Lucifer & Our Divine Human Potential
We are understanding what we have made, and its shape is ours; we have made history… the laws that govern it are not the laws of nature, but they are the laws that govern us. So let us learn, by all means, why the voices wailed that Pan was dead. Let us learn why Moses had horns, and why the Israelites worshipped a golden calf; why Jesus was a fish… But let us not think that in such explorations we have disposed of or robbed of significance the story these figures tell. The story remains; if it changes, and it does, it is because our human nature is not fixed; there is more than one history of the world. But when we believe that we have proved there is no story, that history is nothing but one damned thing after another, that can only be because we have ceased to recognise ourselves.
John Crowley, The Solitudes: Book I of the Aegypt Cycle, pp. 84-5.
It is often true that the darkest shadows of the human imagination produce some of the greatest art, and the literary and artistic treatments of Satan are a prime example of this. Many studies have delineated the sociocultural contextual factors leading to the devolution of the Light-Bringer into a paragon of evil, and in the common era, first Dante, and then Milton consolidated the collective Western perception of the tale of Lucifer’s fall from grace which has since formed the touchstone for his artistic and literary representation. As noted by religious scholar Elaine Pagels, there are three main Biblical sources that gave rise to the clusters of Luciferian narratives in Western culture: the first and best known, drawing on Isaiah 14, speaks of his outright rebellion; the second, based on the enigmatic verse in Genesis 6 and expanded on in the apocryphal Enoch I, tells the story of angels falling in love with human women, their subsequent fall and imprisonment; the third, based on early Jewish sources, blames the angelic refusal to accept humans as their equals for the celestial rift.
The monstrous Satan languishing in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell and Milton’s disgraced rebel angel may be the most familiar forms given to Lucifer in Western culture, but from the eighteenth century onwards, a new perspective began to emerge; that of a more Promethean figure whom many Romantic poets, artists and authors sought to redeem. This curious phenomenon, sometimes termed “Literary” or “Romantic Satanism”, was the product of a number of sociocultural shifts and changes that took place throughout the “long eighteenth century”, including the primacy of the “Age of Reason” and the cultural impact of the French revolution. As summarised by Ruben van Luijk in a recent anthology of essays on Satan in Western culture:
While Christian mythology had banished Satan to Hell and blamed him for evil, Literary Satanism to a greater or lesser degree rehabilitated the fallen angel and proclaimed that he had stood in his right after all. Secondly… they resurrected him from the burial the Enlightenment had given him… In traditional Christian theology, Satan’s fall had been associated with proud, unlawful insurrection against divine authority. The philosophes and French Revolution however, had given ‘insurrection’ a wholly new, positive meaning for substantial parts of Europe’s intellectual elite; and this revaluation reflected on the myth of Satan as well…. Satan as noble champion of political and individual freedom remained the most important theme of Literary Satanism throughout the nineteenth century.[1]
The evolution and transformation of Milton’s Lucifer into this new cultural hero has been eloquently detailed by Peter A. Schock in his Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron; [2] a trend that carried over into France, where Satanism became a stock feature of the French occult milieu as well as of Decadent literature.
One of its earliest appearances is found in the work of J.K.Huysmans,[3] an uneasy Catholic, and in his novel La-Bas (Down there) he presents ‘an incredible and untranslatable picture of sorcery, sacrilege, black magic, and nameless abominations, secretly practised in Paris… [giving] currency to the Question of Lucifer, promot[ing] it from obscurity into prominence, mak[ing] it the vogue of the moment.’[4]
Even though the work of earlier Decadent poets such as Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), and Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) feature demonic themes and musings on Good and Evil, they are more after the style of Milton, featuring a specific decadence and perversity[5] reflecting and revelling in the ‘tortured poet’ persona, with aesthetic, rather than occult content and intent. Though there are certainly metaphysical and ontological concerns in the work of these, and other poets of the time, from Baudelaire’s seminal Flowers of Evil to Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, the demonic element is more of an aesthetic framework than any indication of occult pursuits, reflecting the ‘metaphysical despair,’ or ‘incandescent melancholia’ [6] of the dark side of Romanticism.
The widespread and often arbitrary use of these motifs had the effect of ‘Satanism and Aestheticism [becoming] equally confounded with other critical definitions – Decadence and Symbolism,’ and as historian James Webb observes: ‘as in general terms the reaction against rationalism had set in, in aesthetic terms the reaction was against naturalism… Whether it led to “Satanism” or the cult of the Beautiful, the face this reaction presented to the public was uniformly rebellious.’[7]
Writing in 1896, occult historian A.E.Waite summarises the two perspectives of Satanism current in France of the time as follows:
It must, however, be observed, that modern devil-worship, as exposed by its French experts, has two aspects,… There is (a) devil-worship pure and simple, being an attempt to communicate with evil spirits, admitting that they are evil; (b) the cultus of Lucifer, star of the morning, as distinguished from Satan, on the hypothesis that he is a good spirit…. The doctrine of Lucifer… is, in fact, the revival of an old heresy founded on what we have most of us been accustomed to regard as a philosophical blunder; in a word, it is a Manichæan system… affirming the existence of two equal first principles, Adonaï and Lucifer, it regards the latter as the god of light and goodness, while the Christian Adonaï is the prince of darkness and the veritable Satan… Adonaï reigns surely… but he is the author of human misery, and Jesus is the Christ of Adonaï, but he is the messenger of misfortune, suffering, and false renunciation…. The worshippers of Lucifer have taken sides in the cause of humanity… with the baffled principle of goodness; they co-operate with him in order to insure his triumph.[8]
This radical role-reversal between the Christian god and Lucifer is indeed one of many revivals of what could be broadly termed Gnostic heresy, but it is an over-simplification to call it Manichaeism. [9] The kind of Luciferianism Waite is describing recognises two, opposing, divine principles and can be described as “syncretic Gnosticism”, a form typical of the late nineteenth century. It is characterised by the conviction that ‘the origins and the essence of gnosis are not to be found alongside Christianity and Hellenism, but alongside the old oriental religions, either of Babylon, Egypt or Iran, bringing authors to identify gnosis with dualism.’[10]
Yet there are two different brands of this dualism, exemplified by Manichaean and Valentinian cosmology, and the difference is important. In the Manichaean cosmogony, the ’emphasis is on dualism rather than holism, and… the goal is “restoration of the lost separateness” rather than “the lost wholeness”’. In Valentinian cosmology the opposite occurs: ‘For the Valentinians it is unacceptable that the principle of evil should have an independent ontological status on a par with the principle of good. Evil must be an aberration.’[11]
This idea is strongly reflected in the work of French Symbolist author and occultist, Joséphin Péladan, a neglected but significant figure of the French occult revival whose prolific oeuvre was oriented towards exploring these questions and using art in all its forms for the restoration of “the lost wholeness” through a curious Luciferian outlook. Based on a complex cosmology with a formidable array of influences, the notion of a superior, “daimonic race” as being the progenitors and benevolent helpers of mankind, lay at the heart of his work. As with many other motifs found throughout his oeuvre, Péladan constantly cross-references between his novels and his more theoretical works, leaving tantalizing clues for the reader to follow, only to reveal a vast and complex cosmology within which each of these notions had a specific role to play. Though Péladan’s influences and recourse to earlier sources are evident throughout his work, his originality lies in their synthesis into an overarching and coherent whole, traceable only when one takes the full span of his oeuvre into account. That is a very different project, so following a brief look at the convictions underpinning Péladan’s approach, in this article we will focus mainly on the legend of the Fall as retold, sensitively and often surprisingly, within not only his fictional work, but as the backbone of his whole worldview.
Péladan was convinced that in redeeming Lucifer and in coming to understand the “natural laws” underpinning human existence, it was possible for humanity to grow into its true potential and bring about a reunification with the divine on a grand scale. He set himself the lifelong task of expressing these notions through his novels, his theoretical works, through his Rosicrucian and Kabbalistic Order, and through the influence he exercised on the circle of Symbolist artists who flocked to exhibit at his Salons. Although ultimately Péladan was to be ridiculed for his zeal and eccentricity, his work represents a Symbolist oeuvre that is worth exploring not only for its richness in terms of occult content and aesthetic philosophy, but as a life’s work that is admirable for its sheer power of conviction and coherence.
Though Péladan viewed occultism through the lens of art, his understanding of occult traditions and esoteric philosophy was anything but superficial. To the contrary he was both extremely well read and his choice of symbolism rested on his occult beliefs and cosmology, and he went so far as to rewrite Genesis, partly following the counter-Enlightenment “tradition” of analogical analysis and allegorical mythography as found in the work of Athanasius Kircher, Antoine Court de Gébelin, Pierre-Simon Ballanche, Delisle de Sales, Fabre d’Olivet , and Eliphas Lévi.
The idea of allegorical and mythographical history is a whole other chapter that will have to f. Suffice it to say that it entails a mythological and allegorical reading of human history, whereby mythic and symbolic understandings are seen as being of equal value to factual history. The sequence of human events and the place of humanity in the cosmos are understood within mythical, rather than literally historical, frames of meaning. Thus, mythic cosmogonies such as Hesiod’s Theogony are conflated with, say, Biblical or other cosmogonies, alongside actual historical events to produce a “universal” history and to explain momentous events (such as the Deluge), as well as the nature and meaning of human existence. They are not interpreted according to free association between similar figures, but on the basis of “universal” principles revealed through allegorical readings. Péladan drew strongly on elements of Fabre d’Olivet’s “universal history,” regarding which Fabre d’Olivet himself explains:
Those who in general write upon this serious subject, more occupied with themselves and their particular passions than with the universality of things of which the whole escapes them, circumscribe their views too much and show too plainly that they know nothing of the history of the world. Because they have heard of the Greeks and Romans, or because they have read the annals of these two peoples in Herodotus or Thucydides, in Titus Livius or Tacitus, they imagine all that is known… That which they lack, I repeat, is the knowledge of the true principles, and this knowledge, which depends on the universality of things, is always produced by it, or produces it irresistibly.[12]
Fabre d’Olivet perceived God as a divine ‘tetrad’ encompassing the three “universal” principles of Providence (represented in man by intelligence), Destiny (instinct), and Will (understanding), the last of which is the point of contact between man and God. While in “universal man” (prelapsarian Adam) the triad is complete and in harmony, following the Fall, the three principles were divided among Adam’s three sons, with Cain representing Will, Abel as Providence and Seth as Destiny.[13] They became the progenitors of humanity, each giving birth to one of the human races, in a reflection of Mosaic genealogy; a trend popular among eighteenth and nineteenth century scholars, according to which the races of mankind were perceived as being descendants of Noah’s three sons.[14]
For Fabre d’Olivet, to understand history was to perceive all historical and mythological data as fragments of a greater whole based on ‘essence’ rather than becoming too attached to the forms taken by that essence.[15] In other words, factual historical detail was only one small part of the whole, and where unrecorded history was concerned, allegorical and philosophical approaches could reveal the totality of historical truth. To this end he claimed:
Be assured, savants of the world, it is not in disdaining the sacred books of nations that you show your knowledge; it is in explaining them. One cannot write a history without monuments, and that of the world is no exception. [16]
These influences, along with similar perspectives from Eliphas Lévi, offer a compelling explanation for Péladan’s lasting obsession with a variety of motifs drawn from across the spectrum of world mythology. To gain insight into his literary use of motifs such as Fall mythology in particular, we must perceive it as he did, from a Symbolist perspective. This is summarised in the Symbolist Manifesto penned by Greek poet and essayist Jean Moréas (1856-1910) in 1886:
Symbolist poetry tries to house the Idea in a meaningful form not to its own end, but subject to the Idea. The latter in its turn will never appear without the sumptuous clothing of analogy; for the essential character of Symbolist art consists in never going so far as to conceive of the Idea in itself. So this art will never show details of nature, actions of humans, concrete phenomena: for they are only the appearances destined to represent to the senses their esoteric affinities with primordial Ideas.[17]
This description of Symbolism holds true for Péladan’s use of the genre. In using the metaphor of “clothing”, or “housing”, an Idea, Moréas is referring to the notion of giving form to otherwise elusive Platonic Ideas, stressing that symbols are no more than vessels, or vehicles for the communication of Ideas, which take their form directly from the qualities of the ideas themselves. The symbolic form has aesthetic, as well as functional value, and takes on an almost sacred role in the process of communicating the “primordial Ideas” that Moréas speaks of. The process of creating such a form, was to Péladan a supremely sacred act, summarised in his aphorism “Artist, you are a priest. Art is the supreme mystery. Artist, you know that art descends from heaven. If you create a perfect work, a soul will come to inhabit it.”
In his seminal artistic treatise, L’Art Idealiste et Mystique, Péladan wrote: “In these pages Art is presented as a religion, or, if you will, as an intermediary aspect of religion between the physical and the metaphysical.”[18] He summarised his whole theory in the axiom: ‘Art is the spirituality of forms,’ and lauded Plato and the Promethean potential within Man, saying that: “Plato magnificently explains the propensity of the human creator, the ravisher of fire; he makes of him a daimon, an intermediary being between the mortal and the immortal.”
Péladan’s concept of the artist as an intermediary and supreme initiate, as well as his intensive use of Fall mythology, falls directly in line with ideas elaborated by Romantic poets and philosophers such as Novalis, Schlegel, and Pierre-Simon Ballanche, whereby the poet is respectively:
...the recipient and transmitter of revelation and a divine universal language,’ ‘a priest who will lead humanity to its eschatological fulfillment by relinking the world here below and divine transcendence,’ and ‘poetry is the intuitive faculty of penetrating the essence of beings and things.[19]
This Promethean worldview derives from the complex interplay between Romantic, Enlightenment, and theosophical thought, heavily infused by the work of Jacob Boehme, and shaped during the “Second Golden Age”[20] of theosophy, between 1750 and 1850, in the work of Counter-Enlightenment intellectuals. One significant current to emerge during this period was the Sophianic tradition, a second was Fall mythology, and the central notions underpinning them both were a new perspective on the nature of time, and the primacy of the imagination as a faculty permitting human understanding of the divine, capable of achieving the reintegration both of the duality within man, and of the fallen world with the divine.
Boehme’s greatly influential work deals with the ‘myths of the androgynous Adam and the Noble Virgin of Divine Wisdom,’[21]connecting this to the Fall and ultimate goal of eschatological resolution through a reunion with the Divine Sophia and a lived process of ‘a path of individual transmutation’ via which ‘God must become man, man must become God.’[22] According to Boehme, ‘the human being as a microcosm contained all the cosmic elements and principles and held a latent power over them. Ascending to the divine life and attaining moral perfection, man could esoterically project the harmony of his inner nature into his physical environment as well.’[23] All of these ideas, while expressed and implemented rather differently, are also found in the sequence of influences received by Péladan.
Péladan was not suggesting that mythology should be taken literally as history, but that its symbolic language should be used to understand and express deeper, inexpressible principles. He demonstrates his awareness of the difference between historical fact and mythic history and his solid understanding of the scientific research methods of his time in his book Les Idées et les Formes: Antiquité Orientale[24]; a careful, sober work in which he explores the known history, art, racial features and mythologies of various Middle Eastern civilisations. Written some ten years after a pilgrimage he undertook to Greece and the Middle East in 1898, it comprises mature, accurate (for its time), and down-to-earth overviews of these civilisations in support of his simultaneously Traditionalist and Platonic premise that ‘A panoramic view of the oriental oeuvre, following evolution, begins in Egypt, at the dawn of history, civilisation, and art, and Chaldea comes next: these two mother civilisations invented everything, ideas and forms.’[25]
Péladan’s recourse to ancient civilisations is not motivated by a perennialist agenda or an appeal to the notion of the noble savage, rather, it is based on a subtle, Platonic premise:
One must have seen, it is the complement to having read. Greece breathes on the metopes of the Parthenon as in the tragedies of Sophocles, Egypt has bequeathed us her temples and not her texts. We understand it today: the museum follows the library and knowledge of forms is necessary for understanding ideas….
What Péladan appears to have done here is to have taken Fabre d’Olivet’s and Eliphas Lévi’s notions of using monuments (as well as art in all its forms) as a series of signposts through which to understand the evolution of human creative expression that gave form to Ideas on the one hand, and the hidden encoding of esoteric teachings on the other:
[T]o learn to see’, [to understand that] art is a universal language, [to] penetrate the arcanum of beauty…[which is] the mystery of forms. An initiation is necessary to understand them at the same time as a disposition…. What is Art? Human creation. God made the universe (macrocosm), man made the temple (microcosm), from where arts emerged…. What is a monument, if not a calculation of lines and volumes for the expression of spiritual will? From the forest path and from the cavern to the cathedral, human work appears colossal. What is a figure such as the sphinx or the winged bull with a human face, if not a philosophical combination of natural motifs for the manifestation of an idea? From the cat to the sphinx, from the savage bull to the genius that guards the temple threshold, through quasi-divine operations the artist raises himself to the level of creator. [26]
Though in the preceding excerpt Péladan is using Assyrian art as a springboard, this approach applied equally to the rest of his work and selected motifs. His aesthetic theory drew strongly on his obsession with Fall mythology, as, following Fabre d’Olivet, he believed that the Biblical interpretation of the Fall of both Lucifer and man, was not quite as it appeared.
Fabre d’Olivet’s reinterpretation of Genesis rests on the premise that religious conflict between the three main monotheistic religions was caused by successive mistranslations of the Bible, owing to the corruption of the Hebrew language. In his subversive reinterpretation of the Hebrew language and of Biblical cosmogony, La Langue hébraïque restituée[27] (1815) he proposed a new and corrected Hebrew grammar and vocabulary, and then proceeded to translate sections of the Bible in order to prove his point. He argued that religious conflict between the monotheistic religions was caused by successive mistranslations of the Bible, owing to the corruption of the Hebrew language. His conclusions were replete with theological implications that would fuel a particular brand of Luciferianism[28] that became central to Péladan’s work.
According to Fabre d’Olivet, Adam was originally androgynous and immortal, and his female counterpart, Isha, not yet a separate entity, represented his ‘will, or “volitional faculty”. For Fabre d’Olivet, the man and woman of Genesis together form universal man and constitute a single androgynous individual.’ [29] The fall occurred when Adam sought to become equal to God, by taking full generative control of ‘the very principle of his existence’ – which is to say that it would have bestowed upon Adam the capability of creation, thus setting him up as a rival to God. Here things become more complex. According to both Fabre d’Olivet and Péladan, this could not be permitted as it would have been a direct contravention of natural law. However, Adam now had knowledge of the possibility of free will and self-determination, and thus, in permitting him to remain immortal, he would have been condemned to an eternity of misery as a lesser being without full volition. Therefore, as an act of mercy, ‘Adam was taken out of eternity where he would have remained in eternal anguish and suffering, and placed in time’.[30]
By making Adam and his descendants mortal, with lives governed by time, the suffering caused by his limited ability to control the creative principle of his existence would be diffused through time and the generations, until it eventually disappeared entirely. Since the creative principle was now limited by time, within the context of a mortal life, man could still express it to the limits of his ability, and in doing so, achieve a form of reintegration with the divine. However, a residual desire for this lost potential would remain, and this is the foundation of evil, which, according to Fabre d’Olivet, would eventually be resolved by the very passage through time, at which point time would end and ‘universal man will return to his former state of “indivisible and immortal unity.”’[31]
Péladan was greatly preoccupied by this question of evil, as well as the question of how man could expedite the process of reintegration. He was also convinced that the world was the creation, not of God, but of the angels, and that it was these same entities who rended the androgyne because it was unable to acquire self-awareness. Thus Adam and Eve became two separate entities, each imperfect, each missing one part of the whole, but this separation, Péladan wrote, was that which gave them the ability to look outside themselves and begin the process of developing self-awareness which would be complete only when the pair could reunite in body, soul and spirit. [32]
However, the inherent imperfection in their natures as individuals was that which gave rise to original sin, since, according to Péladan, male and female received slightly different qualities; where man received intellect and spirit, woman received volition and instinct, and this imbalance caused evil to enter the world. In Péladan’s reinterpretation of Genesis III, a dialogue takes place between Eve (whom Péladan names Aischa), Nahash (the serpent of Genesis), Adam, and Elohim the creator. Nahash asks Aischa why they have not been allowed to cultivate their sensitivity and understanding of all phenomena, and consciousness of essential reality. Joah Elohim replies to Aischa that if they were to develop such consciousness, this would lead to an understanding of good and evil. Driven by a passionate curiosity, Aischa sought to learn more of this mystery, and since she represented the force of volition, she was able to convince Adam to do so, and thus “they came to know, with lucidity, that they were mutually imperfect and unable to bear the mysteries they had provoked, their minds grew dim and they trembled at their own weakness.”[33]
Joah Elohim goes on to chastise Adam and Aischa for their curiosity, and then speaks to Nahash, identifying it as “the elemental unconscious, an incoherent principle”. Péladan’s interpretation of the following verses are particularly enlightening:
- Joah Elohim said to Nahash: “Since you have upset the equilibrium, you will be the incoherent principle, dangerous to all that breathes, according to your principle of unconscious attraction, you will be the base vortex of elemental exhalation and all dissonance will come from you.
- Between you, the elementary unconscious, and Aischa, the superior unconscious, I will place hostility. Her passion will oppose your whirling, and your whirling will stifle her passion.
- And to Aischa: “I will multiply your vulnerabilities, that Nahash may attack without rest, but I will also multiply your points of sensitivity towards your conscious intellect, Aisch [Adam]: and you will always be extreme in both senses, with a perpetual, painful appetite, ceaselessly focused on your positive reflection Aisch, whose reflection you are; you will never know true existence and you will never be coloured, except by his reflection.”
- And to Adam: “Since you have ceded your unconscious reflection, and your senses followed it into the vortex towards this notion of essence [divine truth] that I have forbidden you, you have condemned yourself, so be conscious, understand your relativities and your connections, now you can only progress through pain, your only benefit now is your immortality.”
- “Nature, henceforth independent of and disobedient towards you, will force you to earn everything, even the elements of your vegetable life.”
….
- Adam and Eve now reduced to the human principle, Joah Elohim interposed the collective entity called Cherubim into an orbit emerging from the primitive, Edenic stasis, into this new becoming through pain. And the collective entity Cherubim was the second cause, the conceiver and fertilizer of mysteries, destined to represent to Adam, through its imperious mirages, in an intellectual atmosphere, a Nahash of light whose incessant whirling would circumscribe an orb of ideality around perceptible life.[34]
In this excerpt, we have the first Fall: that of both Satan, and Adam and Eve. Nahash is the name given to the serpent in the Biblical Genesis, but it is open to interpretation, and here Péladan designates it as the uncreated principle of chaos and the unconscious impulse. In other works he is more explicit; and it should be noted that in the beginning of the chapter in which this excerpt is found, he has taken care to leave signposts; there are several quotations from his other books – mainly from his novels, which lead to clearer explanations of his meaning. The “Nahash of light” incessantly orbiting the perceptible world is none other than Satan in Péladan’s cosmology; a point confirmed by repeated references to Satan’s transformation into an eternally burning sun:
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… [He] 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.[35]
Here Péladan is essentially demonstrating Satan’s Promethean nature, referring to the forbidden and failed attempt to lead Aisch and Aischa toward self-awareness, in a very different take on the question of the fall of Lucifer. Even God recognised his good, though misguided, intentions according to Péladan, and thus he is condemned to become the eternal light-bringer. Péladan could not fathom the concept of original sin being an immutable curse on mankind, nor could he accept the idea that either Satan, or mankind were eternally condemned. He stated this quite openly in an interlude entitled Arcanum of Lucifer, or of Birth (capitalisation his):
I deny demonology as it is taught in the seminaries…. and I deny it, based on my faith in a Greek, and Orthodox phrase: my authority, oh naïve curates, is His Majesty Saint Dionysius the Areopagite:[36] “Absolute evil does not exist; evil is an accident of goodness.” Demons are not essentially evil, they have lost angelic goodness, but they maintain their natural forces.
Were they evil to themselves, they would corrupt themselves. If they are evil for others, then who do they corrupt?
Substance, power, or operations: they corrupt that which is susceptible to corruption.
THEN, EVIL IS NOT THERE FOR EVERYTHING AND IN EVERYTHING, they weakened in upholding their principle, they forsook divine goodness in habit and operation: they were named evil, due to the debilitation of their natural function.
Evil is not among the demons in the form of evil, but as a defect and lack of perfection in their attributes.
Finally, [according to] St. Thomas Aquinas:
“The demon wants to obtain this similarity with God that comes from grace by virtue of its nature, and not with divine help.”…
Onto this serious and healthy notion of the demon [as] obscured angel, I have grafted the occult idea of involution and evolution; there are two series of beings here below: beings who, born of the earth, attempt to rise, and others, born of the spirit, for whom earthly life is a fall and an expiation of some mysterious crime of the beyond.[37]
Elsewhere he was to repeat his conviction that evil was not inherently woven into the fabric of creation, seeing it rather as a natural inevitability, summarised thus:
Evil does not exist in God, or in man, it is no more than a consequence of sequences of events. Subjected to overwhelming organic needs, to passions, and to false ideals, we have to vanquish either our conscience or our feelings, and this fight between multiple forces causes accidents which are [the root of] evil.[38]
These passages summarise Péladan’s whole Luciferian perspective; he saw the various levels of being – angels, d(a)emons, and humans as irrevocably interconnected and interdependent, a set of beliefs forming the core of his occult philosophy as well as his way of life. As noted by scholar Nelly Emont with regard to Péladan’s recurrent interest in this theme:
The spirits of those beings survived the deluge, and … they would intervene in men’s affairs, a role they would play until the end of time. These beings that Péladan named ‘daimons,’ and which, according to the Neo-Platonists, were intermediaries between God and man, are the ‘obscure offspring of angelic descent,’ and nothing happens on earth without their intervention. […] Péladan acted and spoke as if he were not only one of the [great] initiates […] but as if he himself were one of those daimons who, until the end of time, intervene among men. An initiate, who wanted to be an initiator, but an exemplary one. [39]
All of these tantalizing references are drawn together and clarified, not, as it might be thought, in Péladan’s more theoretical works, but in his novels and plays; in fact his theoretical monographs are only elucidated when read alongside them, and Péladan deliberately cites these works to point the reader to his illustration of the principles laid out in more rational terms in the theoretical books. Although he was capable of discussing these ideas in more literal and philosophical terms, he believed that for such complex and archetypal notions to be fully understood, the best way to communicate them was through symbolic expression, and he utilized his literary skills to this end.
His novels were not intended to be read as fiction, and he repeated this at every opportunity. Styled as éthopées, they were not intended so much to entertain, as to teach. The term éthopée is a figure of speech stemming from the Greek ethologia or ethopoiia, literally meaning study or creation of ethos (understood as customs or mores). Essentially, Péladan’s books, plays, and characters, were themselves both artistic and occult ‘signs’ for esoteric meaning, drawing on several centuries of universalist esoteric thought, and the perceived power of the written word to manifest change in the material world.
In a biography written in 1946, Péladan’s close associate and Rosicrucian successor Emile Dantinne sheds light on his motivation and confirms the necessity of reading between the lines of Péladan’s fictional work:
One should not search for romantic intrigues in his books, apart from two or three of them; right from the start derivative elements fade and are dominated by an esoteric preoccupation. This preoccupation is essentially the esoteric explanation of the first books of Genesis. From the Rosicrucian conception of the first Book of Moses there emerges a metaphysics that permeates all of Péladan’s work. He includes everything, everything down to his own personality. He considers the ‘Oelohites’ [Nephilim], those mysterious sons of the Elohim who loved the daughters of men and with whom he is concerned in the fifth book of Genesis, to be superior beings, attached to the mysteries of the spiritual world. In Typhonia, an autobiographical novel, he presents himself as the Sâr, the Oelohite opposed to materialism and widespread Pharisaism; in book II of the prologue of Istar, he defines the psychology of the Oelohite.[40]
The two novels cited here by Dantinne, Istar in particular, reveal the full depth of Péladan’s understanding of the idea of the Fall. Istar 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 exalts spiritual union and devotion, though he does not deny erotic physicality, but carefully distinguishes between brutish lust, and sacred lovemaking. He makes full use of all the opportunities the narrative and its motifs give him to explore the redemptive potential of prioritising spiritual union, the metaphysical properties of the androgyne, and the occult pathways hidden within the stories of the first and second angelic fall – the first being that of Adam, Aischa-Eve, and Nahash-Satan, and the second being that of the Oelohites, some of whom, according to his tale, took their place among mankind for all eternity, seeking redemption as they took on the role of teachers of mankind with whom their fates were forever intertwined. Teasingly, Péladan 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.
In the first chapter entitled ‘La légende de l’Inceste,’ Péladan narrates the tale of a small, maverick planet, guilty of ‘the greatest sin of all: incest.’[41] He describes how after the Great Flood, Bené Satan (Satan himself has been transformed into the sun warming the planets) implored the Virgin Mary to intercede on behalf of himself and his children, the Oelohites. The Archangel Michael appears to tell him that his prayer has been answered, and that the Most-High has decreed that he and his sons and daughters will be spared, but exiled to an ‘errant planet,’ also inhabited by humans.
At first eager, then apprehensive, Bené Satan watches as his sons and daughters begin to mature and long for love, and soon finds them trysting with human men and women, whom Péladan names Kalibans (in a deliberate reference to Shakespeare whom he read avidly as a teenager).[42] In a dream, Bené Satan sees horrific visions of a race of archangels breeding monsters together with the ‘beastly’ inhabitants of the planet. He calls on Michael and asks for help: ‘they dare not marry their flame in incest, and love will mix the blood of the Kaliban [sic] with my blood. Sacrilege!’ Michael’s response and the ensuing dialogue are as follows:
– It is God’s design! Bené Satan! Your father wanted to be the Messiah; his demon’s heart was nothing other than a princely heart; he had beauty, genius; the only thing missing was charity and this is what confused everything. God left him his glory when punishing his crime; the soul of the false Jesus feeds the sun, shines upon the world, in the manifestation of his Word and the Laws. For you, Bené Satan, and your race, I know of one solution: That your sons and daughters should live their human life, without love, without embraces, that your hybrid race should not propagate itself, and so you will be received into the second atmosphere, always punished, but less humiliated.’
– You are joking Michael, the daemonic life is the life of love.’[43]
Satan adamantly refuses Michael’s terms. On returning to his offspring, with a heavy heart he pairs them off among themselves, preferring the ‘ultimate’ sin of incest over intermarriage with humans or the extinction of his race. After emphasising the loneliness and thirst for love (not lust) experienced by the Oelohites, Péladan ends the chapter by launching into a curious and paradoxical series of acclamations:
Hail to the obstinate ones who do not drink drunkenness except from cups struck with the weapons of their own blood.
Hail to the vigilant ones (Watchers)who know the arcana and respect the way of idealism. These are the Oelohites, the daemons of light, who, militant and faithful to the work of God, choose sterility over the propagation of evil.
Kneel on the ground before the decrees of the Most High, and Glory to those who expect sublime incest.[44]
This enigmatic finale is explained by a further excerpt from Péladan’s reinterpretation of Genesis. After spending much time discussing the qualities of masculine and feminine, active and passive principles as outlined earlier, essentially following Fabre d’Olivet with regard to the “universal principles” and their association with Noah and his sons, Péladan adds a new dimension to his exposition. The original Fall had been caused by Nahash encouraging the newly formed Adam and Aischa to seek self-awareness; promptly forbidden by Joah-Elohim. Péladan explains that this was on account of the creator angels, Satan among them, falling in love with their own creations:
I had once believed that Satan, on the one hand, keeper of mysteries, in coming into contact with humanity was moved by a senseless ambition: to intervene in the evolution of mortals and supersede the second divine personage… May Satan forgive me for attributing to him such a blasphemous plan… this prince of intelligence would never be obscured on this point, I am contrite and confused about my stupid explanation…No, Satan and his angels fell because of the mirage of their oeuvre; these artists of creation were seduced by their own handiwork…[45]
This is followed by a retelling of the Fall as related in the Book of Enoch (Enoch I), but in contrast to the Biblical narration whereby the Flood destroyed all of the progeny of the union between humans and angels, drawing on early rabbinical sources, Péladan explains that this was necessary because the material world could not bear so much spiritual essence in its pure form, but nonetheless, the angelic seed survived among the descendants of these unions, as well as in the form of those Oelohites who, condemned to a life of celibacy and solitude, chose to remain on earth as teachers of men, and ultimately sowed the seed of creativity that would permit mankind to gradually evolve and reawaken to their divine potential by their own means. This potential and these teachings, Péladan believed, were most clearly expressed in the art forms of ancient civilisations, expressed in symbolic forms that clothed those Ideas that would permit a gradual reawakening through the alignment of intellect, spirit and will, as men and women respectively came to understand and manifest their potential. Since the Oelohites were not permitted to intervene directly, this blossoming of spirit could only be driven by human effort at self-realisation and self-redemption, and the Oelohites could only be redeemed if mankind achieved this.
Therefore, Péladan’s “religion of art” was motivated not by delusions of grandeur, but by a Promethean urge to seek and share the path to self-redemption. His efforts were tuned not only to the awakening of his fellow men, but to the redemption of what he saw as his spiritual daemonic kin. He invoked their names frequently, in many often enigmatic prefaces to his books, and gave them roles in his novels and plays in an attempt to demonstrate their constant presence in human history:
The Bené-Oelohim were the sons of your will and I would like to believe that I am descended from them… True to the Bereschit [Genesis] and to the sepher [book] of Enoch, in the genius of a Plato, of a Dante, of a Wagner, I see a daimonic descent… [this is] the conflict of angelic nature enclosed within the human condition.
I believe, along with Pythagoras and Plato, that the genius is never a man, but a d[a]emon, that is to say, an intermediary being between the spiritual and the earthly hierarchy: and it would take a papal bull, ex cathedra, to change my opinion.
“The enchanters, the egregores of all times, of all lands, mages, saints, artists, poets, aristes, mystagogues, are all the obscured or shining offspring of angelic descent.”[46]
And, at least in Péladan’s compassionate narrative, the daemon, or angel, who began it all, did so out of mercy, and not out of overarching pride, just as Péladan’s “religion of art” was motivated not by delusions of grandeur, but by a Promethean urge to seek and share the path to self-redemption.
It is easy to misread Péladan, and during his lifetime he was sorely hard-done-by, dubbed “the Dreyfus of literature” by the periodical press of his time. ‘No literary figure of the late nineteenth century had been more ridiculed, lampooned, and caricatured,’ we are told by one biographer; and the majority of modern scholarly references and studies leave an impression of Péladan as an attention-seeking, arrogant and eccentric braggart, whose significance in the worlds of literature, art, or esotericism, was negligible. Yet this does not reflect the reality, and as noted earlier, there is much to commend his work which also commands attention by virtue of its sheer breadth, audacity, and originality of synthesis and conviction.
This article was originally published in The Fenris Wolf 6, Edda Press, Stockholm, 2013.
Footnotes:
[1] Ruben van Luijk, ‘Sex, Science, & Liberty: The Resurrection of Satan in 19th Century (Counter) Culture,’ in The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity ed. by Per Faxneld & Jesper Aa. Petersen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 41-52 (p. 44).
[2] P.A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003).
[3] Arthur Edward Waite, Devil Worship in France: The Question of Lucifer (London: Redway, 1896), p. 12; Webb, The Occult Underground, p. 164.
[4] Arthur Edward Waite, Devil Worship in France: The Question of Lucifer (London: Redway, 1896), p. 12; Webb, The Occult Underground, pp. 156-161.
[5] Best encapsulated in Rimbaud’s famous statement: ‘I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men.’ Letter to Paul Demeny, 18 May 1871, in Melissa Kwasny, Towards the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), p. 147.
[6] Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism, (New York: SUNY, 1994) p. 47
[7] Webb, The Occult Underground, p. 163.
[8] Waite, Devil Worship in France, pp. 15, 17; cf. Webb, The Occult Underground, pp. 142-3.
[9] “Manichaean”, Oxford Dictionaries (Oxford University Press: 2010). Accessed 21 October 2012. <http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/Manichaean>.
[10] Michel Tardieu & Jean-Daniel Dubois, Introduction a la Littérature Gnostique I: Collections retrouvées avant 1945, Initiations au Christianisme Ancien (Paris: Cerf, 1986), p. 34
[11] Wouter J. Hanegraaff, ‘A Dynamic Typological Approach to the Problem of “Post‐gnostic” Gnosticism’, ARIES, 16 (1992), 5‐43 (pp. 29-30).
[12] Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, Hermeneutic Interpretation of the Social State of Man and of the Adamic Race, trans. by Nayan Louise Redfield (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), pp. xviii-xix
[13] Ibid., p. 17.
[14] Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 41-57, cited and discussed in Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment, pp.50-1.
[15] Ibid., p. xiii.
[16] Ibid., pp. xiv-xv.
[17] Jean Moréas, “Symbolist Manifesto”, Le Figaro 18 September 1886; translation in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Manifesto: A Century of Isms (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), p. 51.
[18] Berthelot, vol. III, p. 29
[19] Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, La langue hebraïque restituée, (1815-1816); F. Schlegel, Novalis, Athenaeum (1798-1800); Pierre-Simon Ballanche, Vision d’Hébal (1831) ; Orphée (1829).
[20] Antoine Faivre, ‘Christian Theosophy,’ in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, pp. 258-267 (p. 263)
[21] ibid., p. 189.
[22] Versluis, The Book of Wisdom, p. 21, citing Jacob Boehme, Signatura Rerum, (1621) X.53.
[23] David V. Zdenek, ‘The Influence of Jacob Boehme on Russian Religious Thought,’ Slavic Review, vol. 21, no. 1 (Mar. 1962), 43-64 (p. 45); cf. Jacob Boehme, The Signature of all Things (1622); Antoine Faivre, ‘The Theosophical Current: A Periodization,’ Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), pp. 3-48, cited in: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, ’ HPSM 156, pp. 10-12
[24] Les Idées et les Formes: Antiquité Orientale, Egypte – Kaldée – Assyrie – Chine – Phénicie – Judée – Arabie – Inde – Perse – Aryas d’Asie Mineure (Paris: Mercure de France, 1908).
[25] Péladan, Antiquité Orientale, p. 7.
[26] Ibid., pp.9, 10-11, 13
[27] La Langue hébraïque restituée et le véritable sens des mots hébreux rétabli et prouvé par leur analyse radicale ouvrage dans lequel on trouve réunis : (1) une dissertation sur l’origine de la parole ; (2) une grammaire hébraïque ; ( 3) une série de racines hébraïques ; (4) un discours préliminaire ; (5) une traduction en français des dix premiers chapitres du Sépher, contenant la Cosmogonie de Moyse (Paris: Chez l’auteur; Barrois; Eberhart: 1815; Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1985); Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, The Hebrew Tongue Restored And the True Meaning of the Hebrew Words Reestablished and Proved by their Radical Analysis, trans. Nayan Louise Redfield (New York & London:Putnam & Sons, 1921).
[28] This term will be discussed and elucidated at length in the following section.
[29] Busst, ‘ The Androgyne,’ p. 16.
[30] Ibid., p. 16.
[31] Ibid., p. 16.
[32] J. Péladan, Comment on Devient Fée, p. 36.
[33] Péladan, Comment on Devient Fée, p. 39; interpretation of Genesis 3:7.
[34] Péladan, Comment on Devient Fée, pp. 41-2.
[35] Péladan, Istar, pp. 257, 261-262.
[36] Here Péladan, like others before him, is conflating Dionysius the Areopagite, an early Christian convert, with Pseudo-Dionysius of the 5th or 6th century CE. See: Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A commentary on the texts and an introduction to their influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Rorem, Paul and John C. Lamoreaux, ‘John of Scythopolis on Apollinarian Christology and the Pseudo-Areopagite’s True Identity’ Church History, 62,4 (1993), 469–482.
[37] Péladan, Comment on Devient Artiste, p. 41.
[38] Péladan, Traité des Antinomies (Paris: Chamuel, 1892), p. 186
- [39] Nelly Emont, ‘Introduction a l’œuvre de Joséphin Péladan,’ in Les Péladan, Les Dossiers H (Lausanne : L’Age D’Homme : 1990), p.70 .
[40] Dantinne, L’œuvre et la pensée de Péladan, p. 163
cf: Joséphin Péladan, Les idées et les formes: Antiquité Orientale, Égypte, Kaldée, Assyrie, Chine, Phénicie, Judée, Arabie, Inde, Perse, Aryas d’Asie Mineure (Paris: Mercure de France, 1908), pp. 35-39; Joséphin Péladan, “I. La legende de l’inceste; II. La reconnaissance oelohite,” La Decadence Latine, Ethopée: Istar, vol 2 of 2 (Paris: Edinger, 1888), pp. 257-283; Ed. Bertholet, La Pensée et les Secrets de Péladan, 4 vols (Lausanne, Editions Rosicruciennes, 1952), IV, p. 65
[41] Péladan, Istar, p. 257
[42] Aside from his other occult reading, in his late teens Péladan was ‘impassioned by theatre… he read Shakespeare, Etienne Jodelle, Corneille, Racine, Crébillon, Dumas, Hugo, Beaumarchais. The Romantics also attracted him : Byron, Sand, Schiller, Jean-Paul, Nerval. After reading Dickens and Walter Scott, he commented on the technique of the 19th century novelists and considered the genre to be dependent on drama.’ Beaufils, Joséphin Péladan, p. 21, citing an unpublished note from the Péladan archive.
[43] Istar, p. 262
[44] Istar, p. 266
[45] Péladan, Comment on Devient Artiste, pp. 21-2.
[46] J. Péladan, ‘Arcanum of Lucifer, or of Birth,’ Comment on Devient Artiste (Paris: Chamuel, 1894), pp. xiii, 41; citing Istar, (1887), p. 41.
[47] Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Biography. Spiritual Revolutionary, Romantic Explorer, Occult Master and Spy (London: Watkins, 2011), p. 5.
[48] Definition of Bamoth: heights, the forty-eventh station of the Israelites (Num.21:19,20) in the territory of the Moabites. “bamoth.” Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary. 28 May. 2012. <Dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bamoth>.
[49] See La Décadence Latine I. Le Vice Supreme. Pp. 42 & 43. (Author’s note).
[50] Octave Gréard, 1828-1904, responsible for reforming the French (secular) educational system in the mid- to late- nineteenth century. See: P. Bourgain, Gréard, un moraliste educateur (Paris: Hachette, 1907).
[51] Gioacchino Ventura di Raulica (1792-1861), a Jesuit priest and philosopher, who held that the existence of the devil was a necessary foundation for Church dogma. Cited and commentated in H.P. Blavatsky, Collected Writings, Volume IX, 1888, (Quest Books, 1966), p. 18.
[53] Auguste Francois Le Canu (1803-1884), ordained in 1826, he held a variety of ecclesiastical positions and rose in the ranks of the clergy. An ecclesiastic historian, he wrote extensive church histories whose main purpose was to strengthen Catholic faith. His strong interest in occultism became apparent with the publication of his Dictionnaire des prophéties et des miracles (1852); les Sibylles et les livres sibyllins, étude historique et litteraire (1856); and the book to which Péladan is no doubt referring to here: Histoire de Satan (1861), in which he attempted to demonstrate incontrovertible proof for the existence of the devil. The book became highly controversial and was censored and destroyed in the same year as publication, but a few copies survived. See: François Laplanche : article « Auguste François Lecanu », in Jean-Marie Mayeur (ed.), Dictionnaire du monde religieux dans la France contemporaine, vol. 9 : Les sciences religieuses: le XIXe siècle : 1800-1914 (Paris: éd. Beauchesne, 1996) p. 400-401.
[54] Here Péladan, like others before him, is conflating Dionysius the Areopagite, an early Christian convert, with Pseudo-Dionysius of the 5th or 6thcentury CE. See: Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A commentary on the texts and an introduction to their influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Rorem, Paul and John C. Lamoreaux, ‘John of Scythopolis on Apollinarian Christology and the Pseudo-Areopagite’s True Identity’ Church History, 62,4 (1993), 469–482.
[55] Ereck = Uruk, ancient city of Sumer excavated during Péladan’s lifetime, from where he draws a large amount of the symbolism featured in his work.
