A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult by Gary Lachman Read Free Book Online

and wrote his early works. His official duties kept him occupied with various posts on land and at sea, and during the war of the Austrian Succession, he was involved in naval campaigns against the English.
    Between 1747 and 1759, Cazotte moved back and forth between France and the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, enduring ill health, miserable conditions, financial problems, official mistreatment and a general run of bad luck. Back in France, in 1760, Cazotte's luck turned, and he was saved from ruin by inheriting a large house in Pierry, near Epernay, from his clergyman brother. There Cazotte married, had three children, and remained for the rest of life, which he devoted to being an amateur litterateur. One of the works he produced during this time was The Devil in Love.
    Most of Cazotte's works deal in some way with the weird, the strange and the occult, and his interest in these was not strictly literary. At some point in the 1770s he became involved in the Martinist lodges following the teachings of Martinez de Pasquales. It is unclear if he joined after Pasquales' death; if so, he may have been initiated into the order by SaintMartin, and if that is the case, he may have been a Martinist of a different stamp. He was clearly a close associate of the Unknown Philosopher, to the extent that Madame la Croix, Saint-Martin's confidant, became a member of the Pierry household, assisting Cazotte in seances and other occult experiments. As Brian Stableford suggests', the occult atmosphere of The Devil in Love is light and playful. However serious Cazotte may have taken his Martinist beliefs, he is concerned here with entertaining. Indeed, Cazotte's tonguein-cheek presentation of ceremonial magic may have been influenced by Saint-Martin's rejection of the theurgic practices of his teacher. Although affirming the efficacy of ritual, Saint-Martin eventually discarded it as dealing solely with inferior realms. Cazotte published The Devil in Love in 1772, and rewrote parts of it at different times, so although he may have started work on it years before meeting Saint-Martin, his association with the Unknown Philosopher could have influenced the work.

    That association came to an end in 1789, a year after his famous prediction. Cazotte, the royalist, could not abide Saint-Martin's brief admiration for the ideals of the revolutionaries - one shared and soon dropped by many Enlightenment occultists. Cazotte was by this time well known as an occultist, and his last work, Arabian Tales, written as a kind of sequel to The Arabian Nights, is in the tradition of exotic occultism inaugurated by Galland's translation and developed in the Romantic years by other occultists like Gerard de Nerval. The Devil in Love, though light fare, links the practice of magic to eroticism, a union that went through several permutations in the following centuries. That the devil appears here both as a beautiful woman and a camel suggests the dangers present in sex and the heathen East. Yet any moralizing on the part of Cazotte - and the different endings he wrote and rewrote suggest that Cazotte himself was unsure what the moral of the fable is - can be excused in a work that contains the overwhelmingly poignant line "Ali Biondetta - if only you were not that hideous dromedary."
    Jan Potocki
    That sex and the East were linked to magic was not something to put off another Enlightenment occultist. To the eccentric Pole, Count Jan Potocki (1761-1815), the three were a positive attraction. Most English readers know Potocki as the author of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, one of the strangest works of 19th century literature. Modelled on The Arabian Nights, The Saragossa Manuscript, as it is often called, is a weird farrago of stories within stories, with an overall supernatural bent. Over a period of 66 days, Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer, recounts his adventures amidst gypsies, kabbalists, demons, corpses, astrologers, the Wandering Jew,