A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  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 spiritua
l 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."

  No wonder when the book was published in 1857 it was immediately taken from the bookstalls and its author tried for obscenity. Baudelaire never recovered from the public outrage, although he continued to write, producing minor classics like his essay on drugs and poetry, Les Paradis Artiiciels (1860), which, in a translation by Aleister Crowley, became something of an underground success in the 1960s. But his own health was failing, and his reputation as a decadent preceded him everywhere: it was not until 1949 that the obscenity conviction was finally overturned. A lecture tour of Belgium in 1864 proved a disaster, and in 1866 he suffered a series of strokes which left him paralysed and aphasic. A collection of prose poems later published as Paris Spleen were his final efforts. The syphilis contracted as an aspirant poet had entered its final phase, and after lingering in squalour in Belgium for a time, he was brought back to Paris where on 31 August 1867 he died.

  Villiers de I'Isle-Adam

  The name jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam is not, I suspect, one on everybody's lips, and even for students of the occult and the bizarre it is still not encountered very much these days. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam is perhaps the most poignant embodiment, if we can use so robust a term for so ethereal a character, of the Symbolist ethic that came to dominate the aesthetic and philosophical consciousness of Europe in the last years of the 19th century. Barely known in his native France until the end of his life, Villiers is remembered today, if at all, for being the author of the archetypal Symbolist drama Axel in which, within a dense forest of occult verbiage and world-renouncing metaphor, there emerges one of the great one-liners of all time. When, just before downing the poison that will consummate for eternity their spiritual love, the beautiful Sara suggests to the ennui ridden Rosicrucian aesthete Axel, that they share at least one night of passion, Axel rejects the idea with disdain. "0 Sara," he cries. "Tomorrow I would be prisoner of your splendid body. Its delights would have fettered the chaste energy impelling me at this instant. But ... suppose our transports should die away, suppose some accursed hour would strike when our love, paling, would be consumed by its own flames ... Oh! let's not wait for that sad hour ..." Sara, not yet entirely convinced that suicide is their best option, and symbol of the fertile but futile vitality that Axel is determined to renounce, compresses her plea into a single cry: "Come, live!"

  "Life?" asks Axel. "No.- Our existence is already full and its cup runneth over! What hourglass could measure the hours of this night? The future? ... we have exhausted it ... As for living? Our servants will do that for us.

  Expecting his servants to do his living for him is an apt sentiment for a character like Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. For one thing, it was something he was determined not to do for himself, for another, Villiers came from an aristocratic family who could look back on at least eight centuries of unbroken nobility- which means, one imagines, quite a few servants. Among his distinguished ancestors was jean de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1384-1437), Marshal of France; PhillipeAuguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1464-1534), founder of the Order of the Knights of Malta; and Pierre de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (?), Grand Standard-Bearer of France in the battle of Roosebeke in 1382. Villiers never forgot the noble line of his descent, which was to him a source both of great pride and considerable inconvenience. Pride in that he could fall back on it when facing a world that invariably proved unwieldy, if not hostile; inconvenient in that it was precisely this aristocratic inheritance that prevented him from rolling up his sleeves and getting down to work when faced with an obstacle. For Mallarme, along with Baudelaire and Wagner one of Villiers' close friends, he was "The man who never was, save in his dreams." For Arthur Symons, who introduced the English speaking world to Villiers in his classic book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), he was "The Don Quixote of Idealism." For the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, Villiers was one of a group of late 19th century writers who "hated the bourgeois world ... with a holy hatred. .. . adapted to nothing: their whole lives were spent in poverty, failure and lack of recognition. "M Even more than Baudelaire or Nerval, Villiers was a man who, while having the unmanifest light of the Ideal in his sight, was constitutionally unable to come to grips with the world. And even more than Baudelaire and Nerval, he sank into an increasingly pathetic destitution, a life of such minimal physical comfort that, were he an orthodox member of the Catholic Church he so fervently accepted, he would by now have possibly been canonized.

  Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was born in 1838 into a family whose noble ancestry made it a target for the Revolution. Living in very reduced circumstances, their financial destiny was made even more precarious by the impracticable and invariably failed dreams of success entertained by Villiers' father, who systematically threw away what little savings and property they retained in a series of absurd get-rich-quick schemes. One fantasy, however, was shared by the entire family: the notion that young Mathias - as Villiers was known to the family - was destined to restore the family honour by becoming a famous writer, and its coffers, by marrying a rich heiress. Villiers did try to make good these expectations: the first by writing some of the most remarkable works of the late 19th century; the second by proposing to a wealthy young English woman. Reports are that the lady, introduced to Villiers by a friend with whom he had entered into a contract to provide him with a wife worth at least three million francs, was so terrified of the poet's passion and lengthy recitations that she escaped from their assignation in Covent Garden as quickly as possible. Disappointment, recriminations, and the return of the clothes Villiers had borrowed for the affair followed. Some sense of lost riches from ages long ago is always in the background of Villiers work; the interest in actual riches is evident, but like the hero of Potocki's Saragossa Manuscript, the allusion to alchemical gold (i.e., esoteric wisdom) is not to be discounted.

  The three million franc wife is just one of several incidents that put Villiers' eccentricities in the same rank as Nerval's lobster. Others were his candidacy to fill the vacant throne of Greece in 1863; his frequent disappearances and equally bizarre re-appearances in Paris after several weeks absence; the reports of his occult retreats in the Abbey of Solesme; his penchant for adorning his ill-fitting and threadbare clothes with an assortment of ostentatious heraldic decorations; his need to borrow suitable dress for the aristocratic evenings he was invited to, while at the same time he was not far from starving; th
e duel he nearly fought when a second rate writer vilified his name in a cheap melodrama. For the first thirty years of his life, Villiers lived in relative comfort, oscillating between the world of high society and the bohemian underground, an aristocrat among the poets, and vice versa. Landing in Paris in his early twenties, his aunt financed the publication of his Premieres Poesies in 1859. Published to hardly any notice, Villiers had at least introduced himself to the Parisian literary scene, a milieu he was to occupy for the rest of his life. He made friends, Baudelaire as mentioned, and also Catulle Mendes and Jean Marras. By the 1860s, he was recognized by litterateurs like Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Theodore Banville, Flaubert, Mallarme and others; by all he was considered an exceptional character and a writer of genius although for the public at large he was a nonentity. In 1862 he published the first volume of his philosophical romance Isis, also known as Wilhelm de Strally and Prolegomenes. Like so many of his other works, this was never completed; like Coleridge and De Quincey, Villiers had the raconteur's habit of talking a good book in cafes, and later feeling too bored with the idea to set it to paper. Others who listened often did, to their profit and Villiers loss. (He was, by all reports, a considerable showman, his satiric recitations featuring the character of Tribulat Bonhomet generally bringing the house down.)