Occult Paris

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The shop at 29 rue de Trévise sold books, and the books were the least of it. The Librairie du Merveilleux — the Bookshop of the Marvelous — opened in 1888 in the ninth arrondissement, founded by a Spanish-born medical student named Gérard Encausse, who signed himself Papus, together with the publisher Lucien Chamuel (born Lucien Mauchel). It was bookshop, publishing imprint, lecture hall, and reading room in a single address: the classrooms of Papus’s Groupe indépendant d’études ésotériques were annexed to it, and from its door went out Stanislas de Guaïta’s Le Temple de Satan (1891), Joséphin Péladan’s Amphithéâtre volumes, the posthumous works of Éliphas Lévi, and, from November 1890, the weekly Le Voile d’Isis, which announced itself as “the first weekly organ of occultism that France possesses.” The young Yvon Le Loup, not yet remade as Sédir, walked in off the street and was drawn shelf by shelf toward the interior of the French occult revival. That was the design. The revival built no temple precinct in its capital because the capital was the precinct: a city-sized sanctuary whose stations were bookshops, galleries, cabarets, hospital wards, museum libraries, and rented apartments, strung along both banks of the Seine.

The geography ran in two constellations. On the right bank stood the rue de Trévise; the Durand-Ruel gallery at 11 rue Le Peletier, the Impressionists’ dealer, where the art-religion of the Rose+Croix would stage its debut; and the cabaret belt of lower Montmartre — the Chat Noir, the Auberge du Clou on the avenue Trudaine — where the revival’s music was written. On the left bank lay the Hôpital de la Charité, where occult science and medicine shared a laboratory; the seventh-arrondissement apartment where a London magus would consecrate a temple; and, facing Notre-Dame from 11 quai Saint-Michel, the bookshop of Henri Chacornac, a bookbinder’s son who issued his first catalog in 1890 under the name Librairie générale des sciences occultes and whose shop became the milieu’s permanent meeting point. Booksellers were the revival’s sextons. They kept the doors, kept the registers, and outlasted the congregations.

The founder was a Paris shoemaker’s son. Alphonse-Louis Constant, born in 1810, was formed for the priesthood at the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet and at Saint-Sulpice, and left the seminary in 1836 without final vows; the suppressed Bible de la liberté (1841) cost him eight months in Sainte-Pélagie prison — radical socialism was his first heresy, magic his second. In 1854 he published, as Éliphas Lévi, the first volume of Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, and modern occultisme had its founding book and its founding city. Lévi spent his last decades teaching private pupils from his left-bank lodgings: on 3 December 1861 Kenneth Mackenzie, envoy of the English Rosicrucians, climbed to the apartment on the avenue du Maine, and the framework expounded there passed in time into the cipher papers from which the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was built — an afternoon’s conversation that re-seeded English ceremonial magic. Lévi died in Paris on 31 May 1875 and was buried in the Cimetière parisien d’Ivry; in 1881 the remains were moved to a common grave whose place is no longer known. The man who renamed magic lies unmarked beneath the southern rim of his city.

The succession was sought across the grave itself. On 11 January 1886 the young Encausse, who had been reading Lévi in the Bibliothèque nationale on the rue de Richelieu, sat at a séance table and called the dead master. Two years later the building began, and for a decade it did not stop. October 1888: the journal L’Initiation, which would run until 1914, its contributor list a census of the milieu — Guaïta, Péladan, F.-Ch. Barlet, Sédir, Marc Haven, Victor-Émile Michelet, Chamuel. The same year: the Librairie du Merveilleux, and the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix, founded by Guaïta with Papus, Péladan, and Oswald Wirth as a graded school of the Kabbalah. November 1889: the Groupe indépendant d’études ésotériques, offering a dozen classes a month on Kabbalah, alchemy, the tarot, and the history of hermetic philosophy — ninety-six groups, branches, and correspondents by Papus’s own 1892 count — reorganized in March 1897 as the Faculté des sciences hermétiques, an open university of the occult granting symbolic degrees. In 1891 the Supreme Council of the Ordre Martiniste was constituted with Augustin Chaboseau, giving Martinism its working order and Paris its lodges: Le Sphinx, Hermanubis, Velléda, Sphinge. In 1893 Jules Doinel’s Église Gnostique de France consecrated Papus a bishop, Tau Vincent. Through it all the organizer held a hospital post — under the neurologist Jules-Bernard Luys at the Charité, Papus directed the hypnology laboratory from about 1890 and defended his Paris medical thesis on 7 July 1894. And in September 1889, with the Universal Exposition filling the city, the Congrès spirite et spiritualiste international brought Spiritism’s delegates to the occultists’ capital. The pattern had set: bookshops as outer court, journals as circulating blood, orders as the graded initiatic interior.

Péladan seceded — the “war of the two roses” ran in manifestos from 1890 to 1893 — and in May 1891 consolidated his own Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal, an order whose sacrament was art. Its liturgy went on public display on 10 March 1892, when the first Salon de la Rose+Croix opened at Durand-Ruel under Carlos Schwabe’s poster and ran to 10 April. Erik Satie — pianist at the Chat Noir until a quarrel moved him in 1891 to the Auberge du Clou — was by then the order’s official composer and chapel-master; his Sonneries de la Rose+Croix sounded over the opening, and he wrote Le Fils des étoiles for the Sâr’s ceremonies. The first Salon drew tens of thousands — twenty-two thousand by one count, more than fifty thousand by another — with Verlaine and Zola among the crowds. Five more followed through 1897, moving to the Palais du Champ-de-Mars, the Galerie des Arts réunis, and Georges Petit’s gallery; for six springs the dealer galleries of Paris served as chapels.

The city’s dark border ran through the press. Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Là-Bas (1891), which put the era’s Satanism on the boulevards, drew on the defrocked priest Joseph-Antoine Boullan of Lyon and on the magical war between Boullan and Guaïta’s circle. When Boullan died suddenly in the first days of January 1893, Jules Bois charged in Gil Blas, with Huysmans concurring in print, that Guaïta had killed him by sorcery at a distance. Guaïta denied it in a published letter, and the quarrel went to the dueling ground: Bois and Guaïta exchanged pistol shots that missed; Bois and Papus fought with swords, and both took light wounds. For some weeks bewitchment was front-page matter in Paris, answerable on the field of honor.

The capital also received. In May 1892 S. L. MacGregor Mathers and Moina Mathers left London for Paris, settling first in the rue Miromesnil and then, from 1 January 1893, at 1 avenue Duquesne near the École Militaire. There, on the evening of Saturday 6 January 1894 — the charter signed by W. Wynn Westcott three days earlier — the Ahathoor Temple No. 7 of the Golden Dawn was consecrated at half past eight, Annie Horniman officiating as Soror Fortiter et Recte. The order’s mother temple remained in London; Paris held its chief: twenty-seven initiates, fifteen women and twelve men, across sixty-four meetings between 1894 and 1900; dormancy after the schism of 1900; the public Rites of Isis that Mathers and Moina staged around 1899–1900; revival from 1909 under his Alpha et Omega into the 1920s. Mathers never lived in London again. He died in Paris in November 1918.

The milieu’s east gate stood at the place d’Iéna, where Émile Guimet’s museum of religions opened in 1889. From 1891 Guimet staged Buddhist ceremonies in its library, led by monks brought from Asia, and the ceremony of 27 June 1898, presided over by a Mongolian lama, drew Georges Clemenceau and a young Alexandra David-Néel, whose vocation began among that library’s books. In occult Paris even the museums initiated.

The deaths came in series. Guaïta died in December 1897, the year of the last Salon. In June 1908 the milieu mustered once more at full strength — the Congrès spiritualiste and its attendant masonic convent at the Palais des Sociétés Savantes, 8 rue Danton, Spiritualists and fringe-rite Masons and Martinists together, Theodor Reuss handing Papus a patent, a young René Guénon sitting on a committee. Then the war. Papus served as a front-line military physician, contracted tuberculosis, and died in Paris on 25 October 1916; he is buried in Père-Lachaise, in the ninety-third division. The institutional engine stopped with him, and the orders splintered. Péladan and Mathers followed in 1918. The afterglow burned where the revival had always kept its fire: in a bookshop. At 11 quai Saint-Michel, Paul Chacornac, Henri’s son and author of the foundational Lévi biography (1926), ran the fourth series of Le Voile d’Isis from 1920 to 1935 — the journal that had begun as a weekly on the rue de Trévise and moved to the quai in 1905 — and in January 1936 he renamed it Études traditionnelles, the vehicle of Guénon’s Traditionalism: under one roof, the house journal of the revival changed state.

From the quai Saint-Michel to the Guggenheim

The recovery of this geography has its own stations. Christopher McIntosh’s Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (1972; reprinted by SUNY Press, 2011) gave the milieu its first standard account in English. The Chacornac archive entered the academy through Jean-Pierre Laurant, whose 1986 report to the École pratique des hautes études (available through Persée) documents the quai Saint-Michel shop as the revival’s most durable institution. David Allen Harvey’s Beyond Enlightenment (Northern Illinois University Press, 2005) treats the milieu’s politics, reading Papus’s institution-building as a synthesis of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment currents. The Salons returned to the museum wall in 2017, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum staged Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897, Vivien Greene’s recovery of Péladan’s six exhibitions as a prehistory of abstraction. The fullest single portrait of the street map — people, addresses, salons, cabarets — is Tobias Churton’s Occult Paris: The Lost Magic of the Belle Époque (Inner Traditions, 2016); the name was always the inevitable one, and Churton holds it in print. Behind these stand the insiders’ own records: Jean Bricaud’s period account of the Huysmans–Boullan affair, Huysmans occultiste et magicien (1913), and Victor-Émile Michelet’s memoir of the circle, Les Compagnons de la hiérophanie (1937).

The walk can still be made in an afternoon. In at the door on the rue de Trévise, where the first book was sold to anyone; up the rue Le Peletier, where painting served as ritual; across the river to the quai Saint-Michel, where the registers were kept; west along the Seine to the avenue Duquesne, where the temple received its twenty-seven; out to the place d’Iéna, where the lamas sang. Read in that order, the addresses compose a curriculum — bookshop, gallery, archive, temple, sanctuary of the foreign gods. Paris between Lévi’s first volume and Chacornac’s last series was a single initiatic text written in street addresses, and the way into it never changed: in off the street, through the shelves, toward the interior.

→ In the library: Papus — The Tarot of the Bohemians (1910)

→ Related: French Occultism · Eliphas Levi Alphonse Louis Constant · Papus Gerard Encausse · Golden Dawn London · Martinism · Joris Karl Huysmans