ABSTRACT
Historians have noted Plato’s commitment to occult mysteries, especially those of Greece and Ancient Egypt. This ideal place, coded within mysteries that Plato was bound to keep secret as integral to the mysteries of knowledge, was analyzed through allegory, myth and symbolism. The witch craze has been well documented within the academic literature that gripped places in Western Europe and the most infamous in North America, at the Salem Witch Trials. Fear and paranoia: the affective remnants of a dying world. Nineteenth century Paris was rife with a particular form of sensationalized satanic resurgence, as artists, visionaries and imaginaries reacted to the slow, impending creep of a modernist ethos that valued reason over faith, science over ritual, empiricism over artistic production. The old discursive trope of “freedom” under the auspices of State hegemony, empty symbolism and neoliberal capitalism was a trap, and it was time to leave that behind.
