ThoughtGallery.org > JSTOR Presents: Satanism and Magic in the Age of the Moulin Rouge

JSTOR Presents: Satanism and Magic in the Age of the Moulin Rouge

An Illustrated Lecture by Tara Isabella Burton

From mysterious Black Masses held in underground crypts to occult bookstores frequented by the literary élite to mad monks and their possibly insane lovers dominating literary salons, the time of the Moulin Rouge was also a time of magical exploration: where the possibility of new industrial technology gave rise to a firmly “anti-modern” obsession with the macabre.

And in the decadent world of 19th century Paris, few knew black magic as intimately as the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose odyssey (ostensibly for the purposes of literary research) into Paris’s underbelly of occultists, Satanists and practitioners of black magic — a group that essentially doubled as a Who’s Who of bohemian artists and poets of France’s Decadent movement — became legendary. Encountering such luminaries as the Abbé Boullan, a defrocked priest accused of human sacrifice; the morphine-addicted poet Edouard Dubus; and the sultry Berthe Courrière: Satanist, séance-hosted, and lover to half of Paris’s literary elite and a sizable proportion of its priests, Huysmans memorialized his journey into the underworld of Paris’s artistic demimonde in his 1891 novel Là-Bas.

A story about the early days of sex, drugs, duels to the death, and early celebrity journalism —  op-eds alleging sorcery in political and literary opponents — this lecture explores the seedy world of black magic among Paris’s fin de siècle literati — blending scandalous historical anecdote with more general reflections on what made occultism so attractive to 19th century Parisians, and the way in which a burgeoning celebrity culture intensified these magical rivalries.











When: Mon., May. 23, 2016 at 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Where: Morbid Anatomy Museum
424 Third Ave. Brooklyn

Price: $8
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An Illustrated Lecture by Tara Isabella Burton

From mysterious Black Masses held in underground crypts to occult bookstores frequented by the literary élite to mad monks and their possibly insane lovers dominating literary salons, the time of the Moulin Rouge was also a time of magical exploration: where the possibility of new industrial technology gave rise to a firmly “anti-modern” obsession with the macabre.

And in the decadent world of 19th century Paris, few knew black magic as intimately as the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose odyssey (ostensibly for the purposes of literary research) into Paris’s underbelly of occultists, Satanists and practitioners of black magic — a group that essentially doubled as a Who’s Who of bohemian artists and poets of France’s Decadent movement — became legendary. Encountering such luminaries as the Abbé Boullan, a defrocked priest accused of human sacrifice; the morphine-addicted poet Edouard Dubus; and the sultry Berthe Courrière: Satanist, séance-hosted, and lover to half of Paris’s literary elite and a sizable proportion of its priests, Huysmans memorialized his journey into the underworld of Paris’s artistic demimonde in his 1891 novel Là-Bas.

A story about the early days of sex, drugs, duels to the death, and early celebrity journalism —  op-eds alleging sorcery in political and literary opponents — this lecture explores the seedy world of black magic among Paris’s fin de siècle literati — blending scandalous historical anecdote with more general reflections on what made occultism so attractive to 19th century Parisians, and the way in which a burgeoning celebrity culture intensified these magical rivalries.

Buy tickets/get more info now