A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  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.

  A precocious child, rejecting his father's wish that he follow in his footsteps, while still a teenager Gerard published several slim volumes of verse. He had already met Gautier, a friendship that would last his lifetime, and by nineteen had made a name for himself with a translation of Goethe's Faust, of which the Olympian himself spoke highly. In 1830 Nerval took part with Gautier and other young Romantics in the theatre riots surrounding Victor Hugo's Hernani, and soon after plunged headfirst into Bohemian22 life. His cronies at this time included Petrus Borel, the self-styled lycanthrope; Charles Nodier, supposed initiate into secret societies; Theophile Dondey, who wore glasses when he went to bed so he could see his dreams; and Alphonse Esquiros, author of the occult novel The Magician and later friend of the kabbalist Eliphas Levi. An inheritance from his grandfather of some 30,000 francs allowed Gerard to travel to the south of France and Italy; it also gave him the wherewithal to found a magazine, Le Monde dramatique. This folded within a year, and Nerval's small fortune was dissipated in promoting the career of his ill-chosen ewig weibliche, Jenny Colon,'described by one critic as "a plump, blonde, second rate actress of easy virtue . . . "23 It is doubtful whether Nerval ever possessed jenny; like Novalis, with whose work he was well acquainted, Nerval's women served more as imaginative stimulators than sensual gratifiers and when it was clear he could do no more for her, she dropped him.

  Now heavily in debt, Nerval entered into a spiral of overwork and nervous exhaustion that would continue until his death. He made several attempts to become solvent, becoming in quick succession a dramatist, man Friday and collaborator with Alexandre Dumas, journalist, diplomat, critic and man of letters. Nothing came of this, and Nerval's fortunes were so low that, after his diplomatic mission to Vienna, he had to make part of his way back to Paris on foot. Signs that something drastic was on its way appeared: his dispatches back to Paris showed evidence of delusions of grandeur, of a personality cracking under the strain. In Vienna he played the role of the literary wit, moving in a milieu of eroticism, conspiracy and mesmeric party games, but fissures were opening in his sensitive, gentle soul, and portions of the other world welled up into his waking life.

  A series of violent episodes during the mardi gras season ended in his arrest and hospitalization. For nine months he was a patient at the Monmartre sanatorium of Dr. Esprit Blanche. A sense of his condition can be had from a letter he wrote at the time:

  You see spirits who talk to you in broad daylight, at night you see perfectly shaped, perfectly distinct phantoms, you think you remember having lived in other forms, you imagine you are growing very tall and that your head is touching the stars, the horizon of Saturn or Jupiter spreads before your eyes ...2a

  Depending on your view of things, this is either sheer schizophrenia or a too intense glimpse of that other world that visionaries like Swedenborg and Blake frequently visited. In his account of his own `descent into the unconscious', C.G. Jung remarked that others had been shaken by these storms, Nietzsche and the poet Holderlin with whom Nerval felt a deep kinship. They had been broken by these eruptions (both went mad) but Jung, whose account reads like a classic depiction of psychosis, believed he withstood them because, along with his own brute strength, he had a raft of solid, middle class responsibilities to support him: his family, his profession, his obligations to his patients .2' Nerval, like Nietzsche and Holderlin, was a drifter in life; Gautier, perhaps his closest friend, described Nerval as an "apodal swallow ... all wings and no feet." It is easy to see how such a creature would be prey to strong winds. Yet it is too easy to relegate Nerval's visions to the dustbin of insanity. Years later, another visionary poet, Rene Daumal, wrote an essay in which he argued that he, too, had visited the exact same dreamscape that Nerval depicts in his poignant Aure'lia. "So, I was not alone!" Daumal, another precocious poet, exclaims, at the beginning of "Nerval the Nyctalope. ,21 Jung's collective unconscious, the weird terrain of alchemical allegory, and the clinically observed phenomenon of shared dreams gives support to Aldous Huxley's much quoted remark that the mind has its own "antipodes, its Africas and Borneos." Nerval may have been merely a dreamer thrust too roughly into the geography of his own soul.

  One mystic landscape he certainly did share with others was the orient. A few months after his release, Nerval embarked on a journey to the east. From Marseilles Nerval headed into the mythic realms of Cairo, Alexandria, Acre, Beirut, Syria, Smyrna and Constantinople, with many other stops along the way. Part rest cure, part `esotourist' expedition, Nerval's year long wanderings were as much a descent into his own occult heritage as they were a de rigueur Grand Tour for self-respecting Western Orientalists. The Arabian Nights, Vathek and The Saragossa Manuscript had created an appetite for accounts of exotic travel and strange customs. Hugo, Gautier, Chateaubriand and Lamartine had all contributed to the fad; now Gerard was heading back to the source. Indeed, in the first wave of his madness, after a night in which he expounded ecstatically on a number of occult topics, Nerval refused to be accompanied home by a friend, and explained that he was not heading back to his room. "Where are you going then?" the friend asked. "To the East," was Gerard's wild reply.

  Inspired by Faust, the teenage Nerval had plunged into hermetic literature. Another guide was the ex-rabbi Alexander Weill, who Nerval had met in Frankfurt while researching the play Leo Burckhart, which he co-wrote with Dumas. Weill was a kabbalist and student of the hermetic mysteries, and it is believed that he introduced Nerval to the serious study of the hidden traditi
on. Mystical and occult themes saturate Nerval's work27. The early play The Alchemist was based on the life of the Renaissance esotericist Nicolas Flamel; years later he would write Les Illumines, its title taken from Adam Weishaupt's secret society. Nerval shared Abbe Barruel's belief that the Illuminati were the hidden hand behind the Revolution, and in Les Illumines he brings together a grab bag of articles dealing with characters like Jacques Cazotte, Cagliostro, the strange Raoul Spifame, Restif de la Bretonne and others, all against a backdrop of Enlightenment occultism. His often impenetrable series of poems, Les Chimeres, are rich in dark references to Pythagoras, Egyptian and Greek mythology, and Christian mysticism. But it is in Voyage in the Orient that Nerval gave a free hand to both his occult preoccupations and his need to fictionalize himself. Whether Voyage in the Orient is "an odyssey - that of Nerval's souli2" or "a tissue of fabrications" and a "Borgesian voyage through the library,"29 it, as its translator remarks, undoubtedly represents "the synthesis of Nerval's esoteric thought," and places him "somewhere between William Blake and Madame Blavatsky.i31

  Voyage in the Orient is full of exotic impedimenta: hashish, eroticism, strange dream states and astral doubles, secret societies and mystic religions, subterranean kingdoms, elementals, Zoroastrianism, the Druse, and the mythology of the `preAdamite races'. Among other works, it draws heavily on Silvestre de Sacy's Memoire sur la dynastie des assassins et sur 1'origine de leur nom (1809). Using the frame of The Arabian Nights, Nerval inserts novella length tales into his reportage and travel writing. "Makbenash" is a retelling of the central Masonic myth, the murder of Hiram Abif. It's unclear what level of freemasonry Nerval achieved; although it is clear he was well versed in Masonic lore, his actual status in the craft is vague. The chapter is the finale to "The Tale of the Queen of the Morning and Soliman the Prince of the Genii," which Nerval claims he heard being told by a professional storyteller over a two week period in a cafe behind the Beyazid mosque in Istanbul, a trope that, true or not, hearkens back to Jan Potocki's own account of his search for the original manuscript of The Arabian Nights. In Adoniram, Nerval's name for Hiram Abif, we find his idealized self-image, the creatorprophet, murdered by the philistines. The Queen of the Morning is, of course, Sheba, with whom, we know, Nerval had a peculiarly unique relationship.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  Although he is remembered today for the unforgettable opening line "It was a dark and stormy night," (Paul Clifford (1830)), in his day, Bulwer - later Lord Lytton (1803-1873) - was an immensely popular novelist, writing a series of very successful `silver fork' romances, which combined gothic melodrama with fashionable settings.31 Perhaps his best known work is his historical novel, The Last Days of Pompei (1834). But along with being a bestselling novelist, BulwerLytton may also have been the single most important occultist of the 19th century; in several highly entertaining works he introduced a variety of esoteric and magical themes which were to prove immensely influential. His The Haunter and the Haunted (1859) - also know as The House and the Brain - is one of the best Victorian ghost stories, appearing beside Poe and M.R. James in classic anthologies. Strikingly modern in its scientific investigation of the ghost - Lytton was one of the first psychic investigators, predating the Society for Psychical Research by decades- it remains a powerfully evocative tale, disturbingly eerie in atmosphere, and containing a description of a magician that ranks besides Tolkien's Gandalf. A Strange Story (1861), an oddly neglected work, centres on reincarnation and the alchemical quest for the elixir of life. Two other novels, however, draw heavily on Bulwer-Lytton's interest in Rosicrucianism, esoteric knowledge, and the idea of a superior type: his Rosicrucian work Zanoni (1842), and the occult science-fiction tale The Coming Race (1871). Both would become central texts of the modern occult revival.

  Bulwer-Lytton was one of those embarrassingly versatile Victorians, combining a successful career as a politician, with a prodigious literary output, and a social life that would make tabloid front pages today: an original dandy, among other accomplishments he is responsible for the rule of black evening dress for men. Bulwer-Lytton's literary life began with the Byronesque Ismael: An Oriental Tale (1820), which set him squarely among the fashionably dark and brooding. A later novel, Pelham (1828), proved successful, yet a disastrous marriage, a scandalous affair and Lytton's extravagant lifestyle, soon put him beyond the pale. Penniless and ostracized - his aristocratic mother cut off her support because of his outrageous behaviour - Lytton discovered a sympathy with the social outcast and outsider; this inspired his successful `Newgate novels', a series of narratives romanticizing criminals. This feeling for the outsider would also have occult repercussions. In the outcast of society, Bulwer-Lytton's evolutionary intuition saw possibilities not available to the law-abiding citizen. Such characters, he recognized, may have more potential for spiritual growth and experience than the average citizen, safe within the bounds of mediocrity and routine. This was, of course, a theme that would strike home later in the century. Decades before Nietzsche first presented the idea, Bulwer-Lytton was suggesting that the higher type, when it arrives, might very well find itself "beyond good and evil." In The Coming Race, which introduced the mystic force vril, by now a staple of the `occult Nazis' sub-genre32, Lytton presented his readers with an entire civilization of such supermen. With his first meeting with one of these beings, Bulwer-Lytton's hero remarks that "I felt that this man-like image was endowed with forces inimical to man." The Vril-ya are ". . . a race akin to man's, but infinitely stronger of form and grander of aspect, and, inspiring the unutterable feeling of dread. ,33 The Vril-ya live for hundreds of years, and it is possible that Bernard Shaw may have had BulwerLytton's `coming race' in mind when he wrote of his `Ancients' in his creative evolutionist play Back to Methuselah (1924). Certainly one of Bulwer-Lytton's readers who harboured similar suspicions about human evolution would prove immensely influential in the history of occultism: Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

  Lytton's interest in the occult started early. At eight, the young Edward found himself "ankle-deep in the great slough of Metaphysics," when he was introduced to his grandfather's library. An early acquaintance was the Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, whose Facts in Mesmerism proved a central influence on Poe. In his early twenties, while on a visit to Paris, Lytton went through a kind of psychic crisis. Retreating from society life, he headed to Versailles for some months, where he spent hours walking or riding alone. In a letter to a friend he explained that "I know by experience that those wizard old books are full of holes and pitfalls. I myself fell into one and remained there forty-five days and three hours without food, crying for help as loud as I could, but nobody came." This unsettling experience - repeated at different times throughout his career - would later emerge in Bulwer-Lytton's work as the episode of "The Dweller of the Threshold," from Zanoni. It is an encounter with one's "shadow," with all that is corrupt and evil, the dark side of the soul, a necessary trial before advancing to the higher stages of initiation. Among the later esoteric thinkers to adopt this theme was Rudolf Steiner, who incorporates it into the scheme of spiritual evolution presented in his book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment (1909).

  Lytton's disturbing rite of passage did not prevent him from becoming an esoteric mover and shaker among the spiritually curious Victorians. As Joscelyn Godwin makes clear in his exhaustive study, The Theosophical Enlightenment, Lytton was at the centre of several occult circles, "the pivotal figure of nineteenth century occultism."" Among other notables, Lytton entertained the renowned spiritualist Daniel Dunglas Home, who held seances at Knebworth, Lytton's estate. (Robert Browning, less open-minded, vilified Home as the despicable "Mr. Sludge, Medium.") At Gore House, the Kensington home of Lady Marguerite Gardiner, the Countess of Blessington (Albert Hall stands there today), Lytton rubbed esoteric elbows with Benjamin Disraeli, Philip Henry, the Fourth Earl of Stanhope (friend of Richard Cosway), John Varley and other luminaries. Among an evening's entertainments were Lytton's and Dis
raeli's psychic experiments, and Varley's accounts of the mad poet, William Blake. Although a highly sought after convert, Lytton's refreshingly balanced approach to spiritualism - he believed in the phenomena but rejected the explanation (spirits of the dead) - earned him the respect of other sympathetic but critical minds, and the contempt of strict devotees. Lytton likewise believed in the efficacy of magical rituals, but denied that spirits or demons were at all involved; instead he argued that what was at work was some unknown force, directed by the human will, and which would eventually be understood by science, a theme close to the heart of The Coming Race. Lytton had ample opportunity to investigate his theories on at least one occasion. In 1861, with two other witnesses, Lytton observed Eliphas Levi, the celebrated `Professor of Transcendental Magic', raise the shade of Apollonius of Tyana on the roof of the Pantheon, a large store on Regent Street. Levi is generally credited with being a powerful influence on Lytton. But, as Joscelyn Godwin contends, the exact opposite may be true. In which case it is Bulwer-Lytton, and not Levi, as it is usually understood, who was the key figure behind the influential French occult revival of the late 19th century, a development that led directly to what we know as occultism today.