THE RED LION

Maria Szepes: The Red Lion -  

A Writer and a Novel that Should Not Be Forgotten.

reviewed by Gisela Kranz

I would like to remember a brilliant novel that I enjoyed this winter, called The Red Lion, by Maria Szepes. It is available nowadays in good libraries, and at second hand book stores but maybe only at an extreme price.

Maria Szepes was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1908, and died there in 2007.  She worked as an actress, journalist and writer; and had profound knowledge of occult matters. Like Dion Fortune, she wrote a book on the occult meaning of marriage, a two-volume-overview on western occult theories (Academia Occulta), and novels, some of them science fiction. 

Szepes wrote The Red Lion during the Second World War, while Europe stood in flames. From the background of this inferno comes the underlying message of the book: maybe it takes many incarnations, maybe we create frightening purgatories, but surely our souls can find their spiral path up to divine enlightenment.

In spite of the serious topic, Szepes succeeded in writing an entertaining, colourful, thrilling novel, deeply rooted in her esoteric knowledge. She outlines the “biography” of a soul: learning, failing and improving during 500 years in various lives in different countries.  It starts out like a crime story, but with every new level of incarnation, a different plot enfolds in front of a new, bizarre historical background. You see the red thread linking the different lives; and after more pages, you are eager to predict which actions in one life would influence the quality of the next. All the stories are told without drama, in a narrative that is never superficial.

 I enjoyed the book while on vacation.

The story of the manuscript of the novel is special too.  It was published in 1946 and soon forbidden and destroyed by the young Communist Government of post-war Hungary. For nearly 40 years, only self-made copies under pseudonym passed from hand to hand in the Hungarian underground. In the 1980s, a manuscript was finally brought to the West, was published again, and became an esoteric bestseller.