Orpheus himself stands for creative genius, initiatory tradition, and his lyre symbolises human existence itself…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.
Book Review: Satanism, Magic, and Mysticism in Fin-de-siecle France (upd)
Far from shedding light onto this period from an interdisciplinary perspective, and despite containing interesting elements, the book misinforms the reader on a number of counts. Unfortunately. rather than illuminating its topic, the book obscures it further, perpetuating clear misconceptions with regard to the character and content of French 19th century occultism.
Of egregores and cultural memory
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…
The Second Angelic Fall retold
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…
Progress update: of history and mythistory
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.…
About this website
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,…
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…