A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (5 page)

William Beckford (1760-1844) became the richest young man in England when his father died in 1770. The ten year old Beckford inherited a fortune made in plantations in the West Indies. Beckford, who travelled through Europe and produced a work of travel writing, Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal, never visited the source of his wealth, and this lacuna in his education caused him little regret. Like his idealized self-image the Caliph Vathek, Beckford was more concerned with spending his fortune than with appreciating the roots of it. Educated by tutors, Beckford's first steps in his journey to the east came through the influence of the artist Alexander Cozens. Born in St. Petersburg and trained in Rome, Cozens had opened a drawing academy at Bath, near Fonthill, Beckford's family seat and site of Fonthill Abbey, Beckford's fabled Gothic folly. Cozens taught Beckford drawing - his sketches can be found in his travel writings - but more important for a history of occultism, he introduced the young heir to the delights of The Arabian Nights. To a young man who could have practically anything, the exotic atmosphere of fantasy, sensuality, criminality, drugs and magic made a powerful impression, and in many ways Beckford spent the rest of his long life living out the consequences of this early influence.

Part of Beckford's excursions into decadence included, at the age of 17, an illicit attachment to William Courtenay, a ten year old boy. (That their names were the same suggests a certain narcissism.) Beckford's passion had to simmer at a distance, however, and Courtenay met some competition from the advances of Louisa Beckford, wife of Beckford's cousin Peter. Consummation of both affairs was difficult, though not impossible. One successful venture was a pagan coming of age party that Beckford planned for himself at Christmas in 1781. Like a mini-version of De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, Beckford, Louisa, Courtenay - secured through the help of Cozens - and a handful of other young and willing participants, locked themselves away for three days and three nights in the millionaire's estate; this birthday rave eventually became the inspiration for Vathek. Along with rare foods, rich wines, incense-clouded rooms, forbidden sex and the occasional magical ritual, part of Beckford's weekend pleasure dome included the `Eidophysikon' of Philip James de Loutherbourg, an Enlightenment version of a multi-media display or `light show'. De Loutherberg was a classically trained painter championed by Diderot; among other accomplishments he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 22. He later worked for David Garrick's Theatre in Drury Lane where he laid the foundations for modern scene-painting and what are since called special effects. De Loutherberg made the occult rounds: he did a portrait of Swedenborg, was a follower of Mesmer, and had met Cagliostro in 1783 at a Masonic lodge in Strasbourg, later becoming an initiate of his Egyptian Rite. De Loutherberg settled in London in 1785, lived in Hammersmith and devoted himself to mesmerism and the pursuit of the Philosopher's Stone; among other occult notables, Cagliostro was one of his guests.

After his wild weekend, Beckford's taste for oriental magic, as well as for sodomy and adultery, became well known. He frequented occult circles in London and Paris, knew the Swedenborgian violinist Francois-Hippolyte Barthelemon and the kabbalistic painter Richard Cosway. Beckford was in Paris for the early part of the crucial occult year of 1784, when the mystical tide was still rising. Later, the current would begin to ebb with Mesmer's fall, the growing antipathy to freemasonry, and Cagliostro's embroilment in the `Diamond Necklace Affair'. Yet, aside from some titillating dabbling, Beckford's contact with the occult was for the most part superficial. His one real encounter proved unsettling and closed the door on any future initiations. During his visit to Paris in 1781, Beckford made the acquaintance of the architect CharlesNicholas Ledoux. Ledoux was a Freemason and practising occultist, and his architectural style ran to the fantastic. In 1784, he and Beckford renewed their acquaintance, and Ledoux offered to show Beckford his crowning achievement, "the most sumptuous apartment I ever erected." Beckford's own architectural taste was outre and he was eager to see Ledoux's handiwork. After an hour's drive from Paris they arrived at a hidden chateau. Ledoux had explained that his client's interests were "not of the common world" and that his own appearance was "very peculiar."

After passing through several chambers, Beckford reached a splendid salon, and there Ledoux introduced him to an old man. Though of small stature, he had a powerful presence, and his odd and antique dress piqued Beckford's interest. The old man asked Beckford to regard the many works of art that adorned the room. Beckford was intrigued by a large bronze cistern, resting on a green porphyry base; it was filled to the brim with water. After studying it for a few moments, something peculiar began to happen.

As I stood contemplating the last gleams ofa ruddy sunset reflected on its placid surface (Beckford wrote in a letter to Louisa) the old man, risen at length from his stately chair, approached and no sooner had he drawn near, than the water becoming agitated rose up in waves. Upon the gleaming surface of the undulating fluid, flitted by a succession of ghastly shadows, somewhat resembling ... the human form in its last agonies of dissolution ...

The images moved quickly, but Beckford had seen enough to produce a genuine frisson. He later told Louisa that what he had seen in Ledoux's apartment reduced "to insignificance all Loutherberg's specious wonders," and that the phantasmagoria "froze" his "young blood." His reactions, however, did not ingratiate him with Ledoux and the mysterious old man. After remarking that "This is most frightfully extraordinary," a shaken Beckford was led away, apparently having failed the test. Passing out of the inner sanctum, Beckford caught a glimpse of a candle-lit chamber, and heard the low sound of voices chanting. When asked what was taking place, an impassive Ledoux remarked that the place was dedicated to a "high, but not entirely religious purpose." It's conceivable, as Joscelyn Godwin speculates in The Theosophical Enlightenment, that Ledoux, through Loutherberg, saw Beckford as a potential ally - or more likely patron - of some secret society, and brought him to the threshold of initiation. Beckford, however, was an inveterate dilettante, and to him henceforth the portal was closed. After this unsettling experience, Beckford apparently lost all interest in the occult.

Jacques Cazotte

Most readers of occult literature know of Jacques Cazotte through the story of his remarkable prediction of the fates of several of the aristocracy and intelligentsia at the hands of the Revolution. The tale turns up in most books on prophecy or clairvoyance. In 1788, Cazotte was present at a dinner party given in Paris by the Duchesse de Gramont. One of the guests, Guillaume de Malesherbes, a minister and confidant of Louis XVI, proposed a toast "to the day when reason will be triumphant in the affairs of men." A day, he added ruefully, "which I shall never live to see."

Cazotte, responding to Malesherbes' remark, rose from his seat and announced that he was wrong. "You, sir," he said, "will live to see that day. It will come in six years." Cazotte then went on to say that the Revolution was soon approaching, and that the lives of everyone in the room would be profoundly affected by it.

Naturally, everyone wanted to hear what would happen. Jean de la Harpe, a staunch sceptic and radical atheist, was intrigued by Cazotte's confident manner, and quickly wrote down his reply. He intended to produce his notes later, in order to show how wrong Cazotte had been, and to prove once again that prophecy was mere superstition. As it turned out, La Harpe's notes, discovered after his death in 1803, are the strongest evidence for the accuracy of Cazotte's vision.

Cazotte regarded his fellow guests and told them what was in store. The Marquis de Condorcet, a celebrated philosopher and proponent of progress would, Cazotte announced, die on the floor of a prison cell, after taking poison to avoid execution. When Condorcet replied that such fate had little to do with an age of reason, Cazotte replied that nevertheless, his suicide would take place during such a reign. A favourite of Louis, Chamfort would, Cazotte went on, cut his veins several times, but not die until some months later. Dr. Vicq d'Azyr would be assisted in a similar fate, having his veins opened by someone else. The astronomer jean Bailly would die on the scaffold, a victim of the mob, as would MM. Nicolai, Roucher, and Malesherbes. Even their host, the duchesse, would meet her end in the same way, along with many other of the ladies present.

After hearing this, La Harpe asked about himself. He, Cazotte replied, would not die, but would instead become a Christian: to the atheistic La Harpe, a fate perhaps worse than death. When asked about his own future, Cazotte likened himself to the man who, during the siege of Jerusalem, walked about its walls crying "Woe to Jerusalem," only to be crushed in the end by a stone from a Roman catapult.

Within six years everything Cazotte had said became true. Condorcet poisoned himself in a prison cell. When threatened with arrest, Chamfort tried to kill himself, but bungled the job, and later died at the hands of the doctor treating his wounds. Dr. Vicq d'Azyr avoided the guillotine by having his veins opened by a fellow prisoner. The rest were guillotined, and La Harpe, horrified by the carnage of the Revolution, entered a monastery and became a devout Catholic. Cazotte, an ardent royalist, was not however killed by a Roman catapult, but executed by the tribunal in 1792 after plans he had made for a counter-revolution had fallen into the wrong hands. Before any of this had come to pass, La Harpe had mentioned Cazotte's prediction to many friends, and Baroness d'Oberkirch records in her memoirs that she had come across the story in 1789. As for the reign of reason that Cazotte assured Malesherbes he would live to see, as Christopher McIntosh makes clear in Eliphas Levi and The French Occult Revival, by 1792, a number of `cults of reason' had sprung up in revolutionary France, the aim of which was to take the place of the detested Church.

Jacques Cazotte was born in Dijon in 1719, and was educated at a Jesuit College, in preparation for a career in law. After qualifying in 1740, he went to Paris to enter the Marine Department of the civil service, and while there became part of several literary circles and salons and wrote his early works. His official duties kept him occupied with various posts on land and at sea, and during the war of the Austrian Succession, he was involved in naval campaigns against the English.

Between 1747 and 1759, Cazotte moved back and forth between France and the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, enduring ill health, miserable conditions, financial problems, official mistreatment and a general run of bad luck. Back in France, in 1760, Cazotte's luck turned, and he was saved from ruin by inheriting a large house in Pierry, near Epernay, from his clergyman brother. There Cazotte married, had three children, and remained for the rest of life, which he devoted to being an amateur litterateur. One of the works he produced during this time was The Devil in Love.

Most of Cazotte's works deal in some way with the weird, the strange and the occult, and his interest in these was not strictly literary. At some point in the 1770s he became involved in the Martinist lodges following the teachings of Martinez de Pasquales. It is unclear if he joined after Pasquales' death; if so, he may have been initiated into the order by SaintMartin, and if that is the case, he may have been a Martinist of a different stamp. He was clearly a close associate of the Unknown Philosopher, to the extent that Madame la Croix, Saint-Martin's confidant, became a member of the Pierry household, assisting Cazotte in seances and other occult experiments. As Brian Stableford suggests', the occult atmosphere of The Devil in Love is light and playful. However serious Cazotte may have taken his Martinist beliefs, he is concerned here with entertaining. Indeed, Cazotte's tonguein-cheek presentation of ceremonial magic may have been influenced by Saint-Martin's rejection of the theurgic practices of his teacher. Although affirming the efficacy of ritual, Saint-Martin eventually discarded it as dealing solely with inferior realms. Cazotte published The Devil in Love in 1772, and rewrote parts of it at different times, so although he may have started work on it years before meeting Saint-Martin, his association with the Unknown Philosopher could have influenced the work.

That association came to an end in 1789, a year after his famous prediction. Cazotte, the royalist, could not abide Saint-Martin's brief admiration for the ideals of the revolutionaries - one shared and soon dropped by many Enlightenment occultists. Cazotte was by this time well known as an occultist, and his last work, Arabian Tales, written as a kind of sequel to The Arabian Nights, is in the tradition of exotic occultism inaugurated by Galland's translation and developed in the Romantic years by other occultists like Gerard de Nerval. The Devil in Love, though light fare, links the practice of magic to eroticism, a union that went through several permutations in the following centuries. That the devil appears here both as a beautiful woman and a camel suggests the dangers present in sex and the heathen East. Yet any moralizing on the part of Cazotte - and the different endings he wrote and rewrote suggest that Cazotte himself was unsure what the moral of the fable is - can be excused in a work that contains the overwhelmingly poignant line "Ali Biondetta - if only you were not that hideous dromedary."

Jan Potocki

That sex and the East were linked to magic was not something to put off another Enlightenment occultist. To the eccentric Pole, Count Jan Potocki (1761-1815), the three were a positive attraction. Most English readers know Potocki as the author of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, one of the strangest works of 19th century literature. Modelled on The Arabian Nights, The Saragossa Manuscript, as it is often called, is a weird farrago of stories within stories, with an overall supernatural bent. Over a period of 66 days, Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer, recounts his adventures amidst gypsies, kabbalists, demons, corpses, astrologers, the Wandering Jew, secret societies and obliging oriental ladies. As Potocki's single masterpiece, The Saragossa Manuscript alone would be sufficient evidence of its author's eccentricities. Yet Potocki's own life, as well as that of his great work, have a history far stranger than most fiction.