CHRISTIANS, INFIDELS, AND WOMEN'S CHANNELING IN THE WRITINGS OF MARIE CORELLI

Extract

“[S]INCE CHRIST ASCENDED into Heaven, our electric communication with the Creator has been established, and an ever-flowing current of divine inspiration is turned beneficially in the direction of our Earth….” So writes Heliobas, the sage scientist from the East in Marie Corelli's first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (247; ch. 14). According to this character's religio-technological treatise on the Creation, God is a “Shape of pure Electric Radiance” and each human soul an electric spark emitted from this wellspring in the heavens (237; ch. 14). Many years after Genesis, human corruption and apathy prompted God to restore electric lines of communication with His wayward humans. For this purpose Christ was sent down to Earth, to establish a connection not unlike that made possible by submarine telegraphy; as Heliobas explains, “this Earth and God's World were like America and Europe before the Atlantic Cable was laid. Now the messages of goodwill flash under the waves, heedless of storms. So also God's Cable is laid between us and His Heaven in the person of Christ” (241; ch. 14). Romance's abundant technological metaphors for Christian worship–prayers imagined as telephone calls and the like (223; ch. 13)–culminate in this daring “Electric Principle of Christianity,” which reinterprets Christ as, in effect, a Word dispatched telegraphically (235; ch. 13).