Marcel-Lenoir, Le Monstre, 1897 [left].
Paul Ranson, La Sorcière au Chat Noir, 1893 [right].
Thou knowest all, proud king of occult things,
Familiar healer of man’s sufferings,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
Charles Baudelaire, “Les Litanies de Satan,” Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857.
In 1860, Eliphas Levi published Historie de la Magie and in 1862, Jules Michelet published La Sorcière. These are imaginatively-written histories that pre-date modern notions of scholarship and must be understood as historical fantasy, significant not as repositories of anything remotely resembling fact, but as consolidations of cultural myth and ideology. Levi catalogues kabbalists and alchemists in lofty ivory towers, Great Old Men from Solomon and Hermes Trismegistus to Nicholas Flamel and John Dee. His occultism is avowedly Catholic and, he takes pains to reiterate, hierarchical, elite, authoritarian. The historian Michelet, however, spun a different tale, a largely fictional one, but one that has informed our magical and neopagan traditions ever since. He was among the first to popularize the notion of witchcraft and so-called Satanism as pagan survivals from pre-Christian times, and in a narrative dressed in Decadent prose and infused with the anecdotal and the supernatural, he presents the witch as a lone symbolic figure, surviving the Medieval centuries. Rustic nature spirits transform into Satans offering succor to the downtrodden – witchcraft is constructed as a kind of grassroots resistance movement against the imposed Christian religion and oppressive feudal overlords, a secret woodland getaway where peasants could practice their own culture, and a subversive way for women to subtly exercise agency as cunning folk, herbal doctors, wise diviners, or, at worst, feared enchantresses.
Michelet’s curiously radical text and Levi’s decidedly reactionary one represent the twin currents of Low and High Magic, and both possessed a certain appeal for the 19th Century’s Decadent dreamers. In addition to the obvious influence on the Golden Dawn writers, that rebel Rimbaud reputedly read Levi’s work, fascinated by his notion of direct alchemical symbology in texts. But it was Michelet’s witch, with her iconic blasphemy, her Sabbats, fires, cats, potions, hexes, shape-shifting, her blasted heaths and secluded woods, that provided pictorial fodder for so many Symbolist artists. Some depicted her as the Decadent femme fatale, as in the case of Marcel-Lenoir, and others with a great deal of sympathy, as in the case of the mystic Nabi, Paul Ranson.
