ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 16
Rodin Opens The Gates of Hell
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On
August 16th, 1880, French President Jules Ferry signed a state commission
ordering the sculptor Auguste Rodin to
produce a monumental bronze doorway for a planned Musée des Arts Décoratifs,
decorated with “bas-reliefs representing The Divine Comedy.”
Rodin, an avid reader of Dante and still a relatively obscure artist at the
time, seized on the assignment with the ambition of a man determined to make
his name. What he ultimately produced, a churning, twenty-year, then
thirty-seven-year obsession containing more than 180 writhing figures torn from
the pages of the Inferno, would become one of the most influential sculptures
in Western art. It would also never once function as an actual gate to
anything.
The
museum it was built for was never constructed. The doors were never installed.
And the single most famous figure to emerge from the whole tortured project has
spent more than a century being misread by nearly everyone who's ever seen a
photograph of it…
Bringing Dante to Life
The
commission's origin was practical rather than purely artistic: the planned
Musée des Arts Décoratifs was meant to rise from the ruins of the Palais d'Orsay, the former Court of
Auditors headquarters burned during the Paris Commune less than a decade
earlier. Rodin, eager for the kind of prestigious public commission typically
reserved for established masters, threw himself into the project, initially
modeling his approach on Lorenzo Ghiberti's celebrated Gates of Paradise
at the Florence Baptistery, which he'd studied closely during an 1875 trip to
Italy.
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He soon abandoned Ghiberti's tidy compartmentalized structure entirely. Rather than dividing the doors into discrete narrative scenes matching Dante's cantos, Rodin let the composition dissolve into something closer to chaos: a single overwhelming cascade of damned bodies falling, twisting, and reaching across the entire surface, with no clean boundary between one torment and the next. It's an approach that abandoned narrative clarity for something more visceral and considerably harder to look away from.
The
museum project, meanwhile, was quietly collapsing. Construction stalled
indefinitely through the 1880s, and the site earmarked for the building was
eventually demolished to make way for the Gare d'Orsay train station instead,
opening in 1900. Rodin kept working on his doors anyway, on and off, for the
rest of his life, adding, removing, and reworking figures for thirty-seven
years without ever declaring the piece finished. He died in 1917 having never
seen it cast in bronze; what existed at his death was a plaster model, the
version now housed at the Musée d'Orsay. The bronze casts familiar from museums
around the world today, including the one standing outside the Rodin Museum in
Philadelphia, were all made posthumously.
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Perched above the doors, meant to preside over the entire infernal composition from the tympanum, sits the figure now recognized around the world as The Thinker, arguably the single most famous sculpture in human history after Michelangelo's David. Almost no one encountering it today, on a coffee mug, a meme, a philosophy department lawn, knows its original name or purpose: Rodin called it The Poet, and conceived it explicitly as Dante Alighieri himself, seated above his own creation, brooding over the circles of hell he'd imagined into being.
Rodin's
own working notes describe imagining “Dante thinking of the plan of his poem”
before the figure evolved into something more universal in his mind. What makes
the original conception genuinely strange, once you know it, is how poorly it
fits its supposed subject. Dante is traditionally depicted as lean, ascetic,
sharp-featured; Rodin's figure is bulky, muscular, and thoroughly physical,
closer in build to Michelangelo's heroic nudes than to any conventional image
of a contemplative medieval poet. Rodin began exhibiting the piece
independently in the late 1880s, sometimes still titled Poet, sometimes
both, and by 1896 had settled on the name that erased Dante from it entirely: The
Thinker, a figure now understood as everyone and no one in particular,
humanity contemplating itself rather than one specific poet contemplating his
own hell.
One name deserves more attention than it typically gets in accounts of the Gates: Camille Claudel, then a young sculptor working in Rodin's studio and beginning what would become a long and difficult personal and professional relationship with him, contributed directly to the piece, responsible in particular for sculpting the hands and feet of many of its figures. The extent of her broader influence on the work's composition remains genuinely debated among scholars, but her hands-on labor on the sculpture itself is documented fact, one easily lost in a story so thoroughly centered on a single famous name.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the damned
figures still falling across Rodin's unfinished doorway, we're recommending a
serious study of the figure who's traditionally presided over Western hell
longer than any of them.
By
Peter Grey | Scarlet Imprint
Peter
Grey's Lucifer: Princeps is precisely the kind of rigorous,
source-grounded study this magazine looks for when recommending books on
infernal subject matter: a serious historical and theological excavation of
Lucifer and the fallen angels as what Grey frames as the actual foundation myth
underlying the Western occult tradition as a whole. Rather than treating
Lucifer as a settled, static villain, Grey traces the figure's shifting
theological identity across centuries of Christian doctrine, heresy, and
artistic reimagining, exactly the kind of layered, contested figure that made
Dante's own Inferno, and by extension Rodin's Gates, culturally possible
in the first place.
Scarlet
Imprint's own reputation, built over nearly two decades on combining genuine
scholarly rigor with hands-on magical practice, shows throughout; this isn't
devotional cheerleading for a reclaimed dark figure, nor is it a dry academic
survey disconnected from lived occult practice. Grey writes as both historian
and practitioner, and the book rewards readers willing to sit with genuine
theological complexity rather than a simplified good-versus-evil narrative.
This
is dense, serious reading rather than a casual introduction, and readers new to
the history of Christian demonology may want supplementary background close at
hand. But for anyone who's just spent today's post watching Dante's own
poet-turned-universal-thinker brood eternally over a door that was never built
and never opened, Lucifer: Princeps offers the deeper theological
architecture underneath the whole infernal tradition Rodin spent thirty-seven
years trying to sculpt.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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