Occult Connections 1870-1939
Introductory Notes
After the turmoil of the French Revolution, Roman Catholicism was re-established by means of the 1801 Concordat between Pope Pius VII and Napoleon. Throughout the nineteenth century politics oscillated between ultra-rightist monarchist Legitimism and liberal anti-clerical republicanism.
In the aftermath of the Paris Commune revolutionaries executed the archbishop of Paris. The anti-clericals were themselves massacred without trial by rightwing Catholics. The occult subculture was dominated by utopian and quasi-millenarian cults allied to the political left. By 1864 Pope Pius IX saw fit to condemn ‘pantheism’ and secret societies along with Rationalism and Socialism in a document called Syllabus Errorum (The Syllabus of Errors), an appendix to the encyclical Quanta Curia. Artists and intellectuals tended to mirror these oscillations of politics; veering from occult anarchism to reactionary proto-fascist Legitimism and religious nostalgia. Nostalgia for religious certainties derived, in the main, from authors such as Chateaubriand (Le Genie du Christianisme, 1802) and Felicite Lamennais. Lamennais exemplified the frustration of many, becoming one of the founders of Christian Socialism after failing to influence the papacy with new ideas of socio-spiritual renewal.
Among the occult theories of the period were Fourierisme, Saint-Simonisme, and Palingenesie Sociale – the doctrine of Pierre-Simon Ballanche. A sculptor called Ganneau evolved another system called Evadism which called for the ‘androgynisation’ of the human race. These systems like Martinist Illuminism often incorporated ideas derived from occult Freemasonry and gave rise to themes and concepts which percolated into the aesthetic ideas of artists and poets. The motif of the Androgyny, for example, was to become a powerful symbol for the avant garde Decadents and Rosicrucian aesthetes of the fin-de-siecle.
By 1830 Paris had become the centre of Polish émigré society following an abortive and humiliating uprising against the Russians. The Poles brought with them a special brand of illuminist politics which took the form of a mystical-apocalyptic messianism in which their home country was identified as The Christ of Nations. This Slavonic messianism fused with native French traditions and became one of the major external influences on the French occult revival. The historian Raymond Pearson has described the mentality of the émigré population in terms which may well apply to all occultists and maudits of the period:
The messianic and chiliastic excesses of the Polish exiles are difficult to comprehend except as an intuitive, collective, morale boosting therapy, the deliberate creation of a fantasy world in which to dwell because the real world has become too painful to endure. Pearson, Raymond, National Minorities In Eastern Europe 1848-1945, Macmillan, 1983
Occultists and avant garde artists naturally empathized with these political exiles whose doctrines were mediated into the French underground subculture by figures like the pseudoscientist Hoene Wronski. In 1852 Wronski came into contact with the leading French occultists including Eliphas Levi. Levi himself became a fervent supporter of Wronski’s bizarre mathematical discoveries and came to regard the Polish messianic practitioner as more important than Newton. Wronski published a major work in 1847 entitled Messianisme ou ref orme absolu du savoir humain in which he defined his objective as the unification of religion and philosophy as the prerequisite for peace and the inauguration of a divine theocratic utopia. These ideas were crucial to Eliphas Levi’s development and through him were to influence subsequent exponents of the occult revival both in France and Germany. Polish messianic ideas can be seen as one strand in a larger stream of influence – Slavophilism, a fascination with Eastern European and Russian cultures with their archaistic, folkloric, primitivism and their Byzantine, theocratic opulence and sophistication0 In the 1880s French intellectual circles enjoyed a craze for all things ‘Slavonic’ and Russian after the discovery of the Russian Novel forcefully publicized by the Vicomte de Vogue in his book La Roman Russe. Other key influences were artists like the Pole Stanislaw Wyspianski and the Czechoslovak graphic artist and designer Alphonse Much whose designs often drew upon Masonic and occult symbolism. At the heart of the Slavonic craze lay an existential unease; the semi-unconscious perception that cultural forms were undergoing a drastic process of disintegration to be externalized as la decadence occidentale. One result of this tendency was an overwhelming nostalgia for traditionalist, pre-positivistic hieraticism (manifest, for instance in the static encrustation of paintings by Gustave Moreau, or later, Gustav Klimt) and the sanctified certainties of Byzantine theocracy.
Another external influence on French occult thought in the pre-1870 period was the philosophy of Swedenborg. His complete works had been translated into French by 1820 and contained a variation on the ancient NeoPlatonic doctrine of Sympathetic Analogy or Correspondences. Together with the themes of the New Age and Angelic Androgynization these ideas influenced a number of writers including Baudelaire and Balzac. Balzac’s Livre Mystique (1835) included the story of the angelic androgyny Seraphitus-Seraphita. Many of these ideas were to resurface in the theories and writings of later authors such as Josphin Pleledan and August Strindberg. Swedenborgianism took the existence of angels and spirits for granted so it was not surprising that the most influential occult craze of the mid-nineteenth century should be spiritualism, which spread to Europe from America after the affair of the Hydesville Rappings in 1848.
In France the leading exponent of Spiritualism was Allen Kardec whose Livre des Esprits of 1857 became the bible of the new movement. After the death of his daughter in 1843 Victor Hugo took an active interest in Spiritualism. He began holding seances and not only established communications with his dead daughter but also made contact with the shades of departed poets – Dante… Aeschylus… Shakespeare and others. He also produced a number of ‘automatic’ drawings which have been regarded by some as forerunners of Surrealism. Mediumistic-automatic art is one of the legacies of the Spiritualist movement which remains largely unexplored: there are works by mediums such as Helen Smith or Madge Gill which display tendencies similar to many Surrealist works (e.g. Andre Masson) and which raise issues of interpretation in the psychology of ‘outsider art’. In later paragraphs we will again touch upon these questions in relation to the emergence of Abstract Art in the years immediately preceding the First World War.
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A.C. Evans
Thanks. Enjoyed reading this – interested to know how it fitted in to the revolutionary political wave that went across Europe in 1848. I know a bit about how this fitting into the art and Literary movements, but the outsider status of the Spirirualist movement wasn’t something I’d looked at in any detail …..
Comment by Steven Taylor on 23 August, 2024 at 6:39 pm