A sample article from the third issue
of Irene's Cabinet published by



of Ellicott City, Maryland

The Serpent and the Sorcerer-Knight
By John C. Sherwood

"It is a romance!" cried Mrs. Forrester. "An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian. They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl." "And two knight-errants to the rescue," added Miss Morstan. … "
– From The Sign of Four, published 1890

We take many of our favorite Canonical images for granted. They were, after all, “created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” But when these complex images are lightly scratched, they reveal underlying aspects of something unintended, unconscious, ancient and archetypal.

On close examination, they may even include spiritual allegories, rooted in earlier centuries – and, ironically, in the religious faith Conan Doyle had consciously dismissed.

Conan Doyle was born into a family that practiced Roman Catholicism in a culture where Anglicans and Presbyterians dominated. In time, however, his mind left no room for any religion he saw as inflexible and unprovable. He made his formal break with traditional faith while in his 20s.

By then, however, the Church’s values and iconography were etched on his mind even though he consciously rejected their theological meaning. As a result, the symbols of traditional faith were to emerge in his writings – symbols that may not have been entirely intended, but which produced forms that had lasting subliminal impact on readers.

The illustration at left shows St. George using his lance to slay a dragon in its cavern.

In fact, almost from the start of the Holmes saga, Conan Doyle borrowed from images inspired by religious faith – specifically, the iconography of Roman Catholic belief, history and symbolism:

Conan Doyle couldn’t have avoided seeing these icons. Among the ruins of England’s abbeys and churches linger thousands of figures that for centuries spoke to the masses. These figures embody the battle between good and evil, typically in the form of a knight – a soldier of God – slaying a dragon or serpent, rescuing the world’s future – represented by a maiden – from Satan, in the form of a corrupted sorcerer.

Such images probably weren’t in Conan Doyle’s conscious mind when, at age 28, he set pen to paper to produce A Study in Scarlet.. As is known, his purpose was – in addition to paying his bills – to create a thoroughly modern detective cast in a scientific mold. Still, religious faith – represented by Mormonism – had much to do with the tale. In fact, the resulting novel was slyly critical of intense religious faith, representing Conan Doyle’s sweeping, youthful view of spiritual subjects. To underscore the point, he provided a hero with no relationship to faith whatsoever.

The scientifically minded Sherlock Holmes became a figurehead of reason and law in contrast to a form of faith-based life depicted – shallowly – as of doubtful merit. In this first novel, Conan Doyle had a young, jocular and sociable Holmes write an article, “The Book of Life,” which – instead of stating a philosophy involving spirituality – sets forth a philosophy of pure reason. Thus, in an interpretive sense, A Study in Scarlet became the young Conan Doyle’s statement that reason could triumph in the face of actions motivated by irrational emotions and belief.

Faith and its forms would hold Conan Doyle's mind in a firm grip all his writing life, and he would produce many works that dealt with the nature of belief in a variety of forms – most notably his own late-in-life trust in Spiritualism.

When Conan Doyle was 30, Lippincott's Magazine asked him to produce a new Holmes novel. He retained his notion of a scientific detective, but felt he should embellish the product. He re-invented Holmes as a reclusive drug addict who rises above his personal drawbacks to battle sinister forces. Superficially stated, Holmes finds a task to occupy his powers – and to avoid the need for stimulating drugs.

However, beneath this image's veneer is something very old. It’s the persona of the shaman – the healer, seer and seeker of knowledge who turns to mental stimulants as part of his regimen – recast as a modern sorcerer of detection. Just as the shaman fights evil spirits on behalf of his tribe, Holmes now sets forth against the forces of greed and death, which in The Sign of Four appear as a modernized dragon (Tonga, who used his breath to kill) and “wicked earls” (Small, Col. Morstan and Sholto).

The images of knights and dragons are pervasive in literature and myth, and were compelling to a man such as Conan Doyle, who considered his greatest fiction to be his tales that harkened back to an age of chivalry.

In this second Holmes novel, the detective emerges – much more fully formed – as just such a chivalrous being. He achieves the state of emblematic goodness stated outright by Mary Morstan, as a bachelor knight-errant serving a noble cause. Watson, in his most primal yet exalted moment in the Canon, even wins the supreme prize – the hand of the tale’s beleaguered maiden. The Duo thus entered the pantheon of a grand tradition.

Fifteen years after first painting Holmes so nobly, Conan Doyle returned to a similar image, this time stated by Watson himself in reference to Charles Augustus Milverton: “I understood the joy which it gave [Holmes] to be confronted with this green and gold monster, the dragon which held in its maw the reputations of many fair ladies.”

Conan Doyle painted Holmes’s enemies and dark sojourns with evocative images and names. Yes, he may have chosen the names “Moriarty” and “Moran” because they hint at a link with the “Irish mafia”; but the first syllable – the Greek root mor – has a long and splendid mythic history, associated in our language with sleep, death and murder.

In Europe’s most ancient tales, the enemies of King Arthur’s knights were Morgana and Mordred. J.R.R. Tolkien, an expert of ancient literature, used similar names blatantly in his fiction: His Sauron is corrupted by the supreme dark lord Morgoth; Sauron’s tower lies in Mordor; the Balrog falls into the chasm in Moria.

Conan Doyle did much the same. The blue carbuncle that spawns greed and death belongs to the Countess of Morcar. And the greedy Grimsby Roylott’s estate is Stoke Moran. Add a few letters to Tolkien’s chasm-ridden “Moria” and you get “Moriarty,” who also plunged into a great chasm.

Holmes’s deeds in “The Speckled Band” parallel the trials of the perfect knight in medieval legend. In myth, the knight and his squire typically circumvent bizarre creatures – usually including a large cat such as a lion – before entering the dark cave to confront the dragon. Holmes and his squire, Watson, do the same, a leopard serving as their huge feline. In the dark chamber itself, Holmes lies in wait and eventually drives the deadly serpent back against its master, who dies. Evil is thwarted, and the intended victim is restored to her legacy, to marriage and the fertility of the world.

Of course there are no Indian swamp adders that climb ropes or respond to a flute. Whether the story is possible or believable isn’t relevant. The supernatural serpent is stopped. The maiden is rescued. The evildoer is obliterated. Thus order is restored, and justice is served.

Conan Doyle has Holmes state this reassurance at the end of “The Speckled Band”: “Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.”

Such words were part of Conan Doyle’s religious and secular education: “He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it" (Ecclesiastes 10:8). “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein” (Proverbs 26:27). John Milton’s Paradise Lost described Satan’s fall into the pit. A little more than a year after “Band” first saw print, the Reichenbach demanded the same word – a “boiling pit of incalculable depth.” Thus Holmes’s role as a soldier of God did not change much during the 15 months that separated publication of “The Speckled Band” and “The Final Problem.”

At right: Using thunderbolts, the sun god drives back the reptilian chaos monster in a 9th century B.C. panel from the palace of Assyria.

For Conan Doyle, that image worked powerfully – and stayed with him. By 1927, both “Band” and “Problem” ranked among the author’s top four favorite Holmes stories, with “Band” his favorite. Both stories – with The Hound of the Baskervilles – still rank among the most popular. Despite that impossible snake, “The Speckled Band” actually leads those polls.

When we ask “Why?” we point to Conan Doyle’s plotting – but what he plotted so well was at root a spiritual allegory.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces shows a 9th century B.C. alabaster panel from the palace of an Assyrian king. It shows the Assyrian sun god, holding lance-like thunderbolts, driving away a flying dragon.

Most people then – as now – had never seen a sun god, let alone a flying dragon. But that did not stop the carver from producing this image. He did not fear those who might say, “There is no such creature.” Neither did Conan Doyle.

At left: Using his cane, Holmes drives back the swamp adder in the famous illustration by Sidney Paget for "The Speckled Band."

As far as conveying the action, that 3,000-year-old panel is identical with Sidney Paget’s illustration of Holmes lashing at the equally nonexistent swamp adder. And it is the same allegory – powerful evil fleeing from powerful good.

In the same fashion, the Dartmoor of The Hound is a fantasy land. The real Dartmoor never could support a stately manor; it never harbored gypsies or fatally deep mires. It was necessary for Conan Doyle to transform the region into a land of myth, where a dog – bred into a canine dragon – could be immune to phosphorous so fire might “burst from its open mouth.”

In this land of sudden fogs and roaming horrors, Holmes slays the impossible beast. The schemer Stapleton presumably plunges into the mire, where fiends belong. The ensnared Beryl is freed and the realm made safe under the returned baronet.

This is myth, replete with all the flavors of the ancient recipe. The tasty proof is in the pudding: When most people read “The Speckled Band” or The Hound, they are satisfied. Impossibilities be damned – skepticism is set aside by even the most reasonable, ignored for a simple reason: These tales reach that part of the psyche that craves justice, reassurance and the restoration of an orderly universe.

So it’s no wonder the tales mentioned here, by and large, remain the most popular among the reading public. Through them, a touch of the Unknown enters our souls, transforming Holmes into something more than a mere man. Subliminally, we recognize that most mysterious of beings, a chivalrous wizard who – though plagued by drug-induced visions – can see the future, heal the afflicted and chase away the dread demons that torment the innocent.

At root, then, the Canon fascinates us not because it offers a plea for reason in an irrational world, but because it allows us to believe in the divinity of reason. It's an irrational notion itself, a form of faith in its own right. And Conan Doyle wins the credit for having shaped it for the modern age.



REFERENCES

Austin, Bliss. 1989. “A Sherlock Holmes Competition,” in The Baker Street Dozen, edited by Pj Doyle and E.W. McDiarmid (New York, N.Y.: Congdon & Weed Inc.)

Campbell, Joseph. 1949. The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).

Clark, Debbie. March 1968. “Holmes – A Wizard?” Baker Street Pages, No. 33, p. 1.

Clarkson, Steve. 1999. The Canonical Compendium. (Ashcroft, British Columbia, Canada: Calabash Press).

Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur. 1887-1927. Various tales about Sherlock Holmes. For textural quotes, this essay relied on the CD-ROM publication Sherlock Holmes on Disc, 1989-92, distributed by Multimedia Corporation.

Stashower, Daniel. 1999. Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: Henry Holt and Company)

Stock, Randall. December 1999. “Rating the Canon,” Baker Street Journal, Vol. 49, No. 4, New Series (Indianapolis, Ind.: Baker Street Irregulars).

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