The Occult Roots of Modernism
In the Paris of the early eighteen-nineties, at the height of the Decadence, the man of the moment was the novelist, art critic, and would-be guru Joséphin Péladan, who named himself Le Sâr, after the ancient Akkadian word for "king." He went about in a flowing white cloak, an azure jacket, a lace ruff, and an Astrakhan hat, which, in conjunction with his bushy head of hair and double-pointed beard, gave him the aspect of a Middle Eastern potentate. He was in the midst of writing a twenty-one-volume cycle of novels, titled "La Décadence Latine," which follows the fantastical adventures of various enchanters, adepts, femmes fatales, androgynes, and other enemies of the ordinary. His bibliography also includes literary tracts, explications of Wagnerian mythology, and a self-help tome called "How One Becomes a Magus." He let it be known that he had completed the syllabus. He informed Félix Faure, the President of the Republic, that he had the gift of "seeing and hearing at the greatest distances, useful in controlling enemy councils and suppressing espionage." He began one lecture by saying, "People of Nîmes, I have only to pronounce a certain formula for the earth to open and swallow you all." In 1890, he established the Order of the Catholic Rose + Croix of the Temple and the Grail, one of a number of end-of-century sects that purported to revive lost arts of magic. The peak of his fame arrived in 1892, when he launched an annual art exhibition called the Salon de la Rose + Croix, which embraced the Symbolist movement, with an emphasis on its more eldritch guises. Thousands of visitors passed through, uncertain whether they were witnessing a colossal breakthrough or a monumental joke.
The spell wore off quickly. At the time of Péladan's death, in 1918, he was already seen as an absurd relic of a receding age. He is now known mainly to scholars of Symbolism, connoisseurs of the occult, and devotees of the music of Erik Satie. (I first encountered Péladan in connection with Satie's unearthly 1891 score "Le Fils des Étoiles," or "The Son of the Stars"; it was written for Péladan's play of that title, which is set in Chaldea in 3500 B.C.) His contemporary Joris-Karl Huysmans remains a cult figure—"Against the Grain," Huysmans's 1884 novel, is still read as a primer of the Decadent aesthetic—but none of Péladan's novels have been translated into English. So when an exhibition entitled "Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris, 1892-1897" opens at the Guggenheim Museum, on June 30th, most visitors will be entering unknown territory. The show occupies one of the tower galleries, in rooms painted oxblood red, with furniture of midnight-blue velvet. On the walls, the Holy Grail glows, demonic angels hover, women radiate saintliness or lust. The dark kitsch of the fin de siècle beckons.
For all the faded creepiness, the moment is worth revisiting, because mystics like Péladan prepared the ground for the modernist revolution of the early twentieth century. John Bramble, in his 2015 book, "Modernism and the Occult," writes that the Salon de la Rose + Croix was the "first attempt at a (semi-)internationalist 'religion of modern art' "—an aesthetic order with Péladan as high priest. In the years that followed, radical artistic thinking and obscure spiritual strivings intersected in everything from Kandinsky's abstractions to Eliot's "The Waste Land" and the atonal music of Schoenberg. In Yeats's "The Second Coming," the "rough beast" that slouches toward Bethlehem, half man and half lion, is no metaphor. Classic accounts of modernism tended to repress such influences, often out of intellectual discomfort. In recent decades, though, fin-de-siècle mysticism has returned to scholarly vogue. In 1917, Max Weber said that the rationalization of Western society had brought about the "disenchantment of the world." Péladan, and those who took up his mantle, wished to enchant it once again.
The occult mania that crested in the decades before the First World War had been intensifying throughout the nineteenth century. Its manifestations included Theosophy, Spiritism, Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, Martinism, and Kabbalism—elaborations of arcane rituals that had been cast aside in a secular, materialist age. Reinventions or fabrications of medieval sects proliferated: the Knights Templar, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (the habitat of Yeats), and various Rosicrucian orders. Péladan belonged to the Rosicrucians, who, following sixteenth-century tracts of dubious authenticity, believed in alchemy, necromancy, and other dark arts. The more élite these groups became, the more they were prone to furious doctrinal disputes. In 1887, a feud broke out in Paris between Stanislas de Guaïta, of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose + Croix, and Joseph Boullan, a defrocked priest who was rumored to have sacrificed his own child during a Black Mass. When Boullan died, in 1893, Huysmans accused Guaïta and Péladan of having killed him with black magic. In Huysmans's 1891 novel, "Là-bas," a character observes, "From exalted mysticism to raging Satanism is but a step."
Péladan was born in Lyon, in 1858, into a family steeped in esoteric tendencies. His father, Louis-Adrien, was a conservative Catholic writer who tried to start a Cult of the Wound of the Left Shoulder of Our Saviour Jesus Christ. Péladan's older brother, Adrien, was the author of a medical text proposing that the brain subsists on unused sperm that takes the form of vital fluid. When Adrien died prematurely, of accidental strychnine poisoning, his brother perpetuated his ideas, suggesting that the intellect can thrive only when the sexual impulse is suppressed. The political views of the Péladans were thoroughly reactionary; they disdained democracy and called for the restoration of the monarchy. Péladan differed from many other occultists in insisting that his Rosicrucian rhetoric was an extension of authentic Catholic doctrine, which Church institutions had neglected.
He made his name first as an art critic, railing against naturalism and Impressionism, both of which he considered banal. "I believe in the Ideal, in Tradition, in Hierarchy," he declared. His model artist was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who rendered neoclassical subjects in a self-consciously archaic style, flattening perspectives and whitening colors. "What he paints has neither place nor time," Péladan wrote. "It is from everywhere and always." Yet he also had a taste for lurid, graphic imagery: the eerily glittering Salomé pictures of Gustave Moreau, the diabolical caricatures of Félicien Rops. Péladan singled out for praise Rops's "Les Sataniques," a series of etchings depicting visibly aroused demons penetrating and killing women. Péladan's pendulum swings between piety and depravity were characteristic of his milieu, although in his case the oscillation was particularly extreme.
Rops provided frontispieces for several of the "Décadence Latine" novels, which began appearing in 1884. "The Victory of the Husband," from 1889, is typical of the cycle, alternating between the lascivious and the ludicrous. The novel recounts the love of Izel and Adar: she, the adopted daughter of a wealthy Avignon priest; he, a young genius who defies the stupidity of the age. They are married, and honeymoon at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. (Péladan had gone there in 1888, and was overwhelmed.) At a performance of "Tristan und Isolde," Izel and Adar cannot restrain themselves and begin making love—a feat that will impress anyone who has endured Bayreuth's hard-backed seats. "Tristan! Isolde!" the lovers cry onstage. "Adar! Izel!" the lovers murmur in the audience, possibly to the irritation of their neighbors. But they clash on the question of "Parsifal," Wagner's final opera. For Izel, it is too "chaste, sweet, and calm"; for Adar, it opens the door to a new mystic consciousness, to the realm of the Holy Grail. He goes to study with a sinister Nuremberg sorcerer named Doctor Sexthental, and drifts away from his bride. Sexthental, sensing an opportunity, projects himself astrally into Izel's chambers, in the form of an incubus. The initiate defeats this incursion, but marital strife persists. Adar must renounce his powers—"I resign the august pentacle of the macrocosm"—to regain Izel's love.
That tale is tame next to "The Androgyne" and "The Gynander," both from 1891, in which Péladan delves into the world of same-sex love. The first depicts the coming-of-age of a feminine boy who seems destined to be gay—male classmates vie for him—but who escapes those desires by engaging in bouts of mutual exhibitionism with a mannish maiden. In the second novel, another androgyne, Tammuz, explores the lesbian underworld. He converts dozens of "gynanders"—Péladan's preferred term for lesbians—to heterosexuality after he magically generates replicas of himself. As an orchestra plays Wagner, the women fall to worshipping a giant phallus. Even as gender roles are subverted, the dominance of the male is maintained: like so many male artists of his day, Péladan was profoundly misogynist. "Man puppet of woman, woman puppet of the devil" was one of his most widely quoted slogans.
In any other society, such material would have been unpublishable, but Péladan sparked little outrage in an environment that had assimilated Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Huysmans. Among impressionable youth, he had an appeal somewhat comparable to that of H. P. Lovecraft. Writers as various as Paul Valéry, André Gide, André Breton, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline read him with fascination, as did Le Corbusier. Verlaine generously summarized him as a "man of considerable talent, eloquent, often profound . . . bizarre but of great distinction." Max Nordau, in his 1892 book, "Degeneration," a mocking survey of fin-de-siècle culture, shows a soft spot for Péladan, declaring that "the conscious factor in him knows that [mysticism] is all nonsense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the unconscious life to do as it pleases." This is probably as strong a defense of Péladan's writing as can be mounted.
The catalogue for the Guggenheim's "Mystical Symbolism" show, which was curated by Vivien Greene, spends little time on Péladan's literary career, focussing instead on his activities as an impresario. In the lead essay, Greene argues that Péladan's flamboyant manifestos and mixed-media happenings anticipated avant-garde trends of the following century—notably, the "conception of the exhibition venue as a space for multidisciplinary performance and as an immersive aesthetic environment." The Salons de la Rose + Croix, which unfolded in various galleries and halls around Paris, were designed less to present a coherent group of artists than to demonstrate art's ability to transform the daily world. What Péladan took from Wagner, above all, was the idea that art could assume the functions of religion. "The artist is a priest, a king, a magus," he proclaimed.
Péladan complicated his task by freighting the salons with often nonsensical regulations. He forbade history paintings, still-lifes, seascapes, "all humorous things," and "all representations of contemporary life, private or public." (Lest anyone miss the ban on naturalism, one poster for the salons showed a Perseus-like hero holding up the severed head of Zola.) Female artists were ostensibly excluded, "following Magical law," although at least five women exhibited under pseudonyms—among them the poet and novelist Judith Gautier, who contributed a relief sculpture entitled "Kundry, Rose of Hell." Furthermore, Péladan alienated several leading figures, including Puvis de Chavannes, by prematurely announcing their participation.
Still, a number of significant Symbolists joined Péladan's solemn circus, because many of his principles accorded with their own. Back in the mid-eighteen-eighties, the Greek-born poet Jean Moréas, who coined the term Symbolism, had renounced the depiction of concrete phenomena; Symbolist writers, he declared, gestured instead toward a primordial Idea, which could be conjured by "pure sounds," "densely convoluted sentences," and "knowingly organized disorder." Michelle Facos and Thor Mednick, in their recent anthology "The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art," observe that the Symbolists undermined conventional modes of representation in an effort to "access the divine directly."
The most renowned member of the Rose + Croix group was the Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff, whom Péladan hailed as "the great argument of my thesis, in defense of the ideal." Khnopff was an artist of exacting technique who emulated the severity of the old Flemish masters and the cool sensualism of the Pre-Raphaelites. In the eighties, he fell under Péladan's sway and gravitated toward Symbolist fantasy. His best-known work, "The Caresses," is inspired by Péladan's play "Oedipus and the Sphinx": a lithe, androgynous lad snuggles with a creature who has a Pre-Raphaelite head and a cheetah's body. The Sphinx clearly is in control, yet her domination is gentle: femme-fatale imagery is edging into a more nuanced mode.
The Guggenheim is displaying Khnopff's "I Lock My Door Upon Myself," which takes its title from Christina Rossetti's poem "Who Shall Deliver Me?" A pale, auburn-haired woman gazes fixedly at the viewer, surrounded by a proto-Surrealist array of objects: stalks of orange daylilies in the foreground; an arrow resting on a draped table; a bust of Hypnos on a shelf; a window giving a view of a black-shrouded figure on an empty street—an image that could itself be mistaken for a painting. At first glance, the work gives a feeling of confinement: the woman appears to be trapped in the artist's cluster of symbols. But Khnopff seems more sympathetic to his female subject than is usually the case in Symbolist art. This cryptic space may be a room of her own, a private world of the imagination.
Péladan also deserves credit for giving early attention to the great Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler. "The Disappointed Souls," a Hodler canvas included in the Guggenheim show, is a study in male dejection: five weathered, barefoot men stare downward, two with their heads buried in their hands, the middle one with his emaciated upper body exposed. The hieratic manner and pale color scheme recall Puvis de Chavannes, yet the imagery is rougher and starker, hinting at the interior desolation of Expressionism.
Perhaps the ultimate Rose + Croix painter is another Belgian, Jean Delville, who shared the diseased opulence of Péladan's aesthetic. A drawing titled "The Idol of Perversity" offers a narrow-eyed Medusa-like woman with a snake writhing out of her breasts. In "The Death of Orpheus," the musician's severed head rests on his lyre, floating down a greenish river in which the twinkling of stars is reflected. When I first saw this canvas, on a visit to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels, it sent me into an uncomfortable trance: the serenity of the painted surface pulled me in as the horror of the subject pushed me away. Precisely because so much Symbolist art seems dated at first glance, it retains its capacity to shock.
Music was integral to the multimedia conception of the Rose + Croix, although several performances that Péladan planned in conjunction with the inaugural salon ran into difficulties. The opening ceremonies were to have included a Solemn Mass of the Holy Spirit, at St.-Germain l'Auxerrois, with excerpts from "Parsifal" on the organ. Wary clerics withheld permission, on the ground that Wagner was Protestant. A later Wagner concert fell victim to a fracas between Péladan and his former financial supporter, Antoine de La Rochefoucauld. While an orchestra was playing the "Siegfried Idyll," an ally of Péladan's, ineffectively disguised by a fake beard, shouted that La Rochefoucauld was "a felon, a coward, a thief." The heckler was ejected, causing a glass door to shatter and the musicians to fall silent.
Péladan's collaboration with Satie, who was then in his twenties, was rooted in the bohemia of Montmartre, where both men cut vivid profiles. Satie was best known as a pianist at the Chat Noir and the Auberge de Clou cabarets; in 1888, he composed his trio of pensively dancing "Gymnopédies." He heralded a new simplicity—music "without sauerkraut"—in defiance of Wagnerian grandeur. He was also an incorrigible ironist who festooned his scores with unperformable instructions. ("Arm yourself with clairvoyance," "Open your head.") Such exquisite pranks seem far removed from the dark-velvet world of Péladan, yet Satie, too, shared in the mystical preoccupations of his generation. His unadorned sonic textures, often based on Greek modes and Gregorian chant, can have the quality of cryptic icons.
The play "Le Fils des Étoiles," which elicited Satie's most striking Rosicrucian score, follows a young shepherd-poet as he is initiated as a magus. The prelude to Act I begins with an astonishing sequence of six-note chords, consisting of stacked intervals of the fourth, with a tritone thrown in for good measure. Although these chords are built on a simple chantlike melody, they are essentially atonal. Satie's score, written more than fifteen years in advance of Schoenberg's first atonal works, subsequently reverts to a more conventional language, but the fabric of harmony has been rent. This time, the composer gives no sign that he is joking: the opening is marked "white and motionless."
"The Dawn of Labor (L'Aurore du Travail)," by Charles Maurin, circa 1891.
After the first salon, Satie broke with Péladan and, in the schismatic fashion of the day, established a private cult, the Metropolitan Church of the Art of Jésus Conducteur, from whose pulpit he issued edicts and anathemas in an apparent parody of Péladan's style. ("I must raise My hand to overthrow the oppressors of the Church and the Art.") The reasons for the split are unknown; perhaps Satie's score for "Le Fils des Étoiles" was too peculiar even for Péladan's recondite taste, or, possibly, Satie decided that his reputation would be better served if he suspended ties with such a controversial figure. Whatever Satie's calculations, he soon sank back into obscurity; only in the second decade of the twentieth century would Maurice Ravel spark a Satie revival by hailing him as a model of anti-Romantic style.
In the mid-twentieth century, Satie's music mesmerized John Cage, who saw it as a challenge not merely to extant harmony but to the very idea of musical form. Cage took a special liking to a short, gnomic, harmonically directionless 1893 piece called "Vexations," at the beginning of which Satie wrote, "To play this motif eight hundred forty times in a row, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, through serious immobilities." In 1963, Cage took that instruction at face value, organizing an epic performance in which a rotating team of pianists repeated "Vexations" for nearly nineteen hours. Because "Vexations" belongs to Satie's Rosicrucian period, the Guggenheim will stage its own daylong marathon, in September. Having attended a "Vexations" event some years back, I can advise prospective listeners that they may experience hallucinations of the Sphinx before the performance is done.
Before Péladan vanished from cultural memory, he received a couple of respectful nods from rising giants of modernism. In 1906, Ezra Pound embraced Péladan's idea that the medieval troubadour tradition was a repository of hermetic wisdom. And in 1910 Vasily Kandinsky cited Péladan in his manifesto "On the Spiritual in Art": "The artist is a king, as Péladan says, not only because he has great power, but also because his responsibility is great." That sentence, oddly prophetic of the "Spider-Man" comic books, is evidence of occultism's lingering reverberations. Kenneth Silver expands on the connection in a thought-provoking essay in the "Mystical Symbolism" catalogue, entitled "Afterlife: The Important and Sometimes Embarrassing Links between Occultism and the Development of Abstract Art, ca. 1909-13." The word "embarrassing" is taken from the art theorist Rosalind Krauss, who wrote, in 1979, that "now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence." Yet in the early twentieth century Kandinsky, Pound, and other modernists absorbed what Silver calls "an amalgam of spiritual sources—Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, kabbalistic, alchemical, and just plain wacky." Assuming the pose of a sorcerer or guru emboldened more than a few artists and writers in their quest to explode tradition and create a new order.
Péladan had little direct impact on early modernism: instead, the dominant force was Theosophy, the half-visionary, half-spurious movement that Helena Blavatsky and others launched in New York in 1875. Blavatsky devoured Rosicrucian texts and related Christian esoterica, and combined their ideas with influences from the East. She notoriously claimed to be communicating with eternal Indian Masters. Such hocus-pocus did not prevent the likes of Kandinsky from appreciating the vigor of Theosophy's assault on materialism in the name of higher truth. Kandinsky's controlled explosions of color bear a striking resemblance to images that appear in "Thought-Forms," a standard Theosophical text. His paintings can be viewed as opaque sacred emblems, conduits of spiritual revolution. Silver sees similar tendencies in the work of Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, Hilma af Klint, and Piet Mondrian. "I got everything from the 'Secret Doctrine' (Blavatsky)," Mondrian wrote, in 1918.
Although Yeats is the exemplary case among occult-oriented modernist writers, T. S. Eliot also deserves a glance. After Eliot converted to Anglo-Catholicism, in the late twenties, he chastised Yeats for having resorted to a "highly sophisticated lower mythology" of supernatural lore. Yet "The Waste Land" begins with a clutter of Decadent elements: quotations from "Tristan und Isolde," allusions to Verlaine and Mallarmé, chatter about tarot cards and séances, intimations of vegetation cults. The poem ends with an Easternized version of a Grail Quest, culminating in a final chant of "shantih shantih shantih." Latter-day readings of the poem tend to see Eliot's intent as satirical, but, as Leon Surette has suggested, the poem has the feeling of an initiation ritual, in the course of which the poet attains mastery of all religious traditions.
Fin-de-siècle spiritualism also had a radicalizing effect on music: "Le Fils des Étoiles" was only the beginning. In the first decade of the century, Alexander Scriabin reached the border of atonality under the influence of Theosophy; he devised an ear-burning, six-note "mystic chord" that voices a hitherto ineffable divine presence. Jean Delville supplied an image of a sun deity for the cover of Scriabin's sumptuously dissonant score "Prometheus, Poem of Fire." As for Schoenberg, he was immersed in mystical texts at the time of his atonal leap: in terminology reminiscent of Péladan, he explained that whereas conventional major and minor chords resembled the opposition of the two genders his new chords could be compared to androgynous angels. Even the cool intellect of Igor Stravinsky was touched by theurgic energies: the neo-pagan scenario of "The Rite of Spring" was co-created by the Russian Symbolist painter Nicholas Roerich, who went on to have a spectacularly strange career as a Theosophical sage.
In the wake of two catastrophic world wars, mysticism lost its lustre. The ecstatic liturgies of the fin de siècle rang false, and a rite of objectivity took hold. The supernatural was all but expunged from modernism's origin story: the great Irish-literature scholar Richard Ellmann insisted that Yeats employed arcane symbols "for their artistic, not their occult, utility." In the narrative that so many of us learned in school, the upheavals of the modernist epoch were, above all, formal developments, autonomous events within each discipline. Clement Greenberg spoke of painting's "progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium"; Theodor W. Adorno, of the "inherent tendency of the musical material." Such sober formulas fail to capture the roiling transcendental longings of a Kandinsky or a Schoenberg.
Hence the disreputable allure of Péladan, who dared to speak aloud what usually remains implicit in the aesthetic sphere: belief in the artist's alchemical power, in the godlike nature of creation, in the oracular quality of genius. (Think of how often prewar Expressionism is said to have anticipated the horrors to come, as if artists were clairvoyant.) The question we want to ask a figure like Péladan is whether or not he meant what he said—whether, in essence, he was a lunatic or a charlatan. Robert Duncan wrote a poem about the relationship between Satie and the "silly old man" Péladan, in which he imagines the composer asking:
Is there a place for such posing
to be containd? for even
fakes of God to touch
some youthful trembling at the edge of God?
Such questions presuppose a clean line of demarcation between the real and the fake, and in matters of the spirit that line can never be fixed. In a sublimely daft portrait by Delville, Péladan hovers before us in priestly white garb, his eyes rolled back, his index finger pointing heavenward. He is the failed prophet of a nonexistent faith. Nonetheless, his conviction is unnerving. Entire religions, entire empires, have been founded on much less. ♦
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