A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (19 page)

Doris-Karl Huysmans was born in Paris in 1848, the only child of a French mother and Dutch father and his early years were saddened by the early death of his father and his mother's subsequent remarriage. After finishing his education, at the age of eighteen, Huysmans entered government employment as a fonctionnaire, or civil servant, working with the Surete Generale. He remained there for thirty-two years. In 1874 Huysmans published his first book, a collection of prose poems, Le Drageoir a epices, which showed the influence of Baudelaire. Coming under the influence of Zola and the Medan Group, Huysmans turned to novel writing, and produced a series of competent, if unremarkable, works in the naturalist style of his mentor. But by 1882, Huysmans had become bored with Zola's sociological approach, and in a letter to his master complained that he felt the need "for a complete change."" The result was A Rebours which marked Huysmans' rejection of Zola and the start of his fascination with the strange, bizarre and artificial.

A Rebours, however, for all its rejection of Zola's methods, retains many of the naturalist school's practices. There is, for example, the prodigious research into a variety of subjects: botany, Latin literature, the Middle Ages, as well as the meticulous detail given to des Esseintes' diet, reading habits, style of dress, the decor of his rooms. Not much happens, and one often feels Huysmans enjoys communicating to his readers the extent of his scholarship. A similar experience greets the reader of La Bas. Like Zanoni, La Bas is full of fascinating information on Satanism, alchemy, the Middle Ages, Christian mysticism, herbology, astrology, black magic, Illuminism, and a host of other subjects. It's not unfair to see it as a kind of encyclopedia of fin de siecle occultism masquerading as a novel.

Exactly how Huysmans became interested in the occult is unclear, but it's likely that he came across occult works early on; as in the case of Rimbaud, occult ideas and references would be available in the popular writing of the time. Early signs of interest are apparent in his novel En Rade, where he speculates on incubi, succubi and the Kabbalah. Yet it was surely his dissatisfaction with crude "implacable life" that prompted his explorations. With des Esseintes' failure, Huysmans too was left still searching for that something else. Communicating his despair at finding any satisfaction in life, Huysmans held out some hope for himself: "Perhaps there's still occultism," he offered. "I don't mean spiritualism, of course ... No, I mean genuine occultism ... there's a mystery there which appeals to me. I might even say it haunts me ...s12 Through the occult, Huysmans hoped to find "some compensation for the horror of daily life, the squalour of existence, the excremental filthiness of the loathsome age we live in.""

One portal to these mysteries was Edmond Bailly's bookshop in the rue de la Chausee d'Antin, home to the cream of Parisian occultists. Huysmans was introduced to the place by his friend, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Here Huymans would encounter occultists like the morphine addicted Rosicrucian Stanislas de Guaita; Gerard Encausse, who wrote under the pseudonym of Papus, `Mysteriarch, Unknown Superior'; Paul Adam, member of the Supreme Council of the Rosy Cross; `Sar' Merodack Madan, an ex-bank clerk turned occult propagandist; and Edouard Dubus, a young poet who shared with de Guaita a taste for narcotics.14 Soon Huysmans found himself involved with the Naundorffists, supporters of the enigmatic King Charles XI, who claimed the throne that his father, Charles Edourad Naundorff, had made a bid for as Louis XVII. At first Huysmans gathered material on the Naundorff cause, thinking to write a novel around it. But soon he dropped that idea for one more powerful: the history of Gilles de Rais, the distinguished soldier and comrade of Joan of Arc who plunged into black magic and an orgy of sadism and cruelty. By the time he came to write Ld Bas, Huysmans' alter ego, Durtal, would split his time between researching Gilles de Rais' enormities, and throwing himself into more contemporary darkness.

Another occult influence on Huysmans, perhaps the most central, was Berthe Courriere, mistress of the writer Remy de Gourmont. Gourmont once described Berthe Courriere as "a kabbalist and occultist, learned in the history of asiatic religions and philosophies, fascinated by the veil of Isis, initiated by dangerous personal experiences into the most redoubtable mysteries of the Black Art ..."15 Berthe had made the rounds before becoming Gourmont's paramour, having been mistress and model for George Sand's nephew, the sculptor Clesinger. Yet others spoke less highly of her. Pierre Dufay described her as "a madwoman whose lucid intervals were not entirely free from the disordered notions which haunted her." According to Robert Baldick, Huysmans' biographer, her mind was "certainly unbalanced." Twice certified as insane and committed to a mental asylum, Berthe harboured an unwholesome passion for priests, and made a practice of shocking, or seducing, young confessors with an account of her unusual sexual practices. Along with distributing communion hosts to stray dogs, she decorated her flat with a disturbing blend of Catholic and satanic bric-a-brac, mixing altar-cloths, monstrances, and dalmatics with the work of Felicien Rops. Gourmont's portraits of Courriere in works like Le Fantome express her religio-sadistic eroticism: ". . . Hyacinthe appeared before me completely naked, begging me to flagellate her. She had in her hand the scourge of a canoness ... I obeyed her. Blood-red lines stigmatized the shoulders of my lover ..."16 Huysmans remained friends with Gourmont and Courriere for a few years, during which time he listened to Berthe's tales of occultism, and at least on one occasion, participated in a seance at their flat.

Huysmans' other dark angel was Henriette Maillat. Maillat and Huysmans had been lovers briefly - she had earlier been the paramour of the notorious `Sar' Madan, another Rosicrucian master - and in L i Bas, Huysmans used many of her love letters to him verbatim. When the novel was published, Henriette made a clumsy attempt to blackmail him. Where Berthe Courriere targeted men of the cloth, Henriette had a thing for writers, and after Peladan, she had bagged Leon Bloy before moving onto Huysmans. Between these two volatile and neurotic women, Huysmans created the figure of Mme. Chantelouve, Durtal's voluptuously wicked and diabolically desirable satanic seductress.

It was through Berthe Courriere that Huysmans would meet the defrocked priest Joseph Antoine Boullan, upon whom he would model Dr. Johannes, the master exorcist of the novel, enemy of all things diabolical. In actual fact, Boullan was an irredeemably nasty character, who, if we are to believe Stanislas de Guaita, advocated practices of wild promiscuity, adultery, bestiality, onanism, incubism, and incest: small wonder that Berthe Courriere knew him. According to Francis King, Boullan was guilty of even worse sins: with his mistress Adele Chevalier, a nun, Boullan is believed to have committed infanticide, possibly murdering one of their own children, as well as others, in satanic rites. The pair engaged in a particularly nauseating form of ritual, in which communion hosts mixed with excrement were employed. For all his encyclopedic research, in the case of Boullan, even the most sympathetic reader must agree that Huysmans was clearly hoodwinked.

Canon Docre, the central villain of the novel, is thought to be based on a Belgian priest, the Abbe Van Haecke. According to Huysmans, at a Black Mass he attended, he noticed a priest dressed in a cassock and hood, observing the activities with deep interest. Soon after, he saw a photograph of the same priest in the window of a bookshop specializing in works on Satanism. It was Van Haecke. Huysmans gathered other evidence, including the reports of Berthe Courriere and the poet Edouard Dubus. Yet both Courriere and Dubus were unstable characters; and it was during a visit to Bruges, where Van Haecke supposedly held his satanic affairs, that Courriere was placed in a mental asylum: she was found practically naked hiding in the bushes on the Rempart des Marechaux. The police declined to accept her story that she had just barely escaped the clutches of the evil Van Haecke, who was known in his home town as a admirably devout and devoted priest. Given Huysmans' accuracy on Boullan, we should, I think, suspend judgement on Van Haecke. One picturesque bit of evidence that Huysmans uncovered, however, is worth mentioning: Van Haecke is supposed to have had crucifixes tattooed on the soles of his feet, so he could have the pleasure of continually walking on the symbol of salvation.

There is also some doubt if Huysmans ever attended a Black Mass, or if what he did attend was the genuine article. Whatever the case, his account of one in Ld Bas is gripping, and if not based on the real thing, it certainly tells us how one should be done. That Huysmans believed he had stepped into the dark zone is undeniable; soon after La Bas appeared, Huysmans found himself involved in a magical feud between Boullan and his arch enemy, Stanislas de Guaita, including evil spells, `fluidic fisticuffs' and more material dangers, like pistols at twenty paces. Even his cat was affected." It's understandable that after all he had been through, Huysmans may have felt quite relieved that "with his hooked paw," the Devil was drawing him toward God. After Ld Bas all that was left was the cross.

Valery Briusov

It's easy to get the impression that Paris was the only European capital harbouring satanic devotees. It wasn't. While London had its own quota of magical societies - most notably the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, out of whose bosom the most notorious magician of the 20th century, Aleister Crowley, would emerge - more exotic cities produced their own occult progeny. Nowhere did the occult craze reach wilder heights or more bizarre depths than in Russia's St. Petersburg. In the Silver Age of Russia (18901914), the city of White Nights, as well as its rival, Moscow, plunged into an apocalyptic orgy of esoterica, magic and erotic madness. It was out of Mother Russia that Madame Blavatsky, the formidable founder of theosophy, would journey to the west. Russia also produced the `mad monk' Grigori Rasputin, the enigmatic G.I. Gurdjieff, and his preeminent disciple P.D. Ouspensky, who we will meet in the next section.

In the years leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution, an eschatological fever spread throughout the Russian intelligentsia, a sense of which was captured by the novelist Hermann Hesse in a collection of essays, Glimpse into Chaos, which had a profound influence on T.S. Eliot, and which he refers to in the notes to "The Waste Land." In the novels of Dostoyevsky, Hesse encountered a powerfully antinomian soul, a dizzyingly paradoxical consciousness that could as easily express itself in the rapture of the saint as in the violence of the criminal. "Russian Man," Hesse argued, was the embodiment of an ancient, occult , asiatic ideal, a primal, archetypal consciousness that threatened to overwhelm the West as much as it held the promise of its vital renewal. "Russian Man" was a sinner and holy man, a criminal and a saint, an ascetic and profligate, an angel and a devil: anything but the lukewarm middle ground occupied by the safe and mediocre bourgeoisie. "Russian Man" is bent on "turning away from every fixed morality and ethic in favour of a universal understanding ... a new, dangerous, terrifying sanctity." He seeks to "perceive the divine, the necessary ... even in what is most wicked and ugly." In him "good and evil, outer and inner, God and Satan are cheek and jowl."'R

As in Paris, one aspect of the Russian mystical debauch was a fascination with evil, and with the variety of gnostic mythologies that saw in the pursuit of vice a short cut to heaven. One strain of this was the kind of erotic saintliness associated with Rasputin. Another was an obsession with the figure of the Devil. Imported via French Symbolism, which reached the Russian steppes by the early 1890s, various forms of Satanism and satanic worship became the central obsession of a host of Russian poets, artists and musicians. Through drugs, wild dress, suicide clubs and other outre behaviour, a variety of diabolical themes fascinated the intelligentsia. Philosophers like Vladimir Soloviev and Nicolas Berdyaev, writers like Dmitry Merzhkovsky and Vasily Rozanov, poets like Zinaida Gippius and Aleksandr Blok, and artists like Mikhail Vrubel and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky all incorporated demonic and satanic themes into their work. The poet Konstantine Balmont published Evil Spell: A Book of Exorcisms, linking the darkness that followed the failed revolution of 1905 to the occult. The poet Ellis (Lev Kobylinskii) asked if Satan "was not better than a large part of the human race we try to save from him?" Satanic erotica became a familiar part of mainstream journalism, with images of passive, half naked women preyed upon by demonic incubi. On stage, the actor Fedor Chaliapin made a career portraying satanic figures, most famously Mephistopheles from Gounod's Faust. Nicolai Riabushinsky, who hosted a suicide club called the Black Swan, published an advertisement in his journal The Golden Fleece, asking for contributions for a special edition dedicated to the Devil: he received ninety-two replies. Some individuals carried the demonic craze to gruesome lengths: Scriabin, whose diabolical compositions include a Poeme satanique, a `Black Mass' (9th Sonata) and the Gargantuan Prometheus: Poem of Fire, remarked on the activities of the painter Nikolai Shperling, who, as part of an `occult exercise', ingested the flesh and blood of wounded or dead soldiers during WWI. What Shperling's digestion thought of this practice is unknown.19

Central to the Russian diabolical milieu was the poet, novelist and critic Valery Briusov. Briusov looked every inch the demonic genius, with his arching, Mongol eyebrows, perfect dress and black beard trimmed to a devilish point. A consummate literary careerist, Briusov was a cultural opportunist who started out as a decadent and aesthete, and ended his career as the head of the Literary Division of the Commissariat of Education. A true Symbolist, Briusov was determined that his life should imitate art and he saw the people around him solely as material for his work, a point we will return to shortly. Suicide, madness and drugs formed the backdrop to his rise. Along with producing some of the most finely chiselled Symbolist poetry, and at least one short masterpiece, the story "The Republic of the Southern Cross," Briusov is responsible for perhaps the most erotically charged occult novel of the 20th century, The Fiery Angel.20