"The Moulin Rouge and Occult Paris" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "OCCULT PARIS: The Lost Magic of the Belle Époque"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 6
The Moulin Rouge and Occult Paris
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On October 6, 1889, a windmill made
of painted wood and electric lights opened its doors at the foot of Montmartre,
and within weeks the Moulin Rouge had become the most famous nightclub on
earth. The cancan, the absinthe, the gaslit scandal of it all, that's the Paris
most people picture. A few streets away and a few years later, two of the era's
most celebrated writers nearly killed each other in a duel over an accusation
of murder by magic.
The weapon in question wasn't a
pistol. It was a letter to the editor…
In January 1893, the Parisian newspaper Gil Blas published a letter from the best-selling author Stanislas de Guaita, denying, at length and with evident relish, the rumors circulating about him: that he had killed enemies from a distance through spellcraft, poisoned them with subtle venoms, sent toxic vapors to the nostrils of men he disliked. De Guaita's letter arrived exactly a week after the death of a defrocked priest named Abbé Boullan, a death de Guaita was being openly accused of causing by magical means. His accusers were two of the most respected names in French letters: Jules Bois, author of a bestselling study of Satanism (and close friend of McGregor Mathers, founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), and Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel À rebours had been crowned the breviary of the Decadence by the critic Arthur Symons. Bois's rebuttal, printed in the same issue, accused de Guaita of using the scandal to sell his new book and of lacking the rigor to discuss occultism seriously. The two men arranged to duel, seconds were recruited from the cream of Decadent literary society, and the whole affair was only defused when Huysmans published a hasty public apology. De Guaita's reputation never fully recovered.
That a literary feud over magical
murder could play out in a mainstream Parisian newspaper tells you something
about just how mainstream the occult had become in the years bracketing the
Moulin Rouge’s opening. This wasn't a fringe subculture operating in the
shadows of respectable Paris. It was respectable Paris, or close enough that
the line barely mattered. Bois's Le Satanisme et la
magie, published in 1895, was a genuine bestseller. So was de
Guaita's own 1890 Au seuil du mystère, and Jules Bataille’s 1892 Le
diable au XIXe siècle. Even the Catholic Church got in on the publishing
boom, releasing La revue du diable to keep the faithful informed about
the dangers supposedly lurking in all this occult enthusiasm. The market for
Satanism, in other words, was not a subculture's secret. It was saleable,
mainstream, and profitable, in exactly the same Paris that was busy selling
tickets to watch women kick their legs over their heads at the foot of
Montmartre.
The occult revival had real institutional weight behind it, too. De Guaita had founded the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix in 1888, the year before the Moulin Rouge opened, with Gérard Encausse, who published under the name “Papus,” as a leading member. Papus took a different tack from de Guaita's embattled defensiveness, publishing Le diable et l'occultisme in 1895 as a direct apologetic, arguing that occultists were working to bring France's intellectual elite back to a serious belief in the Beyond. Huysmans, for his part, had already fictionalized this entire milieu in his 1891 novel Là-bas, a thinly disguised portrait of Boullan’s own circle that became a controversial success in its own right. The book’s mystic character des Hermies offers a line that could stand as the whole era's epitaph: magic flourishes when materialism is rife.
The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot,
one of the most celebrated medical men in France, built his reputation partly
on public demonstrations of hysteria treatment that blurred uncomfortably into
theater, performances staged before male audiences that a visiting British
doctor, Ernest Hart, described in the British Medical Journal that same
January of 1893 as artificial, more picturesque eccentricity than real science.
Hart's own investigation into Parisian mesmerism led him straight into Papus's
own circle, described as the headquarters of hypnotism and the new magic. The
line between legitimate medicine and occult performance, in other words, was
far blurrier at the time than either side would have liked to admit, and the
public appetite for spectacle ran straight through both of them.
Belle Époque Paris was a city working out its anxious, ambivalent relationship with its own headlong rush into modernity, mass media, and commercialized spectacle, whether that spectacle took the shape of a cancan line or a Black Mass. The cabaret sold electric lights and a painted windmill as a new kind of nighttime wonder. The occultists sold magic, danger, and the promise of hidden knowledge as a different kind of wonder entirely, and the same newspapers, the same reading public, and more than a few of the same people consumed both without seeing much contradiction in it. A windmill opened its doors on October 6, 1889, promising Paris an evening of modern spectacle. A few streets away, an older, stranger kind of spectacle was already drawing just as large a crowd, and reading just as well in the morning papers...
OCCULT PARIS: The Lost Magic of the Belle Époque
By
Tobias Churton | Inner Traditions
Tobias Churton’s Occult Paris: The Lost Magic of the Belle Époque, published by Inner Traditions in 2016, is close to five hundred pages of exactly the material this post has only had room to sketch. Churton structures the book around real places and real documented gatherings, opening at Edmond Bailly’s bookshop in 1888, moving through dedicated chapters on de Guaita, Papus, and the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix, and devoting a full chapter to the Boullan affair this post built its opening around. He doesn't stop at the famous names, either; readers get a chapter on how the composers Erik Satie and Claude Debussy were drawn into this same Gnostic orbit, a detail that rarely makes it into more conventional occult histories, alongside material on the Gnostic Church these circles eventually built together.
What distinguishes Churton's approach
is his insistence on treating fin de siècle Parisian occultism as a serious,
continuous intellectual movement rather than a colorful sideshow to more
respectable Belle Époque history. He traces how the Rose-Croix salons of 1893
to 1897 actually functioned as gathering places, follows the development of the
Martinist order Papus helped build, and gives real weight to the personal and
professional rivalries, de Guaita and Papus included, that shaped the movement
from the inside rather than simply cataloguing its public scandals from a
distance.
This is a dense, heavily researched
work rather than a light introduction, and readers wanting a gentler entry
point might start with a general history of the Golden Dawn or Western
esotericism before tackling Churton's level of detail on the French scene
specifically. But for readers who finished today's post wanting to actually
walk the Rose-Croix salons alongside the cancan dancers, rather than simply
know they existed at the same moment, Occult Paris is the single best
door into that world currently in print.
(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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