SOURCE: Twitchell, James. “The Supernatural Structure of Byron's Manfred.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 15, no. 4 (autumn 1975): 601-14.

[In the following essay, Twitchell discusses the supernatural world created by Byron in Manfred.]

Although in recent years there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in Byron's verse dramas, little new knowledge has flowed in its wake. This is especially true of Manfred, where although there is a new level of appreciation (witness the number of times it has been anthologized in the last decade), critical commentary has lagged. Perhaps this new interest in Manfred has arisen because scholars who have been uneasy about Byron's place in the nineteenth century have at last found a way to make him into a Romantic. For Manfred is Byron's most “Romantic” work, both in character and in theme. Here is an almost Faustian man, who has spent his life pushing towards a union of himself and invisible forces beyond, a “Streben nach dem Unendlichen.” Like his peers Prometheus or Endymion, Manfred finally does what no eighteenth-century character could ever do: he transcends body and mind of this world to enter a “world beyond.” But unlike them he is not seeking the future; like the Ancient Mariner, he is fleeing the past.

Despite the Romantic character of its hero, other attributes of Manfred make it an uneasy ally of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Prometheus Unbound or Endymion. The most common problem that critics have faced is that the “world beyond” that Byron created has little in common with the imaginary worlds of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. For the super-naturalism Byron created above Manfred is rigorously and logically organized; it is not as much a creation of the imagination as it is the result of imaginative borrowing. With the other Romantic poets, it is not always necessary to understand precisely how their supernatural worlds operate, for their poems can be read and appreciated in spite of the supernatural machinery. But in Manfred this is not the case. Here there are no loose ends, no supernumeraries in the heavens.

Like a Neoclassicist, Byron has built a very sturdy Chain of Being; but like a Romantic, he has used it not to keep man in his place, but to show that there are certain links man can snap and certain ones he cannot. This paper intends to show 1) that the spirit world above Manfred is no hastily constructed cosmos; and 2) that a new and perhaps deeper understanding of the play will result from an understanding of how the spirits of Acts I and II are organized and how they reflect psychological changes in the protagonist.

There has been almost no attempt to dismantle the world above and around Manfred, partly because critics have assumed that Manfred, like other supernatural Romantic poems, really does not depend on the spirit level for “meaning.” It has been assumed that the spirits in Manfred, like the Polar Spirit in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or the spirits in Endymion or at the end of Prometheus Unbound, are included more for adornment than for actual thematic consequences. They are important, but they are not crucial to an understanding. But to understand Manfred, it is necessary to understand what is above him. For what Byron has done, especially in the second act, is to create a world above his protagonist that mirrors the psychological world within.¹

There is ample evidence that the farther Manfred moves away from natural states, the closer he moves to psychological phenomena. This is most obvious with Arimanes, where Manfred is dealing not so much with the power behind external evil as with the personification of deeply-buried impulses for evil within himself. This gradual change as the play progresses from natural to psychological, from surface to myth, is part of what makes Manfred such a Romantic poem. And this change is achieved, as it is in many other Romantic poems, through the use of a supernatural spirit world.²

To understand how this change occurs, it is helpful to see how Byron first conceived of his hero, and then to see how he fitted the spirit world around him. Byron himself wrote of Manfred that it was “a very wild, metaphysical, and inexplicable” kind of drama in which “almost all the persons—but two or three—are spirits of the earth and air, or the water, [and] the hero is a kind of magician [who] wanders about invoking spirits who appear to him and are of no use. …”³ In the nineteenth century it was accepted that Byron had plagiarized the beginning of Goethe's Faust, although he repeatedly claimed that “his Faust I never read, for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis … translated most of it to me viva voce.”⁴ The influence of Shelley, Walpole, Coleridge, Maturin, Lewis, and Beckford were so blatantly obvious in his other works that it seemed only natural to accuse Byron of writing Manfred with Faust open before him. E. M. Butler in Byron and Goethe absolves Byron of what were thought to be his sins of commission by stressing that Goethe draws his Faust from the medieval Christian tradition, whereas Byron's Manfred is “a direct descendent of the mighty magicians of old, who had power over the spirits.”⁵ He does not, however, attempt to explain who he considers to be the “magicians of old.”

To understand what kind of magician Byron intended Manfred to be, it is helpful to remember that 1) at the turn of the century there was a revival in interest in Near Eastern mythologies;⁶ and that 2) in 1816 Byron, mainly as the result of his association with Shelley, became fascinated with the works of the ancient Neoplatonic mystics of Alexandria: Iamblichus, Plotinus, Porphyry, and a number of others.⁷ A brief explanation of their cosmic system will show why it was so adaptable to Byron's artistic needs.

The Alexandrian Neoplatonists believed in a graduated cosmos which emanated in steps from the One downward to the phenomenal world. The most obvious attraction for such a cosmic picture is easily seen, for wherever there are plateaus in this cosmic staircase, there is the potentiality for psychological correspondences. This is the basic principle behind all myth, namely that the outer world will mirror inner space, and the Neoplatonic mythologies are no exception. They simply are more organized and logical than most.

In retrospect it seems inevitable that these plateaus were eventually peopled by, as Byron said, “forms that can outlast all flesh.” In Manfred Iamblichus seems to be the most important recorder and creator of these forms. For Iamblichus in the second century wrote an elaborate description and defense of Chaldean theology, known as On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, which Byron certainly had heard of, probably had read.⁸

Like his fellow philosophers Iamblichus believed that at the very top of this cosmic pyramid is the One—the force of unity for all life. Below this point—the point of God—emanate the rational and universal souls downward through the angelic, archonic, heroic, and daemonic orders to man.

The chief concern of Iamblichus' On the Mysteries is not, however, the topography of the cosmos or psyche, but rather the problem of how the magician can communicate with the daemons which exist in the lowest of the material spheres or plateaus. This is of considerable importance, for the theurgist (a “white magician” as opposed to the goetist, or “black magician”) is responsible for preserving material harmony on the earth. He is responsible for making things go. And to do this he energizes different types of daemons. These daemons who mediate between the gods and the material world are organized into distinct hierarchies. For instance, according to Olympiodorus, there are six different genera which can be classified according to habitat, so “it may be said that some of these are celestial, others ethereal, others aerial, others aquatic, others terrestrial, and others subterranean.”⁹

These spirits exist on their own plateaus within the universal spirit, until conjured up and out by the theurgist. As they have no reason of their own, they may be commanded by a rational creature (IV,2). But to do this the magician must understand a doctrine central to Neoplatonic cosmology: a doctrine of signatures or the parallelism existing between the nominal and phenomenal worlds.¹⁰ Man is capable of discovering these signatures because, as Iamblichus says, “we preserve in the soul collectively the mystic and arcane image of the gods, and through this we elevate the soul to the gods, and when elevated conjoin it as much as possible with them” (VII,4). And so in the process of discovering the external divinity we may be brought into contact with the gods (II,11). Again, it is easy to see how such a schema almost begs psychological interpretation. For if things work this way on the outside, why don't they work the same way inside?

Every Neoplatonist places these daemons differently in the cosmic structure. For Iamblichus, these daemons exist between the two extremes of divine genera, namely the gods and human souls, and thus are the median link in the chain of command over nature. They have both productive and operative powers (I,5); they are both ministers of the gods (I,20; II,1) and the means of nature (III,15). Iamblichus denies them fixed form, saying that they assume whatever shape they are invoked into or whatever form pleases their imagination (I,8,16).

Two important facets of Iamblichus' argument are: 1) the hierarchy of daemonic powers and their singular characteristics, and 2) the insistence on the inherent dualism of man, the insistence that he is endowed with two souls, one sensual, of the body and fated, the other transcendent, immutable, and of the gods (VIII,6, 7, 8).

The most direct reference in Manfred to Iamblichus and his turbid vision of the universe is one that has been usually overlooked by scholars. Manfred, having conjured up “The Witch of the Alps,” says,

                    I made
Mine eyes familiar with Eternity,
Such as, before me, did the Magi, and
He who from out their fountain-dwellings raised
Eros and Anteros, at Gadara,
As I do thee. …

(II.ii.89-94)

Byron himself glosses this as referring to Iamblichus,¹¹ and Hartley Coleridge further elaborates in his 1829 edition of Byron's poetry.¹² Although this tells nothing of the magic practiced by Manfred, it does establish a link between Byron and Iamblichus or his explicators. One of the most famous of these explicators was Michael Psellus, who classified the daemons as the “igneum” or fiery spirit of the upper air, the “aereum” or the aerial spirit of the air surrounding man, the “terreneum” or earthly spirit, and continuing through the orders of “aquarium et merinum,” “subterraneaum” and the “lucifugum” or light-fleeing spirit.¹³

Looking at the spirits Manfred invokes in Act I, one finds that this supernatural pattern is undisturbed. The first spirit is celestial: “From my mansion in the cloud / Which the breath of Twilight builds” (I.i.51-52). The Second spirit is ethereal, drawn from a lower sphere from which it controls mountain tops with avalanches and glaciers; the Third is aquatic, from “the blue depth of the waters / Where the wave hath no strife” (I.i.76-77). The Fourth is subterranean, from the “slumbering earthquake”; the Fifth is aerial, “Rider of the Wind, / The Stirrer of the storm” (I.i.100-101), and the Sixth is the “lucifugum,” saying only, “My dwelling is the shadow of the Night, / Why doth thy magic torture me with light?” (I.i.107-108).

According to Iamblichus, these spirits have no bodies of their own but can assume bodies on command (I,8, 16). They are also without passions (I,10, 11). In Manfred the daemons never appear physically and are distinguished only by their voices. In unison the Seventh Spirit and the six daemons claim that

We have no forms, beyond the elements
Of which we are the mind and principle:
But choose a form—in that we will appear,

(I.i.181-183)

and when Manfred is unable to choose a form it is the Seventh Spirit, not the six daemons, who has the power or will to assume physical shape.

Since the daemons are the productive and operative executors of nature (I,5), they have power only over the four elements, not over the mind or psyche of man. It must be remembered that these are the lowest sublunar genera. Above them are the corporeal, physical, intellectual and divine gods, all of whom do have power over man. Therefore, it is perfectly consistent that they refuse Manfred's plea for “oblivion, self-oblivion,” saying,

We can but give thee that which we possess:
Ask of us subjects, sovereignty, the power
O'er earth in the whole, or portion—or a sign
Which shall control the elements, whereof
We are the dominators, in each and all,
These shall be thine.

(I.i.139-144)

Next higher in Byron's Chain of Being is the enigmatic Seventh Spirit of the “star which rules thy destiny” (I.i.110). Typical of the bewildered interpretation it evokes is Andrew Rutherford's comment: “If this spirit rules the star under which Manfred was born has he controlled or influenced the hero's life? Was it he or some external fate, who was responsible for that dire change?”¹⁴ Rutherford continues, saying that this type of ambiguity is characteristic of the play's supernatural element “so that in the play there is serious confusion or obscurity in the metaphysics.”¹⁵ He later concludes that this spirit suggests “a devil trying to win the hero's soul.”

But it is obvious from the play that the star does not control Manfred, nor does Manfred control the star (cf. I.i.125ff). Once the metaphysical pattern has been understood, the role of the Seventh Spirit is understandable. The Neoplatonists believed that everyone received a personal daemon at the hour of birth, which then controlled both body and environment.¹⁶ These “celestial animals of the gods” exist in higher heavenly spheres and therefore are more powerful than the other daemons since they are closer to the “One.”

Manfred's star, however, has become

A wandering mass of shapeless flame,
A pathless comet, and a curse,
The menace of the universe,

(I.i.117-119)

which serves to heighten the awfulness of Manfred's fate in much the same way that Childe Harold's birth “beneath some remote inglorious star” substantiates his melancholy. Byron's use of star lore is probably not drawn directly from the Neoplatonists; more likely it is a syncretism of ancient and then-current astrological beliefs. What is interesting, however, is that the Seventh Spirit's place in the Chain of Being of Manfred is consistent with his place in the hierarchies of the Alexandrian mystics.

Thus far—through Act I, Scene 1—the spirits exist outside Manfred and are powerless to help him. They are executors of nature only, not helpmates for man. Byron seems to be objecting to the unquestioning faith of his contemporaries in the palliative powers of nature. The spirits of nature are at best only temporary salves. At the end of the first scene, however, with the eerie “Incantation” the action takes the first turn from external to internal nature. The Seventh Spirit has just appeared in the form of Astarte, and Manfred is so shocked that he “falls senseless.” The Incantation follows, and although we never learn whose voice chants the magical song, the import of the words is clear. We are, from now on, going to be dealing with psychological as well as supernatural phenomena. This nameless power behind the voice is in the process of transforming Manfred's “soul” so that it will be his prison house (I.i.192-261). Manfred is condemned to live in the “clankless chains” of his memories. And his eye that had once looked outward “now closes to look within.”

Manfred awakens with the new realization that

The spirits I have raised abandon me,
The spells which I have studied baffle me,
The remedy I recked of tortured me;
I lean no more on superhuman aid. …

(I.ii.1-4)

Again as in Scene 1, he implores Nature to provide release but he finally realizes that it is he, not she, who must compromise and accept. Finally a desperate Manfred prepares his own balm by planning to leap from the cliff. But just as the nameless spirit has promised, he cannot escape himself: he has lost all control of his self.

I feel the impulse—yet I do not plunge;
I see the peril—yet do not recede;
And my brain reels—and yet my foot is firm:
There is a power upon me which withholds,
And makes it my fatality to live,—
If it be life to wear within myself
This barrenness of Spirit and to be
My own Soul's sepulchre. …

(I.ii.20-27)

Although this reading is by no means conclusive, it does suggest the possibility that the spirits we are now to encounter fit into not only a cosmic pattern but also a psychological one. As is often the case in myth the spirits exist both within and without.

As we move higher up through the “daemonic realm” we start to move deeper into Manfred. The characters become more organic and personalized. Above the daemons and Manfred's star, both chronologically and spatially, is the Witch of the Alps. She resembles Shelley's Witch of Atlas only in the sense that they both resemble the “Venus Genetrix” of Lucretius' On The Nature of Things. Once again Manfred conjures her presence by use of a theurgitic sign, but unlike the invisible wisps of daemons previously conjured, she has a form in which

The charms of Earth's least mortal daughters grow
To an unearthly stature, in an essence
Of purer elements. …

(II.ii.15-17)

As the ruling principle of material beauty, or as the “Mighty Mother” of all earthly life, it is implied (II.ii.155-159), she controls the purpose of the six daemons. In other words, she would probably be at the level of “god” in the Neoplatonic hierarchy. But the Witch of the Alps' role is more important structurally than thematically. She binds the Neoplatonic and the Zoroastrian, allowing Manfred opportunity to explain “my sciences, / My long pursued and superhuman art,” and to refer obliquely to Astarte, his “heart-crushed love.” Both of these points in tandem are important, for it is guilt-possessed Manfred who actively seeks out the higher celestial powers with his magic, not vice versa. He is “possessed” only in the sense that he must remember and be slave to those memories. But he still has the power to will.

In terms of a psychodrama, it is here that Manfred of his own accord turns inward, refusing the anodyne of a life lived in external nature. Again Byron seems to be toying with the Romantic view of nature as release by having Manfred contemplate a life completely outside himself, with this “Beautiful Spirit! in [whose] calm clear brow / … is glassed serenity of soul” (II.ii.25-26). For when the Witch asks why she has been called, Manfred answers,

To look upon thy beauty—nothing further.
The face of the earth hath maddened me, and I
Take refuge in her mysteries, and pierce
To the abodes of those who govern her—
But they can nothing aid me. I have sought
From them what they could not bestow, and now
I search no further.

(II.ii.38-44)

But when he realizes that such a life demands that he “swear obedience to [her] will, and do / [Her] bidding” (II.ii.156-157), he refuses and discharges her. Manfred is now more alone than ever. On the supernatural level he has transcended the world of the Intermediary Spirits and on the psychological level he has refused a Lotus-Eater's life in Nature. He is now to pit himself against his own mind and the “unnatural” universe.

This unnatural universe takes on a singularly malicious quality when Byron next draws from the mythologies of Zoroastrianism to complete the metaphysical pattern. Whereas Manfred's powers over the daemons of Nature, his star, and the Witch of the Alps were not complete, at least he had the power to evoke and discharge. With the phantoms of the second act, Manfred's powers are less distinct and this is psychologically sensible, for man has more control of the world outside than the one within.

The cosmos of the Zoroastrian religion that Byron knew was one split and united by the constant tensions between Good and Evil. Ormazd, the Lord of Goodness and Light, wages constant war against Ahriman, the Lord of Evil and Darkness. Beneath these great patriarchs extend vast sublunar worlds of daemons, who are good or evil depending on which hierarchy they are in, that of Ormazd or that of Ahriman. This dualism is marked and distinct—man is given the choice of worshiping either the Good or the Evil. The six major spirits presided over by Ahriman are collectively called the “daivas” and it is they who implement the policies of evil through the offices of still lesser spirits.¹⁷ Not only is the Chain of Being maintained as it is in Neoplatonism, but even the same numerology is employed, except that now the six spirits are actively and consciously malefic, whereas in Neoplatonism they are noisy but innocuous.

After Manfred has refused the solace of submission to the Witch of the Alps (II.ii.165), he appears in the court of Arimanes (II.iv), presumably by his own volition as there is no mention of his being conjured “up” or of his conjuring Arimanes “down.” Byron himself glosses “Arimanes” as being Ahriman, the evil principle of Zoroastrianism. He writes elsewhere that Manfred “at last goes to the abode of the Evil Principle in propria persona to evocate a ghost, which appears, and gives him an ambiguous and disagreeable answer. …”¹⁸ It is obvious from the text that Arimanes controls the three Destinies, the six spirits (not to be confused with the six daemons of Act I), and Nemesis.

There is also no doubt that evil extends throughout Arimanes' hierarchy. On the lower level the three Destinies pride themselves on: 1) freeing a captive usurper so that he can return to the destruction of his nations; and 2) causing a tempest to wreck a ship, so as to kill all but one traitor who is to be saved. This traitor in turn is to “wreak further havoc” by causing a plague that will destroy a nation.

Next higher is a malicious Puck, Nemesis, who has just returned from

                    repairing shatter'd thrones,
Marrying fools, restoring dynasties,
Avenging men upon their enemies,
And making them repent their own revenge;
Goading the wise to madness. …

(II.iii.62-66)

Later, when Manfred wishes to speak with “the Phantom of Astarte,” it is Nemesis who, with the approval of Arimanes, “uncharnels” her spirit. From this evidence Maurice Quinlin believes Nemesis bears “a resemblance to Druj Nasu, the corpse-fiend of Zoroastrian belief who is described as a personification of the spirit of corruption, decomposition, contagion, and impurity, which in the shape of an abominable fly, takes possession of the dead body and spreads contagion every where.”¹⁹ But it seems doubtful, judging from his other daemonic characterizations, that Byron intended to be so specific. If so, why did he choose a name like “Nemesis” that is freighted with such mythological, and even Platonic, implications? In Western cultures it was she who meted out both happiness and misery to mortals; she is the personification of retributive justice.²⁰ It is more likely that Byron has here fashioned another artistic syncretism of pagan and Zoroastrian beliefs. It may be inconsistent, and even illogical, to use the name of a Minister of Justice in a completely daemonic context, but it is unmistakably effective.

Surrounding Arimanes are six Spirits whose proximity to the godhead indicates that these are the six Spirits who minister the will of the evil principle to the lower spirits, in this case to the three Destinies. In Zoroastrian mythology each of these is charged with the working of a specific evil.²¹ But in Manfred these six Spirits seem to have no function other than to pester Manfred with commands to kneel and praise Arimanes.²²

One thing they do, however, is to provide Manfred with an opportunity to allude to a still higher (in fact, the highest) power in the hierarchy. Manfred demands that Arimanes

                    bow down to that which is above him,
That overruling Infinite—the Maker
Who made him not for worship—let him kneel,
And we kneel together.

(II.iv.46-49)

Whether or not this “overruling Infinite” is Ormazd, as Quinlin supposes, the Neoplatonic One, or what Iamblichus calls “First God and King,” it makes little difference. What is important is that it established the topmost or innermost limit as being Good and ultimately victorious. There is the implication that even in this imperfect universe redemption and salvation are possible to those who resist the compromise with evil.

It has become something of a critical commonplace to regard Byron's 1816 and 1817 works as emotionally cathartic and therefore not as carefully structured as his later poetry. It is true that Manfred was written during a period of intense domestic turmoil. For instance the references to his relations with Augusta Leigh are too obvious to miss. Yet in spite of all the biographical material, Byron constructed a cosmic psychological and mythological system of some sophistication. Although he is not the “profound philosopher” that Coleridge might ask a poet to be, he has nonetheless made a considerable effort to work within a system. Expressed schematically the supernatural pattern would look something like this:

Ormazd—the One—Sun

Ahriman
“Daivas” or six Spirits	Zoroastrian
Nemesis
Three Destinies	Act II

Witch of the Alps—“Venus Genetrix”
Seventh Spirit—Manfred's star

celestial
ethereal
aquatic	six Daemons	Neoplatonic
subterranean
aerial		Act I
light-fleeing

What is intrinsic to both systems is their fundamental dualism. In Zoroastrianism, it is a dualism of Good and Evil in the cosmos. In Neoplatonism, it is a dualism of the higher and lower souls of men. As we have seen in the first act, Manfred's magic, made possible by the control of his higher soul, allows him some power over the material daemons. But his power is useless, for the six daemons can direct only the forces of nature, not the will of man. In the second act we learn that it is his once-detested will that prevents Manfred from succumbing to the evil forces of Arimanes. Ironically, what saves Manfred from capitulation to evil is the same thing that he had once wanted to destroy. And in the third act we get a kind of synthetic restatement of the theme, this time in a Christian context, with the Abbot begging Manfred to “reconcile thyself with thy own soul, / And thy own soul in Heaven” (III.i.99-100). This is the final redoubling of the psychological and metaphysical, inside-and-outside patterns dovetailed. The tension between Manfred and his soul is mirrored in the tensions between his soul and a spirit world beyond.

Edward Marjarum is certainly correct when he writes that “the proper understanding of Byron's poetry requires the critic to be prepared at any time to consider the sincere statement of any one of several types of religious or philosophical thought.”²³ For if we now accept the metaphysical pattern that Byron has woven from these three religions, we soon realize, as I suspect Byron intended, that Manfred is caught in the Hobson's choice of being damned if he acts and damned if he does not. By the very nature of the cosmos which Byron has erected around Manfred, and by the very nature of the dualism he has created within him, Manfred is powerfully powerless. Condemned by his birth to be “half dust,” condemned by his theurgistic power to be “half deity,” Manfred will be conscious of, but never able to reconcile, the ideal and the real, or, in terms of the drama, the fire and the clay.

Still, it is from understanding the supernatural patterns that we are led to understand the psychological ones. Manfred was fated to be born free, and in the cosmic system which Byron created, freedom is only slavery. Byron develops his own special brand of irony by creating a tragedy that traces neither the fall of a “high” man nor the demise of a “common” man, but rather one which shows a superhuman character fated by the very nature of his mind and the universe to be destroyed not but defeated. He is a very sophisticated Byronic hero; we are never sure that he “comes out on top.”

Byron was irate when his editor cut the line, “Old Man! 'tis not so difficult to die” (III.iv.151), saying that “the whole effect and moral of the poem” had been destroyed.²⁴ And it had been. For, as we have seen from Byron's handling of the psycho-cosmic analogy, Manfred's cosmos allows spiritual victory to come from physical destruction. Manfred realizes that he is chained to the natural and purposeless world by his mortality, and accepts death as meaningless because it is inevitable.

This reading is reinforced by what we see happening within Manfred. As with any psychodrama, the battle is with evil, not with death; within the mind, not within the cosmos. In this context it is the refusal to submit to Arimanes, a refusal in his own self to give in to the tyranny of evil, that destroys and saves Manfred.

Only in the terms of the microcosm-macrocosm, the world inside and the world outside, do we find Byron in the tradition of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope. Philosophically he is far removed from them and is closer to the Romantics. The symbolism inherent in the supernatural hierarchy magnifies Manfred's capacity to think and feel, since he can move between the two by virtue of his magic. As one might expect, his emotions become extreme. His thoughts and actions gain an almost cosmic significance through the supernatural quality of his powers. Whereas for the earlier poets the macrocosm was an imperturbable system “out there” of which this world is a dull reflection, a characteristically iconoclastic Byron conjoins the two. And in doing so, he becomes uncharacteristically Romantic.

Notes

1. For a more complete explanation of Byron's interest in psychological and mental states, see Ward Pafford, “Byron and the Mind of Man: Childe Harold III-IV and Manfred,” SIR, [Studies in Romanticism] 1 (1962), 105-127.

2. C. I. Patterson calls this spirit world the “daemonic realm” which expresses “a particular area or activity of the human consciousness influenced by much that wells up from the unconscious” (The Daemonic in the Poetry of John Keats [Urbana, Ill., 1970], p. 11).

3. “Letter to John Murray, Feb. 15, 1817,” Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland Prothero (New York, 1922), IV, 52-53.

4. “Letter to John Murray, June 7, 1820,” Letters and Journals, V, 37.

5. (London, 1956), p. 33.

6. See Wallace Brown, “Byron and the English Interest in the Near East,” SP [Studies in Philology], 34 (1937), 55-64.

7. For example, Mary Shelley wrote that “during this summer his [Shelley's] genius was checked by associations with another poet [Byron] whose nature was dissimilar to his own, yet who in the poems that he wrote at this time [Manfred and Canto III of Childe Harold] gave tokens that he shared for a period the more abstract and etherealized inspirations of Shelley” (The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley [Philadelphia, 1939], p. 116).

8. The translation he may have read was written by Thomas Taylor. Taylor's translations of the Neoplatonists were widely read among the nineteenth-century literati. Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, Blake and lesser luminaries such as Peacock, Southey, and Flaxman were all influenced either by his work or by his eccentric character. For the best treatment of Taylor's influence see Kathleen Raine, “Thomas Taylor in England,” Thomas Taylor, the Platonist (Princeton, 1969), pp. 3-49.

9. As quoted in Taylor's Notes to On the Mysteries (2nd ed., London, 1895). Taylor's section and chapter numbering is confusing since both are in Roman numerals; in order to simplify this, notations will appear hereafter in the text in parentheses (section numbers in Roman, chapter numbers in Arabic).

10. This doctrine of signatures that contends that every body has stamped on its essence the symbol or sign of its divine origin is discussed in the Notes by Taylor, pp. 343-347, and in the text by Iamblichus, III,16, 17; VII,4, 5.

11. Byron, Works: Poetic and Dramatic, ed. John Nicholas and J. C. Jeaffreson, with notes by Lord Byron (Philadelphia, 1883), p. 147.

12. Hartley Coleridge relates this story told by Eunapius about Iamblichus: “It is reported of him that while he and his scholars were bathing in the hot baths of Gadara, in Syria, a dispute arising concerning the baths, he, smiling, ordered his disciples to ask the inhabitants by what names the two lesser springs, that were fairer than the rest were called. To which the inhabitants replied, “that the one was called Love, and the other Love's Contrary, but for what reason they knew not.” Upon which Iamblichus who chanced to be sitting on the fountain's edge where the stream flowed out, put his hand on the water, and, having uttered a few words, called up from the depths of the fountain a fair-skinned lad, not over-tall, whose golden locks fell in sunny curls over his breast and back; so that he looked like one fresh from the bath; and then, going to the other spring, and doing as he had done before, called up another Amoretto like the first, save that his long-flowing locks now seemed black, not shot with sunny gleams. Whereupon both the Amoretti nestled and clung round Iamblichus as if they had been his own children. … After this his disciples asked him no more questions.” In Byron's Works: Poetry (New York, 1901), p. 105, quoting Eunapius Sardiani, Vitae Philosophorum et Sophistarum, p. 459, 11, 20-50.

13. “De Daemonibus” in Marcilio Ficino, Opera Omnia (photographic reproduction of the 1576 Basel edition, Torino, Italy, 1959), II, 1939ff. If Byron had not read Taylor's translation, I think it likely that he read Ficino's translation of Iamblichus, On the Mysteries. For Ficino's translation also includes Proclus', Plotinus', Porphyry's, and Psellus' dissertations on daemonology.

14. In Byron: A Critical Study (Stanford, 1961), p. 80.

15. Rutherford, p. 81.

16. See for instance Apuleuis' De Deo Socratis, which goes through the usual doctrine of the intermediary spirits, ending with the highest, most august class of daemons, the guardian spirits that watch over every man. Appropriately Byron places this spirit in Manfred's star, so as to make it physically higher than the other daemons. In fact the seventh spirit even admits that it ruled the star that ruled Manfred's destiny (I.i.110).

17. Cf. George Foot Moore, History of Religions (New York, 1922), I, 357-405; John Walters Waterhouse, “Zoroastrianism,” Great Religions of the East (London, 1934); and Robert Ernest Hume, The World's Living Religions (New York, 1955), pp. 205ff.

18. Letters and Journals, IV, 54-55.

19. In “Byron's Manfred and Zoroastrianism,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 57 (October, 1958), 730, quoting A. V. Williams Jackson, Zoroastrian Studies (New York, 1928), p. 101.

20. Plato, for instance, describes her as “a messenger of justice who penalizes with severity those who fail to respect the hierarchy of gods, heroes and daemons” (Laws, IV, 717, in Morris Stockhammer, Plato Dictionary [Totowa, N. M., 1965], p. 180).

21. Hume, pp. 205ff.

22. Quinlin considers these six Spirits to be the six “daemons” conjured down by Manfred in the first act. But he is mistaken. The “daemons” are not evil but the executors of nature. Quinlin erroneously claims (p. 731) that the Spirits can perform only at night, citing the Sixth Daemon's statement that “my dwelling is the shadow of the night, / Why doth thy magic torture me with Light?” (I.i.108-109). But, as we have seen, this is Byron's representation of the light-fleeing or “lucifugum” daemon. Likewise he believes the Seventh Daemon to be Aeshma, a spirit, but again it is clear that the Seventh Daemon is the spirit of Manfred's star. This makes a considerable difference in interpretation, for if Quinlin is correct, Manfred has been determined from birth, and therefore is not responsible for his actions. But if the spirit only represents Manfred's star, then its control has extended only to Manfred's time and place of birth, not to his will.

23. Byron as Skeptic and Believer, Princeton University Studies in English (Princeton, 1938), No. 16, p. 45.

24. Letters and Journals, IV, 157.