A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult
Gary Lachman
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1560256567
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Originated these men, who seem to arise from the bowels of the earth, who start into existence with their plans and their projects, their tenets and their thunders, their means and ferocious resolves; whence, I say, this devouring sect? Whence this swarm of adepts, these systems, this frantic rage against the altar and the throne, against every institution, whether civil or religious, so much respected by our ancestors? The answer is out of the bosom of freemasonry. We've seen that to some.
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.
Baudelaire is one of the tragedies of literature. Dead at the age of 46, he produced only a small body of work, and his reputation rests effectively on a single collection of poems, the infamous Les Fleurs du mal (1857). Nevertheless, this seemingly meagre output was perhaps the single most influential work written by a poet in the 19th century. To the contemporary reader, Baudelaire's friend Nerval remains pretty much unknown, and Gautier, to whom he dedicated Les Fleurs du mal, is mostly.
Exotic, Jeanne Duval was illiterate, unfaithful, malicious and, for a good part of the time, drunk. It is difficult to see what Baudelaire saw in her, except for the typical Romantic need for an impossible love affair. (Like Novalis and Nerval, Baudelaire became deeply obsessed with unattainable women, and remained devoted to his mother throughout his life; she too had absolutely no understanding of his genius.) It is also possible that, as one critic suggests, Baudelaire's early sexual exploits.
Dark and profound, SaintMartin worked at unifying Boehme's vision with his earlier Martinist doctrines. He seemed to have sensed that his last days were upon him, and writing to the end, after a brief fit of apoplexy, he died on 13 October 1803. Followers of his ideas came to be called Martinists as well, causing some confusion among occult historians. Saint-Martin's central theme is that mankind's mission is to `repair' the world. A similar doctrine appears in the Kabbalah, in which creation is.