EBB TIDE & CULTURE WAR

 

 

Various Occult and Other Connections 1870-1939

A C EVANS

 

By the mid-1890s the tide of the French occult revival was at low ebb. In 1894 Papus called for a withdrawal out of the limelight:

We have decided to leave society folk to amuse each other, and to retreat more than ever into the closed groups from which we were obliged to emerge in 1882…

Papus himself died of tuberculosis in 1916, at the height of The Great War that was to rupture the fabric of European society. During the war he served in the army in a medical capacity and was promoted to the rank of major. In 1905 he traveled to St Petersburg at the invitation of illuminates close to the Tsar. It is said that he summoned-up the ghost of Alexander II with necromantic rituals performed at the behest of the beleaguered Romanovs. So Papus’ later career vividly illustrates the headlong, chaotic course of events in Europe, as the forces of revolution and imperialist reaction prepared to engage in cataclysmic struggles which were to engulf all proponents of the occult underground. These social struggles were the crucible, from which would emerge a more hardened, more radical form of Modernism than that envisaged by the pioneers of the 1870s and 1890s.

In 1897 came the death of Guaita, killed by the morphine to which he was addicted. Peledan staged the last Rosicrucian Salon in the same year. The Catholic Church contributed to the anti-occult climate by putting L’Initiation on The Index of Prohibited Literature and overtly condemning the Gnostic Church of Jules Doinel (Gnostic Bishop of Mirepoix) and Leonce Fabre des Essarts (The Patriarch Synesius). Despite attempts to reach a rapprochement with the French Republic the Church maintained a haughty Ultramontanist position that looked back to the days of L’Ancien Regime. Indeed the very doctrine of Papal Infallibility, which had been defined in the year of 1870, against the background of the Franco-Prussian War, symbolized how The Vatican was to turn against all signs of ‘the modernist heresy’ thereby initiating a culture war (or kulturkampf) that has grown in strength and scope ever since; a transnational multi-faith backlash against modernity and most if not all aspects of modern life (individualism, separation of powers, democracy, pluralism, feminism, press freedom). This would become a hybrid struggle, perpetrated by hubristic cultural elites who knew that secularization would compromise their privileges and social status.  

In 1907 the Vatican continued its crusade against modernism with the decree Lamentabili describing the ‘heresy’ in sixty-five propositions. The main target of official Catholic Anti-Modernism was the method of scriptural exegesis developed by liberal theolo­gians in Germany. At the same time Catholic writers in France accused sociologists of ‘dogmatic atheism’ as the establishment continued to impose its modernization programme. Durkheim’s Les Formes Elementaires de la Vie Religieuse (1912) consolidated a ‘scientific’ perspective on all spiritual matters, asserting the notion that ‘god’ was a collective representation of society itself and that, to quote Thompson, ‘our basic ideas of time, space and causation may reflect past and present social organization’.

The uncompromising stand by the Church exemplified the growing tensions of the age: the position was soon to be mirrored by other regimes that were to find all aspects of modernity in cultural matters equally uncongenial. In due course both Hitler and Stalin were to condemn the ‘degeneracy’ and ‘decadence’ of cosmopolitan modernism.

French right wing politics had often focussed upon the theme of the return of the monarchy, occasionally taking the form of bizarre types of monarchist Legitimism – the philosophy of the Divine Right of Kings. In essence this was yet another form of reaction against the uncertainties of the secular world. The alienating dread arising from the loss of official faith prompted many to take up reactionary monarchism, an overstressed religious orthodoxy, or causes like Boulangisme – anti-German French Nationalism. This was a time of developing militarism. All of these activities derived from a crypto-mystical atavistic irrationalism calculated to appeal to disaffected intellectuals. As referred to earlier, Maurice Barres was among the first to abandon Decadence for a style of politics many considered authoritarian. As an anti-Dreyfus activist he purveyed a ‘blood-race-soil’ brand of mystico-nationalist cultural warfare. Together with Charles Maurras and Leon Daudet he was associated with the right-wing L’Action Francaise organisation. His views were both monarchist and anti-semitic.

J-K. Huysmans was to continue his researches into the occult but was also attracted by the doctrine of monarchist Legitimism as the possible subject for a novel. His close associated Villiers de l’Isle Adam and the ultra-traditionalist Leon Bloy, known as l’entrepreneur de demolitions would have encouraged him in this direction.

Bloy’s writings were saturated with a millenarian sense of doom, reflecting the degeneration of bourgeoise society as the debacle of 1914 drew ever nearer. He had been a member of Le Chat Noir group and had written atudies of Verlaine and Rollinat (1882). Influenced by Ernest Hello and Thomas Carlyle, convinced of the supernatural validity of the stigmatic visionary Anna Kathrina Emmerich (1774-1824) Bloy wrote aggressively controversial books such as Le Desespere (1884), La Femme Pauvre (1897) and Le Sang du Pauvre (1909). His journal for the years 1892-1917 provides an insight into his intransigent support for Catholic Ultramontanist anti-modernism and his scathing rejection of science, progress and democracy. A position which many intellectuals were to find beguiling as the sense of alienation from the modern world grew. However Bloy was not representing a recent development: his early books were influenced by J. A. Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808-1889), a proto-decadent critic and novelist. Perhaps more than anyone Barbey d’Aurevilly had encouraged the spirit of Catholic reaction among the later Decadents. Himself follower of Byron, Scott and Baudelaire, he helped to formulate the idea of the fin-de-siecle Dandy, creating an image derived from a nostalgic noblesse oblige earning him the sobriquet Le Connetable des Lettres.

Barbey d’Aurevilly’s flight into archaistic formalism looked back only as far as the jeunesse dore of the 1830s but he nevertheless exerted a considerable influence over the next generation. His works combined a high-sounding neo-Catholic outlook with a passion for Legitimism and a ‘modern’ taste for the sordid and the pathological, masquerading as the exposure of ‘satanic’ influences, as in Les Diaboliques (1874), Une Vieille Maitresse (1851) and L’Ensorcelee (1854). However it is for his cult of Dandyism that he is remembered. Here he crystallized a key aspect of the introspective, isolated individual pitted against the stultification of nineteenth century philistinism and irreligious tendencies. Dandyism was a metamorphosis of the English idea of the Dandy as epitomised by Beau Brummel and Byron. In 1844 Barbey had written a book called Du Dandyisme et de Georges Brummel. The sartorial elegance and severity of the Dandy became stance that encompassed anti-materialism, eccentric panache and a haughty disdain. It became the basis for a ‘discipline’ incorporating a morbid aestheticism which, in later times, contributed to the emergence of the ‘camp’ sensibility. This elitist psycho­logical strategy suited the disillusioned intellectual seeking some form of non-metaphysical self-transcendence in a post-Darwinian world of directionless indeterminacy and ever-encroaching secularity.

This doctrine of Dandyism, as practiced by Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly and others complements the aestheticism of purity, which permeated the early modernism of the fin-de-siecle. Hand-in-hand with a perception of ‘the decline of the West’ this theory of personal integration and isolation reinforced both stylistic innovation and the quest for ‘the absolute’ in all artistic matters.

From the poetry of Mallarme to the elegant canvasses of Whistler or the urbanity of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, Dandyism signalled rejection of the common world for the rigours of artistic creation. The ideal of Art for Art’s Sake is here based upon ideas of ‘discipline’, ‘asceticism’ and ‘ordeal’. In the works of later writers, like the Japanese author Yukio Mishima, we see how these aspirations incorporate a very strong mode of sado-masocistic eroticism. The works of the period exemplify the attainments of this imperative to erotic purification as it clashed or combined with an uprising of the unconscious. Never before had such steps been taken; never before had such outrages been perpetrated against reactionary forces of academicism and officialdom. The high cost of this culture war strategy is manifest in the ‘casualty list’ of death and madness typical of the epoch, culminating in the loss of a whole ‘tragic generation’ of innovative artists – Symbolists, Decadents and Expressionists – in the unparalleled barbarism of The First World War.

 

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