ABSTRACT
Following the "godfather" of decadence Charles Baudelaire, decadents opposed materialist realism with "occult" ideas reflecting the immaterial, imaginary, and symbolic. Tradition's counterpart idea in Nature is the alchemists' perception of matter being the differentiation of a once undifferentiated, primal substance surviving occultly, whose recovery could transmute all things. "Occult Paris" died as a Hermetic movement with the First World War. Papus was admitted as a neophyte at Mathers's temple in Auteuil in a ceremony specially conducted in French. While follower Deodat Roche would lose faith in the Church, Roche nevertheless maintained the flame he received after joining Papus's Independent Group of Esoteric Studies in 1896, and entering the Gnostic Church in 1899, where he encountered Fugairon and Fabre des Essarts. The idea of magic as a technique of the imagination carried artistic implications, and would inform the magic of the British offshoot of "Occult Paris," the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, established in London, significantly, in 1888.
