Texts of 19th century occultism, magic and Satanism

Jules Bois, Le Satanisme et la magie, with Malvost illustrations:

https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Satanisme_et_la_magie/Texte_entier

... and a preface by Huysmans (or so I gather, as I have no French).

Yes - preface by and a study of JKH. It looks like the opening bit is a conjuration of the POD. I may translate that - or bits - and post it here later... something there about his sceptre being a bloody phallus. Not very elegant.

Here is my abject attempt at translation of the Preamble:

Prayer for the Conjuration of Satan

O Satan, you who are the shadow of God and of ourselves, I wrote these anguished pages for your glory and for shame.

You the Doubt and the Revolt, you the Sophism and the Impotence, you the Despair, - you reawaken in us and around us, as real as in troubled centuries of the middle ages, when you reigned supreme, spattered with tortures, like an obscene martyr, on your throne of darkness, waving, in your left hand, the abominable scepter of a bloody lingam.

Today, your degenerate and scattered sons celebrate your worship in their solitude. Your traditional pontiffs are blind shepherds, vile sluts, arrogant mages and poisoners, and assorted melancholic outcasts.

But your people have multiplied, O Satan, you can take pride in the numbers of your faithful, as mediocre, as empty, as treacherous as your will may have dreamed. You are immanent in the modern world that denies you, you dwell there, you hover over it like the faint scent of dung exuded from rotting roses.

You will abide, O Satan, anonymous and obscure again for a few years; but the coming century will proclaim your revenge. You will be reborn in the Antichrist. The occult sciences, springing up suddenly in black waves around the rock of our disgusts, already slake our curious unease: the young men and the women immerse themselves in the roil of intoxicating illusion and insanity.

Leave those who have scorned your snares in adoring your sufferings, reveal to these deluded crowds the mystery of deception on which flows, fulsomely, your deluge of false happiness in which parched lips have never won a more unquenchable thirst.

Charming Satan! I tore off your mask of gluttonous pleasure, and I fell in love with your doleful countenance, beautiful as an eternal and vanquished rancor.

Hideous Satan! I discovered your ignominy and I reveal your vertigo. If your accursedness adorns itself with the nobility of irrevocability and is proudly borne like the splendid halo of Redemption, O Scapegoat of the world, your heart throbbing with death, covets immense and definitive vileness; you weep like a Messiah, but you are corrupt and degrade like a Curse.

So, I testify to your infamy and your attraction, I sing an infinite lament in cursing your crimes. You are the last ideal of fallen man; but if your cherub's wings seem to insinuate the realm of the heavens, if your woman's breast drips with a somnolent mercy, your scaly belly and your bestial legs sweat with sluggish languor, valor forsaken and consent in abjection.

I know your role and your destiny in the Divine plan; I do not wish, in lashing out at you, to alter those bonds, but to provoke their awakening and their purification. May your defeat, under the very insolence of your triumph, effect, in crushing you, to quickly extinguish the bright torch that you are! Then of You, transformed by a sublime death, nothing will remain, but the essence from which all misfortune flowered, and the irresistible taste of heaven that remains after satiety in evil.

O holy and impious Satan, symbol of the degenerate universe, you who know and you who suffer, become, by the word of divine covenant, the propitiatory emblem of Atonement!

... abominable scepter of a bloody lingam is good! I first mis-read it as "abominable spectre" which works conceptually quite well but presumably is not a good translation at all.

But your people have multiplied, O Satan, you can take pride in the numbers of your faithful, as mediocre, as empty, as treacherous as your will may have dreamed.

Huysmans is welcome to his argument, of course, and I'm not well versed so perhaps he's merely treading along a path of long tradition. I incline, however, toward the concept of Satanism rooted in opposition to whatever Law enjoys hegemony ("You the Doubt and the Revolt"), and would not rejoice in multiplying the "mediocre" or "empty". ("Treacherous" still works, depending upon the particular understanding of the term.)

The invocation is not by Huysmans, but is the author's - and the sense of the paragraph you cite probably suffers the mediocrity of my effort.

Yeah, I have that one. It's very interesting. Huysmans only wrote the preface though. (But it seems he was acquainted with the author).

Ah, it's available online now. Good.

Does anyone know of any efforts to translate Stanislas de Guaita's writings into English? Several things, in French, are available for free download.

https://archive.org/details/LaClefDeLaMagieNoire

>10 Randy_Hierodule: Referring to their novels and poetry alone, de Guaita, like his erstwhile collaborator Sâr Péladan, seem to have nothing in English translation (although I believe there is something by Péladan in one of the American Aphrodite volumes or some other anthology). Several of de Guaita's technical esoteric works (e.g., http://pansophers.com/khunrath-rosecroix-pantacle/) are available in translation online.

Given their influence in fin de siècle occult circles, one would think that a Brian Stableford and/or one of the myriad extant esoteric presses would have produced something by now.

Thank you for the link - I hadn't seen that before.

Yes, I have also wondered why some high-ticket, awkwardly translated paperback slathered in garish cover art hasn't made it through the peristaltic publishing process at Hollywood comics, or some such.

I have hoped that some university press would incorporate Guaita's contributions in one those periodic series they do: Notable Installments in the History of Western Esoteric Diddling, etc.

I think bits and pieces of Peladan have turned up in anthologies, here and there (The Decadent Reader, etc.).

Aleister Crowley paintings, etc.:

http://www.openculture.com/2018/08/surreal-paintings-occult-magician-writer-moun...

'Essais des sciences maudites' Great title

My compliments on the translation. This kind of flowery highly ornate style of French is difficult to render into English without becoming clunky and turgid. You did a great job.

Thank you, sir. There is more, but the wind is out of my sails.

Thank you for pointing out Jules Bois. That way I have discovered l'affaire Boullan, which makes the plot of your average Jean Rollin movie look tame.

The United States has been a curious bastion of amateur theology and hypocritical moralizing. So, yeah, the Church Lady:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RTSuiaDe0A

...intromission...

Professional theology. Ya know ... like professional wrestling

I know - I just got done watching the news - was grumbling about everything.

At last, something more of Péladan in translation: https://www.llewellyn.com/product.php?ean=9780738759487

Thank you for the reminder - I had been tracking that one, but had forgotten it. Hopefully they will do the same for Stanislas de Guaita in the near future.

Definitely worth a look:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/10/zohar-studios-an-invented-artists-livel...