- Satanism, Magic and Mysticism in Fin-de-siècle France by Robert Ziegler
The last decades of the nineteenth century were a mixed bag in France: science, its fires stoked by Darwin, chugged forward; technology claimed ever more territory from religion; royalists and aristocrats had become endangered species; and art itself, thanks to movements like naturalism, yielded to the pressure of empiricism. Yet the same period is marked by an infatuation with things darkly spiritual — from magnetism and table-turning to mysticism and the occult. In Satanism, Magic and Mysticism in Fin-de-siècle France, Robert Ziegler examines this life of the shadows, in both its cultural and artistic manifestations. Each chapter is dedicated to a particular type of fin-de-siècle figure: the satanist, the hoaxer, the magus, the mystic, and the miracle-worker. Ziegler sees these categories as operating roughly in succession, although they clearly overlap in definition and in time. J. K. Huysmans has pride of place in the analyses: ‘one finds that — more than any other public figure — [Huysmans’s] career followed the trajectory of fin-de-siècle occultism’ (p. 2). Most prominent is his role as a representative of satanism (Là-bas (1891)), but Huysmans makes his ghostly apparition in the other sections as well, for he engaged with all the major hermeticists of his day. Whether in Huysmans or Stanislas de Guaïta or Jules Bois, satanism appears, paradoxically, as a re-energizing of religious power, as an escape from the relentless materialism of the age. It gives rise to entirely authentic anxieties, even when the gruesome practices of satanists are related as part of a spoof. Accordingly, the second chapter focuses on the epic hoax played by Leo Taxil, who fabricated the story of a devil-worshipping secret society known as Palladism. Although his motives remain obscure, Taxil’s tales connected with the popular imagination, readers falling readily for the outlandish descriptions of ritual incest, necrophilia, and bestiality. In Chapter 3 the figure of the magus, best exemplified in the writings of Joséphin Péladan, appears as a Messiah figure — the apotheosis of the aristocrat. In contrast, we have the mystic (Chapter 4), who believed in a new form of Gnosticism, whereby higher knowledge might be attained through spiritual enlightenment, represented in the works of Eugène Vintras. Last of all, Ziegler dedicates a brief fifth chapter to Huysmans’s study of miracles, focusing on the novelist’s final book and spiritual quest. The strength of the study lies in its breadth, including canonical writers like Huysmans and lesser divinities such as Jules Bois and Ernest Hello. Yet some groupings feel a touch forced (nearly all figures are associated — perhaps hastily — with Decadence), and the urge to cover so much leaves little room for textual analysis or reflection. We would also have benefited from more developed conclusions in most chapters. The chapter on Leo Taxil is a case in point: it is a delightful romp through Palladism, but it leaves us hungering for more [End Page 269] critical synthesis. That said, even if the parts are greater than the whole, Ziegler’s book is nonetheless a trove of enticing parts.