Occult Connections 1870-1939
From all these things I extracted the quintessence. The filth you gave meI have turned to gold. – Baudelaire
A C EVANS
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An Alchemical Inferno
One of the mainsprings of that fin-de-siecle tendency called Decadence was a desire for purification – purification of The Image; purification of The Word.
This drive for purity was also the imperative underlying developments in the performing arts for example the free Dance of Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis, Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman which formed the basis for the Modern Dance movement exemplified by the later work of Martha Graham. In music this tendency was not only exemplified by the ‘ultra-modern’ Expressionistic music of the 2nd Vienese School (Schoenberg, Webern and Berg), but also in the ‘indeterminate’ chromaticisms and tonalities of other composers (Mahler, Strauss and Sibelius) who extended the scope of musical experiment in the wake of Wagner’s Parsifal.
In all of these cases one detects an. underlying concern with artistic evolutionism and renovation achieved through acts of aesthetic purification in which the creative impulse is enhanced because the necrotic growths of dead academicism and useless traditions have been expunged or transcended. In this respect the processes of imaginative creation merge with ideas of ritual initiation and self-purification: Baudelaire’s Dandyism, Rimbaud’s Alchimie du Verbe, Mallarme’s Grand Oeuvre and the culte du moi of Maurice Barres.
One is also reminded of Nietzsche’s philosophical theories of ‘the Will to Power’, and non-metaphysical transcendence embodied in his conception of the Ubermensch. It is perhaps Nietzsche above all others who penetrated most deeply into the mysteries of this post-Darwinian universe of infinite directionless fluctuation, recognizing that modern man’s loss of belief in ‘truth’ reveals a crushing nihilism which must be assimilated. Can Western man cope with the total disintegration of the moral and scientific order? Perhaps Nietzsche’s own mental collapse is an indication of the great difficulties involved. Underlying much fin-de-siecle art is the notion that the poet-artist is a maudit, an outcast, a marginalized ‘wanderer’ or fugitivus errans, immersed in the psycho-spiritual problems of his own inner struggle but also a symbolic exemplar of the epoch.
In Jungian terms the poet stimulates, perhaps only half-consciously, the processes of his own spiritual evolution or Individuation. Jungian Analytical Psychology, (itself the inheritor of many Gnostic idea) incorporated theories from the Hermetic traditions of Alchemy into its explanation of these mental processes. The creative process becomes ‘active imagination’. The sufferings of the maudit, the outcast, can be seen as a quasi-shamanistic ordeal of transformation (or Revolution in Marxist or Hegelian mold) in which impure elements are turned into a spiritual ‘gold’. This is an interpretation of Alchemy as an inner spiritual discipline taking place in parallel with an outer, material, or even social transformative process. It can be seen from a study of the great Alchemical works such as those by Trismosin (1582), Bonus (1546), Ramon Lull (c1315), Norton (1477), Michael Maier (1618), and others) that they preserved, in a semi-aesthetic form, the essential Gnostic-Hermetic doctrines of transmutation, initiation and rebirth throughout the period from the Alexandrian era to the eighteenth century.
The proto-scientific aspects of these theories became unfashionable and discredited during the Eighteenth century, but the symbolism was preserved in the rites of occult Freemasonry and subsequently percolated into the artistic avant-garde through the works of the German Romantics and the writings of Boehme and Swedenborg and the esoteric Rosicrucians. Throughout the nineteenth century a number of adepts had tried to keep proto-or para-scientific alchemy alive. Among these were, of course, Eliphas Levi, but also Fernand Rozier and Louis Lucas. Mention should also be made of Barlet, a disciple of Papus and a member of Guaita’s Rosicrucian Order. There was also Francois Jollivet-Castelot whose book of Hermetic speculations entitled La Vie et l’ame de la Matiere was published in 1894. After publication of this work Jollivet-Castelot was contacted by August Strindberg, the Swedish novelist and dramatist then living in Paris.
Strindberg, perhaps the most eminent avant-garde writer to involve himself in the occult, had a long-standing interest in ‘natural science’ and had written a book on the subject called Antibarbarus. During his stay in Paris his ‘scientific’ interests took an occult turn and he wrote a number of articles about curious experiments with copper. These operations were carried out in a room where the walls and floor were covered in gray sacking. By 1896 Strindberg had become co-founder with Jollivet-Castellot of the hermetic magazine Hyperchimie. He also engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Papus in the magazine L’Initiation. In 1897 he was a ‘Master’ of La Societe Aichemique de France and was entertaining wild ideas of competing for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Strindberg was a typical, if extreme, example of the fin-de-siecle ‘maudit personality’. Brilliant and demented by turns, a paranoid misogynist tortured by a spiritual malaise. His works followed the archetypal pattern of inner spiritual progress. Just as the Dutchman Toorop moved from Impressionism, to occult Symbolist Esoterisme, to Catholic Orthodoxy, so Strindberg moved from the scathing Naturalism of the Red Room (1879) – an autobiographical novel – and the plays The Father (1887), and Miss Julie (1888) to the intense, phantasmagoric Symbolism of A Dream Play (1916) and his ‘intimate’ expressionist chamber plays – for example The Ghost Sonata (c1907). Various experiences in early childhood had undermined his sense of security. Later, official reaction to his works – he was prosecuted for blasphemy in 1884 and attacked for immorality in 1888 – only confirmed his belief that the world was a form of Hell or Purgatory. After finishing The Ghost Sonata he wrote:
…it is horrifying like life, when the veil falls from our eyes and we see things as they
are… I have suffered as though in Kama-Loka (Sheol). . . and my hands have bled (literally)… we live in a world of madness and delusion… from which we must fight our way free.
Strindberg, August, Inferno And From An Occult Diary, Penguin Books, 1979
Such statements reinforce the belief that the artistic progress of the late nineteenth century that created the idea of Modernism involved a critical and radical procedure of dis-illusion, a painful stripping away of the accumulated dogmas and illusions of past culture. It is known that Strindberg was influenced by the German philsophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the writings on ‘degeneracy’ purveyed by such authors as Max Nordau. The ‘pathological naturalism’ of Strindberg’s works can find echoes in the early writings of Huysmans and Zola. But this ‘naturalism’ becomes its antithesis through a ruthless eradication and a concentration on the sordid and negative aspects of existence in the name of scientific objectivity. The ultimate goal of this aesthetic striving becomes an idea of freedom via transformation, Renovatio or even revolution – as in the works of the Dadaists who created a strange new beauty from the dross and junk of the post-1914 era.
Before coming to Paris Strindberg had married twice – to the actress Siri von Essen in 1887, and to an Austrian journalist, Frida Uhl in 1893. Both marriages were disastrous and it was after the virtual collapse of the second one that he moved to France and plunged into the psychological crisis recorded in his journal Inferno (1897). Strindberg is thus, like so many others involved in the struggle to create ‘modernism’ an artist of crisis, inhabiting an epoch of crisis as the imperial order of Europe in both the East and the West entered a period of catastrophe and convulsion. It is quite understandable that Strindberg, like Nietzsche, found it impossible to separate his personal instability and crisis experiences from the sociopolitical crises and instabilities of the world. Early Modernism was an art of crisis; modern art is (or rather, was) the outward sign of underlying turmoil.
During the 1890s Strindberg was associated with many personalities among the Parisian avant-garde. Among them was a fellow Nordic, the painter Edvard Munch whose works operated in much the same psychological territory as Strindberg and who externalised the alienation of modern man in pictures that caused scandal and consternation. Like Strindberg Munch’s aesthetic was rooted in an anti-academic Realist Naturalism such as ‘Girl Kindling the Stove’ (1883) or the Impressionistic ‘Rue Lafayette’ of 1891. However Munch’s work soon exhibited a preoccupation with the ‘pathological’ Naturalism of ‘degeneracy’ in such paintings as ‘By the Deathbed (Fever)’ (1893), ‘The Day After’ (1895), and ‘By the Roulette’ (1892).
Both Munch and Strindberg had lived for a period in Berlin where the Artist’s Association was split between conservatives and their opponents, the radicals, who wished to import French anti-academic ideas into the stultified ethos of officialdom. Munch’s exhibition in Berlin in 1892 was responsible for the birth of German Secessionism when a number of his pictures were banned and a group of younger artists led by Liebermann and Leistikow walked out in protest. In the following period Munch and Strindberg were closely involved with Berlin bohemian personalities, such as the Polish-German decadent author Stanislaw Przybyszewski who subscribed to an aesthetic doctrine dubbed ‘psychic Naturalism’ which aimed at the frenetic depiction of inner mental states and emotional complexities. Numerous works by Munch from this period depict these inner ‘psychic’ realities in a manner that was both highly stylized (drawing on the innovations of Synthetism and Art Nouveau) and also Naturalistic-Realistic: ‘Anxiety’ (1894), ‘The Dance of Life’ (1899), ‘Jealousy’ (1895), ‘Vampire ‘(1893/4), and the famous image entitled ‘The Scream’ (1893). All of these works and numerous other paintings by Munch portray in the starkest manner possible the Hell-On-Earth experience of the alienated maudit oscillating between a candid, cynical depiction of human depravity and desperate frenetic, nihilistic neurosis of sexual crisis which eventually finds its resolution in a form of semi-mystical anti-naturalistic pantheism: ‘The Voice’ (1893), ‘Starry Night’ (1893) and ‘The Sun’ (1912).
Both Strindberg and Munch were in Paris in 1895 and Strindberg claimed to have created gold from lead by alchemical transmutation. In 1895 he gave interviews explaining that his bleeding hands were the result of scorching during the experiments although it known that the condition was in fact a symptom of a skin disorder called psoriasis. Strindberg continued his articles on copper in his fruitless efforts to achieve scientific credibility and prove that the metal contained carbon. Needless to say only occultists were impressed by his claims. By night he would walk the graveyards of Paris with Munch describing his nightmare world of Kama-Loka: a world of persecution by enigmatic enemies and ‘signs’ from ‘unknown powers’. Whenever he used the microscope he saw hands beckoning him -he knew that his enemies were attacking him from the astral plane and using an ‘electric machine’ against his personal aura. At times he felt able to strike back by telepathic means.
Eventually, after reading Baizac’s Serphita Strindberg emerged from the crisis. He never abandoned his occult worldview and still expressed his belief in ‘unknown powers’ and the Swedenborgian apocalypse or Vastation. He believed the Twentieth Century was to be a New Age. He returned to Sweden to another disastrous marriage to another actress – but in later years, from the relative peace of his Blue Tower he produced some of his most influential plays as well as philosophical and political books.
illustration: Edvard Munch: Portrait of August Strindberg, 1896
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