A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (28 page)

But Strindberg was interested in more than a new approach to art. He took his alchemy seriously and soon after his arrival in Paris, he turned his back on the literary world and got to work on the archetypal alchemical project: making gold. From what we can gather from Inferno, we can see that, at least to his own satisfaction, he succeeded.

A pharmacist who took an interest in his pursuits allowed Strindberg to work in his laboratory. He sent the results to a firm of chemists to be analyzed. Their tests proved positive. Other encouragement followed. A summary of Strindberg's scientific work appeared in Le Petit Temps, followed by long articles on `Strindberg the scientist' in La Science Francaise and the widely read Le Figaro. Strindberg petitioned to conduct further experiments using the laboratory at the Sorbonne. The faculty thought little of his work, but granted him permission. An engineer at a chemical factory who read of his experiments wrote to him saying that they threw light on "hitherto unexplained phenomena in the manufacture of sulphuric acid and sulphides." At the same time, a correspondence with the distinguished chemist Marcellin Berthelot suggested to Strindberg he was on the right track.

It was around this time that Strindberg came into contact with the Parisian alchemical underground. Francois Jollivet- Castelot, whose book Strindberg had read with enthusiasm, had heard of Strindberg's work, and approached him.Jollivet- Castelot later became editor of an alchemical journal, L'Hyperchimie, and published Strindberg's account of his alchemical work, "The Synthesis of Gold." Strindberg's alchemical celebrity was assured when Gerard Encausse - better known under his occult pseudonym Papus - published an account of his work in his periodical L'Initiation. "August Strindberg," Papus wrote, "who combines vast knowledge with his great talent as a writer, has just achieved a synthesis of gold from iron." His work, Papus continued, "confirms all the assertions of the alchemists.""

This was high praise. The author of several influential works, as the leader of the Groupe Independant d'Etudes Eso- terique and Grand Master of the Martinist Order, Papus was a powerful figure in the Parisian occult underground. He was also indirectly involved in the magical feud that had Huysmans, Sar Peladan and De Guaita casting spells at each other. When Papus elected Strindberg an honorary Master of La Societe Alchimique de France, it's understandable the accolade went to his head. After years of obscurity, rejection and accusations of madness, to be accepted as a genius by men whose intelligence he respected, must have given Strindberg some satisfaction.

Yet his alchemical adventure wasn't purely benign. Nurtured by his occult obsessions, Strindberg's deranged sense impressions began to get out of hand. More and more he recognized in them the sign of an occult intelligence which he called "the Powers" and "the Unseen," a somewhat more benign, though still disturbing version of Maupassant's invisible superior being.

He began to feel that he was being tested. He talked to the Powers, thanked them, asked them for advice. He saw their work everywhere. Money appeared miraculously, allowing him to buy scientific instruments. Observing the embryo of a walnut under a microscope, Strindberg was convinced he could see two tiny hands, clasped in prayer, emerging from the seed. On a chance trip to the country, his deranged sense impressions transformed a stone into a statue of a Roman knight. Pleased with this effect, he looked in the direction the statue was pointing. On a wall he saw the initials F and S. He first thought of his second wife, Frida Strindberg. But then he realized that it was really the chemical symbols for iron and sulphur (Fe and S), the ingredients, he believed, for alchemical gold. A crumpled pillow became a Michelangelo bust, then a likeness of the Devil. A shadow in his room became a statue of Zeus. He had precognitive dreams. A dead friend appeared, offering a large American coin. When Strindberg reached for it, the friend disappeared. The next morning he received a letter from America. Arriving months late, it informed him of an offer of 12,000 francs to write a piece for the Chicago Exhibition. But the deadline had passed, and the money, a fortune for Strindberg, was now lost.

A host of strange simulacra followed. In the zinc bath he used for making gold by the wet method, he saw a remarkable landscape. Formed by the evaporation of salts of iron, Strindberg saw "small hills covered with conifers ... plains, with orchards and cornfields ... a river ... the ruins of a castle." It was only months later, during a visit to his daughter, who he hadn't seen for two years, that he recognized his vision as the landscape around his mother-in-law's house. Making gold by the dry method produced its own terrors. After melting borax in terrific heat, he found a skull with two glistening eyes. On another occasion a chunk of charred coal revealed a bizarre formation: a body with a cock's head, a human trunk, and distorted limbs. It looked, he remarked, "like one of the demons that used to perform in the witches' sabbaths of the Middle Ages."

A reading of Balzac's Seraphita convinced Strindberg that his alchemical experiments were unholy, and that for his salvation, the Powers had consigned him to Hell. Strindberg was high-strung and thin-skinned; some of his tortures seem more like inconveniences than anything else. But some are more in line with the magical adventures familiar to the time. Strindberg began to feel there was an occult conspiracy against him, and he was convinced someone was spying on his alchemical activities. The sound of pianos playing eerie, disturbing music followed him everywhere. He believed the Polish decadent writer Stanislav Przybyszewski had come from Berlin to kill him. A persecution complex developed. His supersensitive nerves detected strange subterranean vibrations. The idea that he was the target of evil emanations obsessed him. Baffling coincidences appeared everywhere. Mysterious noises from the rooms next door tormented him, and he was convinced that someone was trying to kill him using an electrical machine. He walked around Paris in a state of tense expectancy, awaiting "an eruption, an earthquake, or a thunderbolt." Friends and acquaintances now became demons, sent by the Powers to show him the error of his ways, and each night he suffered anxiety attacks. Because he had rejected the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, for some time he was convinced his assailants were a group of theosophists .. .

Eventually Strindberg passed through his ordeal, convinced the Powers had tested him to aid his spiritual evolution. By 1897, his interest in alchemy abated, and the urge to write had returned, one product of which was Inferno. In 1898 he began work on To Damascus, perhaps his greatest play. His belief in the Powers, however, remained for the rest of his life, and he went on to write several more masterpieces, including the expressionistic A Dream Play (1902). In 1912 he was diagnosed with a stomach cancer and died a few months later, a Bible on his chest.

Gustav Meyrink

In 1891, at the age of 23, Gustav Meyer (he later adopted Meyrink as a nom de plume then took it as his legal name) was a successful, if unorthodox banker. A dandy, man-about-town and owner of the first automobile in Prague, Meyer had a reputation as a fin de siecle decadent, a sophisticated pleasure seeker, as well as an astute financier. The bank he started with a nephew of the poet Christian Morgenstern - a devotee of Rudolf Steiner - was a success and Meyer was living the high life. Yet although Meyer presented an extraverted personality to the world, he was by nature a sensitive introvert, poetic and contemplative. The tension between his two selves grew too great and the young aesthete suffered a nervous collapse, a complete breakdown that had him on the brink of suicide. Just as he was about to kill himself, a leaflet was pushed under the door of his flat. Meyer stopped and picked it up. It was an advertisement for a book on occultism. Meyer concluded that fate had intervened and he quickly plunged into a study of the arcane arts, becoming soon after a founding member of the Theosophical Lodge of the Blue Star, the first theosophical organization in Prague.

Ten years later Meyer met another fateful crossroads. While convalescing in a tuberculosis sanatorium, he wrote his first story, "The Ardent Soldier." Legend has it that, like many other unsolicited submissions, it quickly found a place in the waste basket of the editorial offices of Simplicissimus, the satirical magazine Meyer had sent it to. Meyer might never have become Meyrink if Ludwig Thoma, the editor, did not idly poke around with his umbrella in the trash, and puncture Meyer's manuscript. Drawing out his catch, Thoma allegedly recognized it as a work of genius and published it. Soon after Meyrink became a regular contributor, his satirical wit infuriating various members of the establishment. Two years later his first collection of stories was published, and Meyrink had established himself as a writer. Meyrink's taste for the occult gave his tales a peculiar atmosphere, a strange, visionary quality that would fully emerge in his first novel, The Golem. Originally published in 1913 in Die Weissen Blatter, when it appeared in book form two years later it quickly sold 200,000 copies". The book made Meyrink famous and rich. Like Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Kafka, two of Meyrink's contemporaries, Meyrink is one of the poets of Prague. If today Kafka's name prompts visions of a dark, ambiguous and threatening Central European city, it should be remembered that in his own day, it was Meyrink who was most associated with this literary effect. Prague had a history of occultism and alchemy going back to the early 1600s, and in his first novel Meyrink managed to condense this into an atmosphere thick with tension, chills and high melodrama, producing a work that is at once a thriller and a metaphysical exploration.

A great deal happened to Meyrink while he was on his way to becoming a bestselling. novelist. It's a cliche to say about some writers that their lives were stranger than their fiction. In Meyrink's case it's true. Gustav was born in 1868, the illegitimate son of a Jewish actress, Maria Meyer, and an aristocrat, Baron Karl Varnbiiler von and zu Hemmingen, minister of state for Wurttemburg. Marriage was out of the question, but the Baron proved generous and paid for Gustav's education, first in Munich, then Hamburg, and, finally, Prague; he later established a trust fund for his son, which allowed Gustav to set himself up as a banker. At some point in childhood his mother left him, and a sense of abandonment and loss of identity often figure in his novels. This is true of The Golem, as well as later works like The Green Face (1916), Walpurgisnacht (1917), The White Dominican (1921) and his last novel, The Angel of the West Window (1927), which features the Elizabethan magician John Dee. The feeling of being an `outsider' remained with Meyrink throughout his life.

In 1892 Meyrink married; the marriage, however, was not a success and in 1895 he met Philomena Bernt, who later became his second wife. The scandal surrounding their affair added to the stress of his unhappy marriage; at the same time, Meyrink's occult investigations had begun, and he busied himself with yoga, freemasonry, alchemy, as well as experiments with hashish and mescaline. It was during this time that Meyrink became a member of several occult organizations. Along with the Lodge of the Blue Star, Meyer also became an Arch Censor in the Mandala of the Lord of the Perfect Circle. Other societies included The Order of Illumination, and the Brotherhood of the Old Rite of the Holy Grail in the Great Orient of Patmos. In his short story "What's the Use of White Dog Shit?" Meyrink even satirized himself and has his narrator remark that "the next thing I did was to immerse myself in the study of the history of secret societies. There can't be a single fraternity left that I haven't joined ..." Later Meyrink would be associated with the German guru Bo Yin Ra, correspond at length with Annie Besant, and receive praise from Rudolf Steiner 39, as well as be seen by many as an esoteric master in his own right. A sceptical occultist, Meyrink's wit and critical acumen are welcome in a field too littered with credulity and self-deception.

The stress of Meyrink's life took its toll and he suffered the collapse that led to the sanatorium. When he recovered he faced yet another challenge. Talk of his affair with Philomena Bernt led to insults, and Meyrink was obliged to challenge two army officers to a duel. Fearing his skill with a blade, they refused, claiming his illegitimacy prevented him from getting satisfaction. Meyrink then challenged the entire officers' corp. In the same year Meyrink was accused of using occult powers to influence his business clients, particularly the female ones, and criminal charges were brought against him. Although the charges were eventually dropped, he spent three months in jail, during which time he became temporarily paralysed, possibly through rough treatment by the guards. He later claimed his yogic practices cured him. When he was finally let out his bank was ruined, and Meyrink was penniless. Obliged to make his living by his pen, Meyrink supplemented his income by working for a time as a representative of a champagne distributor, a position he more than likely enjoyed.

In 1904 scandal and social ostracism led Meyrink to leave Prague and move to Vienna. His stay there was short and in 1906 he moved to Bavaria, after finally divorcing his first wife and marrying Philomena. But it wasn't until 1911 that he finally settled by Lake Starnberg in a place he called the House of the Last Lamps. Here he would write The Golem and his other novels, and live until his death in 1932. By this time his celebrity had passed and in his last years ill health forced him to stop writing. Although The Golem has a large cast of weird and eccentric characters - the trademark of all Meyrink's novels - the central star is Prague itself, especially the old Jewish ghetto. Meyrink's portrayal of its sunless, narrow streets and eerie, jutting architecture lent itself to the Expressionist cinema then in its infancy. Evidence for this can be found in Paul Wegner's two film versions of The Golem as well as in the classic Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Meyrink discovered the legend of the Golem in his reading of Hebrew mysticism. There are variations of the story but in its basics, the Golem is an inanimate man-like creature, usually made of clay, that is brought to life by a rabbi or kabbalist. By placing the word EMETH - life - on its forehead, the Golem is awakened, ready to do the bidding of its master. Generally, some variation of the Sorcerer's Apprentice happens, and the Golem, like any good Frankenstein's monster, gets out of control. He can be stopped only by rubbing out the initial E, leaving the word METH, death, on its brow.