The article that follows is a translation of a piece originally written for my (almost) weekly column in the Greek cultural magazine PHENOMENA, a weekly insert in one of the Greek national daily newspapers, Eleftheros Typos, and published Saturday, Sept. 9th 2012. Expanded and accordingly footnoted, this will also form a subsection of my thesis, but in the current form it was expressly written for a general readership. The Greek version is here.

Many of us will remember the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice from our childhood, embellished with images of the tragic musician, who could enchant the whole of creation with his music, and even moved Hades to tears, but was unable to save his beloved. Our teachers used to tell us the story as a moral lesson, stressing Orpheus’ error as he hesitated at the threshold of the Underworld and turned back to see if his beloved Eurydice was truly following him. They would interpret the tragic end of the story as the result of breaking a promise.

Plato reproached Orpheus, saying that since he was not prepared to die in order to be with his beloved, Hades tricked him by showing him only a shade, and not the true Eurydice. According to Aeschylus, at the end of his life, Orpheus denounced the worship of Dionysus and turned to worship Apollo, and as a result was torn to pieced by furious Maenads as a punishment for abandoning Dionysus. The pieces of Orpheus’ corpse ended up in the river Evros, where his lyre and his head, continuing to sing mournful hymns – travelled as far as Lesvos, where they were buried (according to one of the many versions of the myth). According to another version, they were placed beneath an oracle, where Orpheus gave prophecies to all who asked for them.

Aside, however, from the better- or lesser-known myths, the figure of Orpheus is surrounded by a host of other stories and legends, some of which would have him be the son of Apollo himself, or the son of Oiagros, king of Thrace. According to Apollodorus, Orpheus was the founder of the Dionysian Mysteries, and the Orphic Mysteries are considered a later evolution of the same. In both cases we find a strong initiatory element interwoven with mysteries of death and rebirth, heavily ritualised with artistic and ceremonial elements.

Time-travelling myths

Through the centuries, the myth of Orpheus kindled the imagination of many scholars, artists, and storytellers. Depending on the period and the source, we find various elements of the myth accordingly highlighted, depending on the priorities, the fashions, and the demands of a given era.

In its journey from the mythology of ancient Greece, through Ovid’s epics, the myth travelled through medieval poems and tales, was the theme of the first true opera (Eurydice by Jacopo Peri, 1600), and dozens of other operatic and musical interpretations, all the way through to the 19^th century, the French occult revival, and the circle of Symbolist artists who were inspired by the work of Joséphin Péladan. Here we find Orpheus – or more specifically, his decapitated head on his lyre – as a central theme of many Symbolist paintings. And of course, since we are dealing with occultists as well as symbolists, these depictions certainly hide far more than a tribute to a tried and tested old favourite of a theme.

The first thing we notice in the Symbolist depictions of Orpheus, is that the vast majority focus on the decapitated head and the lyre – the dead Orpheus in other words, who continues to sing, even in death. In the painting by Gustave Moreau we see a young Thracian woman holding the head and the lyre, while the paintings by Redon, Séon and Delville all follow precisely the same motif: the head and lyre in the foreground, and the sea or beach where, according to legend, Orpheus’ remains were washed up, forming the background.

We might assume that, lacking further imagination, these artists simply depicted the end of the myth as a kind of study in symbolic still life. However, a closer look at the journey of the Orphic myth through the centuries, demonstrates that this isn’t the case at all.

Since the Renaissance, the figure of Orpheus had already been conflated with that of Dionysus, and Orpheus was frequently considered and depicted by various artists – particularly Michaelangelo – as an alter ego of Dionysus himself.

In his treatise The Birth of Tragedy (1886), deeply influenced by various Theosophical theories and other occult practices of his time, Nietzsche outlined the notion of Dionysian-Orphic ecstasy and possession that were the motive force of Symbolist art, and a supreme form of initiation into the invisible forced of man and universe. This idea of initiation was at the heart of occult thought of the time, and it refers to awakening, discovery, and the development of dormant human faculties which are available to all, but are in a state of dormancy. Just like in Orphic legend, only initiates may drink from the spring of Mnemosyne after death, so that they may evolve spiritually.

In the greatly influential work The Great Initiates (1889), Edouard Schuré discusses the notion of initiation in depth, and presents the initiatory journeys of various great figures in human history and legend. Among them, Ram, Moses, Jesus… and Orpheus. Regarding initiation, he says the following: “Modern man seeks happiness without knowledge, knowledge without wisdom… For someone to achieve mastery, the ancient sages tell us, man must fully reconstruct his physical, ethical and spiritual existence. Only then can an initiate, initiate [another]….Therefore, initiation was, then, something very different from a hollow dream, and something far greater than a simple scientific theory: it was, then, the creation of a soul out of itself, its evolution on a higher level, and its flowering on the divine plane.”

For Schuré, Orpheus was the one who, heralding Dionysus, transmitted this Dionysian, theurgic impulse, first throughout Greece, and

then Europe. Orpheus himself stands for creative genius, initiatory tradition, and his lyre symbolises human existence itself, whereby, according to Schuré, “every chord corresponds to a mood of the human soul and contains the laws of one science and one art,” thus ‘proving’ Orpheus to be “the great mystagogue, ancestor of poetry and music, which reveal eternal truths.”

This “religion” of initiatory and creative genius was the motive force of the Symbolists, for whom Orpheus was the archetypal Artist-priest, who, in Péladan’s vision, would collectively initiate society through their exposure to the mysteries hidden within symbolic artwork. Therefore, these works in which we see the repeated motif of Orpheus’ head and lyre, are no less than sacred icons, talismans encapsulating their whole raison-d’etre. And Orpheus is their patron saint…

One might rightly quesiton why the Symbolists preferred the decapitated form as opposed to a more Dionysian, triumphal figure such as that preferred in Renaissance depictions. The simple answer is ideologically based: the head and lyre are symbols, and as such, offer more compositional and interpretative freedom to the artist than a full human form complete with background and props, where focus on the symbol will necessarily be diluted. By isolating the complex symbol of the head-and-lyre, the artist is free to make it his own and to use all his skill so as to communicate the symbolic message, just as is the case with stylized icons in various religious traditions.

The second, more complex answer, is rooted in human prehistory, since the human head and ritual decapitations date back to the time of the Neanderthals, as is evidenced by archaeological findings. We find decapitated heads as ritual objects in diverse prehistoric civilisations. It also appears in Greco-Roman myths, albeit in refined form, such as the relatively unknown story of Lityerses, bastard son of King Midas, who would decapitate his rivals until he was himself decapitated by Hercules. The Celts preserved the heads of enemies defeated in battle and hung them around their horses’ necks, a practice recorded in Celtic, Roman, and French art, as well as on coinage of the day, and the Vikings had a similar practice.

In legends from the medieval period onwards, there were stories of heads as oracles, the best-known of which was the Baphomet of Templar lore. Many studies have also noted references in chivalric tales of the quest for the Holy Grail, where in many cases, rather than a cup, a tray is described, upon which sits a decapitated head with magical properties. From medieval times onward, we also find numerous references to magical heads and ritual decapitations in alchemical allegories, as well as in a host of folk traditions from across Europe and beyond, from Asia to Latin America.

The ceremonial significance of the decapitated head differs a great deal from one civilisation to the next, and as stressed by archaeologist Lauren Talalay in a detailed study of ritual decapitation in prehistoric Greece, we should not assume that what applies to one culture, also applies to another. In most ancient Asian cultures, for example, as well as Assyrian culture, enemies were decapitated as a sign of manhood, heroism, and the honour of victory, while in other cultures decapitation was exclusively seen as an act of respect and ancestor-worship.

In Greece and in regions of Anatolia, human skulls have been discovered – often decorated and painted – dating from the Neolithic period. These were carefully placed in specific parts of buildings, positioned in relation to specific sculptures or other artistic elements, or on altars. Despite the fact that the precise details of their use and significance remain a mystery, most archaeologists appear to concur with regard to their ceremonial and deeply symbolic significance, as well as the fact that they formed a symbolic link between the living and the dead. Above all, however, through the decapitation and attribution of a new symbolic form to the skull after death, automatically the skull and all that it stands for acquires a new form of life, and thus, a kind of immortality.

Which brings us back to the Orpheus of the Symbolists. Resurrected in the fin-de-siècle, with new magical qualities, as an archetype and epitome of human creativity and artistry, the representative and embodiment of Dionysus, simultaneously a tragic figure reborn as a supreme symbol through the wrath of the Maenads. A symbol need not be elaborate in order to be powerful – in this simple lyre and peaceful face are concentrated all these meanings, with the depth of centuries. All that is left, is to allow him to perform his initiation.

By way of an epilogue:
When a myth travels down the centuries and across civilisations, there are always additions and subtractions of details, conflations

and syntheses with other myths and folkloric elements. It is very easy for oversimplificatioons to occur because we think that some elements seem similar to others, or to insist that one or other version of the myth is “the right one”. But if we look at a myth – or a symbolic figure such as Orpheus – without keeping in mind this journey through time, then we are almost certain to come to the wrong conclusion. The Orpheus of the French Symbolists and occultists is not the Thracian Orpheus of the 5^th and 6^th centuries B.C.E. He represents the transmuted myth that now carries the mythology, the hopes, wishful thinking and visions of two and a half centuries, and is represented in these specific ways at this specific time. Nor, as some purists might argue, is he a “false,” “stolen” Orpheus. He is who and what he is, and if we are to comprehend this fragment of culture on its own terms, then we need to perceive it within its full context. By overlaying our own interpretational filters, we are simply creating new material for interpretation by future sociologists and cultural theorists, and unfortunately, we would also be missing the point.

 

Sources:

• Edouard Schuré, The Great Initiates
• Lauren Talalay, Heady Business: Skulls, Heads, and Decapitation in Neolithic Anatolia and Greece, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 17:2 (2004).
• John F. Moffitt, Inspiration: Bacchus and the Cultural History of a Creation Myth, Leiden, Brill, 2005.
• Dorothy Kosinski, Orpheus in Nineteenth Century Symbolism, University of Michigan Press, 1989.

 

Another 18000 words finally sculpted, pruned, and teased into shape ahead of my supervisory board meeting this week, and I’ve been delving deep into the mysteries of esoteric lineages and that thorny question of authenticity, in order to successfully unravel the relationship between mythic history and esoteric traditions. All this is no more than the background to my central argument that Péladan consciously created a legendarium to fulfill his purpose of redeeming his society through a mixture of art and occultism, and as (should) be the case with this kind of research, I had several epiphanies while writing this piece. 

It all started with the niggling conviction I had, that straightforward historical research, cataloguing and codifying Péladan’s output would have done a monumental disservice to his oeuvre. What I really want to find out, and hopefully share in the process, is what he was trying to do with it, and more importantly, how. To do that, I have to get inside his head, and tap into the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural context he was heir to, both consciously and subconsciously, and attempt to work out the machinations of his own mind when he tried to put his theory into practice. Fortunately, Péladan left not a breadcrumb trail, but a mile-wide highway of hints and clues. It is no speculation to say that he wanted his work to be studied, he even said as much: 

Péladan will one day be the object of detailed study… The novelist of la Décadence Latine, the playwright of Babylone and la Prométhéide, the philosopher of l’Amphithéâtre des sciences mortes, the art critic of la Décadence esthéthique, the savant of ideas and forms, and finally the zelator of the Rose-Croix, is an infinitely curious student, who built six careers simultaneously, of which one alone would have been sufficient for the activity of a writer…
[J. Péladan, unpublished notes for an autobiography written in the third person, Péladan archives, Bibliothéque de l’Arsenal. The notes are undated but have been estimated to date from between 1900-1904 by Christophe Beaufils in Joséphin Péladan, p. 350, n. 46.]

  The main question I’m currently working on has to do with the context, because much as Péladan’s actual work forms the bulk of my evidence, understanding where it came from is as, if not more important. Clearly the broad brushstrokes of his context derive from the post-Revolutionary social conflicts, the sociopolitical melting pot that was nineteenth century France, and which Péladan was closely involved with due to his father’s legitimist activism. The finer detail begins to emerge when one looks a little more closely at the influence of Eliphas Lévi and the occult milieu of the fin-de-siecle. But at this point, I still felt that I was standing at a window looking through a dusty pane at the tableau I was trying to interpret. 

The breakthrough came when two phenomenal  new books arrived on my desk: Joseph Mali’s Mythistory: The Making of  Modern Historiography, and Wouter Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture.  Both have been pivotal for my thinking and I am grateful to the authors for giving me the tools with which to first see, then describe and defend, the notion of an esoteric culture in its own right. This in itself is not a new notion, and has been successfully described and circumscribed many times; for example: 

[E]sotericism not only involves the construction of its own tradition; it can even be understood as a specific form of tradition and transmission… In the construction of their own traditions, both pre-modern and modern esoteric paradigms… claim to represent or restore an ancient, primordial wisdom tradition as a kind of “secret knowledge”… The questions of heritage and tradition, of origin and genealogy are crucial to the foundation of any esoteric knowledge. It defines, and moreover legitimates itself, through its origins, its ancestry, and its means of esoteric transmission. In so doing, esotericism seeks to invent its own tradition, to map its master narratives, to construct its myths of origin and its myths of transmission.
Andreas B. Kilcher, ‘Introduction,’ Constructing Tradition in Western Esotericism: Means and Myths of Transmission in Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. ix-x.]

So what concerned me in this section was this process of constructing master narratives, of the esoteric propensity for self-referential, auto-evolving tradition-building, and most of all, to discover the rationale behind it. Naturally it all begins with the Renaissance notion of philosophia perennis, and Hanegraaff’s excellent dissection of this  alongside the related, but significantly differentiated prisca theologia and pia philosophia was invaluable to my argument, discussed together with Garry Trompf’s discussion of macrohistory, Assmann’s mnemohistory, and Mali’s mythistory. 

But something was missing, and as is often the case, I stumbled over it almost unintentionally. The missing piece of the puzzle was not “what” the builders of esoteric traditions were doing in their careful constructives of narratives and myths of origins, nor the meta-analysis of their social or structural function – this ground I had already covered. The question was the why of it, the esoteric why, what was so special about such mythistorical genealogies that went beyond the romantic allure and profound mystique of claims to Egyptian forefathers and antediluvian legacies, which, as I noted in my last post,  formed the core of much of Péladan’s cosmology.

The missing piece(s), were egregores, followed by a misinterpretation of a mistranslation.

Tempted though I am to do so, this is not the time for me to share my full line of reasoning. Suffice it to say that it all starts with a misinterpreted line from Eliphas Lévi’s The Great Secret, Or, Occultism Unveiled: 

“These colossal forces have sometimes taken a shape and appeared in the guise of giants: these are the egregors [sic] of the Book of Enoch… [The planets are] governed by those genii which were termed the celestial watchers, or egregors, by the ancients.”

Eliphas Lévi, Le Grand Arcane, (Paris: 1868), pp. 127-130, 133, 136.

This wording gave rise to a misinterpretation which nonetheless was to become common currency in several occult systems thereafter, as it was taken to mean ‘a collective entity’,¹ or alternatively, ‘a subtle force made up in a way of the contributions of all its members past and present, and which is consequently all the more considerable and able to produce greater effects as the collectivity is older and is composed of a greater number of members.’² Whether due to Lévi’s phrasing or careless interpretation, the word that had meant angelic Watchers, or guardians of mankind, took on this new meaning, of an entity formed by collective belief.

The reception of this idea in nineteenth century French occult circles was further specialised in an anonymous book attributed to Christian mystic Valentin Arnoldevitch Tomberg (1900-1973) (his emphasis): ‘one endeavours to collectively create an egregore for this special purpose: as a “group spirit” or the spirit of the fraternity concerned. This egregore once created, it is believed that one is able to rely on it and that one has an efficacious magical ally in it.’³ This notion was taken still further, and evolved into various other permutations by Helena Blavatsky’s successors, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, in their works on thought-forms, which although slightly different and more individualised than the notion of a group egregore, nonetheless reflect the notion of the manifestation of thought in matter.^{4 There are many further examples, but those will stay sub rosa for now.}

This compelling idea was become the apple of discord sparking some of the most bitter – and bizarre – “magical battles” between different lineages of esoteric orders from the nineteenth century onward in a curious line of reasoning that also explains the ‘older is better’ notion at the heart of most esoteric groups. Such disputes have arisen frequently among different lines of Martinism, Rosicrucianism and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and at the time of writing different strands of the latter are engaged in an acrimonious, very public dispute over the question of authenticity and authority, in which debate the matter of egregores figures quite strongly.

By claiming (or constructing) a powerful myth of provenance, a given order or group is thought to be “tapping in to” the egregore of the “original lineage”, which in many cases is perceived as the prisca theologia itself, thus empowering a given order or practice even if it does not actually have “true” historical roots in such a tradition. In this respect, just like in the case of apostolic succession, direct lines of initiation are jealously guarded and flaunted even in modern orders as an indisputable mark of legitimacy. The claim to antiquity then, is not only a matter of mystique that in the nineteenth century especially might have been attributed to Romantic “Egyptomania” ¹ or Parnassian philhellenism.² From the perspective of an esoteric practitioner, the older and more illustrious the tradition, the more powerful the egregore, and thus the work of the order or practitioner accessing it. A further dimension of this is the role that this kind of thinking plays in the consolidation of both social and cultural memory, whereby:

[G]roups which do not “have” a memory tend to “make” themselves one by means of things meant as reminders… In order to be able to be reembodied in the sequence of generations, cultural memory, unlike communicative memory, exists also in disembodied form and requires institutions of preservation and reembodiment.³

Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory,’ in: Astrid Erll & Ansgar Nunning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin; New York: de Gruyter, 2008), 109-118 (p. 111).

Aside from preserving and passing on esoteric traditions and occult ‘secrets’ to the next generations, esoteric orders also play a very important part in the preservation of esoteric cultural memory. By seeing esotericism as a culture, rather than simply as a set of linked but essentially obscure traditions, it is possible to ‘de-occultize’ the notion of the egregore without falling into reductionist perspectives. From there on, each individual esoteric current follows the same pattern, with its own ‘artifacts, objects, anniversaries, feasts, icons, symbols, [and] landscapes]’⁴ forming its own unique cultural footprint. And importantly for newcomers to this area of inquiry, this also justifies this practice to a great extent; for the cultural appropriation of such material is often seen and presented as somehow being  dishonest and deceptive – an accusation levelled many a time at Péladan by virtue of his eccentricity, but this is not, apparently, the case.

The notion of the egregore and initiatic lineages, reflecting apostolic succession and characterised by continuity is essentially a reiteration of the Renaissance philosophia perennis, and forms the backbone of the esoteric propensity for the construction of mythic histories. The flesh of these histories as they formed in the fin-de-siècle, along with its symbols and artifacts, was sculpted out of the broader intellectual and cultural context of Illuminism as will be discussed in more detail in the relevant section, and in the case of Péladan and his circle, the complex and all-encompassing “Philosophical History” of Antoine Fabre d’Olivet.

As noted with some exasperation by Fabre d’Olivet’s (only) biographer, Léon Cellier: 

[T]o exalt Fabre d’Olivet without taking account of the motifs that had caused his name to disappear, is, purely and simply, mythomania…. Fabre d’Olivet pretended to have rediscovered lost traditions by his own means…So credulous [were] our hierophants that … to justify his exegesis, they appealed sometimes to some initiation, sometimes to some traditional source.”

And as one contemporary critic of Fabre d’Olivet added:

Theoreticians, more than historians, they were not satisfied, neither one of them, to report the facts without anything more, but they tried to justify their systems, that does not make a work of science… I cannot recommend strongly enough to occultists, that they carefully compare the works of masters with the actual facts of science. 
J. Brieu, Mercure de France, n.d., Tome LXXXIII, cited in Cellier, Fabre d’Olivet, p. 394.

 Both Brieu and Cellier demonstrate precisely the differentiation between the esoteric and the conventional worldview, reflecting the same exact divide  Hanegraaff so thoroughly reveals in his analysis of pre- and post-Enlightenment thought and justifying the practice if it is viewed from within, and not outside, that dusty pane that so often divides scholars and laypersons from practitioners. The occultists that so baffled Cellier and other critics, were true to character for specific reasons – and their perception of ‘mainstream science’ was entirely secondary to the acts that they believed they were undertaking –  ‘acts of poesis’ according to anthropologist Victor Turner,¹ or perhaps deliberate recourse to ancient egregores.

Oblivious to the criticism of the mainstream, from the rich smorgasbord of world mythology, compiled by Fabre d’Olivet into a sweeping history of humanity, Péladan and his circle picked, chose, and reinterpreted those elements that best suited their own purposes, building their own mythical histories through which to summon the egregores that would empower them. Péladan himself called on Chaldean deities in both his fiction, his theory, and his public life… and this is the next part of my thesis that I’ll be working on in coming months.

For more discussion of Péladan’s deployment of these ideas, watch this space. Over the summer I’ve two conference papers to write, and sub-sections on Péladan’s main inspirations to form into coherent prose, and I will share any interesting snippets when time allows.

.¹Victor Turner, ‘Social Dramas and Stories about them,’ in On Narrative, ed. By W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 164

 

 

The story of the war, and subsequent fall from heaven and the disgrace of Lucifer has been retold many times, giving rise to some of the most compelling poetry and imagery in Christian history, with no better example than John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), which I freely admit was one of my initial inspirations for the deeper study of esotericism and metaphysics, while it has also been the source of inspiration for a number of my paintings.

No study of the Angelic Fall can omit an exploration of the Book of Enoch, and this quickly leads to all sorts of other interesting avenues of enquiry within the Apocrypha. Péladan was preoccupied by this story, particularly because of his reception of the work of Fabre d’Olivet and the implications it holds regarding the accuracy of Biblical translation. Fabre d’Olivet, and Péladan after him, undertook no less than the rewriting of Genesis, with all sorts of theologically shocking implications. This  motif was central to Péladan’s cosmology, as was the question of the Fall of Man and paths of redemption. Despite his powerful Catholic faith, there are many overtly Luciferian references and positions in Péladan’s work which form one of the more interesting aspects that I am attempting to tease out of his work.

One of his most overtly Luciferian novels is Istar, published in two volumes in 1888. It is a curious book that was very successful compared to many of his other novels, though none met the initial success of his debut novel, Le Vice Supreme. Self-referential, self-conscious, painfully tender, exceptionally sensitive, Istar draws together many of Péladan’s occult and social preoccupations. It is both a novel within an novel and a contemporary social commentary in which he intersperses more general observations about human and social relationships with the narrative itself, but without falling into an overly didactic mode which is characteristic of many of his articles and later works. Péladan was not yet as disillusioned as he was to become from the mid-1890s on; at this time in his life he was still aspiring towards the Platonic ideal of love and woman, and sought to transmit this to anyone who would listen. Istar also comprises a resounding refutation of Péladan’s many biographers who have accused him of misogyny: it contains some of the most tender and romantic love scenes he was to write, along with a sensitive consideration of the social lot of women in his time:

” From boarding school where spontaneity is reprimanded, to the salon where again, games of wordplay and double meanings are forbidden to her, the modern woman obeys negative commandments.

To wait, to refuse, to retreat and to be silent, there is the entire expected behaviour: and society, which is more selfish than anyone because it is constructed from general selfishness, overwrites the individualism of souls as if with a State decree.
Here is an instructive example to serve as the proof of universal stupidity; scientific progress has not made the walls oscillate. In our time, where the nervous system has begun to be understood a little more, public opinion sees nothing stupid in condemning two beings to the same bed for their whole lives, even when they have had no other physical contact beyond the touch of gloved hands. “

The novel centres around the story of Istar and Nergal, both of them Oelohites, children of Bené-Satan, himself the son of Satan, who were given the chance to atone for their father’s sins by living out a sequence of mortal lives alongside mankind, so as to instill divine genius among brutish “terrestrials”. The punishment is made more tragic because the Oelohites are fatally attracted to one another, yet incest is of course perceived as the greatest sin of all. Péladan uses this moral bind to illustrate the virtues of Platonic love, a religious kind of eroticism which can eschew physical contact while exalting spiritual love and devotion. He makes full use of all the opportunities the narrative and its motifs give him to explore the redemptive potential of this kind of love, the metaphysical properties of the androgyne, and the occult pathways hidden within the stories of the first and second angelic fall. Teasingly, he uses Kabbalistic references and almost playfully decodes their meanings, illustrated by the protagonists themselves, while also drawing in his broad knowledge of world mythology to enrich the referential layers of his narrative. Several chapters begin with an almost ritualistic sequence which is repeated, in reverse, at the end, giving these chapters a particularly occult atmosphere, and Péladan displays a number of different styles of expression and writing throughout, though these are well enough controlled to maintain clarity rather than cause confusion. The end result is an intriguing tragedy, which feels more like a collection of books, all held together by the overarching narrative and motifs.

Istar has never been translated into English, and this is a task which I hope to undertake once my thesis is complete. I have translated a few chapters to share with colleagues and for my own personal use, and below follows the first, introductory chapter of Book II of Istar, telling the initial, tragic story of the near-redemption and fall of the Oelohites. This translation has now been published in The Fenris Wolf #6 (Stockholm, Edda Press, 2013), following an article of mine on Péladan’s Luciferianism.

I am sharing it here for general interest, and I strongly request that readers respect the work that has gone into this, and that you do not share or otherwise reproduce this document for any use other than personal interest. If you do wish to do so, then please contact me or at least credit the translation properly.  If I find this translation reproduced without credit or permission, I will take appropriate action.

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This is the first chapter from tome II of the novel ISTAR by Joséphin Péladan, published in 1888. The copyright for this English translation belongs to Sasha Chaitow. This document may be downloaded for personal reference only, and may not be published, used, or reproduced in any form, without the copyright holder’s express written permission. NB. I have preserved formatting and punctuation as it is in the original. This is more of a draft than a polished end-product, but should suffice for non francophone readers to get a sense of the text. The original document can be found here: http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb310738377
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THE ŒLOHITES

I

The Legend of Incest

In the Ether, where the giant stars circle, there was a small world – insubordinate to the Sun – a small, vagrant world.

The Ancients of Days and the Watchers know the sin of the planets.
The Sun, is the heart of Satan who burns without reviving his wife, Sina, frozen in punishment; but the smallest world committed the greatest sin: incest.
Here it is.

I

It is the Deluge! The wrath of God swallows Atlantis; the waters have covered everything, only the heights¹ remain unsubmerged.

Bené Satan stands there, his sons and his daughters around him. Already the green flood is about to soak the edges of their tunics, foaming silver on the golden armlets of the women. Lightning crashes and swirls around these haughty ones whose pride did not demand grace, like a fearful executioner, holding back and not daring to strike the sublime, guilty ones.

Yet, a terrifying cyclone is about to swallow the heights.

“Maria!” Satan said.

II

“Maria!” And the waterspout exploded in the distance.

“Maria!” And the flood moved away from the rock.

“Maria!” The thunder ceased baying.

“Maria!” The Ocean, immobile under the clearing sky.

After this fourfold invocation, he said: “Lord, I repent for my father’s sin; he was wicked to dare deny your Word and to attempt for himself that which only you can do; I humble myself before you, Lord, to save my family”.

And the son of Satan bent his beautiful knees: “Oh, you, who are conceived without sin, who conceived God, my forehead, which I have never bowed, salutes you! Future mother of the Saviour, save Bené Satan and his sons, who bow down to you seven thousand years before your birth. Avé, Maria!”

Then Michael appeared in dazzling glory:

“Your homage to the Virgin saves you, you supremely guilty one, and the Most-High wishes to commute your damnation to exile on a vagrant world.”

And all of the Bené Satan were borne up by clouds; with feet of fire and revived hearts they landed on the wild crest of the small, vagrant world.

III

The son of the great, fallen one, orbited the planet and soon brought it to order. Then he rested; a child awoke:

“Father, there are earthlings there, along with us saved ones”.

“How hasty they are!”

As he slept again, a girl came to him:

“Father, I am moved, the earthlings are begging, they are servitors, slaves, and God has mixed them with us, he has had his will; this irritated him, this was wise, oh father!”

“That they may thus be supported.” And Satan slept with this merciful thought; but he dreamt an atrocious vision, that his daughters coupled with the Kalibans, birthed bastards, and that his lustful sons would scour the earthly lands for sensuality; and his race of archangels would be cross-bred with brutes.

He gave such a cry of wrath and rage that returned appalling echoes from the sky. Awaking, his children ran to him.

“Go back to sleep, a dream haunted me, a detestable dream; he said faintly. Children, I shall watch over you; sleep is bad for my eagle eyes, but you must sleep in peace!”

IV

Night fell. Satan the dreamer strode majestically across the fields and the shores. Suddenly, he saw his favourite daughter Izél, teasing some oaf.

He snatched up a sapling and with a single blow felled the audacious youth.
Bené Satan’s daughter wept: “He spoke to me of love, this was sweetness, in killing him you have struck your daughter.”

Satan was silent, and continued on his way.

In the shelter under a rock, his son Rouna was stealing kisses at the breast of a female Kaliban.

Faced with his father’s wrath, the rebellious lover cried:
“Do you not know the past, and how since you fell from the sky you are a son, as am I, of a simple mortal, greedy for kisses, spasms, and giddiness? When you conceived me, it was in the nude, on the perfumed bed of Ereck. Why do you reproach others for your sin?”

Bené Satan was silent, and continued on his way. That night, he watched his race sleep. The adolescents writhed on their beds of ferns, fondling phantoms, and the virgins kissed their own flesh. The scent of love grew, and the father wept.

V

On the mountain he waited for dawn, and with the first ray of light he incanted:

“Michael!”
And the archangel appeared.

“Oh, you who were my brother and whose intellect has not been obscured, counsel me. My admirable daughters are gasping with love and my sons resemble furious bulls.

They may not dare join their flames in incest, and love will mix the blood of the Kalibans with my blood! This is sacrilege!”
“It is God’s design! Bené Satan! Your father wanted to become the Messiah, his demon’s heart was no less than the heart of a prince; he had beauty, genius: but charity was lacking and everything was confounded. God left him his glory when punishing his crime: the soul of the false Jesus is the fuel of the sun, resplendent over the world, in his realisation of his Word and the Laws.

For you, Bené Satan, and for your race, I know only one solution: That your sons and your daughters must live out their human lives without love, without kisses, your hybrid race must not reproduce, and so you will be received into the second atmosphere, still punished, but less humiliated.”

“You are joking Michael, the daimonic life is that of love.”
“All right then! Lower your pride, allow the Kalibans to approach your daughters and let the women of the earth conceive with your sons. Know that the good God, whose enviable role crushed the shoulders of the great, fallen one, wills that through the force of love, the brute will be elevated and that with understanding focused on the idiot, genius will penetrate their ignorance. Show solidarity forever, do the works of Christ, be faithful to the one who anticipates divine mercy. Come on! Bené Satan, your pride hears this beneficial advice dictated by the bonds of our common essence.

“Angel,” the rebel said, “I am outraged by both these tortures, whether to sterilise my race or to prostitute it to mortals, and to mix the star that once fell from the red firmament, with vile and filthy dust, and you can tell God that Satan does not want to do either.”
“Take care, angry spirit, there are no more words that can save you anew, only the name of the Madonna was able to change your destiny, and that only once.
Are the Arcana not known to you? Science alone suffices to confirm to you that no humanity can live in incest, and that God has willed it that the one will redeem the other, and that the great will extend their bounty to the small.”
Bené Satan crossed his arms across his chest:

“Then this is our last meeting, Michael, speak my damnation.”
“You will be reunited, mind and soul, with your damned father on the Sun, and your offspring will be thrown to earth, they will even forget the name and will of Satan. As they have chosen the path of incest, they will know no love except between themselves, and they will seek out their own blood.”

“How marvellous, so the word of God follows the Word of Satan.”
Michael exorcised the blasphemy by the sign of the cross:
“Poor, pitiful, arrogant Satan, you speak like a man; have you lost all celestial knowledge? As soon as this world, lost through your sin, rejects your offspring thrown on the earthly shores, they will find misfortune without respite. Scattered among a hostile human race, in a hundred years no brother will be able to find his sister: and your daughters will be trampled by the brutes, and your sons will forget themselves in red and heavy embraces; mixing your blood with earthly blood, it will be salvation… What should I say to God?”
“You can tell God that Satan does not want this.”
Bené Satan descended to the foot of the mountain, all his children were anxious, waiting, knowing very well that he brought an inescapable verdict, the terrible word he had demanded from the skies. He took the hands of the virgins.

“Oh my sons! Here are your wives.”
And he put them in the hands of their brothers.
“Oh my daughters” Here are your husbands.”
And, sacrilegiously, he blessed the sin that would conserve his race.

VI

Never had flesh burned so hot since the night of Ereck, when the two hundred celestials fell into mortal ecstasy that incestuous midnight.
The rustling of bodies sounded like wheat bending in the wind, and the groans of love emerging from their chests drowned out the clamour of the sea.
Sinister lights illuminated the seas, dancing on the edges of the rocks; then the flames appeared and the ground split open under the guilty palpitations.
So Satan, for one last time, blessed the mad incest. Tirelessly, furiously, conserving his race; this world cracked, scattering islands, demons, and humans, into the air.

In the ether, where the giant stars circle, there is a small world – insubordinate to the sun – a small, vagrant world.

The Ancients of days and the Watchers know the sin of the planets.
The Sun is the heart of Satan that burns without reviving his wife, Sina, frozen in punishment, but the smallest world committed the greatest sin: incest!
Here it is!

And since that time, with unearthly equality, love has mixed the poet with the chisel and the queen with the valet. The Oelohites, glorious sons of Satan, did not know how to close their hearts; hungry for love, thirsty for tenderness they flocked to the vulgar ones, and from puberty to the pale moment when death came to deliver them, the greatest hearts were taken into the coarsest hands, like fine birds in the hands of peasants.

Thus God wished the word of the elder insubordinate and arrogant one to follow the whole race: and Socrates, and Dürer and The Great Dante himself, damned to never receive sacrament, fornicated below them.

Bené Satan said to God: “I do not want this,” and his sons obeyed the will of a fool, his daughters the desires of a cad.

Lamentable sin, a more lamentable condemnation that imprisoned the great ones in the blackest of vessels, cloaked with indignity.

But there were Orphic deniers of base pleasures, who, fleeing from the Maenads, knew how to live for a name and die for a dream: Eurydice.

There are patient hearts that persist and search, conscious of their fate, the only joyful being.

Hail to those haughty ones who, disdainful, look differently upon the dancing below them.
Hail to the obstinate ones who do not drink to intoxication except from cups stamped with the insignia of their rank.

Hail to the watchers, who know the arcana and respect the paths of ideals; these are the Oelohites, the daimons of light, who, for God’s work, militant and faithful, prefer to be sterile rather than fertilized by evil.

Kneel on the earth before the decrees of the Most-High, and Glory to the aspirants of sublime incest!

It’s been a while since I updated this website so this post is highly overdue. One of the main reasons is that over the last few months I changed the direction of my thesis to reflect the content, rather than the history, of Péladan’s work more closely, and so have been working to that end.

Initially this thesis started out as an attempt to re-examine the life and work of Joséphin Péladan from the perspective of the History of Western Esotericism, and to place it firmly within that context. However, I elected to change focus for a number of reasons, not least because a rigidly historical approach did not allow for the exploration of the esoteric, philosophical, and literary themes within Péladan’s work. Secondly, with the previous approach, the bulk of the thesis would have involved writing ‘around’ Péladan so as to situate him within the set of historical currents informing his work, leaving only one chapter in which to cover his actual writings, and so, after a year and a half of research, it has become clear that there are motifs and characteristics embedded in his work which deserve further emphasis, as they reveal the actual significance and character of the work itself. The most significant of these appears to be the notion of mythic history and mythopoeia as the core motive force of both his life and his work.

Therefore, as opposed to a chronology of esoteric thought focused around Péladan, which might have been of interest as a microhistory but would tell us little about the man and his work, the revised thesis focuses on mythic history in its capacity as a significant construct within esoteric thought, using Péladan’s life , work, and impact during the height of the Belle Epoque as a singular case study of the function of mythic history within his teachings.

The central purpose of the thesis is therefore, to explore Péladan’s mythopoeia and underlying motifs, to demonstrate its capacity as a near-legendarium in its own right, and to place it within the broader intellectual and esoteric milieu of his time.

I have now completed a comprehensive introductory section functioning as an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for the thesis,  in which I argue for the necessity of such an approach, while considering a number of factors relating to the philosophy of history and the role of mythic history, especially in relation to Western Esotericism and the Illuminist current in general, Péladan’s work in particular.

From now on I will be making an effort to update more regularly since I set up this website as a PhD diary to help me keep track of various interesting insights, as well as to connect with other admirers of Péladan – and I am glad to say that the latter goal is already beginning to bear fruit.

The purpose of this website is to provide bibliographical data, a repository of all public domain works by (or related to) Joséphin Péladan, as well as a gallery of Symbolist artwork from the artists who exhibited in the Salons de Rose+Croix that Péladan organised between 1892-1897.  These elements will gradually populate the subpages under Péladania, and this blog will host short articles and other Péladan related information. Please be patient and check back periodically (or subscribe to our feed) for updates: this website is a labour of love reflecting a PhD thesis which is under way, but affords little free time for extra-curricular activities!! The blog will be updated to reflect new additions to the galleries and repositories.