her wings. I went into seven tombs in all: Ramesses I, the earliest; Seti I, the best in point of art (Belzoni’s), both of the XIXth Dynasty, fourteen centuries before Christ; Seti II, the last of the dynasties whose name is scratched out, and the first king of the XXth Dynasty (Nilus, the contemporar y of Menelaus, seems to have appropriated the tomb) thirteen centuries before Christ; Ramesses III, the largest of all the tombs (Br uce’s); Ramesses IV; Ramesses V, brothers, this last the most curious and metaphysical al all; Ramesses IX, quite in the decadence of art, all four of the XXth Dynasty. But all declining in point of beauty and execution, both the sentiment and the drawing becoming more laboured. And so farewell to the Valley of the Tombs, to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the most curious of man’s creations perhaps. For what after all were these palaces hewn and sculptured and painted with such curious art? Were they walled up immediately after the solemn burial and the openings concealed with anxious care and only remembered in the traditions of the priests? Were they meant never to be opened again by mortal hand? Or, at the end of the 3000 years, the ‘‘Orbit of Necessity,’’476 which is just about now expiring, did the Egyptian 476 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs 3:464.

396 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions priesthood fondly hope that their throne was established forever upon earth and that some of their descendants, perhaps they themselves in their returning bodies, would be here to open them and to welcome the returning monarch? Was all that learning and art and labour really to be buried forever? or who was to read it and profit by it within? Did they look upon the tombs as indeed a ‘‘long home,’’ and that the spirit was there to profit by their care? or were they working for future ages? The tombs give no answer and these unearthly treasure houses of earth’s best learning confound all our usual experience of human motives and man’s usual modes of action as much as if we were to find records of the creation of the planets and their primeval launch from the central sun, written by the hand of some genii, in a language decipherable by us and laid up for us in the caves of Elephantine or the fossil forests of the west. Source: Letter 45, 1854 ed. 241-50, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/20, 22 3/4

Dendera [Monday] 25 Februar y 1850 Dendera is a vulgar, upstart temple covered with acres of bas-reliefs which one has no desire to examine, built without faith or purpose, but cleaned out by the pacha to the bottom so that one can walk about it but too well. The only impression one brings away from it is that the people who built it thought that there must be gods and that the god of the Egyptians would do as well as any other—it did not signify—take him into the Pantheon. So without really believing much in any god, Dendera was built and the consequence is one never wishes to see it again. And while there, one has no wish to examine the miles of sculpture; one does not want to become better acquainted with them or with it. It is the very sanctuar y of priestcraft, a wonder of holy artifice; the walls so thick that no sound can go through them, the sekos and its two auxiliaries entirely surrounded by a broad passage, beyond that a hedge of priests’ apartments and, finally, the whole outer wall, hollowed like a honeycomb with secret passages, riddled with staircases, and one or perhaps two storeys deep provided for beneath, in the substructions. Into these passages you crawl through a hole which just admits your horizontal body. We found three such in the priests’ apartments. They could evidently be made up with a stone from within, so that no external trace should remain. We saw other stones which had been insufficiently put in, betraying other holes. These pas-

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sages were wide enough and high enough to walk comfortably in, and led from storey to storey by staircases, and the whole was lined every inch of it with bas-reliefs. They had probably served for initiations, mysteries, etc. They must have been rather stuffy. Besides these, there are all sorts of wider processional passages, from roof to floor and from floor to roof. The portico of Dendera, as you know, is magnificent. I think we found the columns to measure twice (in diameter) those of Philae. Dendera is, of course, Roman. The earliest name which you find there is of that vile Cleopatra. The only room which interested me was one in the roof. It was while I was there that I heard the most supernatural noise, like the sighing of spirits in hell, rising from one place and spreading over the whole temple, evidently some effect produced (and provided for) by the wind in the secret passages. In this chamber there was a poor imitation of Philae: an Osiris half raised on his bier, Hor us giving him life and the soul, a human-headed bird, sitting on a tree at the head. There was, too, an idea copied from the older monuments: all the gods, with Amun at their head (Thoth, etc., inclusive), making offerings to Osiris, a beautiful idea, that all the attributes of God are but the servants or ministers of His goodness, which animates them all. Hor us, piercing the serpent, and all the usual representations were there. One new to me was of boats, with a radiating sun at the prow, but a mere list of these would not interest you and I have no inspiration about Dendera. Outside was a frieze of kings’ souls, the sun between each two, with three beams coming down to earth in the form of lotus buds—to show his fertilizing power, I suppose. There is also a little temple to Hathor there, peripteral, with rather a pretty frieze on the inner side: Horus on a lotus between Typho and Mors. We rode into the sacred place, a process one does not feel a profanation there, but which is an abomination to me in general, that we, upon our asses’ feet, should be treading the place too sacred in their eyes for any but their high priest, cleansed and purified, to enter: the place of all their aspirations and all their love. The ride to Dendera through long halfeh grass and doum palms is ver y pretty.477 To the astronomer Dendera is dear, for upon its portico is the famous Zodiac and in the Zodiac the sign of the lion comes 477 Ms 9017/20: But no letter at Qena, my dears, and that is the reason mine are so stupid; it is so difficult to write with no news from home.

398 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions first, showing that the summer solstice was then in that sign instead of, as now, in Cancer, for the summer solstice began the zodiacal year with the Egyptians, which we begin with the vernal equinox. In the zodiac at Esna the sign of Virgo comes first, instead of Leo, showing that then the summer solstice was in Virgo. Now this proves that, in Egypt, the precession of the equinoxes was already known and it may prove more. But as both Esna and Dendera are only Roman, all that is certain is that the Egyptian astronomers wished to represent in those two zodiacs two successive states of the heavens: that in which the summer solstice was in Leo and consequently the vernal equinox in Taurus, instead of Aries, and that in which the summer solstice was in Virgo and consequently the vernal equinox in Gemini. Now we know that it was before the date of Dendera that the summer solstice passed into Cancer and the vernal equinox into Aries. Therefore it was not, at all events, the actual state of the heavens which the astronomer wished to represent but a recorded state. And if, as Champollion478 thinks, both Dendera and Esna are copies of much more ancient monuments, of which the present were simply restorations, and that this proves that Egyptian astronomers were acquainted with the precession of the equinoxes at the time those monuments were made, to what a period does it not bring back that knowledge? We know that 2160 years is the time necessary for the passing of the equinoctial point from one sign into another, and therefore this brings us back to more than 2160 years before the last déménagement of the sun, which was before the Christian era, years we thus find written in this Esna zodiac. It may be, however, that the Egyptian astronomers were only composing states of the heavens, according to the law known to them, as you may compose eclipses in the past as well as the future. Doctors disagree. One does long in Egypt to know more of this wonderful race of men, the Egyptian priesthood. That promotion and power was held from the civil authority by them, as well as by the English hierarchy and that theirs, as ours, was endowed by the state, is evident—but the duties they had to perform in return were enormous in comparison with ours. Once a year every priest had to go to the metropolis, whether it was Thebes, Memphis or Alexandria. Perhaps Moses took his idea of assembling his whole nation at Jerusalem from this, ‘‘And ye shall be a 478 Champollion, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie 108, 199-200.

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kingdom of priests.’’479 The enormous power of the Egyptian priesthood was evidently given them by the spirit of the people, to whom religion was everything. All their insurrections (even in Roman times) arose from insults made to their gods; the nation invoked the gods upon ever y possible occasion, public and private. The priests, being a caste, of course all the offices and all the lands were hereditar y. But the great difference between their priesthood and ours, and the way to define it, seems to be—not that the priesthood had got hold of all the offices political, legal, religious, scientific and administrative—but that all knowledge and science being holy, the profession of any science made the priest. It was a national state of mind, of which we can have hardly any idea. Religion and law were its two characteristics. It was not as if a great and ambitious body had by degrees worked itself into all the power and influence in the country. It was as if the power and influence of knowledge, being sacred, made their possessors sacred. It was a part of religion as much to take care of your health as to go and sacrifice in the temple. Therefore the doctor was as much a priest, or a sacred character, as the hierophant or the sacrificer. The priest was not the doctor or the lawyer, but the doctor or the lawyer was a priest. Medicine was a subject of law and it was not legal to study more than one species of disease—the number of doctors for each was regulated. But how this omnipresence of law had its origin in the physical nature of Egypt, and how differently it would work here from what it would in our northern countries, it is impossible for an European to conceive. God seems to have created Egypt as the personification of law: a country without rain, without variations of climate, its food annually provided for it by an annual phenomenon without example in the world for its regularity, beginning and ending on a certain fixed day. It makes the character of an Egyptian so different from that of the self-dependent, liberty-seeking European that it seems as if Egypt was the very land for the observation of cause and effect, so much more certain must the noting down of consequences be here. Disease, weather, returns of every kind, from the public health to the causes of crime, might be here so much more easily calculated than anywhere else, that the things which seem to us most variable, most precarious and least fit to find a place in any almanac we can construct, may in Egypt be actually (by studying the law which is easily discoverable) made the subjects of law. 479 Exod 19:6.

400 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions To find, therefore, every individual thing in Egypt a measure of police, everything provided for by law, does not seem extraordinar y, while in Europe this would be impossible with our present ignorance—with our future wisdom, not desirable. On the other hand, the effect became again a cause and, no doubt, owing to the severity of police and of regulations in general, the public health and everything else in Egypt was much more regular than we can conceive possible. Then every year the same phenomena recurring enabled the college of priests to study again, as our books say of Ireland, ‘‘Its Evils, their Causes and their Remedies.’’ And thus the wonderful bill for mummying all animals, and the other administrative measures of her religion, cease to be wonders. In Egypt science deserved to be religious, she was so practical. On the propyla of the temple astronomy seems to have been studied. In Egypt our week of seven days had its origin, in a mistake no doubt (viz., in believing that there were but seven planets, of which the sun and the moon were two), still a most useful invention. All our calendar we have from Egypt. Chemistry took its name from Khemi, the old name of Egypt. Astronomers and philosophers then were priests and also, alas! astrologers: these Greece never inherited with Egypt’s other legacies. But, in Egypt’s early times, astrology meant only the study of the stars and of their influences upon natural phenomena , upon the changes of the weather and the seasons, which in Egypt were peculiarly certain and might be catalogued. Greece, where religion played so small a part, where there was so poor an idea of a priesthood and where the service of the temples was its only occupation, can give us no true account of the real feeling which surrounded the Egyptian priesthood, so that we are almost in ignorance about it. But you find the priestly caste in every office, disdaining none, extending from the king, who was often a high priest, down to the porters of the palaces. Always with the head shaved and the linen tunic, you recognize them in the monuments, from the scribe with his pen behind his ear (there is a precedent 4000 years old) to the panther-skinned priest of Osiris. The women, too, had offices and vocations in the church—as in ever y church except ours—the wives of the priests, the daughters of the kings were so employed. In the very tombs of the queens you read some title of the kind. What the education of the highest order of priests was, we see by that of Moses, who was prophet, legislator, general, politician and philoso-

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pher, all that was necessary to make a king, as the Egyptians said—and we see how he beat the Egyptian wise men at their own weapons. Clement of Alexandria says that he studied in the colleges of priests,480 particularly the hieroglyphic and symbolic art. How entirely we have mistaken the character of the institution of the priests in Egypt is wonderful, though after all it is not wonderful, for how can we conceive a nation who wrote its religion upon its public monuments (fancy the statue of the Duke of York inscribed all over with the belief in a future state), to whom religion was what politics, what railroads are to us? There is something very beautiful in all knowledge being so religious that the very professing of it consecrated a man. To the Egyptians Sir Isaac Newton would have been as holy as St Augustine, the one kind of knowledge was as much inspiration as the other. In this kind of priesthood there is nothing repulsive though its later degeneracy has taught us what seeds of danger there were in it, and how to avoid them (by having none at all). It has taught us that priesthood but too easily becomes priestcraft, and we have reversed the lesson and said that priestcraft is priesthood. Champollion says that he has measured 50,000 square feet of sculptures on one temenos wall. I suppose there is no parallel to this in any land. In Egypt every monument is its own interpreter; it bears its own date, its own history, its own faith engraved upon itself. There is no occasion to go, as in Greek and Roman history, to a number of traditions—all of which we know to be false—and uncertainly to grope for the truth only by comparing the false. Would we but study the language, here we have the contemporaneous history of ever y monument written upon its own self. Who will come and read it? For the philosophy of history, what country stretches out its hands to press such facilities upon us as Egypt? In every other one gets one’s knowledge out of books. Here, even we, in our ignorance, feel we have read what we know from the monuments themselves. There is, too, this certainty, that though the Roman and Ptolemaic monuments are often disgusting from their style of art, yet Champollion says he is convinced that the ancient gods of Egypt were still reigning the day their temples were closed by Christianity, that the inscriptions of the Roman and Ptolemaic buildings are exact copies of the pharaonic, as is proved by all the many cases where the blocks of 480 Stromateis II.95.13.18-19.

402 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions the pre-existing building were used for and built up in the restored one. The triads never changed. On the site of the Roman temple of Kalabshah, which I was so disgusted with, there was a previous Ptolemaic one and another before that, of Amenophis II, the creed the same in all, as proved by the inscriptions of the old blocks. Homer, like Pythagoras and Plato, studied in Egypt. The things he revealed in his poetry to Greece he did not learn there: he found them here. As Champollion says, how feelingly he puts in Ulysses’s mouth, ‘‘It is not a good thing, the government of many, let there be but one chief, one king.’’ Having had the opportunity of comparing the prosperity, philosophy and religion of monarchical Egypt with the rivalities and ambitions of Greece, having seen in Egypt one faith, one hope of a future state, kings bowing their heads before it and their religion—law ensuring order throughout a vast empire, the highest classes submitting to it and the rest following, monuments which no work of man has equalled, writing, i.e., demotic in general use—no wonder Homer was captivated481 with Egypt; he spoke avec connaissance de cause when he made comparisons in his own mind, odious at that time, of course. Source: Claydon Diary

22 Februar y 1850 Thebes. Farewell day to the Libyan suburb, first to old Qurna, the most lovely of all the temples, under its palm trees, then to the Ramesseum, Medinet Habu; and saw the sun set upon the colossi, making them like gold. 23 Februar y 1850 Sailed for Qurna at daylight and said farewell to Thebes in the afternoon—how familiar everything had grown on that western cliff. 24 Februar y 1850 Dendera. Arrived at Qena by daybreak. Consul’s boat there. Told us we were at war with Greece. 25 Februar y 1850 Rode to Dendera, a temple without faith, a sanctuary without religion, a wonder of priestcraft, the walls a honeycomb for secret passages. Sailed at sunset. 481 Ms 9017/22 3/4: épris.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 403 Source: British Library Diar y

22 Februar y 1850 Luxor before breakfast. Long morning by myself at old Qurna. Sat on steps of portico, moving with the shadow of the sun and looking at that (to me) priceless view. God spoke to me again. Bade farewell to Ramesseum, Medinet Habu, colossi, like gold in sunset for our last day. 23 Februar y 1850 Sailed for Qurna; they went up to Valley of Kings. Farewell to Thebes. Wrote my letters. Sailed at 4 p.m. 24 Februar y 1850 Qena by dawn. They went to Dendera; I tried to write but could not. 25 Februar y 1850 Sent letters by consul. Mr B. and I went to Dendera. Sailed at sunset. Source: Letter 46, 1854 ed. 250-53, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/22 3/4

How (Diospolis Parva) [Wednesday] 27 Februar y [1850] We breakfasted in haste, mounted our bridleless asses and were off before eight o’clock to see a tomb at How, about a mile inland, which has a judgment scene. It was a most interesting ride: an immense plain, with cultivation about a mile in depth, then, without warning or apparent difference of level, or tongues of sand encroaching, but only divided by a sharp straight line, began desert, which reached to the foot of the square of mountains or rather cliffs, the whole of this desert under our feet being evidently but the lid of a subterraneous city of tombs. Σ and I sat down on the sand and were surrounded by the sheikh and all the elders of a neighbouring village, draped and coloured like Guercinos— red, blue and brown (that heap of brown drapery they wear upon the shoulder is so like his pictures)—the sheikh looking like a St Peter with crimson turban and white beard. They seemed a well-to-do village and did not cry ‘‘Baksheesh,’’ and there was nothing of the usual sordid look about them. But conceive our desperation when we found the tomb we came to see positively carried away bodily, the stones, the painted stones, gone to make a sugar factory at How, where Mr B. saw them afterwards, not a public enterprise but a private speculation of a son of Ibrahim Pacha. This sugar factory employs 200 people who are paid thirty paras a day (1 3/4 d.). It goes day and night—an Englishman directs it. How is very pretty, when the sugar chimneys are out of sight, acanthus and sycamore round it, wells for the passer-by.

404 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Girgeh [the party arrived at Girgeh on 2 March], with its seven minarets, looks almost like an European town from the opposite shore. The modeeh’s [governor of the province] boat anchored there at the same time as ours, he having arrived on business, that business being, I suppose, to make the miserable villages pay twice over—there can be no other here. We went to the Latin church which, to judge from its size, must have a congregation, but the Latin father was gone to Asyut. With what joy I entered a Christian482 church again! Really my heart leaped within me The mass book was in Coptic and Arabic. Girgeh is the second town in Upper Egypt and we saw a school with six scholars who wrote on a tin plate very tolerably. There were no candles to be had in all the town of Girgeh and the Coptic clerk of the above church promised to manufacture some for Paolo, his particular friend. In about eight483 hours they arrived: pure wax with the honey in it they certainly were, but unless appearances are ver y deceptive, they were stolen out of the church’s store and we are now burning the ecclesiastical candle. I hope our friend is filling up the gap484 and now manufacturing for the church. Fancy us going to the second town of Egypt to feed, like David, on the showbread.485 There was no path up from the river to the town. All day long the unfortunate water carriers were coming down a perpendicular steep bank with their skins to fill and climbing up again with a stick. But Girgeh itself is crumbling into the river bit by bit. Here I saw four-storeyed houses, every window walled up with unburnt bricks and every appearance of being uninhabited, save by a woman on the roof or a blue-veiled face sticking out of a hole in the third storey. Anything so forlorn as the brown mud walls which make the streets of Egyptian towns, without windows, without any openings but the door, is impossible to conceive. One thing I must say for the poor women one meets walking alone in the streets, they never peep, they never try to show their faces, but are always most conscientiously covered; you never see anything but the oldest most withered hag unveiled. A ruined mosque in Girgeh is the most desolate thing I almost ever saw. We left Girgeh at night [5 March at 4 a.m.] but, when we had gone three miles, were obliged to put back for the wind. The next day we 482 483 484 485

Ms 9017/22 3/4: Catholic. Ms 9017/22 3/4: three. Ms 9017/22 3/4: fulfilling his promise. An allusion to 1 Sam 21:6.

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struggled on to Akhmim, the ancient Chemmis, and modern (i.e., Roman) Panopolis; but there is nothing left but enormous mounds, dividing the wretched village into three. Source: Claydon Diary

26 Februar y 1850 Nile. Contrar y wind all day. 27 Februar y 1850 Anchored at How (Diospolis Parva) and rode into the desert to find the tomb destroyed to help to build the sugar factory. Source: British Library Diar y

26 Februar y 1850 Began writing up my notes. 27 Februar y 1850 Made How before breakfast (Diospolis Parva). Rode to the tomb, a mile into the desert (destroyed!). All the afternoon in sight of How factor y sugar chimneys. Source: Letter 47, 1854 ed. 253-55, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/22 3/4

Asyut [Saturday] 9 March [1850] We have been just a fortnight coming from Thebes to Asyut, owing to the north wind blowing like a tempest,486 whereas the whole distance from Thebes to Cairo is generally done in eight days. This has been very aggravating as all the time that we have been lying at different places we might have spent at Thebes, and been just as forward on our voyage. What would not another week at Thebes have been worth to us! [Yet] we have been living at Thebes all this fortnight and ever since we left her. Arrived at Asyut, we went straight up to Lycopolis. The view and the place were as interesting as ever, but our grand eyes rather disdained the more-than-three-quarters-effaced sculptures and the cartouches which did not determine their age. However, my noble mind was bent not upon tombs, but upon hareems, upon Mustafa’s (our cook’s) ‘‘womans.’’ I do not care a doit about seeing Abbas Pacha’s hareem, one never gets further than the sweetmeats and the fine clothes, but I do want to 486 The wind made it impossible for the group to stop at the famous sacred site of Abydos.

406 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions see the common hareems. So, armed with needles and pins, we went to Mustafa’s house, nominally to thank for some bread they had presented us with on our way up the river. Oh! what a curious sight it was—no! the incongruities! the principal lady, the married sister, dressed like an oriental queen, but without a shift or anything487 which could be washed next her skin, and sitting upon the mud floor—no furniture, but a slave and the square holes for windows stuffed with mats. The second wife, in a blue shirt, stood on the threshold. The mother was baking downstairs—and two slave wives peeped in at the door. I never saw anything so really beautiful as the woman’s dress—of course it was her only one: cashmere trousers of a delicate small pattern, a ‘‘yelek’’ with hanging sleeves of an exquisite Brusa silk, crimson and white, trimmed with gold binding, a ‘‘tob’’ with immense sleeves of lilac silk, and over it (for the Arab never wears her gayest clothes outside) a purple gauze drapery embroidered with silver and veil of the same colour, embroidered in silks. And, withal, she had the carriage of an empress as she pointed to the carpet she had spread for us and invited us to eat. The kitchen, where she had been baking, was a mere tent, screened off from the yard by mats and poles, and there was no other furniture but a few pots and pans, and one very old clasp knife, made (apparently) by Tubal Cain,488 which was given us to eat with. The house was a large one for an Arab and the room we sat in was upstairs—room it was not, but a shed. Of course the woman’s dress was not a fair specimen, as Mustafa, having asked us to go, had been up and in the town since daybreak preparing for us and was himself so fine we did not know him. But there was not the slightest fuss or vulgarity in their way of receiving us when we did come. You never see an oriental in a fuss. When a sheikh asks you for a baksheesh, he does it like an emperor. In Egyptian ‘‘Mai’’ means ‘‘the beloved.’’ Ramesses was Amun Mai, the beloved of Amun. I have so often thought of our Mai when I read the inscriptions. You see I had an Egyptian prescience in my childhood.

I saw the prettiest sight I think it is possible to see, riding up to Asyut: a rough black buffalo bending down his great hairy head to be caressed by a delicate snow-white ibis, which was stretching up its exquisite swanlike neck to reach his face. It was the most beautiful epitome of God’s creation, of the most spiritual and most refined helping the coarsest and most degraded: it was Christianity among the savages, Thoth civilizing men, Moses raising those miserable Hebrews. I never understood the triad of Kom Ombo before: Sobek (darkness) with his crocodile head; Hathor (beauty); and out of them comes Khonsu (strength). It really was beautiful, the ibis and the buffalo each helping one another. I wish I were a poet, I could have made such a pretty picture out of it. Source: Claydon Diary

28 Februar y 1850 Nile. North wind blew such a gale we could not get on. 1 March 1850 Lay off Balyana all day. Whirlwind of sand. 2 March 1850 Girgeh. Came with the cord against the wind to shore opposite Girgeh where obliged to stop. Saw Girgeh’s minarets through a cloud of sand all day. Crossed over to Girgeh at night. Modeeh arrived at the same time on business, i.e., to make the villagers pay their taxes over again. 3 March 1850 Went to the Latin church but Latin father gone to Asyut. 4-5 March 1850 Girgeh. In all the land of Girgeh no candles, whereupon the Coptic clerk of the Latin church, a friend of Paolo’s, proposed to manufacture us some. In eight hours they arrived, good wax candles mixed with honey, but unless their appearance greatly belies them, they are holy candles out of the ecclesiastical store. Sailed, made three miles, stopped in the wind and put back to Girgeh with the sail for fear of robbers. Never went up sail so quick in all our voyage. Sailed at 4:00 a.m. Akhmim 12:00, which is now some three villages divided by the huge mounds of old Chemmis, afterwards Panopolis; left Akhmim, wind got up, thought of going back, obliged to stop but after dark pulled on to Souhadj, stern foremost, our last trick.

408 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 6 March 1850 Nile. Ten days from Thebes and made about 130 miles and the whole voyage to Cairo generally made in 8. Such a north wind and so cold, not known for 60 years. Fell in with the mad Frenchman, struggled on to Gebel Sheikh Hereedee, where we anchored and stayed two nights and a day. Wind blowing a gale the whole time. 7 March 1850 Thursday a tremendous cliff with lines of inaccessible tombs halfway up, near the top everywhere fantastic rocks, at the bottom a loose, isolated rock just like the head of Memnon. Walked on the opposite shore, an encampment of Arabs, not with huts but screens of Indian corn and a few jars, dogs and buffalos. 8 March 1850 Asyut. Left the cross old sheikh (at 3:00 in the morning) who had played us such a turn with his gobel [?]. Wobbled about all day, lay to at a village at sunset and walked ashore. Market and buffalos. Reached Asyut at midnight. 9 March 1850 Rode up to Lycopolis. White ibis and black buffalo. Mustafa’s ‘‘womans’’ sister en grande tenue and withal, with most imperial carriage; bade us eat, so we sat and eat on her carpet, mother baking cakes in the tent. Visit of priest in Arab dress. Left Asyut at sunset and went aground. Source: British Library Diar y

28 Februar y 1850 Walked round a civilized little village inland with village green and acanthus. Paolo had his fall. Hard at work with Tombs of the Kings. God called me with my madre’s490 words. 1 March 1850 Made El-Balyana. Oh! my madre, my madre. This was the time I made the retreat with you, which you said was more for me than for the children. Two years ago. Boat a hospital. Gave up Abydos. 490 A reference to Nightingale’s meetings in March 1848 with the maîtresse des externes, Laure de Ste Colombe, at the convent of the Sacré-Coeur, Rome.

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2 March 1850 At anchor opposite Girgeh all day. Made it at night. 3 March 1850 Girgeh. Did not get up in the morning but God gave me the time after wards, which I ought to have made in the morning: a solitary two hours in my own cabin, to ‘‘meditate’’ on my madre’s words. 4 March 1850 Girgeh. 5 March 1850 Sailed 4 a.m. Akhmim (Panopolis). Souhadj. 6 March 1850 Sailed 6 a.m. Anchored under Gebel Sheikh Hereedee. 7 March 1850 Gale all night and all day. Lying under Gebel Hereedee. God called me in the morning and asked me, Would I do good for Him, for Him alone without the reputation? 8 March 1850 Thought much upon this question my madre said to me: Can you hesitate between the God of the whole earth and your little reputation? as I sat looking out at the sunset upon the river in my cabin after dinner. 9 March 1850 During half an hour I had by myself in the cabin while Trautwein was up at Asyut with Mustafa’s womans (till I was called to advise Paolo about staying or going). Settled the question with God.

Cairo and Surroundings Source: Letter 48, 1854 ed. 255-70, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/23

Giza [Monday] 18 March 1850 You are dear good people. I have found here no end of letters from you, all good news We arrived here on Saturday morning, 16th . Mr B. said we would send into Cairo for the letters and we would go up the pyramids because then, if anything had happened, we should at all events have secured them. This, though said in joke, I believe pretty much expressed the feelings of all, viz., that it was a very good thing to have the pyramids to occupy our attention while waiting for the letters. However, a greater than Mr B. decided: the khamsin, and it made its decision with so loud a voice that to the pyramids we could not go. So Mr B. and I mounted our asses and rode into Cairo for the letters, which we found after a world of trouble and after frequently hearing there were none. Many and thick and happy ones, thank God—you are ver y good people. Nothing, however, decisive as to whether it is possible for us to go to Greece, so we came back again for Σ and wandered about old Cairo in the afternoon. Sunday we went in to church upon our asses and, meeting the Murrays, just landed, went in to luncheon and then to call upon the L[ieders]. You have no idea how strange it is to come back again into the world of life and civilized wants and customs, after having been for three months and a half in the land of graves, amidst death and a world of spirits. But the spirits of the old Egyptians are such good company and preach such nice cheerful sermons upon death and a hereafter.

I never shall forget the strange feeling, as we sailed up to Cairo on Saturday, of hearing a band of military music in the distance—we who have heard nothing but the music of the stars or the still small voice of the dead, for a whole winter. 491 The uncertainty affecting the travel to Greece was due to the sequels of a British-Jewish citizen’s misfortune: the merchant Don Pacifico had lost his property in the course of anti-Semitic pogroms in Athens and requested restitution; upon the Greek government’s refusal, the British foreign secretar y, Lord Palmerston, threatened to and then did order the blockade of Piraeus near Athens.

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This morning we set finally and resolutely out for the pyramids, but we had not reached the shore before it became invisible for the sand clouds—the wind covered us with water—it was hopeless. We said to the asses, wait—a welcome word to the Egyptian, who will wait for twenty-four hours without moving, if you tell him—and came back. At this moment I can hardly write and cannot even see Rhoda. We are keeping on the boat till we have accomplished these unaccomplishable pyramids, and are lying off Giza as it is too far to go from Cairo. And now for Memphis—beautiful, poetic, melancholy Memphis. No one had prepared us for its beauty. We thought of it as a thing to be done, tiresome after Thebes. We had three fair days of sailing from Minya and had not been ashore. The last night a storm arose and we were obliged to anchor; but rain—three drops!—fell and the wind was so terrified that it fainted away. By dint of tacking we got on the next day to Badrashein but took the little boat to get there. Paolo went up to the village for asses, we starving and shivering meanwhile in the boat. And shortly we saw Gad return, driving before him a troop of asses, about thirty or forty (Gad, if I mistake not, means ‘‘a troop’’). After some delay we mounted (no ass having a bridle) and rode along a causeway till we came to the most beautiful spot you can imagine. I have seen nothing like it except in my dreams, certainly not in Egypt: a palm forest, the old palms springing out of the freshest grass, the ground covered with a little pink flower (of which I have tried in vain to preser ve a plant for you) and the most delicate little lilac dwarf iris. Here and there a glassy pool and a flock of goats and kids, the long sunlight streaks and shadows falling among the trees. It looked as if nature had spread her loveliest coverlid, had grown her freshest flowers to deck the pall and throw on the grave of Memphis. I have seen nothing like this palm forest in the east. And in the middle, in a grassy hollow, by the side of a bright pool of water, lies a statue of the great Ramesses, the most beautiful sculpture we have yet seen. I must even confess that there is nothing at Abu Simbel to compare with it. I never felt so much the powerlessness of words. There he lies upon his face, as if he had just lain down weary. You speak low that you may not wake him to see the desolation of his land, yet there is nothing drear y but all is still. It is the most beautiful tombstone for the grave of a nation I ever saw. I felt as if God had placed it there Himself and said, ‘‘Ver y dear to me thou wert, my land of Memphis, and thou shalt have a fitting monument, the sweet green grass above thee spread and one of the most glorious statues in the world to

412 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions mark the place.’’ I could have cried when I heard them talk of turning it round upon its back, as if God had placed it there and it should not be touched by man. This statue was given to the English. It is well indeed we did not take it.492 We went down into the hollow to see the features: they are composed, serene, purified beyond anything I ever saw, with such a smile on the mouth and such an intellect in the brow. I had rather look upon that face again than upon anything in Egypt. The art is so perfect that the stone had all the softness of flesh. You are really afraid to touch those colossal stone features, the high blood nostril, the short upper lip, the moulded brow, for fear of insulting him—he lies so calmly upon his pillow, the pillow of his mother earth. Nothing is broken but the legs. In either hand is a papyrus with his cartouche upon it. Though the eyes are open, there is the most perfect appearance of repose. But I am ashamed to speak about the art when such an expression is there: the spiritualized, tranfigured expression, not indeed of a Christ in his transfiguration, but of an Aeschylean creation, a Prometheus or an Abdiel of Milton. This was the colossal standing statue which perhaps stood before the great temple of Ptah. At some hundred yards distance is a cluster of three mounds, about a mile round, with walls of crude brick, varying from twelve to twentyfour feet thick. This we fixed upon in our own minds as the site of the temple of Ptah, that wonder of ancient times. I brought away (for the school) a crude brick, full of straw, which mayhap the Israelites may have made. At all events, it is part of no Arab building, but of a real old Egyptian one. But I felt as if I had lived so intimately with Moses and Ramesses for the last three months that I did not care much about their bricks, when I had themselves. Today I walked with Moses under the palms, through the desert where he killed the Egyptian,493 about the palace where he lived as the grandson of the king, round the temple where he derived all his ideas of a pure worship and (sifting the chaff from the wheat) thought how he could retain the spirit of the religion while getting rid of the worship of animals. I forget whether it is Manetho494 or Strabo who says 492 Ms 9017/23: What luck we did not take it. 493 An allusion to Exod 2:12. 494 See Manetho: The History of Egypt Fragment 54 (from Josephus); see Loeb Classical Library edition 125, 131, 139, 145, where it is claimed that Moses had first been a priest at Heliopolis.

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that ‘‘Moyses’’ was a priest of Heliopolis, who wished to change the worship of brutes in Egypt. And I have often thought he may have tried the Egyptians first and, failing, gone to the Hebrews. I looked at the line of hills and of pyramids which he had looked at, and thought that probably the hills were more altered than the pyramids. How grieved he must have been to leave Memphis, guilty of ingratitude, as he must have seemed to her, towards his princess-mother who had so tenderly and wisely reared him and given him the means of learning all he valued so much, as the way of raising his brethren: that great, that single instance in history as far as I know, of a learned man, a philosopher and a gentleman, forming the plan of himself educating savages and devoting himself to it. It was like Sir Isaac Newton keeping school among the Nubians, Charles James Fox turning missionar y. There was more of the Roman Catholic, of the Jesuit, in Moses than of the Protestant. We should have said, what a waste! to squander such talents among miserable slaves, who won’t understand you. Keep in your own sphere—you will do much more good among educated men like yourself. I do not know any man in all history with whom I sympathize so much as with Moses: his romantic devotion, his disappointments, his aspirations, so much higher than anything he was able to accomplish, always aspiring to give the Hebrews a religion they could not understand.495 Well, we rode on through palm groves and cornfields, and by a small lake where once the famous sacred lake of Memphis was, over which the dead were ferried, to the edge of the desert where once was the necropolis of Memphis and which we call the desert of Saqqara— a desert covered with whitened bones, mummy cloths and fragments, 495 Ms 9017/23: Then in his measures he was a little like a Jesuit, as well as in his devotion, that astrology which I always think as little about as I can help. I never could bear reading about his magic when I was a child, and his doing evil that good might come: that abominable taking away the jewels from the good-natured Egyptian women and telling them that God wished it, and the killing the eldest sons. I only hope it is not true. But I think as little as possible of all that Jesuitry, magic and jugglery, which could not have been Moses’ doing, but his counsellors’, of whom Manetho [Histor y of Egypt, Loeb Classical Library 129] says he had many [who] walk with him under the palms when he was working out his highest aspirations for the good of his people, that unprecedented feat in history, by which he converted a caste of slaves into a nation. But I will not falsify my conscience by believing that black was white and wrong was right because Moses did it and said that God did it.

414 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions and full of pits, not here and there, not in one place and then in another—but strewed like a battlefield so as really to look like the burial place of the world. Of all that mighty world not one living man has remained to us, only this valley of their bones. Here Ezekiel might have seen his vision of the dry bones496 and passed by them round about, for there were ver y many in the open valley and lo! they were ver y dr y. Here the pyramids lost their vulgarity, their come-look-at-me appearance, and melted away into a fitting part and portion of this vast necropolis, subdued by the genius of the place. Hardly anything can be imagined more vulgar, more uninteresting than a pyramid in itself, set up upon a tray, like a clipt yew in a public-house garden. It represents no idea; it appeals to no feeling; it tries to call forth no part of you but the vulgarest part: astonishment at its size, at the expense. Surely size is a very vulgar element of the sublime. Duration, you will say, is a better [element], that is true, but this is the only idea it presents: a form without beauty, without ideal, devised only to resist time, to last the longest. Age is an idea one is so familiar with in Egypt that if a thing has nothing but age to recommend it, you soon learn to pass by it to the children of Sobek and Hathor, of Time and of Beauty. No, the pyramids are a fit emblem of the abominable race they represented and overthrew. Have they a thought in them? It is a thought of tyranny. What earthly good they ever did to any human being but upsetting the wretches who built them, I never could find out, except determining, by the mathematical accuracy of their position that in 6000 years the axis of the earth has not changed an iota of its direction. As a monument of time, then, the earth is as good as the pyramids. Well, I had been very loath to see the pyramids, but here we stood at the bottom of the oldest monument of man in the known world, the large pyramid of Saqqara, which is now believed to have been the family tomb of the first of the IIIrd Dynasty, Sesorchris I, 3500 years before Christ.497 There is nothing left to testify of man’s existence before this. It is not above 300 feet high and has a chamber excavated beneath it in the rock 100 feet deep, into which you descend by a well. I should like to have seen this mysterious cave, but it was impossible. This pyramid, unlike the others, is made of five great steps. I ran up a mound near it, from which I could see the whole of this necropolis of the world. Sprinkled about the churchyard stood the 496 An allusion to Ezek 37:4. 497 Name and date are probably incorrect.

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nine pyramids of Saqqara. On my left, to the south, the two of Dahshur, of which the nearest is almost as large (by thirty feet) as the Great Pyramid of Giza; both these are supposed to be of the IIIrd Dynasty; near them the two brick pyramids, mere ruins. On my right, to the north, the three pyramids of Abu Sir, of the three last kings of the IIIrd Dynasty, and beyond them, but seeming quite near, the two Giants of Giza with the smaller one of the Holy Mycerinus (all of the IVth Dynasty, 3229 bce) [now 2613-2492]. Above my head was the great pyramid of Saqqara, 3453 bce [now c2800-2700]. But their ugliness was softened away by the shadow of death which reigned over the place, as moonlight makes everything look beautiful. Tombs but a little larger than the rest, sprinkled over this burial place of the earth, as voices but a little louder than the chorus in this great elegy. I felt they were quite in keeping with the place. But how different was the Egyptian elegy from those of modern days. ‘‘He is made one with nature,’’ sing we. The Egyptian puts his dead beyond nature, out of the reach of nature (you may say, in an unnatural world), alone, where God only can come, beyond the reach of all that is under the sun, beyond the arm of all protection save that of God alone. Where only the wind can blow and the sand heap arise, the Egyptian sows his dead. Well has the seed come up and well has God kept His trust for him. It was a sublime idea, confiding his dead to the desert of Saqqara—the ocean itself could not make a more eloquent, a grander tomb. I could have wandered about that desert and those tombs for hours, but fatigue and those screeching Arabs, the two great Egyptian evils, drove us away. We stopped as we went at the tomb of Psammetichus II, a modern of 600 years before Christ, the predecessor of the Pharaoh Hophra [Apries] of the Bible [Jer 44:30], who was the predecessor of Amasis, the patron of Pythagoras and Solon, and friend of Polycrates, of the XXVIth Dynasty. This was a series of chambers, excavated in the ground, to which you descended by a pit. The chambers were vaulted and had pits in them. The hieroglyphs were clear—they were of the decadence. A granite sarcophagus here, an ibis pit there, stopped us as we rode away from the Arabs and back to Memphis, by the long palm grove and village of Saqqara. Again we stopped and had a long look at our Ramesses, whom we found still sleeping on the turf of the valley. I never saw anything which affected me so much. I do not believe there is anything like it in the world, except the Santa Cecilia

416 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Decollata [beheaded] in Trastevere at Rome.498 We clambered over the mounds and thought we made out499 two gigantic clusters of what must have been temples. Here and there we found an Hathor capital, a granite figure of an official, bearing on his shoulders one of those staves with king’s heads which were carried in processions. Otherwise the city of 3600 [3000] and odd years before Christ, founded by Menes himself, lay asleep under the green sod and the palm trees, ‘‘At her head a green grass turf, at her feet a stone.’’ The difficulty of writing about Egypt is that one feels ashamed of talking about one’s own impressions at such a deathbed as this—and yet, describe the place itself, one cannot—there are no words big enough. Memphis has wound itself round my heart, made itself a place in my imagination. I have walked there with Moses and Ramesses, and with them I shall always return there. But now I must go on. I told you how Saturday morning Mr B. and I rode into the town from old Cairo, about two miles (I always feel so proud when mounted like a caliph on my ass); how he deposited me with Mme François, my friend and hotel keeper; how I walked up and down the drear y sandy large high room with no furniture but mosquito curtains, and getting impatient looked out of window into the white unwindowed street; how one solitary individual came down the street, who, looking up at the same moment that I was looking out, turned out to be the mad Count we met on the Nile, who gave us birds and books, but whose name we never knew; how I was very near jumping out of window, second pair back, upon Count - -’s head, but remembering I should have to give back the books, refrained; how Mr B. came back with only one letter; how M Legros followed with a new pair of primrose-coloured gloves, put on for us, in which he looked like a dear old bear in satin shoes; how he fell about our necks; how he wanted me to go and see the hippopotamus; how I, getting uneasy about Σ, wished to go back; how he mounted us on our asses; how Mr B., at the door of our consulate, remembered he must go to the Greek merchant; how I rode into the consulate, ass and all, taking her with me as a sufficient chaperone, and a quite maternal 498 The church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere preser ves fragments of a thirteenth-centur y fresco of the Last Judgment by Pietro Cavallini (1250-1330). The interior of the church was further decorated in the eighteenth centur y and displays a languid statue of St Cecilia under the altar. 499 Ms 9017/23: verified.

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protector, even though she could not speak ; how at this moment two handfuls of letters arrived; how I snatched; how M Legros said, ‘‘Won’t you get off to read your letters?’’; how I did it, but remembering in the house the gross impropriety I had been guilty of in leaving my ass and coming in without her, implored to go into the garden; how I climbed up upon a white wall to be modest and retiring, and read my letters; how shocked I was when wine and biscuits arrived and were deposited by a dumb Arab in beautiful trousers before me (if it had been coffee I might have had fewer scruples); how I crawled down again and, remounting our asses, for Mr B. had by this time come back, we embraced M Legros and ambled away to old Cairo at a pace caliphs might have envied. Well, we fetched Σ and spent the afternoon in Fustat (Old Cairo), ver y interesting, though differing from Memphis. First, we went through narrow, narrow streets, with threads, not gleams, of sun through them, where the Moorish balconies not only met but overlapped overhead, to a Coptic church in the Roman fortress, where a Coptic funeral was going on, women couchant on the floor and howling, the coffin a mere shallow tray with the body in it, covered by a pink gauze, a priest chanting. And, when he had done, the finery torn off the corpse, which galloped away, followed by the women howling. Below the church we went down into a grotto or crypt, supported by four slips of columns on either side, making three aisles, very small and low, about eight paces by seven: certainly the oldest Christian place of worship I ever was in, without excepting the catacombs of Rome. Mr B. thought it older than any church at Jerusalem. Here, it is said, a serpent was worshipped by the Egyptians till the Virgin and Child made it their abode, when it disappeared. Certain it is that all sects, however inimical, Copt, Catholic, Greek, Maronite, believe in the tradition and each says mass there. I cannot help, like Robertson,501 believing in tradition, with one’s own reser vations. It is astonishing how much more difficulty we have in believing in an antiquity 1800 years old than in one of 6000. We have lately been so intimate with 500 An allusion to Num 22:28. 501 Perhaps Frederick W. Robertson (1816-53), Anglican preacher.

418 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions buildings of thousands of years and cannot now believe in one of hundreds. However that may be, it is certain that many martyrs suffered here, that it served as a Roman dungeon in Diocletian’s time. It is within the Roman camp of Fustat and near the gate where the praetorium was. It is certain that Mary was in Old Cairo and I shall believe that it was here she lived till further notice. says it could not be because it is so near the praetorium. but it was much more likely that Mary should put herself under the protection of the Romans, who cared for no religion (till the Christians fersecuted them) than under the enthusiastic bigoted Egyptians who, like us, hated and despised every nation but their own. The insignificant Mar y could be of no importance to the Romans, except as a Roman subject, for what were they likely to know of Herod’s quarrels? From hence we went to a Coptic convent, still on the site of the Roman fortress, of which the church is of the third centur y, full of beautiful Moorish screens and ivory work, with saints which work all sorts of miracles. One, a ‘‘patriarch Abraham,’’ who with the help of a believing shoemaker, saved the Christians’ lives by making a mountain move to convince a hardly believing caliph. They showed us his and the shoemaker’s picture, and the mark on the pillar where he rested his head when he prayed. Is it not curious?, evidently some mixture of the visit of Abraham to Memphis, with ‘‘Christians’’ substituted in the tradition. Also a picture of the Virgin and Child by St Mark, and a St Onofrio, whose shrine was covered with bits of hair nailed under his picture by [people] believing toothaches, having done this, are cured. There cannot be a doubt that Onofrio is the same name as ‘‘Annofre’’ (revealer or opener of good), the name of Osiris and that this refers to Osiris as the manifestation of the goodness of God. We went to the rooms at the top of the convent, where sick Copts (among others, Dr Abbott’s wife) come to get well, and the Roman Catholic odours savoured sweet in my nostrils. But I never remember so strange a feeling as looking through a chink in the convent wall (in a great state of rapture at finding myself really again in something like Catholic precincts) and seeing the pyramids as large as life in the plain. Strange incongr uity! After alternating Osiriolatry and Mariolatry (on my part), we took a third dose in the form of Amrou’s mosque,502 which he built when he 502 Built by Amr, companion of Muhammad and general who conquered Egypt for Islam.

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took the Roman fortress sixteen years after the Hegira for the Caliph Omar, calling the place Fustat, from his leather tent. He was seven months taking the place: he made it the royal city. Now his mosque stands among mounds and ruins, desolate to see. But oh! what a beautiful thing it is: an immense open quadrangle, with the octagonal well and water ‘‘de rigueur’’ in the middle—at the further end a colonnade of seven aisles, so light and airy that they look as if they were there for their amusement and were dancing with their shadows, not at all burdened by a sense of their responsibilities but laughing merrily with the sunbeams. The adjoining side has rows of columns, three deep; the other two, one. You never saw anything so pretty or so gay. The pulpit and reading place, the niche towards Mecca and Amrou’s unhonoured tomb in the corner are still there. But it looks to me like the place of worship of the Cluricaunes or where Titania’s mischievous elves make their devotions, not at all where a reasonable Muslim like myself could do so. We rode home over those desolate mounds: the ancient Ramesses of the Egyptians, where the pharaonic palace stood only a little more to the south in which Moses met pharaoh; the Babylon of the Persians (who christened the rebuilt city after the Babylon of the East), whence Peter wrote his first epistle (there seems no doubt that this is the Babylon he mentions at the end503 and that he came here with Mark, whose stay at Alexandria everyone believes); the Fustat of Amrou who built his city at the northern end of the vast Babylon. Then came Salah-e-dien, my old friend Saladin, 500 years later and moved the city still farther to the north, to Masr-el-Kahirah (the victorious Masr) which we have degraded into Cairo; upon the citadel are his ruins still seen. All this story the mounds tell, besides the Roman one; for all the convents we saw are within the Roman fortress, which now contains a Christian village. And five steps away is the Jewish synagogue, which you can only go into on a Saturday, where the oldest copy of the law is found and which is called the synagogue where Jeremiah was when in Egypt. I think it matters little to the spirit of the thing to verify the exact spot, whether five feet to the right or left, where these men walked and talked. If I can believe that here Jeremiah sighed over the miseries of his fatherland, that here Moses, a stronger character, planned the founding of his, that here the infant eyes opened which 503 An allusion to 1 Pet 5:13.

420 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions first looked beyond the ideas of ‘‘fatherland’’ and of ‘‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,’’ and planned the restoration of the world and the worship of the God of the whole earth: is not that all one wants? There is no want of interest, you see, in Cairo, even after Thebes. And now, my dearest people, I must put up, very much more comfortable in my mind, I can assure you, since I have had my letters. If you can read this, it is in spite of 504 the khamsin. At this instant the floor of the cabin is a quarter of an inch deep in sand, our faces are covered like the hippopotamus and I could write much more easily on the table with my finger than on the paper with my pen. It is almost dark, and to sit in the sitting cabin, which is the outer one, is impossible. Let an European wait till he has seen the Nile in a khamsin before he speaks uncivilly of 505 a London fog. We are come over to the island of Rhoda for shelter (where the cradle of Moses stuck) but have not been on shore yet. As to our plans, Zirinia, the great Greek merchant, says there is no difficulty in going to Greece. In three weeks everything at Athens must be settled between the fleet and Otto [king of Greece], and this dreadful wind over, which will most likely last now all through the equinox.506 However, all this is ‘‘en l’air’’ [up in the air], or rather ‘‘en sable’’ [in sand] at present. If you were to see the ‘‘sable’’ on the paper, you would think it a sandy foundation. The moon has just become visible, all covered with sand. She wants her face washed . We lie here because we are in mortal fear of a party to the pyramids. People in Cairo are always making parties thither.507 All the boats from Thebes are coming in.508 There was such a shaking and bowing after church yesterday and at Shepherd’s Hotel,

504 Ms 9017/23: it is not the fault. 505 Ms 9017/23: turns up his nose at. 506 Ms 9017/23: The Northamptons have got our rooms at François’s and the transit hotels are unbearable. But I think we shall be nicely perdus in a house. 507 Ms 9017/23: And dear old Legros wanted to go with us. 508 Ms 9017/23: but the Guthries go tomorrow.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 421 Source: Claydon Diary

10 March 1850 Nile. Reached Manfaloot at noon. Lay to because of high wind. Walked about Manfaloot, market day. Sailed at sunset. 11 March 1850 Went ashore at Tell el-Amathe [Awatka/Amarna?], walked to the substructions of Alabastron, made out the very houses in the ancient town and the closet where the good wife kept her preser ves. Went aground and stayed there all night. Passed Actinae [El Timay?] in the dark. 12 March 1850 Nile. Passed Beni Hasan with heavy hearts, not able to stop but gazed in at the Doric columns wistfully. Passed Minya. Calm. Anchored under a steam engine. Chimney for the night. Came in sight of Gebal el Teir [?] at sunset. 13 March 1850 Passed Dayr el Adhra early in the morning; five monks came swimming off. South wind all day, first fair wind we have had. Made great way and anchored a little short of Beni Suef because of difficult passage. 14 March 1850 Memphis. Third day of making way and no going ashore. Passed Beni Suef in the early morning with a south wind. Wind changed and became a hurricane. Mr Harris passed us, obliged to anchor off the false pyramid. In the evening rain 3 drops. Wind fainted away with surprise and horror. 15 March 1850 Tacking all the morning in sight of Bardshein. Landed at last in the little boat. Memphis in its palm groves the most poetic place I ever saw; its colossus, lying asleep like St Cecilia in Trastevere, the very rapture of repose. There was nothing drear y but the very poetr y of stillness. Walked where Moses walked and looked on the pyramids of Saqqara as he did, less changed probably than the hills which he walked on. 16 March 1850 Cairo. No pyramids, wind too high. Rode into Cairo for our letters and back, having good news at the pace of caliphs. Old Cairo in the afternoon. Christian village in the Roman fort (with Virgin’s grotto; church of 3rd centur y with its St Annofre and St Abraham). Amr’s mosque.

422 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 17 March 1850 Rode in to church on our asses. Murrays came back and we went in to luncheon and to call on the Lieders. He better than her. After our quiet boat what a mob of acquaintance, what a loquaciousness [?] of salutations. Cairo streets as beautiful as ever with their cross gleams of sunshine and the white veils peeping out of Moorish balconies. 18 March 1850 Pyramids. Set off for the pyramids. Before we reached the shore, shore became invisible for sand. The khamsin blew all day; we stayed in the boat with closed doors but the floor standing ¼ inch in sand, not a glass of water to be had but only of sand. Source: British Library Diar y

10 March 1850 Ever y day, during the ¼ of hour I had by myself, after dinner and after breakfast, in my own cabin, read some of my madre’s words: Can you give up the reputation—suffering much and saying little? they cried to me. 11 March 1850 Thought how our leaving Thebes, which was quite useless owing to this contrar y wind (we might have had another fortnight there), but without it I might not have had this call from God. 12-13 March 1850 Very sleepy. Stood at the door of the boat looking out upon the stars and the tall mast in the still night against the sky (we were at anchor, they were all asleep, I could not go to bed) and tried to think only of God’s will and that everything is desirable and undesirable only as He is in it or not in it, only as it brings us nearer or farther from Him. He is speaking to us often just when something we think untoward happens. Made great way with the south wind and great way with my Theban letters too. Champollion from the mad count a great help; wish we had had him at Thebes. 14 March 1850 Finished my letters home in the morning and sat talking to Σ and reading pyramids all the afternoon, while Mr B. was on board the Harris boat and we were beating about in the wind. 15 March 1850 Such a day at Memphis and in the desert of Saqqara. God has delivered me from the great offence and the constant murderer of all my thoughts.

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16-17 March 1850 Tried to bring my will one with God’s about Athens and Malta all the way as we rode into Cairo. Can I not serve God as well in Malta as in Smyrna, in England as at Athens? Perhaps better; perhaps it is between Athens and Kaiserswerth; perhaps this is the opportunity my 30th year was to bring me. Then as I sat in the large dull room waiting for the letters, God told me what a privilege he had reser ved for me, what a preparation for Kaiserswerth in choosing me to be with Mr B. during this time of his ill health and how I had neglected it and been blind to it. If I were never thinking of the reputation, how I should be better able to see what God intends for me. 18 March 1850 Wrote home about Memphis and Fustat during the khamsin and to Catherine Stanley about her marriage. Source: Letter 49, 1854 ed. 270-80, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/28

Cairo, Hôtel d’Orient [Saturday] 23 March 1850

Greek affairs go ill. I cannot very well tell what we shall do.509 No one can know like the Bracebridges how entirely right Lord Palmerston is in the principle, though people may differ about the manner and time of the thing. But here, for four years, has that obstinate knave of an Otto gone on resisting these just claims. It is not as if they had only now arisen, but he has been dunned for payment these four years and never has paid, though we have a right by the treaty to put in a receiver at the Piraeus and pay ourselves by the customs.510 509 Ms 9017/28: They have intercepted all Mr B.’s letters. 510 Ms 9017/28: As for that lying article in the Times, which we have only just seen, it lies in its throat, as everybody in the Times does, and antedates Pacifico’s case by ten years; you may tell it with my compliments. And if Otto sees himself backed by all the English papers in this way, he will hold out forever, mistaking it in the English for a love of tyranny.

424 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions But511 European politics are disgusting, disheartening or distressing, these three. Here there are no politics at all, only hareem intrigues and deep, grinding, brutalizing misery. Let no one live in the East who can find a corner in the ugliest, coldest hole in Europe. Give me Edinburgh wynds rather than Cairo Arabian Nights. And yet they are such an attaching race, the poor Arabs, [see] the tears of our crew at parting with us, their round merry faces a mile long, sobbing outside the door. All for what? Merely for not having been maltreated. I am sure I could not have imagined what real sorrow it was to part from them. If I had not been crying myself, I should have said what a pretty picture it was yesterday. When they all came up to the hotel to bid us goodbye a second time, they begged to see me, else I should not have done it again, and when I went in, they were ranged in two semicircles, all their shoes left outside, one black face leaning against the white drapery of the bed. Even the stupid old reis cried and my particular friend Abul Ali, arrayed in a beautiful new brown zaaboot and clean white turban, was spoiling all his new clothes with wiping his eyes. Then they all pressed forward to salute us, Arab fashion, which kisses your hand and presses it to the heart and to the head, and then they all would do it all over again. After that we parted and shall never see one another more. In the evening, three of them, who had done us particular services, came by appointment for a particular conversation. Abul Ali, who is ver y anxious to marry but cannot have the 150 piastres necessary to buy a ‘‘tob’’ or garment for the lady, a saucepan, a mat and two tin dishes, which is all the father or any father requires, agreed with me that he would really save 75 piastres within a year, if I would leave the other 75 piastres with the consul, for him . He further promised he would not beat his wife, which he said he should not have occasion to do as she was not a Cairene but of the country and very steady, and that he would not put her away when he was tired of her. He was not profuse of words and I believed him. Then he swore, not by my request, but by Allah and his two eyes. Another hand-kissing followed and so we parted. a crew of more native gentlemen never existed—they never showed any curiosity, never peeped into our cabins and, though not only always kind but empressés, they yet never intruded themselves. The only thing that disconcerted them was that Mr B. sometimes left us with 511 The 1854 ed. leaves out the first words of this sentence, thereby changing its meaning: But I must to business, seeing that all but . . . (Ms 9017/28).

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strange gentlemen at Thebes and kept them [the crew] with him, instead of sending them to mount guard over us. But I ought to begin my story in order. I think. I must kill a few of these flies, though unlike Sir Isaac, before I begin. I am getting just as bad as the Egyptians and let them settle all over my face in black clusters, resigning myself to the will of Allah and the flies. Well, I have disturbed the flies, but now you must wait another moment while I check the saltatory exercises of a few dozen of fleas, but it is of no use—I might as well devote myself to the pleasure of the chase once and forever.512 On Tuesday [19 March] it was still khamsin, but there was so little that all of a sudden, at eight o’clock, we made up our minds to go to the pyramids of Giza. We were tired of playing hide and seek with all our acquaintance at Cairo who wanted to make a party there. We were tired, too, of having the boat off Giza. Paolo was too ill to go with us, but we thought we could manage with two of our excellent crew. The road from Giza is very pretty (though not equal to Memphis) with fields of corn and acres of that exquisite little dwarf lilac iris. We went along a causeway between an avenue of tamarisk. The remains of the old causeway are quite perceptible in it, built to convey the stone which cases the inside of the pyramids (from Toora, the ‘‘Troici lapidis 512 Ms 9017/28: Some people are always undressing in Egypt but, bless my soul! if I were to do that, I might as well devote myself to the pleasure of the chase at once and forever.

426 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions mons,’’ the ancient ‘‘Troja’’); the outside is built from the Libyan quarries (refer to your Herodotus). Presently those forms of perfect ugliness loomed upon our view through a grey fog or sand, not unbecoming however. Presently we reached the desert as usual without the slightest warning and, an Egyptian donkey’s wont, my ass immediately lay down to roll, an operation he frequently repeated. In an hour and a half we were at the foot of the Great Pyramid, leaving the Sphinx to our left, but no feeling of awe, not even of wonder, much less of admiration, saluted us. There is nothing to compare the pyramid with; you remain from first to last insensible of its great size, which, as it is its only quality, is unfortunate. As it was now calm and the wind might rise, we immediately began to go up . As to the difficulty, people do exaggerate it tremendously: there is none—the Arabs are so strong, so quick and I will say so gentlemanly . They drag you in step, giving the signal, so that you are not pulled up piecemeal. The only part of the plan I did not savour was the stopping every time you are warm for a chill on a cold stone, so that I came to the top long before the others. Arrived here, I walked about, trying to call up a sentiment—the stones certainly were remarkably large, the view was remarkably large, the European names cut there were remarkably large. Here are three sentiments: which will you have? I do not know why the desert of Giza is so much less striking than that of Saqqara. One can, in Egypt, seldom render an account to oneself of any impression. Perhaps it is that Saqqara looks like the burial place of the world, it is so grand and desolate and lone, and so riddled with graves. Giza looks like what it is, the burial place of a family of kings and their courtiers. The remains of buildings, too, about the place give it the look of habitation, make one think of porters and sextons, and men and women. The utter loneliness of Saqqara, away from all that one is accustomed to see under the sun, makes one think of souls, not men, of another planet set apart to be the churchyard of this, which is the dwelling place. It was not at all cold or windy at the top, and we did not hurry ourselves. Then we came down again, but no spirit of Ramesses or of Moses helped me down the steps; only the spirit of Cheops gave me his arm, and very bad company I found him. About halfway is a grotto, formed by a very few stones having been taken out—this does give one some idea of size.

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You stop a few courses short of the bottom, under the wonderful pointed doorway, which makes the entrance to the inside—everybody knows it by picture. It is made of four huge blocks. Here, clad in brown holland and flannel (one comfort is that the Arabs look upon this last with very different eyes from the English, as it is a festive or state garment, and two of our crew, to whom I gave flannel waistcoats, always wore them outside their mantels or zaaboots), having taken off your shoes, you are dragged by two Arabs (before you had three) down one granite drain, up another limestone one, hoisted up a place where they broke a passage (how they ever found the real one is a miracle). You creep along a ledge and at last find yourself in the lofty groove—I can call it nothing else—up which you ascend to the king’s chamber. This is the most striking part of the whole; you look up to what seems an immeasurable height, for your light does not approach the roof. Only the overlappings in the sides, which gradually approach one another as they come nearer the top, give you any measure and you see nothing but black stone blocks: blocks you should not call them, but surface for you can barely perceive the joints. Except this, I think the imagination can very well supply your place in the pyramid . After you have crawled, ramped and scrambled for two hours in black granite sheaths without an inscription, without a picture of any kind but the Arabs fighting for the candle, ‘‘the mind,’’ I assure you, ‘‘is satisfied.’’ As to the difficulty, here again, there is none: people talk of

428 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions heat, the Theban tombs are much hotter; of suffocation, I did not even feel the thirst, which in Egypt is no joke; of the slipperiness, it is impossible to fall with those Arabs. The only danger you can possibly run is that of catching an awful cold in your bones : this is unavoidable. But I suppose, as we have got so far, I must go through with you, though very unwillingly. When I was a rat then, not in Pythagoras’s time, but on 29 March [we would expect 19] 1850, which I can but too well remember, I arrived, after running in my usual manner down one drain and up two others—large airy drains they were for me—to a sort of black thing like a tank with a flat roof and a lesser granite tank in it without a cover, where they say a very bad rat indeed, and the grandson of a worse, Shafra Chabryes, laid his bones. He made the rats work so hard to heap up this mound which the Big Rat, his grandfather, had begun that they would have no more kings of that family. There is a ver y curious way of getting out of the grandson rat’s chamber. It seems the architect thought to stop it up forever by granite portcullises, which you can still see with their grooves on the four sides of the entrance drain, and to climb out themselves either over the portcullis or by a passage which, some say, came out under the chin of the great Sphinx, shutting up the drain as they came along. But the portcullises are broken through and I, for my part, got under ver y well, some of the native rats with me spitting continually to moisten the stone for our pats. In the great granite tank are outlets to the outside of the rat hill, such as ants practise in their anthills to let in air. I was very curious about these portcullises, which I thought surprising to have been made by my forefather rats 5000 years ago, and went over them again and again, but could not make out how they were managed. Then I ran through a very easy drain without a fall in it, to a room with a gabled roof, just under the middle of the mound. After this, we wanted to run down the lowest drain which burrows almost to the centre of the earth, in the living rock underneath. But the rubbish has filled it up so entirely that even we rats are worsted and it requires a mole, so we were obliged to give it up, as you know we abhor the infidel race of moles. the drains are so much like one another, that a travelled rat like me, who has seen one has seen all. The other rats were ver y good-natured in hauling me down the broken drain you remember, and then we ran out above ground, I, for my part, thinking that the rat who made all this might as well never have lived at all.

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As I was leisurely crawling up the last passage, my two Arabs having been left fighting for an end of candle, Abul Ali ran down from the outside, seized my hand and dragged me up triumphantly to the top with the usual Hel-e-hel, with which they haul up the yard or pole the boat off a sandbank. With this appropriate introduction, I emerged (oh, could anyone but have seen that scene!) to find a hareem from Constantinople: about fifty women, all looking like feather beds in their huge ‘‘habarahs,’’ veiled up to the eyes, and three grave Turks, their happy possessors, all sitting over the door of the pyramid like a semicircle of vultures, waiting to see me come out (and drinking coffee in that happy prospect), bonnetless, shoeless, in my flannel and brown holland. If I had had ‘‘an umbrella in case of fire, it would have been something’’ but Σ was my good angel.514 She had not been in and though, she could not speak for laughing, she pounced upon me, wrapped me in a shawl and stuck on my bonnet. The Turks never moved a muscle—they probably thought me some description of sheytan, which are ver y common, as well as efreets, in Egypt. Well, my dears, I expect you will murder me—I could almost murder myself—all I can say for myself is that I have faithfully rendered in blue ink what impressions the pyramid makes.

Now, what will become of me? That I can never revisit my native countr y, an outcast from my hearth and home, is certain and—the smallest evil resulting from an ill-timed sincerity—a victim to truth I must remain. In England, where Egypt is considered as a tray for pyramids and little else, where not to have prostrated oneself at the foot of the pyramid is not to have admired Egypt, where Egypt = Pyr. and Pyr. = Egy., because things which are = the same thing are = one another, which is out of Euclid; it is mathematically proved that either I have not been in Egypt or I am no fit inhabitant of the land of England: qed. 513 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, chap 64. 514 9017/28 marchioness.

430 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Goodbye. You will never see me more. One thing is a comfort, neither will the pyramids. But before I sink, a victim to persecution,515 I will endeavour to atone for my errors by riding round the other pyramids. The second, built by the first Cheops, 3229 [c2600] bce (abominable man!), is the most perfect in its exterior casing, but we did not go in. The great one is built by the second Cheops and finished by his grandson, the last of the IVth Dynasty. It is no doubt a marvel of mathematical accuracy: the four sides lying to the four points of the compass, no easy matter with that size of building; height : base :: 5: 8; ½ base : perpend. height :: inclined height : base, etc. All that is very fine but does not make an impression. Next we rode round the third and small pyramid where Mycerinus the Holy, who still lives in songs and hymns, was laid by a grateful people: he was the third of that unlucky dynasty. We have his body and the cover of his sarcophagus in England: there is a beautiful prayer on our lid. Beyond this are three little pyramids, half ruined, where the second Mycerinus and his wife and daughter were laid. Nitocris, the heroine of all the romance of Egypt, finished the third pyramid in which she lies. She is the original of ‘‘Cinderella,’’ of Herodotus’s stor y of ‘‘Rhodopis’’ the ‘‘rosy-cheeked,’’ of Strabo’s fable of ‘‘Naucratis’’; her name means Neith the Victorious. She is still seen by the Arabs, a beautiful shade, wandering round her pyramid. She maintained the throne six years in the name of her murdered husband (2973 [c2230] bce VIth Dynasty), finished her pyramid, invited the murderers to the consecration, when she avenged her husband and then perished by her own hand. But her sarcophagus has disappeared. Here you can see plainly the two causeways which led from the pyramids to the river, a rounded head of rock forming one side of something like a great entrance and near it the Sphinx. People ought to have some conscience—as to the expression of the Sphinx, you might as well talk about the expression of our High Tor.516 You can make out much more per fect faces there. Well, some people have imaginations and some have not. Go to. I hope when my portrait is exposed in the same condition as this of Tuthmosis IV of blessed memory, people will discover as many marks of profound intellect, great sweetness and 515 Ms 9017/28: like Lord Palmerston under ignorant persecution. [Palmerston suffered the mistrust of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.] 516 High Tor is a lofty rock near Matlock, Derbyshire.

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propriety of conduct, united with perfection of feature. A wonderful gift is ‘‘Einbildungskraft’’ [imagination] certainly. May a ‘‘portion for seven and also for eight’’ thereof be mine before I visit the Sphinx again. It is the more abominable, because Tuthmosis IV, being so late as 1509 [1420] bce, has no right to be so defaced. I cannot help it. He is said to lie inside, but some may say the Sphinx only contained the outlet for the workmen who closed the entrance to the Great Pyramid. Well, let them all rest in peace and let me rest too. As we rode away we saw the tombs hewn in the rock and another causeway , leading to the Libyan hills. We found our boat, stretching out its motherly arms to us, off the Nilometer at Rhoda, and dropped down directly to the lower end of the island (where we lay the first night we went on board). There we found Mr [Harris], who came on board directly with his charming daughter, a black and a great friend of mine; the only pretty picture I had had in my mind all day, she gave me. Years ago she used to sit with her father and his gun in the moonlight on the side of the pyramid, a few courses up, watching the jackals and wolves run by. Fancy the old white-headed man, the little black dab of a child (the ugliness of the scene softened by the moonlight), watching the troop of jackals whistling by like a rushing wind in the deep shadow. Source: Claydon Diary

19 March 1850 Pyramids—up and into the great one. Perfectly easy and perfectly uninteresting, no spirit of Ramesses or of Moses helped me up the steps; only the spirit of Cheops gave me his arm, and very bad company I found him. 20 March 1850 Cairo. Rode into Cairo and took our rooms at Hôtel d’Orient, then to Schranz for the daguerreotypes. Packed all the afternoon while the boat wrung its hands to part with us and we irrigated it with our tears. Walked in Rhoda, hottest khamsin we have had. 21 March 1850 Came down to Boulaq where we shook hands with the dear old boat and I was got out joint by joint. Rowed down to Shubra and went to Heliopolis to divert our woes. In the garden round the obelisk, where Plato walked and Moses prayed, stayed long and rode home the way Mar y rode into Cairo.

432 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 22 March 1850 Cairo. Our first day in a respectable inn, but we did not know how to sit or do long dinners or behave ourselves, but, in memory of our boat, tried to catch fleas and go to bed. Turkish bath before breakfast. After all the Arabs of our crew came up to bid us goodbye and they cried and we cried. Miss Harris came to see me. 23 March 1850 Mr Playfair’s birds and to Raimonde Odescatchi [?] for birds for Shore. To the Citadel through the never-ending delights of the streets. Went into the old lion’s den and down Joseph’s well. Evidently an old Egyptian work (cleaned out by Saladin) perhaps ordered by Joseph. Source: British Library Diar y

19 March 1850 Great Pyramid. Gave me no one impression. 20 March 1850 Our last day in the boat. Packed up in a khamsin, i.e., in a perspiration. 21 March 1850 Left the boat wringing our hands. Such a delicious hour in the gardens of Heliopolis, where Plato walked and Moses prayed, undisturbed by my great enemy. Thought as I rode home how many who came the same road would not have planned how to surprise her husband by how ill she was but how well. 22 March 1850 Bade the last adieu to our dear boat and our men, who came up to see us and cried at parting with us. Enjoyed the luxury of having a room to myself for the first time; what use shall I make of it? 23 March 1850 Knocking about all day after the birds, and then to the Citadel. Source: Letter 50, 1854 ed. 281-90, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/28

[Cairo] Palm Sunday [24 March] 1850 [completed 25 March] I am afraid to think of what I have done—look on it again, I dare not. What? Disparaged517 the Great Pyramid? But after all, would any Chris517 Ms 9017/28: denigrated.

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tian lady or gentleman of my acquaintance feel much interested by crawling in drains, of which the only observable trait is ‘‘granite’’? or ‘‘limestone’’? ‘‘limestone’’? or ‘‘granite’’? for more than twelve or fourteen hours, the time varying according to the taste and pursuits of the crawler. That cannot be so ver y interesting which nobody but an explorer wants to go to twice. Egypt is like a vast library, the finest, the Alexandrian library of the world. You read and look and study—and read and look and study again. And if it is so interesting to me, you say, who can only read one word in a page, what must it be to him who can read two? At last you come to a huge folio which, the librarian tells you, is the oldest and biggest book in the world. You run up the ladder and turn over one blank page after another. You soon get tired of that work and you will never run up those steps to look at that book again. I do not call any book worth reading which is not worth returning to many times. Mr Harris discovered some names of the Shepherd Kings in the tombs about the pyramids, which may lead to something. On the 20th we rode up into Cairo to find some rooms. where I am sitting at this moment with open windows, 6 o’clock in the morning, three minarets and a palm visible above the trees of the Ezbekeeyeh, the beloved Nubian old friend of a sakia, going under the windows, and all kinds of Eastern groups under the trees. We have retur ned to what we call civilized habits, but how much less really savage was the dinner of our poor Arabs, which took ten minutes preparing, ten minutes eating, then they all jumped up and thought no more about it, than the mortal hour and a half we spend every day here, out of the twenty-four God has given us, at a table-d’hôte of Indians, one chef and two assistants at least to prepare it, that is thirty-six hours of time to get it ready, and if we are thirty at dinner, that is forty-five hours to eat it. After taking our rooms we returned to the boat to pack up in a khamsin. Between our feelings and the khamsin a camel would have pitied us—we were so hot. Towards sunset

434 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions we took our last walk on Rhoda, but the sun went down, that khamsin day, in a glare of red sand and we came back without waiting for sunset . This was our last night in the Par thenope. The next morning we dropped down at sunrise to Boulaq, intending to go to Shubra, but the north wind was so high we could get no further. So we were dug out of the boat, as it were, joint by joint, and forced518 into the little sandal, where six of our men rowed us down in a nor’wester to Shubra, mounted us on asses, had a great hand-kissing and launched us on the wide world again. I had had my head out of window all night to enjoy my last night on board the quiet boat, the sweet Par thenope. She has done us good service and now she is looking dirty and desolate, no one to clean her out and make her look pretty. I dare say by this time she is full of fleas and hareems, and not my Parthenope anymore, and she was so sorry to part with us. I have another Parthenope, but she will never have anyone to value her as we did. We left the dear old boat wringing her hands, while we irrigated the ground with our tears all the way to Heliopolis. But we had a glorious day there, to let us down easy at parting; we could not have adjourned to the noisy, dusty, bustling inn and Indian table-d’hôte at once. I had always made a sort of saint’s day to myself of the day I should spend at Heliopolis, where Plato walked and Moses prayed, where Pythagoras , where Solon and Thales learnt all their wisdom: the nurse of Athens, the Alma Mater of Egypt and, through her, of the world, that small city which had so great an influence, where the priests of the Sun dwelt who were celebrated all over the world ‘‘for learning and meditation.’’ It shall be my Sunday, I thought. not even Thebes, is so sacred as this and oh, how Nature has respected it! We reached it through rich fields of corn.519 The mounds are small. A gateway of Tuthmosis III, the king of the Exodus, has just been dug up by the Arabs, proving that there were two temples here, one beside the famous Temple of the Sun, to which the obelisk belongs. The hieroglyphs on these prostrate doorjambs are just as fresh as ever. In them Amun, who was a form of Ra, and peculiarly the Lord of the 518 Ms 9017/28: shovelled. 519 Ms 9017/28: We now proceeded as well as our feelings would allow through rich fields of corn towards Heliopolis.

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Obelisk, promises the king purity, life, etc., and calls him the friend of tr uth. From here we rode into a garden of citron, orange and almond trees, and there among them stood the famous obelisk, with the cartouche of Osirtasen upon it, fresh as the day it was cut—the oldest existing ‘‘sunbeam‘‘ (its companion is gone), yet equal in beauty to those of the best times.520 It records Osirtasen’s dedication of the temple—the same Osirtasen who built the oldest part of Karnak and who must have raised this obelisk twenty years before Joseph came into Egypt, if we put him back to the earliest date possible, i.e., in 2775 [c1900] bce. In that case, Joseph’s nameless pharaoh was the great Sesostris of the Old Empire and this man his uncle (of the XIIth Dynasty, the same as Beni Hasan which place alas! we were obliged to pass with heavy hearts on our way down, we had made so slow a voyage). Now the wild bees have settled all over the obelisk and each has made himself a house to live in, an uncomfortable place, I must say, to stick upon, but they seemed to like it and their pleasant hum filled the citron trees and cactuses, and the sweet smells floated on the air. How pleasant it was, how lovely—this obelisk stood before the temple where all the learning of the world was cherished! Here Moses sat and Plato, the pair of truest gentlemen that ever breathed. But Moses was the greater man for, whereas Plato only formed a school, which formed the world, Moses went straight to work upon the world (‘‘as if a God had been abroad and left his impress on the world’’), the chisel as it were to the block, his delicate perceptions acting upon those miserable savages. He was not only the sculptor, but the workman of the statue, the scholar, the gentleman and the hardworking man, all in one. Tell Aunt Mai I ran all over Rhoda desperately to find her a bulrush, without success. I could only bring her some rose leaves, but I gathered her a citron branch from Heliopolis, which is to me more sacred—as much more sacred as the grown-up man [Moses] is than the child—and I dare say he was a very naughty521 one. He must have been a dreadful child at three months old to make such a noise that they could not keep him. Here was the place where he learnt and felt and thought, and I could have walked in that garden for days, but we were obliged to go. Here Plato lived for thirteen years—he did not think three enough to finish his education. The Grecian and the 520 Ms 9017/28: the most modern. 521 Ms 9017/28: nasty.

436 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Hebrew philosophers, how they twine themselves round one’s heart here! I feel as if I should know them again, better than many people I have lived with all my life: should know Plato’s childlike simplicity and humility, who was ‘‘meek and lowly in heart,’’522 and gave all the glory to Socrates, his friend, and Moses’ dauntless soul but sensitive mind. He was a man—I cannot approve St Paul’s sentiment and say of whom ‘‘the world was not worthy,’’523 but a man worthy to do his work in the world. Oh, Moses! come again; how much are you wanted! I did not walk so much with Pythagoras there; I believe he was mostly at Thebes when he came over with an introduction from Polycrates to Amosis (XXVIth Dynasty). Amosis gave him letters to the priests of Heliopolis, who referred him to those of Memphis, who referred him to Thebes, where they were ver y much surprised that he was willing to undergo the ordeal and the severe preparation necessary to be initiated. At Dendera there are some maxims on the wall about the unity of God, signed with the name of Annofre, the teacher of Pythagoras.

I am glad that doorway of Tuthmosis has been found because, if he was the king of the Exodus, it was built at the very time Moses was here. Some think that a fortified wall extended all the way from Heliopolis to Avaris and that Migdol was upon it, and that Tuthmosis II, brother of the Third, drove the Hyksos all along this wall to Avaris, near Pelusium, whence the Third expelled them and raised this temple on his way back. We were loath to leave the garden. We rode about it and found a broken stone of my friend Ramesses and the well where Mar y rested, for Heliopolis has recollections from Moses and Pythagoras and Plato down to Mary. A man with an ass was coming out at the time just like old Joseph. Then we rode home through long avenues to Cairo, the ver y way Mary and the baby must have come on their road to Fustat— I thought of her all the way, how tired she must have been. The next day [22 March] we sat at home. We were wear y and the H[ar rises] came to wish us goodbye and to see my sacred ibis, and compare it with the ancient sculptures. They had never seen one, it has become so rare.524 Mr Harris is now the best antiquarian in Egypt 522 Matt 11:29. 523 Heb 11:38. 524 Ms 9017/28: so I have not changed it, thinking, when an antiquarian thought it so precious, Shore might still make a good [illeg] for it in England.

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and his daughter is very learned too. I was very sor ry to part; she is almost the only person I can talk to about Egypt, we ‘‘understand each other.’’ I ran about all the next morning after bird-men for S. .525 In the evening we rode up through those neverending pictures of streets to the citadel. Mr L[ewis], who has been everywhere, says there is no Moorish architecture to be compared with that of Cairo for the best style; no Arabian city that he knows comes near it, —Constantinople is a degenerate mixture of the worst Italian. As to Muhammad Ali’s mosque on the citadel, how such a building could ever have entered the imagination of men to conceive passes belief: two minarets, like Mordan’s patent pencil cases, set on end, a mass of white ugliness, and you see it from everywhere. We were allured into the old lion’s den, where our drawingroom sofa first met my eye, then two of our chairs. We made out the corner where he sat, with the pyramids seen through a window with splendid French curtains, to his right! Then we went down Joseph’s well, that incredible work, a square shaft hewn through the living rock from the top of the citadel to a sakia, which pumps up the waters from the Nile. Some call it the work of Saladin, but there is no doubt that he only cleared it out and that it is a work of the old Egyptians. No others would have done it; it may have been ordered by Joseph. They show something at the bottom which they call his tomb. Sunday [24 March] we went to church, but how could a man preach such a sermon in the land of Moses! Oh go out, good people, to Heliopolis and see what your race can do—you will not learn it in that church at all events. Σ and I stayed at home the rest of Palm Sunday. It is ver y interesting to see in the old Egyptian sculptures the custom of strewing palms in the way. Cairo is over flowing with Franks, but we have hitherto refused all invitations, we were too tired. 525 William Shore Smith (1831-94), Nightingale’s favourite cousin and heir to the Nightingale estate after his mother.

438 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Today [25 March] we have been to the bazaar, but you have no idea how difficult it is to find anything in Cairo you like unless you buy the house and window: that would be a present. I never saw such a picture as the end of the silk bazaar, with a Moorish arch at the farthest corner and two others on either side, where it is fastened up by a chain, and you can look about without danger of being borne down by a string of camels. Then the groups you see! I did buy a scribe’s inkhorn, such as they wear stuck in their girdles in the sculptures, like Ezekiel’s man ‘‘which had the writer’s inkhorn by his side.’’526 They sell all goldsmith’s things by weight and, as government manages everything, we had to go to the government scales to have it weighed, for which we had to pay. In the little goldsmith’s shop, which is nothing but a square box or shed open upon the street, sat on the front a woman wrapped in her black silk habarah all but one eye which was a very pretty one, who had brought all her diamonds and pretty things, and even her silver goolleh tops for sale—she was probably separated from her husband. She asked no questions, showed no interest, but sat, the picture of meekness and despair and resignation, while her things were offered to us by the goldsmith. But the bazaars are so queer— there is no choice, no stock, but people walk up and down the shady street, roofed in at the top, with their bracelets and things in their hands, which, if you catch a sight of, you may buy, if not, not. Alas! we have now done with Egypt. Cairo is not Egyptian, it is Arabian. The day we sailed into Cairo we were at the place, a little south of Old Cairo, where Moses, after going to the pharaoh, at Ramesses, and returning to the people several times, led them away at last. The Arabs have a tradition marking the spot where he sat and counted them passing by. ‘‘Goshen’’ took in Old Cairo and Heliopolis, and extended northward along all the right (eastern) bank of the Nile. The only thing which now remains to us of Egypt is the pyramids, which stand there, looking as if they would wear out the air, boring holes in it all day long. I am sure that no European can at all imagine the entirely different feeling with which one lives in Egypt compared to anywhere else, nor describe it. It is perfectly distinct from that in any of 526 Ezek 9:2.

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our living countries. It is like going into the sun and finding there not one living being left, but strewed about, as if they had been just used, all the work, books, furniture, all the learning, poetry, religion of the race, all the marks fitted to give one an idea of their mind, heart, soul and imagination, to make one feel perfectly acquainted with their thoughts, feelings and ideas, much more so than with those of many of one’s own kin. You open the journal left lying on the table and feel almost ashamed of prying into its secrets. You see the place where they have been praying. You walk about, expecting every moment the people to come in, but not a living being: all, all are gone and not one ‘‘escaped alone to tell thee.’’527 But it is not necessary for anyone to tell the tale, you read it written everywhere. But still, the star is a deserted one. It had a race, of which not one remains, for besides that Egypt to an European is all but uninhabited, the present race no more disturbs this impression than would a race of lizards, scrambling over the broken monuments of such a star. You would not call them inhabitants, no more do you these. So farewell, dear, beautiful, noble, dead Egypt, the country which brought forth a race of giants, giants in war, art, science and philosophy. Farewell, without regret, without pain (except a merely personal sorrow), for there is nothing mournful in the remains of a country which,528 like its own old Nile, has overflowed and fertilized the world, and to which you can so plainly hear its Maker saying, ‘‘Well done.’’ Goodbye, dear people. I am afraid you are tired of Egypt, but I have mercy now upon people for writing such stupid things upon her, it is so impossible to write anything else.

Source: Claydon Diary

24 March 1850 Cairo. Church. Good man, go to Heliopolis and see if Moses and Plato cannot inspire you to preach a better sermon. Fleas disturbed me so or I could have preached to myself. Madame Rosetti came—capital specimen of Roman Catholicism, fervent and cheerful. Sat still. 25 March 1850 Bazaar. Goldsmiths and silk [store], the last a picture of Moorish architecture, with the arch at the end, and one on each side divided by a 527 Job 1:15-19. 528 Ms 9017/28: has so nobly done its work and.

440 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions chain from the shoemaker’s bazaar and one was not run down by strings of camels. Pictures of people too, the poor divorcée in her black haborak selling her ‘‘plate’’ here and pretty things. Source: British Library Diar y

24-25 March 1850 Did not make any use of my Palm Sunday. Wrote letters till midnight and then again from 6 o’clock. Bazaar. Source: Letter 51, 1854 ed. 290-309, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/24-25

Cairo [after 25] March 1850 I knew so little about the Muhammadan religion and it interested me so little that I felt quite strange in the mosques of Cairo. In Karnak I felt that their God was my God, In Abu Simbel I felt more at home, perhaps, than in any place of worship I ever was in. But Egyptian Islam I never could understand, never could feel any interest in, never could look upon as a religion at all. However, I must say that Arabian Islam is very different, and that the mosques of Cairo are quite as wonder ful, quite as poetic an incarnation of the intercourse of man with God as anything in Thebes or Nubia itself. When one goes into any church, be it the temple of Karnak, be it St Peter’s, be it the Mosque El Azhar, be it St James’s, one always feels, Here is the foot of Jacob’s ladder,529 and angels are ascending and descending upon it: this is the gate of heaven. But in London, the room that they can spare to plant the foot of Jacob’s ladder is so small, twenty-six inches to each person, is it not? They fulfill so literally the word that strait is the gate530 that sometimes the ‘‘angels of God’’ have not room to spread their wings and decline coming. At best we cannot call it the poetic incarnation, i.e., the incarnation of the spirit of the thing, but the matter of business incarnation, i.e., man must go to church, therefore take as little room and get as much for your money as possible. What does man want room to think for? thinking does not pay. In Karnak it is, above all, the philosophical incarnation. In Cairo, what shall I call it? If you would look for a contrast, striking and glaring in every respect, small and great, it is between the Arabian and the 529 An allusion to Gen 28:10-22. 530 An allusion to Matt 7:14.

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Egyptian. In Thebes you never see two lines parallel, two sides alike, two columns the same size. In the Moorish architecture ever y pattern grows out of a mathematical figure: give the keynote and you can finish the air for yourself. But there are deeper differences than these. The mosques of Cairo are the most beautiful, the most gorgeous, the fairest in the world—those of Constantinople are barns in comparison, they say. Even the Moorish part of Spain cannot vie with the Moorish part of Cairo, which is one great Alhambra. But it is impossible to describe and the great drawback is that, as you must have a firman [king’s permission] and a pacha’s janissar y, and pistols and whips and I do not know what besides, to visit them, you must not loiter, you cannot go again, and they remain in one’s mind, quite ineffaceable, but still one great dream of confused magnificence. It is more like a dream than anything else to me, now that I have been in Cairo, though I must say it surpasses everything that the names of Baghdad and Damascus and Harun al-Rashid ever did conjure up in those childhood days of dreams. We spent many days among the tombs of the Mameluke sultans in the desert and I wish we had spent as many weeks. So wild, so drear y, so beautiful, so deadly fair, as they raise their spiritlike heads in the desert, you become an efreet yourself wandering among them. Yet there is nothing in them hideous, like the pyramids, which become more utterly repulsive the longer you look back upon them; for here the mosque and the ‘‘foundation’’ are always the principal feature, the tomb is merely supplemental. Here the place for fellow creatures to worship God, the school for them to learn God, is the main thought: the human element is always the uppermost, while in the pyramids it is only the selfish. Still, though it is against all truth to feel melancholy among images of decay or change, I must confess that those Mameluke tombs are the most profoundly melancholy places I ever was in. There sit the pyramids on the other side the river (I knew they were there, though I did not choose to look , utterly repulsive, but defying time, though they have been the quarry for half Cairo. Here lie the most beautiful creations of man’s hand, crumbling away. In a ver y few centuries they will be quite gone, and one asks, Are beauty and decay the same thing? Can ugliness and selfishness only be compatible with duration? If it is God’s thought, there can be nothing melancholy in

442 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions it. But what is God’s thought about it? It cannot be a law that only perishable forms531 have beauty. I wish I could describe these mosques and tombs. There were three to which we always managed to go: El Berkook, El Ashraf and Kait Bey. You know the general plan or plans of them—there are but two: one after the original pattern of Asur (the first built after the Hegira), viz., a square hypaethral court with the tank in the middle and porticoes all round, the portico opposite the entrance being the deepest, five to seven ranges of columns, and out of this, under its little dome, the tomb of the founder. Under this portico is the pulpit, and the niche towards Mecca. Turn thy face to Mecca, I soon found myself saying. But these wonderful places of worship, what idea do they incarnate? I cannot call it anything but sensual Unitarianism . I do not feel that I understand in the least and I doubt whether it is possible for an European really to seize the mixture of sensuous enthusiasm and severe unity and purity of idea in these extraordinar y places—thrice extraordinar y to those coming out of old Egypt. Where is the Holy Place? you say. Where is the Secret Sanctuary? You walk round an open court, you look up to a cloudless sky, down into a pure cistern, nothing but air, earth and water is here. Where shall I hide myself ? was my first feeling. Are there no mysteries, no initiations, no ceremonies in this religion for the poor human mind, striving after images, to lay hold of? None. Here is silence, here is space, here is room for thought in these vast colonnades. Turn in here, walk up and down among those columns, no one will disturb you but those prostrate men with their faces to the ground, as silent as yourself. Are you tired of your daily work and the busy city? Here are places where ever yone may have rest and thought. And so it is. Oh! if the poor women had but been there, I could have said, this is the very thing I have so often sighed for in London, where there are tens of thousands who never, from their first to their seventieth year, never have one moment alone, one place in which to pray, to think. Here, in this noisy and infidel Cairo, they have spared these magnificent spaces, open and always open, and open to all. But what am I to think about? is the next question. Are there no images, no deeds of God or of God’s saints to speak to my eye, to 531 Ms 9017/24: materials.

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excite my thought? None, there is not a single image. A sentence of the Qur’an is the frieze, the ornament. The most rigid Unitarianism is the first thing which strikes you, and the last. Nothing is to alter the purity of the idea of the one God. Even the very domes catch the sentiment. At St Peter’s I obser ved the bridge of rays was three, which entered through the windows at the rising sun, to remind us of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. At Sultan Hassan, the dome which after St Peter’s has struck me the most, two rays bridged the vast mysterious solitary space, for there is but one God, and Muhammad his prophet. But it is not the western Unitarian who has built this: though here is severity in doctrine, there must be enthusiasm in practice. I cannot tell you how touching it is to see (among these ‘‘infidel dogs’’) man giving all his best to God, the fairest that he has, the most precious, the most costly, instead of keeping it for himself—it is literally lavishing his best. Ceiling, wall and floor are inlaid with the most delicate mathematical patterns, those of the ceiling made of mother-o’-pearl and different-coloured woods, those of the walls of mother-o’-pearl, lapis lazuli and precious marbles, those of the floor of pietra dura, more beautiful than anything I have seen in Rome. Here there is nothing held back: God was to have all, all, the best. It was not, How can I choose that which will make most show at least cost? but, What is most beautiful, most costly? that must be for the house of God.532 And yet there is nothing, nothing of the pomp of wealth here. On the contrar y, upon the first coming in nothing strikes your eye; you are only pleased by the perfect harmony of the whole, by the wonderful and subdued richness. After a time you discover that you are in the midst of gold and precious stones and mother-o’-pearl. Certainly, as Jacob said, ‘‘This is none other but the house of God.’’533 Then they could find no other frieze worthy of it but what they believed to be the word of God. In all , round the springing of the dome, runs, in gigantic gold letters, upon a sober blue ground or yellow, a sentence from the Qur’an, sometimes outside as well as in. And certainly, no more poetic534 frieze could have been 532 Ms 9017/24: Ruskin would be satisfied here. [John Ruskin (1819-1900), art critic and social reformer; he offered a spiritual interpretation of art, linking moral and aesthetic ideals.] 533 Gen 28:17. 534 Ms 9017/24: beautiful.

444 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions invented. Perhaps it is this that kept the Arabic character so beautiful, while all others have become so prosaic. In the Mecca niche the name of God, no image of Him, no glory round it, generally holds its solitar y place. You never go into a mosque and find it empty. But what go ye out for to see?535 What are the worshippers of this most dreamy, yet most sensuous Unitarianism assembled for there ever y day and every hour of the day? Is it for a daily sacrifice, either actual or commemorative? For a sacrament, like the Jewish, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant? For a mysterious charm, which wins the Divine presence down upon earth, like the S.S. Sacramento [Santissimo Sacramento: the Eucharist]? The God of the Muslims has no sacrifices, no mysteries, no charms; the only incantation by which the Muslim invokes His presence is his own devout spirit; the only place where he seeks and hopes to find Him is in himself. This is, after all, the most enthusiastic faith which, disregarding the help of ceremonies, disdaining the use of images, sets itself to finding God in the hear t, in its own solitary heart, unaided by communion with others, by the infection of enthusiasm (except occasionally, as in the der vish dance). It is impossible not to be touched with admiration and sympathy at the sight of a Muslim at his prayers, of his perfect abstraction and his entire simplicity. I think a Cairo mosque gives you a better insight into the oriental mind than anything else can. It is the religion of the Arabian Nights, of Solomon’s Song, of genii. It is the most dreamy, the most fantastic, the most airy, and yet sensuous religion. It is the religion of Undine before she had a soul. But it is not the religion of men, not of rugged, crooked, hard-necked man, but of spirits. It will never lead a man to morality, to inflexible unswerving duty, to the spirit of sacrifice, excepting inasfar as with his sense of beauty and his dreamy enthusiasm, he loves to give all to God. The Egyptian is to me the philosophical view of religion; the Protestant is the moral (nothing else); the Roman Catholic the spiritual, which makes self-sacrifice an enthusiastic pleasure and goes merrily to its martyrdom; the Moorish is the imaginative, I had almost thought the fanciful view of religion. I am afraid I can give you no idea of these mosques and tombs, the purest of Moorish architecture. I confess, to me the lines are far more beautiful than the Gothic. In the Gothic arch, diminishing and diminishing and diminishing, line within line and again within line, I am troubled536 and provoked. And it seems to me to see the hand of man diminishing the thought of God and adding precept within precept, till he has twaddled it all away with his nineteenthly and his twentiethly. But in those airy caves, which fill the top of the Moorish arch, in those delicate stalactites overhead, I seem to look up into an ocean cave, to see the hand of man simply applying the thought of God, to see almost a work of God himself. In beauty, nothing surely can come near the Moorish architecture. In the Mameluke tombs, we always went first to that of Sultan Berkook (E’Zaher Berkook). You know his history: how he was first a Circassian slave, then regent for the last of the Bahree Mameluke sultans, and deposing him, in 1382, how he founded the Dynasty of the Circassian Mameluke sultans, to whom Egypt and Syria remained subject for a century and a half. Berkook twice repulsed the Tartars under Tamerlane. Round that solitary mosque are evident traces of a learned foundation and of ‘‘riwaks’’ or apartments for the students, where now the jackals dwell, I mean the Egyptians. I like those first words of the creed, ‘‘I believe in God,’’ so much, I want no others. I have so often said them to myself in Egypt. Those four words [‘‘I believe in God’’] run in one’s head perpetually here. I believe in God, Him who knows all, who can all, who loves all, and therefore no one can ever be lost. Therefore Egypt will be saved and therefore one can believe even of these creatures that ‘‘it is good for them to be here.’’537 I believe in God and therefore Egypt is not hell, as one would otherwise believe. 536 Ms 9017/24: bothered. 537 A paraphrase of Matt 17:4.

446 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions But I have left El Berkook and his two minarets, which I think are the most beautiful in Cairo: not rising in steps, one storey above the other, nor yet like a Chinese cap, but each exquisite little balcony bowing down to meet the one below it. After El Berkook we go to the tomb of El Ashraf, a sultan of the same Circassian Dynasty, and perhaps the gem of them all. It is on the other plan, no hypaethral court: an oblong mosque with coloured glass windows and roof inlaid, and leading out of it the tomb, a double cube, including the dome with dado, niche and floor, all rich with marbles and mother-o’-pearl. A new pattern you discover every time you go, or a new figure forming itself out of an old one, and yet (though the longer you look the more you see, a cross here, another figure there) there is no confusion—the eye is not displeased by the intricacy. The colours are ver y few, generally red, black and white, with a little blue. Here a little girl, who I believe was a mother, held my paper with one hand and her baby with the other, while I was tracing, and did not ask for baksheesh, a fact which I record. Our third tomb was El Kait Bey (near the end of the same dynasty), during whose reign Grenada was lost by the Moors, 1492. This is the most magnificent of them all: you have the square mosque, with the horseshoe arch on the four sides, opening on every side to a raised divan or recess, the floors of which were strewed with palms, the ceilings rich with the sober colouring of the most beautiful and precious inlaying, the Qur’an frieze, the tomb within, double cube, with the beautiful woodwork screen round the grave. Muhammad left his sacred footprint here (one of the few fanatics I never could feel any respect for), it was very easy to manage men in his way. The beautiful entrance to the mosque has a little school opening out of one side, where the master, with his little establishment of a few beads,538 a few leaves of the Qur’an and a few bits of tin for the boys to write upon, welcomed us rather unusually. After our second day at the tombs we rode back, past Kait Bey and the citadel wall, and stopped at the spot where Mar y, on her way to old Cairo, must have looked down. From this point six cities of the dead and one city of the living lay before us, all the vast southern cemeter y which we had not yet visited, all the plain through which Moses once led out the Israelites on the morning of the Exodus, and beyond, on the other side of the river, the whole line of the pyramids, 538 Ms 9017/24: breads.

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Dahshur, Saqqara, Abu Sir and Giza: I never saw a more extraordinar y view. We rode on through the tombs and in at another gate, Bab el Karafeh, within which lies the great square of the Rumeyleh, surrounded by its splendid mosques and overtopped by the citadel. From the Rumeyleh you pass down a narrow street with a beautiful black wooden house with meshrebeeyehs on one side, and, on the other, high, high above your heads the gorgeous arch of the porch of the mosque of Sultan Hassan—to my mind the most beautiful thing in Cairo. This gentleman belonged to the Dynasty of the Bahree Mamelukes, the one preceding the Circassians, and his mosque was built about 1356, two years after his death (I have such difficulty in not putting bce to my dates). When Saladin and his successors ruled over Egypt, they strengthened themselves by buying Turcoman Mamelukes, or white slaves, and bringing them up as military slaves on the island of Rhoda, wherefore they were called the Bahree Mamelukes or Mamelukes of the river—Bahr is river. One of these white female slaves, the ‘‘tree of pearls,’’ Sheger-ed-Dur r, was married by one of the sultans descended of Saladin and she began the Dynasty of the Bahree Mamelukes, putting to death her stepson for this purpose. This was in the time of St Louis at Damietta.539 Sultan Hassan was later by a century. Oh the glory of that mosque! You enter from the top of a flight of steps by this towering arch, with its little caves at the top, into a dark porch surrounded by four arches and with an inlaid wall in the front, and turn to the left where men bring you straw canoes and fit them on over your shoes. Then you cross the sacred threshold and find yourself in such a court! hypaethral, as large as any of the mosques. Instead of being enclosed on each side by rows of colonnades, vast arches span the whole space (like the Temple of Peace). The eastern, the largest and loftiest of them all, seemed to me like one of those dreams which one has when one is a child, when the bed seems to rise and rise over your head and to expand at last into something unknown in magnitude. I felt as if I had seen Sultan Hassan before. His eastern arched vault is like Westminster Hall in grandeur . It rises free and clear to its summit; only a gigantic sentence of the Qur’an on an arabesque ground runs round it. Behind is the mysterious vastness of the tomb, as you look into it from this arch, with perhaps one solitary figure, in 539 Damietta, north of Cairo, fell to the crusaders in 1249 during the seventh cr usade undertaken by St Louis.

448 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions his flowing scarlet robes, entering it, the dome rising to one knows not where and the corners for the dome filled with those woodwork caves! How I should have liked to have gone there alone, and again and again! The next day we went to the mosque of Sultan Teylun,540 which is ver y curious as a ‘‘monument of architectural history,’’ its pointed arches prove that they existed in Saracenic architecture three centuries before they are found in ours, and that we borrowed them from the Saracens. Ibn Teylun lived in 883 and was the man who first, like Muhammad Ali, declined allegiance to the caliphs of Baghdad541 saying, ‘‘I will reign in your stead not only in Egypt but in Syria.’’ But as he was a Turkish slave, he could not be caliph, or descendant of the Prophet, therefore the caliph, as head of the church, was still prayed for—there were farces then as well as now. The Arab name for the place, ‘‘Kalat el Kebsh,’’ recording the tradition that this was the place where Abraham sacrificed the ram, interested me more. We went along the ruined roof and up the minaret. The decay of the mosque, which is crumbling away, arches and all, is cruel, and it is dangerous walking there. In the large ruinous court grow trees about the tank and, while the party walked round, Σ and I sat and meditated, and wished there were such places set apart for solitude in other crowded cities. From Sultan Teylun we came out by another gate into a narrow little street, so rich with woodwork, meshrebeeyehs and carved doorways that this must have been the place of the Arabian nobility. Then we rode through the town and, stopping at the small city gate, got off and went into a little street, where we could not ride: such a picture of oriental life. In the tiniest meshrebeeyehs we saw blue bundles, showing that the women had got in, body and all—I wonder they did not break down. We peeped into shady courts and then we rode out across the southern countr y of tombs, which we had seen yesterday, to a mosque in the side of the Mokattam. Even the Mokattam is riddled with old Egyptian tombs, like Lycopolis, and in its yellow rock this modern mosque, the tomb of a sultan, nestles itself. We wound up the cliff to it—such a view! and in a gay little dressing room, laid out upon a tray and with an open window, through which he is looking out at that wonderful view, lies his vizier—such a nice way to be buried! 540 This seems to be the Ahmad Ibn Tulun mosque built in 879. 541 Ms 9017/24: said ‘‘Adieu’’ like the caliphs of Baghdad.

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I crawled into some curious little cells; I do not know what they were. Then we came down into a modern Turkish family tomb, so clean and dressed with flowers, such a nice homey place. But I did not stay in it, for there was a mysterious, gloomy, lurid sunset behind the pyramids, the first and only time I have ever seen them look well, like the fall of Babylon—they looked immensely large and spectral. The ground descended, from where we stood, in a series of vast sweeps, all deserts, to the river. It was like the Last Day, that sunset among the tombs, as we rode home through them in the gathering darkness, for it was already twilight. The tombs all looked wan and spectral as we passed them. There was still that lurid glare in the west and the graves of nations seemed to lie about us. We rode in through the great Place of the Rumeyleh and passed Sultan Hassan with his towering arch in the twilight. He, too, looked like a spectre, but a friendly one. Aimé[s] [Beloved], how little I can tell about our field day among the mosques! We enjoyed at last the privilege of going out like princes and, furnished with a firman, we set forth. First rode the pacha’s janissar y, armed and carrying besides a whip, then the consul’s cawass, entirely arrayed in white and also armed, then our janissary, and finally we. Oh, if you knew how difficult it is to bring away a single impression, hurried through them with a party! the consul calling to us, and ver y properly, to keep close and not to loiter, the pacha’s cawass driving back the people—as well might you try to see Rome in a day. We went first to El Hakim, a ruined mosque of enormous size, through which a thoroughfare now runs. It is close to Bab el Mur and was founded in 1012 by that man (I do not know whether he was a tr ue man or an impostor) who founded the Druses and this mosque, the Caliph El Hakim, of that race of Fatimeh, which at first ruled only over northern Africa (over the real Moorish race), having made themselves independent of Harun al-Rashid in 800. These gentlemen then thought proper to possess themselves of Egypt. They founded Cairo and called themselves caliphs. After it we went to the mosque of Sultan Kalaun. He was the founder of that Dynasty of Bahree Mamelukes, to which Sultan Hassan belonged, and this mosque was built in 1284. In Kalaun’s tomb, a little quiet place, we found a man praying. He moved when we disturbed him and began again, so intently, so intensely, yet so quietly, you would hardly have thought he was yet in the body. The mosques are all mixed up in my head and

450 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions miserable has been my account to you of them. I had rather have seen but one or two. However, it could not be helped, so I will just say that Sultan Kalaun stands by the Morostan, the madhouse, which he founded, in the most beautiful of all the streets of Cairo. We were so hustled at the corner, where we got off our asses, by the angry people that we could not stop a moment, but we would not submit to drive in a car riage, as some of our party did. We made a vow, and kept it ‘‘strong,’’ that we would not get into a carriage all the while we were in Cairo. You can see nothing of the best streets if you do—it is brutal and it is unsafe. One of these tombs, El Mu-eiyad, I think, is exactly like the Alhambra. Over the grave is the dome (the tomb is not separated, as in the rest, from the mosque), supported by four horseshoe arches and the whole, arches, windows, everything, covered with that exquisite white fretwork, that delicate tracery of the Alhambra. The effect of this, looking into it from the dark mosque beyond, [is] fairylike. The mosque is the richest we had seen, all, even to the bolt of the door, the ceiling, the niche, the pulpit, the walls, the doors, being inlaid with mothero’-pearl, rare woods and precious stones, yet all subdued to the most lovely harmony, in ‘‘sober livery’’ clad. The effect of the fretwork tomb was like that of a moonlight night, the colouring of the mosque like a gorgeous sunset when it is beginning to grow dark. I have sometimes seen the effect in nature—never before in a building—and I cannot conceive anything so beautiful. I bethink me I have not told you about El Jama el Azhar, ‘‘the splendid mosque,’’ certainly the most curious mosque in Cairo. After passing the usual winding porch and passage , you find yourself in the large square hypaethral court, crowded with people, sitting, standing, praying, talking and making—so unlike the silence of the other mosques— a most tremendous noise. The whole court is surrounded with buildings and at the farther end is the deep, deep portico, eight columns deep, divided in this case from the court by partitions between the front row. It was all matted or carpeted, the walls and ceiling quite plain. And here there was the most profound silence. Only, leaning against a pillar, here and there stood a sheikh or imam, and at his feet sat a circle of men, either intently listening or writing or learning by heart, grown-up men—none of them boys. The Muslims put us to shame by the care with which they learn their religion, with which they study the Qur’an and listen to commentaries. It is said that in

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Cairo the Muslims are generally much better instructed in their religion than the average of Christians ever are in theirs—how these grown-up men can find the time is the wonder. That was the most oriental sight I ever saw: those lecturing ulama, those silent circles sitting on the ground—no need of desks or benches— each had his little plate to write on upon his knee, his inkhorn, like Ezekiel, in his girdle, each sat cross-legged on the mat. It carried one back into the Temple of Jerusalem where the boy Christ sat down in like manner among a similar circle,542 into the days of Arabic learning when Baghdad and Damascus were the universities of the world. You cannot conceive what a picture it was: the robed and turbaned professor, the oriental dignity of the listeners. We went into a side chapel, called the Chapel of the Blind, where 300 blind students are maintained upon a foundation. One was sitting with his back to the wall, chuckling at having got his lesson well. We could not stay, for the people were getting irritated543 at the presence of the Christian female dogs in this sacred mosque and the cawass was obliged to protect our departure, not with his sword but with his whip, which he carried on purpose, beating back the people. Our departure was very like the way in which one backs out of a field where there are angr y cows. As to the Mussulman horror of us, I never could feel anything but the deepest sympathy for it, the deepest humiliation at exciting it. When you think that a woman who goes with her face uncovered is, with them, more indecent than a woman who should go without clothes544 among us, that it is here the stamp of a disgraced character, it is exactly as if a dancer were to come, in her disgraceful dress, into Salisbury Cathedral during the time of ser vice . Would not the vergers put her out? I only wonder at the tolerance with which we are treated here, not at the contrar y, but it makes an European woman’s life in the East a misery. The Azhar is the university of the East, for it is the university of Cairo and Cairo is the only city which keeps up its reputation as a school of Arabic literature. The riwaks or apartments for the students still surround three sides of the court, each country or province having its foundation. All the instruction is gratis and formerly the students, who are mostly poor men, were fed; but that man, 542 An allusion to Luke 2:41-50. 543 Ms 9017/25: wretched. 544 Ms 9017/25: naked.

452 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Muhammad Ali—that great prince who has such a reputation for advancing civilization—took possession of all the lands of the Azhar (among the other mosques) and, consequently, of all the salaries of the ulama or learned men—so that they now receive nothing but are obliged to maintain themselves by private lessons, etc. There is some credit in being a professor in the Azhar now and giving away learning gratis. To do so, permission must be obtained from the sheikh of the mosque—I should like to see our Cambridge men asking permission to teach gratis. The poor students must also get their living as they can and the imams of mosques are generally chosen from among them. But, since this great confiscation their number has, of course, diminished, and what between Muhammad Ali and the French invasion, the learning of the Azhar has altogether deteriorated, which, no doubt, that good and wise man was glad to see. From the Azhar, we went to the Hasaneyn, the most sacred of all the mosques. The sheikh at the door read our firman over twice before he would believe that we were to come in, and then an imam ran to shut the silver doors of the place where the head of the martyr El Hoseyn is buried, the grandson of Muhammad, the son of his daughter. I had got off from my ass first and might have run forward, too, but I was ashamed to give them pain in a place where we were only upon sufferance at all. In the Hasaneyn there is nothing to see any more than in El Azhar. There is no hypaethral court; it is simply a portico, carpeted and supported by many columns. But the silence and twilight of the place are ver y striking. One solitary professor leaned against a column with a circle of, I suppose, eighty men at his feet. We rode home past my favourite sebeel, one of those public fountains which there are in almost every street in Cairo, the most beautiful specimens of Moorish architecture and Moorish hospitality. It has a semicircular front, jutting out into the street, with three grated windows: behind each window a trough of water and a chained mug—you put your hand through the grating and drink. A deep wooden coping, car ved and coloured, overhangs the windows, generally with all the beauty of Moorish fretwork. And above, or beside, is a schoolroom, open (except by pillars) to the street. But Muhammad Ali seized upon the funds of all the sebeels, which were generally the gift of private individuals, and they are fast going to decay. When there is not a sebeel, there is a hod at every corner of the streets, a trough under a little arched recess. But the commonest thing is to see a sakia, or one of the old water carriers, with a goatskin of water at his back, giving to

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drink out of his spout to everyone who passes by, having been paid to do so by somebody, either for the sake of a dead friend or of some welee whose festival is being kept, or if the person has been simply making a visit to a tomb. The sakias chant while they are doing this, offering a charity in the name of God. It is very pretty, and you are supposed to implore a blessing, if you drink, for the person who is gone. That riding through the streets of Cairo is endless in its delight, though how you ever get through you know not; the ass manages it. It is true, your ass driver keeps up an incessant ‘‘shemâlak, shemâlak,’’ thy left, thy left; ‘‘riglak, riglak,’’ thy foot, thy foot; ‘‘hôt, hôt’’ attention, attention, though whether this is addressed to the ass or the passengers, I never could make out, for, in spite of hôt, shemâlak and riglak, nobody stirs. And the 20,000 asses which are said to ‘‘perambulate the district’’ ever y day (for in Cairo no one but the slave and the beggar walks) tread on to the tune of squashed babbies.

Alexandria and Off Source: Letter 52, 1854 ed. 309-21, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Mss 9017/1 and 9018/7

[off Alexandria] [after 6] April 1850 Well, dearest people, I suppose you are waiting for a description of Cairo, but you will not get it, I am sorry to say. You might as well try to record a dream, and I do not know whether the waking dream of the living city within or the silent vision of the dead city without is the most unreal. I am sorry we have not seen the dervishes dance, to which I had looked forward much, but it so happened that Good Friday and Easter Sunday [29 and 31 March] were their only days, and we did not like to go galloping off the instant after that service was over. Did you think of me on Easter Sunday at the sacrament? And on the full moon of Holy Thursday, as I looked out upon that vast city which did not know its right hand from its left,545 which did not know, perhaps not fifty of them, perhaps not five, what they were put into this world for, as the night cry from the minarets fell on the still air and told how they were really seeking God. I thought how Christ, if he had been there, would have felt—how he would have yearned over Cairo and how he would 545 An allusion to Matt 6:3 from Jonah 4:11.

454 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions have been straitened till his task was accomplished. Behold that great city, how would he have set about her deliverance?546 I never told you about our day to the Petrified Forest. It had been a long settled thing that we should have a day in the desert, that Mr Mur ray should send out a tent for us to spend the heat of the day in, etc. This party swelled to inordinate dimensions—Lord Lincoln547 and the Northamptons, etc., made part of it. We were all to go out separately at whatever hour we pleased. We set out late, as we do not mind the heat and had a great deal to do that morning. It was not till noon that we issued forth, Mr B. and the German professor on dromedaries and we on asses. So we rode through the desert, Sheikh Bisharee with us. We rode a long way and could see no traces of the tent till we met one of the Bedouins who offered to show us the way. We found it at last in a little valley, under the ridge of Gebel Attaka, the Valley of the Deliverance, believed to be the line by which Moses led the Israelites. The Petrified Forest is a most curious deposit of immense palms, bamboos and many trees not belonging to Egypt, evidently left by the subsiding of some mighty stream. The desert for miles is strewed by them and we measured some of vast size. I believe the thing is quite unique in geology. From the top of a ridge we saw a wonderful view of the pyramids, which look larger and larger the farther you get from them. The encampment looked very pretty as we rode up, with all the white Arabian horses and dromedaries picquetted about and the Arab servants. But the hills and valleys of that wild desert, which Moses, so strong of purpose, actually persuaded the infirm of will to pass through when within the very sight of the fleshpots of Egypt, are not places for the fleshpots of picnicking. We left Cairo a week earlier than we intended, which is the reason why we have seen so little of the Arabian city. We idled our time at first, being tired , and then afterwards found no place for repentance.549 Easter Monday [1 April] was our last day. We went before breakfast to Dr Abbott’s museum to look at his funeral papyrus, which we could now understand a little about. The different transformations of the 546 An allusion to Nineveh in Jonah 3 and 4. 547 Possibly Lord Lincoln who was appointed chief secretar y for Ireland in 1846 under Sir Robert Peel. 548 Martineau, Eastern Life: Past and Present 313. 549 An allusion to Heb 17:12.

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dead, different trials and subduings of successive vices under the form of beasts, like the labours of Hercules, are all there. Then we went to Schranz’s to get you some photographs, and long we stood in his little narrow street, in the Copt quarter where the meshrebeeyehs not only met but folded in overhead, fitting in and dovetailed into one another, and friendly walls, tottering to one another, supported each other by a horizontal prop between them. Ever y storey projects a little farther than the lower one, till the top[s] all but meet. A solitary old water carrier, or blue-veiled woman, sauntered occasionally along. On a sunny day the effect is too spotty for beauty: the streaks of light and the deep shadows are too zebralike, too chequered, but on a cloudy day the light and shade is beautiful. In a glaring sun, you would not believe it (in an accurate drawing), nor admire it, if you did. Easter Tuesday [2 April] we left Cairo, the Transit driving us down to Boulaq in thorough English style, to our great disgust, with an English coachman and an omnibus and four. On board the boat for Atfih we found my dear Mme Rosetti, the Tuscan consul’s wife, all the Zizinias, Count Benczik the Hungarian, a sick French woman and the reverend mother of the Good Shepherdesses at Cairo, all her sisters clinging round her as she was bidding them adieu to return to France upon a mission. We were a day and night on our way to Alexandria, and what a strange day and night is was! There was the mother of the Zizinias, an old Smyrniot, her beautiful hair, at sixty years of age, dressed round a red tarboosh with a blue gauze cockade (a sort of cross between an Indian begum [Muslim lady of rank] and Lady Holland550), putting ever ybody to rights who sat where it did not please her and looking like the head wife of a pacha. What curious contrasts there were that night between this fierce, undisciplined, clever old Smyrniot, with her fine beetling brow and brutal mouth, and the severely disciplined and repressed and chastened white nun with every passion in order and ever y feeling checked, except that which belonged to her vocation. She was a German of high family (and gave me a letter to her sister at Münster), had gone through the cholera and every disease at Cairo, where she had had her sisterhood thrice renewed from Europe during her five years’ superiorship, for the sake of establishing the first sisterhood that ever has been there, and having utterly failed and, as she 550 Lady Holland (1812-89), a famous Liberal political hostess.

456 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions said herself, wasted life for nothing (alas! she ought to have all Cairo in her Refuge), was undertaking this journey to the Maison Mère at Angers for the sake of having the Refuge reorganized upon a different system. So suffer those who pioneer a new road, so fall those who throw their bodies in the breach, but they bridge the way for others to tread upon them. Yet the woman was as serene and simple and cheerful as if she were a child gathering daisies, instead of a prophet gathering souls. Another contrast was between the weak, wicked, gambling, dying Frenchwoman, who dragged herself in the middle of the night into the gentlemen’s cabin to play cards, though dying of a hideous complaint, and the devoted, genial, fervent Mme Rosetti, who sat wherever none else would sit, slept where no one else would lie, subdued even the fierce old Smyrniot to help her in making poor people’s clothes, nursed the sick woman and melted all these different raw ores under her sunshine—not disciplined, like the white nun, but denying herself out of the very fer vour of her benevolence and as anxious to get us into a hareem as she was to perform her Easter retraite and to read a good book to the boat with an inflammation of the windpipe, working the whole time at her poor’s clothes. It was a curious night. A third contrast was between a languid, spoilt, pretty Indian we had under our charge, and a little ugly tiger of a Zizinia who, under the cover of being a fiancée, ran about giving her lap dog to hold to any gentleman she met, but as free with her coffee and her bonbons, with which she kept all the company alive. We did not get to Atfih till ten o’clock, too late to bid adieu to our solemn Nile who, indeed, had been all that day as ugly and as contrary as it was possible to be. It was pitch dark. We had heaps of luggage. Nobody helpful but Σ. There was the wretched sick woman to be carried. Mrs - -’s spoilt child would not part with its wax doll. What was to be done? A good-natured man took charge of the doll and the child, and I took charge of his baggage, as being the least helpless thing of the two, and of Mrs - -. At last we arrived at the Mahmoudieh Canal— you have to walk across to the boat as they do not open the locks at night. If anybody could have drawn that scene, how good it would have been: the imperious old Smyrniot with her blue cockade in the foreground, the miserable Benczik with the Zizinia dog in his arms, which it became a tour de force to be able to hold, behind—helpless females not daring to step across the plank. At last Mrs - - and I were left alone on the shore. Paolo came. ‘‘Take Mrs - -,’’ I heroically cried,

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‘‘I will not stir from the hatbox of the man who has taken charge of the doll.’’ At last we were all lodged on board the Mahmoudieh boat, where you sit bolt upright all night on the benches round the cabin, with a large company of biting animals of every description. The moon shone, the horses, each mounted by a wild Arab, galloped—for you are towed by horses—and we went along very merrily, only occasionally going aground, owing to the lowness of the water. At breakfast the old Smyrniot ate enough for ten men’s dinners. It was too cold and too ugly to go on deck. We reached Alexandria about twelve [3 April] and spent the rest of the day in making ourselves clean and seeing after that wretched Frenchwoman. The news from Greece was bad and all thought it best and shortest to go to Corfu by the Trieste boat, do our quarantine there, instead of perhaps two quarantines at Smyrna and Syra, and get the latest news of Athens. I was sorry to leave Alexandria where I had troops of friends: all the Sisters of St-Vincent-de-Paul, Mme Rosetti, Miss Harris and the white reverend mother. On Thursday [4 April] we had a knocking-up day: we had to wash up and pack up in a great hurry for a final farewell to Egypt and we paid a visit to Miss Harris. Abbas Pacha is said to be very ill with the fêtes which he gave on the marriage of his eldest son. It is hoped that he will die, in which case Said Pacha, who is an excellent man, an educated man and a gentleman, will succeed. The viceroyship goes to the oldest male heir of Muhammad Ali. On Friday [5 April] I was up early and spent the morning in the StVincent schools. At Alexandria, Abraham would have found the thirty righteous men,551 women I mean. I never saw so charming a woman as the schoolmistress nun and, when I observed her careful knowledge of the disposition of ever y child (300) and thought of the patent improved-man-making principle at home—the machine warranted to turn out children wholesale, like pins, with patent heads—I did not wonder at the small success of our education. Except in the ragged schools in Edinburgh and one in Westminster, I have never seen anything so perfect as this. The horrid system of classes was entirely done away with, by which we reverse the system of Providence, who does not make children come into the world like rabbits in a litter but gives (to 551 An allusion to Gen 18:30.

458 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions the majority) that finest of all educations, the having a younger to take care of, an older to look up to—beginning in early life the discipline we all have afterwards. In my nun’s school, each of the elder children was the ‘‘bon ange’’ of a little one who always sat by her ange. Those in whom she had most confidence had two or three ‘‘daughters’’: this was the highest privilege she could give. When you consider that her scholars were taken out of the most degraded population in the world, the Arab, Smyrniot and Maltese, you can hardly overrate the importance of the principle she thus set in motion in their hearts. The carelessness for infant life here, the horrible neglect and filth in which the children live, or rather die, is what no Mungo-Park description of the misery of an African village can give the least idea of. The mortality among infants in consequence is something you would hardly believe. You cannot blame the people for it, when you know that the best service a mother can do her own child, and the one she most frequently performs, is to put out its right eye or cut off its forefinger to save its being enlisted for the pacha’s army. Here was the indefatigable nun writing another law in her scholars’ hearts for the time when they should become mothers. She said she found that the necessity of setting a good example to the protégées was everything as an influence with the protectors. It saved her, too, the necessity of many a scold. When the little one came late, the ange scolded for her and if the ange scolded too zealously, which often happened, she said, ‘‘You must scold like a guardian angel, always keeping that idea as your model.’’ In class a big girl and a little one stood alternately.552 552 Ms 9019/11 contains the following notes written by Nightingale at the time of her visit[s] to the Sisters of St-Vincent-de-Paul in Alexandria; they were dated 22 November 1849 by Nightingale, but could as well date from April 1850: Let each of the older children be the bon ange of a little one, let her sit by her ange. If there are any in whom you have more confidence, let them have two or three daughters. The necessity of setting a good example is everything upon [for] them. It saves you many a scold. When the little one comes late, the ange scolds for you. Then I say, ‘‘You must scold like a guardian angel, bien, bien doucement, make the angel your model.’’ In class came a big girl and a little one alternately; only the head of the class corrected. With the ‘‘signal,’’ la soeur snapped twice whenever a fault was made, a mistake in reading, once when all were to stand up and stuck it against the book when each child had read enough. Pharmacie (300 Arabs daily): row at first inconceivable. The sister could not make her voice heard but she hushed and raised her hand and taught them to sit on benches and keep silence; now most perfect discipline obser ved.

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In their hospital the noise had been at first inconceivable. The Arab knew neither how to sit nor to be silent; the sisters could not make their voice[s] heard. But they began with raising their hands before they could raise their voices as the signal for silence, and now the most perfect discipline is observed. I have seen the idea of the ‘‘ange’’ system in the ragged schools, where the dirtiest boy is made to look after the cleanliness of the others and a large thief to superintend the morals of a smaller, and where it acts excellently too, but never so well carried out as here. We muddled away all the rest of the day in our preparations, packed up the boxes for England, and so forth. Saturday [6 April] was our day for leaving Egypt, our last day in the East, and really I think my most curious day, perhaps the most curious day of my life. The things were to be on board by eight553 o’clock, so I was up early, and by seven, I had plenty of time to go and wish the sisters goodbye. As I was like a tame cat there, I went in without ringing and straight to the dispensary, where I generally found two or three hundred Arabs waiting. I found one of the sisters digging in the garden and, coming in with her, was just sitting down for a chat among the bottles, when the reverend mother of the Good Shepherd, my white Cairene friend, came in, hearing I was there, and wanting to talk to me about her sister at Münster. We were all very merry together, when a message came that there were some English sisters in the Parlatorio and ‘‘would I go in, as there was no one in the convent who could understand them?’’ So we all adjourned. There we found the superior of the Sisters of Mercy in Australia, who had been founding an establishment there, with one of the sisters and a little ‘‘Bush’’ child. She had undertaken this immense voyage home for the sake of getting help and more sisters from the mother establishment, had been up three nights and was going off that very afternoon. She was to leave the little ‘‘Bush,’’ who was quite tame, in Europe to be educated. There is a freemasonr y, instead of a jealousy, among the orders. They all go to one another’s houses for hospitality and, whether they can speak one another’s language or not, they are always sure to find help and sympathy. Here were three superiors, none of them old women, meeting from different quarters of the world, all on their way home (for the Alexandrian mother was going too), one to Angers, one to Paris, one to Dublin: not on their own business or their own 553 Ms 9018/7: seven.

460 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions pleasures, but on objects of their mission to their Maisons Mères, for purposes of reorganizing, enlarging, etc., and all so simple, quiet and merry about it. You would have thought it a very cheer ful morning visit if you had made such a one in London. The superior of Australia would not allow she was glad to be going home. She said she longed to be back, there were so few sisters to do the work, and they had nine little Bushes in the house, besides their day schools, a refuge for servants of good character out of place, and the sick to visit. She said the work of the Egyptian sister was harder than theirs, for the ‘‘Bushes’’ had no religion, absolutely none—and therefore there was nothing to undo—it was all doing. The little child she had with her was an orphan and had been bought for a shilling (a hundred miles up the country from Perth) from her tribe, who were going to eat her. Others had been rescued in like manner, but they had now some scholars, whom the mothers themselves had brought, a great encouragement. The establishment is at Perth, has been founded four years. Tired as they were they wanted to see the house, the Arabs in the dispensar y, the schools. I took them round. The little Bush was taken to the little Arabs who cried out, ‘‘Here is a sister!’’ She behaved very well. Then we went into the dispensary where the patients asked if that was the head hakim [Muslim physician], pointing to the Australian sister who was a very tall and beautiful woman, and whom in her black robes, different from the dress of their sisters, they took for the first physician. They wanted a priest to confess but there was none who could speak English. They were eager to learn all they could about the Arabs, pitied the Egyptian sisters who were decimated by the climate and thought themselves ‘‘so well off.’’ The St-Vincent sisters take no vows and are not engaged for more than a year when they may marry or do anything else ‘‘sans blesser leur conscience’’ [without hurting their conscience]. They support the establishment by taking pensionnaires [boarders] and reckon that, for every pensionnaire, they can take two ‘‘orphelines’’ [female orphans]. So that these labourers not only bring in the harvest554 but work for their bread; not only work without hire, but pay for their own work. I think St Paul555 would have been pleased.556 554 An allusion to Matt 9:37-38. 555 1 Cor 9:11-18. 556 On Nightingale’s encounter with the sisters see Letter 8 above.

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Alas I was obliged to go, to my great distress, for I was afraid of being too late. And so we parted, all four, they to their work, never to meet again. Mme Rosetti had made, unknown to us, an appointment with Engeli Hanum, the wife of Said Pacha, for us, which she could not break, so off we set on asses, in our travelling coats, to the hareem. Two successive curtains (two successive gardens between) were lifted up to let us pass. Troops of beautiful white Circassians came to receive us; a black showed the way. Through marble halls, with fountains in the middle, we passed, till we reached the room where Engeli Hanum rose to receive us. Tall and with a beautiful figure, unlike these Turkish women, she seemed to us the most lovely woman we had ever seen, with that soft melancholy eye, that exquisite mouth and complexion. Ever yone says that she is unique among the Turks. Such manners: so sweet, so humble, so benevolent to the poor. I am glad our hareem specimen did not send us away in disgust. I felt that I could have died a martyr to give her one hour of such feelings as those sisters have, but I was nearer the consummation of my kind wishes than you can have any idea of, for certainly a little more of such a place would have killed us. Luckily, we were obliged to hurry away for the boat, though the first time we got up, she would not let us go, having no idea that there could be such a thing as necessity. Oh, the ennui of that magnificent palace—it will stand in my memory as a circle of hell! Not one thing was there lying about to be done or to be looked at. We almost longed to send her a cup and ball. She was dressed in a green pelisse, lined with fur, over yellow trousers and train, and was sitting in an immense marble hall with no article of furniture but the divan, embroidered with the moon and star. She was too much of a born gentlewoman to examine our dress and there we sat, without even the weather to talk of. Coffee came, of course, and pipes covered with diamonds. And the Circassians, the most graceful and the most sensual-looking creatures I ever saw (like dancers), stood in a semicircle or knelt round us. The very windows into the garden were woodworked, so that you could not see out. The cold, the melancholy of that place! I felt inclined to cry. Presently she got up and took us into another hall to see the family pictures. The tears filled those soft melancholy eyes when she looked at that of Muhammad Ali. She was the only thing the old Lion loved and he would have given her his kingdom. I don’t wonder at it. I would have died for her, but I could not have lived with her. She was herself a Circassian slave, adopted by Nezleh Hanum, Muhammad Ali’s eldest daughter, which is done by

462 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions the process of passing the child through the dress—this gives the child all the legitimate rights of a daughter. She is the only wife of Said Pacha, the youngest son of Muhammad Ali, and the future viceroy. A little adopted daughter of her own was brought in for us to see, dressed in yellow satin and a shawl round its waist, with a turban and a little train: a sweet little child, but I felt how much rather I would be that little Bush, how much better chance she had than this. After this penance was over we went away, she as gracious as real kindliness could make her, sending her compliments to our husbands and begging us to come back. There was nothing sensual in her countenance, as in that of the slaves: she looked sighing for better things. I had rather have felt less interested in her, though that is wrong. but if heaven and hell exist on this earth it is in the two worlds I saw on that one morning: the dispensary and the hareem. The princess did something for Mme Rosetti’s poor while we were there and I was pleased to see how Mme Rosetti was welcomed by ever ybody in the hareem. that afternoon [6 April] we sailed from Alexandria. Our solemn old Egypt we had left when we left the Nile, but I was grieved sadly for Arabia. Source: Claydon Diary

26 March 1850 Cairo. Khamsin. Went to the tombs (with Dr Koch) of the Mameluke sultans riding out of the Bab el-Mure [?]. Tombs of the 1st of the dynasty. El Berkook and El Ashraf, the former the great mosque with two exquisite minarets, the latter not much outside but within inlaid with all the mathematical Saracenic patterns. Looked at Kait Bey. 27 March 1850 Dined at Mr Murray’s, moon rising over the palms when we went into the garden. Lincoln and Northampton party. 28 March 1850 Cairo. Tombs of the Mamelukes again with the Koch. El Kait Bey little school in lobby, horseshoe arch. El Ashraf and took all the patterns. Rode back past Kait Bey and the city wall, looked down upon the place of the Exodus and the whole line of the pyramids, rode through the southern tombs and through Rumeyleh going into Sultan Hassan.

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29 March 1850 Good Friday. With Legros, Mrs Lushington and the Koch to Sultan Teylun and to the top of it, through the beautiful little street by the little gate, across the country of tombs to the mosque in the side of the hill. Little tomb in the ‘‘dressing room’’ looking out of an open window on the pyre, his vizier. Modern family tomb—mysterious gloomy sunset behind the pyre through the tombs of each by Rumeyleh in the twilight. 30 March 1850 Cairo. Petrified Forest with the dromedaries and two asses and home with all the English. 31 March 1850 Easter Sunday. Church. Schranz. Mosques el Mur, El Hakim, close to El Azhar. El Hasaneyn, Kalaum by Morostan. El Mu-eiyad. Sultan Hassan. 1 April 1850 Cairo. Dr Abbott’s museum before breakfast, funeral papyrus, Schranz, and stood in his little narrow street where the meshrebeeyehs overlap. Sat still looking at the groups in the Ezbekeeyeh, sitting in circles on the ground, telling stories. 2 April 1850 Off by 8 a.m. in the steamer. The white nun, the superior of the Good Shepherd at Cairo, going home to forward her mission, every feeling in order, ever y thought disciplined; the fierce old Smyrniot, Zizinias, Mère, such contrasts; the fervent genial Madame Rosetti and the gambling dying Frenchwoman. The languid Indian, Mrs Lushington and the untutored Greek [illeg]. Atfih 10 p.m. 3 April 1850 Alexandria. After a most wonderful night with a vast deal of livestock, human and (not) divine, besides animals, in one small cabin, reached Alexandria noon. Hôtel d’Europe. Warm bath and went to see the wretched Frenchwoman. 4 April 1850 Bought. Called on Miss Harris. Decided to go by Corfu. 5 April 1850 Alexandria. To my sisters of St-Vincent-de-Paul before breakfast. In the dispensary and in the school. Capital grammar lesson, not much doing in the dysentery way. Packed for England.

464 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: British Library Diar y

26 March 1850 Spent much time at home reading my madre’s words. 28 March 1850 Looked out upon the silent city in the moonlight and thought what He would have done here, that great city which cannot discern its right hand from its left.557 [Good Friday] 29 March 1850 Stayed at home as knowing that I did not go to church to seek God, nor expect to find Him there. Read my madre and my own history. Did Christ thank God for this day when it dawned upon him? [Easter Sunday] 31 March 1850 Sacrament. 1 April 1850 Not able to go out, but wished God to have it all His own way. I like Him to do exactly as He likes, without even telling me the reason why. 2 April 1850 We all had to spend the night sitting up in that cabin of beasts. Found the prospect of having that wretched woman to nurse cheer me up suddenly and all other woes grew light in comparison with hers. 3 April 1850 Mme Rosetti read her good book to us. Arrived at Alexandria. 5 April 1850 Went to the externe school at St-Vincent-de-Paul. ‘‘Mon Dieu, je lui dis toujours dans mes prières, c’est votre affaire, ce n’est pas la mienne. Je ne suis que cela dans vos mains’’ [My God, I always say to Him in my prayers, it is Your business, not mine. That is all I am in Your hands], holding up the signal thing she used in the school (the nun). Source: Letter 53, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/24 (not in 1854 ed.)

Alexandria [Saturday] 6 April 1850 My dearest people, just off by the Trieste steamer [the Schild] for Cor fu, there to do quarantine and wait for decided news from Athens. We have given up Smyrna because the news will not be so certain 557 An allusion to Nineveh in Jonah 4:11.

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there. If it is feasible, we shall take the steamer from Corfu to Athens via Gulf of Lepanto, if not we shall come on to Trieste by the next opportunity. At all events, write to Athens to the direction I gave you. We shall be three or four days going to Corfu. I have just had a dear letter from Parthenope, dated 14 March. So I have had altogether from you: one Marseilles, one Alexandria, one Nubia, two Luxor, nine Cairo, one Alexandria. I have so much to tell you about Cairo, but we have been so hurried that I have not a moment, as we had not the least intention of going by this Trieste concern. I have just dispatched two boxes for England, full of rubbish, which you may do anything you please with. Yours au revoir Mrs Lushington will call upon you, bringing from me a bracelet for Pop’s birthday. Be kind to her, she is a nice little woman. I send the key of Mr Bracebridge’s box. We have this day despatchedfour boxes and a mummy board (of these, two boxes are his and two mine). They will arrive by the Prussian ship Fur y six weeks from this date. You must write to McCracken enclosing this key and saying that mine is fastened to the box, that he must claim them, forwarding to you the bill and my boxes (which have W.E. Nightingale upon them), to Atherstone Mr Bracebridge’s and the mummy case. Don’t write to McCracken till near the time. I will write from Corfu. Four boxes in all, you understand, and one mummy case. Source: Claydon Diary

6 April 1850 St-Vincent-de-Paul before breakfast. The white nun came out to see me and we were all sitting in the dispensary chatting very comfortably among the bottles when I was summoned into the parlour to interpret for two English nuns just arrived from Australia (the three orders). Said Pacha’s hareem with Mme Rosetti, such a contrast. Off by Schild for Corfu 4:00 p.m. Source: British Library Diar y

6 April 1850 The three orders at St-Vincent-de-Paul from Australia, Cairo, Alexandria. And the hareem of Said Pacha.

466 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Letter 54, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 8993/33 (not in 1854 ed.)

[Trieste] [Aboard the Schild] [Saturday 13 April 1850] There are gone home in the box: first, two nasty scar fs for you and Mama, with my good wishes expressed upon them in Arabic—that you should wear them with good health and prosperity, which indeed I do; second, a piece of silk for a por tière, which won’t make it, there not being enough; third, an Arabic inkhorn for Papa, a white and gold affair for caps, which I pray you to have made up into a bag for Mama; a delicate pair of slippers to make up for your little feet, they will be too small for most people; a little tablecloth of the real Cairene colour and two littler for the small round table in the drawing room, where you have that abominable thing lined with blue; a Burnous for you. If there is anything you do not care about, which Aunt Mai could have, I should be very glad. But do you take first choice. I have got a scarf, which I think will do for her if you want all that I have sent home. The birds, of course, are for Shore. Also, if there is anything you like to spare for Catherine Mrs Vaughan, I should be glad. As for the Egyptian rubbish, you may do just what you like with it, keep it or give it away. There is nothing that reminds me of what I have seen, nothing that savours of my Karnak or the sculptures except the bronze dag, the brick seals, which sealed the tombs at Thebes, and the four little seals in the night-light box, two of which are of Ramesses. Shore must have one of the ostrich eggs, if he cares for it. I don’t think he will. Stay, you must not give away what is in the great Nubian basket, because some of that rubbish is Trout’s. The Darfur bracelets are for you, I got them at Philae. Louisa must have a pair of the little figures found in the tombs, but I shall make her a little collection out of the rubbish when I come home. The thing you will take for a stool and which is a pillow was a present from the ‘‘Bigs’’ of the cataracts—I must keep that for ‘‘sentiment.’’ The photographs and lithographs are beautifully like (all of Cairo) and are, of course, for you; I have some little scarabs I did not send home (for fear of being lost) for you. The best part of this panoramic voyage round the world558 is that the captain and all the people thought us so lucky: you get so much more for your money, why, you have three times the voyage for the 558 Unable first to stop at Corfu for quarantine, the ship had to sail on to Trieste, Ancona, Brindisi and then finally Corfu on 19 April.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 467

same money and we take you back for nothing. What would you have? Why, you have taken out your money’s worth and got thirteen days instead of three to Corfu for it (for we shall arrive at Corfu on Friday). You don’t know how difficult it is to get anything at Cairo for I know you will think, and very truly, what I have sent home very shabby. Ever ything has to be ordered. The Alfords went to the bazaar ever y day and we had not strength for that. As for the Egyptian things, unless you carry away Memnon’s head, like Belzoni, I don’t know that there is anything to be had. Source: Claydon Diary

9 April 1850 At sea. Off Crete with her snowy ridge and Mount Ida towering behind. Made C. Matapan in the mist. 10 April 1850 Off Chiparissia. Mount Oleno, the Parnassus behind. Passed Zante [?] between Cefalonia and Ithaca, past Leucadia and the Lover’s Leap, saw Actium, sunset upon Parga on its rock by the seashore. Anchored at Corfu 10 p.m. Nessuna sperazione le fa la notte [Night brings you no hope]; they would not take us into quarantine. Nor even allow us to stay in the open boat with a guardiano till daylight. 11 April 1850 But it is no such great favour to take us into prison, we cried. Nessuna sperazione le fa la notte was the answer. Ma cosa bisogna fare [But what to do]? we said. Bisogna andare piu giù giù fino a [We must go further on to] Trieste and malinconoci, Icaro [Just too bad, Icarus]. We did go giù into bed and go giù for a week more at sea. 12 April 1850 The best of it was the captain thought he was doing us such a favour. Ten days more for your money, lodging and carriage compris. Saw no more land till we reached Trieste in a grey mist. 13 April 1850 Trieste. Found rooms at the Hôtel de France; wonderful red, lurid sunset over the sea, like a Martin’s Fall of Babylon.559 Spent the evening in the mosques of Cairo. Sat still. Wrote home.

559 Joseph Lemuel Martin, English landscape painter.

468 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: British Library Diar y

7 April 1850 In berth all day on board the Schild but passed a very happy day. My God, Thy will. 8 April 1850 In berth. 9 April 1850 Passed Crete. Got up, had the very same wind which forced St Paul out of his course560 from Alexandria. 10 April 1850 Mrs Williamson asked me why we avoided her. My God, do I in all my intercourse (with Benczik, with Mr Vernon, with Σ, with her) consider only the object for which we are put into the world, only the serving Thee? 11 April 1850 Could not stop at Corfu. But I only wish God to do His own will. His will is561 ever ything. 13 April 1850 Ar rived at Trieste.

‘‘Vision of Temples’’ Source: Letter 55, 1854 ed. 322-34, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9017/26-27

[Febr uary/April 1850] Editor: This essay goes back to Nightingale’s stay in Thebes in Februar y 1850, but appears here in Ms 9017 and the 1854 edition. Since it is addressed to family and friends, it is viewed here as a letter. M.D. Calabria edited the text and provided notes and an introduction in Florence Nightingale in Egypt and Greece (121-38). See Letter 40 of 11 Februar y above for parallel material. Calabria comments on her text: ‘‘In ‘Vision of Temples,’ Nightingale utilizes the historical figures of Egyptian kings to illustrate the evolution in the concept of God, from that of a God of Power to an ineffable God embodying Perfection, Harmony, and Order. Her comments are not based on fact, but rather on 560 An allusion to Acts 27:9-41. 561 Calabria read: in.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 469

impressions she gleaned from the monuments erected by the ancient kings’’ (133). Her essay distinguishes seven periods of that evolution; accordingly the respective sections are held together and the periods separated by a space. My dearest, the enclosed562 will give you no idea of the temples of Thebes, but it is what they said to me. Such as I have give I thee.563 To me the six great temples of Thebes were the efforts of different characters, successful and unsuccessful, according to the state of the vessel, as is the case with all inspiration, to render into form the inspirations of each member of the Great Triad of Thebes: Amun, Mut and Khonsu. Karnak and Medinet Habu temples of Amun, the ‘‘Concealed’’ God built by Seti I, bce 1397 [beginning of his reign 1318] and Ramesses III, bce 1290 [1198] Luxor and Qurna [temples] of Mut, Nature, Mother of all things built by Amenophis III, bce 1478 [1417] and Ramesses I, bce 1409 [1320] Deir el-Bahri and the [temples] of Khonsu, Strength or grace; Ramesseum Hor us, Eros or the world or beauty or order; Thoth, Wisdom: these were all the same built by Tuthmosis III, bce 1557 [1504] and Ramesses II, bce 1388 [1304] Ramesses II seems to have had a peculiar affection for Atum, a Theban form of his own Ra, whose name means to ‘‘complete’’ or ‘‘perfect’’; and his whole temple bears the impress of his love of harmony. Atum leads him into the presence of the god, Atum writes his name, etc. Ramesses III, on the contrary, reminds me perpetually of that old roué Solomon, whose book Ecclesiastes he might have written, I think. And the sons of the Theban kings presented themselves before the Lord. And He said, Behold, I send you upon the earth to govern and 562 Ms 9017/26: I write the enclosed only for you. 563 Acts 3:6.

470 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions raise the nation that I love. Build me a house that I may dwell in. And the sons of the kings said, What house, Lord? And the spirit of the third Tuthmosis descended upon earth. And he said, Behold, God has sent me to drive out the invader from the land and to glorify his name in the nation that he loves, that there may be none like her upon the earth. So he went forth with the bow and with the sword, and the enemy fled before him, with their hosts 240,000 men. And he pursued with his chariots and his horses till the land was utterly purged from their feet, and the glory of the kingdom of Egypt was great; there was none like unto her in all the world. Then the soul of the third Tuthmosis exulted within him and he said, I have raised the glory of the God of hosts, the Lord of strength shall be His name, and I will choose me out a high place which shall overlook all the land; on the high places of the earth shall be the dwelling of my God and He shall see the beautiful land of Thebes, whose glory is above the kingdoms of the world. And he chose him the heights of Deir el-Bahri. And he built there a temple for the God of armies; for he said, Glory and strength are my God. By the strength of my arm and the power of my intellect have I gotten myself the victory. And he offered to God all his riches and all his mighty spoils, and he made a list, and he inscribed it with the names and the numbers of the vessels of silver and vessels of gold which he had given to the Lord. And he said, Surely His glory is great, and mine also. And he reigned forty years and his spirit returned to God who gave it. And it came to pass that, after four and thirty centuries, the spirit of Tuthmosis returned to the land of his forefathers. And he revisited the Deir el-Bahri and behold! not one stone remained upon another. And he said, How is this, Lord? And the Lord said, Because thou didst think that I loved glory and that my greatness was in my strength, and in much show that I took pleasure, and didst love thy own glory therewith a little. Therefore have I thrown down thy edifice so that one stone does not stand upon another. And didst thou think that the Lord, who hideth himself, whose most mighty works go their still and silent course, without wakening one little bird that sleeps under its mother’s wing, who has given his children to perform more beautiful works than he has done himself, and who suffers them to think them their own, who has given to them to create with toil and trouble, that they might have the satisfaction of thinking, ‘I have done this,’ didst thou really think that He had for his object his own glory and that his servants were to seek first, not the ‘‘kingdom of God’’ but his regalia and his coronation clothes?

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 471

And the spirit of the third Amenophis was sent upon earth. And he over ran all the land as far as Mesopotamia, and he called himself the Lord of Truth, and he said, I am become like unto God. Therefore, he said, I will build a temple to Nature, for by the laws of the universe have I conquered and she is my mother. And he chose him out a place by the riverside, fertile and full of corn and cattle, and he called it Luxor, because, he said, I have built me palaces for the mother of all things. And he remembered his own mother who nursed him upon her knee so tenderly and who governed the kingdom so wisely during his wars. And to her he dedicated chambers in his temple and he made many dark places and secret chambers, and a holy place into which no eye could see, Because, he said, Night is the genesis of all things; primeval darkness is the mother of the world, for darkness is more ancient than light and day was born of night. So rested he in ‘‘Nature, not the God of Nature,’’ and forgot that darkness is good only because out of darkness proceedeth light. And after three and thirty centuries of purification, the spirit of Amenophis revisited the temple he had made and he found it full of unclean beasts and creeping things. And of the unclean things, of all the dogs and goats and asses, the most unclean was man; and vilest of the creeping things and most abject was man. And Amenophis said, My kingdom has become a base kingdom and my temple the dwelling of beasts, not of gods, nor even of men. And God said, Because thou hast worshipped Nature, not me, because thou hast seen law, not the God of laws, in the world around thee, because thou didst think thou couldst become the Lord of Truth by obser ving truth, therefore have I filled thy temple with that thou didst seek: lo! there is nature and natural life crawling about thy ruins. Thou must be the servant of Truth, not her Lord, and Truth must be thy master. But because thou hast loved thy mother and preferred her in honour, because it was not thy own glory thou didst seek, therefore have I not destroyed thy temple: it shall stand, but stand as a den of beasts. And God said, I will send a new race upon the earth to govern Thebes, my chosen. And he sent the spirit of the first Ramesses. And Ramesses said, I will build a temple for the great God. Yet, said he, not so, for how can the Unknown be known? how can the Spirit find a place? how can the Concealed be manifested? I will seek me out a place under the shadow of the palms, in the cool of the garden, and it shall be dedicated not to the glory of God but to the manifestation of God, to Nature, the benevolent mother. And at Qurna, where the palm trees

472 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions grew the tallest, where the mimosas were the greenest and the shades were the freshest, where the sound of the sakia was heard and the women brought their flocks to water, there he built the house to the manifestation of his God. But pure was the spirit and bright the soul of the builder, and short was his purification for, before the temple was finished, his spirit had been recalled to the God who gave it. No monument records his wars, nor are his name or his glories found on the stela, nor in the tomb, but morning and evening the Theban maiden came with her flocks and herds to sit upon the steps of his colonnade and to look out over fields of waving corn and under the shade of the groves to the eastern palaces and the distant hills, and bless his peaceful name. And when Ramesses revisited the earth, not to dwell there but to see his children and his children’s children making his name eternal, he found his temple completed in his name. He found justice done here in his name in the great hall of the temple set apart for it; he found religious assemblies and political, the incarnation of religion, here held. He found his son loving his memory and his son’s son loving his father’s and binding up their names in one. And there, though the voice of the speaker and the tongue of the preacher have long been dumb, the flocks and herds still come, the acacias are ever green and the sun still sets upon the amethyst crown of Thebes. And the spirit of the first Seti was sent upon the earth: the warrior, the artist, the philosopher, the tender and conscientious heart. Shall I build a house unto the Lord? he said. I will, but it shall be a house to the great Unknown, the Unutterable, the Infinite Himself, to Him to whom great things are as small and small things as great, to Him to whom a thousand years are but as a day and a day as a thousand years,564 to Him who creates, good and evil, who has formed darkness as well as light. I will build a temple, he said, mysterious as the future and vast as the past, yet it shall be the symbol of a day, of so small and definite a thing as a day, that my people may know that upon the hours of a day are laid the destinies of man. Karnak itself shall be but the image of a day. And he built a temple to the one God, such as the world has not seen, a hall of columns like a forest of the west, and the columns seemed to support the sky. Peradventure among them the Unseen will appear, he said. 564 An allusion to Ps 90:4.

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 473

And there were six mighty columns on either side; for twelve are the hours of the day and they are the pillars of man’s soul, he said. Can we make the hours too great or too awful? for upon them is built the temple of man’s per fection. And on either side were raised sixty lesser columns, yet loftier and greater than any the eye of man had yet seen, the columns of the sixty minutes for, he said, The minutes make the hours, that my people may not despise the ‘‘day of small things.’’ So, when the shadow of those mighty columns moves round with the sun, shall my people see that every minute casts a mighty shadow upon the future, though it be but a little thing, even upon all the future. Each minute is great as our father time, for time hangs upon a minute. And my temple shall be so high that it shall seem to connect earth and heaven. Even so doth time, mysterious time, whose minutes flow on noiselessly like the sand, yet remain firm as the rock in their effect. And he lighted his temple with the light of heaven from above, even as time, he said, is lighted by eternity, and till the light of eternity is thrown upon them, we cannot truly judge of our deeds. And he said, Shall we have nought that is evil, have nought but the ener vating good? Nay, but even with God impossibilities are impossible. Can man have the good of patience without suffering? have the good of happiness and the good of suffering, and both from happiness? Can he be taught without evil? the law he is to learn without enduring the consequences it has caused? But without consequences there would be no law. Let us have evil, he cried, O my God. And he caused himself to be represented gifted with life by the two Spirits of God, Good and Evil, that all the people might see that their king accepted suffering. And he called the Unknown God ‘‘Come’’ because, he said, He ‘‘cometh’’ to his creatures and manifests himself unto them. And he said, Nature is good, for she maketh Him known. But Nature is not God, yet shall she lead me into the presence of God. And she did so. And among the columns of his temple he found his God. And he overthrew nothing which his fathers had raised; he carefully preser ved it all, for he said, The Unknown is the God of my fathers also; they sought him after their manner and we will all seek him each after our own. But in the faithful observance of each daily hour and its occupation we shall find him best. And he caused himself to be represented on his tomb with the chain of the hours round his neck, not heavily weighing him down,

474 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions for each hour bears its own portion of the chain, its own burden, but binding him to fulfill his hour, for he said, I am not the lord of my hours, but I am their servant, for each hour is a genius, a messenger of the Unknown God. So will I seek my Lord, and then in the temple he shall ‘‘come’’ unto me. Thus the vast mysterious temple of the immeasurable Karnak and the steadfast procession of the little hours alike witness of God to the mind of the true artist. And when Seti died, there was joy in heaven and the spirits of heaven arose and went forth to meet him. And he said, ‘‘Come,’’ Lord. And the Lord said, Here, my child. And God said, His temple shall stand forever and that image of Good and Evil shall not be effaced, for my servant has read me aright and the Unintelligible has become intelligible to him. And Seti returned from heaven to his own temple of Karnak and he saw his own name forgotten, so that one man read it one way and one man another, but his idea was still living. Of all the temples in the land of Thebes his alone showed forth to the world, clear as on the day which first saw them sculptured, the thoughts which had inspired him and which shall still inspire man. And he said, It is well, Lord. And he saw a silent and a melancholy northern race arise and they visited his own loved land of the south, and they said, We have suffered much Evil, yet a thought comfor ts us: it will pass away; this is but a world of trial, therefore we can endure. And he said, I have suffered much Evil, but a thought inspires me—it will not pass away, it bestoweth life. This world is eternal and giveth eternal life, therefore we need no comfor t, for evil is but another name for good. And the spirit of the great Ramesses was sent upon earth, purified by intercourse with his father. He came, the warrior and the devout philosopher; and he delivered his nation from her enemies, and he said, ‘‘It is the Lord.’’ And he said, We know the Lord but by his works, the Great First Cause by its effects alone. Now the first of its effects is harmony, therefore will I build a temple unto Harmony, unto Eros, for wherever the Lord is there is Harmony, which is grace or strength. And my temple shall have in it the sanctuary for the Intellect and the sanctuary for Religion and the sanctuary for Justice and the sanctuary for Nature, for the Lord’s grace is in all his works. Ethically, it is Concord, the harmony of the Intellect and the Will; physically, it is Beauty or Order, the harmony of the active Intelligence and Matter; morally, it is Eros or Love, the harmony of Intellect and Feeling; intellectually, it is Rea-

Letters and Diaries from Egypt / 475

son or Heavenly Science, the harmony of Power and Light. These are but forms of the same, and in my temple there shall be a place for all. And he built him a library for the learned and a temple for the devout and a hall of justice for the people and a tower to survey the world above and the world below, by night and by day, for he said, All the faculties of man must be cultivated in Harmony. And he said, The Complete, the Perfect shall be the Genius of my temple and the spirit of my mind, because Perfection, or the harmony of all things, is the characteristic of God who doeth no exaggerated nor imperfect thing. My temple shall not be awful in size nor stupendous in art, but it shall be finished in all its parts. And he placed in the library the sacred books and in the Hall of Justice he placed statues of the Thirty Judges, without hands and with eyes cast down, and an image of Truth about their necks, because, he said, the judge should receive nothing, neither be guided by affection in his judgments, but his eyes should be intent on Truth alone. And he caused himself to be represented as conducted by the spirit of ‘‘Completion’’ into the presence of God. And he said, My temple shall not take up the space in which man can cultivate the fruits of the earth. Not so is the Lord’s will, that would be destroying the harmony which he has created. I will build him a house on the edge of the desert before the tombs, so shall it join the two regions of life and death. And the winds of heaven shall blow around it and it shall stand upon a hill, so that it cannot be hid. And he represented with himself his wife and his daughter and his mother; because, he said, that we may be together in the temple of the Lord. And he said, ‘‘It is accomplished.’’ And in two and thirty centuries he returned upon the earth and the Lord was pleased with his temple and with his servant’s offering, and he said, Thy temple shall stand, my son, and thy recollection shall not be effaced. Though thy own statue shall be overthrown, and the features thereof be disfigured and destroyed, yet shall the devotion with which thou hast worshipped the Perfect Goodness remain and its influence shall not be wiped away from the earth. And the loving Nefertari and her hero are still seen there side by side, worshipping the Perfect. And there was an interval in Egypt: her power declined, her kingdom was given to strangers, her people to anarchy. Her arts of peace and of war were forgotten; disorder reigned where once was concord.

476 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Then the third Ramesses came upon earth and he restored power to Egypt, and he extended the terror of his arm over all the earth, farther even than his great forefather had done. And he said, The earth is mine and the fulness thereof.565 Now will we dedicate ourselves to her pleasures and her glories, and whatsoever our eyes desire will we not keep from them. But the people believe in a God, in a higher than me. Therefore, as Ruler in the name of the Most High, shall I have more glor y in their eyes. Therefore will I consecrate my coronation on the walls of a temple to the greatest of the gods, for He only is worthy to be my guardian deity. I will emblazon my victories on its stones and they shall bear the record of the splendour of my power and the greatness of my name. And we will eat and drink and withhold not our hearts from any joy in the precincts of the Holy Place, and I will tread upon the necks of the ‘‘red-bristled barbarians,’’ and I will say that He has put them under my feet.566 And all that he said, even so he did, and sons and daughters were born unto him, and he said, I have established my kingdom forever. But from that hour there was no more prosperity in Egypt (though, when the stranger saw her luxurious he called her prosperous) and the sceptre passed away from the hands of Thebes, and of all the sons of Ramesses there was none to support the glory of his name. And religion, from being inspired, became laboured and that which was artificial was called art and pomp was called power, till the throne was transferred to another land and there were no more Ramesses. And the third Ramesses has not yet returned upon earth, though one and thirty centuries have been fulfilled, for he is wandering in wear y ways. He must purify himself from the lust of the flesh in the form of a swine, from the lust of the eyes in the form of a peacock, and from the pride of life in the form of a stag.567 Through forms of the lowest animals must he pass, a loathsome pilgrimage. And when at last he revisits Thebes (not his beloved Thebes, except as ministering to his glory), he will find his temple hewn in pieces to serve another religion: not a trace of his sacred place remaining, nought but the record of his pride and the memorial of his low ambition. 565 A paraphrase of Ps 24:1. 566 An allusion to 1 Cor 15:25. 567 An allusion to 1 John 2:16.

List of Emendations

T

he left column shows the standard method of spelling adopted in this edition; the right column, the various spellings encountered in Nightingale’s letters.

Abu Girgeh Abu Simbel Abu Sir Abufeda Agrigentum Akhmim Amenophis Ammenemes Amosis Amun Anukis Assasif Aswan Asyut Atfih Atum Balyana Beit el-Wali Beni Hasan Beni Suef Boulaq cadi Cairo caliph dahabieh

Aboo Girgeh Ipsamboul, Aboo Simbel Ypsamboul, Aboo Simbil Abousir, Aboush Aboofeyda Agrigenti Ekhmim Amenoph, Amunoph Amenembe Amasis Amen Anouke Assaseef Assouan, Asouan Osyoot Atfeh Atmoo Baliane Beil el Walee Beni Hassan Benisouef Boulak, Boolak kadee El Kahireh, El Kahirch kaliph, khaleefeh, kahliph dahabeeh

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478 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Dahshur Dakka Dar fur Deir el-Bahri Edfu Elephantine Ergamenes Esna Ezbekeeyeh Fayium Fustat Ger f Hossein Giza Hagar Silsilis = Gebel el-Silsila Har un al-Rashid Hassan Effendi Hathor Hor-Pre Kalabsha Khnum Khonsu Luxor Ma’at Mahmoudieh Mameluke Marettimo Marsamxett Medinet Habu Merneptah Michelangelo Minya Montu Muhammad Muhammadanism Muhammad Ali Mullah Muslim Nezlah Hanum Osirides Pacha

Dashoor, Dashus Dakkeh Dar foor Dayr el Bahree Edfoo Elephantina Ergamun Esne Ezbekeyeh Faioum Fostat Ger f Hossayn Gizeh Hadjar Silsileh Haroun El Rasheed Hassan Effendee Athor Horpire, Harpara Kalabsheh Neph Khonso El Uxor Thmei Mahmondiet Mamluk, Memlook Marittimo Marsa Mushet Medina Tabou, Medeenet Haboo MeKhnumthah Michael Angelo Mynieh, Minieh Mondoo Mahommed, Mohammed, Mahomet Mahomedanism, Mahometanism Mehemet Ali, Mehmet Ali Mola Mahomedan, Mahometan, Mussulman Nuzli Hanem Osiridae Pasha

List of Emendations / 479

Philae Poimandres Ptah Qena Qur’an Qurna Ramesses Ramesseum Rhoda Samalut Saqqara Satis Scarab Sesostris Seti Sheikh Sheikh Abd el-Qurna Sheshonq Sobek sphinxes St-Vincent-de-Paul Trismegistos

Philoe Pimander Phthah Keneh, Kenneh Koran Koorna, Koorneh Ramses, Rameses Rameseum Roda Samaloot Sakkara, Sakhara Sate Scarabaeus Sesotris, Sesortosis Sethos Sheekh, Sheykh Shekh Abd el Koorna Shishak Sabak, Savak, Sokh, Sebek, Suchos sphynxes S. Vincent de Paule Trismegistus

Brief Chronology of Ancient Egypt and Some Important Kings and Pharaohs Pre-dynastic period Thinite Period Dynasty I-II Old Kingdom Dynasty III-VI

4500-3150 bce 3150-2700 Narmar-Menes 2700-2190 Djoser, Cheops, Mycerinus, Nitocris 2200-2040

First Intermediate Period Dynasty VII-XI Middle Kingdom 2040-1674 Dynasty XI-XIV Second Intermediate Period 1674-1553 Dynasty XIV-XVII New Kingdom 1552-1069 Dynasty XVIII-XX

Third Intermediate Period Dynasty XXI-XXIII Late Period Dynasty XXIV-XXVI First Persian Period Dynasty XXVII Last Egyptian Period Dynasty XXVIII-XXX Second Persian Period Greco-Roman Period Macedonian Dynasty Ptolemaic Period Roman Period

Tuthmosis I, Amenophis III, Akhenaten, Seti I, Ramesses II

1069-702 Shoshenq I-IV, Osorkon I 747-525 Amasis II, Shabaka 525-404 404-343 343-332 332 bce-ce 395 332-304 Alexander the Great 304-30 Cleopatra VII Philopator 30 bce-ce 395 480 /

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions

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Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions edited by Lynn McDonald

T

his brief section is only one of several places where material on non-Christian, Eastern religions will be presented. Here the material consists chiefly of Nightingale’s letters and notes to her friend, the distinguished Orientalist, Julius Mohl. Unfortunately, only a small number of these letters is now available, as Nightingale’s cousin, Rosalind Nash, burned many of them as being ‘‘repetitive.’’ The material is given in chronological order, beginning with an odd note to Nightingale’s friend and former suitor, Richard Monckton Milnes, apparently from a letter she wrote him before the Crimean War, comparing various Christian groups and Eastern religions.

Source: From a letter to Richard Monckton Milnes, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 8994/9

[Paris] 2 March [1853] The contemplative orders, which they have founded, have always failed, gradually diminished and died because they were not in their proper soil. You must go to Muhammadanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis and Fakirs, to pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism. See how Fénelon was slighted and fell to the ground in the Catholic Church. He was essentially a mystic. He (and others such) have taken root much more in evangelical Germany. (As far as the Protestants have had any religion at all, they have generally been mystics.) See too the Carmelite order, which has always been composed essentially and only of great ladies (its foundress, St Teresa, was a great lady), of Mme de Longueville,1 Mme de La Vallière,2 Mme 1 Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, duchesse de Longueville (1619-79), sister of the great Condé; involved in the political turmoil of the century, she withdrew to a Carmelite house at the death of her husband (1663). 2 Louise de la Baume Le Blanc, duchesse de La Vallière (1644-1710), favourite of Louis XIV; she became a Carmelite nun in 1674.

/ 483

484 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Louise de France3 (see too the list of the prieures in Cousin’s Mme de Longueville 4) and is now almost extinct, the number even restricted and fallen away, as all institutions which have their run among the great and never take root in the body of a nation or religion must always do. The foreign elements from the East, which have been really incorporated, and have tinged the whole of Catholicism with their colour, have been Manicheism5 and fetishism. You trace their influences here at every step, and as Protestantism is but a mummied Catholicism (excepting perhaps in Germany), which leaves the principles just as they were, and only cuts off what seems to it the extreme of absurdity, thereby showing the principle still more absurdly (as a principle not pursued to its farthest point must always be, because it is bleeding at its mutilated extremities). So—even in Protestantism—Manicheism and fetishism turn up, though not so much as here. Here it is incredible. I believe there are only some few tribes in Australia which have displayed the character of fetishism to the degree to which European Christianity has done so. There is now a society in Rome which disposes of the funds left by some ragamuffin, a Borgia, I believe, to decree crowns to the vir gins who have done best service. It is evident that here the virgins are not different representations of one Spirit, but are different fetishes in themselves. Last week arrived two crowns of enormous value (I think the Virgin’s was 60,000 francs) for the Virgin and Child of St Severin here, who were supposed to have done special good service in sending Oudinot to Rome and dispossessing Mazzini. And there people talk of the religion of the nineteenth century. A sovereign of Spain made a certain Virgin and Child in South America field marshal and colonel in the Spanish Service and they wear the hats of Spanish marshal and colonel respectively. We laugh at this, but the Englishwoman believes, when she puts on her best clothes and cleans up her house on Sunday, that she has done good service to her fetish, Sunday. That it is better to be clean than dirty, to have whole clothes than 3 Madame Louise de France (1737-87), Carmelite nun, daughter of Louis XV. 4 Victor Cousin, La jeunesse de Madame de Longueville and Madame de Longueville pendant la Fronde 1651-53. 5 The movement called Manicheism was initiated by Manes, or Mani (c216-76), who believed in a primeval conflict between light and darkness.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 485

ragged ones, all, I believe, except the Manichees and Diogenes,6 agree. That it is better to put a crown upon the Virgin’s head than upon one’s own, all, I believe, will agree too. But that does not alter the question. The fundamental idea of the relation which God bears to the world, whatever this has been in the mind of the founder of the religion, determines the whole religion. It permeates, governs and percolates through ever y remotest branch and usage of the religion, just as a mineral at the root of a tree will turn ever y drop of sap in that tree to the colour which that substance is made to produce. Salt, it is said, makes the hydrangea blue and Manicheism, which has so deeply penetrated Christianity, has coloured its spirit and observances to the remotest tittle. Manicheism is a cross of Zoroastrianism and Christianity, of the Persian and the Semitic. Wherever the contest of two principles has been admitted, it has dragged the sect into all sorts of inconsistencies. Manes, I believe, was the first Christian who admitted that the world was made by the Demiurge, and him an evil Spirit, and set him up in opposition to God. Hence our devil and all our absurdities, for it follows that entire indifference, if not aversion to matter, is the highest virtue. And that God has a bad time of it and does not often come off omnipotent nor anything like it. Zoroaster who, I believe, was the original of the idea, was not half so bad. It is true Ahriman made the world and all things in it, but Ormazd was to get the better at the end of 20,000 years, very much like the Revelations. All the mortifications which have poisoned Christianity come from Manicheism. There appears to me no trace of it in Christ, though a great deal in St Paul. The Gnostics,7 the Ophites8 and 6 Diogenes (400-325 bce), cynic Greek philosopher. 7 Gnostic/Gnosticism refer to certain spiritual orientations of Jewish, Greek or Christian groups encountered in the first through fourth centuries ce. Those groups claimed to have received, through revelation, a secret ‘‘knowledge’’ (gnosis) of God, of divine mysteries, of the origin and destiny of human beings, that helped the ‘‘elect’’ return to their original home. Gnosticism was based on a distinctive dualism (between the demiurge and the tr ue God, matter and spirit, this world and the world above) prone to discredit the body and our earthly existence. It led some to extreme renunciation, others to utter moral licentiousness. The study of Gnosticism has been revived by the discovery of a Coptic library in Nag Hammadi, Upper Egypt, in 1945; most of its thirteen codices express gnostic beliefs. 8 ‘‘Ophites’’ designates a gnostic sect which derived its name from the special ’´φις) because of its role in having Adam and place given to the ‘‘serpent’’ (ο Eve eat of the tree of knowledge.

486 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions the Nicolaitans,9 who were all Manichees, are formally condemned by the early Christians in Revelations, though the one who wrote Revelations is, at least, strongly tinctured by it. Let us hope the one who wrote Revelations was mad. The degree to which mortification is carried now and the reaction against it (for, after all, it is only the exaggeration of a natural principle) appear to me quite frightful, the reaction in the luxury of the age among seculars, the personal dirt and self-negligence of the religious bodies. So fetishism appears to me never to have been carried to such an extent as now. Even the Greeks never believed that one statue had more power or more virtue than another, nor one day more value than another. It is monstrous and this nineteenth century calls itself civilized. There never will be any religion till the relation between God and the world is rightly established, till we have first discovered (which we never have done as yet), and then logically worked out to its practical consequences, the connection which a perfect Being would bear to the world he has made, till we have divested Him of all the imperfect and even weak qualities with which we have invested Him. Wherever we have admitted two principles, see what work we have made of it. It is the eternal contest between common sense and conscience against the logical carrying out of the wrong principle. Ever since the time of Zoroaster and all through the history of Christianity, the history of religion has been merely the struggle of sects to determine how much power the bad principle had and how much the good. The good one was omnipotent, was not omnipotent, both at once; the bad one sometimes was omnipotent, oftener than otherwise, though they said he was not. Milton is merely the poetical rendering of the highest form of this strange illogical idea. Some sects made the bad go so far, some so far, some made it eternal. It is impossible when you once admit it that it should not be like two cats pulling at a rope; one gets possession of so much of rope. Then the other gets most rope and so on. Again, in the third centur y of Christianity, began the contest of the two principles of the church and the will, and all Christian churches, except the Socinian,10 have been but modifications of this contest. If 9 Nicolaitans were thought to be members of a gnostic sect whose existence was postulated on the basis of a mention in Rev 2:6 and 14f. 10 The followers of a theological writer, Fausto Paolo Sozzini (1539-1604), whose work denied the divinity of Jesus.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 487

half a dozen expressions were blotted out of the New Testament, or rather out of St Paul ( Jewish expressions about Christ being a sacrifice), none of this would have arisen. But those expressions have sufficed to put it into the church’s head (a very natural temptation) to administer the blood of Christ and by its sacraments. From the moment it is admitted that salvation means anything but a will in a right state, from the moment we leave the principle that mankind is to create mankind, that ourselves are to be the instrument of our own per fection by the will of God (God giving Himself and His Laws) and have recourse to the grace of God and the blood of Christ, sacramental grace and the church follow, of course, because something must apply the blood of Christ. Then follows a perpetual rebellion of conscience and common sense and Christianity becomes nothing but a series of sects, to decide how much will is to do and how much grace and the church are to do, for mankind rebels at once against the preposterous idea that he is to do nothing and that he has no free will. As fas as I know, Jansenism11 and Socinianism have been the only strictly logical sects. Jansenism said, as did Calvinism, ‘‘there is no free will, man has nothing to do with it’’ and predestination follows of course (the inscrutable intention of God from the beginning of the world to bestow free grace upon this fish whom he fishes up out of the kettle and not upon that as the Thirty-Nine Articles12 put it) and that there are ‘‘babes burning in hell a span long’’ follows necessarily. So there are [damned babes] in other churches, but from want of baptism. The Jansenist did not think about baptism. ‘‘I am a stick and a stone’’ is one of the clauses at this day of the subscription to the Protestant Magdeburg Confession.13 The Puritans follow, of course. The Socinians say that free will does everything. In one sense this is not true. Still they are right in another sense. The Jansenists were too logical for the common sense of the Catholic Church, which has always rated good works very high indeed, and has put free will practically higher than grace, so she bethought 11 A movement, condemned as heretical by the pope, named after Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585-1638), noted for its theological pessimism and determinism. The members of Port-Royal were Jansenists. 12 The Thirty-Nine Articles are a set of doctrinal statements accepted by the Church of England in the sixteenth century. 13 One of the first theological statements of Protestant resistance to superior magistrates, written in 1550.

488 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions herself of putting Saint-Cyran into [the prison of] Vincennes, by way of convincing that good man’s understanding. But hugely vague, indefinite and contradictory as religionists have always been (oh! what should we say if the ‘‘Institut’’ or the College of Surgeons had done its work as the ‘‘bishops and curates’’ have done theirs), there is nothing vaguer nor more undefined than how much grace is to do and how much good works are to do, or whether good works are to do nothing, as the Church of England (low) says, or sacramental grace is to do everything, as the Church of England (high) says. It is like Mrs Hominy.14 ‘‘But what we are or how we are or if at all we are,’’ etc. The sincerity of great bodies, M Mohl says, is undoubted, because hypocrisy never spreads and governs. Even the Jesuits are sincere; they believe that intelligence is to govern the world, and that they are the representatives of intelligence, as indeed they once were (and it is evident that they had the best of it against poor Port-Royal). They support the pope, because in their eyes he represents the spiritual principle. We must come at last to having a spiritual governor, instead of a political one, because God, the great Governor, has made the spiritual the great principle, of which the political is only a branch. Various attempts have been made: the pope, the superiors of religious communities; the King of England, as head of the Church of England; Fliedner, as head of a spiritual community. They have all wrecked themselves, because they did not understand the nature of God. Muhammadanism is almost exactly the Jewish religion. Muhammad took more from the Jews, of whom Arabia was then full, than from any other. If we want to know what the Jewish religion was, we have but to look at the Muslim, except that the mystic principle is far more deeply grafted upon the Muslim. Almost every religion we can trace to its source: the Essenes15 were a cross of the Jew and the Pythagorean. Philo16 and the Alexandrian Jews, from whom the Christians have borrowed so largely, were a cross of Sabeism,17 Platonism and Jewdom. 14 A literar y celebrity in Charles Dickens, Mar tin Chuzzlewit. 15 A Jewish sect, second century bce, better known today thanks to a recent find (see p 216 above). 16 Philo (c20 bce-c70 ce), Jewish exegetical writer and philosophical mystic. 17 The Sabeans (or Sabians) are identical with the Mandeans of the second centur y ce, a baptist sect that has survived to the present day in Iraq and Iran.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 489

The mortification of the Sufi18 and the Fakir19 and the Dervish20 was on a far more logical principle than the mortification of the Roman Catholic or Puritan devotee, because they were simply conjuring the anger of a passionate old Father. The pantheistic saint was not thinking of this, he was simply attaining the state of perfect happiness, which was to be, not given to him, but was itself indifference to the world, approach to, or absorption in God by contemplation. The spinning Der vish turns his back successively on everything earthly; the Persian Sufi is raised above law by his ecstasies and may even get drunk. The Hindu Fakir may open his mouth to take food, if anybody drops it in, but must be perfectly indifferent to it; he must be simply a receiver from heaven, be near God in the state of contemplation, insensible to earth. Pantheism, which represents the world as an exile, necessitates this. Plato, the highest of all pantheists, did this, represented matter as bad, the earth as a place of banishment. But he did not take the gloomy side of his own doctrine. His successors did. Source: Letter, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 8994/27

[Paris] 8 June [1853]

My dear people I am going today to my place, Maison de la Providence, 5 rue Oudinot, but my letters will be directed here [the Mohls’ place] please. Françoise, the bonne [maid] here, is to come every day to see me, as it is close by . . . . The Soeur Supérieure of my place is a silent, staid, respectable old body, not at all like a Frenchwoman, but more like a lord chancellor. The state of religion appears to me more and more curious every year. The blood of Europe is Hindu, therefore pantheistic; the belief of Europe is Semitic, coming from the Hebrew, therefore monotheistic, hence a perpetual oscillation, hence the mobility of the European mind. They have a belief grafted on them of a different blood from their own and are uneasy under it. The Hindu pantheism, which represents man in a state of exile, of expiation not repentance, of having, not offended God (who cannot 18 The Sufi is a member of a Muslim mystic sect, dating from the eighth century and developed mainly in Persia; some Sufis exhibit pantheistic tendencies. 19 The Fakir is a Hindu or Muslim ascetic, usually performing feats of magic or endurance. 20 A Der vish is a member of a Muslim fraternity; some achieve collective ecstasy through whirling dances and the chanting of religious formulas.

490 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions be angry or surprised with that which He has made) which is doing as He intended it to do, but of having to work his own way up to perfection by gradually overcoming the flesh till he is reabsorbed into God. This, the logical belief mixed with many mythological superstitions inherent in our blood, is perpetually at war with that other monotheistic belief derived from the Hebrew and the Arab, which represents God as a capricious personal being, with passions and compassions, who punished Adam not with sin but with misery. Original sin is an invention of St Augustine’s, as indeed the Trinity is the exegesis of the quarrels of the church, far more than a growth from the East. The Hindu pantheism works its world by laws of nature, which are so because the nature of God is so, not by the wills or decrees or interference of God, who has to be propitiated and sometimes interferes and sometimes not. All that is the growth of the Semitic race, which formed God after its own image, and whose opening words are, He formed man in His own image,21 testifying that God and man are alike in their idea. The Vedas are the deification of the laws of nature as indeed much of the Egyptian mythology is. But to this day there are Semitic tribes who bury fatted men as human atonements. Sacrifice, atonement, propitiation, are the idea of the Semitic, not of the Hindu, who is to work his way up by perpetual refining of the material, casting away the world, till, when he is in a perfect state of contemplation, unable even to think, unconscious of the world and of his nails growing through his flesh, eating what is put into his mouth, but ignorant of hunger, having overcome the world, he is ready to be reabsorbed into the Divine. But many states must be gone through first. The Catholic idea of mortification springs direct from the Hindu; the Protestant idea of blood, the sacrifice of blood, comes from the Semitic. Many superstitions, even Semitic ones, have defiled the original logical idea of the Hindu. Again, Zoroaster took Ahriman, the Spirit of Evil, from his predecessors. Where there is no free will, the devil must always be exalted even to omnipotence, to account for evil and Hebrews, who were long without any devil, took theirs from Zoroaster and the East, and engrafted him upon their own system. Zoroaster had a perpetual combat going on between the divine and the devil, like Milton. The Hindus are now divided, like us, between the destructives and the conservatives, the Vishnuites and the Sivaites (Brahma like our God is gone to sleep for some thousand years). The 21 Gen 1:26-27.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 491

incarnation is strictly a Hindu idea: Vishnu, the Incarnated Krishna, is the conservative power, worshipped by one section, Siva, or destruction, by the other. So M Mohl tells me and I was struck by the likeness. The fact that the Semitic ideas were preached in Europe and the purity with which they came to us, while the Hindu ideas were never preached here, seems to account for the fact of our having received this, to us unanalogous religion. The Stoics in Greece were the nearest representation of a perfect pantheism which have ever existed— the idea of duty supreme—God not a personal capricious being. The Christians, by the perpetual repetition of the words ‘‘the son of God’’ and by reading nothing else, came to believe in an Incarnation. The God of pantheism was not a God to be loved, not a moral God: he was more the ideal of perfect happiness, into which man was to be merged, but man might transgress moral laws, might pass over the bounds of earth, when in a ‘‘per fect state of contemplation.’’ The Semite God was a God to be loved, but then who could love Him? Zoroaster is full of angels and devils, all the powers of nature turned into spirits; the Vedas are the simplest idea of the powers of nature. English belief is a curious compound of the two. I do not think we can too much ask the ‘‘comment’’ and the ‘‘pourquoi,’’ because, if I do not know what the character of God is, how can I have any sentiment towards Him? Religionists, even Christ, have too much set down ‘‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,’’ without giving us a Being whom we could love. The being whom St Teresa loved was not a God but a devil and the Christian’s God is too often one (vide Calvin’s and the bishop of Exeter’s22) whom it is impossible not to hate, if he existed, which he does not. I had rather hear the clear (though ‘‘still small’’) voice23 than the ‘‘whispers of the Eternal mind,’’ and the ‘‘myster y of things’’ appears to me a curious subject of ‘‘inspiration,’’ believing, as I do, that God’s express purpose, in creating us, is that we should learn all He knows, that all that is His is ours, and that for us He keeps no myster y, i.e., not eternally.

22 H. Philpotts in 1847 refused to appoint a priest, G.C. Gorham, to a parish on grounds of his unorthodox beliefs, sparking a legal appeal, controversy and the exit of notable members of the church to Roman Catholicism. 23 An allusion to 1 Kings 19:12-13.

492 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: From a letter to Parthenope Nightingale, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 8994/30

Paris 8 July [1853] Good kind Mr M[ohl] talks with me forever about the East and the West. But I suspect we differ widely in our conclusions as to the future of religion in the world and the prospect of a perfect religion and the likeliness of improvement in the race. . . . There cannot be a doubt, I believe, that the Jews knew nothing of a future state till they returned from the captivity. All their knowledge of that kind they derived from the Assyrians and Persians. Indeed the orthodox Jew, the Sadducee, we are expressly told, never believed in a future world. It is self-evident from Job, from the Psalms, from Moses’ teaching of temporal punishments, that they had no belief in eternity. From Persia they derived their belief in reward and punishment and in eternal life. The Pharisee was a cross between the Persian and the Jew. The Essene, the third sect, was a cross of Pythagorean and Jew. The Jews were an Arab tribe, who believed in many gods, hated the others, and worshipped their own. The Arab Muhammadanism to this day is as like their religion as possible, a little improvement upon it being a pure monotheism. Otherwise Muhammad’s exterminating God and the Jews’ are both creations of the Semitic mind as like as possible. The Arab too is not given to mysticism, notwithstanding his proximity to Persia and in all the Old Testament you can scarcely find a mystic word. By mysticism I mean the endeavour to establish a personal relation between God and the individual, by means of the high degree of sanctity of the individual, by means of contemplation, the highest degree of which is absorption, and this the Spanish Carmelite, the Persian Sufi, the Calvinist Puritan, the Hindu Fakir have all endeavoured more or less wisely to effect. But the Buddhist books are infinitely more moral, as far as I can see. A Roman Catholic book impresses upon you as morality to go to mass and confession, a Protestant book to read the scriptures, believe in the atonement, observe Sunday, take the Lord’s Supper and say your prayers. The Brahminical and Buddhist books all put morality in its highest point of view, higher than these observances, viz, man’s own effort higher than these means and appliances. Tholuck24 says that 24 August Tholuck (1799-1877), biblical scholar and theologian; he also wrote on mysticism.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 493

Persian Sufism has produced a higher degree of personal intercourse with God than Christianity. Persian Sufism and Persia altogether are now in a state of decline, are, like this country, a barbarous nation. For barbarism is when the state absorbs all individual action, when there can be nothing au dehors of the state, and the truest marks of barbarism are over refinement, over dress, luxury in all things, great refinement of language, care and attention to words and form. All the human mind overflowing in this way. These marks of decadence exist here. (A barbarian is not a savage, who has no state, but lives independent as he can.) Source: Unsigned letter, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 8994/100

1 Upper Harley St. 21 April 1854

My dear [Parthenope Nightingale] It is certainly incorrect to say that Hermes was the author of the idea of the Trinity. It appears to have sprung up in all corners of the earth, the trio of the father, the mother and the child being obviously the origin of it in all metaphysical countries and that origin being as wide as the earth, of course. Many, however, differ from M Mohl, and believe Egyptian civilization to have been the oldest.25 Be that as it may, Hermes Trismegistos was a very apocr yphal personage, though Dakka is dedicated to him. I have no books here of reference and cannot recall all things clearly to memory. Champollion, I think, believes most about him. And Hermes is greatly quoted by Iamblichus,26 if I mistake not, he is said to be the author of some of the sacred books. I believe in the human existence of Hermes, of Osiris, of Christ and in their divine qualities, though I believe in the miraculous births and 25 See John A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs Gaskell #217, 27 October 1854: ‘‘The study of the truth as disguised in the myths and hieroglyphics of the Egyptian religion as the root of other religions took hold of her [Florence Nightingale] (you will see the exquisite beauty of her ideas on this head when you get her letters [from Egypt]). . . . They were correcting the proofs of her Egyptian letters when she was here, and had to refer to her about the myth about Thoth. . . . The latter volumes of Bunsen are the only books that she even looked into here. . . . The only thing she talked much about that I knew was suggested by ‘Bunsen, who stated something like this—that among the Japhetic races individuals had not so much influence as among the Shemetic. . . . ’ ’’ 26 Iamblichus (250-325), neo-Platonist, of the Syrian school, who incorporated Greek and Oriental gods into his system.

494 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions deaths and in the miracles of none. Indeed, if I did, it would destroy all my love and reverence. You most certainly alter the word ‘‘invented by Hermes’’ (of the Trinity) I believe him to have been an author, perhaps the oldest author, of it. But the idea exists where neither India nor Egypt have ever reached and is certainly coincident with the race itself. . . . Source: Excerpt from a note of Richard Monckton Milnes, Trinity College Archives, Cambridge University, Houghton 18/152(1)27

[1855-56] F.’s last letter says she looks ‘‘upon progress and civilization as at an end in the East. Muhammadanism, it is true, is extinct. Turkey has ceased to exist except as a Christian country. But the Greek fanaticism is essentially an aggressive fanaticism. And who can say what the next thirty years will see. To anyone who will live to see them I prophecy a greater change in the world than the last thousand years have brought. For the Russian fanaticism, as shown by the confiscations and banishments in Lithuania against the Protestants, as shown in Minsk against the Roman Catholics,28 is essentially aggressive, and of the worst kind of barbarism. Christianity has been more often propagated by the sword than by preaching. Perhaps we shall see it carried all over the East by a Russian Charlemagne. Alas poor ghost, the ghost of Christianity.’’ Source: Letter to Frances Nightingale, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 8996/21

5 March 1856 Dearest Mother I have never had time to tell you that your gold robe is a chapter of the Qur’an, the last I believe, repeated, plus these words: God be with you, God protect you, May you live long in happiness, Although you are in joy, remember the words of the Prophet. . . .

27 There is a draft or copy of a letter with very similar content to Jenny Lind 19 April 1856, written at the General Hospital, Balaclava, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 8996/49. 28 On the persecution of the Abbess of Minsk in Society and Politics and European Travels.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 495 Source: Undated note by A.H. Clough of a conversation of Nightingale with Sir John McNeill, Wellcome 7204/8

Persian literature, etc. More Persians can read, write and do arithmetic than is the case in any other nations. He found his grooms, etc., all could do so. They can generally repeat the famous passages from Hafez29 and Saadi.30 Modern Persian, even as used in the court, is full of Arabic. In making any public addresses I always made it a point to select the native Persian equivalents and was generally complemented by my learned friends. There is a great Persian dictionary which contains the full Persian vocabulary and is the authority for words being native Persian. Ferdosi31 is not so remote as Chaucer, more like the translation of the Bible. There is one famous poet who is only known by the extracts given in this dictionary. Hafez is full of obscenity and the sex of the objects of his passions is unfortunately not always female. This vice is ver y prevalent in Persia, almost as bad as in Russia (where they had to break up a corps called the - - Guarde, on account of its prevalence among the members of it). Yet the Qur’an denounces the furies of hell against all Sodomites [and] prevails among the Turks but not (he believes) with the Arabs. There is no objection to the use of translations from the Qur’an. The famous passages are taught in the original, with explanations and translations. Cohesion of the Persian empire, all being Shi’ites,32 any provinces which the Turks have ever taken have generally come back on account of the good will of the Shi’ite population. Sufis and their doctrine of emanation as a light is reflected in a hundred mirrors, any one of which may be removed or destroyed, without diminishing it. So we reflect the deity and perish without affecting his existence (the Old Man of the Mountain [is] a Sufi, personal attachment to a Sufi as the present representative of the deity). Ver y numerous, though considered heretics, many young men belong, and then leave. General scepticism of the upper classes—they are deists and laugh at the fables of Muhammad’s miracles. Omitus [Sir John MacNeill] spoke with admiration of Rumi, so-called because of his residence in Turkey, a mystic 29 30 31 32

Hafez (c1300-88 ce), Persian lyrical poet. Saadi (1213-92 ce), Persian poet. Ferdosi (c935-c1020 ce), considered the greatest Persian poet. Members of the Muslim branch that hold Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and sonin-law, to be the true successor of the prophet.

496 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions poet. . . . Spoke of the truth speaking of the Arabs, as instanced in a journey of his own to Baghdad. All the tribes east of Persia and north are per fidious, the ‘‘Turkos’’—the Afghans, more honourable. He had been very anxious when in Persia to send an emissary to Badakhshan, where he was told there was a king claiming descent from Alexander, who had a book which no one could read and which a Georgian had seen and said was so like Georgian he had thought he could read it, but found he could not—the Georgian alphabet is very like the Greek. But the Uzbeks broke in before his emissary could go and there was no longer any chance. Merchants to and from Kashmir now go round either by Afghanistan or to the east on the other side. Source: From a letter/draft/copy to Sir John McNeill, London Metropolitan Archives (Florence Nightingale Museum) H1/ST/NC3/SU145

15 April 1862 I hear from M Mohl that he has ‘‘got lately from Teheran an enormous folio, containing the last editions’’ (to the fables on Alexander the Great) ‘‘and they are strange enough and illustrated by lithographed vignettes, where Alexander pays court to an European princess, who is represented sitting in crinoline on a rococo canapé. He is a Muhammadan in this wonderful book.’’ Source: From a letter to W.E. Nightingale, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9000/71

25 October 1862 I have always thought the Hindu philosophers have done just what I would not do, viz., speculated about the nature, neglected the character, of God. I believe M Mohl would tell you that the Hindu metaphysics are the first in the world, their moral philosophy the last, or rather none at all. Brahmanism appears to me the most monstrous of all the despot priesthoods, with no God at all, Buddhism a beautiful social reform, but also without any idea of a perfect God. Editor: In working on the thorny issue of medical education for women Nightingale described herself as ‘‘ ‘trembling like a cloud driven by the wind,’ as the Veda says.’’33

33 Letter to Harry Verney [1867], Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9002/143.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 497 Source: From a letter/draft/copy to W.E. Nightingale, Add Mss 45790 ff352-55

4 October 1867 As for the pulpit, it is no use looking to them to preach. They have not even agreed on the first principles: what is love to God and love to mankind? Some preach a strange doctrine about saving the soul by the church, others by the atonement. ‘‘Il faut sauver l’âme par l’âme elle-même,’’ says Plutarch. M Mohl says that we are far behind Buddha, Confucius, etc. in real Christianity. Mr Jowett says that we are behind Marcus Antoninus, Plato, Xenophon and Isocrates. When I read that Plutarch denounces those who threatened eternal punishments beyond the grave, those who, when they were unfortunate, laid it not at their own door but at God’s—exactly what we do now—who said that it was God who, to avenge Himself, brought these afflictions upon men (exactly what we say now), those who ‘‘flattered’’ and ‘‘calumniated’’ God by turns, when, instead of doing our business for us, He maintains His general laws (exactly the way we ‘‘flatter’’ and ‘‘blaspheme’’ now). When I read these things I do indeed think that Plutarch, 1800 years ago, was wiser than we, and a better Christian. Source: Extract from an unidentified source, Add Mss 45845 f137

28 April 1869 Sixth century before Christ [was] born: Pythagoras [c568-c493 bce] Greece Zoroaster [c660-c583 bce] Persia Sakyamuni [sixth century bce] India Confucius [c552-479 bce] China The tremulous sensibility with which the venerable Siddhartha takes leave of his cousin Ananda, of the innumerable company of holy scholars x x and then crossing the Ganges seeks a vast forest and there enters into nirvana, can never be forgotten. The scene is instinct with rapture and elevation. (Wearily and heavily, with a jaded sense of baffled endeavour the father of Chinese philosophy lays him down to die, looking earthwards to the last.) Source: Letter fragment or note by Julius Mohl to Nightingale, Add Mss 43397 f332, Nightingale’s underlining indicated in bold

[1869] I have tried to find a manageable formula for my very simple idea about treating historically of the different religions, but have been

498 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions perpetually interrupted and find the thing difficult enough because it runs into details against my wish. You look at the absolute value and result of religion in the idea of a perfect God and tr y to see how far each approaches this ideal. But this must do for a historical exposition of religions, because they do not form a continuous development as a science does, which one can follow in a straight line. Religions arise from two, or perhaps three, fundamentally different ideas of the world of being, and perhaps none of them has carried out its own fundamental idea without a deviation, because they found on their road a difficulty which they got over by an inconsequence. Look at the Jews: evidently their God created a perfect world, but then came the difficulty of the too evident imperfection of it, and this they got over by the story of the apple and later by bor rowing the devil from the Persians, where he was indigenous and logical, because they recognized the co-existence of a brute matter, which the spirit was to conquer gradually. But it is no use trying to make myself intelligible in a few words. I will try to do it as soon as I have some quiet hours. I wish I had followed out my plan of writing a book on the Gnostics, because they had mixed up all the fundamental ideas of every religion, and so you can analyze them and as, in chemistry, separate the original elements. Source: Undated draft letter or note to Julius Mohl, Add Mss 43397 ff331, 333

I am rather scandalized at your liking Max Müller.34 Also: it makes me mad to see you translating ‘‘nir vana’’ annihilation, which is a quite immoral error. Is it true that our friend of the yellow book has written to Max Müller to say that the ‘‘Three Beedaghats’’ [?] (the Tripitaka) are to be printed in Pali35 for us to translate into Bur mese and English! Also: what is the exact meaning or derivation of the word in Pali or in Burmese which we render ‘‘religion’’? If the Buddhist religion has no God, the word is not, I suppose, derived from the same idea (of ‘‘tie’’ to God)? And what is the meaning of the word in Sanskrit? 34 Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900), philologist noted for his translation of Eastern religious classics, Sacred Books of the East, in fifty volumes, over thirty of which were on India. Nightingale disagreed with Max Müller on the Franco-Pr ussian war. 35 The language used for canonical books in Buddhism.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 499

Has religious teaching theoretically (of course good men are always better than their theories; this is a truer general statement than that we are never up to our principles), has religious teaching theoretically ever been much more than threatening and promising? Yet, if other education were limited to, or consisted chiefly of, promises and threats, what should we say to it? He is now more like a military sovereign (the secretar y of state for war). Like any other holder of power [he] likes all manner of protection, especially from the natural consequences of his own acts.

Source: Letter/draft/copy, Add Mss 46385 ff15-16

Lea Hurst Matlock 13 September 1871 Dear M Mohl Your letters are so rich they are pasture for a month, which is more time than you let pass between one and another, though even that is more than I deserve. Would you send me the title of that book of M Obry36 on ‘‘nirvana,’’ unless it is something enormous or only published by some Académie, that I may order it? It is more for Mr Jowett than myself. I have violent moral opinions about ‘‘nir vana.’’ I am ver y sorry to hear you say that you are so ‘‘fatigued of the world and its life’’ (that is just my feeling, but I am sorry to hear you say it). I am so fatigued of the world and its life that not only do I ‘‘think with uneasiness of the necessity of beginning again,’’ but have only got through the last ten years of life by considering (as the doctors told me) that I had not six months to live. But I don’t think Buddha was ‘‘psychologically’’ the man to have yielded to this feeling, so as to put it into his doctrine. Now please do accomplish your promise (in the little sheet) and write your ‘‘idea about treating historically of the different religions.’’ n.b. (this is only a note): ‘‘Look at the Jews,’’ you say, ‘‘evidently their 36 Jean-Baptiste François Obry (1793-1871), author of Du nirvana bouddhique, en réponse à M Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire and of Du nirvana indien: ou de l’affranchissement de l’âme après la mort selon les Brâhmanes et les Bouddhistes.

500 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions God created a perfect world.’’ But did He? Is not ‘‘per fect’’ a making complete through struggle or at least work involving evil, a going through, going through what? Effort and mistake and suffering, as well as good and enjoyment. Is not this the only true definition of ‘‘perfect’’? And is it not better answered to, really, by Eve’s stor y than by the Creation and Eden story? ‘‘Borrowing the devil from the Persians where he was indigenous and logical’’ (I am quoting still from the same great commentator’s letter). Yes, but would it not be possible because it is true, that one writing now (not ‘‘historically’’) upon ‘‘religions’’ might show the real ‘‘logic’’ of all these notions about the devil, viz., that he, the devil, is not really evil, in the sense of Absolute Evil, but that he is the only way to Perfection (the ‘‘ser vant of God’’) or rather an absolute essential of the way to Perfection, without which Per fection could not be, in that ‘‘per fect’’ is the working through or the working out good. It is not innocence. We acknowledge this practically every day of our lives. For how can patience or courage or any form of heroism be, unless there are trials to overcome, difficulties to exercise it? These are the devil. But the devil is a virtueworking devil for all that, though we are often fatigued of him. (And he has been a dreadful devil to me.) Now, you must write your book about the Gnostics. I will have that book about the Gnostics, do you mind? I am rather glad that you and Mme Mohl are to be settled again together at Paris immediately (I hope she is at this moment at 35 South St. and will be with you tomorrow.) I am sure it is the best thing for body and spirit (of both). ever yours gratefully old Flo Source: From a letter to M Mohl, Add Mss 46385 f17

23 October 1871 I am exceedingly furious that you never wrote to me that letter you promised me on 30 August about religions, your ‘‘idea’’ as to religions (1) being all based on two or three simple, fundamental principles; (2) not being logical; (3) and not at all to be referred, as I do, to showing how near they come to the ideal of a ‘‘per fect’’ God. Also you must, you shall, you ought to write your book upon the Gnostics, whose ‘‘idea’’ was, you say, a sort of quintessence of the ideas of all the other religions. If you don’t, I will pursue you with a mortal and

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 501

undying hatred,37 and come over to Paris, like a Wahhabi,38 to do execution upon you. . . . What is ‘‘nirvana’’? Have you settled it? yours ever and always old Flo Source: From a letter to M Mohl, London Metropolitan Archives H1/ST/ NC1/73/5

19 December 1873 I do think that I am the most unfortunate Tantalus39 in your hands I ever fell across. Nay, he was in heaven compared to me. What! you wrote to me on the very subject of all others I care most about, viz., the ‘‘principle of morals’’ and your ‘‘speculations’’ about it and on its ‘‘difference or agreement with the stories and others’’ and you did not send it me. ‘‘Fiend! thou torment’st me ere I come to hell.‘‘40 Send it me this minute or I will shut you up in a country house in paradise for 3000 years with three deans, two bishops and one archbishop. Some time ago, you said you would send me your theory about the Gnostics, as embracing most forms of religion. And you never did. Send it me this minute or your term of 3000 years shall be lengthened to 30,000 and three. I want nothing so much as your inspiration. If I have time and strength—but latterly I have been so broken up and broken down—nothing solaces me so much as to write upon the laws of the moral world, especially as exemplifying, if possible, the character of a perfect God, in bringing us to perfection through them in eternity. Quetelet, who is an old friend of mine, sent me his new Physique sociale and Anthropométrie.41 These especially interested me because, inasfar as the laws which register mankind’s crime and other social movements are laws. Of course our legislature and administration must be based upon them, instead of being just the reverse. Latterly I have been reading over again the Physique sociale with the view of 37 A paraphrase of Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, chap 38. 38 A follower of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92), Muslim reformer; Wahhabism prevails in present-day Saudi Arabia. 39 The mythical Tantalus (from which ‘‘tantalize’’), son of Zeus and an Oceanid, punished for giving the nectar of the gods to people, made to stand chin-deep in water with fruit just out of reach, the water receding whenever he tried to drink. 40 Shakespeare, King Richard II Act 4, scene 1. 41 See Society and Politics.

502 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions writing as above. But of course there are weeks and months that I cannot write. Then it all has to be begun over again. Now, give me a fillip, do. 30 December 1873 All my misfortunes always culminate each year at Christmas. It’s a way they have. So this letter has remained unfinished many days. But it shall go all the more and see what it can get out of you. I am not like you, because I have to ask a favour. You have to grant one. And the more the letter won’t go: the more I say, it shall. ever yours F.N. Source: From a letter to Harry Verney, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9007/47

7 July 1876 I do hope that whatever England does will only be to prevent atrocities, not to drive Christians under Turks again.42 Source: From a letter probably to Parthenope Verney, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9007/66

10 January 1877 I have got M Mohl’s volumes 2 and 3 for you but have not sent them as you think the interest only ‘‘linguistic’’ and ‘‘antiquarian.’’ To me the interest overpowers everything I had anticipated as one of the most significant chapters of what he was always tending to: viz., the history of God, the history of civilization, or of the mental principle overcoming the material, soul-subduing matter, which he always said came from the East. Surely there is nothing in Homer to compare to it in interest. And although, like Homer, it is one of the six great epics of the world, yet even this is far below in importance the rank it takes in this history of God. Editor: When Fred Verney invited Nightingale to a ‘‘Buddhist conference’’ in 1884 she declared that there was ‘‘scarcely anything in this world that I should like better than to attend your Buddhist conference, so valuable and so important with its knowledge from the source.’’ She could not, for reasons of health, but asked for books 42 A reference to the Turks murdering rebellious (Christian) Bulgarians.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 503

from it for Samuel Shore Smith.43 She described this as ‘‘a curious taste in an idle boy, but his grandmother [Aunt Mai Smith] and aunt (à la mode de Bretagne) had it before him. Let us hope it will come to something real. The Blavatzky44 taint is, I trust, dropping off.’’45 Source: From a letter to Parthenope Verney, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9010/121

28 November 1885 Sir Harry said, looking at my kitten, ‘‘he has his life before him,’’ as if he, Sir Harry, had not. I feel, for him, he has his life before him, this the mere episode of an early morning hour. But, as Zoroaster takes care to remind us, one part of eternity is of as much importance as any other part, and no part can we have again; if we have not got its good out of it, that good is gone forever. But this life, as a part of eternity, is fully as interesting and important as what we generally call eternity. Source: From a letter to Parthenope Verney, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9011/65

9 November 1886 Have you seen a translation from the Mahabharata, called the Song Spiritual. It reminds me so of what M Mohl used to say. It is beautiful. Mr Jowett sent it me. I have been seeing Indians by the bushel. Source: From a letter to Margaret Verney, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9011/138

14 June 1887 She [Maude Verney is] going off with the children to unknown and solitar y regions in Scotland and he [Fred Verney is] on a grand tour of the utmost importance to treat with oriental regions, really to us almost unknown. We never come really nearer to Orientals. The Brahmin may be veneered over with Locke and Milton, but there is the Brahmin underneath still. And so it is, I take it, with Siamese and Japanese as with Hindus. These very people when they go back to their own countries leap back into all their old grooves. 43 Letter to Frederick Verney 27 April 1884, Add Mss 68883 f81. 44 Spiritualist Hélène Blavatzky (1831-91), founder of the Theosophical Society. 45 Letter to Maude Verney 16 May 1885, Add Mss 68883 f149.

504 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: Unsigned, incomplete letter, Collection of Hugh Small, copy Balliol College

10 South St. 5 December 1887

Dearest Aunt Mai [Mary Shore Smith] Always I like your bits, and I liked these you have been so good as to send so much. But most of all the bit about yourself. I wish I could send you bits (modern), as you wish, about the future life for each of us. All my bits are old saints’ bits. I think they are rare now, but for this reason: the philosophers, for example Mr Jowett, at least those that I know, lose all sense of immortal individuality in a kind of nirvana. It is very strange and arises, I think, from the constant confusion between metaphysics and theodicy, which a too great study of metaphysics and abstract terms, leading them to dispute terms at every step, brings on. (I long thought myself most impertinent to think this, much more to say it.) They also say that it turns us away from what we can do here, to be dwelling upon what we shall be able to do there. I believe you and I think just the reverse. In how many things is the Hindu, that is the Bengali, especially in the want of the strong, Western individuality and the Western anti-nirvanaism, irremediably Eastern, and not to be Westernized? I used to think. But now I think the Western philosophers are coming over to the Eastern. But I don’t agree with you that the devotional books are not full of the individual’s immortality. Do you remember Carlyle’s46 ‘‘run on better errands by and bye’’? Here is a phrase in MacDuff:47 ‘‘Remember what we are now will fix what we shall be.’’ We ‘‘are forming now for eternity, settling down and consolidating in the great mould which ultimately will determine, etc.’’ I do not go on, because it does not seem to admit enough of eternal progress. . . .

46 Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), essayist, historian. 47 Probably John Ross MacDuff (1818-95), a much-published devotional author.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 505 Sources: Typed copy of a letter, Add Mss 45808 ff83-85, torn copy at London Metropolitan Archives (Florence Nightingale Museum) H1/ST/NC5/3/36

10 South Street Park Lane, W. 21 May 1888

My dear Miss Munro I think so much of your Egyptian expedition. You must not, please, say, ‘‘I may fail, and then I shall come back in a year.’’ But screw your courage to the sticking point, and you’ll not fail. Would you like to have the scriptures in Arabic to take with you, for your own use, I mean? Or perhaps you have a copy already? Please say. 2. It is such a momentous thing to go among the Muhamadans, not in order to convert them, but that they may ‘‘see Christ’’ in us. In India the natives say: ‘‘There are the Hindus, and they know their religion and practise it; there are the Muslims and they know their religion and practise it; there are the Christians, and we 48 know their religion and they don’t practise it.’’ And this is the great bar in the way of conversion—a governor in India said this to me. We know they will not have to say it for you. The natives, who are as sharp as needles, have lynx-eyes upon us now, but so have our own East-Enders, patients in hospital, ‘‘infidel workmen,’’ as they are called, upon us. . . . 4. You feel yourself called to this Egyptian work, a great work it is. This is the accepted time when God will send His spirit. I pray for you hourly that He, full of grace and truth, will grant it abundantly. Do you know that in the most ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, we found these words: ‘‘God,’’ ‘‘full of grace and truth’’? They are in some of the Thebes tombs and in some of the Nubian temples. There is as it were a foretaste of the Christian religion. . . . All blessings attend you ever yours most hopefully, (Signed) F. Nightingale Editor: Nightingale subsequently sent to the above correspondent, ‘‘after having asked the various pundits,’’ three Arabic ‘‘alphabets’’ with pronunciation and some colloquial words; Palmer’s Arabic Manual; Allen’s Hindustani, Persian and Arabic Simplified Grammar (Trubner’s); Newman’s Handbook of Modern Arabic (in European type).49 48 LMA copy has: who (instead of: and we). 49 Letter to Miss Munro 5 June 1888, Add Mss 45808 f38. A copy of a letter 30 May 1888 offered to send something other than the Arabic scriptures; see Add Mss 45808 f37.

506 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Source: From a note, Add Mss 47728 ff251-52

[late 1890s] Why have all missionary efforts failed, more or less, hitherto, especially in India? Because you can never obliterate the early life. You may plaster over the Hindu, but the early associations always show through. I remember Sir J. Lawrence saying: It takes two generations to make a Christian. Had he lived to see the results of the government education, he would have said: It will take ten. Now they have neither Hindu nor Christian religion. The only religious Orientals are the Muslims. Source: Note, Add Mss 45845 f40

Laws of Nature: Nemesis shall make the better better, the worse worse is explicable: God means us to go abroad. The better shall not help their own nearest. The impelling Saviour shall come from without/ above, not from within/below. Buddha, Moses, Nurses, Denison. . . .50 I don’t think the world sailing on its way [is] a proof of a good God. On the contrary, I should say what a pity so much power was given to such a wretch, such an enormous disproportion. Comte51 could have made a better universe himself. I am so afraid of coming to: I feel it, and then to feeling sometimes like Mr Jowett and a future state. A future state of progress more than a feeling, a conviction to me. Pauperism—bring it to an end—so many signs of a good God—must he not have made continual progress? Can it be that each of us is in the future generation, that will give the successive lives of improvement to each? The best go away to another world, like Christ. Miranda = Madman. Diotima.52 F.N. Source: Note, Add Mss 45845 f138

Confucius: The great study stops only at perfection, the means to its attainment: 1. Propriety of conduct, 2. Right feeling (‘‘intérieur’’), 50 Probably Edward Denison (1840-70), whose work in the East End of London Nightingale discussed in Theology (3:39-40, 78-79). 51 Auguste Comte (1798-1857), French philosopher, advocate of positivism; he coined the term ‘‘sociology.’’ 52 Diotima was an actual or fictitious priestess, from whom Socrates, in Plato’s Symposium, claimed to have learned his theory of love.

Letters and Notes on Eastern Religions / 507

3. Cor rectness of purpose (‘‘pureté d’intention’’), 4. Intelligence of mind. Source: Note, Add Mss 45845 f99

Make a cross between Christianity and Buddhism, divine Father and law. But Christianity has rejected ‘‘law’’ (Weltordnung) and Buddhism has rejected the divine Father (Law-Giver). Source: Incomplete, undated note, Wellcome (Claydon copy) Ms 9023/5

With well-being, Osiris or what we call the good principle, takes us in his hand and leads us, and it is well with us, if we bring to be those coexistences by which the divine Spirit within is counteracted or silenced, the evil principle takes us in his hand and we suffer, but it is still the hand of God, still Osiris, the ‘‘goodness of God.’’ The suffering is the direct consequence, etc. Source: From an undated note, Add Mss 45827 ff185-86

Older Christianity: St Thomas older than present Hinduism. Buddha our man preached the great renunciation. One hundred of his followers met on his death in a cave; in 100 years spread all over India. Quer y: between sixth? and fourteenth century. Karma = action. Buddhism has a moral governor and a moral government. Ever y cause has its effect in spiritual, as every effect has its cause in material life. Christ, Brahmin sacrifice, or interfering with this moral effect government is impious. Jains the only Buddhist sect. Parsis—both regarded as foreigners. Buddhism was gradually ousted by the Brahmins—the Brahmins took part of their own old Vedas, part of Buddhism and mixed it all up with the ancient demon beliefs, a god for this, a goddess for that, to be propitiated—and manufactured this into an exoteric religion for the ignorant, which they hold now and which is later than Christianity. (This process was between sixth? and fourteenth century.) FN: I cannot think how the Hindus are called immoveable when millions change entirely—Brahmins now our great assistants. Source: Undated notes, Add Mss 45845 f184

Talmud: It is not incumbent upon thee to complete the work, but thou must not therefore cease from it. * The sun will go down all by himself, without your assistance.

508 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions * Do not live near a pious fool. * When the masters of the law entered and left the Academy a prayer of thanks that they had been able to carry out their task thus far, a prayer ‘‘that no evil might arise at their hands, that they might not have fallen into error, that they might not declare pure that which was impure, impure that which was pure, and that their words might be pleasing and acceptable to God and to their fellow men.’’ * When the thief has no opportunity for stealing he considers himself an honest man. * For the righteous there is no rest, neither in this world nor in the next, for they go from striving to striving. * God: These wicked ones not only vulgarize my/God’s coin, but they actually make me impress base coin with my own stamp (the human face divine). Source: Note, Add Mss 45844 f185

Let the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian each live in his God’s sight, doing His work rightly.

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale

This appendix lists a substantial number of the works on religion Nightingale used throughout her life and which appear mainly in the first four volumes of this Collected Works: books she owned herself, annotated, gave away (sometimes with inscriptions), discussed in correspondence, etc. If the book is now in a museum the location is given. The volumes in which the book appears are noted. Some books Nightingale both owned herself and purchased copies to give to friends, family, nurses or reading rooms; some indeed appear on numerous lists. For some persons, like Spinoza, for whom many editions are available and it is not known which Nightingale used, the titles only are given. For some probably an earlier edition was used. Abbreviations: Florence Nightingale Museum, London = FNM; Royal College of Nursing, London = RCN; Columbia University, Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing = Col; Wellcome Institute for the Histor y and Understanding of Medicine, London = Wellcome; and RSAS Lea Hurst, Derbyshire = LH.

Bibles Bibles Given to Nightingale Holy Bible. Oxford University Press 1843. Inscribed [faintly] P.N. to F.N. with all her best. In Nightingale’s hand: F. Nightingale. FNM. CWFN vol. 2. Holy Bible. Oxford: University Press for the British and Foreign Bible Society 1854, inscribed flyleaf: James Edward Quick, from Florence Nightingale, Scutari Hospital 25 April 1855. Wellcome. The Devotional Diamond Bible with Notes and Reflections, ed. W. Gurney. London 1821. Presentation copy to Florence Nightingale 510 /

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale / 511

from William James Orsman, inscribed: ‘‘Flit on cheering angel’’ 1857. Previously at Wellcome, but lost in move. Holy Bible. Oxford University Press 1887. Edition to commemorate the 50th year of the reign of Queen Victoria, given to Nightingale by Louisa Ashburton 1892. RCN. CWFN vol. 2.

Bibles Nightingale Gave to Others Holy Bible. Charles Bill 1693. Signed: Florence Nightingale. Col. New Testament. Cambridge: Parker for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 1838. Inscribed: Serjt. Thos. Johnson 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards from Florence Nightingale, Crimea April 1856. Holy Bible. Oxford University Press. Inscribed: Elizabeth Holmes with Florence Nightingale’s prayers. Lea Hurst 1877. Private Collection, Roy Leafe. Holy Bible. Oxford University Press n.d. Inscribed: Alice Munday with the most affectionate good wishes and earnest prayers for her best happiness, both here and hereafter, of her friend Florence Nightingale. London 1875. Col. Holy Bible. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode 1877. Pocket Paragraph Bible. Inscribed: For my very dear Louis [Shore Nightingale] with love from the depths of Aunt Florence’s heart. And when he was 12 years old, Christ said: ‘‘Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’’ Lea Hurst 21 September 1878. FNM. Holy Bible. Oxford: University Press n.d. Inscribed: Cecilia Linford with Florence Nightingale’s affectionate wishes & earnest prayers that we may both be able to say to God for 1877: ‘‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me according to Thy word.’’ 1 Januar y 1877. FNM. Holy Bible. Oxford: University Press. n.d. Inscribed: Offered to Miss Robinson with Florence Nightingale’s highest hopes for her happy and useful future ser ving our God and fellow creatures both in this world and the next. August 1889. Wayne State University. Holy Bible. Oxford University Press n.d. Inscribed: Offered to Fanny Burton with Florence Nightingale’s ver y best wishes for her highest and humblest success both here and hereafter in God’s strength, and for all her work done in God’s name. July 1890. Col. Holy Bible. London: Oxford University Press n.d. Inscribed: Offered

512 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions through her dear mother–Florence (Lees) Craven. F.N. On flyleaf: For my dear little godchild Waldemar Sigismund Craven, with his godmother’s most earnest prayers that many, many New Years, both in this world and the next, may pour upon him all the highest blessings that God can give and I can wish him and that the child Jesus may be born anew in all our three hearts, his, and his mother’s, and mine, than which there can be no better wish. Florence Nightingale 1881. Col. The Psalms of David. 1771. Inscribed: W. Smith 1771. FNM.

Other Bibles Nightingale Owned and Used Rogers, William, ed. The School and Children’s Bible. London: Longmans, Green 1873. CWFN vol. 3. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament According to the Vatican Text, trans. Lancelot C.L. Brenton. London: Samuel Bagster 1844. CWFN vol. 2.

Other Scholarly and Reference Books on the Bible Abbott, Edwin. Bible Lessons. London: Macmillan 1870. Arnold, Matthew. Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible. 2nd ed. Smith, Elder 1873. RCN. CWFN vol. 2. Augustine. ‘‘Tractate 56 on the Gospel of John.’’ In The Fathers of the Church. Washington 1994. CWFN vol. 2. Colenso, John William. St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. New York: Appleton 1863 [1862]. CWFN vol. 2. Donnegan, James. A New Greek and English Lexicon, Principally on the Plan of the Greek and German Lexicon of Schneider. London 1826. Edwards, John. A Discourse Concerning the Authority, Stile, and Perfection of the Books of the Old and New Testament. 2 vols. London 1693-94. CWFN vol. 2. Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried. Einleitung in das alte Testament. Göttingen: Rosenbusch 1824. CWFN vols. 2 and 3. Essays and Reviews. London: Parker 1860. CWFN vols. 1 and 3. Ewald, Georg Heinrich von. Die Dichter des alten Bundes. 3. Teil: Das Buch Ijob. Göttingen 1854. CWFN vols. 2 and 3. . Life of Jesus Christ, trans. Octavius Glover. Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1865, from his Geschichte des Volkes Israel. CWFN vol. 2. . Die Propheten des alten Bundes. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 1868. Göttingen 1867-68. CWFN vols. 2 and 3. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Vom Geist der hebraïschen Poesie. Vols. 11-12 of

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale / 513

Herders Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung 1879-80. CWFN vols. 2 and 3. Jebb, John. Sacred Literature. London: Cadell 1828. CWFN vol. 2. Luchtmans, S., and J. Luchtmans. Johannis Buxtorsii Epitome Grammaticae Hebraeae. 1761. FNM. CWFN vol. 2. Lunn, W.H. The Scholar’s Instructor: An Hebrew Grammar. London 1810. FNM. CWFN vol. 2. Nicholls, Benjamin Elliott. The Mine Explored; or, Help to the Reading of the Bible. Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union 1853 [1850].

Books Given by or to Nightingale with Inscriptions Adams, William. Sacred Allegories. London: Rivingtons 1873. Inscribed: Offered to our dear Nurses of No. 6 Block: St Thomas’ with Florence Nightingale’s Easter Love 1877. FNM. Berquin. L’Ami des Enfans. New ed. 4 vols. London: J. Johnson 1798. Balliol College Library. (Inscriptions show that the book was given to Mary Shore in 1807, then to Florence Nightingale in 1827). Balliol. CWFN vol. 1. Book of Common Prayer. Oxford: University Press 1866. Inscribed: To my dear Edith from her affectionate godmother, Florence Nightingale, Christmas 1867. Wellcome. Book of Common Prayer. Oxford: University Press n.d. Inscribed: Cecilia Linford for her first Communion, 29 April 1877 with Florence Nightingale’s most earnest prayers. FNM. Bunyan, John. Pilgrim’s Progress. London: Oxford University Press 1863 [1678, 1684]. Inscribed: ‘‘For our very dear Miss Crossland with gratitude and birthday love and with earnest prayer for each and for all of our dear ‘‘Home’’ people that 1877 may set us each and all farther on in our ‘‘pilgrimage’’ to our Father’s home and on and on in the ‘‘holy war’’ against all evil, against His enemies and ours, within and without, from a fellow pilgrim, Florence Nightingale 13 January 1877. FNM.1 CWFN vols. 2 and 4. . An Autobiography. London: Religious Tract Society n.d. Inscribed: Offered to our dear nurses of No. 2 Block by a fellow

1 Nightingale also gave a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress to Gwendolen Verney 4 Januar y 1891 (Letter of acknowledgment, Add Mss 68890 f10).

514 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions pilgrim, Florence Nightingale. And may this be a happy Easter to us all! Easter 1878. . . . FNM. Carpenter, J. Estlin. The Life and Work of Mary Carpenter. London: Macmillan 1881. Inscribed: Offered to our dear probationers with Florence Nightingale’s prayers for every best Whitsuntide blessing upon us. Whitsun Eve 1881. FNM. Conybeare, W.J., and J.S. Howson. Life and Epistles of St. Paul. London: Longmans Green 1875. Inscribed: Offered to Miss Crossland & our dear probationers with Florence Nightingale’s Easter love 1877. FNM. Ewing, Juliana Horatia. The Story of a Shor t Life. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. n.d. Inscribed: Lilian Grillage, with Florence Nightingale’s kindest wishes for her success in this world and the next. And may we all take example by Leonard in his ‘‘short life.’’ London, July 1886. Wayne State University. Farningham, Marianne. Lays and Lyrics of the Blessed Life. London: James Clark 1879. Inscribed: Offered to the nurses of Block 6, St Thomas’ Hospital with Florence Nightingale’s most earnest good wishes for each and for all not only here and with us but forever. August 1881. FNM. Farrar, Frederick W. The Fall of Man and Other Sermons. London: Macmillan 1878. 4th ed. Inscribed: Offered to Nurse Tousden [Vousden?] on her entrance into St Marylebone new Infirmar y with Florence Nightingale’s earnest prayers that she and all her Patients and all the Nurses may be led to that higher life which our Lord wills for us all. June 1881. Col. . Saintly Workers: Five Lenten Lectures. London: Macmillan 1878. Inscribed: For our dear probationers with Florence Nightingale’s best wishes for the New Year that it may make saints of us all. Januar y 1879. FNM. . Seekers After God. London: Macmillan 1877. Inscribed: For our dear probationers with F.N.’s love Februar y 1878. FNM. Keble, John. The Christian Year: Thought in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Year. Oxford: J. Parker 1835 [1827]. Inscribed: Nurse Owen with Nightingale’s earnest and daily prayers. ‘‘And help us this and every day to live more nearly as we pray.’’ Easter 1877. FNM. CWFN vols. 1-3 and 5. Marsh, Catherine. The Rift in the Clouds. London: James Nisbet 1879 [1871]. Inscribed: For dear Mrs Broomhead with Florence Nightingale’s love & truest prayers for the peace & comfort of

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale / 515

God upon her in this year & for all time & eternity New Year’s Day 1881. Read ‘‘An Old Man’s Grief’’ and ‘‘An Old Man’s Joy’’ page 21 and page 39. LH. . The Golden Chain. London: James Nisbet 1874. Inscribed: For dear Mrs Broomhead, and that this coming year may be one of God’s true happiness to her whether in this world or in a better world is the fervent prayer of Florence Nightingale, New Year’s Day 1881. LH. Also given to nurses. CWFN vol. 3. Montgomer y, James. One Hundred Choice Hymns in Large Type. Edinburgh 1879. Inscribed: Mrs Broomhead with Florence Nightingale’s love from a friend & fellow pilgrim. Lea Hurst 12 November 1879. LH. CWFN vol. 1. Moon, G. Washington. The Soul’s Inquiries Answered. London: Hatchards 1876. Inscribed: Offered to my dearest friend Mrs Wardroper, by one who meets her daily and nightly in the heart of God. Florence Nightingale 5 June 1878. FNM. Palmer, Roundell, ed. Book of Praise. London: Macmillan 1871. Inscribed: Offer to our dear Nurses of No. 2 Block: St Thomas’ with Florence Nightingale’s Easter love 1877. FNM. Patmore, Coventry, ed. The Children’s Garland: From the Best Poets. London: Macmillan 1874. Inscribed: Offered to our dear Nurses & Nurse maids of No. 4 Block: St Thomas’ with Florence Nightingale’s Easter Love 1877. FNM. Smiles, Samuel. George Moore: Merchant and Philanthropist. London: Routledge 1878. Inscribed: For our dear Probationers with F. Nightingale’s best Christmas greetings & prayers for the best & choicest Christmas blessings. Xmas Eve 1878. FNM. Smith, William. A Smaller Dictionary of the Bible. London: John Murray 1875. Given to nurses Easter 1878. Inscribed: All through this hour, Lord, be my guide; And by Thy power, No foot shall slide, Say the Houses of Parliament chimes to us every hour. Who listens to them? FNM. Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn. The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold. 2 vols. London: Fellowes 1858. Inscribed: Ever very affectionately yours T. Arnold; one volume given to Mrs Truelove, Hampstead 1861. Vancouver General Hospital School of Nursing. Yonge, Charlotte M. The Pupils of St John the Divine. London: Macmillan 1868. ‘‘Florence Nightingale 1873’’ on blank page. Annotated. Inscribed: Presented to Sister Sophiea Collyer by the fam-

516 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions ily of the late Miss Florence Nightingale in remembrance of her attendance upon Miss Florence Nightingale. Janry 1911. FNM. CWFN vol. 4.

Biographies, Autobiographies, Memoirs, Letters Abbott, Evelyn, and Lewis Campbell. Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett. 2 vols. London: John Murray 1897 and supplement 1899 (given to Nightingale by Balliol College). CWFN vol. 3. Baker, Augustine. Life of Gertr ude More, ed. Benedict Weld-Blundell. 2 vols. London: Washbourne 1909. Baxter, Richard. The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, abridged J.M. Lloyd Thomas, ed. N.H. Keeble. London: Dent 1974. CWFN vols. 1 and 2. Bence Jones, Henry. Life and Letters of Faraday. 2 vols. London: Longmans Green 1870. CWFN vol. 3. Bernard, Eugène. Les derniers jours de M. l’abbé Henri Perreyve. 2nd ed. Paris: Douniol 1864. CWFN vol. 2. Blackwell, Elizabeth. The Laws of Life, with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls. New York: Putnam 1852 (Miss Florence Nightingale, Embley. With Blackwell’s autograph. S. BonhamCarter Dec 1942). RCN. Boudon, H. La vie du Père Surin. Paris 1689. CWFN vol. 3. Chauveau, Pierre, Frédéric Ozanam, sa vie et ses oeuvres. Montreal: Beauchemin 1887. CWFN vol. 2. Chocarne, B. Le R.P. H.-D. Lacordaire. 2 vols. 8th ed. Paris: Poussielgue 1894 [1806]. CWFN vol. 2. Church, R.W. Saint Anselm. London: Macmillan 1870. Annotated. FNM. CWFN vols. 1 and 3-4. . Miscellaneous Essays. London: Macmillan 1888. CWFN vol. 2. . Dante and Other Essays. London: Macmillan 1889. CWFN vol. 2. Clay, Walter Lowe. The Prison Chaplain: A Memoir of the Rev John Clay. Montclair NJ: Patterson Smith Reprint 1969 [1861]. CWFN vol. 1. Colani, T. Examen de la vie de Jésus de M Renan. Strasbourg 1864. CWFN vol. 3. Cousin, Victor. The Youth of Madame de Longueville, or Raw Revelations of Cour t and Convent in the Seventeenth Century, trans. F.W. Ricord. New York: Appleton 1854. CWFN vol. 5.

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale / 517

Denison, Edward. Work among the London Poor: Letters and Other Writings of the Late Edward Denison, ed. Baldwyn Leighton. London: Isbister (rev. ed.) 1884 [1872]. CWFN vol. 3. Die Taube von Kaiserswerth. November 1936. RCN. Dr David Livingstone, The Great Missionary Traveller. London: Adams 1875. Farrar, Frederick W. Life of Christ. 2 vols. 30th ed. London: Cassell 1890 [1874]. CWFN vol. 2. Fer rand, Antoine. Eloge historique de Madame Elisabeth de France. 2nd ed. Paris: Desenne 1814. CWFN vols. 1 and 2. Fer rucci, Caterina. Rosa Ferrucci e Alcuni Suoi Scritti. 2nd ed. Florence: Barbèra, Bianchi 1858. CWFN vol. 2. Froude, R.H.F. Remains of the late Rev R.H.F., ed. J.H. Newman and J. Keble. London: Rivington 1838-39. CWFN vol. 5. Goodman, Margaret. Experiences of an English Sister of Mercy. London: Smith, Elder 1862. CWFN vol. 3. . Sisterhoods in the Church of England. London: Smith, Elder 1863. CWFN vol. 3. Gordon, Charles George. Letters of General C.G. Gordon to His Sister M.A. Gordon. London: Macmillan 1897 [1888]. FNM. CWFN vol. 5. Gordon: A Life of Faith and Duty. London: Christian Knowledge Society 1885. CWFN vol. 5. Gratr y, A. Henr y Per reyve, trans. Henrietta L. Sidney Lear. London: Rivingtons 1872. CWFN vol. 2. Hankin, Christiana C., ed. Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpennick. 2 vols. London 1858. Given to nurses. Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1969. CWFN vol. 5. . Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. P.C. Hodgson. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press 1984-88. CWFN vol. 5. Hill, George Birkbeck. Colonel Gordon in Central Africa 1874-1879. London: Thos. De La Rue 1885. Inscribed: Mrs Davidson with Florence Nightingale’s earnest wishes and prayers. And may we all each in her measure have the heroic love and devotion to our fellow creatures, the sympathy and disinterestedness that this hero, saint, Gordon, practised. Claydon October 1886. Several copies given to nurses at FNM. Holt, Emily Sarah. Imogen: A Story of the Mission of Augustine. London 1876 (book sent by author to Nightingale).

518 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Howson, (Rev.) J.S. Deaconesses; or the Official Help of Women in Parochial Work and in Charitable Institutions. London: Longman Green 1862. FNM. Hunter, William. The Old Missionary. Oxford: Henry Frowde 1896. Inscribed: Offered to Alice Maud Ruddock on her way to India with Florence Nightingale’s kindest regards. March 1897. FNM. Jones, J. Memorials of Agnes Elizabeth Jones, by her sister. London: Strahan 1871. 2nd ed. Annotated. FNM. CWFN vol. 6. Kingsley, Frances E. Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories. 2 vols. London: H.S. King 1877. CWFN vol. 2. Lasteyrie, Mme de. Vie de Madame de Lafayette, par sa fille, précédée d’une notice sur la vie de sa mère Mme la duchesse d’Ayen. Paris: Leon Techener Fils 1868. CWFN vol. 3. Lear, Henrietta L. Sidney, trans. Madame Louise de France. London: Longmans Green. New ed. 1890. CWFN vol. 3. . A Dominican Artist: A Sketch of the Life of the Rev Père Besson of the Order of St Dominic. London: Rivingtons n.d. CWFN vol. 2. . Revival of Priestly Life in the 17th Century. London: Rivingtons 1873. CWFN vol. 3. Luther, Martin. Die Deutsche Theologia, ed. J.H.K. Biesenthal. Berlin: Wilhelm Thone 1842. FNM. . ‘‘An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer.’’ In Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann. Philadelphia: Fortress 1969. CWFN vol. 2. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. Essays, Critical and Miscellaneous. Philadelphia: Hart 1852. CWFN vol. 3. Madden, Richard Robert. The Life and Martyrdom of Savonarola. 2 vols. 2nd ed. London: Newby 1854 [1853]. CWFN vol. 3. Marsh, Catherine. Death and Life: A Record of the Cholera Wards in the London Hospital. 1867. CWFN vol. 3. Martyn, Henr y. Memoirs of the Rev. Henr y Mar tyn. New York: Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge 1858 [1819]. CWFN vols. 2 and 4. Masson, David. Life of John Milton: History of His Time. 7 vols. London: Macmillan. CWFN vol. 5. Montalembert, Charles René Forbes. Monks of the West from St Benedict to St Bernard. 2 vols. Boston: Donahoe 1872 [1860]. CWFN vol. 3. Newman, John Henry. Lives of the Saints: An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 6th ed. 1989 facsimile of 1878 ed. [1845]. CWFN vol. 3.

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale / 519

. Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. de Laura. New York: Norton 1968 [1848]. CWFN vols. 1 and 3. . Loss and Gain: The Story of a Conver t. London: Longmans Green 1903. 14th ed. 1916 [1848]. CWFN vol. 5. Obr y, Jean-Baptiste-François. Du Nirvana Bouddhique en réponse à M Bar thélemy Saint-Hilaire (Paris 1863) and Du nirvana indien: ou de l’affranchiessment de lâme après la mort selon les Brâhmanes et les Bouddhistes. CWFN vol. 4. Purcell, Edmund Sheridan. Life of Cardinal Manning. 2 vols. London: Macmillan 1895. CWFN vol. 3. Renan, Ernest. Vie de Jésus. Paris: Lévy Frères 1863. In English, Renan’s Life of Jesus, trans. W.G. Hutchison 1897, from 13th ed. CWFN vol. 3. Sabatier, Paul. Vie de S. François d’Assise. 2nd ed. Paris: Librairie Fischbacher 1894. RCN. CWFN vol. 3. Seebohm, Frederic. The Oxford Reformers: John Colet, Erasmus and Thomas More. 3rd ed. London: Longmans Green 1887. CWFN vol. 3. Seeley, John Robert. Natural Religion. London: Macmillan 1882. University of Nottingham Archives. Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn. Sinai and Palestine. London: Murray 1860 [1850]. CWFN vol. 3. Strauss, David. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot. London: Chapman, 1848, from 4th Ger. ed. CWFN vol. 2. Tr ue Nobility, or the Golden Deeds of an Earnest Life: A Record of the Career and Labours of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. London: Ward, Lock 1886. Upham, T.C. Life of Madam Catharina Adorna. New York: Harper 1858. CWFN vol. 3.

Other Books of Sermons Arnold, Thomas, Sermons Chiefly on the Interpretation of Scripture. London: Longmans Green 1878. CWFN vol. 2. Colani, T. Sermons. Premier recueil 3rd ed. Strasbourg: Treuttel & Wurtz 1860. CWFN vol. 2. Jowett, Benjamin. Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, ed. W.H. Fremantle. London: John Murray 1901. Note on title page: Florence Nightingale, sent to me after his death. Sept. 10 1905. FNM. CWFN vols. 2 and 3. . College Sermons, ed. W.H. Fremantle. 2nd ed. London: John Murray 1895. Given to E.F. Bosanquet December 1910. FNM. CWFN vols. 2 and 3.

520 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions . Sermons, Biographical and Miscellaneous. Given to Nightingale by Master and Fellows of Balliol. FNM. CWFN vols. 2 and 3. Kingsley, Charles. Good News of God: Sermons. 1878. Also given to nurses. FNM. CWFN vol. 5. . All Saints’s Day and Other Sermons. London: C. Kegan Paul 1878. Given to nurses. FNM. Manning, Henry Edward. Penitents and Saints: A Sermon Preached on Behalf of the Magdalen Hospital at St George-in-the-Field. London: Rivington 1844. CWFN vol. 3. Maurice, Frederick Denison. The Lord’s Prayer, The Creed, and the Commandments: A Manual for Parents and Schoolmasters. London: Macmillan 1870. CWFN vol. 5. . Sermons Preached in Country Churches. London: Macmillan 1903.

Devotional Books, Poetry Abbott, Jacob. The Way to Do Good, or the Christian Character Mature. London: Tegg 1836. CWFN vol. 1. . The Corner-stone, or, a Familiar Illustration of the Principles of Christian Truth. London: T. Ward 1834. Also given to nurses. CWFN vol. 1. . Fire-Side Piety, or, the Duties and Enjoyments of Family Religion. London: R.B. Seeley & Burnside 1836. Also given to nurses. CWFN vol. 2. . Hoar y Head and the Valleys Below. London: G. Wightman 1838. Also given to nurses. CWFN vol. 5. Abbott, John S.C. Path of Peace. Boston: Crocker & Brewster 1836. Also given to nurses. CWFN vol. 2. Adam, Thomas. Private Thoughts on Religion. 2nd ed. York: G. Peacock 1795. Bible Christian’s Way of Salvation, or the Faith of the True Believer. London: J. Nisbet 1830. Bird, Robert. Jesus the Carpenter of Nazareth. London: Kegan Paul 1892. Blackmore, Richard. The Poetical Works of Sir Richard Blackmore. Edinburgh: Mundell 1793. CWFN vol. 5. Bowring, John. Sacred Poetr y. 1872. CWFN vol. 2. Brown, Colin Rae. Noble Love. London: Skeffington 1871. (Receipt from author acknowledged Ms 5482/90.)

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale / 521

Brown, James Baldwin. The Higher Life: Its Reality, Experience and Destiny. London: C. Kegan Paul 1879. Browning, Robert. Stafford, A Tragedy and ‘‘Paracelsus.’’ In Poetical Works of Robert Browning. London: Smith Elder 1889. CWFN vols. 2 and 5. Bush, Joseph. Bread From Heaven. London: Mason 1859. Cecil, Richard, and Josiah Pratt. Remains of the Rev Richard Cecil. New York: R. Carter 1843. CWFN vol. 2. Chalmers, Thomas. The Application of Christianity to the Ordinar y Affairs of Life. 1820. CWFN vol. 5. Elliott, Charlotte. Leaves from the Unpublished Journals, Letters and Poems of Charlotte Elliott. London: Religious Tract Society [1874]. Ewing, Juliana Horatia Gatty. Jackanapes. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 1879. Also given to nurses. FNM. CWFN vol. 1. . Laetus Sorte Meâ or The Story of a Shor t Life. 1882. Also given to nurses. CWFN vol. 1. . Daddy Darwin’s Dovecote. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 1881. Given to nurses. FNM. . Dandelion Clocks and Other Tales. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Given to nurses. FNM. Faber, Frederick. Spiritual Conferences. London: Thos. Richardson 1859. CWFN vol. 3. Fosber y, Thomas Vincent. Voices of Comfort. 3rd ed. London: Longmans, Green 1903. Gambold, John. The Poetical Works of the Rev J. Gambold. Baldwin & Craddock 1816. Gatty, Margaret Scott. Parables from Nature. 2nd series. 2nd ed. London: Bell & Daldy 1858. CWFN vols. 1 and 5. Gertrude of Helfta. The Herald of Divine Love, trans. Margaret Winkworth. New York: Paulist 1993. CWFN vol. 4. Hanna, William. The Last Day of Our Lord’s Passion. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas 1862. Given to nurses. FNM. Havergal, Frances Ridley. Life Mosaic: The Ministry of Song and Under the Surface. London: James Nisbet n.d. Given to nurses. . Poetical Works of Frances Ridley Havergal. Toronto: Toronto Willard Trust 1880. CWFN vol. 2. Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne. ‘‘The Two Voices.’’ In The Poetical Works of Mrs Hemans. London: Frederick Warne Reprint n.d. CWFN vol. 1.

522 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Herbert, George. The Temple. London: S. Roycroft 1678. CWFN vol. 2. . Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson. Oxford: Clarendon 1941. CWFN vol. 2. Hogg, James. Brave Men’s Footsteps. Published by author 1872. Hymns and Poems for the Sick and Suffering. 1878. Given to nurses. Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. London: Burns and Oates 1880. CWFN vol. 2. John of the Cross. The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, of the Order of our Lady of Mount Carmel, trans. David Lewis. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green 1864. CWFN vols. 2-4. Kingsley, Charles. Prose Idylls: New and Old. London: Macmillan 1889. FNM. MacDuff, John Ross. The Bow in the Cloud, or Words of Comfort for Hours of Sorrow. London: Nisbet 1880. Martineau, James. 9th and 10th sections of Common Prayer for Christian Worship, ed. T. Sadler, or ser vices 9 and 10 of Ten Ser vices of Public Prayer. London: Williams and Norgate 1879. CWFN vol. 1. Morrell, M.A. Our Work for Christ among His Suffering People: A Book for Hospital. London: Rivington 1877. FNM. Oxenden, Ashton. The Home Beyond, or a Happy Old Age. London: Wertheim, Macintosh & Hunt 1861. Pearse, Mark Guy. Daniel Quorm and His Religious Notions. London: Wesleyan Conference 1876. CWFN vol. 3. Perreyve, Henri. La Journée des Malades. Paris: Douniol 1900. 11th ed. [1860]. CWFN vol. 2. . Une station à la Sorbonne. Paris: Douniol 1865. CWFN vol. 2. . Méditations sur les saints ordres. Paris: Douniol 1874. CWFN vol. 2. Pietas Quotidiana: Prayers and Meditations . . . From the Most Eminent Divines and Moral Writers. Peacock and Bampton/Bowdery & Kerby 1823. Montagu Burgoyne to his friend Frances Smith 27 August 1824. Also inscribed: S. Bonham Carter 27 October 1873. RCN. Pringle, Thomas. Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle. London 1839. Pusey, E.B. Private Prayers, ed. H.P. Liddon. London: Rivingtons 1883. Given to Nightingale by Dr Acland. Acknowledged Bodleian 22 August 1897. Sadler, T. Common Prayer for Christian Worship. London: Williams & Norgate 1879. Sanderson, Joseph. The Bow in the Cloud, or Words of Comfort for Those in

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale / 523

Bereavement, Sickness, Sorrow and the Varied Trials of Life. New York: E.B. Trent 1887. Given to nurses it seems. Savonarola, Ierolamo. Poesie di Ierolamo Savonarola. Florence: Tommaso Baracchi 1847. CWFN vols. 2 and 3. Southey, Caroline Bowles. Poetical Works. Edinburgh: Blackwood 1867. CWFN vol. 1. Taylor, Emily, compiler. Flowers and Fruit Gathered by Loving Hands from old English Gardens. Houlston & Wight 1864. Inscribed: For Florence N. with E.C.’s love Bagshot June 1864. (Sibella Mary B.C. from her grandfather). RCN. Taylor, Jeremy. The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living. London: Bell & Daldy 1857 [1650]. Given to nurses. Thomas à Kempis. The Following of Christ in Four Books: A New Translation [The Imitation of Christ]. London: Burns & Lambert 1851. Annotated and another copy given to nurses FNM. CWFN vol. 4. Walton, Amy Catherine. Nobody Loves Me. London: Religious Tract Society [1883]. Waring, William Edward. The Hospital Prayer Book. London 1872. (Nightingale gave advice to the author, see Wellcome Ms 5482/96.) Waugh, Arthur. Gordon in Africa. Oxford: Shrimpton 1888. CWFN vols. 1 and 5. Whittier, John Greenleaf. Poetical Works. 1894. CWFN vol. 5.

Historical, Philosophical, Theological Books Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. Logique de Port Royal. Paris: Vrin 1981. 2nd ed. rev. [1662]. CWFN vol. 3. Atkinson, Henry G., and Harriet Martineau. Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development. London: John Chapman 1851. CWFN vol. 1. Bacon, Francis. Valerius Terminus. In The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al. 6 vols. London: Longmans 1889. CWFN vol. 2. Bingham, Joseph. The Antiquities of the Christian Church. 10 vols. London: Reeves & Turner. Bonivard, François. Les chroniques de Génève. 2 vols. Geneva 1831. Fleming, Robert. A Discourse on the Rise and Fall of Papacy. Edinburgh: John Ogle 1792 [1701] (for Harley St.)

524 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Gladstone, W.E. Review of Ecce Homo: a Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. Macmillan 1866. Greg, William. Creed of Christendom. Toronto: Rose-Belfor 1878 [1851]. Hooker, Richard. On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. 2 vols. London: Dent [1593, 1597]. CWFN vols. 2 and 3. . Works of . . . Mr Richard Hooker: With an Account of his Life and Death, ed. Isaac Walton. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1850. CWFN vol. 5. Jelf, Richard William. Grounds for Laying before the Council of King’s College London Certain Statements. Oxford: J.H. Parker 1853. CWFN vol. 3. Kant, Immanuel. Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996. CWFN vol. 2. Kingsley, Charles. The Hermits. Sunday Library 1868. , , F.D. Maurice and J.M.F. Ludlow. Politics for the People. London: John Parker 1848. CWFN vol. 5. Lindsay, Alexander William Crawford. Sketches of the History of Christian Ar t. 1847. Long, James. Eastern Proverbs and Emblems. London: Trübner 1881. Ludlow, John Malcolm. Woman’s Work in the Church: Historical Notes on Deaconesses and Sisterhoods. Washington: Zenger 1975 [1866] (Nightingale supplied material to the author). Mansel, Henry Longueville. The Limits of Religious Thought. Oxford: John Murray 1858. CWFN vol. 3. Martineau, Har riet, ed. Traditions of Palestine. London: Longman Rees 1830. Inscribed: From her Grandmama [Smith] August 1832. . Eastern Life: Present and Past. 3 vols. London: Edward Moxon 1848. CWFN vol. 4. The Modern Buddhist; Being the Views of a Siamese Minister of State on His Own and Other Religions, trans. Henry Alabaster 1870. [Chao Phya Praklang], given by Nightingale to Benjamin Jowett. Neander, Johann August Wilhelm. Das Leben Jesu Christi. Hamburg 1845. In English, The Life of Christ in Its Historical Connexion and Historical Development, trans. J. M’Clintock and C.E. Blumenthal, from 4th Ger. ed. 1851. Ranke, Leopold von. Histor y of the Reformation in Germany. 2nd ed. Longman 1845 [1844]. CWFN vol. 5. Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin. Por t Royal. 7 vols. 8th ed. Paris: Hachette 1912. CWFN vol. 5. Schimmelpenninck, Mary Anne. Nar rative of the Demolition of the

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale / 525

Monaster y of Port Royal des Champs. London: J.& A. Arch 1816. Annotated. FNM. CWFN vol. 3. Searle, John. Human Nature Laid Open. Penrhyn 1836. CWFN vol. 3. Seeley, J.R., Natural Religion. London: Macmillan 1895. Sibbas, Richard [Sibbes]. The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes. 7 vols. Edinburgh: James Nichol 1862-64. CWFN vol. 2. Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics; Theologico-Political Treatise; and A Shor t Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being. CWFN vol. 3. Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn. Letters on the History of the Jewish Church. 3 vols. London: John Murray 1879-80 [1867]. CWFN vol. 3. Swaine, General Gordon. London: Cassell 1885. Taylor, Jeremy. Ductor Dubitantium. 4th ed. London 1696 [1660]. CWFN vol. 3. Wedgwood, Julia. John Wesle y and the Evangelical Reaction of the 18th Centur y. London: Macmillan 1870. CWFN vols. 1 and 2.

Religious Novels and Stories Charlesworth, Maria Louisa. Oliver of the Mill. Montreal: Dawson 1876. Also given. CWFN vol. 2. .Ministering Children: A Tale Dedicated to Childhood. London: Seeleys 1854. Edgeworth, Maria. Moral Tales for Young People. 3 vols. London: J. Johnson 1802. Toronto Children’s Public Library. . A Sequel to Early Lessons. 2 vols. London: R. Hunter 1821. Toronto Children’s Public Library. Fisher, James. Scripture Riddles. Derby: Richardson & Handford 1822. Toronto Children’s Public Library. Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to Be Written by Himself. 1766. CWFN vol. 5. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s School Days. London: Macmillan 1900 [1857]. Kingsley, Charles. Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography, ed. Elizabeth A. Cripps. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1983 [1850]. CWFN vol. 5. . Two Years Ago. London: Macmillan 1906 [1857]. Also given to nurses. FNM. CWFN vol. 5. . Hereward the Wake, True Words for Brave Men.

526 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions MacDonald, George. Rober t Falconer. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett/Garland Facsimile Reprint 1975 [1868]. CWFN vol. 3. . David Elginbrod. London: Hurst & Blackett 1874. CWFN vol. 3. . Thomas Wingfold, Curate. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett 1876. CWFN vol. 3. Marsh, Catherine. A Hero in the Battle of Life. London: Religious Tracts Society 1876. CWFN vol. 3. . Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars. Montreal: E. Pickup 1856. . English Hearts and English Hands, or the Railway and the Trenches. London: Nisbet 1858. . Shining Light. 1869. . The Rift in the Clouds. 2nd ed. 1871. CWFN vol. 3. . The Harbinger of Dawn. 1876. . A Peerless Princess, Alice Maud Mary. 5th ed. London 1879. Given to nurses. Clear Shining: A Memoir of Gertr ude Mar y Aclom, by her mother, with an introduction by Catherine Marsh. Pleasant Tales to Improve the Mind and Correct the Morals of Youth. London: E. Newbury 1801. Toronto Children’s Public Library. Porter, Jane. Thaddeus of Warsaw. London: Warne 1868 [1831]. CWFN vol. 2. Stretton, Hesba [Sarah Smith]. Fern’s Hollow. London: Religious Tracts Society 1864. CWFN vol. 2. . Enoch Roden’s Training. London: Religious Tract Society [1865]. Given to nurses. . Pilgrim Street: A Story of Manchester Life. London: Religious Tracts Society 1867. Also given to nurses. CWFN vol. 2. . Little Meg’s Children. London: Religious Tracts Society 1868. CWFN vol. 2. . Bede’s Charity. London: Religious Tracts Society 1882. CWFN vol. 2. . A Thorny Path. London: Religious Tracts Society n.d. CWFN vol. 3. . The Fishers of Derby Haven. London: Religious Tracts Society n.d. CWFN vol. 2. . Jessica’s First Prayer. N.d. Given Nightingale for her birthday by her sister. Also given to nurses. CWFN vol. 5. . Jessica’s Mother. London: Religious Tracts Society n.d. CWFN vol. 2.

Appendix: Religious Books Used by Nightingale / 527

. David Lloyd’s Last Will. 2 vols. London 1869. Given to a nurse. . Alone in London. London: Religious Tract Society. Yonge, Charlotte M. Pillars of the House, or, Under Wode, Under Rode. Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz 1873. CWFN vol. 2. . Lady Hester, or, Ursula’s Narrative. Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz 1874. CWFN vol. 2. . A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands. New ed. London: Macmillan 1888. Given to nurses. FNM. , ed. A Book of Wor thies, Gathered from the Old Histories. London: Macmillan 1869. Also given to nurses. CWFN vol. 2.

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532 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Ewald, Georg Heinrich von. Geschichte des Volkes Israel. 3 vols. Göttingen: Dieterich 1843-52. . Die Propheten des alten Bundes. 3 vols. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1867-68. Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe. Explication des maximes des saints sur la vie intérieure. Paris: P. Auboin 1697. Fer rand, Antoine, ed. Eloge historique de Madame Elisabeth de France. 2nd ed. Paris: Desenne 1814. Gertrude of Helfta. Ger trude of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love, trans. M. Winkworth. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press 1993. . Ger trude d’Helfta: Oeuvres spirituelles: Le Héraut, trans. J.-M. Clément and B. de Vregille. Sources chrétiennes 139, 143, 255, 331. Paris: Seuil 1968, 1978, 1986. Gliddon, George Robins. An Appeal to the Antiquaries of Europe on the Destr uction of the Monuments of Egypt. London: J. Madden 1841. . Ancient Egypt. New York: J. Winchester 1843. . The Nile: Its Ancient Monuments, Its Modern Scener y. London: J. Madden 1849. Grimal, Nicolas-Christophe. A Histor y of Ancient Egypt. trans. Ian Shaw. Oxford: Blackwell 1992. Hales, William. A New Analysis of Chronology. 3 vols. London: Rivington 1809. Herodotus. Histor y. Books 1 and 2, trans. A.D. Godley. Loeb Classical Librar y. London: W. Heinemann 1966. Hornung, Erik. The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. D. Lorton. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press 1999. Iamblicus. On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, trans. T. Taylor. Frome, Somerset: Prometheus Trust 1821 (1999). . Jamblique: Les mystères d’Egypte. trans. and ed. Edouard Des Places. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1966. Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius of Loyola: The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. G.E. Ganss. New York: Paulist Press 1991. James, Thomas Garnet Henry. An Introduction to Ancient Egypt. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux 1979. Janet, Paul-Alexandre. ‘‘La crise philosophique et les idées spiritualiste. II: Le positivisme et l’idéalisme.’’ Revue des deux mondes 52,4 (1864):718-46.

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Jensen, Debra. ‘‘Florence Nightingale’s Mystical Vision and Social Action.’’ Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 19,1 (1998):69-81. John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans. K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez. Garden City ny: Doubleday 1964. . Selected Writings, trans. and ed. K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez. New York: Paulist Press 1987. Johnson, Samuel. Dictionar y of the English Language. 9th ed. 4 vols. London: Longman 1805. Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. Vol. 1 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans 1989. Keble, John. The Christian Year, Thought in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Year. Oxford: J. Parker 1835 [1827]. Keele, Mary, ed. Florence Nightingale in Rome. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society 1981. Lane, Edward W. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. 3 vols. London: Thomas Nelson 1836. . The Thousand and One Nights (A New Translation). London: C. Knight 1839-41. Leake, William Martin. Map of Egypt. London: A. Arrowsmith 1840. . Map of the Course of the Nile. London: A. Arrowsmith 1845. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, trans. E.M. Huggard. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1952 [1710]. Lepsius, Carl Richard. Chronologie der Ägypter. Berlin: Nicolaische Buchhandlung 1849. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. H. Chadwick. Stanford ca: Stanford University Press 1957. . Werke. 8 vols. München: Hanser Verlag 1970-79. Manetho: The History of Egypt, trans. W.G. Waddell. Loeb Classical Librar y. London: Heinemann 1940. Maria Magdalena de’ Pazzi. Tutte le opere dai manoscritti originali. 7 vols. Florence: Nardini 1960-66. Martineau, Har riet. Eastern Life: Past and Present. 1 vol. London: E. Moxon 1875 [1848]. Martyn, Henr y. Memoir. 3rd ed. London: J. Hatchard 1819. Newman, John Henry. Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions, ed. M.J. Svaglic. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1967 [1865].

534 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Nightingale, Florence. Letters from Egypt (for private circulation only). London: Printed by A. and G.A. Spottiswoode 1854. Nock, Arthur Darby, and André-Jean Festugière, eds. Corpus hermeticum. 4 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1954-60. Noffke, Suzanne, ed. The Prayers of Catherine of Siena. New York: Paulist Press 1983. Obr y, Jean-Baptiste François. Du nirvana bouddhique, en réponse à M Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire. Paris: A. Durand 1863. . Du nirvana indien: ou de l’affranchissement de l’âme après la mort selon les Brâhmanes et les Bouddhistes. Amiens: Duval et Herment 1856. O’Driscoll, Mary, ed. Catherine of Siena: Passion for the Truth, Compassion for Humanity. Selected Spiritual Writings. New York City Press 1993. Park, Mungo. Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. London: W. Bulmer 1799. Plato. Timaeus, trans. R.G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library. London: W. Heinemann 1929. . Phaedr us, trans. Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library. London: W. Heinemann 1932. Plutarch. Moralia. ‘‘Isis and Osiris,’’ trans. F.C. Babbitt. Vol. 5 of Loeb Classical Library. London: W. Heinemann 1936. Porphyr y. De l’abstinence, trans. J. Bouffartigue. Paris: Belles Lettres 1995. Quinn, Vincent, and John Prest, eds. Dear Miss Nightingale: A Selection of Benjamin Jowett’s Letters to Florence Nightingale, 1860-1893. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987. Rees, Joan. ‘‘Florence Nightingale: ‘God Spoke to Me at Karnak.’ ’’ In Writings on the Nile: Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Amelia Edwards. London: Rubicon 1995:46-68. Richardson, Samuel. The History of Charles Grandison: In a Series of Letters. 7 vols. London: Printed for Harrison & Co. 1783. Robertson, Frederick W. Sermons Preached at Trinity Chapel Brighton. London: Smith, Elder 1855-90. . Sermons. 4th series, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner 1902. Rodriguez, Alfonso. Practice of Perfection and Christian Vir tues, trans. J. Rickaby. Chicago: Loyola University Press 1929. Sattin, Anthony, ed. Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-1850. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1987. Scott, Walter, and Alexander Stewart Ferguson, eds., Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings which Contain Religious or Philosophic

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Index

Index

S

pace limitations required some compromises in producing the index. It includes most proper names, generally omitting those of recent authors and of persons only occasionally mentioned. Entries are grouped as much as possible. Of the geographical names outside Egypt only the most important are indexed. As well, only significant animals are entered in the index. Biblical references are indexed by books under ‘‘Bible.’’ Entries with identifying information on persons or various items are shown in italics. Aaron 392, 425 Abbas Pacha 120, 146, 155, 158, 169-71, 178-79, 214, 230, 237, 321, 405, 457 Abbott, Jacob xii, 111n Aboukir 153, 158 Abraham 162, 199, 227, 275, 290n, 418, 420-21, 440, 448, 457 Abu Girgeh 174 Abu Simbel 120, 245, 257-74, 276, 278, 282-83, 286, 298, 324, 327, 331, 335, 349, 355, 358, 360, 367, 370, 381, 411, 440 Abu Sir 182-83, 415, 447 Abufeda 197, 200 Abydos 405n, 408 Abyssinia/n 248, 256, 263, 273, 297-98, 300 Achilles 255 adytum 242, 267, 273-74, 278-80, 283, 307-10, 349, 361 Aeschylus 412 Aesculapius 341 Afghanistan 496 Africa 140-41, 175, 177, 180, 183,

538 /

202, 211, 225, 263, 265, 281, 449, 458 afterlife (see also heaven, hell, Hades) 192n, 227, 291n, 302n Agathodaemon 270, 370, 373 Agrigentum 138 Ahriman 29, 485, 490 Akhmim (Chemnis, Panopolis) 207-08, 213, 405, 407, 409 Alexander the Great 164, 349, 496 Alexandria/n 47n, 53n, 117, 123, 125n, 134, 137, 140, 142-61, 167, 169, 172, 202-03, 205n, 206-07, 213, 216-17, 220, 232, 238, 289n, 298n, 316, 324, 398, 410, 419, 423, 433, 453, 455, 457-65, 468, 488 Alford, Lady Marian 338, 356, 368-69, 467 Alhambra 441, 450 Allah 165, 424-25 Allen, Thomas George 291n Althorp, John Charles 34, 39 Alvarez, Balthazar 42n, 59n Amasis 415 Ambrose of Milan 54

Index / 539 Amenemhet 247n Amenophis II 375, 402 Amenophis III 241, 247, 319, 322, 327, 349-50, 352n, 355-56, 368, 376, 469, 471 Amenophium 355, 361 Amense 339 Amenti (see also nether world) 261, 310, 361-63, 378, 381, 383, 385, 387, 389-90, 395 America/n 154n, 229, 252, 347, 356, 484 Amina 163 Ammenemes 241 Amosis 319, 322, 436 Amrou (mosque) 418-19, 421 Amun 222-24, 261, 303, 314-15, 338, 340-43, 349-50, 357, 366, 370-71, 374, 376, 378, 384, 392, 406, 434, 469 Amun-Ra 279, 314, 342, 348 Ananda 497 Anaxagoras 259 anchorite 202, 206-216 Andrews, Carol 291n, 353n angel/ic 50, 67, 191, 210, 216, 226, 250, 268, 300, 329, 346, 379, 440, 491 Angela of Foligno 78-79 Angers 456, 459 Anglican Church 82, 170, 309 Annofre (see also Onofrio) 386, 391, 418, 421, 436 Anonke 314-15 Anselm of Canterbury 24n, 112n Antaeopolis 206-07 Antioch 105 Antony (monk) 217-18 Anubis (jackal) 203, 306-07, 314, 362, 383-85, 394 Anukis 250, 279 Aphrodite 257 Apis (sacred bull) 306 Apollinopolis Magna 317-18 Apollo 145m 209, 224 Apollo Belvedere 253, 270, 308, 327 Apophis (serpent) 313m 385, 390, 395

Apries (see also Hophra) 415 Arab, Arabia, Arabic 118, 138-40, 144, 146-51, 154, 156-58, 161-68, 170-71, 173-74, 176-78, 184-85, 188-90, 194, 196, 199, 203-04, 210n, 211-14, 229-30, 232, 234-35, 248, 252, 256, 265, 275, 276n, 280-82, 285n, 294-95, 299, 301, 305, 316, 320-22, 326-29, 332-33, 336-37, 352, 360, 376, 389, 404, 406, 408, 412, 417, 426-30, 440, 444, 448, 451, 454, 457-60, 462, 466, 488, 490, 492, 495-96, 505 Arabian Nights 177, 187, 221n, 245, 444 Arianism/Arius 211n, 217 Arihos Nofri 366 Aristophanes 321n Aristotle 162, 292 Ark/Arkite 250, 261, 271, 340, 358-59, 366 Armant (see also Hermonthis) 242, 244-45 Armenia 145-46, 148, 150, 171, 178, 183 Ar veris 317 Ashburton, Louisa 124n, 406 Asia/Asiatic 265, 313, 359, 389 asp 188, 270, 286, 308, 348, 373, 390 Assasif 352, 367, 369 Assyria/n 125n, 127, 243, 389, 492 Aswan(see also Syene) 245, 248, 250-51, 253, 256, 273, 300, 302, 317-18, 324 Asyut 199n, 201-03, 205-08, 211-13, 217, 221, 229, 238, 321, 324, 404-05, 407-09 Atfih 159, 161, 167, 213, 455-56 Athanasius 216, 217-18, 222 Athena 310, 365 Athenagoras 54 Athens 227n, 349n, 350n, 410, 420, 423, 434, 457, 464-65 atonement 17, 24, 47-48, 63, 227, 430, 490, 492, 497 Atum 384, 469 Augustine of Hippo 15, 21n, 32, 46, 48, 53, 112n, 401, 490

540 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Augustus/Augustan 153, 217, 247, 267 Aumale, duc d’ (Henri d’Orléans) 128 Avaris 354, 436 Babylon 243n, 419, 449, 467 Bach, Johann Sebastian 21 Bacon, Francis 393-94 Badrashein 411 Baghdad 441, 448, 451, 496 baksheesh 158, 211, 267, 285, 299, 403, 406, 446 Bal 313 Balaam 24n, 300, 329, 417 Balliol College 9n, 504 Balyana 407-08 baptism 50, 64, 265, 487 Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco (Il Guercino) 146 bastinado 120, 148-49, 157, 165, 169-70, 177, 205, 214, 321, 335, 337 Bedouin 158, 187, 196, 454 Beelzebul 338 Beit el-Wali 278, 281, 284, 313 Belzoni 328, 352, 369, 379, 387, 395, 467 Benczik, Count 173, 369, 455-56, 468 Benedictine 64n, 66, 68 Bengal/Bengali 32, 504 Beni Hasan 190-91, 192n, 195-96, 202, 208, 221, 319, 324, 421, 435 Beni Suef 180-81, 183, 196, 421 Berber 158, 281, 296n Berkeley, George 276-277 Bernard of Clair vaux 11, 48 bey (governor) 166, 171, 173, 321 Bible/biblical (see also New Testament, Old Testament) 54, 71n, 89n, 119, 124, 142, 172, 203, 225, 258, 269, 276, 279, 310, 326, 340, 373, 386, 415, 492n, 495 Genesis 1:2 250, 364; 1:26-27 490; 1:28, 31 364; 2:15-17 312; 4:22 406; 18:30 457; 22:1-9 227; 24:45 175; 28:10-22 440; 28:17 443; 41:14 392; 46:34 197 Exodus 2:5 201; 2:10 265; 2:12

412; 3:14 286; 4:2-4 275; 7-8 392; 13:21-22 177; 19:6 399; 28:30 204; 33:18-19 307 Leviticus 288, 290, 359 Numbers 290; 22:21-41 300, 329; 22:28 417 1 Samuel 21:6 404 2 Samuel 1:33 357 1 Kings 19:12-13 357, 491 Chronicles 359 Job 1:15-19 439; 2:1 258 Psalms 18:4 89n; 24:1 476; 42:7 218; 51:9 260; 51:16 260; 72:19 310; 90:4 432, 472; 91:4 269; 118 46; 137:1 250; 145:17 304 Proverbs 31:23 205 Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 293; 11:1 391 Isaiah 5:8 179; 6 386; 14:9 234, 332; 14:12 233; 24:12 345; 29:16 307; 41:25 307; 45:9 307; 52:13-15 72-73; 53 52, 69, 72-73; 53:2 185; 53:4 312; 53:11 346; 54:5 304; 63:15 304; 64:7 304; 64:8 304; 66:12 263, 269; 66:19 218 Jeremiah 2:24 175, 264; 44:30 415; 49:36 218 Ezekiel 1:11 358; 9:2 438; 37:4 414 Daniel 5:27 360; 11:31 251; 12:11 251 Joel 3:19 345 Jonah 3-4 454; 4:4 453, 464 Micah 6:8 260 Habakkuk 3:3 310 Malachi 4:2 242, 270 Matthew 3:4 203; 3:9 332; 4:3 184; 5:26 149; 5:29 194; 5:39 74; 6:3 453; 7:9 198; 7:14 440, 453; 9:1-8 198; 9:37-38 460; 10:16 270; 10:42 160; 11:28 101; 11:29 108, 436; 12:45 179; 17:4 445; 18:6 170; 18:14 286; 19:24 154; 24:15 153, 164; 24:35 346; 25:32 363; 28:3-6 268 Mark 1:17-18 375; 4:3-8 391; 5:1-5 249 Luke 1:35 269; 1:38 110; 2:14:

Index / 541 108, 307; 2:41-50 451; 2:49 110; 7:24-26 444; 9:58 74; 10:31-32 171; 12:50 50; 14:12 52; 17:21 18; 22:19 102; 22:31-32 305; 22:53 170; 23:46 110 John 3:31 348; 4:24 288; 4:34 19; 6:51 102; 6:56 102; 6:63 102; 11:25 307; 14:6 373; 14:12 48; 14:23 19; 16:7-15 131; 16:33 78, 126; 17:1-26 10, 50-54;17:4 450; 17:8 288; 19:30 50, 347 Acts 3:6 469; 17:23 307; 27:9-41 468 Romans 8:28 370 1 Corinthians 2:2 48; 3:2 222, 231; 9:11-18 460; 12:1-11 386; 12:31 357; 13:1-2 346; 15:25 476 Galatians 6:14 48 Philippians 2:7 307 Hebrews 2:14 131, 307; 2:16 307; 11:38 436; 17:12 454 James 1:17-18 69, 277-78, 347 1 Peter 5:13 419 1 John 2:16 476; 3:2 18, 69, 383; 3:15 110 Revelation 1:12 386; 2:6, 14 486; 13:18 313; 21:1 134; 21:6 307 Bidji 295-97, 300-02 birds 432, 437 Birket Habu 353 Bisharee, Sheikh 454 Blavatzky, Hélène 503 Blenheim 356 boat, sacred 271, 309, 314, 354, 366, 373, 389-90, 395 Bocchoris 376 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon (see also Napoleon III) 127n Bonham Carter, Henr y ix Bonham Carter, Hilar y 146 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 13n Book of the Dead 291, 353 Borgia 484 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne 13n, 14n, 15, 27n, 28-29 Botta, Paul-Emile 126

Boulaq 160-61, 174, 186, 431, 434, 455 Bracebridge, Charles ‘‘M.B.’’ ix, 1, 118, 121, 125, 128, 137, 146, 151-53, 155, 159, 162, 172-73, 176, 178, 180-81, 183, 187, 189, 196, 200, 204, 215, 217, 221, 230-32, 237, 239, 241, 245, 251, 253-54, 274, 277, 281, 283, 289, 299-300, 318, 320, 322-25, 328, 337, 350n, 353, 403, 410, 416-17, 422-24, 454, 465 Bracebridge, Selina, ‘‘Σ’’ ix, 1-2, 16, 118, 121, 125, 130, 134, 137, 139-40, 146, 147n, 150, 153, 156, 159, 169, 173, 189, 193, 196, 200, 208-09, 214-15, 232, 238-39, 241, 245, 267, 273, 281, 298-99, 309, 318, 323-24, 337, 369, 371, 374, 383, 385, 403, 410, 416-17, 422-23, 426, 429, 433, 437, 448, 456, 468 Brahma/Brahman/Brahmin/Brahminism 490, 492, 496-97, 503, 507 British Museum 126n, 221n, 279, 298n, 344 Br uce, James 202, 368, 384, 395 Bubastis/Bubastite 304, 310, 340, 373 Buckle, Henry Thomas 67 Buddha/Buddhism/Buddhist 4, 47, 219, 483, 492, 496-99, 502, 506-08 Buffon, George Louis Leclerc, comte de 173 bulls (Assyrian sculptures) 125-28 Bunsen, Christian Carl Josias von 117-18, 124, 183, 190, 196, 206, 208, 241, 251-52, 263n, 270, 274, 287n, 289n, 290n, 291n, 310, 311n, 317, 352, 374, 493n Bunyan, John 377 Burgundy, Duke of 39-40 Burma 499 Byron, Lord 171n, 177n cabiri 311, 324 cadi (magistrate) 148, 157, 178, 189, 297 caduceus 292 Cairo (Masr-el-Kahira)/Cairene 53n, 120-21, 123-24, 150-51, 159-74, 178-84, 186, 188-89, 195, 205n,

542 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 209, 211-14, 230, 232, 238-39, 242, 252, 275, 296, 313, 320-21, 324, 360, 405, 407-56, 459, 462-63, 465-67 Calabria, Michael D. 1, 9n, 120, 122, 132n, 327n, 468 caliph 165, 172, 201, 416-18, 421, 448 call to service xii, 1, 12, 15n, 111, 117 calvar y 61, 347 Calvin, John 491 Calvinism/Calvinist 487, 492 Canaan/Canaanites 264 Candace, Queen 282 Carlyle, Thomas 504 Carmelite 39, 48n, 68, 111n, 483n, 484n, 492 catacombs 152, 158, 184-85, 417 Catherine of Genoa 39 Catherine of Siena xii, 23, 61, 64 Catholicism/Catholic (see also Roman Catholic) xiii, 129, 139, 404n, 410, 417-18, 483-84, 487, 490 Cavallini, Pietro 416n Cavour, Camilo Benso 39 Cecilia, Santa 415-16, 421 Cerber us 172, 362 Chaeremon 289 chameleon 272-74, 282-84, 322, 337 Chamonix 264 Champollion, Jean-François 124n, 163, 192, 196, 268, 315, 341-42, 352, 355, 368, 382, 385-86, 388, 390, 392, 394, 398, 401-02, 422, 493 Charlemagne 494 Charles II 226 Charles X 128 Charon 187, 196, 247 Chaucer 495 Chemnis (Akhmim, Panopolis) 207, 405, 407 Cheops 172-73, 426, 430-31 China 159, 195, 446, 497 Christ (see also Jesus, Lord, Son) 19-21, 41, 47-49, 52-54, 57, 64, 66-67, 72, 74, 76-77, 79, 81, 84-88, 98, 100, 102-04, 106-08, 110, 112-13, 136n, 149, 156, 228, 247, 258, 266, 288, 305-06, 313, 354-55,

370, 395, 412, 415-16, 451, 453, 464, 487, 491, 493-94, 505-07 Christianity/Christian religion 15, 18, 30-31, 33-35, 54, 57, 68-69, 73, 82, 107, 112-13, 119, 123, 126, 130-32, 155-56, 162, 169-71, 179, 186, 188-89, 202, 204, 215-17, 219-20, 222, 225, 227, 231, 243-44, 249, 259, 261n, 263, 269, 285n, 297, 303, 309, 313, 316, 338, 358, 371-72, 398, 401, 404, 407, 417-19, 421, 432, 451, 483-87, 490-91, 493-94, 497, 502, 505-08 Christology 15, 220n church/churches 30-32, 38, 42, 45, 49, 56, 61n, 62-63, 82, 106, 110, 117, 130, 135, 145, 173, 209, 220, 231, 243-44, 249, 297, 301, 358, 360, 400, 404, 410, 416n, 417, 420-22, 437, 439-40, 463-64, 486-87, 491n, 497 Church of England xii, 123, 133n, 487n, 488 Cimabue 388 Circassian 159, 165, 445-47, 461 Clark, W.I. 11 Clement of Alexandria 54, 287, 400 Cleopatra 158, 167, 188, 244, 397 Clough, Arthur Hugh Jr 53, 83, 124, 495 co-workers (with God) xiii, 82 coloquintida 330, 377 colossus/colossi/colossal 153, 233, 235-36, 246, 257, 260-62, 267-69, 272-74, 320, 326-28, 330-31, 335, 344, 349-50, 355-56, 375, 381, 402-03, 412, 421 Coltman, Justice Thomas 271 Combe, Andrew 20, 55n communion, holy (see also Eucharist) xiv, 80, 83, 102-04, 109-10, 220 Comte, August 506 confession 86, 91, 460 confirmation 109 Confucius 497, 506 Constantine, Emperor 219-20 Constantinople 155, 189, 215, 371, 429, 437, 441 Cook, Captain 282, 300, 302

Index / 543 Cook, Edward T. 1, 16, 107, 118n Copt/Coptic 118, 155, 159, 169n, 170, 186, 190, 216, 231, 404, 407, 417-18, 455, 485n Cor fu 457, 463-65, 466n, 467-68 Cor y, Isaac Preston 247n, 284n, 286n, 287n, 321n Cousin, Victor 484 Creator/creation/creature 18, 23, 27-29, 46-48, 52, 65-66, 70, 77, 79, 87-90, 92-94, 98-99, 104, 164-65, 170-72, 202, 209, 219, 222-24, 226-27, 229, 233, 239, 247, 249-50, 252, 261-62, 265-67, 275-78, 307-12, 314, 331, 341-42, 351, 354, 364-65, 372, 384, 394, 396, 399, 407, 445, 472-73, 475, 491, 498, 500 Crimean War xi, xiii, 9, 83, 84n, 118, 483 crocodile 379, 389, 407 cross 15, 46-49, 64, 69, 72-77, 81, 87-88, 100-02, 107, 111-12, 308, 316 cr ucifix/cr ucifixion 81, 107, 130-32, 149, 302 Dabed 284 dahabieh 120, 150-51, 166, 172-77, 181n, 182, 187, 190, 194, 197-98, 230, 264, 295-96, 321, 329 Dahshur 182-83, 415, 447 Dakka 278, 282-84, 291, 324, 365-66, 493 Dalton, John 67 Damascus 441, 451 Damietta 447 damnation (see also hell) 46, 63, 86, 172, 219, 382, 487 Dante Alighieri 156, 242, 268, 327n Dar fur 248, 256, 272, 274, 295, 466 David (psalmist) 311, 404 Dead Sea Scrolls (see also Qumran) 216n death/die/dead 24n, 37, 39-40, 56-57, 61-63, 69, 73, 75, 83, 86-89, 94, 98, 100-01, 106, 108, 110-12, 131, 134-35, 141, 148, 157, 163, 169, 172, 178, 181n, 182, 184, 187n, 192, 203, 209, 214, 221,

228-09, 232-35, 243-44, 247, 249, 261, 271, 282, 285n, 291, 294, 302n, 303, 306-09, 312-13, 317, 324-29, 332, 335, 341, 344-47, 353, 357, 362-65, 367, 369, 373, 378-79, 381, 383-85, 387, 389-90, 392, 395, 410, 413, 415-16, 446-47, 453, 455-57, 461-62, 475, 494, 497, 507 de Bussiere, Marie Théodore 39n Defoe, Daniel 21n de Grey, Lord 53 deify/deification 127, 219, 225, 287, 303, 358, 490 Deir el-Bahri 328, 331, 345, 354-55, 367, 369, 376, 469-70 Deir el-Medina 361, 365, 367, 369 deism 495 deity/deities 55, 220, 225, 261n, 264, 266, 276, 279, 286, 292, 307, 311, 315, 333, 341, 346, 351, 357, 366, 371-73, 383, 385, 387-88, 394, 476, 495 Democritus 277 Dendera 376, 394, 396-98, 402-03, 436 Denison, Edward 506 Derr 256, 262, 273-74, 282 der vish 230, 444, 453, 489 devil/s (see also Satan, sheytan) 46-47, 67, 170, 173, 180, 184-85, 230, 246, 249, 303, 338, 340, 351, 382, 441, 485, 490-91, 498, 500 Diana 310, 314 Dickens, Charles 31n, 429n, 488n, 500n Diocletian 418 Diodor us Siculus 150n, 344, 363, 385 Diogenes 485 Diotima 506 disease xiii, 36, 67, 148, 399 divine being 263, 343 Döllinger, Johann Joseph Ignaz von 31-32 Domdaniel 327, 334, 378 Dominic, St 14 Dossey, Barbara M. 1, 12n dromos 236, 283, 328, 375-76 Dublin 459

544 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Dum Dum 36 Du Pont, Louis 59n Easter 453, 456, 463-64 Ecclesiastes 469 ecstasy 12-13, 22, 35, 61n, 142, 489n Edfu 251, 317-18, 365 effendi (master) 183, 186 efreet (demon) 121, 160, 173, 175-76, 180-83, 222, 230, 236, 330, 429, 441 Egyptian religion 123, 222-28, 310, 335n, 371, 193, 493n Egyptologist 117-18, 122, 163n, 221n, 263n Eilethyia 269, 319-20, 322 El Ashraf (tomb) 442, 446, 449, 462 El Azhar (mosque) 440, 450-52, 463 El Berkook (tomb) 442, 445-46, 462 El Hakin (mosque) 449, 463 El Hoseyn (Hasaneyn) (mosque) 449, 452, 463 El Kait Bey (tomb) 442, 446, 462 El Mu-eiyad (mosque) 449-50, 463 Elephantine 245-47, 249-53, 255, 300, 302, 305, 396 Elgin marbles 264 Elisabeth de France, Madame 83-84 Elysian Fields 244, 395 Engeli Hanum (wife of Said Pacha) 461 England/English 25, 82, 123, 139-40, 143, 145, 150-51, 157, 159-60, 169, 171-72, 175, 177-78, 186, 193-94, 199, 205n, 206, 209, 212, 220, 223, 226n, 227, 229, 232, 239-40, 243, 245, 255, 267, 296, 298n, 300, 319, 325, 334, 347, 355, 367, 398, 403, 412, 423, 427, 429-30, 436n, 442, 455, 459-60, 463, 465, 484, 491, 499, 502 Eos 326n Epicur us/Epicurean 124, 202, 245, 257 Erasmus, Desiderius 15, 21, 32 Eratosthenes 247n Erebus 321 Ergamenes 283, 285 Eros 343, 357, 365, 469, 474

Esna (see also Latopolis) 238, 245, 318, 320-23, 365, 375-76, 398 Essene 216, 488, 492 eternity/eternal life 18, 34-35, 46, 48, 51, 53, 62-63, 65, 67n, 68, 70-72, 83-84, 90, 96-97, 99, 101-02, 109, 134, 142, 149, 218, 226-27, 261, 267, 286, 298, 305, 312, 333, 345, 350, 362-64, 384, 472-74, 486, 491-92, 497, 502-04 ethics 224-25, 227, 315, 372, 394 Ethiopia 146, 209, 245, 247-48, 256, 265, 278-79, 283, 285n, 313, 326n, 328 Eucharist (see also communion) 444 Euclid 429 Europe/European 1, 30, 118, 123, 140, 144-45, 148, 150, 162, 164, 166, 168-69, 171, 175-77, 181n, 185, 193, 210, 214, 225-26, 243, 248-49, 252, 263, 280, 289, 324, 337, 346-48, 350n, 361, 382-83, 389, 393, 399-400, 404, 406, 420, 424, 426, 437-39, 442, 451, 455, 459, 484, 489, 491, 496 European Travels 1, 39n, 53n, 173n, 210n, 266n, 378n, 494n Eusebius 286, 321n evangelical 26, 37, 45, 55, 59, 63, 74, 483 Evangelist 218, 358 Evans, William 356n evil/evil spirit (see also good and evil) 16-17, 29, 45n, 46-49, 51, 60, 69, 80, 86, 92-93, 97, 119, 153, 164n, 171, 221n, 228-29, 243, 258-59, 303-04, 308, 310, 373-74, 383, 415, 429, 473-74, 485, 490, 500, 508 Exodus 352, 434, 436, 446, 462 Ezbekeeyeh (promenade in Cairo) 161, 167, 433, 463 Ezekiel 126, 243, 351, 358, 373, 414, 438, 451 faith xii-xiv, 51-52, 55, 58, 70, 74, 93, 104, 111-13, 119, 136n, 207n, 217n, 220n, 225, 228, 324, 351-52, 370, 391, 394, 396, 401-02, 444-45

Index / 545 Fakir 483, 489, 492 Falloux, Frédéric, comte de 129 Father (God, see also Lord) 19-20, 22, 28, 49-51, 62, 65, 69, 71, 87, 97, 109-10, 113, 131, 142, 223, 265-66, 285, 287-88, 312, 342, 364, 370, 372, 443, 507 Favre, Marie-Jacqueline 77 Fayium 247 fellah (peasant) 178-79, 196, 295 felucca (small boat) 185, 187 Fénelon, François Salignac de La Mothe 14n, 15, 27, 39, 76, 483 Ferdosi 495 Ferguson, Alexander Stewart 284n, 350n, 351n, 364n Fer rand, Antoine 84n Festugière, André-Jean 284n fetish/fetishism 327, 484, 486 Ficino, Marsilio 284n firman 441, 449, 452 Flaxman, John 267, 374 Fliedner, Louise 71n Fliedner, Theodor xii, 53, 59, 117, 488 forgive/forgiveness 49, 83, 86, 96, 98, 265 Forty-Two Assessors 172, 353, 362-63, 368, 389 Fowler, Dr Richard 147, 213-15 Fox, Charles James 413 France/French 11, 16, 22n, 23n, 28n, 39, 64n, 78, 83, 109, 138, 153, 163n, 172, 173n, 205n, 221, 227, 232, 238-39, 243, 293n, 317, 320, 322, 351n, 408, 437, 452, 455-57, 463, 489, 506n Francis of Assisi, St 11 Francis Xavier 33 Franciscan 217 Franco-Pr ussian War 22n, 499n François de Sales 11, 14n, 21 free will 25, 29, 66, 68, 304, 487, 490 Fremantle, William H.F. 110 Fustat 417-19, 423, 436 Ganges 56, 498 Gaskell, Elizabeth C. 122 Gatty, Margaret 213

Genesis 290, 392 genie/genii/genius 195, 210n, 262, 268, 270, 333, 347, 356, 362, 367, 384, 393, 395-96, 414, 444, 474-75 Génie Adorant (art piece) 266 Georgia 496 Ger f Hossein 275, 278, 283 German/Germany 27-28, 31, 64n, 124, 132, 221n, 243, 263n, 292, 305, 317, 337-38, 347, 454-55, 483-84 Gertrude of Helfta 64-68 ghoul 163, 165, 185, 221, 249, 330 Gilbert, Mr 144, 146, 148n, 149n, 155 Girgeh 206, 209, 211, 213, 231, 404, 407, 409 Giza 182-83, 409, 411, 415, 425-26, 447 Gliddon, George Robins 124 gnostic/Gnostics/gnosticism 213, 218-20, 284n, 485, 486n, 498, 500-01 God (see also Father, Lord) 5, 11, 17, 19, 22-23, 25, 27, 30, 35-37, 39, 41-42, 44, 46-64, 67-78, 80, 82-91, 93-104, 106-111, 119-120, 131, 143, 148-49, 156-57, 171-72, 177, 179, 184n, 185, 191, 194, 206, 211, 213, 216, 218-19, 222-29, 233, 242-43, 249, 251-52, 257-58, 261n, 262, 263n, 264-67, 270, 271n, 274, 277, 285-88, 290-93, 303-04, 307-08, 310-15, 321, 327, 329, 331, 338, 340-42, 345, 347-48, 350-51, 354-55, 362, 364-65, 370-72, 376, 382-84, 386-87, 390, 392, 397, 399, 403, 407-09, 411-12, 413n, 415, 420, 422-23, 433-36, 440-45, 453, 464, 468-76, 485-94, 496-503, 505-08 God, character of 13, 15-16, 23, 27-28, 32, 34-35, 46, 52, 57, 89, 103, 491, 496, 502 God, goodness of 24, 36, 45-47, 60, 62-63, 68, 97, 100, 149, 303-08, 310, 312-14, 347, 362-63, 397, 418, 507 God, justice of 24, 63 God, love of 20, 37-38, 49, 51-52, 54, 66, 68, 78-79, 90, 95, 266

546 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions God, perfect 13, 25-26, 28, 34, 68-69, 71, 496-97, 500-01 God, plan of 13, 16, 35, 40-41, 45, 55, 68, 82, 84, 119, 222 God, will of 13-15, 25, 33-35, 38, 40-41, 43, 45-46, 48-49, 52, 60-61, 65, 84, 103, 113, 262, 312, 422, 487 God’s church 24 God’s law/laws 11, 13-15, 22, 24-26, 28, 33, 35-43, 46-48, 52-53, 55-58, 63, 66, 69-70, 75, 81, 89, 97, 303-04, 487 God’s ways 27, 48, 55, 57-58, 66-68, 89, 103 god/gods 29, 49, 121, 126, 145, 172, 186, 192n, 193, 200, 203, 218, 224-25, 242-43, 249, 252, 255, 257, 262, 264-66, 269-71, 275, 277, 280, 284n, 285n, 287-90, 292, 303-06, 308, 310-11, 314-15, 317, 339, 341, 343, 346, 348, 350, 354, 356-57, 359, 368, 374, 381, 384-85, 390, 394-97, 399, 401, 476, 492, 493n, 497, 501n, 507 goddess 222, 225, 227, 242, 257, 278-79, 308, 310, 315-17, 326n, 334, 342, 365-66, 373, 387, 394, 497, 507 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 132 good and evil 47, 80, 84, 98, 258-59, 266, 290, 304, 351, 359, 370, 372, 386, 413n, 472-74, 486, 500, 507 Good Friday 309, 453, 463-64 Gordon, Charles 111 gospel 32, 36, 74 Gothic 358, 393, 445 grace 22, 55, 62, 69-70, 86, 90-91, 93, 98-100, 103-04, 106, 112, 261, 343, 357, 382, 474, 487-88, 505 Grandison, Charles 319, 322, 328 Greece/Greek xii, 1, 9n, 21, 22n, 50, 117, 119, 122, 139, 141, 145-46, 159-61, 166, 168, 187n, 194, 220, 249, 253n, 257-58, 260, 263, 270, 275-77, 284, 289n, 290-92, 294, 326, 340n, 343, 347, 351, 356n, 366, 383, 393, 400-02, 410, 416-17, 420, 423, 435, 457, 463, 485n, 486, 491, 493n, 494, 496-97

Greek religion 222-27, 287 Gregor y Nazianzen 54 Grenada 446 Guerçino 403 Guillemin, Jean 130 Guizot, François-Pierre-Guillaume 28 Gulliver 273, 282, 327 Gully, James Mandy 135, 275 Hades (see also afterlife, hell) 228, 235, 306-07, 313, 327, 331-32, 335, 353, 378 Hafez 495 Hagar Silsilis 246, 251-52, 317-18 Hakè 365, 394 hakim 460 Hakt 322 Hales, William 290n Hallum, Arthur Henry 72 Hamlet 241 handmaid of the Lord xiii, 110 hareem 120, 157, 166, 171, 214, 405-06, 424, 429, 434, 456, 461-62, 465 Har-Hat 317 Harley Street xiii, 118 Harpocrates 243, 314, 362 Harris, Anthony Charles 298, 301-02, 309, 315, 317, 421, 431, 433, 436 Harris, Selima 298, 301-02, 431-33, 436-37, 457, 463 Har un al-Rashid 441, 449 Hasan Bey 166 Hasaneyn (see also El Hoseyn) 449, 452 Haska 349 Hassan Effendi 184, 189-90, 238 Hathor 186, 257-58, 260, 269, 273, 304, 310-11, 314, 317, 343, 361, 365, 379, 397, 407, 414, 416 Hatshepsut, Queen 328n hawk 286, 306, 313-14, 357-58, 366, 375, 383, 391 Hayter, George 194, 356 heaven (see also afterlife) 18-20, 23-24, 29, 48, 63, 66, 75, 88, 95-97, 99-101, 107, 112, 143, 161, 171, 193, 228, 231, 249-50, 257, 279, 285, 292,

Index / 547 315-16, 324, 327, 332, 334, 343, 346, 351, 353, 357, 365, 376-77, 389, 392, 394, 440, 462, 473-75, 489, 501 Hebrew/Hebrews 72, 175, 192n, 203, 227, 265, 276, 348, 378, 392-93, 407, 413, 436, 489-90 Hebrew Bible 29n, 207n, 271n Hecataeus 340 Hecate 310 Hegel, Friedrich 28n Hegira 419, 442 Helen 359 Heliopolis 164, 173, 193, 392, 412n, 413, 431-32, 434-39 hell (see also afterlife, Hades) 44, 46, 67n, 74, 89n, 95, 97, 100, 112, 141, 156, 219, 227, 233n, 249, 306, 378, 397, 445, 461-62, 487, 501 Henri V 128 Hephaistos 275 Herbert, Sidney xiii, 40n, 52-53, 83 Hercules 172, 314-15, 340, 394, 445 Her mes Trismegistos 223, 278, 283, 284-92, 302, 314, 323, 340, 350-51, 353, 363, 365, 367, 383, 392, 493-94 Hermonthis (see also Armant) 242, 244-45 Herod 418 Herodotus 124, 206, 247n, 311n, 426, 430 hieroglyph/hieroglyphics 163n, 191-92, 194, 221n, 228, 233, 237, 261n, 287-88, 291n, 292, 303, 309, 313, 317, 335, 338, 353, 355, 359, 365, 373, 379, 381, 385, 401, 415, 434, 493n, 505 High Tor 430 Hill, John Henry and Mrs (missionaries) 1, 349n, 350n, 410 Hindu/Hinduism 4, 489-92, 496, 503-08 Holland, Lady 455 Holy Sepulchre church 309 Holy Spirit/Holy Ghost 219, 223, 285, 443 Holy Week 119, 293, 295, 453

Homer/Homeric 207, 240, 252, 255n, 267, 356, 368, 402, 502 Hophra (see also Apries) 415 Hor-hat 342, 365 Hor-Pre 242-43, 313 Horace 124n Hornung, Erik 291n Hor us 206, 224, 243, 257, 259, 270, 292, 302, 305-10, 313-17, 342-43, 359, 362, 365, 373, 375, 379, 383, 385, 388, 394, 397, 469 hospital xiii, 129 How (Diospolis Parva) 403, 405 Hrosvita 202 Hyksos 339, 354, 436 hymns 48 hypaethral 230, 256, 294, 315, 442, 446-47, 450, 452 Iamblicus 286n, 287, 289, 493 ibis 205, 287-88, 407-08, 436 Ibrahim Pacha 120, 149, 162, 167, 170, 174, 178, 186, 190, 214, 244-45, 298, 403 Ibreem 283 idealism 13, 25-26, 30 Ignatius of Loyola 14, 43 Ignatius Theophorus (of Antioch) 2, 105-07 ill/illness 39-42 imam 450, 452 Imitation of Christ 2, 9, 81-104 immortality 378, 504 Incarnation 491 India/Indian xiii, 2, 33-34, 56, 118, 120, 138n, 140, 153, 161, 177, 219, 254, 290, 455, 494, 497n, 498, 499n, 503, 505-07 Indian, American 231, 252, 408 Indian, British 133, 135, 137, 140, 144, 159-60, 238, 433-34, 456, 463 Indian Mutiny 36 indifference 40, 80 Inshallah 157 inspiration 19, 22, 33-34, 38, 43, 45, 58, 70, 75n, 89, 101, 129, 225, 284, 348, 354, 372, 387, 391, 401, 439, 469, 474, 476, 491, 501

548 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions intaglio rilevato 186, 258, 260, 267, 278, 343, 373-74, 381 Iona 250-51 Irenaeus of Lyons 54 Isaac 227, 420, 440 Isaiah 243, 304, 307, 386 Isis 138, 141-43, 153, 158, 188, 225, 257, 270, 284, 294-95, 302-10, 312, 314-17, 333, 342-43, 357, 361, 365-66, 370, 378, 381, 388, 395 Islam (see also Qur’an, Muslim) 216, 338, 418n, 440, 492, 494 Isocrates 497 Israel/Israelite 89, 91, 291n, 354, 412, 446, 454 Italy/Italian 11, 22n, 61n, 118, 138, 140, 143, 159, 161, 171, 173n, 191, 199, 221, 240, 347, 437 jackal 170, 178, 183, 185, 189, 203, 246, 251, 282, 285, 298n, 337, 352n, 357, 377, 383, 431, 445 Jacob 197, 200, 227, 420, 440, 443 Jains 507 James, St 277, 440 Janet, Paul Alexandre 25n janissar y 144, 155, 441, 449 Jansen, Cornelius Otto 487n Jansenism 487 Japan/Japanese 504 Jeanne of Chantal 11, 37 Jehovah 29, 73-74 Jensen, Debra 1 Jeremiah 419 Jericho 213 Jerome, St 217-18, 266 Jer usalem 53n, 223, 294, 340, 367, 398, 417, 451 Jesuit 39, 43, 59n, 61n, 68, 118, 138-39, 393, 413, 488 Jesus (see also Son, Christ, Lord) 1, 5, 49, 53, 57, 61, 74, 76-77, 79, 84-85, 88, 90, 101, 105-07, 110, 112, 129, 153, 164, 219-20, 419, 486n Jews/Jewish religion/Judaism 52, 69, 74, 123-24, 127, 149, 160, 207n, 216n, 217n, 220, 224, 288, 290, 335n, 350, 355, 358, 410n,

419, 444, 485n, 487-88, 492, 498-99 jinn/jinnee 210-11, 221n, 330-31, 374 Job 234, 258, 492 John, St 105-06, 191, 217, 223, 303 John of the Cross 11, 23n, 76, 77-78, 81 John of Lycopolis 202, 217 Johnson, Samuel 20n Joseph 49, 183, 190, 192-94, 196, 259, 374-75, 392, 432, 435, 437 Jowett, Benjamin ix, xiv, 9, 83, 112, 133n, 497, 499, 503-04, 506 Judaeus 313 Judah 340 Judas 50, 111, 129, 389 Julian, Emperor 287 Julius Caesar 244 Juno 145, 159, 225 Jupiter Capitolinus 209, 222n, 260, 308 Jupiter Olympius 222, 224 justice 96-97, 157, 260, 271, 291, 348, 350, 362-63, 370, 381, 474-75 Justin Martyr 54, 207 Kaf 331 Kaiserswerth xii-xiii, 1, 53n, 71n, 117-18, 423 Kalabsha 272, 274, 278, 280-82, 284, 343, 402 Karma 497, 507 Karnak 232-38, 240-41, 252, 261, 289, 313, 323-25, 328, 330-31, 338-40, 344-45, 349-51, 354-58, 367-70, 375-77, 435, 440, 466, 469, 472, 474 Kashmir 496 Kasr e Rubahk (temple) 329 Keele, Mary 126n, 225n, 260n khamsin (sand wind) 197, 199-200, 321, 410, 420, 422-23, 425, 431-34, 462 khan (shelter) 176, 180 Khem 223, 314, 371, 374 Khnum 222-23, 249-50, 261, 267, 270-71, 279, 303, 306-08, 312, 314, 316-18, 322, 333, 365, 373, 375, 378-79, 384-86, 388, 390

Index / 549 Khnumon, Queen 376 Khonsu 314-15, 340-41, 342n, 343, 354, 357, 366, 370, 407, 469 kingdom of God 18, 52, 75, 96-97, 110, 470 Kom el-Ahmar 190, 196 Kom Ombo 317-18, 407 Kôni 188 Korosko 272, 274 Krishna 491 Lacordaire, Henri-D. 107 Lactantius 54 lake, sacred 353, 376-77, 389, 413 Lane, Edward W. 124, 187, 196 Laputae 273-274, 282 Last Judgment 191, 198-99, 233, 416n Latin 181, 217n, 284n, 326, 327n, 404, 407, 445 Latopolis (see also Esna) 322 La Vallière, Madame de 483 Lawrence, Brother 111 Lawrence, John 34, 52-53, 57, 506 laws, moral 13, 25-26, 195, 491, 502 laws of nature xiv, 11, 13-14, 25-26, 30, 34-43, 46, 48, 55, 58, 67, 119, 219, 228, 490, 506 Layard, Austen Henry 126n Lear, King 327 Lebanon 279 Legros, Mr (consul’s secretar y) 161-62, 166-67, 171, 173-74, 416-17, 420n, 425, 463 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 28 Leo the Great 54 Lepsius, Carl Richard 221, 245, 247n, 274, 288, 291, 298n, 317, 352-53, 367, 369, 374 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 15, 72 Levinge 154, 173-74, 212 Lewis, John Frederick and Mrs 295-297, 300-02, 268, 437 liberal/liberalism 135, 136n Libya/Libyan 141-42, 204, 231, 235, 237, 289, 326, 353-54, 376-77, 402, 426, 431 life/live 37-38, 40-41, 52, 54, 56-57, 59, 62, 69-71, 83, 85-89, 96, 98, 100,

102, 107-12, 118-19, 131, 140-43, 147, 149, 163, 171, 178, 184, 186, 193, 196, 203, 206, 214, 228-29, 235, 239-40, 243, 246, 250, 252-53, 258-60, 262-64, 268, 279, 292, 297-98, 305-07, 310, 312-15, 319, 324, 328-29, 332-33, 345, 357, 359-60, 363-65, 379, 372n, 373-75, 378, 381, 384, 386-87, 389-90, 397, 410, 418, 424, 430, 435-36, 438-39, 445-46, 461, 473, 475-76, 494, 500, 503-04, 506, 508 Life and Family xi, 53n Lilliputian 327 Lincoln, Lord 350n, 454, 462 Lindsay, Lord 291n litanies 35, 45 Lock Tay 246 Locke, John 503 Loggie 278 London 107, 109, 123, 152, 156, 226, 239, 330, 338, 349, 358, 379, 420, 440, 442, 460, 506n London, plague of 36, 38 Longueville, Madame de 483 Lord (God or Jesus) 32, 34, 42, 48, 60, 64-66, 69-70, 73, 85, 88-91, 94-103, 106-07, 110-13, 218, 229, 250, 260, 271, 312-13, 347, 350, 469-72, 474-75, 491 Lord’s Prayer 112-13 Lord’s Supper 492 Louis, St 447 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) 127n Louis XIV 39n, 357, 429, 484n Louis-Philippe 128 Louise de France, Madame 484 Lower Egypt 181, 289n, 313 Lucifer 233 Luke, St 358 Luther, Martin 15 Lutheran Church xii Luxor 221, 233-41, 262, 323-26, 328-30, 337, 348-49, 355, 369, 375-76, 403, 465, 469, 471 Lycopolis 202-04, 206, 405, 408, 448 Lyons 129

550 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Ma’at 270-71, 278-79, 291, 361-63, 373, 389, 395 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 226 Macbeth 187, 246, 277, 327, 345n, 367n MacDuff, John Russ 504 Maconochie, Alexander 141 Madeleine, La 356, 360 Magdeburg Confession 487 Mahabharata 503 Mahatta 295-96, 300-02 Mahmoudieh Canal 150, 159, 161, 213, 456-57 Malta/Maltese 132-43, 146, 148, 150, 238, 320, 324, 423, 458 Mameluke 120, 162, 165, 447, 449 Mameluke tombs 166, 441, 445, 462 Manchester 320 Manetho 247n Manetho 206, 340, 392, 412, 413n Manfaloot 197, 199-201, 298n, 421 Manicheism/Manichee 29n, 484-86 Marcus Antoninus 497 Mariette, Auguste 328n Mark, St 316, 358, 418-19 Maronite 417 Mars 242 Marseilles 130, 132-34, 137, 142n, 232, 238-39, 349n, 465 Martineau, Har riet 124n, 192, 220, 239, 293n, 303n, 336, 454 Martyn, Henr y 33 martyr/martyrdom 36, 39, 88, 105, 202n, 249, 256, 297, 303, 418, 431, 436, 444, 446, 461 Mar y, mother of Jesus (see also NotreDame, virgin Mary) 162, 164, 418 Mar y Magdalene de’ Pazzi 48 Masr-el-Kahira (see also Cairo) 419 Mau 270, 292 Maut 270, 349 Max Müller, Friedrich (see Müller, Friedrich Max) Mazzini, Giuseppe 484 McCracken, Mr 124, 212-13, 465 McNeill, John 495-96 Mea 36 Mecca 155, 209, 419, 442, 444

Medinet Habu 330-31, 335-36, 343-44, 353, 356-58, 360-61, 368-69, 392, 402-03, 469 Memnon 326, 349, 367, 408, 467 Memphis 398, 410-13, 415-18, 421-23, 425, 436 Menelaus 359, 395 Menes (see also Narmer) 172-73, 289, 291n, 310-11, 416 Mephra, Queen 339 Mercur y 154, 291, 366 Mernaptah 351 Mesopotamia 349, 471 Messiah 52, 74 Metahara 188, 196 metaphysics/metaphysical 192n, 219-20, 224, 242-43, 292, 311, 341, 343, 351, 363, 393, 395, 493, 496, 504 Metareh 231 Methodism/Methodist Church xii Michelangelo 22, 190n, 202, 378 Middle Ages 11, 61, 66, 393 Mill, John Stuart 15, 29, 54 Milnes, Richard Monckton 483, 494 Milton, John 29, 242, 244, 252, 412, 486, 490, 503 Minya 183-87, 189, 195-96, 201, 411, 421 miracle 28, 35, 38, 67, 75n, 99, 198, 200, 212, 252, 418, 427, 493-94 mission 43, 52, 384, 459 missionar y 1, 33-34, 47, 187, 297, 351, 413, 506 Moeris Apappus 247 Mohl, Julius ix, 108-09, 171, 483, 488-89, 491-93, 496-503 Mohl, Mary Clarke ix, 108-09, 221n, 489, 500 Mokattam 448 Moltke, Helmut von 22 monks/monastic/monasticism/ monaster y 82, 111, 138, 215-16, 217n, 222, 231, 382 monotheism 489-90, 492 Montu 242 Mooi 342, 366, 394 Moore, Mary Clare 2, 9, 78

Index / 551 Moors/Moorish 161, 165-66, 169, 173, 191, 417-18, 422, 437, 439, 441, 444-46, 449, 452 moral philosophy 89, 496 mortality xiii, 86, 458 mortification 30, 39, 83, 98-99, 485-86, 489-90 Moses/Mosaic 33-34, 89, 94, 113, 162, 164, 166, 174, 177, 226, 240, 265, 275, 286, 288, 290, 291n, 308, 336, 340, 348, 382, 398, 400, 407, 412-13, 416, 419-21, 426, 431-32, 434-39, 446, 454, 492, 506 muezzin (caller to prayer)156, 158 mufti (lawyer) 157 Muhammad (= Mahomet, Mahommed, Mohammed) 4, 162, 418n, 443, 446, 448, 452, 488, 492, 495 Muhammad Ali 120, 146-47, 149n, 158, 162, 164, 170-71, 176, 189, 195, 197, 200n, 221n, 240, 321, 376, 437, 448, 452, 457, 461-62 mullah (priest) 146, 158, 178 Müller, Friedrich Max 498 Mur ray, Charles August (consul-general) 166, 168, 171, 179, 230, 300, 302, 337-38, 350n, 360, 367, 369, 410, 417, 422, 454, 462 Muslim/s (= Mahometan, Mahomedan, Muhammadan, Mussulman) (see also Islam, Qur’an) 118, 138, 146, 154-56, 158, 164, 167, 170, 185, 205, 214-17, 229-31, 244, 249, 279, 289, 297, 352, 419, 440, 444, 450-51, 460, 483, 489n, 496, 501n, 506 Mustafa (cook) 180, 212, 280, 329, 337, 405-06, 408-09 Mut 310, 314-15, 340, 342-43, 366, 370, 375, 469 Mycerinus 415, 430 myster y 11, 27-29, 35, 46-47, 91, 143, 145, 169n, 182, 184, 193, 265, 346, 357, 388, 397, 414, 442-44, 447, 449, 472-74, 485n, 491 mystical religion 13, 33 mysticism/mystical 2, 9-14, 17-27, 30,

32, 34-35, 38-39, 41, 44, 47-48, 61n, 74, 81, 83, 119, 185, 220, 343, 363, 381, 386, 388, 393, 483, 488, 492, 495 myth/mythology 119, 178, 187n, 228, 310, 313, 340n, 342, 363, 490, 493 naos 244, 280, 309, 394-95 Napoleon 129, 134n, 237n, 356-57, 360 Napoleon III (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte) 127n Narmer, King (see also Menes) 289 Nash, Rosalind Shore Smith 11, 16, 483 Nebuchadnezzar 127 Nefertari, Queen 263, 269, 331, 340-41, 343, 357, 475 Negro 265, 279, 389 Neith 284, 304, 310, 314, 322, 342, 365, 374, 430 Nelson, Horatio 153 Nemesis 506 neo-Platonism 202, 217n, 287n, 289n, 493n Nephthys 302n Nero, Emperor 289n nether world (see also Amenti) 178, 187n, 293, 321-23, 327n New Testament 24, 50, 358, 487 Newman, John Henry (Cardinal) 15, 54, 67 Newton, Isaac 401, 413 Nezlah Hanum 162, 171, 461 Nezlet e Sheikh Timay 195-96, 200 Nicholson, George Henry 205n, 206n, 232, 239, 283, 324 Nicholson, Hannah 151 Nicolaitans 486 Nicopolis 153 Nightingale, Frances ix, 124n, 133, 245, 275, 318, 322, 466, 494 Nightingale, Parthenope ‘‘Pop’’ (see also Verney) ix, xi-xii, 121-22, 132, 135, 145, 166, 210n, 284, 293, 295, 298n, 317, 323, 420, 423, 434, 465-66, 493, 502-03 Nightingale, William Edward ix, xi-

552 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions xiii, 2, 16, 124n, 134-36, 150n, 275, 323, 465-66, 496-97 Nightingale Fund 110 Nile 118-20, 132, 137, 148, 150n, 151, 155, 159, 161-62, 166-68, 169n, 173-78, 180n, 181-84, 186-87, 190, 193, 196-201, 204, 206-07, 213-14, 218, 222, 229-30, 235, 244, 295, 297, 300-01, 305-06, 318, 323, 326, 328, 330, 337, 347, 349, 360, 377, 383, 405, 407-08, 416, 420-21, 437-39, 456, 462 Nilometer 181, 431 Nilus 305-06, 316, 349 nir vana 498-99, 501, 504 Nitria 215 Noah 271 Nock, Arthur Darby 284n Noffke, Suzanne 61n Northampton, Marques of 150, 299-301, 338, 350n, 420n, 433, 454, 462 Notre-Dame (see also Mar y, Virgin Mar y) 125 Nubia 118, 145, 157, 199, 212, 221n, 232, 237, 239, 245-46, 252-53, 255-56, 261, 263n, 264, 272-75, 280, 282-83, 293-96, 300, 316, 322, 326, 413, 433, 440, 465-66, 505 Nugent, Lord 133, 135, 141 obelisk 235, 237, 339, 350, 354, 363, 376, 384, 431, 434-35 Obr y, Jean-Baptiste François 499 O’Driscoll, Mary 61n O’Fer rall, Richard Mor ris 138-39 Old Testament 193, 220, 227, 358, 492 Olier, Jean-Jacques 61 Olympiads 290 Ombte (see also Seth) 258-59 Onase 189 Onofrio (see also Annofre) 418 Ophites 485 Origen 54, 217-18, 222 Ormazd 29, 485 Osirides 257, 262, 268, 274, 278, 331, 339n, 360, 376

Osiris 153, 158 162, 172, 186, 203, 223-25, 228, 250, 256, 258, 261-63, 265-66, 268-71, 273-74, 276, 285n, 291, 293, 295, 302-10, 321-16, 318, 333, 342-43, 353, 362-63, 365-67, 378, 381, 385-87, 392, 395, 397, 400, 418, 493, 507 Osiris’s chamber/hall 271, 274, 293-94, 301-03, 306-08, 312, 314, 323 Osirtasen 190, 194, 339, 375, 435 Otto 420, 423 Oudinot, Nicolas Charles Victor 484 Ovid 239n Owen, Robert 278 pacha 171, 179, 181n, 184, 186-87, 189, 205, 211, 244, 272, 274, 296, 320, 322-23, 356, 371, 396, 441, 449, 455, 458 Pachomius 215-17, 222, 231 Paetus and Arrian 266 Pair (colossi) 234, 237, 241-42, 335, 337, 339, 355 Palaestinus 313 Palestine 339 Pali 499 Palm Sunday 432, 437, 440 Palmerston, Viscount 410n, 423, 430n Panopolis 207, 212-13, 405, 407, 409 pantheism 27, 58, 483, 489-91 Paolo (guide) 137, 176-77, 180-81, 183, 187-88, 198-99, 201, 211-12, 236, 246-47, 254-56, 272, 274, 280-81, 318, 323, 337, 378-79, 404, 407-09, 411, 423, 425, 456 papal infallibility xii Paris xiii, 47n, 109, 118, 125, 126n, 127-28, 133, 226, 237n, 339, 356n, 459, 489, 501 Park, Mungo 202, 458 Parsis 507 Pascal, Blaise 351 Passion Week 295, 301 Passover/Passover Week 295, 315 Paul, St 15, 48, 106, 191, 353, 436, 460, 468, 485, 487 peace 44, 55, 58, 61, 73, 86-88, 90,

Index / 553 92-95, 103, 126, 166, 195, 234, 244, 252, 266, 431, 475 Pentateuch 112 per fection 47-48, 59, 66, 71, 77, 81, 84-85, 88-89, 100, 104-05, 193, 226-27, 276, 363, 365, 381, 464, 473, 475, 486-87, 489-91, 498, 500-02, 506 Persia/Persian 71, 143n, 167-68, 215, 137, 243, 249, 259, 288, 294, 419, 485, 489, 492-93, 495-98, 500 Peter, St 50, 98, 106, 111, 210, 305, 403, 419 Peter of Alcantara 11 Petrified Forest 454, 463 pharaoh 155, 164, 186, 194, 201, 249, 265n, 332-33, 378, 392, 401, 415, 419, 435, 438 Pharisee 111, 492 Pharos 125, 143, 153 Phidias 22, 488 Philae 119, 150, 225, 228, 245, 249-51, 255-57, 272, 282-84, 293-95, 297-98, 300-18, 322, 324, 349, 358, 366, 397, 466 philanthropy 15, 31 Philistines 265, 339 Philo of Alexandria 217-18 Phoenicians 227 phookas 221-22, 340 Pilate 41, 129, 149 Piraeus 410n, 420, 423 Pius IX (pope) xii, 127n Plato/Platonism 15, 21, 53-54, 202, 217-18, 220, 225, 227, 286, 292, 332, 341n, 347, 366, 386, 393, 402, 431-32, 434-36, 439, 488-89, 497, 506n Plotinus 289n Plutarch 305n, 306, 308n, 340n, 386-87, 497 Pluto 224 Poimandres 284n, 363-65, 383 politics 119-20, 141, 149, 154, 157, 170, 348, 370, 372, 394, 401, 424, 472, 488 Polycarp 105 Polycrates 415, 436

polytheism 219 Pompey 143-44, 152-53, 158 pope/s 128, 487n, 488 Porphyr y 289 Port-Royal 487n, 488 portico 244, 278, 280, 282, 309, 315-16, 321-23, 330, 348, 360, 397, 403, 442, 450, 452 positivism 13, 25-26, 30, 34, 506n prayer 10, 12-14, 17-18, 22-26, 32-33, 35, 38, 45, 49, 51-54, 57-58, 60-63, 66, 68, 70-71, 77, 80, 83, 85, 90, 92-93, 100, 103-04, 106, 109-11, 113, 119, 124-25, 155-56, 170, 178, 188, 196, 203, 215, 222, 265-66, 271, 292, 302, 311, 320, 341, 352, 362, 365, 418, 430-32, 434, 439, 442, 444, 448-50, 464, 492, 505, 508 predestination 3 Prest, John 16n priest/priesthood xiv, 37, 135, 165, 204, 224, 259, 271, 277-78, 285n, 287-91, 309, 319, 328, 343-44, 348, 358, 366, 70, 382, 392-93, 395-401, 408, 417, 434, 436, 460, 496, 506n priestcraft 347-48, 396, 401 Prometheus 239n, 347, 412 pronos 244, 265, 280, 358, 361 prophecy/prophet 58, 69, 74, 89, 99, 113, 193, 217, 224, 243, 288-90, 392, 425, 456, 494 propylaeum/propylon 185, 190, 233, 236-37, 240-41, 251, 278, 284, 308-09, 317, 319, 339, 344, 350, 355, 360, 367-71, 375-76, 400 prosekos 258, 278, 309, 376 Protestant/Protestantism xiii, 1, 13n, 28n, 82, 146, 216, 225, 338, 413, 444, 483-84, 487, 490, 492, 494 Proteus 359 providence 35, 46-47, 57, 72, 164, 258, 457 psalms 492 Psammetichus II 415 Pselcis 282 Ptah 222-24, 267, 275-78, 283, 308, 314, 394, 412 Ptolemais 212, 218

554 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Ptolemy/Ptolemies/Ptolemaic 153, 204, 237, 249, 291n, 294, 317-18, 326, 353, 361, 367, 370, 392, 401-02 Public Health Care xiii Puritan 26, 294, 487, 489, 492 Pusey, Edward B. 133, 140 pylon 236-37, 284, 294, 339, 375-76 pyramids 160, 62, 166-67, 173-74, 182-83, 191, 208, 242, 288, 298n, 303, 381, 410-12, 414-15, 418, 420-22, 425-27, 429-31, 433, 438, 441, 446, 449, 454, 462 Pyramid, Great 415, 426-27, 431-32 Pythagoras/Pythagorean 227, 366, 382, 386-88, 391, 393, 402, 415, 428, 434, 436, 488, 492, 497 Qena 206n, 215, 220-22, 225n, 229-32, 234, 238, 241, 302, 323-24, 349n, 397n, 402-03 Quetelet, Lambert Adolphe Jacques 16, 501 quietism/quietist 13, 27n, 44 Quinn, Vincent 16n Qumran (see also Dead Sea Scrolls) 216 Qur’an 155, 158, 189, 289, 321, 443, 446-47, 450, 494-95 Qurna 331, 348-49, 360, 369, 402-03, 469, 471 Ra 261, 264-65, 267, 270-71, 279, 311, 314, 344, 348, 363, 379, 383-84, 388, 391, 434, 469 Rachel 338 Ramesses 406, 419, 426, 431, 438, 466, 476 Ramesses I 341n, 343, 348, 368-70, 390, 395, 469, 471 Ramesses II/Ram/Ramesses the Great 186, 190, 234, 236-37, 241, 258, 260, 263-69, 273, 278-79, 282, 284, 285n, 291n, 294, 298n, 309, 313, 319, 327, 331, 335, 340-41, 344, 346-48, 350, 355-56, 358-59, 361, 363, 368n, 375, 377-78, 411-12, 415-16, 436, 469, 474-75

Ramesses III 186, 339, 357-60, 368-69, 384, 389, 392, 395, 469, 476 Ramesses IV 330-31, 334, 395 Ramesses V 330-31, 333-34, 368-69, 381, 389-92, 394-95 Ramesses VIII 376 Ramesses IX 369, 395 Ramesseum 234-35, 328, 330-3I 335-36, 340, 342-44, 349, 352, 355, 357-58, 363, 367-69, 402-03, 469 Raphael 210, 224, 278, 388 Ravignan, Gustave-Xavier Lacroix de 11, 26, 77 Re 273 Rees, Joan 1 Rehoboam 338-40, 367 reis (captain) 180, 194, 198-99, 254, 321-22, 394, 424 religion/religious/religionist xi, 10, 13, 17, 20-21, 23, 24n, 25-30, 32-33, 34-38, 42, 45-46, 49, 60, 74, 85, 112-13, 118-19, 135, 141, 156, 162, 169, 179, 196, 202, 217-20, 226, 244, 261n, 289-90, 291n, 292-93, 306, 309, 333, 335, 338, 340-41, 345-48, 350-51, 357-58, 370, 372, 386, 392-94, 399-201, 412, 418, 439-40, 442, 444, 450-51, 460, 472, 474, 476, 485-89, 491-92, 497-501 religious orders xiii, 42, 59n, 216, 270, 483, 488 Rembrandt van Rijn 194 repentance 243, 266, 334, 371-72, 389, 454, 489 resurrection 69, 97, 106, 203, 228n, 243-44, 268-69, 302n, 305-08, 314, 353, 373, 378 Reto 242-43 reveal/revelation 58, 61n, 64n, 68, 72, 257, 263, 268, 284n, 304, 310-12, 362, 402, 418, 485n Revelations (see also Bible, Revelation) 134, 177, 313, 329, 358, 485-86 Rhaebenaen 186, 190 Rhoda 166-67, 173-74, 181, 411, 420, 431-434-35, 447 Richardson, Samuel 319n Rigoleuc, Jean 11

Index / 555 Roberts, David 237 Robertson, Frederick W. 15, 21n, 24, 417 Rodriguez, Alfonso 20n, 23n, 43n Rolfe, Baron 271 Roman Catholic (see also Catholicism) xii, 19, 26, 30-32, 37, 42, 45, 81-82, 123, 135, 146, 216, 309, 338, 351, 362, 413, 418, 439, 444, 489, 491-92, 494 Rome/Roman 105, 127n, 129, 139, 152, 190n, 204, 213, 217, 221, 244, 248-49, 253n, 256n, 259, 266n, 278, 280, 282, 284, 295n, 287, 291, 330-31, 351, 354, 375-76, 397-99, 401-02, 405, 416-19, 421, 438, 449, 484 Rome (Nightingale at) xii, 1, 117, 126n, 143n, 174n, 260n, 275, 302, 408n, 443 Rosetta 317 Rosetti, Madame 161, 167, 171, 439, 455, 457, 461-65 Rumeyleh (square) 447, 449, 462-63 Rumi 495 Ruskin, John 443n Russia 494-95 Ryllo, Padre 256, 297, 301 Saadi 495 Sabaco 377 Sabeism/Sabeans 488 Sabellius/Sabellians 213, 218-19 Sabora 377 sacrament (see also holy communion, Eucharist) 37, 64, 83, 100-04, 170, 173, 316, 444, 453, 464, 487 sacrifice 18, 61, 84, 127, 151, 172, 223-24, 227, 260-61, 274, 279, 282, 312, 315, 319, 328, 337, 344, 382, 384, 399, 444, 448, 487-88, 490 Sadducee 492 Said Pacha 120, 146, 457, 461-62, 465 saint/sanctity 34, 85, 106, 202, 285n, 418, 434, 442, 489, 492, 504 Sainte Colombe, Laure de (madre) 408-09, 422, 464 Saint-Cyran 15, 488

sais 172 Sais 284, 310 sakia 272, 294, 349, 433, 437, 452-53, 472 Sakyamuni 219, 498 Salah-e-din (Saladin) 419, 432, 437, 447 Salmis 282 salvation 14, 19, 23, 24n, 36, 46-47, 65, 100-01, 487, 497 Samalut 185, 190 Sanskrit 393, 499 santon (hermit) 185, 230 Saqqara 182, 413-15, 412-22, 426-47 Saracen/Saracenic 249, 448, 462 Sarah 338 Satan (see also devil, sheytan) 29, 244, 258, 308, 313, 366 Satis 250, 253 Sattin, Anthony 1, 120-22, 150n, 154n Saviour 19, 69, 77, 84, 101-02, 160, 162, 228, 242-43, 293, 305, 306n, 312, 333, 445, 506 scarab 263, 267, 277, 308, 318, 378-79, 389, 391, 466 Scott, Walter 284n, 350n, 351n, 364n Scutari 118 Seb 394-95 sebeel 452 Sehel 253 sekos 242, 244, 258, 361, 392, 396 Semite/Semitic 192n, 313, 410n, 485, 489-92 Senzi, Felicetta 212-13 Septuagint 72 Serapeum 217 sermon 82, 170, 266, 344, 383, 410, 437, 439 Sesostris 127, 241, 258, 435 Seth (see also Ombte) 258-59, 302n, 303, 313, 373-74 Seti I 434, 348, 351-52, 357, 368-71, 373-74, 376-81, 384-85, 387-90, 392, 395, 469, 472-74 Seti II 392 Severin, St 484 Shakespeare, William 241, 501n Sharpe, Samuel 124

556 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions Shaw Stewart, Jane 53 sheikh 149, 178, 185, 195, 200, 247, 253, 255, 275, 300, 352, 403, 406, 408, 450, 452 Sheikh Abd-el-Qurna (tombs) 327-28, 330-31, 352, 367, 369 Sheikh Hassan 184, 189 Sheikh Hereedee 408-09 Sheikh Hoseyn (consul) 320-31 Sheikh Timay 195, 200 Sheshonq 339-40 sheytan (see also devil, Satan) 230, 429 Shi’ite 405 Shubra 431, 434 Siamese 503 Siddhartha 498 Sier ra Leone 56 Sieveking, Amelie 1 sin/sinner 46-48, 71, 73-74, 86, 98-99, 101-02, 127, 249, 265-66, 304, 313-14, 334, 353, 362, 371, 382, 386, 389, 490 sirocco 197 Sisters of Charity (of St-Vincent-dePaul) 47n, 457-59, 463 Sisters of Good Shepherd 455, 459, 463 Sisters of Mercy 459 Sistine Chapel 190, 193, 196, 378 Siva/ Sivaites 490-91 Smith, Bertha 271n Smith, Louisa Shore 324 Smith, Mary Shore ‘‘Aunt Mai’’ ix, 83, 89n, 150n, 151, 225n, 258, 406, 423, 435, 466, 503-04 Smith, Samuel Shore ix, 226n, 503 Smith, William Shore, ‘‘Shore’’ ix, 173, 324, 432, 436n, 437, 466 Smyrna/Smyrniot 105, 145, 148, 420, 423, 438, 455-58, 463-64 Sobek 317, 368-69, 407, 414 Society and Politics xiii, 29n, 39n, 45n, 54n, 58n, 494n, 502n Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 11, 16 Socinian 486-87 Socrates 67, 209, 341, 383, 436, 506n Sodomite 495

Solomon 293, 360, 444, 469 Solon 227, 415, 434 Son of God (see also Christ, Jesus, Lord) 19, 28, 47, 49-50, 74, 149, 223, 285, 364, 443, 491 Sori 394 Sothis 316, 341 soul/s 20, 22-24, 27, 30, 33, 49-50, 52, 57, 60-63, 65-66, 70, 73, 76, 78-79, 87-93, 95, 102-03, 108, 113, 131, 187n, 203, 211, 219, 231-32, 250, 259-60, 263, 267, 306-07, 313-14, 316, 332, 334, 341-42, 346, 352-53, 362-65, 372, 381-84, 386-87, 390, 397, 426, 439, 444, 456, 477, 473, 497 Sozzini, Fausto Paulo 486n Spain/Spanish 11, 16-17, 39, 66, 127, 441, 484, 492 sphinx/es 236, 283, 308, 328, 373, 375-77, 426, 428, 430-41 Spinoza, Benedict 13, 15, 58n Spirit of God 19, 43, 71, 101, 131, 249-50, 261n, 271, 286, 303, 364, 386, 505, 507 spirituality/spiritual 10-12, 15, 17, 21-22, 25-26, 55-59, 77, 85-86, 105-13, 120, 202, 206, 218, 224, 227-28, 260, 262, 269, 312, 316, 334, 336, 341-42, 365, 392-93, 407, 412, 443n, 444, 488, 497 spiritual exercises 11, 35, 43-45 Spiritual Journey xi-xii, 15n, 17n, 55n, 83n, 89n 105, 110 St Paul’s church 156 St Peter’s church in Rome 156, 202, 271, 275, 350-51, 356, 358, 440, 443 St Thomas’ Hospital 1, 111 St-Vincent-de-Paul, Sisters of (see also Sisters of Charity) 117, 128, 140, 147-48, 152, 157-58, 164, 167n, 457-61, 464-65 Stanley, Arthur 136n Stanley, Catherine 207, 324, 409, 423 Stanley, Edward 136n Stanley, Mar y 324 Stephen, Barbara 11, 16

Index / 557 Stephen, James 67 Stobaeus 350n, 364n Stoicism/Stoic 491 Strabo 412, 430 Strauss, David F. 305 Styx/Stygian 187, 321. Sudan 248 Suez 164, 173, 215 suffer/suffering 20, 24, 40, 45-47, 49, 52-53, 57, 61-65, 69, 71-75, 77, 79, 81, 85-87, 90-91, 95-97, 101, 105-07, 109, 196, 243-44, 262, 303-04, 312-13, 353-54, 371, 418, 456, 474, 500, 507 Sufis 483, 489, 492-93, 495 Suggestions for Thought xi, 17n, 23n Sulpicius 54 Sultan Hassan (mosque) 162, 443, 447, 449, 462-63 Sultan Kalaun (mosque) 449-50, 463 Sultan Teylun (mosque) 448, 463 superstition/ious 22, 158, 224, 490 Surin, Jean-Joseph 11, 61, 76 Swift, Jonathan 273n Syene (see also Aswan) 245-46, 248-49, 251-53, 255, 299-300 Syra 349n, 420, 457 Syria 105, 137, 294, 354, 445, 448, 493n, 497n Tabenna 215, 222 tabernacle 94, 340, 358-9 Talmud 507 Tamerlan 445 Tamun 374 Tantalus 501 Taphis 284 Tartar 445 Teheran 496 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 13n temenos 339, 376-77, 401 Teresa of Avila 11, 14, 20n, 23n, 32n, 39n, 56n, 58n, 60n, 66, 68-72, 77, 81, 483, 491 Tertullian 54 Thales 434 Thames 197, 200n, 330 Thamus 292

Thebaid 187, 202-03, 206, 215-17, 222, 382 Thebes 120, 155, 188, 205, 213, 221, 223, 229, 231-35, 237-40, 242, 245, 247n, 251, 257, 261n, 288-89, 307, 310, 314, 318, 321-96, 402-03, 405, 408, 411, 420, 422, 424, 428, 434, 436, 440-41, 466, 468-72, 474, 476, 505 Theban triad 314-15 theodicy/theodikè/theology 14-15, 19, 23, 25-31, 47, 54, 112, 216n, 224, 287-88, 486n, 487n, 492n, 504 Theology xi, 9n, 16, 18n, 23n, 133n, 151n, 223, 305n, 506n theology, Egyptian 35, 222-27, 242, 244, 277, 307, 310-12, 372 theosophy 121 Thermuthis 188, 373, 390 Thetis 207 Thiers, Adolphe 128 Tholuck, August 492 Thomas, St 507 Thomas à Kempis 9, 21, 82-83 Thoth 265, 284n, 285n, 287, 291-92, 311, 314-16, 341-42, 350, 354, 359, 362-66, 371, 374-75, 381, 384, 397, 407, 469, 493n Trautwein 121, 132, 152, 166, 183, 194, 212n, 274, 323, 336, 369, 409, 466 Trench, Miss 325 Trieste 349n, 410, 457, 464-68 Trinity/trinitarian 28, 213, 218-20, 223, 225, 265, 270, 284, 286, 306, 315, 342, 370, 373, 490, 493-94 Trismegistos (see Hermes) Trojan War 359 tr uth 25-26, 31-35, 38, 40, 46-48, 51, 54-55, 58, 62-63, 66, 69, 71, 73-74, 88-89, 91-92, 94, 96-97, 99, 107-08, 112-13, 141, 140, 172, 193, 204, 222, 224, 241, 259, 261, 270-71, 276-78, 288, 291-92, 295, 303-04, 312, 316, 332, 342, 348, 350-52, 357, 359, 361-64, 373, 378, 381-84, 387-89, 401, 429,

558 / Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions 435, 441, 471, 475, 493, 499-500, 505 Tunzelmann, Elise von 135 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 22 Turk/Turkey/Turkish 120, 144, 150, 161, 167-69, 171, 173-74, 176, 178-79, 189, 295-96, 329, 425, 429, 432, 448-49, 461, 494-95, 502 Tuthmosis 265 Tuthmosis I 339, 355, 376 Tuthmosis II 339, 436 Tuthmosis III 328, 330, 339, 350, 352, 354-55, 368, 375-76, 434, 436, 469-70 Tuthmosis IV 430-31 Typhon 206, 258, 309-10, 313-14, 373, 397 Ulama (scholars of Islam) 189, 450, 452 Ulysses 402 union/unity with God 12-13, 19, 33-34, 41-42, 44, 46, 48, 51, 54, 103-04, 266, 372, 387, 390 Unitarian/Unitarianism 220, 442, 443-44 Upper Egypt 160, 201-02, 205n, 209, 240, 256, 289n, 383, 404 Urim and Thummim 204, 271 Ussher, Archbishop 312n Uzbekistan 496 Vacherot, Étienne 28 Valley of the Kings 221n, 235, 288, 330-35, 368-69, 377-96, 403, 408 Valley of the Queens 335, 367, 369 Veda 490-91, 496-97, 507 Venus 138, 143, 160, 257 Verney, Emily 298n Verney, Frederick 23n, 142n, 502 Verney, Har ry (Sir) ix, 110, 263n, 298n, 496n, 502-03 Verney, Margaret 503 Verney, Maude xiin, 111, 503 Verney, Parthenope (see also Nightingale) 502-03 Vesta 250, 279, 314-15

Victoria, Queen 194n, 331, 430n Vincent de Paul 47 Vincent, Samuel 71 virgin 279, 372 Virgin Mary (see also Mar y, NotreDame) 148, 186, 225, 421, 485 Virgin and Child 417-18, 484 Vishnu/Vishnuites 490-91 Vulcan 224, 275-77 Wahhabi 501 Waldenses 146 Ward, Henr y George 136, 139 Wesley, John 21n, 112n Wesleyan Church/movement xii Westminster Abbey 21, 268 Wichern, Johann Hinrich 1 Wilbraham, Richard 53 Wilkinson, John Gardner 124, 154n, 190, 200, 223n, 239, 245, 270, 284n, 286n, 291n, 303n, 302n, 305, 308n, 312n, 360, 362n, 363n, 395n woman/women, condition of 118, 153-57, 159-60, 165, 169-70, 181, 205, 209, 248, 269, 297, 327, 338, 400, 404, 438, 451 Women xiii Wood, Charles 53 worship/per 26, 127, 148, 162-63, 203, 219-20, 222m 250, 256, 261-62, 265-67, 272, 288, 291, 306, 308-09, 319, 333, 351, 354, 357-58, 361, 392, 412-13, 417, 419-20, 440-42, 444, 475, 492 Xenophon 497 Yonge, Charlotte 2, 105-06 Zehnab 296-97, 301-02 Zeus 310, 501n Zizinia 455-56, 463 zodiac 397-98 Zoroaster 29n, 54, 286, 288, 485-86, 490-91, 497, 503 Zwingli, Huldreich 20n