Stanislas de Guaita, Edward Bulwer Lytton and ‘Zanoni’.
Although Stanislas de Guaita played an important
rôle in the formation of initiatory groups in Paris in the last decade of the
19th century and was a larger than life figure in his time, such as
to rival even Papus, his lasting contribution is likely to be what he wrote
rather than what he did. Even so, he was
not able to finish his “great work” – the three volume La Serpent de la
Genèse (The Serpent of Genesis).
Le Temple de Satan (The
Temple of Satan) was an historical survey of magical belief and practice. La
Clef de la Magie Noire (The Key to Black Magic) virtually a treatise on the
Astral Plane. And the uncompleted and barely begun Le Problème du Mal (The
Problem of Evil) would have been a philosophical review of the concept of evil.
Why he chose such ominous titles remains something
of a mystery to me, they were hardly instruction books on the dark arts of
sorcery, and certainly not intended as such. He seemed prompted by a desire to
contribute a major work on the popular conception of evil beyond a fire and
brimstone Demon King or the tempting Serpent in the Garden of Eden. The three
volumes were loosely structured around Tarot Trump images following Eliphas
Levi’s preferred system although for the most part there seems to have been no
deep significance in this. He used it when it seemed appropriate or obvious and
did not when it was not.
Victor Emile Michelet, true to style, tended to take
his work and fate deeply romantically. “If he prematurely lifted the veils
that conceal the dark Isis, if his tranquil audacity provoked the anger of the
Furies, it was simply his destiny as a revealer. Death, jealous at having him
reveal her mysteries, like a vengeful woman struck him down as a lover who sang
too much about her intimate beauty.” In brute physical fact the odds were
stacked against Stanislas from the beginning by an illness that had probably seen
his father die young and which prostrated him with migraines of increasing
frequency and severity from which he found relief only in narcotics. Which took
him off, drugs or disease, or a combination of both, remains a matter of
speculation.
His early essays in the esoteric field were
published in volume form under the title Au Seuil du Mystère (At the
Threshold of the Mysteries) in the final (1894) edition of which is an appendix
on the subject of the English Rosicrucian novel Zanoni by Bulwer Lytton,
which he hails as “an exceptionally significant work in the form of
a contemporary novel that is nothing less than a great esoteric and idealist
epic.”
Zanoni
had been first published in 1842 and into French in 1867.
A fact that was welcome by Stanislas,
but who was incensed by the fact that the French edition had omitted the
author’s Introduction to the original work. Indeed, so incensed was he, that he
translated it himself and published it himself.
“We think these omitted pages of such
importance that we have no hesitation, with the assent of the copyright
holders, to repair the omission of the first translation. So bizarre as it may
seem to offer the public a preface without a text, here are the preliminary
pages together with a few substantial annotations.”
His view was that it contained ‘the magical key to
the work’.
“Zanoni is a book full of revelations and arcana.
Under the veil of dazzling fantasy the author has disguised secret traditions
of the Rose Cross, and as far as the far depth of fraternities even more
ancient and occult, of which the Order instituted by Rosenkreutz is only the
latest prolongation.”
With this in mind, we might do well to take
advantage of the fact that we have both original text and Introduction (or
Preface as Stanilas tends to call it) readily available to us in English along
with the text of the original novel. It is readily available on the internet.
Indeed it is well worth treating as a guided
visualisation, about going to a rather strange antiquarian occult bookshop and
meeting another customer who befriends us and whom we meet again coincidentally
at the foot of Highgate Hill who accompanies us to the top and invites us into
his house that has some aspects as an art gallery and museum and overlooks the
town and city of London.
It can be a useful preliminary to then tackling the
novel itself. Again which is best read with emphasis on the pictorial
imagination rather than the discursive mental faculties. You never know where
this can lead. Beats television or cinema or computer games any day of the
week!
Remember it was a ‘loaded’ novel by Péladan that set
de Guaita on his way.
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