“I regret never having met Odilon Redon. Lithographer, etcher, he had begun to paint at the age of forty, like Titian. This Saturnine visionary of dark worlds, bathed in a halo of obscurity—the years that have passed since his death have so far illuminated only a few too-faint rays of a glory still to come.”

Victor-Émile Michelet, 1937

 

“For a long time we could not hope to prove to a critic that the Symbolists were not Rosicrucians; we were told that the Rosicrucians declared themselves Symbolists, that Péladan was almost the same thing as Paul Adam. We had to explain that there were symbols and symbols: religious symbols, Rosicrucian symbols, Symbolist symbols, and a variety of symbols for each Symbolist. The bewildered critic would recoil and go away repeating: The Symbolists are occultists.”

Gustave Kahn, 1902

 

“‘What is God?’

“‘The ensemble of Forces,’ stammers the shrill and musical voice. 

“‘What is a force?’

 “‘That which creates movement, heat, electricity, all the states and aspects of nature, and in consequence, the universal physical laws, the attractive relationships of heavenly bodies, nebulae, suns, planets, vapors, seas, waters, vegetation, plasmatic cells, mollusks, fish, amphibians, quadrupeds and humans.’

“‘Did God, then, create humans?’

“‘Yes, through the series of the three kingdoms, and in order that humans, in their turn, in accordance with the evolution of races, would know and adore the harmony of Forces.’

“‘What do you know about Adam and Eve?’

“‘Adam is the red Earth, the incandescent Earth before the gradual cooling of the planet. Eve is Aïscha, or the volitional faculty, the energy that permits the evolution of life, from the humblest cell of vegetal plasma to the scientist and the hero. Because of that, the priests taught that Eve was taken from Adam’s rib—which is to say that human intelligence was extracted by the evolution of cooling matter.’”

Paul Adam, 1891

“Just as the majestic multitude of worlds surpasses our tiny globe, so the night sky seems to me superior to the daytime sky.

“What moves me most about the stars is not the brilliance of these powerful masses, nor the prodigious distances that separate them from one another. 

“It is the presence of the souls gathered around these innumerable hearths.

“We all breathe together in the same light. The scintillations of the stars are for me like an image of gazes crossing everywhere in space. Under the figure of the stars, we discover the august assembly of creatures seated in a circle before our eyes, on the infinite tiers of the amphitheatre of the universe.

“How could one not be stirred in the depths of the soul at the thought of so many unknown and unimaginable beings surrounding us, sharing with us the same time, the same space, the same ether, and, under the hand of the same sovereign, rushing through the varied tumult of life toward the same end? What diverse organisations! What destinies! What alternations of good and evil! What trials! What passions in motion! What surges! What despair! What adorations and prayers!

“In the apparent immobility of the constellations, what an appalling swarming!”

Jean Reynaud, 1863

“'Wouldst thou know my power?' said the false goddess, in her charming and paradoxical voice. 'Listen, then!' She put to her mouth a gigantic trumpet, decorated after the fashion of a mirliton with the titles of all the world’s newspapers, and with this instrument she sounded my name, so that it reverberated in the air like the sound of a hundred thousand thunderclaps, and sent echoes back at me even from the furthest of the planets.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1863

“He decided to devote his stock of teeth to the execution of his mosaic.”

Raymond Roussel, 1914

 

“On this subject, illustrious Amilec, I will tell you that they take the idea of the plurality of worlds to extremes. They know that Mercury, Venus, all the other planets and their satellites are inhabited, like the Earth, or habitable. They also know that every fixed Star is a Sun that illuminates its Earths, as ours illuminates its own. 

“In addition to that, however, they claim that every drop of water, having, as everyone knows, a swirling movement, must be a little world, in the center of which there is a tiny sun, which illuminates even tinier worlds placed at its circumference—with the result that when a Lunar Philosopher drinks a glass of water he regards himself as a monstrous animal swallowing a prodigious multitude of Suns, Earths, Moons and Worlds. 

“Furthermore, they say that, what a drop of water—which is an aqueous world—is to ours, ours may be to a third. It might be that our Sun, our fixed Stars and our Vortices is, as a whole, nothing but a drop of liquid, which some enormous animal, an inhabitant of a Planette much more immense than we can imagine, might one day drink.”

Charles-François Tiphaigne de La Roche, 1754

 

“The night of my début at La Scala, I was horribly frightened. I sang out of tune and lost my head completely. The audience hissed at me, and quite rightly! How often, since then, have I blessed that fortunate hissing which made me realise my shortcomings and spurred me to undertake the serious studies which I so much needed!”

Emma Calve 1922

 

“Silence, radiant reparative force, slumber of life, brief glimpse of the mountains of faith.....Silence, original to the beginning and the end, overwhelming law.....Silence beneath the arpeggios of the Sun on serene coasts..... Silence of the coraline cities of submarine depths.....Silence of the time when, weary of its futile sleep, the Sun drapes itself, and the clots of its blood stain the quotidian and temporary crosses of the ether.....Silence, promise of Erebus, and of the lairs of inspired seers.....Silence, sole word among the blind who dream the worlds.....Silence, of which only the tortures of hunger draw the iron talons from the excoriated prophet.....Silence, liturgy and panacea.....Silence, thou the hope all the days of the world.....Silence, father of the night of our over-feverish and excessively ambulant dreams.”

Gustave Kahn, 1898

 

“Henri Delaage wrote a number of forgotten works on magnetism, occultism and kindred stimulants of the imagination by which some of the meek are, in every generation, consoled and made insolent.”

Lewis Galantière, 1937

 

“Madame Truphot, rid of her husband, had realized a long-cherished dream. She had opened a literary salon. Symbolism was then at its height, and hordes of fools, devoid of all syntax and spelling, were working to overcrowd the asylums by offering up masses of improbable rebuses for admiration, formulas as unheard of as they were hermetic, in which, it seemed, they had imprisoned Beauty. Madame Truphot was thus a Pre-Raphaelite, ardently. Young men, somewhat kleptomaniac, came every Tuesday and Saturday to pour out the overflow of their genius into her home, in the form of pentameters, hexameters, and myriameters, while simultaneously oozing, as best they could, the scrofula of their aestheticism. After some resistance, Sar Péladan, his head adorned with an armful of sepia-toned shavings and a bundle of steel wool, Sar Péladan himself, finally yielded and, for a year, graced her dwelling with his dandruff and his ears shaped like nightjar wings.”

Fernand Kolney, 1904

 

“You who are passing through the crossroads of infinity, pause; form a circle around me. Although old, my melody is always new. The one who made it is the master to whom I belong. Beneath his hardened fingers, a thousand centuries ago, I learned it in order to make the round-dance of the stars, worlds, skies, people and hours who link hands circulate and sway around him. Again, again! Let the round begin again! Let the suns rotate more rapidly! Let the waltz of the spheres and their satellites pass and pass again, whirling, until they are dizzy, until they say, staggering: “Satellites, where are we?”

Edgar Quinet, 1834

 

“A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume floats above a box of sandalwood.”

Robert Chambers, 1895

The Wax Lady

I watched the mannequin turning round,

Admiring her figure, her bosom fair,

Her golden hair, her teasing little face,

When suddenly I saw her nostril quiver

And her slender neck of viper-like form.

"She lives, then!" I told myself in terror.

And ever since, haunted at every hour

By a love that nothing can destroy,

I have both the fear and the curiosity

Of seeing the wax lady enter my home.

In every weather, beneath an African sky,

Or under clouds uneasy and forlorn,

Like a swimmer pursued by a shark,

Unable to flee, I remain before her display window,

And there I hear my heart beating like a drum.

Though I tell myself, "Horror! Madness!"

There are nights of dreadful darkness—

—So much do I summon her, so much do I desire her!—

When I can imagine it possible

That the wax lady might enter my home.

Just as she is, in her nankeen dress,

With eyes the color of aquamarine,

And that alluring, mischievous smile,

The spinning beauty with crimson lips

Settles herself into my brain and engraves herself there.

I willingly hallucinate her,

And, drunk on strangeness, sink deeper

Into a fog that my reason strives to tear apart,

For it is my most ardently cherished dream

To see the wax lady enter my home.

Maurice Rollinat, 1883

 

“One day I had a bad cold, and I remarked to my teacher that I could not think how I had caught it. She looked at me with a frown and said: 'Have you washed your head?' I nodded. 'Certainly,' I said, 'I washed it two days ago.' She shook her finger vehemently at me. 'A singer never washes her head,' she said. 'She cleans it with tonic. She cleans it with a fine tooth comb. But she never washes it.'”

Emma Calve, 1922

 

“Théa has not accompanied us to the city of Mercure. She has gone back to Jupiter, to which her office summoned her. We are walking alone, Pythie and I, through the miracles of the scientific city.”

Paul Adam, 1898

 

“The mass by Palestrina was incredibly beautiful. Although written in a strict manner technically, its effect is one of perfect whiteness, and emotion is not expressed (as it has come to be) by shrieks and roars, but by melodic arabesques. It is the result to a certain extent of the contours, and the interlacing of the arabesques—producing something which seems to be unique: harmony created by melody.”

Claude Debussy, 1893

“The Bat-Magi, the Satan-Magi, have come to Earth to aid in the reincarnation of Martian souls, to introduce them by means of their perfumes into human bodies and secure them in place by their incantations, after having expelled the human souls. For the Earth is the Martian paradise, the place necessary to Martian souls after death; it is on our planet that these souls are ordinarily reincarnated in the bodies of new-born babes, which become in consequence violent and bellicose individuals, criminals and warriors. And because the population of Mars is four or five times less than that of the Earth, these errant souls find themselves rapidly reincarnated, and the ex-Martians are a minority among human beings. 

“But the cremation of their planet by the Thunderbolt from Jupiter has liberated millions of Martian souls at a single instant! They have arrived on Earth, their paradise, hoping to begin the new existence that will eventually permit them to pass on to Venus, then Mercury—necessary stages of the transmigration that is destined to end in the supreme beatitudes of the central star: the Sun!”

Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet, 1922

 

“Yes, Monsieur, the Ruling Being of Mars has wings. He flies, passing from one continent to another like a spirit, all around his world, although he is unable to move beyond the vestiges of its atmosphere. I see them flying over the plains and cities, in the gilded air that they have there–for although it was believed in former times that the Martian sky is red while ours is blue, it is actually yellow: a beautiful, golden yellow.

Guy de Maupassant, 1887

“I understand why the cat struck Baudelaire,

Through its magical being in which the Sphinx is incarnate;

Through the caressing charm of the light so clear

That escapes in long jets from its two lynx-like eyes,

I understand why the cat struck Baudelaire.”

Maurice Rollinat, 1883

 

“'Nevertheless,' replied Maurice’s guardian angel, 'man has created science. The important thing is to introduce it into Heaven. When the angels possess some notions of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and physiology; when the study of matter shows them worlds in an atom, and an atom in the myriads of planets; when they see themselves lost between these two infinities; when they weigh and measure the stars, analyse their composition, and calculate their orbits, they will recognise that these monsters work in obedience to forces which no intelligence can define, or that each star has its particular divinity, or indigenous god; and they will realise that the gods of Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, and Sirius are greater than Ialdabaoth.'”

Anatole France, 1914

 

“The child loved Wagner; she sensed something in birth in those monstrous choirs, and, dreamily seeking on her guitar the intervals between the intervals, she found the voice of the wind, and beyond the scales of the wind, yet other scales.”

Louise Michel, 1886

 

“'Father, dear, what will the weather be like in a fortnight’s time—which is to say, on the third day of the second moon?'

“'I’ll tell you, my dear Sinusia. Let me consult the meteorometer.'

“These words, which might seem strange, were exchanged in the workroom—or, rather, the laboratory—of Professor Spherides Altair, in one of the most beautiful dwellings of Jovian Avenue in Kentropol, in the year 9978 of our era.

“'There’ll be a little rain in the morning,' he declared, 'but fine weather in the afternoon and for the next two days.'

“'Ah! So much the better—for I’m planning to take a pleasure trip to the ruins of Paris and London with my friends Aphelia and Parhelia Elliptine, their brother Helikos, and Triagul Parabolis.'”

Henri Allorges, 1922

 

“To be back in Paris I would willingly give the nine symphonies of Beethoven bound in the skin of Richard Strauss.”

Claude Debussy, 1891

 

“The green transparencies

Have drowned into the depths,

Which now roll within their black folds

The sonorous Vertigos.

Conquering Night

Has come,

And one sees the train undulate

Behind her robe fringed with moist stars,

Then disappear.

Behold, far away,

The Lighthouses begin to appear.”

Marie Anastasie Krysinska, 1890

 

“Yes, Monsieur, science will procure the definitive triumph of suffering humankind. It has already done a great deal; it has tamed time and space. Our railways, our telegraphs and our telephones have suppressed distance. If we succeed, as Dr. Pastoureaux seems to anticipate, in demonstrating that we can put intelligence into our machines, humans will be liberated forever from servile labor. No more serfs, no more proletariat! Everyone will become bourgeois! The slave machine will liberate from slavery our humbler brethren and give them the right of citizenship among us. 

“A day will come when machines, always running hither and yon, will operate themselves, like the carrier pigeons of Progress; one day, perhaps, having received their complementary education, they will learn to obey a simple signal in such a way that a man, sitting peacefully and comfortably in the bosom of his family, will only have to press an electro-vitalic switch in order for machines to sow the wheat, harvest it, store it and bake the bread that it will bring to the tables of humankind, and thus finally become the King of Nature.”

Emile Gondeau, 1891

“Evening fell. At sunset the mountains were opalescent. New ones appeared; they trailed laminated algae, which, long and fine as hair, appeared first as captive sirens, then as a vast reticulation; the moon shone through as a jellyfish in a net, as nacreous holothurian; then moving freely through the open sky, the moon turned azure-colored. Pensive stars went astray, whirled, plunged into the sea. Toward midnight appeared a gigantic vessel; the moon illuminated it mysteriously; its rigging stood motionless; the bridge was dark. It passed close beside us; there was no sound of oars, no noise from the crew. We finally realized that it was caught in the ice, between two icebergs that had closed in on it. It passed on by, silently, and disappeared.”

André Gide, 1893

“They are creatures perfect enough to disquiet their creators with the possibility that these strange beings should one day cross, by means of their acquired speed, the narrow frontier within which intelligence confines instinct, trying in their turn to scale the heavens, to stifle their bewildered masters against breasts of bronze, and to render into their native dust the human clay that they once took for gods!”

Alfred Didier Marie Mesnard, comte de Chousy, 1884

“The Eye, Like A Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity.” 

Odilon Redon, 1882

 

“Harmony is nothing but a garment, more or less diaphanous, more or less suitable, which one throws over a beautiful body like gauze, silk, linen or wool, allowing one to discern its forms and outlines, disguising them, or altogether suppressing them. Melody without harmony is always something; harmony without melody is nothing.”

Fabre d'Olivet, 1810

“Already the Master’s soul has departed, at the mere word The Bells, toward dazzling rhapsodies.

“Here ring out upon the piano: bells of spring mornings, bells across the countryside, bells of village baptisms.

“And the harmonies are as limpid as the sky where the last rose-colored traces of dawn have just faded.

“Then comes the Angelus bell, hovering like a sacred dove above fields where sheaves lie flattened, cut by the sickle, now idle in the brown hands of praying peasant women.

“The keyboard murmurs like distant organs in Gregorian plainsong.

“But here is the tocsin—the bell of disaster, of insurrection, of massacre.

“And the chords, under the magician’s fingers, become dissonant, torn by cries, heated with cascading blood, darkly blazing with fire.

“One can discern the clash of arms; the chromatic scale of turmoil rides the sound waves; the minor lament of the sacrificed breathes out.

“Bah! Since men kill one another, they must be remade.”

Maria Anastasia Krysińska, 1905

“That garden is singular too; you shall see it shortly, very nearly as it has always been. High walls surround it on three sides and weld it to the house. It is not vast; it is square; arcades of old box-trees line the wall and form two niches at the far corners in which there are two figures, one of a Faun crushing a bunch of grapes under his hoof, the other of a Centaur rolling a waterskin with his. In the center there is a pond, also square, with raised edges of green-tinted stone, in the middle of which, on a pedestal set in the water, stands a green bronze statue of a naked man who seems to be listening attentively to the surroundings. As there are neither trees nor flowers in the garden, dead leaves and petals do not fall into the water; it shines, bright, profound and black; when one walks around it one can see therein the mirage of the statue, which follows you, and always seems to be looking at you, for it has four identical faces on four bodies, which, by an artifice of optics, are the same one, taking turns.”

Henri de Regnier, 1897

“And Monelle handed me a hollow stalk of fennel, inside of which burned a pink filament. 

“'Take this torch,' she said, 'and burn. Burn everything on the earth and in the sky. And break the fennel and put out its flame when you have finished burning, for nothing should be passed on; 

“'So that you be the second Narthekophoros, and that you destroy with fire, and that the fire fallen from the sky rise again to its heights.'”

Marcel Schwob, 1894

 

“'What! You are singing in a theatre!' exclaimed my aunt, when I told her of my engagement at Brussels. 'My poor child! You will be everlastingly damned! Who would ever have thought such a thing possible? A little girl of our family going to be an actress—one of those women who could not be buried in consecrated ground in the old days! The curé himself has told me all about it. It's terrible, terrible!' she cried, rocking herself back and forth in her chair and bursting into tears. 'I will pray for you!'”

Emma Calve, 1922

“We read also, that they in Apulia that were touched with a kinde of dangerous Spider, were astonished untill they heard a certain sound, at the hearing of which every one riseth up and danceth.”

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, 1533

“Have the beautiful magic lantern set up in your home. It won't cost you more than fifty-five sous. Until now it has only been the pleasure of children, but I have invented a magic lantern for the usage of adults, which will show you a thousand ingenious and various tableaux for the amusement of parents and the tranquility of children.

“Attach a white sheet to your wall, while calling to me through the window, and arrange yourselves very sagely, like the Tuesday spectators at the Comédie Française. I shall come with my apparatus, and then you will have pleasure for your money. You will see the Good God, and Monsieur le Soleil, Madame la Lune, Mesdemoiselles les Étoiles, the King, the Queen, the Gendarme, the Executioner, Morning, Midday, Evening, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Elements and many figures of an enticing modernity.”

Théodore de Banville, 1883

 

“After a comfortable dinner, as we were lighting cigars, plunged in profound armchairs, someone pronounced the word occultism, and our conversation turned toward strange things.”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1922

“I don’t imagine I shall ever be 'influential.' I've been too thorough in cultivating my indifference to my fellow human beings, which is probably the only way one can choose between them.”

Claude Debussy, 1901

“My first sensations under the new drug were similar to those induced by a strong dose of Cannabis indica. There was the same protraction of the time-sense, by which mere minutes were stretched out into ages; and the same spatial expansion, by which my laboratory walls appeared to recede to an immense distance, and my own body, as well as the familiar objects about me, extended themselves to prodigious height and length. The legs of my chair were tall as the famed sequoias. My hand and arm, reaching up to make sure that the graph was correctly adjusted on my forehead over the pineal gland, seemed to scale a gulf like that of some profound canyon. A carboy loomed like a giant monument.

“I gazed on a medley of strange-angled forms that might have materialized from a geometrician's nightmare.”

Clark Ashton Smith, 1933

 

“Hashish is composed of a extraction of Indian hemp, butter, and a small quantity of opium. Take a clump the size of a nut, fill a small spoon, and happiness will be yours: absolute happiness with all its intoxication, its youthful folly, and its infinite blessedness. 

“As far as possible, you need a fine apartment or a beautiful scene, a free and unconcerned mind, and a few accomplices whose intellectual talents are similar to your own; and a little music if you can get it.

“Then the hallucinations begin. External objects take on a monstrous appearance. They show your senses forms heretofore unknown. Then they are deformed and finally enter into your being, or rather you enter into theirs. Sounds have colors, and colors have a music. Musical notes are numbers, and you perform mathematical calculations with terrifying speed as the music flows into your ears. You are seated and you have a smoke; you start to think that now you're inside the pipe, and it's you whom your pipe is smoking; you yourself are being exhaled in the form of bluish clouds.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1860

“For today, be content to know that this crocodile is a cruel being, but cunning, as the wicked are, and timid, like them.

“In fact, by dint of agitating, the crocodile is oozing a thick foam from all its pores, which emits a noxious odor. In addition, torrents of fire emerge from its mouth, which would have intimidated the most intrepid of men. That foam and that fire amalgamate together and are transformed into an innumerable multitude of maleficent animals of every species, which circulate en masse in the atmosphere, obscuring it to such an extent that nothing at all can any longer be discerned, and not the slightest particle remains that is breathable.”

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, 1798

 

“I had taken hashish three times with little result, beyond a slight disturbance of the optical perceptions. The fourth time, I increased the dose by a fourth of the usual amount, and waited patiently among my books.

“I gazed upon them with the dreamy languor of a god.”

Clark Ashton Smith, 1920

“Thanks to the labors of a science which is comparatively recent, and more especially to the researches of the students of Hindu and Egyptian antiquities, it is very much easier today than it was not so long ago to discover the source, to unravel the underground network of that great mysterious river which since the beginning of history has been flowing beneath all religions, all faiths, and all philosophies: in a word, beneath all the visible and every-day manifestations of human thought.”

Maurice Maeterlinck, 1922

 

“On the eleventh day, in the morning, Ab-Hakek was not yet dead. A noise of heavy footsteps was heard in the stairwell of the turret. The door opened: a phantasmagoric and portentous being entered. It was Agraman. 

“At the sight of him, the magician, burdened and statue-like as he was, stood up. ‘I am hungry!’ he murmured, ‘I am going to die: it is time to tell me the last word of science.’

“Agraman took him by the wrist and shouted in his ear, with a violent and metallic burst of laughter: ‘Master! Science is the shadow of a shadow: umbra umbræ!’”

Alphonse Esquiros, 1838

 

“This opera by Zola and Bruneau is full of symbols. I must say I don’t understand this excessive need for symbols. They seem to have forgotten that it is still music that is supreme in its beauty. As you would expect, each symbol takes the form of a leitmotiv; once again music is weighed down by these obstinate little phrases, which insist on having their say no matter what else is going on. Really, to pretend that such-and-such a succession of chords represents this or that sentiment, and that so-and-so phrase is one or another character—it is nothing but an anthropometrical game.”

Claude Debussy, 1901

“Baudelaire really gets on my nerves.”

Eugène Delacroix, 1857

“Certain omens of battle were beginning to appear in the heavens and in the speeches of diplomats. The first days of spring had arrived, and spring seemed, in the opinion of all men of war, to be the best time to undertake the mutual massacre of nations.”

Paul Adam, 1893

“Claude Debussy is little known by the crowd, goes nowhere, composes, I fancy, only when he feels inclined, and lives like a recluse, scorning all noisy advertisement. What an admirable and rare example! And what a lot of valuable time some men waste nowadays in preparing their publicity, in writing and distributing notices that proclaim their own glory. Having shut himself up in this haughty seclusion, M. Debussy seems intent on expressing the transient impressions of the dream he is in quest of, rather than the eternal passions of the world which he shuns. There is a certain amount of danger in this tendency for, sooner or later, truth and reality must triumph over illusion, be it ever so seductive.”

Alfred Bruneau, 1900

 

To the Illustrious Cabaner

“May he be cursed, this Wagner

Who stole your glory from you!

Glory to your name, Cabaner!

Nerve—

Where all harmony vibrates!”

Anonymous, 1881

 

“Symbolism dead! But it is, precisely, that which does not die, for it’s the quivering idea, living in all forms. In art as in nature, everything can be a symbol, since everything has a hidden meaning.”

Willy, 1901