A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (20 page)

Born in Moscow in 1873 to a family of prosperous cork merchants, by 1894, at the age of twenty, Briusov was already heralding himself as the leader of a new literary movement. In his diary for 4 March 1893 he wrote: "Talent, even genius, by honest means earns only gradual success ... For me that's not enough ... Decadence. Yes! ... the future belongs to it, especially when it finds a worthy leader. And that leader will be I!i21 Driven to carve a literary name for himself, Briusov fulfilled his dream rapidly. Influenced by Poe, Baudelaire and Huysmans, in 1894 and 1895 Briusov. published three slim volumes of Russian Symbolists. Although quickly ridiculed by Vladimir Soloviev, Briusov's translations of Verlaine, Maeterlinck, Mallarme, and Poe, as well as his own contributions, established him as the central authority on the new Russian literature. From then until 1912, the year that saw the beginning of his decline, Briusov reigned as the magus of Russian decadence. As well as his Mephistophelian appearance, Briusov's tactics included well-calculated social effects. Entrances and exits from literary fetes were carefully timed. With his domineering personality, Briusov quickly gathered a coterie of obsequious followers. His relations with other poets were that of teacher and student, even when the other poets were of equal, or greater stature. Friends who rejected such arrangements were quickly branded enemies. With his strong position as editor of the literary journal The Balance and association with the publishing house Scorpion, Briusov was 22 not an enemy many wanted to have.

Acutely conscious, reserved, and highly disciplined, Briusov was attracted to more ecstatic types, as well as to expedients like drugs, magic and eroticism, to stimulate his inspiration. One source was the precocious Aleksandr Dobroliubuv, a seventeen year old poet who was thrown out of high school for preaching suicide. A devotee of Poe and Baudelaire, Dobroliubov wore only black, smoked opium, and lived in a small windowless room, whose black walls were adorned with satanic bric-a-brac. Like Rimbaud, after plumbing the decadent depths, Dobroliubov abandoned poetry and started a religious sect. He was known to travel throughout Russia encased in iron hoops. According to Nicolas Berdyaev, his followers had the peculiar habit of not responding to a question until a year had passed. As Berdyaev points out, this made conversation inconvenient.23

Konstantine Balmont was another source for Briusov, and with Andrei Bely, who we will meet further on, Briusov carried on something of an occult feud. A follower of Rudolf Steiner, Bely came under Briusov's influence but soon asserted his own creative identity. A greater writer, though a more labile personality, Bely felt himself the subject of an "extremely suspicious psychological experiment": he believed Briusov was trying to hypnotize him. A kind of magical war flared up between them, mostly in print, with Briusov happily accepting the persona of the dark sorcerer. Yet Bely was not without resources, and in a dream duel, Briusov felt himself pierced by a sword in Bely's hand. He awoke with a pain in his heart.

This magical rivalry forms the basis of Briusov's medieval occult psychodrama, The Fiery Angel. Like Ld Bas and Zanoni, The Fiery Angel is encyclopedic; Briusov was nothing if not thorough and he studied the literature diligently. Faust, Mephistopheles, Cornelius Agrippa, the Inquisition, demonology and other magical themes all make appearances. Briusov's recreation of the medieval occult milieu is flawless. But the plot, centred around the sado-erotic obsession of the hysterical Renata with Madiel, the fiery angel, comes straight out of Briusov's life, and is based on an erotic triangle between himself, Bely and a young poet named Nina Petrovskaya. Nina Petrovskaya was a nineteen year old minor poet married to the publicist Sergei Sokolov. She had fallen in love with Bely, but lost him to the wife of the poet Aleksandr Blok. She turned to Briusov for help; it's said they practised magical rituals in order to renew Bely's affections for her. This failed and out of revenge, Nina became Briusov's lover. Of Briusov, Nina wrote that he offered a "chalice of dark, astringent wine ... and said, `Drink'." She did. For the next seven years, during which time Briusov maintained a curious bourgeois double life with his wife Joanna, they engaged in a sadomasochistic affair fuelled by drugs, madness and suicide pacts. In her memoirs Petrovskaya speaks of Briusov as a master of the "dark sciences," and of their relationship as a "pact with the Devil." Together they were "children of evil."

In the novel Nina is Renata, possessed by demons, Briusov the knight Ruprecht, obsessed with Nina, and Bely the satanic Madiel, the fiery angel. In the novel Ruprecht/Briusov agrees to attend a Black Mass in order to help Nina find Madiel. Though more of a witches' coven, it is as gripping a tour de force as Huysmans' Ld Bas. Life, however, imitates art, and having written the novel, Briusov lost interest in Nina and callously dropped her. Crushed, she left Moscow and later committed suicide. She was not the only one. After Nina Briusov became involved with another unstable poet, Nadechda Lvova, whose lyrics show a preoccupation with death. The poet V.F. Khodasevich claims that Briusov encouraged her suicidal inclinations, even presenting her with a pistol that Nina Petrovskaya had once turned on Briusov himself. After he ended their affair she shot herself with it. Another poet, the twenty-one year old Viktor Gofman apparently took Briusov's advice on this matter as well.

Death held an attraction for Briusov; several of his early poems deal with necrophilia, and focus on the premature death of his first lover - she died at twenty-four of consumption - a theme that would continue to fascinate him. His interest in the occult may have been, like so much else, a calculated pose. But it attracted him early on; in the early 1890s he was already holding seances in, of all places, a notary's office. But it was the promise of power, more than anything else, that lured him to the dark side. At the end of his life, solitary, suffering and addicted to morphine - when Khodasevich heard of his death in 1924, he was surprised he hadn't already committed suicide - Briusov may have regretted typecasting himself so perfectly as the satanic master.

Notes

1 As mentioned, Rudolf Steiner adopted Ahriman as one of the spiritual entities interfering with human evolution; the other he named Lucifer. Ahriman is the embodiment of cold, factual, materialist thought. Following Milton, in Lucifer Steiner sees the archetype of impulsive, rash, overweening arrogance.

2 Francis King, article on Satanism in Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, editor Richard Cavendish (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) p. 219.

3 That a similar form of `reversal' was a common practice in earlier times is well documented; one thinks of the ancient Saturnalia, when slaves were made kings and virgins prostitutes. One also thinks of the Greek practice of enduring some selfinflicting suffering to offset a piece of good luck, as a kind of inoculation against the jealousy of the gods. The basic mechanism is a kind of regulatory process, whereby a desirable mean between good and evil, yang and yin, is maintained. In the 1960s, student radicals employed a strategy of `reversal' against the `establishment' that is strikingly similar to that used in the Black Mass. See my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2001).

4 An altogether more satanic character, the notorious Aleister Crowley, engaged in very similar activities, filing his canines and subjecting female acquaintances to his `serpent's kiss' and, at least on one occasion, hanging his current Scarlet Woman upside down from a ceiling.

5 He also knew Verlaine, and it was Bretagne who suggested to Rimbaud that he send the older poet copies of his poems.

6 Enid Starkie Arthur Rimbaud (London: Faber and Faber, 1961) p. 98.

7 Ibid. pp. 165-167.

8 The parallel's with Lautreamont are worth mentioning. Poesie, written after Maldoror, is Lautreamont's complete rejection of his earlier, `satanic' work.

9 Colin Wilson The Books in My Life (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 1998) p. 240

10 He also served as a model for Proust's Charlus in A Remembrance of Things Past.

11 Quoted in Robert Baldick The Life of j..K. Huysmans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955) p. 77.

12 Ibid. p. 141.

13 Ibid. p. 140.

14 Both de Guaita and Dubus would die of overdoses. De Guaita died in 1897, at the age of 36; in his last years his life sunk into unrelieved decadence, and he emerged from his scarlet and black apartments only to search for books on occultism, and drugs. In 1895, Dubus was found dead in the urinal of a restaurant in the Place Maubert. He had been released from an insane asylum a few months earlier. A few days before his death, he had complained to Huysmans about voices that pursued him, and confessed to having practised black magic.

15 Quoted in Christopher McIntosh, Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival (London: Rider, 1972) p. 178. Baldick, p. 138.

16 Quoted in Remy de Gourmont, The Angels of Perversity, tr. Francis Amery (Sawtry: Dedalus, 1992) pp. 170-171.

17 The entire story can be found in Baldick and in McIntosh. McIntosh also provides fascinating material on De Guaita's and Peladan's brief collaboration in the Cabalistic Order of the Rosy Cross, before splitting up into rival Rosicrucian groups. Neither Peladan nor de Guaita had any connection to the 17th Century Rosicrucians, other than name. Peladan had a brief celebrity as the host of a series of Rosicrucian salons, which aimed to unite mysticism and art. Some of the people involved were Erik Satie, Gustave Moreau, and Puvis de Chavannes.

18 Hermann Hesse "The Brothers Karamazov or The Decline of Europe" in My Belief (London:Jonathan Cape, 1976) pp. 71-73.

19 For a full account of the satanic world of the Russian fin de siecle see Kristi A Groberg's essay "The Shade of Lucifer's Dark Wing: Satanism in Silver Age Russia," in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal ed., (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997) pp. 99-133.

20 Prokofief based his 1919 opera of the same name on Briusov's novel, adding his own contribution to a late flare of Russian occultism.

21 The Diary of Valery Briusov edited and translated by Joan Delaney Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) p. 36.

22 Both The Balance and Scorpion have clear astrological associations: Libra and Scorpio, signs of the pervasive occult atmosphere of the time.

23 Nicholas Berdyaev Dream and Reality (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950) p. 200.

Fin de siecle Occultism

The twenty-four years between 1890 and the beginning of World War I saw a remarkable eruption of creative energy and speculation, a fantastic melange of alternative and progressive ideas wedding ancient beliefs and modern science. Central to this ideological flood was the occult, the elements of which reached from the dim, primeval past to the unimagined future. Notions of prehistoric lost civilizations and evolutionary supermen shared the same intellectual space as a profound rediscovery of magic and a dizzying preoccupation with higher dimensions. As in some aspects of current New Age philosophy, science and mysticism were seen to support each other, with Einstein's theory of relativity and ideas about `non-Euclidean space' bolstering accounts of astral travel and visions of the Akashic Record. Philosophy, too, was conscripted, and Nietzsche's prophecy of the Ubermensch blended with eastern ideas of karma and reincarnation. A deep dissatisfaction with the mechanical picture of the universe professed by rationalist science primed western consciousness for a cultural journey to the east, and an influx of oriental philosophies invaded Europe, the results of which we still see today. In fact many of the preoccupations that we associate with New Age thought have their roots in the turn of the 19th century. Yoga, meditation, vegetarianism; multiculturalism, homeopathy, and higher consciousness; visions of an alternative society, anticapitalism, and interest in primitive beliefs; a fascination with ancient stone monuments, religious cults, and communes; progressive education, free love, feminism and openness to homosexuality and lesbianism; experimentation with drugs, a rejection of cold reason in favour of feeling and intuition, paganism and nature worship; a turning away from modernity and progress as well as a feverish millennialism: in the years leading up to World War I these and other ingredients com bined to produce an effervescent, highly charged atmosphere in which anything seemed possible and in which the new century just dawning seemed a blank slate on which mankind could now write its own destiny.

Like today, much of this optimism took place on the lunatic fringe, and books like James Webb's The Occult Underground, which charts the history of a variety of occult, mystical and in some way alternative societies at the turn of the 19th century, are an entertaining and sobering read. But a good deal of this activity had firmer foundations and found its way into some of the most intelligent minds of the time, influencing the literature, art, and social theory of the era. In the concluding essay "The Modernist Occultist" I will touch on some of the results of this influence.

Probably the most immediate name to come to mind associated with the occult revival of the late 19th century is W.B. Yeats. Yeats was drawn to the occult early on and was a member of two of the most celebrated magical organizations of modern times: the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, both of which we will hear more of shortly. But poets were not the only individuals drawn to the dark side of the mind. The psychologist and philosopher William James was deeply interested in the phenomenology of mystical experience, so much so that he sought some first hand evidence, experimenting with both nitrous oxide and peyote. One result of this was his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, which argued for the validity and importance of supernatural experience, over the uniform strictures of dogma. James was also profoundly drawn to a study of the paranormal, being at one time a president of the Society for Psychical Research, a position he shared with his friend and fellow philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson, too, was a student of the non-rational areas of consciousness, and along with studies of telepathy and other paranormal abilities he wrote on dreams, mysticism, and altered states of consciousness. Bergson was also one of the first philosophers to draw on the new advances in biology and to argue against the mechanistic vision of positivist science. In books like Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896) Bergson advanced the idea that reason and the intellect were evolutionary tools developed by the mind in order to deal with the necessities of survival. To be effective they must falsify reality and present as a static, solid world of material things what is really a ceaseless flow of experience. A truer, deeper rapport with reality, Bergson argued, can be achieved only through our intuition, something the Romantics had claimed a century earlier. One writer profoundly influenced by Bergson's ideas was Marcel Proust, whose Remembrance of Things Past is an extended essay in Bergson's duration.