The Occult Art of L’ordre de la Rose+Croix du Temple et du Graal Sâr Joséphin Péladan’s R+C Salons, 1892–1897 Edmund B. Lingan rench novelist, playwright, and occultist, Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918), was a champion of the international wave of symbolism that emerged in FEurope during the 1880s. Péladan believed that art had the potential to link humans with the divine, and he professed that all true art was essentially religious in nature. In 1892, Péladan established a fraternal Rosicrucian order: L’Ordre de la Rose+Croix du Temple et du Graal (R+C). Claiming the title Sâr Joséphin Péladan, he served as leader of the R+C from 1892–1897. It was in affiliation with the R+C that Péladan curated five interdisciplinary salons between 1892 and 1897. The R+C Salons presented the work of artists from various nations, including France, Belgium, Spain, the U.S., Java, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Many contemporary critics and artists have come to think of the R+C Salons as seminal events in the development of abstract and modern art. The Solomon R. Gug- genheim Museum in New York City acknowledged the significance of Péladan’s salons with an exhibit titled Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897, which ran from June 30 to October 4, 2017.1 This exhibition included a wide selection of works that were exhibited in the five R+C Salons that Péladan curated. Viewing the Mystical Symbolism exhibit revealed that no particular artistic style was used to create a sense of aesthetic unity. This stylistic variety in the Gug- genheim exhibit was not a curatorial miscalculation. Critics who viewed the R+C Salons in the late nineteenth century commented on their lack of aesthetic unity. Despite the variety of styles exhibited in R+C Salons, some critics who viewed the original R+C Salons claimed it was Péladan’s teachings—not aesthetic style— 98 PAJ 119 (2018), pp. 98–106. © 2018 Edmund B. Lingan doi:10.1162 /PAJ J _ a _0 0411 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00411 by guest on 28 September 2021 that established a consistency of concept, content, and theme which enabled the various works presented to “hold together.”2 Like W.B. Yeats and Andrei Bely, Péladan’s passion for and belief in the occult was a defining aspect of his life and work. During his career, Péladan wrote several volumes dealing with occult theory and practice, including L’Occulte Catholique (1898) and L’Art Idéaliste et Mystique (1911). Before founding L’Ordre de la Rose+Croix, he was a member of the Rosicrucian Order that was founded by the poet Stanislas de Guaita. In addition to his works on occult theory, Péladan wrote plays and novels that gave expression to his esoteric principles. The R+C Salons were presented as an expression of the doctrines of the L’Ordre de la Rose+Croix. Péladan was so popularly associated with the occult in his time that Parisian journalist, Jules Huret, distinguished Péladan from other Symbolists artists and playwrights by placing him in a category of lesser known “magi” artists who all shared an understanding of “the occult as a synthesis of philosophy, science, and a way of life.”3 Many of Péladan’s contemporaries accepted his proclaimed belief in the occult. Be they critics or collaborators, many of Péladan’s contemporaries acknowledged that occultism was central the curation of the R+C Salons. Exploring Péladan’s occult teachings today can provide a sense of thematic cohesion to the contem- porary viewer of the works that were presented at the Mystical Symbolism exhibit. Without an understanding of Péladan’s spiritual ideas, the Guggenheim’s collec- tion of works might appear to be little more than a discordant—albeit fascinat- ing—assortment of paintings, prints, architectural designs, and decorative objects. THE CATHOLIC OCCULT Learning about what Péladan referred to as “the Catholic Occult” will help twenty- first-century critics disentangle one of the most puzzling aspects of Péladan’s work: namely, the manner in which he linked Catholicism to his avant-garde agenda. In his Symbolist Theatre: The Formation of an Avant-Garde, Frantisek Deak comments on the consternation felt by critics who, on the one hand, recognize the impact of Péladan’s work on development of abstract and modern art and, on the other, struggle with the fact that Catholicism remains “as unpopular with modern artists and intellectuals” as it was in Péladan’s day.4 Anyone troubled by this paradox would have found no solace at the Mystical Symbolism exhibit, because Catholic imagery was in no shortage there. With its realistic depiction of Christ’s musculature, George Rouault’s depiction of The Holy Women Mourning Christ (1895) looks quite like an Italian Renaissance painting. Armand Point’s The Annunciation or Ancilla Domini (1895) makes direct reference LINGAN / The Occult Art of L’Ordre de la Rose+Croix du Temple et du Graal 99 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00411 by guest on 28 September 2021 to Botticelli’s Annunciation (1485–1492). The content and style of Charles Filiger’s Madonna and Two Angels or Madonna of the Fireflies (ca. 1892), which depicts Mary with two winged-angels peering over her shoulder, brings to mind medi- eval Byzantine art and Gothic stained glass because of its two-dimensionality and its defiance of the laws of proportion. Jean Delville’s Portrait of the Grand Master of the Rosicrucians in Choir Dress, Joséphin Péladan (1895) depicts Péladan dressed in a vestment that resembles that of a Catholic priest. Saintly imagery was incorporated into Henri Martin’s Young Saint (1891) and Alphonse Osbert’s Vision (1892). Both paintings depict young women in open fields whose heads are illuminated by aureoles and whose hands are prayerfully folded. If viewed only from the standpoint of style and content, these Catholicism-infused pieces starkly contrast the images of Orpheus, demonic entities, and cultic temples that were also shown at Mystical Symbolism exhibit. Péladan’s occult approach to Catholicism, however, enables him to establish an occult relationship between Catholic and pagan symbolism. In L’Occulte Catholique (1898), Péladan distinguishes the occult from any particular religious dogma by describing it as a method for probing dogma. Through occult methods, human beings are enabled to move from the known to the unknown, to move between the world of man and the world of God. Through this occult process, the divine awakens within the human being and manifests as spiritual wisdom. Artists, according to Péladan, can create work that facilitates this occult process within human beings and results in divine understanding. By doing so, such artists become occultists who point the way toward a truth that is catho- lic: that is, a truth that is universal, eternal, and transcendent of the restrictive understandings of any specific religious doctrine. Péladan explains that human beings do not have the ability to fully conceive this eternal truth, because of their intellectual and spiritual limitations. For Péladan, these human limitations are in no small part the result of the time and place in which a person happens to live. Thus, eternal truth, which is best understood within the spiritual mind of the human, passes from the occult-mind into the body of the enlightened artist, and from the body of the enlightened artist into the world through the creation of artistic forms. Péladan understands these artistic forms—such as Catholic paintings of angels and pagan statues of Pan—not as complete depictions of the eternal truth, but as individual attempts to adapt that eternal truth into a form that makes sense to people in a particular time and place.5 This is the occult function of art, in Péladan’s opinion, and it is a position that he shared with many of the other leaders of the Occult Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Catholic imagery of the paintings depicted in the R+C Salons do not repre- sent a traditional understanding of Catholicism, but rather the conviction held 100 PAJ 119 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00411 by guest on 28 September 2021 by Péladan and his followers that these images were attempts to communicate an eternal truth in a way that could be understood by particular people living in a particular time and place. Péladan argued that such images had precedents in earlier, pagan forms. In particular, he states in L’Occulte Catholique that Catholic representations of angels have their roots in the depictions of spiritual beings that were incorporated into the dramatic initiation rites of the ancient cult of Eleusis. For Péladan, linking the representation of spirits in the cult of Eleusis to those of Catholicism was not an act of blasphemy or religious inversion. Péladan made these statements to suggest that some images, such as images of winged messengers from the beyond, are so effective at revealing eternal spiritual truth that they are re-used at many different points in human history. He was arguing that the efficacy of some representations of spiritual truth are so powerful that they transcend the time and place in which they were originally created. ORPHEUS AND HIS LYRE As was the case with many other symbolist artists, Orpheus was a significant figure to Péladan and the members of the R+C. For symbolists, the eternal cre- ative force of Orpheus was inseparable from the lyre that he played. Orpheus was so tenaciously attached to his lyre that—after being torn limb from limb by a group of enraged maenads—his head and his lyre became fused.