The Magus

Abstract

Huysmans’s research into devil worship and expressions of interest in Catholic mysticism took place in an unusual cultural climate that fostered investigations into all forms of supernaturalism. It was against a backdrop of Republicanism, rationalist Positivism, and the increasing laicization of French society that interest in the occult began to flourish in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Among the educated, there was a growing belief that science was poised to identify the exact laws governing the origins and destiny of the human species. Findings in the domain of geology, astronomy, and paleontology seemed to set science in conflict with traditional Christian teachings, opening to question, as Jean Pierrot observes, “the vision of the origins and evolution of the world found traditionally in the Bible.”¹ In opposition to this trend, occultists writing at the century’s end heralded the superiority of supra-rational knowledge, the Gnosis that, in their view, was not attainable through reason and analysis but came only through spiritual illumination.