“The Mark of the Beast” was written by Rudyard Kipling and first appeared in The Pioneer (July 12-14, 1890). Kipling (1865-1936) was one of the dominant British popular writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. “The Mark of the Beast” is one of Kipling’s finest works, and perhaps his best horror story.

It is New Year’s Eve at the station near Dharmsala in India, and English soldiers and agents have gathered “from the uttermost ends of the Empire...to be riotous....half a dozen planters had come in from the south and were talking ‘horse’ to the Biggest Liar in Asia, who was trying to cap all their stories at once.”¹ The nameless narrator and his friend Strickland accompany their friend Fleete home; it is half past three in the morning, and Fleete is drunk. Unfortunately, as the trio are passing a little temple of Hanuman, the monkey god, Fleete breaks away from the narrator and Strickland, runs into the temple, and grinds the ashes of his cigar into the forehead of the statue of Hanuman. Strickland and the narrator are horrified, more out of fear of what will happen than from the offensiveness of Fleete’s act. The temple priests and the natives are more than just horrified. Fleete is oblivious, for he instantly curls up and goes to sleep. However, before anyone can do anything a leper emerges from behind the statue. He is naked, and the narrator calls him “a Silver Man” because “his body shone like frosted silver, for he was what the Bible calls ‘a leper as white as snow.’ Also he had no face, because he was a leper of some years’ standing, and his disease was heavy upon him.”² As the narrator and Strickland are lifting Fleete up and trying to carry him out of the temple the Silver Man grabs Fleete and presses his head against Fleete’s chest.

The priests were very angry until the Silver Man touched Fleete. That nuzzling seemed to sober them.

At the end of a few minutes’ silence one of the priests came to Strickland and said, in perfect English, “Take your friend away. He has done with Hanuman, but Hanuman has not done with him.”³

Strickland and the narrator take Fleete home, but before Fleete goes to sleep he complains about slaughterhouses being allowed so close to English residences: “Can’t you smell the blood?”⁴ He continues to be oblivious to what he has done, but Strickland is not so sanguine, although he is mystified as well as frightened by the behavior of the Indians. The next afternoon Fleete is in a foul temper and demands a raw pork chop from his cook. On his chest are a circle of black rosettes. When the narrator, Strickland, and Fleet go out to ride the horses go mad in Fleete’s presence. They refuse to let him come near them and even try to attack him. Strickland, cryptically, asks the narrator to stay for a few days, to watch Fleete, “but don’t tell me what you think till I have made up my mind.”⁵ That night, when Strickland and the narrator drop by the bungalow to pick up Fleete for dinner, they find that he has been rolling in the garden, and “his eyes were horrible to look at. There was a green light behind them, not in them....”⁶ Fleete excuses himself to go change. Then, from his room, comes a wolf’s howl. When Strickland and the narrator run in to his room, they find Fleete trying to escape through the window.

He made beast noises in the back of his throat. He could not answer us when we shouted at him. He spat...Fleete could not speak, he could only snarl, and his. snarls were those of a wolf, not of a man. The human spirit must have been giving way all day and have died out with the twilight. We were dealing with a beast that had once been Fleete.⁷

The pair hear mewing from outside the house and know that it is the Silver Man making that noise. They tie up the beast and call for a doctor; he says that it is a bad case of hydrophobia, and that nothing can be done for Fleete. Strickland gathers some equipment and vows to rectify the situation in the most direct way possible. Strickland and the narrator capture the leper after a fierce struggle. Strickland and the narrator torture him until he agrees to “take away the evil spirit,”⁸ which he does, and only a few hours later Fleete is as good as new, with no memory of what happened. Strickland goes to the temple of Hanuman “to offer redress for the pollution of the god, and had been solemnly assured that no white man had ever touched the idol, and that he was an incarnation of all the virtues laboring under a delusion.”⁹ When Fleete comments on the “horrid doggy smell” in the room Strickland begins laughing hysterically. “Then it struck me that we had fought for Fleete’s soul with the Silver Man in that room, and had disgraced ourselves as Englishmen forever....”¹⁰

“Your Gods and my Gods–do you or I know which are the stronger?” Native Proverb.

East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.¹¹

Like many of the best horror stories, “The Mark of the Beast” works on two levels, the literal and the metaphoric. On the literal level, it is a deadpan, chilling story. Like Kim, “The Mark of the Beast” has the assured tone of an old India hand and adventurer’s story. Kipling is in complete control of “The Mark of the Beast,” from its pacing to the small and authentic-feeling moments of Indian culture to the horrific implications of the story. There are some lines with real horror behind them, including “he has done with Hanuman, but Hanuman has not done with him”¹² and the way in which the narrator continually refers to the possessed Fleete as “the beast.” There is some frightening brutality, as in the way that Kipling prepares us for the torture scene, showing us how willing the narrator and Strickland are to torture the Silver Man, and then skips over it (“...and we got to work. This part is not to be printed”¹³), leaving the reader to frightful imaginings about what was done to the Silver Man. As a horror story, on the basic, literal level, “The Mark of the Beast” is superb.

And there is also the metaphoric level. Accusing “The Mark of the Beast” of being racist is easy enough: Kipling uses the term “Fuzzies,” the treatment of the Silver Man and the natives seems to be contemptuous, and Kipling appears to ignore the gross insult of Fleete’s act. But a little consideration of the story shows that Kipling is, if anything, working against the assumptions and biases of his contemporary audience. Strickland, one of Kipling’s recurring characters–he appears in Kim and in the 1891 story “The Recrudescence of Imray”–is generally seen by critics as Kipling’s version of the Great Detective character. (Both Strickland and Sherlock Holmes [see: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries] debuted in 1887, and there are numerous similarities between Strickland and Holmes).¹⁴ But Strickland does not hew to a strictly rationalist line in dealing with Fleete’s punishment. Strickland accepts the supernatural as the cause of Fleete’s affliction, something a Sherlock Holmes would not do, and acts as if the supernatural were real, and that a supernatural curse can be lifted through magical means. The story is craftily ambiguous about whether what happened to Fleete had a supernatural cause or not, and whether an anti-rationalist/materialist, pro-supernatural position is the wisest one to take when living in India. But Strickland, and later the narrator, have no doubt.

Nor does Kipling argue that Fleete’s punishment was wrong, simply excessive. Strickland’s comment is, “But he can’t take away the life! He can’t take away the life!”¹⁵ Strickland’s objection, and the story’s preferred inscribed narrative–that is, Kipling’s likely intent in writing the story–is that Fleete deserved punishment for “polluting the image of Hanuman,”¹⁶ that the punishment he received was disproportionate.

Finally, there is the moment, near the end of the story, when Strickland and the narrator, having tortured the Silver Man, begin laughing in a brittle and hysterical fashion, because they had “disgraced ourselves as Englishmen forever.”¹⁷ Strickland and the narrator are unable to counter what is being done to Fleete with Victorian English values or tactics. The doctor, the representative of the values and abilities of the enlightened West, is similarly helpless to cure Fleete and eventually summons a nurse to euthanize him. Strickland and the narrator are forced to assume more primitive (i.e., Indian) tactics and values as the only way to save Fleete. Kipling essentially says, in the story, that Indian tactics and values are the only ones which can be used in India, and that if the English want to remain English and not go native, they should not be in India. “The Mark of the Beast” is a rebuke to the notion of enlightened colonialism and imperialism, that England could civilize and uplift heathen India, and while there is a racist element to the idea of India as irredeemably primitive, it is clear from the story that Kipling, like Strickland, does not disapprove of a primitive punishment for Fleete’s crime, only an excessively severe primitive punishment. Also, consider the story’s title. On the obvious level “the mark of the beast” refers to the mark Fleete leaves on Hanuman’s forehead. But it can just as easily refer to the mark left by the beast, i.e., Fleete.

Most critics in the twenty-first century have come to see Kipling with a nuance that earlier critics, who unfairly labeled him a jingoistic poet of Empire, lacked:

With few exceptions, recent critics of Kipling’s work have commented on the ambiguity and multi-voicedness of his fictional portraits of Empire, and have rightly insisted on separating Kipling’s public persona from his artistic personae. Of course, no one can deny the sympathy for the project of empire-building–and the admiration for those engaged therein–that runs throughout much of Kipling’s Indian fiction, but there are also darker, more cynical visions of Empire in his work.¹⁸

These critics note in particular “The Mark of the Beast” as one of Kipling’s most complicated, and oppositional, views of Empire:

Marking the beast means writing the beast–producing colonial discourse; the rhetoric of colonial discourse informs Fleete’s attempt to define Hanuman, and its ultimate goal is to enact that rhetoric. Yet “The Mark of the Beast” instead enacts a spectacular failure of the colonizer to define the colonized; indeed, the colonized, through the agency of Hanuman and the Silver Man, participate in the construction of colonial discourse in the process of marking Fleete. The tale is, as its name suggests, a meditation on the phrase “the mark of the beast”–an exploration of writing (“the mark”), possession and agency (“of”), and bestiality (“the beast”). In dwelling upon the way meaning naturalizes itself, the text exposes–and thereby destroys–the device through which colonial discourse typically writes the Other. As an allegory of the literary and political relations of colonization, the confrontation of Fleete and Hanuman paints a dark picture of the project of Empire: Fleete is subsumed by his own discourse, forced to act out the rhetoric by means of which he seeks to control Hanuman.

Yet this is not the full extent of Kipling’s critique of colonial discourse, for both Strickland and the narrator reproduce Fleete’s crime on other textual levels, and the tale condemns them for their actions just as it punishes Fleete for his.¹⁹

Print: Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales. London: Gollancz/Orion, 2007.

¹ Rudyard Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1899), 291.

² Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 292-293.

³ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 293.

⁴ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 293.

⁵ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 296.

⁶ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 298-299.

⁷ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,’ 299.

⁸ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 303.

⁹ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 305.

¹⁰ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 305.

¹¹ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 290.

¹² Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 293.

¹³ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 303.

]¹⁴ Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detections and the Imperial Venture (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2004), 64-78.

¹⁵ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 301.

¹⁶ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 301.

¹⁷ Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast,” 305.

¹⁸ Paul Battles, “‘The Mark of the Beast’: Rudyard Kipling’s Apocalyptic Vision of Empire,” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 333.

¹⁹ Battles, “‘The Mark of the Beast,’” 337.