Iván Elvira. “De Occulta Philosophia.

Literature and Occultism in Victorian Era”

De Occulta Philosophia. Literature and Occultism in Victorian Era

Or let my lamp at midnight hour

Be seen in some high lonely tower,

Where I may oft outwatch the Bear

With thrice great Hermes.

John Milton. Il Penseroso.

In this brief essay about the problematic and striking

relationship between the particular and curious philosophy often
called occultisme and the literature inscribed in this dilated period
of English History (1837-1901), normally associated to her most
powerful sovereign, the Queen Victoria, firstly we should take
account of the complexity and depth of such relation through the
ages. Certainly, it’s rather known that our contemporary sense of the concept of
“occult” necessarily has no relation with the Ancient or Modern uses of that term.
Regardless of this fact, obviously it has not been significant changes within human
inner condition from the Ancient Mediterranean World to our current days, and their
preoccupations and weaknesses are in great part similar to ours, which implies that the
astonishing references on occult phenomena including, verbi gratia, in the Ancient
“novel” Metamorphoses of Apuleius and the nineteenth ghost stories by E. F. Benson,
are more closer in essence than we are willing to affirm as historians. Surely we can
conceive those similarities almost as an exercise of Anthropology, but it’s more than
this: something in our hidden nature claims for emerge and give sense to the non-sense
using “irrational” or “magical” methods and arguments, and sometimes the writers’
speech is directed with the intention of explain or unveil those mysteries, but most times
their purpose is to veil or hide those supposed symbols which lies beneath the written
pages.

Obviously, the common and scientific conceptions of “supernatural” or

“irrational” have suffered many changes through its long journey across the centuries
and the authors, but undoubtedly the psychological mechanism which encourages them

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 Iván Elvira. “De Occulta Philosophia. Literature and Occultism in Victorian Era”

stills intact, at least in our Western Civilization. On the other hand, we have chosen the
nineteenth century’s approach on the matter precisely because of the fine and inquisitive
perspective supported by the wide range of writers, occultists, philosophers and
scientists who dealt with the Esoteric matter in that period.

And first of all, we’re obeying to define what we understand when we apply the
term “Occultism” to these nineteenth currents of thought and literary masterpieces,
because its definition is in most cases vague and mistakenly assimilable to related
concepts such esoterism and hermetism. In fact, we ought to delimit this term to those
opuses inspired in a pristine hermetic tradition, which appeared for the first time in our
century, and invariably based in a confuse joint of philosophies mainly inherited from
the eighteenth theosophists. Naturally, our “occultists” tried hard to support their
authority in more noble and ancient sources, but honestly their approach to the previous
authors normally involved in the so called Western Esotericism was derisory in most
cases. In short, the Occultism is an obscure philosophy which claims to be a “new” way
to face the physical reality and a resource capable to unveil the spiritual dimension. In
some cases, this new approach was positioned against the Christian churches and the
modern parameters of the society and the positive science, but it does not work in the
same manner in all cases, as we will see. Anyway, it’s suggestive the opinion of Nelly
Emont when she alluded to une crise1 performed during the latter years of the
nineteenth century to explain the apparition in stage of these occultist currents.

At first glance, we can observe in the occultist literature of the period, some
tendencies at the time to tackle the esoteric phenomena, and surely will be useful the
accurate appreciation of the erudite and Victorian writer M. R. James, who warned us
about the risk of ruin a good ghost story using the technical jargon constructed by the
occultists; in other words, if our purpose is to perform an optimal climax for the terror,
we should occult the mechanism which support the fiction, trying to avoid any sort of
murky and esoteric lucubration. Certainly, we agree with Dr. James in regards to the
horror genre, but during our period we can identify many other incursions in the esoteric
phenomenon, and aimed by different mottos. Fully inscribed in the nineteenth occult
currents of thought, we find the work and philosophical backgrounds of some writers
like A. Blackwood, G. Meyrink, H. Jennings, C. Flammarion, A. Machen, C. Maturin,
1
Cf. EMONT, N., "Thèmes du fantastique et de l'occultisme en France à la fin du XIXe siècle", in La
littérature fantastique: colloque de Cérisy, Paris: A. Michel, 1991, pp. 137-156.
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 Iván Elvira. “De Occulta Philosophia. Literature and Occultism in Victorian Era”

Bulwer-Lytton, A. Conan Doyle, H. de Balzac or B. Stoker. Likewise, those

personalities found egregious precedents in German quills like Goethe and Novalis, or
in the magnificent visionary creation of William Blake. In addition, there’s a large list
of writers integrated in the supernatural horror tales, gothic, symbolist and ghost stories,
and other related fiction genres which merely catch a glimpse of the occult, with no
other intention but to create an atmosphere of horror, mystery or restlessness. Finally we
will mention some writers inscribed in non-related literary genres who deal with the
occult obliquely.

But before to achieve a recount of those occult writers inscribed in this

passionate era, we should come a halt and highlight which are the main features
attached to the literature inscribed in our century, some of them parallel to the Faivre’s
mainstream considerations affirmed in his renowned Accès de l’ésotérisme occidental,
but in this case exclusively concerned to our period. In other words, we do consider this
lavish amount or scientific literature as gifted by the following characteristics: Firstly,
the exaltation of the so called “living nature”; secondly, the reconstruction of a holistic
and esoteric conception of the religious experience; thirdly, the nostalgic attempt to
recover a pre-scientific visions of the universe; and finally and fourthly, the rise of the
Occultism as an established current of thought, along with other related currents such
Spiritualism or Mesmerism. Certainly, and through the vision of these nineteenth
hermetists, the modern science has failed at the time to comprehend the veritable
essence of the cosmos, since it was considered as a dead, hazardous and nonsensical
mechanism. And precisely was the astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) the
champion of this beautiful consideration in the philosophical part of his opus Les
Merveilles célestes: lectures du soir2:

“La philosophie doit aller plus loin. Elle ne doit pas se borner à voir sous une
forme plus ou moins distincte le grand corps de la nature ; mais, étendant la main, il
doit sentir sous l’enveloppe matérielle la vie qui circule à grands flots. L’empire de
Dieu n’est pas l’empire de la mort : c’est l’empire de la vie”.

And that’s the reason why a universe ruled by spiritual forces and beings was so
attractive for those nineteenth minds, linking in this sense directly with the so called
“magical thought”. In addition to this important feature, we easily identify a tendency of

2
Cf. FLAMMARION, C., Les merveilles célestes: lectures du soir, Paris: Hachette, 1872, p. 346.

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 Iván Elvira. “De Occulta Philosophia. Literature and Occultism in Victorian Era”

those new esoteric speculators to reinterpret the religious experience using heterodox
and romantic terminology, and the exaltation of the artistic and spiritual dimension of
Christian religion supported by Chateubriand, or the mystical experience constructed in
Novalis or Blake’s opuses, or vaguely in the case of Sade, Baudelaire, Lautréamont or
Rimbaud’s pagan and savage dimension in the pursuit of épater le bourgeois, bear out
such theory. Even recent works have tried to elucidate the esoteric elements which
inspired the background of writers like Balzac, inscribed a priori in the Realism3.

Whatsoever, we should revaluate the importance of the occult and mystical

fashions which crawling in our period, and great Spanish novels such La Regenta
(1884-85) and Fortunata y Jacinta (1886-87), by L. A. Clarín and B. P. Galdós
respectively, bear testimony of that peculiar intellectual milieu which wandered in
Europe. Moreover, the well-known philosophical assimilation between God and His
Creation, frequently named with the terms of immanentism, pantheism or deism, found
important defenders in literary lost characters and antiheroes like Fernando Ossorio
(Camino de perfección, 1902), obviously against the catholic dogmas. On the other
hand, is notorious the case of Jakob Böhme (ca.1575-1624) and Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688-1772), and their literary influence in gloomy, thoughtful and tortured characters
like Roderick Usher (The Fall of House Usher, 1839), Gottfried Wolfgang (The
adventure of the German student), and even in the out of period Harry Haller (Der
Steppenwolf, 1927); and precisely such evocative, lonely and bizarre human conditions
was extremely useful for Edgar Allan Poe to recreate the distinctive awe atmosphere
which lies in great part of his masterpieces, and certainly in the very remote entrails of
modern men.

Nevertheless, and accordingly with the clever perspective supported by W.

Hanegraaff4, we must try to avoid the wide-spread tendency of devaluate those occultist
elements, focusing our attention on the irrational and conservative objectives and tenets
which hypothetically aim these heterodox currents of thought. On the contrary, in many
ways these esoteric conceptions have encouraged the birth of modern world in scientific
terms. As a literary paradigm of such assumption, we can find in the immortal opus

3
Cf. LOZANO SAMPEDRO, M. T., dissertation: El esoterismo en la obra de Balzac, Salamanca, 1990.
You can read it online in: http://www.revistaazogue.com/hermetica/documentos.htm
4
Cf. my academic project within Azogue Journal: http://www.revistaazogue.com/hermetica/Julio08.htm

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 Iván Elvira. “De Occulta Philosophia. Literature and Occultism in Victorian Era”

Frankenstein (1818) some references to the youthful flirtings of our Dr. Frankenstein
with the old and dusty books written by Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535), Albertus
Magnus (ca.1200-1280) and Paracelsus (ca.1493-1541), which bear witness to the
inclination of modern scientists to the so called “natural philosophers” from the
Renaissance, in their pursuit to conceive a panvitalist vision of the whole universe and
the rise of a scienza nuova.

The passionate portrait of a living nature organically linked between all of its
elements and the anatomia essentialis defended by Paracelsus, seduced our wretched
Mary Shelley’s child, in the same way of many other real scientists during the century.
And we already shall know the mainstream idea which lies underneath: the restless
quest of the ens spirituale within living matter, or more precisely, a sort of medicine
science entirely based in van Helmont’s concept of archeus influus, the unifying
principle latent in all organic form of life. In short, the triumph of Prometheus’ search in
the pursuit of the divine fire; the principle which rule the creation of life in base of dead
matter, using in that difficult chore the procedures of the alchemists, as Paracelsus did
in regards to the perturbing figure of the homunculus. Briefly, doctor Frankenstein tried
“to read in the book of Nature with the eyes of the spirit”, following his master’s
maxim.

And naturally we have arrived in this flowing argumentation to the Alchemy.

Obviously this is not the adequate place to undertake any rigorous approach to the
historical background of this phenomenon, but it’s an unavoidable task to make a halt
and explain slightly its relation with very well-known writers of the period like Goethe
(Faust I and Faust II 1808-1832), M. R. James (Casting the runes, 1911), Gustav
Meyrink (Der Golem, 1915), E. G. Bulwer-Lytton (Zanoni, 1842), or even H. P.
Lovecraft (with the short tale The Alchemist, 1908). Certainly, in many ways the
Goethe’s approach to the alchemy was merely a poetic attempt to introduce his
passionate readings of Paracelsus, Basilius Valentinus, Georg von Welling and Anton
Joseph Kirchweger in his writings; but probably we ought to focus our attention on his
most renowned character Faust, in order to explain his philosophical obsessions and
literary intentions. Undoubtedly, his unfortunate character yearns for a divine and
hidden science; he got to meet all human knowledge and now is craving to go beyond.
The scholastic measures seem short for our hero, but the magic and alchemical rituals fit

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 Iván Elvira. “De Occulta Philosophia. Literature and Occultism in Victorian Era”

perfectly for his very new purpose. Certainly the same hope and desire identified in
regards to the ancient practitioners of magical mysticism or late antiquity’s alchemists,
both representative of the spirit of those wises who yearn for a new “science of occult
virtues”, useful to unveil the secrets of Nature, as Festugière noticed in his Révélation5.
Unequivocally, the main difference stems from the mephistophelian nature of the pact
between the evil forces and our unruly character, either Faust or Melmoth.

Regarding to the alchemical and magical topics dealt in this and other nineteenth
and early twentieth opuses (the panacea and the elixir of eternal life, the homunculus
and the golem, the rebis, and finally the lapis philosophorum), is notorious for a
historian their ignorance and their marvelous poetic license. Anyway, we should take
account of the theosophical, pietist and spiritual influences of such alchemical
conceptions, in the new theoretical sense given by celebrated opuses like the
Amphiteatrum sapientiae aeternae solius verae (1595) of Heinrich Khunrath (1560-
1605), or in the Opus mago-cabbalisticum et theosophicum (1735), by Welling (1655-
1727), cited above as a great inspiration for Goethe’s Faust. Overall, those new spiritual
or theosophical alchemists gave more importance to the salvation in Christian terms,
rather than any sort of greasy alchemical task, and this new “alchemy” suits perfectly
with their literary purposes and religious anxiety, as well as for the intentions of French
occultists like Gerard Encausse (Papus), Eliphas Lévi or Stanislas de Guaita, who
widely comment the Amphiteatrum. It’s beyond doubt that this murky and metaphysical
concept of the occult sciences was a strong literary inspiration for many writers and
artists during the analyzed period, and such insane lucubrations became an excellent
argument at the time to recreate many unforgettable horrified and oppressive
atmospheres.

And continuing with the relationship between the nineteenth literature and
modern science, inevitable we have flowed into those wide-spread incipient pseudo-
scientific currents like the Mesmerism and the Spiritualism, which had a tremendous
influence in the literary panorama of the period. Anyhow, once again we should not
forget that the problem of death, the spiritual world, the apparitions, specters and ghosts,

5
FESTUGIÈRE, A.-J., La révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste, París: Les Belles Lettres. Vol. I. L'astrologie
et les sciences occultes, Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 1986, p. 41.

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 Iván Elvira. “De Occulta Philosophia. Literature and Occultism in Victorian Era”

have leaded a great part of the spilt ink and not necessarily regarding the occultist
literature, despite of the disdain of many renowned occultists towards the Spiritualism
movement. In any case, the ghost topic was widely treated by many writers and
occultists during that period, occasionally as a mere diversion but sometimes as a
meditate way of express a firm belief in a transcendent reality.

For instance, we discover in the sarcastic genius of Guy de Maupassant, a great

interest in the animal magnetism and in the hidden and invisible creatures who prowling
out of sight (Le Horla, 1887), as well as physiological conceptions defended by pseudo-
scientists like Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) and Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828),
the introducers of a suggestive way to describe the human nature through the face’s
features, extensively used by writers like Charlotte Brontë (The Professor, 1857), or
Balzac again in his Physiologie du marriage (1829). It’s also remarkable the influence
of mysterious phenomena like the magnetism and the hypnotism again in the case of
Balzac and his novel Ursule Miroüet (1841), or Maurice Maeterlinck and his Le Grand
Secret (1927). And finally it was a physician, James Braid (1795-1860), who following
the Mesmer’s teachings introduced the concept of hypnosis in the equation, giving to
Poe the chance of write one of the most frightening horror tales ever: The facts in the
case of M. Valdemar (1845).

Yet it was by the hand of the occultist writer Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
(1803-1873), when in our opinion the nineteenth occultism got its zenith. And probably
his novel Zanoni is the most comprehensive masterpiece conceived by the occultists
during that period, and there’re many reasons to support this assert. Firstly because of
the close relationship of his author with other renowned occultists, his membership in
the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), and the evident encyclopedic knowledge
demonstrated in this and other occult tales like The Haunted and the Haunters (1857), A
Strange Story (1862) or Vril, the Power of the Coming Race (1871). The author of those
passionate tales reveals a thorough interest in the so called hermetic sciences, beside the
influence of an animal magnetism assimilated to the ancient astromagical energeia.
Particularly in Zanoni6, we assist in the fourth book, signified called The Dweller of the

6
Cf. my academic project within Azogue Journal:
http://www.revistaazogue.com/hermetica/febrero10.html

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 Iván Elvira. “De Occulta Philosophia. Literature and Occultism in Victorian Era”

Threshold, to an initiation path in the extraordinary secrets of the Rosicrucians, the

oldest and most powerful hermetic order:

"that there were no mystic and solemn unions of men seeking the same end
through the same means before the Arabians of Damus, in 1378, taught to a wandering
German the secrets which founded the Institution of the Rosicrucians? I allow,
however, that the Rosicrucians formed a sect descended from the greater and earlier
school. They were wiser than the Alchemists,—their masters are wiser than they"
(Book IV, chapter II).

Zanoni and Mejnour, both extraordinary characters adorned with the aureole of
the occult sanctity, defenders of the eternal secrets of Nature; the first one entirely
devoted to the beauty and brightness of the “sublunar world”, and the second to the
melancholy of the heavens above. Undoubtedly, Zanoni is one of the best exponents of
the occult conception within the esoteric currents of thought. And for our purposes, it’s
important to remark -and relatively unknown- the fact that apparently Lévi traveled to
England in order to perform a theurgic ritual through the mediation of Lord Lytton, a
ritual in which Apollonius of Tyana -the ancient wise registered by the Greek historian
Philostratus-, appeared and revealed some cabbalistic truths to our French occultist, or
at least that’s what he affirmed in his Dogma et Rituel de la Haute Magie, and Butler
reflected such amusing and novelistic episode in his famous Ritual Magic under the
title: “Apollonius of Tyana in London”.

As a conclusion, we would like to call your attention on the fact that many of the
protagonists of those literary works, either heroes or antiheroes, and counterpart or not
of their gloomy creators, have showed a wild tendency to go beyond human
possibilities, directly through the inner places of matter, spirit and au-delà worlds. In
short, this inclination for the irrational and obscure side of human and divine essences
that we effortlessly find in those occult writers, is the scion of a contradictory epoch full
of splendorous décadence and rage. A bastard child inclined to kill his holy fathers and
the deformed and malevolent image reflected in the mirror of Léon Spilliaert and Dr.
Jekyll’s failed experiment. An insane introspective eager to dismantle the very hidden
nature of things, and a disorganized attack against the orthodoxy. It was the Nietzsche
and Schiele’s defense of the all-mighty matter against the frayed consciousness, and the
piteous journey of the doomed across the forgotten rivers of the Hades.