Sasha Chaitow’s publications, videos, and abstracts of her research on Josephin Peladan, the French visionary author who rallied Symbolist artists to re-enchant Belle Epoque Paris.
R+C Salon, book launch & exhibition
Péladan book release in July 2022!
After a long, long gestation, I’m delighted to announce that my research study of Péladan, drawn from my PhD thesis, will be published in July 2022 by Theion Publishing!
This is the first of four books I will be publishing with Theion. Entitled Son of Prometheus: The Life and Work of Joséphin Péladan this is the first scholarly study of Péladan that places him in the context of the history of Western Esotericism while also providing a clear roadmap to the entirety of Péladan’s initiatory teachings and philosophy of the esoteric power of art.
Course on Péladan’s self-initiation system
In this groundbreaking course, Dr Sasha Chaitow, who is the world’s leading Péladan scholar and a professional artist, leads participants through the first level of the three-degree system, Péladan’s Order of the Rose+Croix of the Temple and the Grail.
Illustrating Péladan: scholarship, practice, and art
SHWEP Podcast: Sasha Chaitow on Joséphin Péladan
2021 Péladan lectures
New lectures on Péladan coming up in early 2021
Articles, Books, and Media
Redeeming the “Dreyfus of Literature”
How are we to understand who he really was, and what he really achieved, if, as we shall discover, the legend is largely a libel?
Ask the man. He left us clues.
Who was Josephin Peladan?
History has not been kind to Josephin Péladan. An enormously prolific author with a vision for societal reform through art, he is usually consigned to a footnote or a few lines in scholarly overviews of Rosicrucianism or the French occult revival. Portrayed as an eccentric oddity, his defining characteristic is that of contradiction and paradox. This…
Péladan lecture for ETH Zürich
Dr Sasha Chaitow delivers an Invited guest lecture as part of the “Aesthetic and Scientific Epistemologies of the Occult in the XIX Century,” a lecture series organised by ETH University – Zurich‘s ongoing project “Scientificization and aestheticization of esotericism in the long 19th Century” .
Quest for a Science of Sciences
Beginning its journey with Aristotle and the pre-Socratics, science passed to the medieval and renaissance alchemists, traveled through Rosicrucianism, crystallized in the Royal Society and the Age of Reason characterized by mechanistic thought – the darkest time for holism. Now it is returning full circle.
2020 Péladan research update
Friends who follow me on other media will be aware that this page has been quiet for a while, following a couple of years of extreme life turbulence. In early 2018 I was making good headway with the manuscript for my (horrendously overdue) book on Péladan, when family emergencies took priority. Sadly, by the end…
Les bijoux de la Rose +Croix
The 27th June 2018 marked the centenary of the death of Josephin Peladan, the mysterious French visionary author who dreamed of igniting a cultural renaissance through symbolic art containing esoteric messages and who masterminded the Salons de la Rose + Croix. Regular readers will know my ongoing connection with Peladan through my doctoral research and,…
New publications 2018
I am delighted to finally see in print several Peladan-related papers and chapters that I have been working on over past years. Here’s the crop for 2018, with two more (one a book) slated for either the end of 2018 or early 2019. For my full list of publications/lectures on Peladan since 2011, see this…
Peladan said what?
It is a common phenomenon to see political supporters of all stripes reaching to thinkers of the past to somehow strengthen their claim to “truth,” such as it may be. It is an often overlooked, though effective tactic that constitutes a double logical fallacy of the first order – an argumentum ad antiquitatem, and an…
Mass media vs. Symbolism 2-0
Yet another mainstream media article dedicated to the Guggenheim exhibition Mystical Symbolism is doing the rounds courtesy of the New York Times, and depending on who you ask, it is either a barbaric attack by an ignorant journalist on a deeply significant, misunderstood movement, or a generic, and predictable critique of a blip in the…
Symbolism at the Guggenheim
Since the upcoming exhibition “Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose Croix in Paris 1892-1897 (due to open next week at the Guggenheim in New York) was first announced, friends of esoteric thought, Symbolist art, and those fascinated by the intriguing phenomenon that was the French occult revival have been beside themselves with excitement, and rightly…
Stained by the Light: 2017 neosymbolist art show
Building on last year’s art collection that illustrated ideas in Peladan’s work, in this year’s collection I am focusing more on my own symbolist compositions. Peladan’s ideals continue to inspire, and these paintings have been set to original music written especially for the exhibition. The collection was exhibited in Corfu in May 2017, and will…
Peladan Illustrated: Saving the Lives of Angels art show 2016
Ever since beginning my research on Peladan’s life and work, I had always envisioned an art collection inspired by his esoteric-aesthetic theory. Organising my time has been challenging, since I continue to create exclusive collections for ICON Gallery, while also teaching and working on various art commissions. I had already created a series of draft illustrations towards this project, but the…
Interview with the Thinker’s Garden
My interview with the Custodian of “The Thinker’s Garden” website – a cabinet of curiosities featuring articles on the sublime and mysterious in art, history, and culture. In a way, Sasha Chaitow is following in the footsteps of the earliest philosophers. Many of them spent their lives in the sun-kissed Greek islands as educators and advisers, developing…