A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (15 page)

In 1853 Levi packed a bag and headed across the Channel to London. As we've seen, there, among other English occultists, he met with Bulwer-Lytton. As Levi's career as a mage had just begun, his reputation can hardly account for this; it seems that he must have been `networking' with other eso- tericists prior to his conversion, which implies that a formidable international occult cabal was well established in the mid-19th century. London was to be the scene of Levi's first major ritual working, his initial attempt to `raise' the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana. The ceremony, commissioned by a mysterious woman in black, took three weeks to accomplish and is described with great relish in Levi's Rituel de la Haute Magie (1856), later published together with the Dogme in a single volume. The account is like something out of Dennis Wheatley. Apparently, the giant figure that appeared was not quite the gentleman Levi had been expecting; the mage fainted and his right arm was numb for days.

After this success, Levi's reputation flourished and other volumes followed, like Le Clef de Grands Mysteres (1861). His renown as the Professor of Transcendental Magic had spread, and his little flat in the Rue des Sevres became a site of pilgrimage. There, devotees of the occult sciences met a rotund man of red complexion, medium height, small piercing eyes, impressive bald cranium, full beard and moustache, invariably wrapped in a monk's robe. His rooms were jammed with occult bric-a-brac. An altar covered in sumptuous drapery supported gilt vessels and a Hebrew scroll of the Law; above this hung a golden triangle with the ineffable Tetragrammaton ('YHVH' the Hebrew name of God) emblazoned on it. Talismans, skulls, magical apparatus and Wronski's `prog- nometre' jostled for space beside a life-size painting of a woman symbolizing the holy Kabbalah.

One visitor to Levi's den was the English occultist Kenneth MacKenzie, a member of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, the group to which Lytton is erroneously claimed to have belonged. During a conversation about the Tarot, MacKenzie noticed a figurine of the Egyptian goddess Isis and remarked on its workmanship. Levi replied that such items were commonplace in Paris, being a very large tobacco jar. Other, perhaps more perceptive students were the Polish noblemen, Alexander Braszynsky and Georges de Mniszech, and another Pole, Dr. Nowakowski, who lived in Berlin. With his Italian student, Baron Nicolas Joseph Spedalieri, Levi carried on an occult correspondence which was eventually published in nine volumes.

Levi's last days were sad. His hopes for France as the saviour of civilization were crushed with the Franco-Prussian War. The siege of Paris made life difficult, and the commune that followed was not to his liking. In his last years Levi had lost most of his revolutionary fervour; with his body wracked with headaches, dizzy spells, dropsy and gangrene, he had little time for utopias. At two o'clock in the afternoon of 31 May 1875, the Professor of Transcendental Magic passed from this sphere into the next. He may not have known it, but his work would reach an audience much wider than he could ever have expected. Levi influenced a whole generation dissatisfied with orthodox religion and materialist science, eager to recover the lost secrets of ages past. Such mainstream cultural figures as the poets Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Andre Breton and the composers Claude Debussy and Erik Satie were some of the beneficiaries of the Professor's magical accomplishments. And in the 1970s, with his name linked to Aleister Crowley's - who claimed Levi as a past incarnation - he would be rediscovered by a generation of head-banging heavy metallers who, like myself, read his books with excitement, pleasure and the occasional grain of salt.

Charles Baudelaire

Like Hoffmann, Poe and Nerval, Baudelaire is one of the tragedies of literature. Dead at the age of 46, he produced only a small body of work, and his reputation rests effectively on a single collection of poems, the infamous Les Fleurs du mal (1857). Nevertheless, this seemingly meagre output was perhaps the single most influential work written by a poet in the 19th century. To the contemporary reader, Baudelaire's friend Nerval remains pretty much unknown, and Gautier, to whom he dedicated Les Fleurs du mal, is mostly forgotten, even in his own country. Outside of thesis papers, others of the late Romantic milieu in which Baudelaire moved languish in oblivion. Yet the author of these dark, sensuous and highly mystical poems remains - aptly, as we shall see - a symbol of decadence and Satanism and, in recent years, has acquired a second lease on life as the character of the `flaneur' or urban wanderer, made popular through the writings of another tragic figure, the German Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin. Hoffmann, Poe and Nerval all antedate Baudelaire as poets of the city, but it is Baudelaire who is associated with the aimless strolling and chance encounters with `found beauty' that, since the surrealists, have informed an often faddish and trendy taste for urban aesthetics.

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. His mother, Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays was twenty-eight; his father, Joseph-Francois Baudelaire, sixty-one. Baudelaire's father was a scholar with a courtly manner; he was also a man of strong religious feeling. All three traits would pass to his son, along with a less desirable inheritance to which his mother contributed as well. Baudelaire's step-brother, Claude-Alphonse - from his father's previous marriage - died in 1862 from a cerebral haemorrhage that had first left him paralysed. Baudelaire's mother would end her days suffering from aphasia, as would her son. The story of Baudelaire's early death lays the blame on his dissipated lifestyle, but it is clear fate was probably against him from the beginning.

Baudelaire's early years were happy. He grew up in comfortable surroundings, and both parents loved him deeply. His father instilled in the young boy an interest in Latin and painting. But then, around the age of six, young Charles was thrust out of Paradise. His father died and the following year, 1828, his mother remarried. For a normal family it was a good choice. Colonel Aupick - four years older than Caroline - was handsome, responsible, and destined for success; he would eventually become commander of the Paris garrison, an ambassador to Constantinople and Madrid, and a senator under the Second Empire. But to sensitive, solitary Charles, it was a misalliance. Although the colonel tried to be friends with the boy, they had little in common, and early on, Baudelaire cast him in the role of the ignorant, yet powerful philistine. Throughout his life Colonel Aupick would remain an authoritarian figure, a stern Jehovah against whom the later Satanist and revolutionary would rail.

Baudelaire was sent to college in Lyons, then later to the Lycee Louis-le-Gerard in Paris. Here he excelled in Greek and Latin. After receiving his baccalaureat, it was time for him to choose a career. Colonel Aupick suggested a position as a secretary in an embassy. Charles told him he wanted to be a poet. The flowers of evil had started to sprout.

Although both his mother and Colonel Aupick were against it, Baudelaire threw himself into what he imagined was a proper environment in which to produce poetry. He read insatiably and he began to frequent prostitutes in the Latin Quarter, from one of whom he more than likely contracted the syphilis that would kill him. His appetite for experience understandably worried his family. Hoping to save him they packed him off on a voyage to India, the journey to the east that Nerval had just embarked on. Baudelaire jumped ship at Mauritius and returned to Paris in 1842, more determined than ever to be a poet. He came into his inheritance and threw himself with gusto into the life of the aesthete and dandy, living lavishly and renting an apartment in the Hotel Pimodan on the Ile Saint-Louis, where he occasionally ate hashish with other members of the notorious Club des Haschichins. It was around this time that Baudelaire met the mulatto woman Jeanne Duval, with whom he became infatuated and with whom he enjoyed, if that is the -correct word, a masochistic relationship. Though beautiful and exotic, Jeanne Duval was illiterate, unfaithful, malicious and, for a good part of the time, drunk. It is difficult to see what Baudelaire saw in her, except for the typical Romantic need for an impossible love affair. (Like Novalis and Nerval, Baudelaire became deeply obsessed with unattainable women, and remained devoted to his mother throughout his life; she too had absolutely no understanding of his genius.) It is also possible that, as one critic suggests, Baudelaire's early sexual exploits left him impotent, and somehow Duval could understand and minister to his more voyeuristic tastes.36

Two years after receiving his inheritance Baudelaire had run through half of it, a considerable splurge, as the initial sum was 100,000 francs, more than twice Nerval's fortune. Against his protests, Colonel Aupick arranged for a conseil judiciarie to administer his stepson's finances. Humiliated, henceforth Baudelaire was to live on a small allowance and whatever he could make from writing which, like Poe, Nerval and Hoffmann, would never be very much. For the rest of his life he was poor. One result of Colonel Aupick's decision was the poet's failed suicide attempt; another was having his first writings published, a collection of criticism, his Salon of 1845, followed by his second Salon of 1846. These established Baudelaire as one of the most perceptive art critics of the time. The second Salon also presented an idea that would feature largely in his later work and, indeed, as the central theme of the Symbolist Movement to come.

Baudelaire had first come across the notion of synesthesia in Hoffmann's Kreisleriana. There Hoffmann remarked that when listening to music he invariably associated the different tones and melodies with colours and scents. Likewise, certain perfumes had a strange effect on him: the scent of brown and red marigolds sent him into a deep reverie, in which he heard a low oboe sound in the distance. He suggested that all these things - colours, sounds, scents - are aspects of a single reality, a ray of pure light, diffracted by the senses. Baudelaire adopted Hoffmann's idea and applied it to the arts in general, thus inaugurating the age of Symbolism, and preparing the way for Walter Pater's remark that all art aspires toward the condition of music. Later Baudelaire would also find a similar sensibility in the work of Richard Wagner.

Hoffmann's notion also prepared Baudelaire for the two most important influences on his work: Poe and Swedenborg. Baudelaire had come across Poe's work in 1847 and soon became obsessed with it, pestering friends with incessant questions about the American poet whose sensibilities so resembled his own. There is a story of Baudelaire hearing about an American writer visiting Paris. He forced his way into the man's hotel room, and discovered him trying on a new suit of clothes. Baudelaire nevertheless harangued him with questions about Poe which the writer kindly answered. What Baudelaire recognized in Poe was his mysticism; he saw him as a man obsessed with confronting the mysteries of existence, a notion that Poe himself would have appreciated. Since Poe's death Baudelaire saw him as a kind of guardian angel, a poetic intercessor on behalf of struggling humanity. During his lifetime Baudelaire was best known as a translator of Poe - the first story he translated was "Mesmeric Revelation" - and the only substantial amounts of money he made came from this work. Curiously, although Baudelaire had ample reason in his own life to adopt the notion, it is in "Mesmeric Revelation" that Poe offers suffering as the means of preparing oneself for the world to come.'

Poe's search for an ideal beauty and his image as a suffering poet confronting the profound ambiguity of existence made Baudelaire receptive to Swedenborg's ideas. It's unclear when or how he first came across them. More than likely it was through reading Balzac, possibly Seraphita, although it is probable that he read Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell and Doctrine of the New Jerusalem, both of which were available in French translations. The idea of the poet as a visionary was powerful in Baudelaire (he called Balzac la voyant) and it is after his encounter with Swedenborg's ideas that a mystical, spiritual atmosphere pervades his work. That sensibility is most obvious in what is perhaps Baudelaire's most famous and influential poem, "Correspondances."

Much has been made of Baudelaire's Satanism, which is really a misnomer and will be looked at in the next section. But if Baudelaire's supposed aesthetic of evil produced an embarrassing number of second rate poets maudit, the mystical vision of "Correspondances" has been even more influential. Reams have been written about it and it is no exaggeration to say that out of these fourteen lines the aesthetic philosophy of the next half century emerged. Taking Hoffmann's remarks about synesthesia and Swedenborg's notion of a spiritual world, Baudelaire puts the poet/artist in the position of a kind of decoder, an expert at deciphering secret messages. Given Poe's penchant for ciphers and hidden clues, it all begins to make a great deal of sense: the poet/artist for Baudelaire is like Poe's eccentric detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who, in "The Purloined Letter" recognizes what is obscure to the average person and is, quite literally, staring him in the face. Only in this case, what is hidden is not only a stolen letter, but the secret meaning of existence, encoded in the landscape of the natural world. Everything in this world is a symbol of a corresponding reality in the spiritual world. In Swedenborg, this arrangement is often presented in a dry, matter of fact manner, a fixed one-to-one relation between natural `signifier' and spiritual `signified'. But Baudelaire loosens this arrangement, and opens the interpretations to a degree of creative ambiguity. Symbolism emerges as an art of nuance, allusion, metaphor, mood. The direct statement is eschewed in favour of suggestion, the general sense that the artist and poet is always gesturing to a world of wider, deeper significance, much like dreams. But also like dreams, the attempt to capture the meaning directly often destroys it. Hence the hazy, shifting, ambivalent, twilight atmosphere of Symbolist art: an atmosphere having much in common with the hypnagogic states that gave birth to it.

Baudelaire argued that the poet must become receptive to the meanings passing to him through the medium of the external world (which also means that he must become a good critic). And as we can never know when or where the spirit will speak, there must then be no restrictions on experience. This, as much as any need to shock the bourgeoisie, accounts for Baudelaire's capacity to find beauty in things that the average person would abhor. This opens the door to decadence, to a sensibility that will respond only to a beauty that carries the seed of corruption: a sensibility that clearly becomes dominant as the century progresses. That Baudelaire knew about corruption goes without saying. One example is his hideously beautiful poem "A Carcass," in which the poet reminisces with his lover about a corpse they came across on a morning walk. "Her legs," he writes, "were spread out like a lecherous whore/Sweating out poisonous fumes/Who opened in slick invitational style/her stinking and festering womb."