“I may have eaten something rotten, but I am a God.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1860

“Debussy not only heard sounds that no other ear was able to register, but he found a way of expressing things that are not customarily said. He had an almost fanatical conviction that a musical score does not begin with the composer, but that it emerges out of space, through centuries of time, passes before him, and goes on, fading into the distance (as it came) with no sense of finality.”  

George Copeland, 1955

“And he said aloud: ‘This is the future.’ Suddenly, without any reason, this thought came to him and flew through the night like a bright meteor.”   

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1910

“The Sâr Peladan surrounded by Rosicrucians took possession of the studio. One smelled incense and the candles’ waxen tears; a lectern held an old Bible. On the dark grey walls I had written Arab proverbs in chalk and quotations from Shakespeare, profundities from Plato. Ladies with their hair in precise braids and their waists thin as stalks sighed and palpitated. Men smoked enormous pipes. Their velveteen suits, stained with ink, paint or clay, carried the signature of their profession. I was happy.”

Georgette Leblanc, 1911

“Wagner, if one may be permitted a little of the grandiloquence that suits the man, was a beautiful sunset that has been mistaken for the dawn."

Claude Debussy, 1910

 

“Anyone who is sensitive and still open to spiritual development can, during the time of this great war, distinctly feel powerful new forces flowing into them. These come from the many dying soldiers”

Gustav Meyrink, 1917

 

“My originality consists in bringing to life improbable beings, and making them live according to the laws of probability, by putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” 

Odilon Redon, 1915

“Prophetic sounds and loud, arise forever from us, and from all ruin, unto the wise, as melody from Memnon to the Sun.”

Edgar Poë, 1833

“The discovery of the microscope was sufficient to prove to us that our senses are deceptive and that we cannot see things as they are. Nature appears to us grandiose and poetic, does it not? But if we were able to see it as it really is, in its all-devouring actuality, it is probable that we would shiver more in horror than enthusiasm.”

Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, 1866

 

“We are in the full assembly of the Sabbat of Sabbats here, and I put it to you that every evening, every arena of Parisian society—including the Opéra and the gatherings of the great and the good of France—is a rendezvous of necromantic mages.”

Jean Lorrain, 1891

"Space is swarming with microbes, is it any more surprising that it should also abound in spirits and spectres?"

J.-k. Huysmans, 1891

 

“Soon the world’s clock will strike twelve; the number on the dial is red, is dipped in blood, and by that you will recognize it.” 

Gustav Meyrink, 1916

 

“Nothing wrong with Debussy that a few weeks in the open air wouldn’t cure.”

Carl Ruggles, 1915

 

“My eyes were strange and vague, a gray sea of boredom seemed to have poured into it entirely, my head leaned over my body, like a flower on its stem. I thought I was a fantastic character of Edgar Poe.” 

Liane de Pougy, 1899

“Among the first composers to be instrumental in introducing this overtone of the ancient Atlantean music was Debussy. In more occult terms he was unconsciously used by the Higher Ones to carry over Fourth Race sound-vibrations into the Fifth.”

Cyril Scott, 1926

 

“They were all black magicians; their miracles crept out of their brains.”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1911

 

“I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find at the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1851

 

"Why should I want to vote? I have not time to vote. If I were a suffragist I should want to do all—lecture, write for it, live it. I can’t do anything in part—I must do it all."

Mary Garden, 1912

 

"The infinite prince, in creating, speaks of himself to himself."

Eliphas Levi, 1854

"There should be in the world a centre of scientific and philosophical research, where the most notable scholars, in possession of new ideas, could readily experiment the value of the hypotheses constructed either by themselves or by their disciples. A centre from which nothing would drive away the good will. A centre wherein a world record could be kept of the entire range of the progressive imagination of man, and where nothing usefully conceived by the human brain would be lost. A centre from which economic and practical knowledge would flow to all parts of the world. A centre and a city outside of all historical and social quarrels, of all economic and national rivalries, a centre belonging, without possible exception, to all. To the Spirit of all. To the Spirit only."

Paul Adam, 1893