Esotericism in art ( Notes on occult aesthetics )

Victor-Émile Michelet

1890

Aesthetics: uncertain and stumbling science! However, it rests on a fixed base.

Beauty has its absolute. The Ideal is one. All the formulas of Beauty given by the different human geniuses, all the great works of art are inspired by this unique Ideal, always the same despite the diversity of the forms it takes. Thus the light sends differently colored rays when it passes through the prism.

I imagine a septenary of great artists, listed at random: Dante, Shakespeare, Vinci, Dürer, Beethoven, Poe, Hugo. It is the same and unique Ideal which shines in varied forms through this prism of souls.

For immutable Beauty is sister of immutable Truth. I will try, in these insufficient notes, to discover the essence of Beauty in the synthesis in which occultists confine their notions about the World, then, by examples, to demonstrate that many great geniuses have known this synthesis.

I. — THE KABBALISTIC FOUNDATION OF BEAUTY

Kabbalah establishes ten manifestations of absolute Being; these are the ten Sephiroth that the Sepher Jesirah calls “the ten ineffable Spirits of the living God”. The tenth of the Sephiroth having an existence distinct from the nonary formed by the others, these nine Sephiroth are divided into three triads, each of which corresponds to one of the three Worlds.

The first triad is that of the divine world, the metaphysical world; the second belongs to the intellectual world, and the third to the natural world. Thus appears the trinitarian series that the Sepher names the Number, the Numbering and the Numbered.

Now, the third Sephire of the second triad, or the sixth of the Sephiroth, is Beauty, it is Tiphereth .

To determine the relationships of Tiphereth , Beauty, with the first five Sephiroth, the first three belonging to the divine world and the other two belonging to the intellectual world, I use the pantacular process.

Establishing the triangle of the divine world, I will write the figure:

Constructing the triangle of the intellectual world I will obtain this second figure:

At the top of the triangle of the divine world, Kether , the Crown, expresses, in the abstraction of the Kabbalistic concept, absolute Being, that is to say the most vast conception that thought forms of Substance, Kether s 'leans on Chochmah and Binah .

Chochmah , Intelligence, is the Logos, the male, active, generative principle, through which creation takes place, the phallus of conceptuality of which Binah is the matrix.

Binah , Wisdom, is the female, passive receptive form of the Spirit.

In the second triangle, Tiphereth , Beauty, is the result of Chesed and Geburah .

Chésed , male, active principle of the intellectual world, expresses Grace and Magnificence, — phallus of intellectuality of which Geburah is the matrix.

Geburah , Rigor, expresses the deconcentration power of Grace, of Chésed .

By virtue of the principle of analogy ( sunt quœ superius sicut quœ inferius ), I oppose the two triangles drawn above, in order to obtain a senary pantacle

The third triad of the Sephiroth, Jesod, Generation or the very Foundation of being, is the result of Netzah, male principle of development, and Hod, Glory, female principle of the creative force, preserver of form.

Opposing this triad of Sephiroth to that dominated by Tiphereth, I will obtain the second senary pantacle below:

Thus, according to these two figures, Tiphereth, Beauty, is a mirage, a reflection of Kether, of absolute being, of that which is closest to the mysterious Ainsoph. Likewise, it is a reflection of Jesod, of the essence of the world.

All the great poets, all the great artists have had an intuition of this nature of Beauty. In their hymns to its glory, they proclaimed, directly or virtually, in their supreme language, this notion of the essence of Beauty, divined by their genius.

II. — ESOTERISM IN THE WORK OF BEAUTY

From the world of conceptuality where the living idea of ​​Beauty radiates, let us pass into the world where it is realized. Let's go from one plan to another. Let us leave occult aesthetics to consider the work of Beauty.

There are men whose mission is to reveal Beauty. These are the Poets.

What is the Poet?

This is one of the various incarnations in which the Revealer, the Hero, the man who Carlyle calls a messenger sent from the impenetrable infinity with news for us , manifests himself. This conception of the Hero, expressed by a genius visionary, is the direct consequence of another conception universally admitted by occultists and mystics, and formulated thus by Novalis: Every created being is a revelation in the flesh. We will find this conception in all the sacred poems of antiquity. Thus, in the great epics of India, in the Ramayana , the child Krishna, the predestined child who must become a savior of men, is a divine incarnation, and Rama, the future hero, is always crowned, in the poem, with a constant epithet: it is called: “duty incarnate”, just as, in Homer, Ulysses is always “the industrious Ulysses”. Contemporary esoteric historians, such as MM. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre and Edouard Schuré are accustomed to considering the heroes who arrive on earth to give some powerful boost to the evolution of humanity.

Carlyle says: The Hero is he who lives in the inner sphere of things, in the True, the Divine and the Eternal, which always exist, unnoticed by most, under the Temporary, the Trivial. His being is in that. He declares this outside. His life is a shred of the eternal heart of Nature itself; — the lives of all men too. But the majority of the weak do not know the Fact and are unfaithful to it most of the time.

The Hero grasps the mystery from the moral side; he teaches Good and Evil, duty and prohibition. He fixes on the crowds a belief based on what he has guessed about the mysterious and uniform Truth. So he is a prophet, like Moses, like Mohammed. If he grasps the mystery from the original side, if he penetrates the sphere of the Principles, without building up a belief within the reach of the crowds, without popularizing his vision and his science, he is a Magus, like Apollonius of Tyana, like Paracelsus, like Khunrath.

If he penetrates the world of Laws and reveals to men not principles, but laws, he is a scientist, like Kepler, like Newton. He evolves, in the intellectual world, rather than in the world of the Divine, rather than in the world of Principles.

If he penetrates the mystery of colors and shapes, or sounds, he reveals Beauty: he is Phidias or Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Beethoven. If he has grasped the mystery of the aesthetic side, as Hegel says, he reveals Beauty, he is a poet, in the fullness of triumphant force: he is Dante, Shakespeare, Shelley.

The poet must have penetrated what Goethe called “the open secret.”

***

A prejudice, which is beginning to disappear, an old commonplace, which has been too widespread, claims that between the world of science and the world of poetry, there is an abyss. We have often heard it said that science and poetry are two enemy sisters, two irreconcilable antagonists.

For anyone who has even glimpsed the occult synthesis, for anyone who has ventured a glance at the world of the Divine, this antagonism no more exists than that found between various religions and science.

Just as each religion is a revelation of the Universal truth, of what constitutes High Science, the definitive science, that which is not limited to knowing the Laws, but which goes back to the First Cause; in the same way all poetry is the expressed vision of a ray emanating from this universal Truth.

A contemporary poet, who had intuitions, like all poets, Mr. Sully-Prudhomme, believed he glimpsed, in the unknown of the future, the coming into the world of poets different from those we have seen until now . These new poets, imbued with finally definitive science, freed from current groping, these new poets, having known the ultimate secrets of nature and the gods, would sing majestic hymns, poems celebrating the harmony of the worlds. They would write, instead of troubled, anxious poems, calm and noble poems, without cries of anguish; they would write

On higher objects poems without tears.

I do not think that the beautiful poems of the future will be without tears, because then they would lose the character which fascinates and charms us the most, their character of humanity.

But we could respond to these verses by Mr. Sully Prudhomme that in all times poets have had an intuition of the universal truth. Many, especially in our time, where few men have turned over the old magic books in which one has to search a lot to find something, many have guessed the Mystery; they knew the Causes, they penetrated the sphere of the Divine. Their genius before them tore the triple veils under which the goddess Isis, dark Nature, hides.

And when they had seen, when they had penetrated these mysteries, to explain them to us, they were obliged to put themselves within our reach, to make what they knew accessible to us. They therefore always showed what they knew by wrapping it in the wrappings of the symbol, by enclosing it in legends, in myths. In this way, the reader understood what he could; he climbed in their work as far as his own spirit allowed him to climb.

Thus, according to the biblical allegory, when Moses came down from Sinai, where he had contemplated God face to face, he returned among men keeping a dazzling light on his face, so that, so as not to blind men by the radiation from his face, he was forced to hide his head with a thick veil.

***

Among poets, among artists, there have been some, in all times, who were guided in their work not only by their intuition, but also by an in-depth study of things in nature that we consider secret; who have known the synthesis of what is called — more or less incorrectly — occult science. There were poets and artists who were what we call Initiates, occultists, magists.

There are very many of these poets, these artists who were initiates. They teem with these works of art which, under the formula of Beauty, reveal scientific truths of the highest order.

Thus, the initiates of our time, those who seek in the books of the libraries, in the systems of the philosophers, in the theories of the Kabbalists, in the symbols of the alchemists, in everything that has touched on the things of the Mystery, something of the Universal truth, those who want to penetrate the secrets of high science must study Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Aeschylus, etc., etc. They will find lessons in the paintings of Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, in ancient statuary, in ancient architecture, in the lyric dramas of Richard Wagner, etc., etc.

Let us not linger too long in the art of antiquity and in the little-known art of the Orient. All this is too far from us, although immortal.

We know that the sphinxes of Egypt, these sculptures which appear to our scholars to be fanciful figures, are what initiates call pantacles, that is to say representations, in a non-arbitrary form, of initiatory conceptions. We know that the man who understood all the ideas contained in the form of the Sphinx would be an Initiate of the highest degree. We know that the pyramids of Egypt are also pantacles, diagrams of the initiatory idea. All ancient architecture, at the time when it was hieratic and sacred, sibylline, built temples whose form was a teaching for the initiator.

I would even say more: the art of theater dance, at the time when it was not, as today, an entertainment, a pleasure for the eyes, but a sacred art, at the time when it was the orchestra of the Greeks , for example, was full of initiatory teachings.

Given the analytical stupidity of contemporary brains and their inability to see synthetically, I can well imagine that it seems highly comical to them to think that a ballet could reveal something of scientific truths.

It would be unpleasant for me, by putting forward such assertions, for which I do not have the time today to provide proof, to come across as a madman worthy of being locked up. I will abandon the mysteries of ancient art.

I will limit myself to recalling that the Exhibition of 1889 in Paris provided several reconstructions of ancient exotic art which deserved the attention of occultists. Thus the palace of Mexico was full of hermetic figures borrowed from a very old American civilization. Thus, in the rue du Caire, the reduced reconstruction of the Egyptian temple of Edfu was what we call a pantacle.

Let's stay in our France. All Gothic art is hermetic, full of occult teachings. All our medieval cathedrals are teeming with these teachings. Notre-Dame de Paris is a school of Alchemy. The portal closer to the Hôtel-Dieu contains sculptures hieroglyphically giving the secret of the Great Work. M. Papus, in his Elementary Treatise on Occult Sciences, gives the explanation.

The Saint-Jacques Tower is a pantacle. The Saint-Jacques Tower contains, carved in stone, more teachings on occult sciences than an entire library. We know about this the legend of the alchemist Nicolas Flamel. Have you noticed, at the top of the Tower, the four colossal figures which, at the four corners, dominate Paris: a lion, an eagle, an angel and a bull? these are the four animals of the Apocalypse, the four symbolic animals whose understanding gives the key to the great arcana, makes the great Mage, tamer of forces; the four animals which constitute the Khéroub of the Khaldea, the Sphinx of Egypt, the calves of the ark of the covenant; the four animals representing what is called the quaternary, what the Kabbalists call by the sacred name יהוה , and what the alchemists call the four elements, Fire, Air, Water, Earth, — elements which appear so naive to modern chemists because let them take them in their positive sense, sticking to the letter, not to the spirit.

Let’s delve into the plastic arts, painting and sculpture. It is obvious, for any occultist, as soon as he sees a work like Saint John the Baptist or the Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci, in the Louvre museum, that the painter who made such works was an initiate of a higher order. I have not yet read Da Vinci's manuscripts, but it is probable that this universal genius detected something of his science there.

Let's look at the modern ones. A painter like Gustave Moreau, an etcher like Félicien Rops, a sculptor like Rodin, have created works that reveal the genius's intuition towards Harmony, towards universal truth. They are unconscious initiates.

It would be easy to reveal the initiation of the poets. They should be studied one after the other. Let us leave aside those of antiquity, Homer, the Orphic hymns, the Sanskrit poems, Aeschylus, which would take us too far, and Dante, whom all Italian universities have been trying to understand for four centuries.

So let's choose a single poet. Let's take a huge one, such as another poet, our contemporary, was able to say that, "when Shakespeare died, humanity was left a widow." Take Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's work is full of magic; it overflows with occult teachings.

It is now claimed that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of François Bacon, the considerable scholar. We don't care here. What is certain is that this genius, whoever he was, knew everything. He was a great Initiate, whom magists must revere as much as Pythagoras or Khunrath or Paracelsus.

Shakespeare lived in a time when occultists were readily burned. So, Faust somehow escaped the stake, Faust, this kind of sorcerer who left us the invention of printing and whose existence inspired the poem of another initiated poet of our century, Goethe; then Agrippa, doctor to Louise of Savoy, died in the hospital in Grenoble, like a simple poet. Two dogs alone followed his convoy, two dogs that gullible imbeciles claimed to be evil spirits.

Paracelsus also died in hospital, on a bed, at the Salzburg hospital. This was the fate of the great initiates of that time.

There was another, whom Shakespeare very probably knew personally: it was the Englishman John Dee, an alchemist who left us a work, Monas hieroglyphica ( in theatrum chemicum ), and which the protection of Queen Elizabeth and of the Earl of Leicester had great difficulty in saving himself from the stake.

At that time, the theater, like the other arts, was very much concerned with magic. The English theater and the Spanish theater, the two most remarkable of this period in Europe, are dotted with scenes drawn from the occult world. For example, in one of Lope de Vega's most graceful comedies, Beauty with Golden Eyes , appears the Moor Zulim, who, as a magician, reveals to the spectators the future outcome of the comedy. Thus, the Infante Henry, who is courting the beautiful one with the golden eyes, asks Zulim if his desires will be fulfilled. And the Arab magician arrives on the scene, holding a genethliac figure in his hand:

He explains to the infante, placed in front of the Moon and staring at it: Venus, tells me that you cannot succeed. The presence of Mars, which you see there, means that the young girl loves a person of her rank, although the two have been at odds since the arrival of your highness. The Sun announces that you will see her one day, without however her honor receiving any damage....

In Spain, in the very country of the Inquisition, playwrights spoke more freely about these mysteries than in England. In the land of Shakespeare, writers were not kind to magists; there was a cause for this:

The King of Scotland, James VI, had written in his august hand a book against sorcerers (1597). He was not a skeptic, this king, he did not laugh at such things; but he proved peremptorily that sorcerers and demons still exist, and concluded that they deserve rigorous judgment and severe punishment.

The dramatic literature of the time obeyed royal ideas and mistreated poor sorcerers. Marlowe wrote a Faust in which poor Faust is thrown into hell. Only Marlowe did not have the stature of Goethe.

Another playwright, Greene, made Roger Bacon, the initiated monk, make amends on stage. Here are the terms:

I declare, Bacon cruelly regrets ever having meddled with this art. The hours I devoted to pyromancy, the papers full of spells that I crumpled during the horror of a late night, the evocations of devils and demons that I made, wearing the stole and of dawn, with the help of the mysterious pentagram, the sacrilegious prayers where I mixed the holy Name of God, Soter, Elohim, Adonai, Alpha, Manoth, Tetragrammaton, with the invocation of the five powers of heaven, there you have it the proofs that Bacon must be damned for daring to thwart God. In the time he lived, Shakespeare had, like all the initiates of that time, — I could say of all times, — to disguise his knowledge; but he lets it shine through on every page. First, his pieces are constructed with harmony proving that the author knew the analogical method on which the occult doctrine is based. From this same doctrine emerge the notions he had of humanity and of all nature.

We see him at every moment showing something of one of those applied sciences which fascinate even the least credulous positivists, the sciences of destiny, such as astrology and palmistry. Thus, in The Merchant of Venice a young Venetian studies the hand of his comrade Lorenzo.

In King Lear , when the king curses the sweet Cordelia, he hurls this anathema at this charming head: By the sacred radiance of the sun, by the mysteries of Hecate and of the night,by all the influences of the stars which make us exist and cease to be, I curse you.

The poet who spoke thus knew the laws of sidereal influences, the magnetic aspiration and breathing of beings, the evolution of the living in the astral light, in a word the laws of life.

Do we want to know how, in this King Lear , Shakespeare expresses, in a form of art, the formula of the astrologers: Astra inclining, not necessitating , by which the occultists express, in human life, the antagonism between the influence of fate and the influence of human will, thereby reconciling the doctrine of determinism with that of free will?

Gloucester is worried, he senses a misfortune, the shadow of which already hangs over his brow:

He whispers: These latest eclipses of the sun and moon do not bode well for us. Natural wisdom may explain them in one way or another, but nature is no less upset by their inevitable effects: love grows cold, friendship deteriorates, brothers are divided; riots in the cities, disorders in the countryside; in the palaces, betrayals; breakup between father and son.

To this concern of the old man, his son Edmond, a young scoundrel, responds with the thoughtless passion of his youth and makes himself the protagonist of freedom:

This is indeed the excellent conceit of men. -When our fortune is ill, often as a result of the excesses of our own conduct, we blame the sun, the moon and the stars for our disasters. As if we were scoundrels by necessity, imbeciles by celestial compulsion, deceivers, thieves and traitors by the predominance of the spheres, drunkards, adulterers, liars by forced obedience to the planetary influx, and guilty in everything by divine violence. Admirable subterfuge of the bawdy man: putting his mud instincts in charge of the stars! My father united with my mother under the tail of the Dragon, from which it follows that I am brutal and promiscuous. Bast! I would have been what I am, even if the most virginal star in the firmament had blinked on my bastardy!

It would take a volume of commentaries to reveal all the esotericism of Shakespeare's work.

What is certain is that the most punctilious magist would not find an error towards magical ritual in all the work of the great poet, not a heresy against occult doctrine.

It would be curious to compare, for example, the appearance of the ghost in Hamlet with the passage in which the contemporary magician Eliphas Lévi gives the ritual to be used towards ghosts, towards the forms that current spiritualists call the disincarnate. I was even very surprised by the scrupulous fidelity with which the great tragedian Mounet-Sully follows towards the ghost the ceremonial that magists use towards the Elementals.

It would be curious to take Macbeth , to look for all the manifestations of the occult, the apparitions of Banquo, Lady Macbeth's bout of somnambulism, when the doleful sleeping criminal sobs the famous verse: All the perfumes of Arabia could not make this little hand pure. And the episodes of the witches, of the three filthy sagans carrying out their strange rites, similar to the witches of Thessaly who bring down the lunar influence at their will, the dark Hecate, triangle of evil. This goetism is also orthodox. See the three witches turn around the vile boiler singing: Three turns for me, and three turns for you, and three more to make nine.

Here, initiates who know the mystical virtue of numbers will recognize what the number 9 does, the number of the astral influx, and of the fulfillment of destinies, the number of the hermit of the Taro.

A witch says: From the tingling of my thumbs, I feel that someone cursed is coming this way. » This proves that this old woman is extremely magnetically sensitive; she knows that the magnetic fluid, like the electric fluid, flows through the tips, that the human fluid passes through the tips of the fingers.

Macbeth alone would be worth a long study by an occultist, because it is the artistic implementation of the domination of the human will by evil influences. In Macbeth , astra requiring . Macbeth is a conqueror of the will, inferior to destiny.

But the works in which Shakespeare put the most mysterious science are a duology, it is his fairy plays, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream , which complement each other. Ah! that there is a lot to say about these two plays, which we generally regard as pleasant games of winged fantasy, of ideal caprice. I would like to show the deep logic, but I would need pages and pages.

The Tempest is Shakespeare's last work, the definitive work; from an esoteric point of view, the capital work. It completes the Dream , written in his youth. The Dream is the action of forces on man. The Storm is the action of man, in the power of his fullness, on the forces of nature. And all this expressed in a symbolism of the most intuitive genius.

The Kabbalists assert that all human knowledge is possessed by the man who understands all the meanings of a mysterious Hebrew word. It is the word that, according to the Bible, only the high priest, the great initiate, had the right to pronounce. It is spelled: יהוה . And we arrange it like this, when we synthesize in it the statement of the great arcana:

Those initiated will understand if I say that we can arrange the four main characters of Shakespeare's fairy tale duology according to the attached figure. Thus Oberon, Titania, Ariel, Puck would symbolize the mystery of the number 4, the mystery expressed by the cross:

In the Tempest , Prospero, the mage whose science and virtue tamed the forces of nature, Prospero who conquered the spirit of evil, that is to say Caliban, Prospero bears all the symbolic attributes of the mage. He has, like the hermit of the ninth arcana of the Taro, the lamp, the staff, and the cloak of Apollonius. When the graceful Miranda, the being of beauty and purity, begs her powerful father to appease thestormunleashed by the Magician's enchantments, Prospero said to him: Take away my magic cloak ; and Miranda gently removes the coat and the stick.

He studied a lot, this Prospero, as much as Raymond Lulle or Roger Bacon: Buried in secret studies, I neglected worldly ends to devote myself to retirement and perfect my mind in this science which, if it were less abstruse, would be more appreciated than all popular goods.

Also he is the master of the forces of nature; he commands the merfolk, the sylphs, the gnomes and salamanders, that is to say the mysterious quaternary of forces. And Ariel said to him: Hail, great master, grave lord, hail! I come to satisfy your best desire, whether it isrun, ofswim, ofdive into the fire, ofride on the curly clouds. At your imperious service employs Ariel and all her gang.

Do you want to know his conception of life, his ideas on the end of our earthbound globe; a contemporary astronomer could, in less beautiful style, state the same opinion:

One day, just like the baseless building of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the magnificent palaces, the solemn temples,this globe itself and everything in it will dissolve, without leaving more vapor on the horizon than the immaterial celebration which has just vanished. We are the stuff dreams are made of, and our little life is enveloped in deep sleep.

An astrologer, Prospero does not accomplish any important act without questioning the astral conjunctions:

Thanks to my prescience, I discovered that my zenith is dominated by a propitious star whose influence I must take advantage of, under penalty of seeing my destiny suffer an eternal decline.

He fixes, according to his astrological knowledge, the nuptial day of his beloved daughter Miranda. Then, when he has accomplished his work, the happiness of his child, he renounces the magical art. He knows that an occult law does not grant the power to wield forces to anyone who is not personally disinterested in their use.

There is not enough space for me to deepen the esoteric meaning of the Dream , and reveal the mystery of the loves of Oberon and Titania, these charming allegories. But in passing, I cannot help but notice a passage where Oberon teaches the alchemists the secret of the great work.

We other spirits, said Oberon,we are not just what we appear to be. I who am speaking to you, have often played games with the lover of the morning; and, like a forester, I can walk in the thickets until the gate of the Orient, all flamboyant, blowing on Neptune with splendid rays,changes the green salt of its waters into yellow gold.

Anyone familiar with the colorful language of the alchemists will understand Oberon's words.

So let us abandon Oberon. But what a regret to move away from Titania, this pretty daughter of Diana, this emanation of the Moon, the planet "sovereign mistress of melancholy", as Cleopatra said to Antony, this capricious Moon "sovereign of the waves which, pale with anger , fills the air with humidity”!

Since Shakespeare, as before him, all the great poets have been either initiates or intuitives. We should cite, in our century, among those who guessed:

Victor Hugo; Lamartine, whose Fall of an Angel , is characteristic; Shelley (especially in Queen Mab ); Charles Baudelaire, who had an extraordinary sense of mystery; Edgar Poë, Carlyle, Barbey d'Aurévilly, etc., etc.

Among the initiates:

Goethe. — His first and especially his second Faust are insider works. Moreover, his letters reveal his studies.

Balzac. — The author of Louis Lambert , Séraphita and La Recherche de l'absolu , a Martinist initiate, certainly possessed a vast knowledge.

Bulwer Lytton, the student of Eliphas Lévi.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a magnificent unknown genius of his time and too soon broke, whose Axël contains a "fourth part" of haughty initiatory significance.

Salute to the heroic group of those predestined whose soul coexists with the soul of the world, and who, in their hand outstretched towards the divine ideal, carry the golden palm oftwice-born men!