ABSTRACT
“Materialism has had its day” runs the masthead to L’Initiation (1888–1908), a Parisian monthly journal produced by “Papus” (Gérard Encausse, 1865–1916), and behind it an “occult revival,” or better, Hermetic movement crystallized in Paris in the late 1880s as outstanding personalities responded to historical forces and ideas set adrift from mainstream religion in the French Revolution’s long aftermath. The movement cannot be separated from the equally entwined artistic movements of Decadence and Symbolism, whose perception of cultural decay promoted inner questing for an underlying sense of eternity to the universe: what has been, is, and always will be. Following the “godfather” of decadence Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), decadents opposed materialist realism with “occult” ideas reflecting the immaterial, imaginary, and symbolic. In 1887 theosophist Édouard Schuré (1849–1929), influential author of The Great Initiates, commented in Anatole Baju’s journal Le Décadent:
Never has the aspiration to the spiritual life or to the invisible world – an aspiration opposed by the materialistic theories of the scientists and by fashionable opinion – been more serious and more genuine. That aspiration can be found in the regrets and doubts, the black despair and even the blasphemies of our Naturalist novelists and our Decadent poets. Never has the human spirit had a more profound awareness of the inadequacy, the poverty, the unreality of this life. Never has it aspired more ardently to an invisible Beyond without managing to believe in it.
(Jullian 1971: 258)