The year 2025 marks the centenary of the death of the English novelist Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925), who began his professional life as an unpaid 19-year-old colonial civil servant in Natal, in order to "gain experience." Here he met and fell in love with a young girl his own age, Lilly Jackson. However, their families refused consent for them to marry until Haggard found gainful, paid employment. By the time he secured a job, Lilly had succumbed to pressure from her family and married another man. Heartbroken, Haggard settled down with a friend of his sister.
Few people know – and fewer understand – the impact that H. Rider Haggard's frustrated love affair with Lilly would have on his creative writing and his very soul. While most scholars recognise the influence of Norse mythology in his writing, it is generally not known that he was a philosophical alchemist.
In his novel She: A History of Adventure, the main protagonist, Ayesha, enters a Pillar of Fire to attain eternal youth. Time can no longer age her body. She went on to build a kingdom, wealth and power. However, the one thing she did not have was love. She had lost her soul mate, Callicrates, in her youth, who died and was taken from her. Instead, Ayesha had to await, for millennia, her soul mate's reincarnation in order for her to be with him again, complete, and once more in balance and harmony. Until then, her rule of the ancient African kingdom she governed as an immortal was cruel and at times brutal, signifying the imbalance and disharmony brought about by the disunity of hate, anger and power over the qualifying attributes of compassion, forgiveness and justice that true love brings.
The novel is cleverly concealed as a romantic story, and that is how most people read it. However, the core theme relates to the “magnum opus” or “Great Work” of uncovering the lapis philosophorum (“Philosopher's Stone”). The hubris leading to Ayesha's death by re-entering the Pillar of Fire (read “Strength”) without first having obtained wisdom (read “Mercy”) results in catastrophic outcomes for both star-crossed lovers. By entering the pillar of fire twice, despite already having what it offered, time caught up with Ayesha. Leo Vincey, the modern-day incarnation of Callicrates, must await the comet's return granting eternal youth so that he, too, may die and rejoin his soul mate. Until then, he also has to live in a state of imbalance, just like Ayesha.
The Philosopher's Stone is, therefore, equated by H, Rider Haggard, with a state of relationship where the desire of opposites (in this instance, the sexual passions and desires of a man and woman for one another) are united and consolidated into a middle way, or third pillar, of generative balance. It is, therefore, nothing more nor less than the "substance" of eternal Love itself. This Haggard knew was his love for Lilly, but this could never be realised in his earthly life; it was only in his imagination and desire for the anima or soul-life she represented.
By using the plot of a novel, Haggard describes the Quest of the Man of Desire in imaginative terms, mirroring that which Shakespeare wrote of in Romeo in Juliet,
"My only love sprung from my only hate
Too early seen unknown, and known too late"
Article (c) M.R. Osborne, 2025
