“Put your eye to this powerful telescope, and follow my explanations. The island, as you doubtless know, has the form of a human body. Direct the telescope toward its contours and you’ll be able, in places, to convince yourself of it. The Superman resolved to distribute his palaces in accordance with that disposition of nature. He occupies the location of the Brain. It’s from there that he directs the thought and action of his realm. Turn the visual axis of the instrument toward that region, and you’ll perceive, confusedly, the mass of brilliant domes beneath which he presides over our destiny. It’s fantastic! You’ll see that in due course. Come and look backwards now. 

“The Heart is that immense red dome, the swelling of which you can perceive. It is, along with the Brain, the most important system in the realm. Immense factories manufacture omnial, sympathetic, telepathic and other fluids there, the services of which we appreciate every day. Telephony, lighting and the various physical energies have their origin there. Also accumulated there is atmospheric electricity, heat from the central fire, the cold of glaciers and the tidal force of the sea, previously unutilized, which our engineers have been able to store.

“To conclude, separating in the sea, there are the inferior Limbs, populated like the Arms, and the region of the Ankles, where the slaves live.”

André Couvreur, 1904

 

Across the foliated space of the twenty-seven equivalents, Faustroll conjured up into the third dimension:

From Baudelaire, E. A. Poe's Silence, taking care to retranslate Baudelaire's translation into Greek.

From Bergerac, the precious tree into which the nightingale-king and his subjects were metamorphosed, in the land of the sun.

From Bloy, the black pigs of Death, retinue of the Betrothed.

From Coleridge, the ancient mariner's crossbow and the ship's floating skeleton, which, when placed in the skiff, was sieve upon sieve.

From Kahn, one of the golden peals from the celestial goldsmiths' shops.

From Lautréamont, the scarab, beautiful as the trembling of hands in alcoholism, which vanished over the horizon.

From Maeterlinck, the lights heard by the first blind sister.

From Mallarmé, the virgin, the bright, and the beautiful today.

From Mendes, the north wind which blew upon the green sea and blended with its salt the sweat of the galley slave who rowed until he was a hundred and twenty years old.

From Péladan, the reflection, in the mirror of the shield silvered with ancestral ashes, of the sacrilegious massacre of the seven planets.

From Régnier, the sorrel plain where the modern centaur snorted.

From Rimbaud, the icicles hurled by the wind of God into the waters.

From Schwob, the scaly animals imitated by the whiteness of the leper's hands.

From Ubu Roi, the fifth letter of the first word of the first act. 

From Verlaine, voices asymptotic toward death.

From Verne, the two and a half leagues of the earth's crust.

Alfred Jarry, 1911

“I thought: Before I write about my favorite artist, what have others written before me? I thought: Perhaps—Many have written about Edgar Poe. Only I’ve been disappointed, so very disappointed. There was just one able to grasp the spirit of him. There was only Baudelaire. Baudelaire whose art came from hashish. How could he not grasp him, he who formed valuable art out of alcohol and laudanum?”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1905

 

“Whereas natural or temporal music will all cease in the course of time, the principal music, whose unity can only be depicted by temporal music in successive form, and which is, in fine, the natural and divine music, will never cease.”

Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, 1790

 

“I remember that, from the first measures [of Wagner's Lohengrin] I experienced one of those happy impressions that almost all imaginative men have known in dreams. I felt myself freed from the bonds of gravity. . . . Next, involuntarily, I imagined to myself the delightful state of a man gripped by a great dream in an absolute solitude, but a solitude with an immense horizon and filled with a vast diffused light; an immensity with no décor except itself. Soon I experienced the sensation of a brighter light, of an intensity of light increasing so quickly that none of the nuances furnished by the dictionary would suffice to express this always renascent increase of brilliance and whiteness. Then I had the full realization of a soul moving in a luminous milieu, of an ecstasy composed of pleasure and knowledge, and soaring above and far away from the natural world.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1861

“The former editor of the Theosophical Society, Henri-Edmond Limet, known as Bailly, died on September 8th last. He was born in Lille on 19th June, 1850, at two o'clock in the afternoon.

“Like Pythagoras, Bailly believed that everything in the world, including planetary movements,‘was created and organized according to the laws governing music,’ music here defined as ‘a harmony formed of several dissonant sounds.’ Through music, he seems to suggest, one could enter into a relation with nature, the cosmos, and all else. All this builds on the theosophical idea that ‘vibrations give form and structure on both the higher and lower planes,’ and that acoustics remake the relations between the visible and the invisible."

Mercure de France, 1917

“In our age of all curiosities is it not astonishing that, apart from two or three hermits whose names each one takes care not to remember, the study of the origin of symbols is nil or almost nil? How is it that such a study, conducted with materials and documents in hand, has not tempted the young phalanx which marches, few in number but ardent, to the conquest of this other golden fleece, the Ideal? 

“Today I experienced the joy of reading a book, the work of an artist who was also a scholar and a philosopher, in which it is established that certain decorative motifs reproduced among all peoples and in all times, on monuments as well as on simple everyday objects, are not due to the simple fantasy of art workers, but constitute a family of hierograms formerly commonly read by the wise men of the whole earth, and since lost due to the eternal inconstancy of human destinies. These signs revealing the most subtle laws of creation, these keys to the mysteries, the writer of the book I am talking about, Mr. Emile-Soldi, rightly considers, as symbols of a primitive language that he calls the Sacred Language.”

Edmond Bailly, 1897

“The value of the word is purely that of a symbol. A sign of the identical unknown that we perceive in everything, it marks the front with a emblem that reminds us of that identity. All things are signs and signs of other signs. Those thoughts were engendered, confusedly, in the minds of the visitors. They had the impression of living, momentarily, in a milieu haunted by symbols.”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1904

“One must never explain symbols. One must never penetrate them. He who has drawn the symbol has hidden a truth inside it, but he must not reveal it, or else why symbolize it in the first place?”

Pierre Louÿs, 1895

“Louder than a normal voice, a voice announces accidents, the temperature and declaims a chronicle or a story. Nothing is more bizarre than hearing the thousand phonographs under the arcades. Each of the “stations” carries a sign indicating the nature of the recitations. The lovers of news stop under the Voice of Events; people fond of literature sup tea under the Voice of the Poets. Those who like to relive ancient times drink within range of the Voice of India, the Voice of Rome or the Voice of Greece. The marine murmur of those confused voices causes a kind of anguish.”

Paul Adam, 1897

“I was about to finish—or near enough—The Fall of the House of Usher, but the illness has blown out my hopes. It’s obviously of little importance on Aldebaran or Sirius whether I write music or not, but I don’t like being contradicted and I take this twist of destiny very hard.”

Claude Debussy, 1916

“Naturalists tell us that the eyes of certain animals, particularly ruminants, possess a vision that magnifies things considerably. It is that perception, on a multiple scale, that earns humankind its sovereignty. That reign by optics is one of the most admirable foresights of the harmonist of worlds. It is also that visual exaggeration that cattle must enjoy, to the point of the total stupefaction, in watching trains go past, magnified for them to the measure of enormous mountains in motion.”

Henri Austruy 1925

 

“The time has come when, under the influence of Mars, millions of men are about to kill one another, hatefully, at a distance. Charnel houses will be displayed under the sun, and that star will cause a destructive atom to bloom pitilessly. It will kill as many millions by means of the infinitely small as by the gigantic engines of war.”

Odette Dulac, 1926

 

“In a time like ours, when the genius of engineers has reached such undreamed of proportions, one can hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer. It only costs ten centimes, too, just like automatic weighing scales! Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic preserved in a disc that anyone can awaken at will? Will it not mean a diminution of the secret forces of art, which until now have been considered indestructible?”

Claude Debussy, 1913

 

“The soul, once free from its body, escapes into the atmosphere, whose electric streams carry it here and there, and whose many-shaped inhabitants it begins to perceive, like fugitive flashes in a thick mist. 

“Then there begins a desperate, vertiginous struggle on the part of the soul, which is still dull and heavy, to rise into the upper strata of the air, to free itself from earthly attraction and reach, in the heaven of our planetary system, the region proper to it and which friendly guides alone can show it. The Greek initiates identified it with the cone of shadow which the earth is always trailing behind it, which shadow reaches as far as the moon; for this reason they called it the Abyss of Hecate. In these murky depths, say the disciples of Orpheus and of Pythagoras, are tossed to and fro the souls which make desperate efforts to reach the circle of the moon, though the violence of the winds beats them back to earth by thousands.”

Édouard Schuré, 1906

 

“'What! You don’t know about the chambardoscope—an instrument invented by an Irish Priest?' None of the ladies or gentlemen was familiar with the chambardoscope. Laflemme brought out his famous old nickel watch. 'It’s not very complicated, as you can see. The instrument is rather reminiscent of a watch, with the difference that it only has one needle. The interior comprises an apparatus that’s extremely sensitive to electric currents passing through the ground. Its use is very simple. You place the instrument flat, like this. If the needle stays on the number six, there’s nothing to fear. If it inclines to the right of the six, it’s because one is dealing with positive telluric currents. If, on the other hand, it steers to the left, that announces the presence of negative currents, which are more dangerous.' All eyes were fixed attentively on the needle, which stayed impassively on the number six. 'We can sleep easy,' Laflemme concluded, cheerfully.”

Alphonse Allais, 1902

 

“'Do not believe, my dear sister, that I wander about in search of adventure and trouble the harmony of the stars. God has traced my path like he has yours, and if my course appears uncertain and wandering, it is because your rays do not extend far enough to be able to embrace the contour of the ellipse which was given to me as my career. My flaming hair is the beacon of God; I am the messenger of the suns, and I dip into their fires in order to share them along my route with young worlds who do not yet have enough warmth and with aging stars who are cold in their solitude. If I tire in my long voyages, if I have a less graceful beauty than yours, if my finery is less virginal, I am nonetheless, like you, a noble daughter of the heavens.'

“After finishing her speech, the comet shakes her mane, protects herself with her ardent shield, and dives into infinite space, where she seems to disappear forever.”

Eliphas Levi, 1854

 

“All that she has revealed to me of her mysterious studies is that she has seen, with her own eyes, plans of aircraft, submarines and automobiles dating back fifteen thousand years before Jesus Christ. She claims that writing has been lost three times on the earth. Thought-reading, which marks one of the phases of human evolution, has existed before. However, arts of speech and writing then became useless, and the spoken word and the pen became obsolete. Fortunately for the loquacious, and for poets, the universal silence of humanity is always followed by the fatal cataclysm that accompanies the somersault of the being known as the Earth, hindered by its growth in its cocoon of humus. Flic, floc! A wave from the depths inundates the continents…and everything begins all over again...”

Odette Dulac, 1926

 

“Finally, the last scene: Humanity is celebrating its salvation with a grand fête that is unfurling through the Champ-de-Mars, transformed into a flower-garden. The cordial and pompous atmosphere of old is reborn. Orpheus is culminating on a throne, surrounded by the masters of occultism. In the air, the souls of disincarnate adepts form choirs. Up above, the sign of the absolute, the universal pentacle of Martinism, is shining like a sun.”

Willy, 1900

 

“The sea, this afternoon, is quite ordinary, uniformly and extensively dark green; it is an endless enchainment of white foam lighting up, going out, lighting up again, it is a legion of sheep swimming, drowning, bobbing up again, and never arriving, until they are ambushed by darkness.” 

Jules Laforgue, 1887