Return from Oblivion: Josephin Peladan’s Literary Esotericism, in: The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema (ed. by Tessel Bauduin & Henrik Johnsson, Palgrave Macmillan).
Link to preview and book information: https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319764986
Joséphin Péladan (Sâr Merodack, 1858-1918) was a key figure in the inception and development of French Symbolism. Responding to multiple cultural shifts experienced by fin-de-siècle French society, he authored over a hundred novels and monographs in an attempt to bring about the spiritual regeneration of society through mythopoetic art underpinned by esoteric thought.
Based on an eclectic esoteric cosmology, expressed through art, literature, and philosophical monographs, his vast, yet coherent oeuvre was intended to bring this call for regeneration to as wide an audience as possible, and thus to spark a social renaissance. Péladan’s intellectual pattern is embedded within the ideas formed at the intersections of Illuminism, Romanticism, and the anti-philosophe movement, drawing on numerous aspects of esoteric thought.
The post-Enlightenment quest for a new understanding of human origins and history, informed by allegorical mythography and philosophical historiography coalesce in his oeuvre, which can also be shown to represent the act of stepping over the threshold of Modernism in response to the challenges of his time. Péladan’s originality lies in the synthesis and its highly individual—and individualistic—nature. However, vilified by his contemporaries, Péladan’s work slipped into oblivion. Extant scholarly accounts of his life and work have tended to focus on his eccentricity or decontextualised elements of his oeuvre. Until recently, scholarly studies had neither explored the content of his work, nor its cultural context and intellectual precedents, resulting in the perpetuation of misconceptions regarding his esoteric philosophy, its role in his work, and its relationship to the wider history of ideas within his historical context.
Péladan’s output represents possibly the largest single body of “literary esotericism,” which is to say, the specific category of literature as an esoteric symbol and vehicle of esoteric praxis. Literary esotericism has never been fully mapped as a genre, since overtly occult works are frequently dismissed as insignificant, and those with more covert references are treated in more conventional ways.
Literary studies of works influenced by esotericism have rarely incorporated the contextual material available from the field of Esoteric Studies, nor paid due attention to matters of historical context, definition and terminology, so that literary scholars dealing with notions of occultism, esotericism, and magic do not always grasp their nuances and significance. Simultaneously, the methodological toolboxes of historiography and sociology of religion may lack the specialised methodologies and vocabulary to approach literary material effectively. This has led to various lacunae in the understanding of many bodies of work, and in the case of Péladan, to his neglect and the perpetuation of severe misinterpretations. Nonetheless, sufficient contextualisation and the judicious use of interdisciplinary approaches may provide a foundation for the decipherment of such texts.
In this chapter, following a brief survey of Péladan’s life and work, I highlight their points of interest alongside the methodological problems of working with such material from monodisciplinary perspectives. Following a justification of the term “literary esotericism” in the context of Modernist literature, I propose both possible ways forward in terms of methodology, as well as specific examples of potential future research in relation to Péladan that may hold import for the wider field.
