It’s been quite a while since I posted an update, for which I apologise, but many developments have been taking place behind the scenes. Among other things, I seem to have managed to revive Péladan’s Salons in a small corner of southern Europe usually associated with summer holidays. I’ll get to that, but there’s a bit of background (and a book plug) to deal with first.
One of the reasons I’ve been lax with posting is because I’ve been writing and publishing a variety of articles on Péladan (forthcoming in The Fenris Wolf #7, Abraxas Journal, and the Pomegranate), and have also recently published my first book on him. (English synopsis here)
Written for the intellectual layperson, this book was commissioned by Daidaleos Press (Salonica, Greece), and represents the first introduction to Péladan written in Greek. Though my decision to publish in Greek first may seem peculiar to some, many readers will know that I am bicultural and bilingual, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I’m currently formulating the English-language synopsis and book proposal and hope to be able to announce good news for the anglophone audience too.
Although firmly underpinned by my doctoral research, the book is written for the general reader and is aimed mainly at culture vultures. I’m saving the bumper academic version for when I’ve completed my PhD, but in the meantime this introductory version is close to my heart as it encapsulates what I’ve been ranting about for a while now: that this sort of material needs to be made available in a format – and written at a level – that appeals to a wide readership, and not only to denizens of the ivory tower.
The book features an introduction by Joscelyn Godwin (who read the English draft which I then translated and adapted for the Greek readership), and Greek author Zephyros Kafkalides, a well-known author in literary and philosophical circles. It begins with a brief biographical overview of Péladan’s life and times, laying out his context and the intellectual milieu. The second chapter incorporates a long translated excerpt from Péladan’s artistic manifesto (partly available in English here), accompanied by interpretive commentary that contextualises and clarifies some of his more obscure ideas. The third chapter is dedicated to his Luciferian legendarium, which, as I have just argued in my thesis, is the cohesive mythopoeic framework that underpins his whole oeuvre. The fourth explores the main symbolic complexes that appear in his work, and the fifth looks at the ways in which Péladan attempted to apply his vision in the real world. In the sixth and final chapter I ask the question: “of what possible use or interest, beyond the academic, can Péladan’s vision hold for us today”. The book also includes two lengthy translated excerpts from Péladan’s novel Istar (1888), and over 50 images (including 5 of my own original illustrations).
On the question of useful applications of Péladan’s work today, I suppose I should reiterate that my intention and interest is not in some kind of covert revival of his esoteric teachings – such as they were, as my own research is echoed in Joscelyn Godwin’s foreword in which he notes that “Péladan was not himself an occultist, but a sort of aesthetic theologian”. This is actually largely true, though I shall “unpack” it another time. I’m far more interested in looking at what use Péladan’s ideas can be to culture ,and artistic inspiration in particular.
I explore this question in the conclusion of my book, but it so happens that quite serendipitously, as I write these lines I’ve somehow ended up conducting a real-life experiment to find out. As a result, in this small corner of Europe that I call home, a sequence of events is unfolding that seems nothing short of miraculous. It is a tale worth sharing, a prime example of how culture can be driven, and what it means to apply scholarship to the mundane world.
It all began when I received an invitation to write an article for the catalogue of a bold new art exhibition that was being organised in Madrid, Spain. The cultural collective behind Semana Gotica de Madrid, together with Mentenebre cultural association and supported by the Autonomous University of Madrid were planning a month long sequence of cultural happenings and events. This year’s programme included a month-long Neo-Symbolist Salon based on Péladan’s Salons. In their call for art submissions, they spoke of the recontextualisation of key Symbolist motifs within contemporary art, which incorporates ‘Neo-Symbolism, new artists of the soul. The brief ended as follows:
“We look to Decadent Paris, where the Salons were the main way of presenting new artistic developments to the public. But we do not try to emulate the grand salons of the Louvre, or even the Salon des refusès where the Impressionists made their mark; rather we look to the adventure of a visionary, the self-proclaimed Sâr Péladan who founded the Salon de la Rose + Croix which involved mainly the current Symbolist artists. While somewhat removed from Péladan’s eccentricity, but following some of the principles that inspired its aesthetic taste, over a century later we present this Neo-Symbolist Salon. Artistic proposals for exhibition should be based on Symbolist iconography but reinterpreted within the parameters of counter-culture, anti-art, in opposition to the market and the establishment. For the true essence of the art of our time is quite far away and must be found in the underground.”
After an exciting brainstorming session with the organisers, I wrote the catalogue article on Péladan’s aesthetics and sent three of my recent illustrations of his work for inclusion in the exhibition. Synchronicity being what it is, within the same week I received the call from my Greek publisher asking me to write the book on Péladan, while my editor at the Greek newspaper to which I’ve been a regular contributor gave me a weekly art column in which I promptly began to develop a series of articles on the value of the arts in the context of the economic and social crisis currently plaguing Greece.
Weeks and months rolled by, the exhibition in Madrid was mounted to international acclaim, the book was published back in
December, and off I went to Salonica for the first book launch. Then I turned my attention to the second book launch on my home island of Corfu, and as it happened, some of my Greek colleagues in Athens and Salonica began to think it would be a nice idea to come along for a weekend break. Well, if we were all going to be in the same city, we had to take advantage of it! And thus the idea for a one-day symposium was born.
Being a Corfu native, the task of organising the event fell to me. Initially it seemed challenging: my associates and I all have very different areas of interest within the broad sphere of arts, letters, esoteric research and philosophy, and I somehow had to find a way of streamlining the event to give it a central focus. The one, striking common thread was our determination and passion for driving culture forward in spite of the crisis that has stunted the arts and letters across Europe, but particularly in Greece.
Then I thought of my current bugbear: making research serve society, and that was my lightbulb moment. I asked the speakers to focus on the practical value and applications of the arts and letters within this sociocultural context: one in which the world around us is experiencing rapid, vertiginous change to which circumstance calls us to either adapt, or be caught up in a vortex of confusion and often despair.
I stressed the need to explain to a general audience that the arts and letters are not only the territory of some privileged elite, but that creating culture involves the whole of society: so I asked them to draw on personal stories and experience of how their own work has had some meaningful impact within that context, particularly in a country where daily bread can no longer be taken for granted.
Our challenge, then, was to answer the unspoken question of why we should continue to support the arts and letters when some of us can barely pay the rent – and the answer could not rest on high-minded claims of intellectual superiority or vague claims about “passion”. I asked the speakers to find a way to explain that even when you can’t pay the rent, even when you can barely put food on the table, culture matters. And then, I went looking for people who are putting their money where their mouth is, and who continue to serve culture despite the odds, in this wrecked country of ours.
Spontaneous creative brainstorming resulted in a three-day event, which has taken on the character of a miniature Salon after Péladan’s example, incorporating a group art exhibition featuring local Corfiot artists, poetry readings and string quartets, platonic dialogues unravelling Péladan’s vision, and a series of talks on the practical, applicable value of studying and communicating through and about the arts, philosophy, history, culture, and indeed, occulture at times of sweeping cultural change. The lecture topics range from poetry inspired by archival discoveries to Nietzschean thoughts on the re-enchantment of the world, with all the arts – and several of the humanities being well represented. (The event website, though in Greek, is at www.artsrevolution.eu)
The event is now less than two weeks away, and in all my years of event organisation (one of my sidelines since my undergraduate days), I have never seen anything like the public response that it has provoked. Announcements began circulating in the local and national media before I sent out a single press release. Art submissions poured in, and though for practical reasons the call to artists was limited to locals (to avoid post-office nightmares), I’m still receiving extremely warm and enthusiastic correspondence from all over the country. Several people have asked whether it will become an annual fixture, and several more have insisted that it should.
All of which would suggest that Péladan’s vision for igniting a social renaissance through the arts is just what the doctor ordered for this embattled corner of Southern Europe. Péladan remains a complete unknown here, yet somehow I managed to revive his idea (and truly, it was an afterthought!) and embraced by the very people for whom he conceived it: by artists, poets, philosophers and art-lovers. There is tragic irony in the fact that Péladan was ridiculed and vilified during his life-time, yet over a century later, it may yet be that his grand vision becomes a vehicle for the very dialogue that he so desperately sought to incite.
It is the historian’s curse to be constantly mindful of the antecedents and influences weighing on our time, and the similarities between the fin-de-siècle and our own time – at least as it is experienced in Southern Europe – are quite stunning. The lived experience of the Greek crisis is quite different to the way in which it is portrayed in the international news alongside infographics of wanton spending and accusations of tax evasion, but there is no need for an in-depth account of the harrowing reality faced by the population. Suffice it to note that this is a society being forced to ask itself some hard questions, a nation at the crossroads between east and west still struggling with its own identity and cultural narratives while being subjected to overpowering geopolitical and economic forces.
In essence, it is experiencing what anthropologist Victor Turner has aptly termed “moments when common traditional meanings of life and history have become indeterminate,” and in such moments, it is to myth and its many modes of expression that societies turn in order to “remake cultural sense”.
This is the common point of reference between the French fin-de-siècle and Greece today, and this is what underpins the rationale behind the decision to introduce and attempt to implement Péladan’s idea of a creative crossroads where the arts become a locus for dialogue: for remaking cultural sense.
Our history has yet to be written, and the success or failure of this creative experiment will be judged by others in years to come. When viewed in the here and now, the role of the arts and letters is, among other things, to bear witness. This act of recording this endeavour as it unfolds is just that: to bear witness to an attempt at using scholarship to produce something of real, practical – perhaps delightfully subversive – use to culture as it is created: on street corners, in dusty bookshops, and in the minds and hearts of fellow citizens.
So, that’s the story of the accidental revival of Péladan’s Salons in Corfu. I have no idea how it will turn out, and right now I’m simply enjoying the sheer creative joy that it seems to have brought to the participants and art lovers of the island (and beyond). If all goes well, then who knows, perhaps it will become a fixture. Either way though, the reception of the idea alone suggests to me that indeed, the quixotic dream of using the arts as a vehicle to inspire social change on some level at least, isn’t so quixotic after all. Watch this space for photos and the event report once it’s all over!
And for those who might be wondering, yes, I will return to posting research updates soon.