The Wild Rose and the Scholomance: Natural and Demonic Magic in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

By Madeline Potter

As he arrives in Transylvania at the beginning of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jonathan Harker muses over how the land is one of mystery, outdated beliefs, and superstitions. ‘I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians’, he writes in his diary, adding, ‘as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool’.[i] Harker’s lines here position him firmly in a rationalistic mindset, indicating that he is perceiving the antiquated world he finds himself in through a sceptic’s eye. ‘Imaginative’ itself shows that to Jonathan, the very idea of superstition belongs to the world of make-belief, rooted in fiction rather than having any real, practical, or religious applicability.

However, it is revealed that both the threats and the protections feared and employed by Transylvanian locals are real, and a world of the supernatural is disclosed not only through the physical presence of vampires, but also, importantly, through the charms which work against them. It is a world in which hidden realities emerge to the surface, uncovered, often ritualistically. As Christine Ferguson has observed, ‘the novel stands as a veritable compendium of occult beliefs, sciences and figures, riven through with allusions to alchemy, necromancy, lycanthropy, geomancy and the Eastern fakir practices that had become familiar to late Victorian audiences through the rise of comparative religious studies and the contemporary occult revival’, although, as she further qualifies, there has been a critical resistance to read the text’s ‘pervasive occult signs as occult’.[ii] At a textual level, it is clear that apparently inexplicable beings and processes populate a rationalised world at the turn of the century. Scholars such as Alison Milbank, Noelle Bowles, Stephen Purcell, and Madeline Potter have written about the theologies inherent in the novel’s ritualism.[iii] Between theology and the occult implications of the novel’s symbolism, the role played by magic has remained somewhat underexplored. From Dracula’s shapeshifting abilities to Van Helsing’s trustingly falling back onto the power of ‘superstition’, the plot is pervaded by references to and intimations of a type of natural, folk magic, both benevolent and malevolent. As this essay shows, it is a type of magic which aims to infuse the material world with supernatural presences, in tune with the broader direction of the novel’s theological impetus. In God and the Gothic, Alison Milbank has argued that Dracula fashions ‘a mode of ecumenical theology’, while I have described the theological makeup of the novel as an ‘eccentric ecumenical theology’.[iv] Part of this eccentric interweaving of doctrines and belief is the concept of magic, which uncovers the reality – at a textual level – of both demonic and sacred forces at work in the world.

I want to begin by drawing attention to the Faustian underpinnings of Dracula’s magical abilities, which he has likely at least partly picked up at the Scholomance. As Van Helsing explains,

The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.[v]

Stoker draws the idea of the Scholomance from Emily Gerard’s book about Transylvania, The Land Beyond the Forest, which Stoker had read.[vi] In addition, his interest in the theme of the Faustian bargain was arguably also stirred by Henry Irving’s performance in Goethe’s Faust on the stage of London’s Lyceum in 1875 – it was in this convention-defying performance that Irving played the role of Mephistopheles; in addition, as Barbara Belford has written in her biography of Stoker, the author ‘found documented accounts of the devil vanquished in Britain by Catholic ritual in an 1875 book on witchcraft’. [vii]

At the intersection of such themes of witchcraft, ritualism, theology, and performativity lies the rooting of Dracula’s powers of magic within the Faustian myth. It is important to note that as Van Helsing makes Dracula’s Faustian backstory explicit, a gap becomes apparent between his practical abilities which we can describe as pertaining to magic, and their source, a gap which is indeed indicative of the early modern distinction between natural and demonic magic. On the one hand, the tangible effects of the vampire’s magic situate him in the apparent domain of natural magic, for it is through recourse to the natural world, its phenomena, and the beasts of the earth, that he can make manifest his powers. ‘[H]e can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat – the moth, and the fox, and the wolf.’, Van Helsing discloses to his group of vampire hunters, in an almost taxonomical exposition of the vampire’s powers, strengths, and weaknesses.[viii]

With its references to animals, as well as natural phenomena such as storms, fog, and thunder, Van Helsing’s discourse echoes the definition of natural magic which we can trace back to an early modern context. Natural magic, as Stuart Clark explains in his book Thinking with Demons, was seen as one branch of the broader concept of magic, alongside ‘demonic magic’.[ix] The general category of magic, Clark writes, was seen to deal with ‘the study and manipulation of many of those phenomena that we have been calling preternatural’, although, as he later importantly stresses, ‘it is still difficult to use the term uncontentiously’ when applied to the context of ‘early modern religion’.[x] However, Clark clarifies, the appearance of natural magic might indeed be an illusory reflection of a more sinister type of witchcraft, indeed one which reflects the intervention of demonic forces. The distinction between natural and demonic magic is ultimately a moral one; ‘the two sets of effects were at opposite ends of the moral spectrum’, Clark explains, adding that they were ‘separated by an almost manichaeistic dualism’.[xi] In its posing malevolent vampire magic against the healing powers of the natural folk magic practiced by Transylvanian locals, Stoker’s novel plays right into this dualism, which exposes the text’s complex challenging of materialism, through a web of theological and spiritual symbols by crucially using the idioms of materialism itself. ‘Our enemy is not merely spiritual’, Van Helsing warns his allies, drawing attention to the vampire’s physical strength, while on a different occasion he muses over how ‘there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way’, illuminating the clear connection between magic and its physical manifestations.[xii]

At the same time, Stoker subtly hints at the distinction between natural and demonic magic by emphasising the source and nature of Dracula’s abilities. Because the devil is not physically present in the novel, and because Dracula’s shape-shifting and control of the natural world, the Scholomance reference, brief as it may be, serves to stress the difference between the two dimensions of magic, making it evident that Dracula’s is a type of demonic, transactional, and hence conjuring magic. His control over the natural world, then, is derived from his dealings with the Devil himself. Van Helsing’s emphasis is on the transactionality of the situation: on the one hand, he refers to those studying at the Scholomance as scholars, drawing attention to the transference of knowledge from the Devil to themselves; on the other hand, he resorts to monetary language to describe how the teacher claims ‘his due’. Significantly, ‘due’ draws together finance and authority. The OED defines its primary sense as ‘[a]n obligatory payment due to an authority such as the church or the State’, a definition which highlights how, in the context of the Scholomance, the Devil is not only the utmost authority but also, when we take into consideration the implication that due is a tax paid to the church, that his own scholarly institution has corrupted and reversed ecclesiastical structures. In contrast, as Steven M. Stannish and Christine M. Dorran have shown, the magic practiced by Transylvanian locals falls under the realm of actual natural magic; their ‘protections are, with the exception of the crucifix, natural remedies: garlic, wild rose, and mountain ash. They offer wholesome, benevolent magic, repelling a monstrous thing.’[xiii] Natural magic, they add, subjects the vampire to nature’s laws, shedding light on Van Helsing’s own remark that ‘he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws – why we know not.’[xiv] The division between nature and ‘he who is not of nature’ highlights the demonic dimension of Dracula’s condition, as well as his use of magic, while the idea that he must obey, partially, the laws of nature, indicates the idea, expressed by Clark in his explication of magic in the early modern era, that natural and demonic magic might both manifest in physically similar ways. The workings of benevolent magic become central to the fight against Dracula, incorporated into a spiritual arsenal side by side with practical and sacramental theologies.[xv] Chasing the Count across Europe seeking his destruction, Van Helsing sets out a plan for trapping him:

We shall at the first board that ship; then, when we have identified the box, we shall place a branch of the wild rose on it. This we shall fasten, for when it is there none can emerge; so at least says the superstition. And to superstition must we trust at the first; it was man’s faith in the early, and it have its root in faith still. Then, when we get the opportunity that we seek, when none are near to see, we shall open the box, and – and all will be well.[xvi]

Van Helsing’s vision – and instruction – regarding the fight against the vampire is interesting in its bringing together not only science and superstition, but also superstition and practical theology. Crucially, here, he is borrowing from the language of religious belief to put his faith, thoroughly, in the protective power of superstition, specifically the wild rose which, as he has explained, will ‘fasten’ the vampire to his coffin.

Indeed, he traces back faith to the belief in superstition, indicating that superstition was ‘man’s faith in the early’, in a formulation which contrasts the rationalistic worldview which seeps into the collective vision of faith in the fin-de-siècle, and an earlier form of faith. As Jonathan Greenaway has argued, it is from superstition that the threat to religion broadly stems, as evidenced by Harker’s note while in Transylvania about ‘people who are without religion, save superstition’.[xvii] It is important to note that, at this point in the narrative, Harker appears to equate religion with the system of late Victorian Anglicanism. In contrast, what this exposes, as Greenaway goes on to argue,

is the extent to which in the Age of British Imperialism, theology has become instrumentalized as both rational, homely belief, useful for upholding the virtues of capitalist exchange and empire, and at the same, a superstitious force that endangers the status of the British middle classes. The fin-de-siècle materialism of Stoker’s novel is not opposed to religion (Harker for example makes frequent reference to God and faith) but rather the threat lies in religious faith that is not under the control and in the service of good Protestant patriarchs.[xviii]

However, the magic-tinted theological worldview which gradually takes hold of Stoker’s fictional world replaces precisely the kind of Protestant, imperialistic religious framework upheld by the self-professed ‘English churchman’ Harker.[xix] Magic and superstition, then, threaten the scientific-religious equilibrium of fin-de-siècle Britain noted by Greenaway on two different fronts; there is, on the one hand, the threat of the vampire, who, as Greenaway writes, embodies ‘uncontrolled superstition’.[xx]Yet at the same time, the status quo is equally menaced by benevolent, natural magic, and by the apotropaic power of what Van Helsing calls superstition, and to which he ultimately traces faith. Hence, this threat consists not in the demonic violence perpetrated by the vampire, but, instead, in the replacement of a post-miracle, sceptical religious view with one rooted in ancient beliefs and practices. Van Helsing’s decisive trusting in the power of superstition echoes the blind entrusting of life and fate into the hands of God expressed by Laura’s father in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella ‘Carmilla’, a principal influence on Stoker. Faced with the yet unelucidated threat of the vampire, Laura’s father attributes it to natural causes:

“All this,” […] “is strictly referable to natural causes. These poor people infect one another with their superstitions, and so repeat in imagination the images of terror that have infested their neighbours.”[xxi]

He then adds emphatically:

We are in God’s hands; nothing can happen without His permission, and all will end well for those who love Him. He is our faithful creator; He has made us all, and will take care of us.[xxii]

Yet while Van Helsing’s discourse mirrors that of Laura’s father, his conceptualisation of the supernatural sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. Where in Le Fanu’s text, the father rejects superstition, construing it as akin to infection, Van Helsing places it right at the centre of faith. Stephen Purcell has argued that sacred symbols are ultimately ‘instrumentalised’ in the novel, employed as mere tools in the fight against vampire evil, and not accompanied by any real sense of conversion.[xxiii] Yet, at the point when Van Helsing professes the need to trust superstition, his expression of faith is at the same time at its most determinate and its most naïve. There is a child-like quality underpinning the plainness and straightforwardness of his ‘to superstition we must trust’, with its earlier echoes of his similar affirmation that ‘tradition and superstition – are everything’.[xxiv] Let us now return to the early modern conceptualisation of magia as not simply irrational and irreligious practice and belief, but rather as what Clark describes as a ‘mystical illumination as a piece of science’, drawing on the influential summary and exposition of magic philosophy in Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, and ‘pioneered by Ficino’.[xxv] Van Helsing’s arsenal against the vampire is certainly wide-ranging and diverse in its spiritual and scientific sources; and while his spiritual weapons cannot be fully reconciled into a unified system, the apparatus thus created serves to reintroduce a rapport between magic, science, and theology, which stands counter to the avowed scepticism Van Helsing associates with the century. Van Helsing is at once a scientistic, a healer, a magician, and a priest-like figure, his character reconciling these strands of resistance against the vampiric threat.

That the sterilised religious structure of late Victorian England would fail to provide adequate protection in the face of the ancient evil of the vampire is subtly indicated early on in the novel, as Jonathan Harker finds himself plunged into what he sees as the strange land of Transylvania. Trapped inside Castle Dracula, he observes the surrounding landscape, writing about how

To the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and crannies of the stone.[xxvi] 

Although not explicitly mentioned by Van Helsing, we know that the mountain ash is amongst the items given to Harker by the local woman he encounters at the inn, alongside some garlic, a crucifix, and a wild rose.[xxvii] Therefore, it is clear that mountain ash too possesses similar powers as the other spiritually-loaded objects offered to Jonathan, all of which we see further used throughout the novel. There is in the above-quoted passage, then, a visual staging of the magical confrontation taking place in the novel, with Castle Dracula, the vampire’s lair on the one hand, and the mountain ash on the other hand, standing tall on the ‘sheer rock’. Importantly, we find in this symbolically rich image of landscape the same notion of roots as in Van Helsing’s metaphor of magic as having its roots in faith. It is as if, the mountain ash and the castle, in dramatic visual opposition to each other, stage the two types of magic inherent in the book – one natural and benevolent, the other demonic. Clark’s analysis of the two types of magic existing within an almost ‘manichaeistic dualism’ is once again relevant here, with the dramatic rendering of landscape intimating that same sense of operatic opposition, and anticipating not only the clash between human and vampire, but also, as it emerges, the clash between the rationalistic worldview and the ancient mysteries forcefully breaking through into the present and the illusion of disenchantment.[xxviii]

At a textual level, then, the two types of magic clash – the garlic, the mountain ash, and the wild rose (alongside the theological-sacramental presences of the crucifix and the communion wafer) counter-balancing Dracula’s own use of dark magic as he controls the elements and shapeshifts into various animals, in a confrontation akin to a fin-de-siècle psychomachia. Hermeneutically, however, there is cohesion between the two opposing dimensions: the Scholomance and the garlic, the bat form and the mountain ash, belong to the same world. At the level of Manichean stagings, then, a chasm is revealed between a world stripped of enchantment in the fin-de-siècle, and the resurgence of an enchanted reality, where both demons and holy forces are at play. The tensions between sacred and satanic, between vampires and righteous humans, and between the two types of magic, natural and demonic, reflect, on the one hand, a struggle between good and evil; but also, ultimately, they coalesce, bound to each other, in a forceful questioning and challenging of materialism and religious utilitarianism.

Madeline Potter is a postdoctoral research fellow at Edge Hill University’s EHU19, supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies, and the British Association for Victorian Studies. Her research explores the intersections between Gothic literature and theology, with a focus on monstrous depictions in nineteenth-century Irish Gothic. Her academic monograph, Theological Monsters: Religion and Irish Gothic is forthcoming with University of Wales Press.

Bibliography

Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Bowles, Noelle. ‘Crucifix, Communion, and Convent: The Real Presence of Anglican Ritualism in Bram Stoker's Dracula.’ Christianity & Literature 62, no. 2 (2013): 243-58.

Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Ferguson, Christine. ‘Dracula and the Occult.’ The Cambridge Companion to Dracula. Edited by Roger Lockhurst. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 57-65.

Greenaway, Jonathan. Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. In a Glass Darkly. Edited by Robert Tracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Milbank, Alison. God and the Gothic Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Potter, Madeline. ‘Ecumenism to Ontology: Stoker’s Theology of the Host.’ Journal of Victorian Culture 27, no. 3 (2022): 526-41.

Purcell, Stephen. ‘Not Wholly Communion: Skepticism and the Instrumentalization of Religion in Stoker’s Dracula.’ Christianity & Literature 67, no. 2 (2018): 294-311.

Stannish, Steven M., and Christine M. Doran. “Magic and Vampirism in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 2, no. 2 (2013): 113–38. 

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Edited by A. N. Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Taylor, Charles, and Library Garbett. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022.

[i] Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. A. N. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p.2.

[ii] Christine Ferguson, ‘Dracula and the Occult,’ The Cambridge companion to Dracula,  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p.57.

[iii] See Alison Milbank, God and the Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).; Noelle Bowles, ‘Crucifix, Communion, and Convent: The Real Presence of Anglican Ritualism in Bram Stoker's Dracula,’ Christianity & Literature 62, no. 2 (2013); Stephen Purcell, ‘Not Wholly Communion: Skepticism and the Instrumentalization of Religion in Stoker’s Dracula,’ Christianity & Literature 67, no. 2 (2018).; Madeline Potter, ‘Ecumenism to Ontology: Stoker’s Theology of the Host,’ Journal of Victorian Culture 27, no. 3 (2022).

[iv] Milbank, God and the Gothic, p. 225; Potter, ‘Ecumenism to Ontology: Stoker’s Theology of the Host’, p. 532.

[v] Stoker, Dracula, pp. 240-1.

[vi] Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Knopf, 1996), p.260.

[vii] Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula, p. 265.

[viii] Stoker, Dracula, p.237.

[ix] Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.214-5.

[x] Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, pp.214-5.

[xi] Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, p.233.

[xii] Stoker, Dracula, pp.319-20.

[xiii] Steven M. Stannish, and Christine M. Doran, ‘Magic and Vampirism in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana and Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ in Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 2, no. 2 (2013), p. 126.

[xiv] Stannish and Doran, p. 126; Stoker, Dracula, p.240.

[xv] It is important to note, however, that neither the Eastern Orthodox nor the Catholic Church, both espousing sacramental theologies, condone the practice of magic.

[xvi] Stoker, Dracula, p.238.

[xvii] Jonathan Greenaway, Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), p. 162; see Stoker, Dracula, p. 41.

[xviii] Greenaway, Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), p. 162.

[xix] Stoker, Dracula, p. 5.

[xx] Greenaway, Theology, Horror and Fiction: A  Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century, p. 162.

[xxi] Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Carmilla,’ In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 269.

[xxii] Le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’, p.270.

[xxiii]  Purcell, ‘Not Wholly Communion: Skepticism and the Instrumentalization of Religion in Stoker’s Dracula’, p. 295

[xxiv] Stoker, Dracula, p.238.

[xxv] Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, p.217.

[xxvi] Stoker, Dracula, p. 35.

[xxvii] See Stoker, Dracula, p.28.

[xxviii] On secularisation and disenchantment, see Charles Taylor and Library Garbett, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).