Some Occult Connections in France, 1870-1939

A C EVANS

A new cult launched in the period after 1870 was Theosophy.

Founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, who enshrined Theosophical  doctrine and precepts in her two books:  Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888). Blavatsky based her doctrine on eastern philosophy and was opposed to both Christianity and Spiritualism.

However, her first French devotee, Rene Caillé’, founder of the magazine L’Antimaterialiste (1884) tried to combine all these spiritual orientations. The French Theosophical Society was also founded in 1884 – the year of A Rebours and Les Poetes Maudits – under the aegis of Lady Caithness, Duchesse de Pomar. The organization was consolidated in 1887 as Le Societe d’Isis under the leadership of Felix-Krishna Gaboriau, editor of the magazine Le Lotus. In that same year, 1884, Theosophy claimed another new convert in the person of Gerard Encausse, a young medical student. His academic researches had lead him to the Bib1thothque Nationale but he spent his time there studying medieval grimoires and treatises on alchemy and Paracelcist healing.

After his conversion to occultism Encausse took the name ‘Papus’, derived from a work by the semi-legendary ancient Greek mage Apollonius of Tyana. He was to become the most energetic publicist and entrepreneur of the occult during the entire period. In 1887 he published his first book, L’Occultisme Contempraine and published his second work, Traite elementaire des Sciences Occultes, in 1888. By this time he had also been elected to the General Council of the Theosophical society by Gaboriau and Colonel Olcott. He later rejected Theosophy and formed his own organization – the first of many – called Le Society Hermes.

As early as 1886, Papus, with his disciple Chamuel, had founded the bookshop Librarie du Merveilleux, one of three similar establishments in Paris at the time. The others were run by Henri Charconac (Librarie Generale des sciences occultes) and Edmond Bailly who owned the Librarie de l’Art Independent . These shops became the focal points of connections between the occultists and the poetes maudits of the Decadent Movement. The first ‘decadent’ poems by Paul Verlaine had appeared in the periodical Paris Moderne in 1882, among them the influential ‘Art Poetique’ which became the basic theoretical statement of the new movement – initially the terms ‘decadence’ and ‘impressionism’ were interchangeable. Both terms symbolized outrage and radical syntactic disruption.

To those who were shocked by their pictures the Impressionist painters seemed to work in a style which demanded the disintegration of the image in the same way that the Decadents, following Verlaine’s dictum ‘Take eloquence and wring his neck!’ required the ‘decomposition’ of language. Both the Impressionists and the Decadents appeared to be out to destroy meaning itself; both schools were opposed to Academic Art, and were, therefore, anti-establishment. Some Decadents, like the Quintessent Anatole Baju evolved a philosophy of transformation influenced by occult theories. Their objective was to create a style which would express the unique subtleties of the modern world as perceived by the unique perceptions of the decadent poet – the  precursor of a new species of man, the ‘outrider’ of a ‘latent transformation’ which would undermine the cultural clutter of Classicism, Romanticism and Naturalism. ‘Society,’ said Baju, ‘is disintegrating, corroded by a deliquescent civilisation.’

The leading Decadents soon allied themselves with the outsiders of the occult. To the bookshops came Huysmans, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Victor-Emile Michelet, and many others seeking enlightenment. Papus himself was keenly aware of the common interests between the Decadents, Symbolists and Occultists. Many of his books such as Le Tarot Des Bohemians (1889), Traite’methodique de Science Occulte (1891) and hi Traite Elementaire de magie pratique (1893) were read by poets who found in their pages corroboration of their own speculations and theories of sensations associees, reciprocal analogy, the supersensible world and sensory derangement. As Charles Morice was to remark: ‘Every true poet is by instinct an initiate.’ This statement pointed to a poetic tradition which stretched back via Rimbaud to Baudelaire and Gerard de Nerval, with roots in the late eighteenth century, the period of the very first occult revival that accompanied the emergence of Romanticism. However the writings of a poet like Mallarme remained infinitely more subtle than the outpourings of the esoteric fraternity, and while he may have found some inspiration in the Nuctmeron of Apollonius he took pains to distance himself from ‘les pauvres kabbalistes’. Likewise Huysmans, whilst he found himself attracted to the nightmare grotesqueries of Satanism, which he depicted in his book La-Bas, eventually admitted himself repelled by the ‘verbiage’ uttered by self-styled initiates.

Despite the success of Theosophy there existed a mainstream of European occultism, expounded by Alephs Levi, Charles Nodier and Paul Christian, as powerful as Blavatsky’s pseudo-oriental myth of the Mahatmas. This tradition was enshrined in Rosicrucianism and the Kabbala.

So it was, that in 1888 the morphinomaniac Marquis Stanislas de Guaita founded the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Croix. A number of prominent figures joined this group: Papus (of course), and Oswald Wirth. Wirth was Swiss ‘magnetic healer’ and a Freemason who became Guatia’s secretary and also wrote a book called Les Vingt-deux Clues Kabbalistiques du Tarot. A number of literary figures also joined including the poets Edouard Dubus, Michelet and Laurent Tailhade, and the novelists, Maurice Barres and Paul Adam.

Of these the most famous was undoubtedly Maurice Barres (1862-1923). In the 1880s he aligned himself with the Decadent Movement and had written the first serious analysis of the movement’s aims in an article entitled La Sensation en Literature (1884) he discussed the work of Verlaine, Mallarme and the poet-musician Maurice Rollinat as exponents of a technique called sensations associees. This was the Decadent version of Baudelaire’s Correspondences, the doctrine of reciprocal analogy, which Baudelaire had in turn derived from the occult tradition of Swedenborg and Bohme. Barres perpetuated his own version of Decadence called the Culte du Moi, a scheme of nihilist individualism which he later renounced in favour of right wing nationalist politics influenced by the philosopher and former anarcho-syndicalist, Georges Sorel. Joining the extreme monarchist, Catholic, anti-Semitic organization L’Action Francaise and the revanchiste Ligue des Patriots, Barres became an icon of the right. In 1921 he was to be denounced by Andre Breton and the Paris Dadaists who declared that he had ‘renounced what may be unique in himself’. Paul Adam (1862-1920) had created a scandal with hi novel Chair Molle, a product of Decadent Naturalism taking as its subject the life and experiences of a prostitute. Both these personalities – Barres and Adam – illustrate the various tendencies that, in the France of 1888, led them to join Guaita’s occult organization. Adam shows how the materialist conceptions of Emile Zola’s Naturalism derived from a nihilist skepticism which rendered the occult more attractive than orthodoxy, while Barres illustrates a trajectory from ultra-individualist Decadence, via occultism, to right wing authoritarianism. The philosophy of Sorel as embodied in his influential Reflexions sur la Violence (1908) was to have far-reaching effects, being one of the ideological sources of Fascism, although ideas such as ‘structural violence’ and the politics of the ‘general strike’ also resonated with movements on the Left.

According to occult historian Francis King, Guaita’s objective was the study of kabalistic philosophy and to thereby aid the spread of occult knowledge. Guaita also had mystical leanings and attempted to achieve ‘divine union’ through meditation and other methods. The marquis was a typical maudit. He lived like an occult des Esseintes, rarely emerging in daylight hours except to purchase some grimoire from one of the occult bookshops. He came from an established Lombardy family and went to school at Nancy where he met Maurice Barres. Later he moved to Paris, supposedly to take a law degree, but he soon chose a literary career instead. In 1881 he published his first book of poems, Oiseaux de Passage, to be followed by La Muse Noir (1883) and Rosa Mystica (1885). According to Mario Praz La Muse Noir dealt with the whole gamut of sensationalist decadent themes: orgies, paganism, tortures, harlots, drugs, vampires and the ‘ecstatic vertigo’ of crime. His perversity found a more constructive outlet in 1881 when he started to read the works of Eliphas Levi. His subsequent occult writings – influential at the time – were merely surveys of earlier literature. He wrote Au Seuil du Mystere, Le Temple de Satan (1891) and La Clef de la magie Noir (1897).

The main significance of Guaita’s order lay in it’s mixed membership of occultists like Wirth and Papus and poets like Michelet and Barres, signifying an attempt to fuse artistic enterprise and. occultism in a formal manner. It was, perhaps, symptomatic of a growing nostalgia, an atavistic desire to resurrect the primordial sources of art in ritual. Paul Adam, like Huysmans, rejected Naturalism and the modernity of Decadence in favour of myth, legend, romance and the fantastic. Writers and artists, in reaction against the spiritual negation of their age indulged their imaginations in various directions. They cultivated the sadistic cruelties of Flaubert’s Carthaginian bloodbath novel, Salammbo, or the vast, encrusted, legendary, erotic paintings of Gustave Moreau (hailed by Huysmans as uniquely ‘modern’). They exemplified an immersion in pseudo-historic fantasy typical of great numbers of Decadent/Symbolist writers and painters who produced large numbers of works using legendary themes, the lives of the saints, or the Norse epics in imitation of Wagner’s Ring.

Guaita’s Kabbalistic Rosicrucian order was the first of many such groups which were to proliferate in England and Europe during the subsequent decades. In 1888 a group of Rosicrucian adepti with similar preoccupations emerged in England when the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn (GD) established its Isis-Urania Temple. Among its members were the Celtic Symbolist W. B. Yeats and the pioneer of cosmic horror fiction Arthur Machen. In 1894 the GD set up a temple in Paris (called the Ahathoor) and by 1895 the indefatigable Papus had been made an honourary member. An intriguing aspect of this convergence of art and occultism is the suggestion that many esoteric ideas were mediated into mass culture from the cultural underground of magical fraternities by artists and writers who came to specialize in various genres of the fantastic.

An early precedent had been set by the English author Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a founder member of the semi-Masonic Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (1866) and author of numerous works of fantasy dealing with occult-magical themes, notably Zanoni (1842) and ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’ (1857). Zanoni was taken very seriously by subsequent generations and the English magus Francis Barrett initiated Lytton himself into the occult arts, it was claimed.

Later examples of the link between fantasy or horror fiction and the occult would include the novelists Arthur Machen (1863-1947) and Algernon Blackwood (1869-1959). Machen’s book The Hill of Dreams (1907) has been called ‘the most decadent book in the English language’. But he is more well known for his horror stories such as The Great God Pan (1895) and The Three Imposters (1896) evoking the occult world of cosmic evil revealed by satanic practices and the atmosphere of Decadence in the literary circles of London in the 1890s. Machen’s work had some influence over the writings of the later American writer of ‘pulp’ horror, H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) who continued to explore worlds of cosmic evil in tales like ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928). The period between 1880 and 1914 witnessed a flowering of occult, and thinly disguised occult, fantasy fiction and pictorial illustration. There were fantasies of Alternative Worlds as described by Lord Dunsany in The Gods of Pegana (1905) or William Morris in The Glittering Plain (1891).

Stories of world catastrophe perpetuated the myth of the fin-de-siecle as a period of cultural breakdown as exemplified by the gruesome racial warfare of M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898) and his novel of total destruction called The Purple Cloud (1901). These works were allied to the pioneer Science Fiction of the time as exemplified by H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1897) and Le Peril Bleu (1910) by Maurice Renard. The apocalypse of 1914-1918 was mirrored in the works of German writers like Oskar Panizza (Visionen der Dammerung, 1914), Hanns Heinz Ewers, and the Austrian Expressionist Alfred Kubin whose novel depicting a parallel universe, The Other Side was published in 1909. The Austrian author of Der Golem (1915), Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932) was an ardent occultist and alchemist from Prague who belonged to an organization called The Theosophical Lodge of the Blue Star. Meyrink’s work was said to have exerted some influence over the Gnostic psychology of C. G. Jung.

Considering Oscar Wilde’s Gothic-Decadent tale of moral degeneracy and magical transformation, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), David Punter has said:

Dorian Gray incorporates the problems of the 1890s in a jeweled nutshell. We have a burgeoning awareness of the existence of the unconscious, of that fountain from which spring desires and needs of a thousand times stronger that those to which we can admit; a sense of dire situations which result from the liberation of those passions…

David Punter, The Literature Of Terror, Longman, 1980