Zanoni, a Rosicrucian Tale, by Bulwer-Lytton

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 346 pages

The complete text of Zanoni, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Rosicrucian novel of 1842, at 346 pages the longest single work in this section. This edition opens with a prolegomena by H.P. Blavatsky, and keeps the author's own apparatus: the dedicatory epistle to the sculptor John Gibson prefixed to the 1845 edition, the preface written for the edition of 1853, the author's introduction and a further introduction by W.M.

The novel runs in seven books, of which the first two are The Musician and Art, Love, and Wonder, and the story follows the immortal adept Zanoni and his master Mejnour through the Naples of the 1780s and into the Terror in Paris. It appears in a section of study notes because of what Blavatsky and others made of it: a novelist's account of adeptship, of the trials set before a candidate and of the price of the immortality it describes, written by a man whose knowledge of the subject was thought to be more than literary. Read as fiction it is a romance; read alongside the studies listed beside it, it is the section's one extended imaginative treatment of what the rest sets out doctrinally.

Read the full text (PDF, 7.0 MB, 346 pages)