A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (12 page)

Most readers may find Poe's vision too abstract to offer much existential comfort, yet embedded in his unparticled matter is a Christian moral. When asked "to what good end is pain," Poe's mesmerized savant replies, "The pain of the primitive life of Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven." Like others we will encounter, Eliphas Levi, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Malcolm Lowry, Poe's way was the way of suffering. We hardly need to be mesmerized to imagine that he would try to find some meaning in it.

Balzac

A story about Balzac tells how, before locking himself in his study, he would undress and hand his clothes to his servant, with the command that he was not to return them until he had written his quota for the day. Apocryphal, no doubt, but rooted in truth. Balzac did don a monkish robe before setting down to a day's, or rather a night's work - his usual schedule was to rise at midnight and work until eight. And he did produce an enormous amount of words each night: one estimate places an average output at around sixteen printed pages. Balzac's production was the literary equivalent of the `progress' that was changing the landscape of France in the first half of the 19th century. Not counting the pseudonymous works of his early years, between the age of 30 and his death in 1850 at the age of 51, Balzac produced over a hundred novels and short stories, not to mention his non-fiction works. He was slowed down only in his last years by his final illness, which was clearly brought on by his crushing schedule. The Industrial Revolution had ushered in a new age of factories, mass production and assembly lines, and Balzac's incredible flood of language rivalled the most prodigious of these new "satanic mills." He was, as he called himself, a "mind factory," and his fluency has led some critics to see in him little more than an egotistic hack with an insatiable need to see his name in print. Such aspersions, however, are wasted on Balzac. He was Olympian enough to be all these things, and still be one of the 19th century's giants of literature.

Coleridge and De Quincey had their opium, Baudelaire his wine and hashish, Poe his drink. Balzac had thick strong black coffee: one estimate puts his working intake at around fifty thousand cups. Made by his own hand, this powerful brew fuelled the writing of his Gargantuan La Comedie Humaine and eventually weakened his heart enough to kill him. Balzac's aim in this mountainous chain of novels, unfinished at the time of his death, was to portray "the history of the human heart traced thread by thread." His vision was of a vast prose epic depicting the realities of the modern urban world burgeoning around him. Master criminals, financiers, socialites, prostitutes and the new urban poor: their story would be told against the remorseless backdrop of their heartless-mistress, Paris. It is a bit odd then to realize that this Titan of realism, whom Zola would later champion as a precursor to his own sociological novels, was an unrepentant life-long mystic to whom the outer, visible world was only a symbol of an inner, spiritual realm.

Honore Balzac - he later adopted the aristocratic `de' when he published his first novel under his own name - was born in Tours in 1799. Like Poe and Hoffmann, Balzac had a dual temperament, clearly fashioned from what he inherited from his parents. Balzac's father was a child of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, an agnostic rationalist with a keen nose for business and finance. Balzac's mother, whose indifference and cold-heartedness to the boy is legendary, was a reader of Swedenborg and Saint-Martin, and a follower of Mesmer, all three of whom would become central influences on the fledgling novelist. It isn't surprising that in Seraphita Balzac would focus on the archetypal symbol for the union of opposites, the androgyne. The alchemical fusion embodied in that sublime creature Seraphita/Seraphitus, spoke also of Balzac's need to bring together, and hence pass beyond, the opposites in his nature.

Balzac's belief in the occult is well documented. "All his life," his biographer Stefan Zweig wrote, "Balzac clung to the most primitive forms of superstition. He believed in amulets, always wore a lucky ring with mysterious oriental symbols and before taking any important decisions he would consult a fortune teller like any Parisian seamstress."" During a trip to Vienna Balzac met the Orientalist Baron Joseph de Hammer- Purgstall, whose book on the Hashishin started a vogue for eastern mystical conspiracy theories. The baron gave Balzac a magical talisman, a ring engraved with strange Arabic characters. Balzac called the talisman `Bedouck' and carried it everywhere, believing it would bring good luck, invisibility, long life, and success with women. Other stories attest to what most biographers consider Balzac's credulity.

But Balzac's deep belief in occult phenomena went far beyond these superficial signs. He was, along with Poe and Hoffmann, a profound student of Mesmer, and of the novels making up his Comedie Humaine, at least four - Louis Lambert (1832), Seraphita (1835), Ursule Mirouet (1842), and Cousin Pons (1847) - deal directly with mesmeric and theosophical ideas. Like Poe, Balzac was convinced that in the `mesmeric trance', consciousness was put into "a state in which the inner sense made contact with the spiritual world, freeing the inner man to wander through space and time ..."20 Balzac had flights of metaphysics equal to Poe's, but his central obsession with `magnetism' was its manifestation in the human will. Will power for Balzac was a very definite thing, an actual force emanating from the personality, generally through the eyes. The stuff of pulp thrillers, immortalized in De Maurier's Svengali, for Balzac and other writers, like his friend Theophile Gautier, it was a fact, and Balzac himself was living proof. Gautier, who used magnetic tropes in many of his stories, spoke of Balzac's "lightning-like glances, so brilliant, so charged with magnetism," and remonstrated with him for using his powers to seduce women. It isn't surprising that Balzac should be interested in will power, given his own remarkable fund of it. He believed that at birth each of us is given a fixed amount of this magnetism, and that with its use, it is burned up, never to be restored. In many ways his novels are thought experiments in which he explores the different ways in which his characters expend their vital fluid. Balzac was always impressed by sheer, ruthless will. Perhaps the archetypal expression of this is the ambitious Rastignac looking at Paris from his garret window and saying, "It's between you and me now!"

But Balzac was also interested in other, more subtle powers of the will. In Louis Lambert, his idealized self portrait, he depicts a young man with almost hallucinatory powers of imagination. When Louis first discovers the world of literature, it is as if he has discovered himself for the first time. Reading becomes "a species of hunger which nothing could allay." "Whenever I wish it," he tells the narrator - Balzac himself- "I can draw a veil over my eyes. Then I suddenly see within me a camera obscura, where natural objects are reproduced in purer forms than those under which they first appeared to my external sense." "When I read the story of the battle of Austerlitz ... I saw every incident. The roar of the cannon, the cries of the fighting men rang in my ears and made my inmost self quiver ..

Clearly Louis has discovered Hoffmann's other world, the imagination. Yet a streak of romantic pessimism makes Balzac kill off Louis, a victim of the very magnetic powers that carry him to the beyond. Balzac believed that a too energetic use of the vital fluids leads to death, and again, his own volcanic history seems to corroborate this. This is the direction Romantic occultism will take as the century progresses. Unlike Blake and Goethe, from Novalis on, the idea that the external world can be transformed into the other world through the imagination, is dropped, and in its place we get the belief that this world is a trap, or at least that it is a sphere too crude and imperfect for sensitive souls like Romantic poets. The option then is to escape this world, and the best way of doing this is, of course, through death.

In Seraphita Balzac brings together several different occult themes: the androgyne, the other world, mesmerism and Swedenborgianism. Balzac's Swedenborg, however, is a particular variant, and is characteristic of the occult smorgasbord that made up alternative thought in 1830s Paris. Of mesmerism Gautier said that it supplied himself and other writers with a system of "the fantastic, the mysterious, the occult and the inexplicable." The same can be said of Swedenborg's doctrines. Balzac knew of them only through a French digest of the mage's work; most of his other knowledge came secondhand through his mother. Another influence was the interesting figure of David Ferdinand Koreff, a German physician who had once held a chair in animal magnetism at the University of Berlin, and who had now moved to Paris. Koreff was a confirmed mesmerist, and introduced the cream of the Parisian literary world to Mesmer's ideas. A witty, cosmopolitan character, Koreff knew Hoffmann, who he apparently resembled, and, as Hoffmann's work was then enjoying great Parisian acclaim, this cachet made him a desirable guest with the literary set. Among his friends and clients were Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Musset, Prosper Merimee, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Benjamin Constant, Heinrich Heine and Balzac.

Balzac was a voracious reader with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and ideas. He was not, however, a particularly analytical or systematic thinker, and the mesmerism that came to him had already passed through a gauntlet of other occult ideas, all of which he absorbed into his capacious mind. Mesmer and Swedenborg met in their belief that in its attempt to account for the external world, rationalist science ignored the deeper questions of man's inner being. That inner being's transfiguration is the theme of Seraphita. The ostensible inspiration for the book was a sculpture by a minor 19th century artist, Theophile Bra, a work depicting Mary holding the infant Christ, surrounded by angels. Angels hold an important place in Swedenborg's philosophy - they are, in fact, humans who have passed over the threshold - and Balzac had had the idea of writing a novel about one for some time. Bra shared with Balzac a deep interest in esoteric thought, and his statue seemed to have a profound effect on him. Balzac's angel became the hermaphroditic creature, Seraphita/ Seraphitus, with whom two mere humans are in love: to the woman he appears as a man, to the man, she is seen as a woman.

Seraphita/Seraphitus is the child of a devout Swedenborgian couple who, during the nine months of pregnancy, performed daily prayers and spiritual meditations. The result was a kind of Rosemary's Baby in reverse. The couple's spiritual preparations were so intense that on the day of the child's birth, Swedenborg, ten years dead, appeared before them and congratulated them on their work.

Balzac wasn't the only one fascinated by hermaphrodites. Around the same time Gautier had published his Mademoiselle de Maupin, a light, frivolously shocking treatment of the theme, remembered now mostly for its influential "art for art's sake" preface. For all his interest in mesmerism, Gautier was very much a man of this world, and he really shared very little of Balzac's passion for the beyond. Yet both may have seen that, along with the long esoteric tradition of androgyne in alchemy and Kabbalah, the idea is also a metaphor for the artist's soul. Balzac himself said that the artist is something of a man/woman. Seraphita, though not his best work, does do something to bear this reflection out.

Gerard de Nerval

If Gerard de Nerval is known at all to English readers, it's more for his Bohemian eccentricities than for his work as a writer. He is, for instance, the man who walked a lobster on a blue ribbon along the Palais-Royal in Paris, and when questioned why, replied: "It does not bark and it knows the secrets of the deep". Others may recall that he once sported a human skull as a wine goblet, claiming that it had been his mother's, and that he had to kill her to get it. (She in fact had died when he was two and he never knew her.) Or there was the wigwam he invariably brought when staying at a friend's, a cumbersome article that was nevertheless more mobile than the immense Renaissance bed he bought for the imaginary consummation of an impossible love affair. (Unused, the bed was finally palmed off on his great friend, Theophile Gautier.) Nerval was also known for carrying an apron string around with him that at different times he variously explained as being the Queen of Sheba's garter, part of Madame de Maintenon's corset, or an indefinite accessory of Marguerite de Valois. For years, friends like Gautier, Baudelaire and others looked at the antics of le bon Gerard with amusement, seeing in them little more than the jeux d'sprit of their talented, if distracted, friend. But soon the eccentricities passed into more perplexing behaviour, and it became clear that something was wrong. Gerard had cleared the threshold of a peculiar kind of madness and was, it seemed, unable to return. In the end, homeless, destitute and quite insane, on a frigid January night in 1855 he put his prestigious apron string to more definite use by hanging himself with it in the filthy rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a squalid alley near the rue de Rivoli. He was forty-six and had only recently been released from his second extended stay in a mental asylum.

Of the French Romantics, Nerval was the one most susceptible to the influence of Hoffmann and the German Romantics; he was also an encyclopedic student of the occult. A visionary like Blake, Nerval, like the student Anselmus, was aware of the other world, and pursued it as his great dream throughout his life. In the end, however, the tables were turned and the dream - now often a nightmare - pursued him. There is a grim irony to be found in the fact that Nerval took the name Aurelia, the title of his most famous work, from a story in Hoffmann's The Serapion Brotherhood. When the black night of madness descended over him - which Aurelia (1855), his masterpiece, recounts in unsettling detail - Nerval, like Brother Serapion, found himself in a world no longer bordering on the territory of reality.

Gerard de Nerval was born Gerard Labrunie in Paris on 22 May 1808. His father, a stern, taciturn individual, was a surgeon-major in Napoleon's Grand Armee; soon after his birth, his mother, Marie-Antoinette-Marguerite Laurent, leaving Gerard in the care of a nurse, followed her husband on a Russian campaign, and died at the age of twenty-five from a fever contracted while crossing a bridge littered with corpses. She was buried in Silesia. Gothic ghosts and Hoffmahnesque settings were not the only spirits drawing Gerard to the misty Teutonic forests. His mother's dreamlike memory - the dream of a memory, in fact - also gave him the material with which to reinvent himself. After years of signing himself simply `Gerard', he adopted a new identity that was a near mirror image of his mother's maiden name. "de Nerval" was the esoteric nexus of a host of imagined histories, the focal point of what Nerval called his genealogie fantastique. Along with showing his clear descent from the Roman Emperor Nerva, his new nome de plume, he claimed, undoubtedly linked him with the German king Otho and the Napoleonic line ... Less doubtful, it was also a secret code for a patch of land in his beloved Valois, owned by his mother's family, the `clos de Nerval', or `black vale'. Yet Richard Sieburth, in his masterful introduction to a recent collection of Nerval's writings, suggests other, more initiatory meanings at work in Gerard's new self: "Nerval" speaks both of Avernus, the mythological portal to the underworld, and vernal, the promise of rebirth21. That Nerval made the descent is unquestioned - his genealogie fan- tastique dates from his first mental breakdown in 1841. His subsequent return trip, however, was less secure: from his mother he also inherited a peculiarly personal form of Sehnsucht: a perpetually unfulfilled search for the Feminine Ideal, an anima image he would house in unlikely candidates with generally disastrous consequences.