On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil's paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.
Sir Beelzebub pulls by the scruff
His little black puppets who grin at the sky,
And with a backhander in the head like a kick,
Makes them dance, dance, to an old Carol-tune!
And the puppets, shaken about, entwine their thin arms:
Their breasts pierced with light, like black organ-pipes
Which once gentle ladies pressed to their own,
Jostle together protractedly in hideous love-making.
Hurray! the gay dancers, you whose bellies are gone!
You can cut capers on such a long stage!
Hop! never mind whether it's fighting or dancing!
- Beelzebub, maddened, saws on his fiddles!
Oh the hard heels, no one's pumps are wearing out!
And nearly all have taken of their shirts of skin;
The rest is not embarrassing and can be seen without shame.
On each skull the snow places a white hat:
The crow acts as a plume for these cracked brains,
A scrap of flesh clings to each lean chin:
You would say, to see them turning in their dark combats,
They were stiff knights clashing pasteboard armours.
Hurrah! the wind whistles at the skeletons' grand ball!
The black gallows moans like an organ of iron !
The wolves howl back from the violet forests:
And on the horizon the sky is hell-red...
Ho there, shake up those funereal braggarts,
Craftily telling with their great broken fingers
The beads of their loves on their pale vertebrae:
Hey the departed, this is no monastery here!
Oh! but see how from the middle of this Dance of Death
Springs into the red sky a great skeleton, mad,
Carried away by his own impetus, like a rearing horse:
And, feeling the rope tight again round his neck,
Clenches his knuckles on his thighbone with a crack
Uttering cries like mocking laughter,
And then like a mountebank into his booth,
Skips back into the dance to the music of the bones!
On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil's paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.
BY NO PEOPLE does the custom of sacrificing the human representative of a god appear to have been observed so commonly and with so much solemnity as by the Aztecs of ancient Mexico. With the ritual of these remarkable sacrifices we are well acquainted, for it has been fully described by the Spaniards who conquered Mexico in the sixteenth century, and whose curiosity was naturally excited by the discovery in this distant region of a barbarous and cruel religion which presented many curious points of analogy to the doctrine and ritual of their own church. “They took a captive,” says the Jesuit Acosta, “such as they thought good; and afore they did sacrifice him unto their idols, they gave him the name of the idol, to whom he should be sacrificed, and apparelled him with the same ornaments like their idol, saying, that he did represent the same idol. And during the time that this representation lasted, which was for a year in some feasts, in others six months, and in others less, they reverenced and worshipped him in the same manner as the proper idol; and in the meantime he did eat, drink, and was merry. When he went through the streets, the people came forth to worship him, and every one brought him an alms, with children and sick folks, that he might cure them, and bless them, suffering him to do all things at his pleasure, only he was accompanied with ten or twelve men lest he should fly. And he (to the end he might be reverenced as he passed) sometimes sounded upon a small flute, that the people might prepare to worship him. The feast being come, and he grown fat, they killed him, opened him, and ate him, making a solemn sacrifice of him.” 1
This general description of the custom may now be illustrated by particular examples. Thus at the festival called Toxcatl, the greatest festival of the Mexican year, a young man was annually sacrificed in the character of Tezcatlipoca, “the god of gods,” after having been maintained and worshipped as that great deity in person for a whole year. According to the old Franciscan monk Sahagun, our best authority on the Aztec religion, the sacrifice of the human god fell at Easter or a few days later, so that, if he is right, it would correspond in date as well as in character to the Christian festival of the death and resurrection of the Redeemer. More exactly he tells us that the sacrifice took place on the first day of the fifth Aztec month, which according to him began on the twenty-third or twenty-seventh day of April.
At this festival the great god died in the person of one human representative and came to life again in the person of another, who was destined to enjoy the fatal honour of divinity for a year and to perish, like all his predecessors, at the end of it. The young man singled out for this high dignity was carefully chosen from among the captives on the ground of his personal beauty. He had to be of unblemished body, slim as a reed and straight as a pillar, neither too tall nor too short. If through high living he grew too fat, he was obliged to reduce himself by drinking salt water. And in order that he might behave in his lofty station with becoming grace and dignity he was carefully trained to comport himself like a gentleman of the first quality, to speak correctly and elegantly, to play the flute, to smoke cigars and to snuff at flowers with a dandified air. He was honourably lodged in the temple, where the nobles waited on him and paid him homage, bringing him meat and serving him like a prince. The king himself saw to it that he was apparelled in gorgeous attire, “for already he esteemed him as a god.” Eagle down was gummed to his head and white cock’s feathers were stuck in his hair, which drooped to his girdle. A wreath of flowers like roasted maize crowned his brows, and a garland of the same flowers passed over his shoulders and under his armpits. Golden ornaments hung from his nose, golden armlets adorned his arms, golden bells jingled on his legs at every step he took; earrings of turquoise dangled from his ears, bracelets of turquoise bedecked his wrists; necklaces of shells encircled his neck and depended on his breast; he wore a mantle of network, and round his middle a rich waistcloth. When this bejewelled exquisite lounged through the streets playing on his flute, puffing at a cigar, and smelling at a nosegay, the people whom he met threw themselves on the earth before him and prayed to him with sighs and tears, taking up the dust in their hands and putting it in their mouths in token of the deepest humiliation and subjection. Women came forth with children in their arms and presented them to him, saluting him as a god. For “he passed for our Lord God; the people acknowledged him as the Lord.” All who thus worshipped him on his passage he saluted gravely and courteously. Lest he should flee, he was everywhere attended by a guard of eight pages in the royal livery, four of them with shaven crowns like the palace-slaves, and four of them with the flowing locks of warriors; and if he contrived to escape, the captain of the guard had to take his place as the representative of the god and to die in his stead. Twenty days before he was to die, his costume was changed, and four damsels delicately nurtured and bearing the names of four goddesses—the Goddess of Flowers, the Goddess of the Young Maize, the Goddess “Our Mother among the Water,” and the Goddess of Salt—were given him to be his brides, and with them he consorted. During the last five days divine honours were showered on the destined victim. The king remained in his palace while the whole court went after the human god. Solemn banquets and dances followed each other in regular succession and at appointed places. On the last day the young man, attended by his wives and pages, embarked in a canoe covered with a royal canopy and was ferried across the lake to a spot where a little hill rose from the edge of the water. It was called the Mountain of Parting, because there his wives bade him a last farewell. Then, accompanied only by his pages, he repaired to a small and lonely temple by the wayside. Like the Mexican temples in general, it was built in the form of a pyramid; and as the young man ascended the stairs he broke at every step one of the flutes on which he had played in the days of his glory. On reaching the summit he was seized and held down by the priests on his back upon a block of stone, while one of them cut open his breast, thrust his hand into the wound, and wrenching out his heart held it up in sacrifice to the sun. The body of the dead god was not, like the bodies of common victims, sent rolling down the steps of the temple, but was carried down to the foot, where the head was cut off and spitted on a pike. Such was the regular end of the man who personated the greatest god of the Mexican pantheon.
The honour of living for a short time in the character of a god and dying a violent death in the same capacity was not restricted to men in Mexico; women were allowed, or rather compelled, to enjoy the glory and to share the doom as representatives of goddesses. Thus at a great festival in September, which was preceded by a strict fast of seven days, they sanctified a young slave girl of twelve or thirteen years, the prettiest they could find, to represent the Maize Goddess Chicomecohuatl. They invested her with the ornaments of the goddess, putting a mitre on her head and maize-cobs round her neck and in her hands, and fastening a green feather upright on the crown of her head to imitate an ear of maize. This they did, we are told, in order to signify that the maize was almost ripe at the time of the festival, but because it was still tender they chose a girl of tender years to play the part of the Maize Goddess. The whole long day they led the poor child in all her finery, with the green plume nodding on her head, from house to house dancing merrily to cheer people after the dulness and privations of the fast. 4
In the evening all the people assembled at the temple, the courts of which they lit up by a multitude of lanterns and candles. There they passed the night without sleeping, and at midnight, while the trumpets, flutes, and horns discoursed solemn music, a portable framework or palanquin was brought forth, bedecked with festoons of maize-cobs and peppers and filled with seeds of all sorts. This the bearers set down at the door of the chamber in which the wooden image of the goddess stood. Now the chamber was adorned and wreathed, both outside and inside, with wreaths of maize-cobs, peppers, pumpkins, roses, and seeds of every kind, a wonder to behold; the whole floor was covered deep with these verdant offerings of the pious. When the music ceased, a solemn procession came forth of priests and dignitaries, with flaring lights and smoking censers, leading in their midst the girl who played the part of the goddess. Then they made her mount the framework, where she stood upright on the maize and peppers and pumpkins with which it was strewed, her hands resting on two bannisters to keep her from falling. Then the priests swung the smoking censers round her; the music struck up again, and while it played, a great dignitary of the temple suddenly stepped up to her with a razor in his hand and adroitly shore off the green feather she wore on her head, together with the hair in which it was fastened, snipping the lock off by the root. The feather and the hair he then presented to the wooden image of the goddess with great solemnity and elaborate ceremonies, weeping and giving her thanks for the fruits of the earth and the abundant crops which she had bestowed on the people that year; and as he wept and prayed, all the people, standing in the courts of the temple, wept and prayed with him. When that ceremony was over, the girl descended from the framework and was escorted to the place where she was to spend the rest of the night. But all the people kept watch in the courts of the temple by the light of torches till break of day.
The morning being come, and the courts of the temple being still crowded by the multitude, who would have deemed it sacrilege to quit the precincts, the priests again brought forth the damsel attired in the costume of the goddess, with the mitre on her head and the cobs of maize about her neck. Again she mounted the portable framework or palanquin and stood on it, supporting herself by her hands on the bannisters. Then the elders of the temple lifted it on their shoulders, and while some swung burning censers and others played on instruments or sang, they carried it in procession through the great courtyard to the hall of the god Huitzilopochtli and then back to the chamber, where stood the wooden image of the Maize Goddess, whom the girl personated. There they caused the damsel to descend from the palanquin and to stand on the heaps of corn and vegetables that had been spread in profusion on the floor of the sacred chamber. While she stood there all the elders and nobles came in a line, one behind the other, carrying saucers full of dry and clotted blood which they had drawn from their ears by way of penance during the seven days’ fast. One by one they squatted on their haunches before her, which was the equivalent of falling on their knees with us, and scraping the crust of blood from the saucer cast it down before her as an offering in return for the benefits which she, as the embodiment of the Maize Goddess, had conferred upon them. When the men had thus humbly offered their blood to the human representative of the goddess, the women, forming a long line, did so likewise, each of them dropping on her hams before the girl and scraping her blood from the saucer. The ceremony lasted a long time, for great and small, young and old, all without exception had to pass before the incarnate deity and make their offering. When it was over, the people returned home with glad hearts to feast on flesh and viands of every sort as merrily, we are told, as good Christians at Easter partake of meat and other carnal mercies after the long abstinence of Lent. And when they had eaten and drunk their fill and rested after the night watch, they returned quite refreshed to the temple to see the end of the festival. And the end of the festival was this. The multitude being assembled, the priests solemnly incensed the girl who personated the goddess; then they threw her on her back on the heap of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the gushing blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden image of the goddess, the walls of the chamber, and the offerings of corn, peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables which cumbered the floor. After that they flayed the headless trunk, and one of the priests made shift to squeeze himself into the bloody skin. Having done so they clad him in all the robes which the girl had worn; they put the mitre on his head, the necklace of golden maize-cobs about his neck, the maize-cobs of feathers and gold in his hands; and thus arrayed they led him forth in public, all of them dancing to the tuck of drum, while he acted as fugleman, skipping and posturing at the head of the procession as briskly as he could be expected to do, incommoded as he was by the tight and clammy skin of the girl and by her clothes, which must have been much too small for a grown man.
In the foregoing custom the identification of the young girl with the Maize Goddess appears to be complete. The golden maize-cobs which she wore round her neck, the artificial maize-cobs which she carried in her hands, the green feather which was stuck in her hair in imitation (we are told) of a green ear of maize, all set her forth as a personification of the corn-spirit; and we are expressly informed that she was specially chosen as a young girl to represent the young maize, which at the time of the festival had not yet fully ripened. Further, her identification with the corn and the corn-goddess was clearly announced by making her stand on the heaps of maize and there receive the homage and blood-offerings of the whole people, who thereby returned her thanks for the benefits which in her character of a divinity she was supposed to have conferred upon them. Once more, the practice of beheading her on a heap of corn and seeds and sprinkling her blood, not only on the image of the Maize Goddess, but on the piles of maize, peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables, can seemingly have had no other object but to quicken and strengthen the crops of corn and the fruits of the earth in general by infusing into their representatives the blood of the Corn Goddess herself. The analogy of this Mexican sacrifice, the meaning of which appears to be indisputable, may be allowed to strengthen the interpretation which I have given of other human sacrifices offered for the crops. If the Mexican girl, whose blood was sprinkled on the maize, indeed personated the Maize Goddess, it becomes more than ever probable that the girl whose blood the Pawnees similarly sprinkled on the seed corn personated in like manner the female Spirit of the Corn; and so with the other human beings whom other races have slaughtered for the sake of promoting the growth of the crops.
Lastly, the concluding act of the sacred drama, in which the body of the dead Maize Goddess was flayed and her skin worn, together with all her sacred insignia, by a man who danced before the people in this grim attire, seems to be best explained on the hypothesis that it was intended to ensure that the divine death should be immediately followed by the divine resurrection. If that was so, we may infer with some degree of probability that the practice of killing a human representative of a deity has commonly, perhaps always, been regarded merely as a means of perpetuating the divine energies in the fulness of youthful vigour, untainted by the weakness and frailty of age, from which they must have suffered if the deity had been allowed to die a natural death.
These Mexican rites suffice to prove that human sacrifices of the sort I suppose to have prevailed at Aricia were, as a matter of fact, regularly offered by a people whose level of culture was probably not inferior, if indeed it was not distinctly superior, to that occupied by the Italian races at the early period to which the origin of the Arician priesthood must be referred. The positive and indubitable evidence of the prevalence of such sacrifices in one part of the world may reasonably be allowed to strengthen the probability of their prevalence in places for which the evidence is less full and trustworthy. Taken all together, the facts which we have passed in review seem to show that the custom of killing men whom their worshippers regard as divine has prevailed in many parts of the world.
"The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). It first was published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes. It was aimed at a broad literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). It offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it dispassionately[1] as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective. The impact of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature was substantial." -From Wikipedia
"The Golden Bough attempts to define the shared elements of religious belief. Its thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship of, and periodic sacrifice of, a sacred king.
This king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth, who died at the harvest, and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend is central to almost all of the world's mythologies."-Taken from Wikipedia
Read The Golden Bough here
The Raven
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore."
"Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor."
"Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore."
"Sorrow for the lost Lenore."
"For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore."
"'T is some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door."
"Here I opened wide the door;—
Darkness there, and nothing more."
"Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."
"'Surely,' said I, 'surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore.'"
"Open here I flung the shutter."
. . . . . . . . "A stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he."
"Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more."
"Wandering from the Nightly shore."
"Till I scarcely more than muttered, 'Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'"
"Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy."
"But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er
She shall press, ah, nevermore!"
"'Wretch,' I cried, 'thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!'"
"On this home by Horror haunted."
. . . . . . . . . "Tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!"
"Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
"'Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked, upstarting."
"'Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!'"
"And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!"
"St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldrith phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.
May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal.
Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity - that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.
I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes - how I shudder to recall it! - the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered-grave.
Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist's art, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.
Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak - thank God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!
The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate - St John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom." - H.P. Lovecraft
"His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar."
— Joris-Karl Huysmans (Against Nature (A Rebours))
French writer and art critic, who was first associated with Émile Zola and the naturalist group and then joined the French Decadent Movement. Huysmans "was a greater artist than Zola," wrote Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature (1938), "left the cathedrals and highways of this world in 1907, and I do not suppose that once in any year you will hear his name mentioned where people talk of books." Huysmans' conversion through Satanism to Catholicism, from obsession with bizarre sensations to the search of spiritual life, can be followed in such works as À Rebours (1884), Là-Bas (1891), and La Cathédrale (1898).
"Indeed, each liquor corresponded in taste, he fancied, with the sound of a particular instrument. Dry curaçao, for example, resembled the clarinet in its shrill, velvety tone; kümmel was like the oboe, whose timbre is sonorous and nasal; crème de menthe and anisette were like the flute, both sweet and poignant, whining and soft. Then to complete the orchestra come kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whisky, deafening the palate with their harsh eruptions of cornets and trombones; liqueur brandy, blaring with the overwhelming crash of tubas, while the thundering of cymbals and the big drum, beaten hard, evoked the rakis of Chios and the mastics." (from À Rebours)
Joris Karl Huysmans was born Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans in Paris of mixed parentage. On his father's side he was of Dutch descent; his mother, Elisabeth-Malvina Badin, was a French. After Huysmans' father died, Elisabeth-Malvina married Jules Og, a Protestant businessman. The early loss of his father remained a traumatic childhood experience for Huysmans. He faithfully kept some of his painting – his father had been a commercial artist. Huysmans studied at the Lycee Saint-Louis, receiving in 1866 his baccalaureate. At the age of twenty, he obtained a post at the Ministry of the Interior; there he remained for 32 year, combining writing with work. Huysmans' first book, Le drageoir aux épices (1874, A Dish of Spices), was a collection of prose poems in the manner of Charles Baudelaire. When it was rejected by several publishers, he finally printed it at his own expense under the name Joris-Karl Huysmans. Later he invented the famous initials "J.-K.". The book received attention of major writers, including Emile Zola, and was followed by a number of naturalistic novels, such as Marthe (1876), Les soeurs Vatard (1879), and En ménage (1881). During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Huysmans served in the army. The novella Sac au dos (1880), based on his experiences from this period, was published in Les Soirées de Médan with other war stories written by members of Zola's 'Médan' group.
Early in 1877 Huysmans met Zola, who had admired the former's review of his L'Assommoir (The Gin Palace). Huysmans shared Zola's idea that a work of art is a "corner of nature seen through a temperament." Huysmans started to publish art critics in the 1870s and defend such Symbolist painters as Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. Of Puvis de Chavannes's painting The Poor Fisherman, in which the tonality is uniformly grey, he wrote: "It is dry, hard, and as usual, of an affected naive stiffness. I shrug my shoulders in front of this canvas, annoyed by this travesty of biblical grandeur achieved by sacrificing colour to line. But despite this disgust which wells up in me when I stand in front of the painting, I cannot help being drawn to it when I am away from it." For Moreau and Huysmans, the sensual and innocent Salome became the embodiment od feminity. Salome was the obsessional subject matter of Moreau's paintings, and Huysmans used them in a scene in A Rebours.
With A Rebours Huysmans turned his back to naturalism, flirting with "decadent" mentality. It was the "poisonous" yellow book to which Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray refers, and whose protagonist Dorian imitates. In the blackly comic story a wealthy aesthete, the Duc Jean des Esseintes, experiments with exotic pleasures, mostly erotic. He lives in his house as in a monastery and dreams of the progress of syphilis down the ages. Finally he is welcomed into the embrace of a femme fatale, whose genitalia are made in the image of a Venus flytrap. Des Esseintes seals himself off from the world so hermetically, that he does not even dare to go on a journey – he is afraid of being disappointed by reality. He has surrounded himself with works of art, "which would transport him to some unfamiliar world, point out the way to new possibilities and shake up his nervous system by means of erudite fancies, complicated nightmares and suave sinister visions." In one of the most famous parts, he decides to have his tortoise's shell gilded.
However, Huysmans could not fully accept his protagonist's eccentricities because he makes des Esseintes wonder, whether the only salvation might not be in a return to faith. "At the time when I was writing Against Nature," he said later, "there must undoubtedly have been a shifting of the soil, a drilling of the ground, to put in the foundations, of which I was not conscious. God was digging holes to lay his wires, and he worked only in the dark reaches of the soul, in the night." The work had a tremendous impact in decadent circles, but also the Catholic novelist Barbey d'Aurevilly paid attention to it. Of A Rebours, Oscar Wilde wrote: "The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain." Arnold Hauser sees the character in The Social History of Art as the prototype of all Dorian Grays. "The age of nature," says Des Esseintes, "is past; it has finally exhausted the patience of all sensitive minds by the loathsome monotony of its landscapes and skies."
In his later novels Huysmans recorded the spiritual quest of a man named Durtal, a writer, his fictional alter ego. Là-Bas was a highly stylized novel of black magic practiced in contemporary Paris. In the story Durtal decides to write a biography of Gilles de Rais (1404-1440), the French marshal, who was accused of Satanism and was briefly associated with Joan of Arc. Durtal is taken to a Black Mass, but he finds the experience disappointing. During his flirtation with Satanism, Durtal has an affair with Hyacinthe Chantelouve, a member of the active Satanist Canon Docre. A pious bell-ringer, Louis Carhaix, aids Durtal in his reserch, but the disillusioned aesthete remains unable to embrace Carhaix's simple faith. Durtal feels that overanalyzation of his faith and feelings has left him without values.
Là-Bas was accepted at face value by many readers. The book became a key work promoting the sensational mythology of the Black Mass. Durtal's historical researches had much in common with Jules Michelet's book La Sorcière (1862), a study about the witch-hunts and sorcery trials of the Middle Ages. It is possible that Huysmans never saw a Black Mass, although some of the occultists of the fin-de-siècle Paris are mentioned in the text. Among Huysmans' friends was the Abbé Joseph Boullan (1824-1893), who served as the model for Dr Johannès. He is portrayed as a priest who practises magic to counter Satanism. Willian Beckford's (1760-1844) autobiographical fantasy Vatek offered another source of influence. Composed in the style of an Arabin Tale, this novel portrayed a licentious caliph, absorbed in occult pursuits and sensual pleasures. At the end he enters a hell, ruled by the Demon named Eblis. The additional 'Episodes' intended for the book contained homosexual tales.
Huysmans remained unwed throughout his life. He maintained that he was not a "true homosexual", and confessed in a letter, that he once spent several evenings in "the sodomite world," to which he was introduced by "a talented young man whose perversities are common knowledge." In the early 1890s, Huysmans underwent the crisis that led to his conversion and started his religious or mystical phase. He was readmitted in 1892 into the Catholic church. In 1895 Huysmans went to the Trappist monastery of Issigny to spent there a week. En route (1895) expressed the author's longing for monastic life. In La Cathédrale Huysmans moved from doubts to the full acceptance of Roman Catholicism. The work was both an account of a conversion and a detailed examination of medieval art.
After resigning his post at the Ministry, Huysmans retired to Liguge in Poitou, where he lived two years as a Benedictine oblate. When the monks were expelled, he returned to Paris. Huysmans was one of the founders of the Goncourt Academy, and in 1900 he was elected its president. Huysmans died of cancer of the mouth on May 12, 1907 – he had complained of toothache for years and eventually it was diagnosed that he had incurable cancer. Huysmans had been a hypochondriac most of his life, but it is said that his final sufferings Huysmans took with Christian resignation. During the last days of his life he was afflicted with an affection of the eyes and it became necessary to sew his eyelids shut.
Huysmans' own spiritual history reflected the successive phases of the intellectual life of the late 19th-century France. He dealt with exoticism, eroticism, and spirituality and wrote of his protagonists' experiences in a rich, intoxicating style. "Art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness," he once stated. The Catholic church regards him as one of its apologists.
For further reading: L'estetique de Huysmans by H. Trudgian (1934); The Life of Joris Karl Huysmans by Robert Baldick (1955); The First Decadent by James Laver (1955); Des ténèbres à la lumière by P.-M. Belval (1967); Joris-Karl Huysmans by George Ross Ridge (1968); Reality And Illusion In The Novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans by Ruth Antosh (1986); Joris Karl Huysmans: Novelist, Poet, and Art Critic by Annette Kahn (1987); The Image of Huysmans by Brian R. Banks (1990); Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Fin-De-Siecle Novel by Christopher Lloyd (1991); The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans by Robert Ziegler (2004) - For further information: Against the Grain ; The Catholic Encyclopedia
Original article can be found here
"Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God...It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin."
— Joris-Karl Huysmans
Read La Bas Here
Femmes Damnées
Like pensive cattle, lying on the sands,
they turn their eyes towards the sea’s far hills,
and, feet searching each other’s, touching hands,
know sweet languor and the bitterest thrills.
Some, where the stream babbles, deep in the woods,
their hearts enamoured of long intimacies,
go spelling out the loves of their own girlhoods,
and carving the green bark of young trees.
Others, like Sisters, walk, gravely and slow,
among the rocks, full of apparitions,
where Saint Anthony saw, like lava flows,
the bared crimson breasts of his temptations.
There are those, in the melting candle’s glimmer,
who in mute hollows of caves still pagan,
call on you to relieve their groaning fever,
O Bacchus, to soothe the remorse of the ancients!
And others, whose throats love scapularies,
who, hiding whips under their long vestment,
in the sombre groves of the night, solitaries,
blend the sweats of joy with the tears of torment.
O virgins, o demons, o monsters, o martyrs,
great spirits, despisers of reality,
now full of cries, now full of tears,
pious and lustful, seeking infinity,
you, whom my soul has pursued to your hell,
poor sisters, I adore you as much as I weep,
for your dismal sufferings, thirsts that swell,
and the vessels of love, where your great hearts steep!
Charles Baudelaire
