The Importance of Being Hermes 

“…and agnosticism shall have its ritual.”

~ De Profundis

There is a trend in Wilde scholarship to rescue Oscar from himself. It’s easy to remember him as an active, outgoing, charismatic artist; an extrovert, a traveler, a dedicated scholar; deeply involved in the artistic and philosophical movements of his day. But it can be a struggle to write about him when studies of his life and work involve the complicated task of framing his many phases alongside viscerally embarrassing anecdotes. Wilde was also an unrepentant, hedonistic exhibitionist, and the artistic movements he followed have bled outside the margins of our present-day notion of academic respectability.

The story of his 1895 trial is tempered with the knowledge that he was being harassed by the Marquess of Queensbury, pushed by Lord Alfred Douglas, and enthused by legal counsel who were looking forward to sensational courtroom drama. Rather more problematic to a respectable biography is the element of occultism that infused his work throughout various phases – such as Wilde basing his final legal decision on the advice of a palm reader. It’s embarrassing to admit that the subject of your studies, a demonstrably intelligent and well read man, went to jail because of a fortune teller.

Wildean scholarship has always been shy about putting too much spiritualism on the page, but Victorian culture studies keep finding references to Wilde in their material on spiritualism. In fact, spiritualism infected so much of Victorian culture that it’s a struggle for historians today to rigorously define its boundaries. One historian – Sasha Chaitow, biographer of the French Occultist Josephin Peladan – writes:

Recent scholarship has highlighted the problematic nature of the indiscriminate use of the term “magic” as a generic umbrella definition, as this leads to a severe distortion of meaning. Rather we should refer to “concepts of magic” to differentiate between contexts and discursive subtleties that would otherwise be glossed over.¹ Sasha Chaitow, Son of Prometheus: The Life and Work of Josephin Peladan (Theion Publishing 2021).

As an example, the term “spiritualist” could mean many things in this cultural context.

Spiritualism could, for example, be paired with the term “Mentalist” to describe a popular style of stage show where performers would practice sleight of hand or display memory feats to make it seem as if they were predicting the future or reading minds.

There is a distinctly American branch of spiritualism known as Transcendentalism, which included – at various points – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman. Transcendentalism was a Protestant branch of Christian philosophy that blossomed in America’s New England region and remained in the national consciousness through the literary contributions of its participants. They even had their own utopian community inspired by Fourierist socialist ideas, Brook Farm, which lasted for about five years.

The Transcendentalists distinguished their theology with an antinomian belief in the holiness of nature, making all of existence an extension of the divine. Transcendentalists took their name from the distinction Kant made in the Critique of Pure Reason between the Transcendental and the Transcendent, which defined Transcendental as the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience, and the Transcendent as what lies beyond the scope of experience. Transcendentalists attempted to use Kant’s definition of reason to justify their faith. This developed into spiritualism, a practice with its own unique cosmology. Spiritualists offered their clients a chance to measure a tiny portion of the spiritual plane in the comfort of a middle-class parlor or an entertainment hall. Seances continued throughout the nineteenth century, long after interest in Transcendentalism had peaked and faded. Some mediums played in theaters to packed audiences, and stage magicians incorporated tricks and symbols from spiritualism to flesh out their performances.² Michael Brodrick, “American Transcendentalism.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu/am-trans/.

In Europe proper, and certainly in the UK, religious syncretism was growing in popularity. It had roots in the same soil as Transcendentalism – Coleridge’s translation of Kant, the materialist dialectics of Hegel, and the Neoplatonism of the Renaissance. But these were fertilized with newer interests. Religious texts from non-Western parts of the world had been rising in popularity since the first words on the Rosetta Stone were translated in 1828.³ At the century’s open, philosophers in Germany discovered that other religious texts brought them the same sense of peace and clarity as Christian texts. In her essay “Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism in the Nineteenth Century,” Margot K. Louis quotes the rationale used by Georg Fredrich Creuzer in Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, published in four volumes between 1810 and 1814:  “In Creuzer’s doctrine of emanation, all things flow from God and must return to him. This vision could readily modulate into a Christian-inflected pantheism, in which all beings participate in the Divinity from which they take their origin and to which they return, rushing (as Carlyle puts it) “through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.”” See Victorian Studies, Spring, 2005, Vol 47, No. 3 (Spring 2005), pp. 329-361 As colonialism swept through Asia, many religious texts were translated into European languages. These translations directly contributed to the inception and popularity of Theosophy, the brainchild of the Russian mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky was fluent in several ancient languages, but it was through the popularity of publicly available translations that she built her audience. Theosophy claimed to bring together religious traditions from around the world, pulling in ideas from the Vedas, Neoplatonism, Ancient Egyptian religion, and Hermeticism through an understanding of their supposed shared roots in universal mystical experience.⁴ For an example of the typical Theosophical argument, see Helena Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy (1889). There were also predecessors to this line of argument, such as Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854). For the influence of Theosophical and other occultist ideas on nineteenth-century socialism and anarchism, see Erica Lagalisse, The Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of Peoples (PM Press, 2019). Madame Blavatsky began her career as a medium, where she made objects disappear and reappear and communicated with spirits. When she was debunked, she claimed that she’d merely relied on the theatrics of magic tricks to sell tickets to her lectures on religion.⁵ It would be more socially acceptable today to remember the nineteenth-century public’s interest in world religions only through world conferences held where religious leaders were invited to give lectures on their faith. But the most thorough archives of the movement come instead from the private clubs that sprang up around the globe. Members like W.B Yeats offer us the clearest glimpse into their rituals and belief systems through his personal documentation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn meetings. See Susan Johnston Graf, W.B. Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeats’s Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries (2000) and Jamie James, “W.B. Yeats, Magus” in Lapham’s Quarterly Volume V, Number 3 (Summer 2012).

Wilde is known for his attachment to Aestheticism, an art movement that encouraged a deeply individualistic and emotional response to art. Aestheticism had its own connection to the burgeoning occult milieu. As the self-proclaimed inheritors of English Romanticism, devotees of Aestheticism lay claim to the spiritualism of Blake, Milton, and Byron. Through Walter Pater’s seminal History of the Renaissance, they took an interest in Renaissance Neoplatonism; Pater himself wrote essays on notable occult enthusiasts such as Giordano Bruno and Charles Lamb.⁶Pater writes: “
No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcile forms of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to adjust the various products of the human mind to each other in one many-sided type of intellectual culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination to feed upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to the generous instincts of that age. An earlier and simpler generation had seen in the gods of Greece so many malignant spirits, the defeated but still living centres of the religion of darkness, struggling, not always in vain, against the kingdom of light. Little by little, as the natural charm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds emerging out of barbarism, the religious significance which had once belonged to it was lost sight of, and it came to be regarded as the subject of a purely artistic or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that from time to time minds should arise, deeply enough impressed by its beauty and power to ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival of the religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves, and men’s allegiance was divided.” From Chapter 2 of The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873). Wilde’s attitude towards truth was playful and protean: he enjoyed contradicting himself and fabricating stories to confuse journalists and scholars. All of his declarative statements are a matter of suspended skepticism until proven through his actions.⁷ I mean, of course, that all his actions were artistic. The fashion-conscious Wilde would have been familiar with anything that was all the rage in his time – and religious theory was no exception. Wilde’s occult interests recur throughout his life and work. And beyond filling in the portrait of Oscar as an individual, they help us map the connections between various syncretist religious projects of the nineteenth century.

~ 

Only a few⁸ In fact, ignoring the spiritual and occult references in Wilde’s work seems to be a hangover from the Satanic Panic of the twentieth century. While it’s difficult to assign a perfect beginning to the rising tide of paranoia that permeated the later half of the century, many associate it with the living memory of public conversations about the effect of rock music on the youth. The visibility for these concerns peaked between the 1980s and 90s, but there were signs of it as early as 1967, when Ira Levin’s horror novel Rosemary’s Baby (1967) made direct allusions to the religious syncretism of the nineteenth century. For decades there was no reference to the spiritual experiments that took place throughout the nineteenth century, either because they seem woefully naive or because they were too closely associated with hysterical fears of the degradation of modern youth. There has recently been more interest in investigating the topic, but as Sasha Chaitow (the biographer of the French occultist Josephin Peladan, cited above) noted, it is hampered by the poor scholarship of earlier studies. Wilde scholars are open to tracing the connections hidden in plain sight between the famous playwright-poet of “art for art’s sake” and the Victorian-era syncretism of world religions. Tracing these connections leads down a strange and winding path. Oscar himself described his inconsistent occult interests as a way to keep a little variety in life. When he was invited to join the Thirteen Club, a skeptics association, his firm rejection note explained:

I have to thank the members of your Club for their kind invitation, for which convey to them, I beg you, my sincere thanks. But I love superstitions. They are the colour element of thought and imagination. They are the opponents of common sense. Common sense is the enemy of romance. The aim of your Society seems to be dreadful. Leave us some unreality. Do not make us too offensively sane. I love dining out, but with a Society with so wicked an object as yours I cannot dine. I regret it. I am sure you will all be charming, but I could not come, though 13 is a lucky number.⁹ Quoted in a notice in the Times of London, 16 January 1894.

 In an article for the house journal of the Oscar Wilde Society, Geoff Dibs recounts two instances when Oscar and his brother Willie Wilde were invited to spectate at a Mentalist exhibition that featured a performer who was a noted skeptic and billed his performances as feats of skill.¹⁰ Geoff Dib, “Oscar Wilde and The Mystics. Thought Transference, The Detection of Crime and Finding a Pin,” The Wildean No. 42 (January 2013), pp. 82-99

Matthew Sturgis included in his recent biography a story of Wilde acting opposite Madame Blavatsky herself in a publicity stunt. According to Sturgis, the two reclined in armchairs behind the display window of a new department store while trading witticisms and smoking like steam engines.¹¹ Matthew Sturgis, Oscar Wilde: A Life (2021)

Wilde’s wife, Constance Wilde, was the most active occultist in the family, first joining the Theosophical Society, then later the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She was good friends with the founder of the Hermetic Order, Dr. Anna Kingsford; in fact, the Wildes met at a seance Dr. Kingsford held at the Saturday at-homes of Lady Jane Wilde, Oscar’s mother. In a review of Dr. Kingsford’s book, Wilde described her spiritual visions as a disappointment but Dr. Kingsford herself as an accomplished scientist. He summed up his review with a sheepish admission of befuddlement: “I must confess that most of modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand.”¹² See Oscar Wilde, “SOME LITERARY NOTES—II” in Woman’s World (February 1889), collected in Reviews (Methuen and Co, 1908), available at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere online.

George Cecil Ives, an early gay rights activist and a friend of the Wildes, began a secret order called The Order of Chaeronea. Like the Golden Dawn, or any other occult organization of the period, the Order was designed to encourage study and religious contemplation; though its existence was ostensibly a secret, there are records of its membership’s activities. Ives chose to re-define the common era to begin in 338 BC, after the Battle of Chaeronea. That date marked the fall of the Sacred Band of Thebans, a cavalry battalion that was said to be made up entirely of gay male partnerships. (Ives requested members not date each other to prevent his Order from becoming a cruising spot.) Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas were known to have participated briefly in Ives’ Order before drifting away.

So far, so biographical. It would be easy enough to dismiss such flirtations with spiritualism as little more than a piece of trivia, nothing but a product of certain associations with occult celebrities and Wilde’s personal eccentricities – but the references continue.

To begin, his education in classicism was tinged with a uniquely Victorian paganism.¹³ See William Chislett, Jr., “The New Hellenism of Oscar Wilde” in The Sewanee Review (July 1915) as well as E. Philip Smith & S. Michael Helfand, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of the Mind in the Making (Oxford University Press, 1989). Paganism in the nineteenth century had a comparable public appearance to (say) modern-day Satanism. There was anxiety early in the century that study of the classics would lead Christians astray in their beliefs. Scholars spent decades warning readers against empathizing too closely with Greeks or Romans. In both A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri (1803) and The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816), George Stanley Faber called Hellenism a “religion of hell.”

There was fear-mongering about paganism leading to mass child sacrifice and orgies, but self-proclaimed pagans were mostly viewed on a personal basis as undisciplined individualists. For example, W.H. Mallock’s satirical novel The New Republic (1877) mocked the strain of Neoplatonism that was being fomented at Oxford throughout the 1860s and 1870s. Characters who are clearly caricatures of influential Oxford thinkers such as Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater are depicted as amoral preachers. Mallock made use of a real-life suicide that occurred during his time at Oxford, of a Scotch Balliol student who, prior to his suicide, told his friends that Jowett’s pagan-inflected Christianity was stripping him of his faith.¹⁴ W.H. Mallock (a.k.a. William Hurrell), Memoirs of Life and Literature (1920). 2d ed. London: Chapman and Hall. By the latter half of the century “paganism” was an empty stock phrase with a connection to a contemporary archetype rather than an antique one, a watery reflection of Matthew Arnold’s image of Hellenism as a secular naturalism that sanctified materialist philosophy.

In a notable academic journal article on the subject, Margot K. Louis pointed out that the Classics were taught in schools under the persistent fear that treating the ancients as equals could imperil the soul. She writes, “Romantic and Victorian poetry… offered a field in which myth could be used, revised, and even explicitly discussed with more freedom than was available to scholars at the time.” While poets still needed to shroud their work in tedious reminders of the dangers of idolatry, they could draw a direct intellectual lineage from the ancients to themselves.¹⁵ Margot Kathleen Louis, “Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Studies 47, no. 3 (2005): 329-361.

In Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1997), Linda Dowling identified a throughline in German philosophy from the Age of Enlightenment into the post-Hegelian discourse of an amoral reading of non-Christian texts, starting with the Oxford Balliol Don Benjamin Jowett. Before Oscar’s time, Jowett used the foundations of Young Hegelian spirituality to inject new life into the study of classical Greek and Roman philosophy. Oxford Hellenism never set out to be a spiritual revival of ancient practices, but instead a re-constitution of Biblical Christianity with the morals of the age it sprang from. As John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty, Christian morality wasn’t so much contemporary British morality as it was an agreement on morals between the different coasts of the ancient Mediterranean, so thoroughly stripped of context by the passage of time that students of the Greats in his contemporary England were walking around with heads full of arcane but meaningless ancient symbols.¹⁶ JS Mill, On Liberty (1859), pp. 90-93 Jowett’s innovation was to re-connect those symbols through the Neoplatonic strains of early Christian mystics. His fingerprints left their marks on Pater’s History of the Renaissance, and in turn, on Wilde’s antinomianism.

Dowling’s book helps identify the importance of a classical education to the British middle class of the nineteenth century, and it was Jowett’s curriculum that Wilde took a double degree in. The Victorian English agreed on where the origin of their moral standards came from, but struggled to intuitively feel the connection between their modernity and ancient texts. This disconnect was jarred further by the scientific landmarks of the day – the fossil record, evolution, and germ theory, among others – that snapped long-held religious beliefs about the nature of reality. The decadence of the Victorian period was therefore a decay of the canon, where a carefully constructed internal fidelity was coming apart from within under any careful scrutiny. Many believed that morality itself would evaporate without the emotional glue to keep readers to their texts.

Wilde didn’t regard tradition as necessary to morality, claiming rather that his main interest in churches and religions was mostly the performance. He was interested in the Catholic Church for his entire life, but he remained a Protestant until a deathbed conversion. The question of the honesty of his faith has been a matter of debate since he was sixteen and arguing with his Protestant father.¹⁷ To Reginald Harding, June 16th, 1877: “My brother and I were always supposed to be his heirs but his will was an unpleasant surprise, like most wills. He leaves my father’s hospital about £8000, my brother £2000, and me £100 on condition of my being a Protestant! He was, poor fellow, bigotedly intolerant of the Catholics and seeing me ‘on the brink’ struck me out of his will. It is a terrible disappointment to me; you see I suffer a good deal from my Romish leanings, in pocket and mind. My father had given him a share in my fishing lodge in Connemara, which of course ought to have reverted to me on his death; well, even this I lose ‘if I become a Roman Catholic for five years’ which is very infamous. Fancy a man going before ‘God and the Eternal Silences’ with his wretched Protestant prejudices and bigotry clinging still to him. From Chapter 1 (“The Student”) of Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters (2010) by Merlin Holland.

Prior to the relatively recent rediscovery of Wilde’s critical writings, his spiritual life has been defined by De Profundis and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Christ appears as a character in several of his short stories and poems, but works like “The Selfish Giant” or “The Hermit and the Thief” aren’t used to define his spiritual practices. Catholic readers discuss Wilde’s conversion as a beautiful act of faith while omitting that it was the man Wilde is buried with, Robert Ross, who begged him to accept last rites. Protestants can say that Wilde said all Popes deserve the guillotine in The Soul of Man under Socialism, and Catholics can point out that he was blessed by Pope Pius IX twice. Much of his early religious study seems to be a bridge between his Protestant background and Catholic inclinations, such as his conversations at Oxford with Cardinal Newman, who began his career in the Church of England until his ceaseless petitions to return all Protestants to the Catholic fold resulted in his own conversion. Wilde was briefly a Freemason, an explicitly Protestant order, but one with pomp and ceremony. During his time in America, Wilde expressed interest in studying Mormonism, which frequently advertised itself as a bridge between the ritual of Catholicism and the secular individualism of Protestantism.¹⁸ See Ed Berne Ogden, “Words with Wilde,” Ogden Daily Herald (March 25, 1882), collected in Robert Marland (ed.), Oscar Wilde Complete Interviews, Volume One (2002) Wilde was seen eagerly buying Mormon literature at train stations on his way to Utah and confidently asserted his interest in the religion to interviewers, but by the time he reached Salt Lake City his enthusiasm had melted in the face of reality. He complained in private letters of plain women sitting silently behind their shared husband and described the Latter Day Saints’ beloved central Tabernacle as a “soup tureen.”

In a 1991 journal article, John Allen Quintus says that, even at the end of his life, Wilde “does not describe himself as a self-hating, pagan-Catholic.” Then again, neither did any of the thinkers he devoured in his youth or hounded in his adult years.¹⁹John Allen Quintus, “Christ, Christianity, and Oscar Wilde,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language
Vol. 33, No. 4, Late Nineteenth-Century Contextual and Psychological Configurations (WINTER 1991), pp. 514-527. And we have already established that Wilde was an element in the school of Hellenism practiced at Oxford.

Wilde’s agnosticism had roots outside of Oxford’s cloistered academia, however. He was raised in a household with two active members of the Young Irelander movement, and Lady Jane Wilde was directly inspired by Thomas Davis’ image of a secular culture designed to bridge religious divides. The Young Irelander bid for unity through secularism was inseparable from its wish for universal education and suffrage. Sir William Wilde’s anthropological surveys of rural Ireland helped serve that purpose, and in his faerie stories he took care to note when Christian mysticism overtook older sites of pagan worship. 

In her 1887 collection of Sir William Wilde’s fairy tales, Oscar Wilde’s mother explained: 

The people [of Ireland] therefore lived entirely upon the traditions of their forefathers, blended with the new doctrines taught by Christianity; so that the popular belief became, in time, an amalgam of the pagan myths and the Christian legend, and these two elements remain indissolubly united to this day.²⁰ Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887).

Dr. Wilde’s credence in folk tales was an element of his humanist philosophy, which he used to explain some of the unfathomable cruelty he witnessed during the Great Famine. As Emer Sullivan pointed out in his book The Fall of the House of Wilde (2017), Sir William considered esoteric beliefs part of the poetry of the people, which gave a romantic air to even the cruelest acts of superstition:

While we write, a country newspaper informs us of the body of a child having been disinterred at Oran, in the County of Roscommon, and its arms cut off, to be employed in the performance of certain mystic rites. About a year ago a man in the county of Kerry roasted his child to death, under the impression that it was a fairy. He was not brought to trial, as the crown prosecutor mercifully looked upon him as insane.²¹ William Robert Wills Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions (1852), p. 28.

While the moral panic surrounding pagan heresies began to diminish, Irish folk spiritual traditions still carried a stigma of superstition and stupidity. Even so, Wilde took the lessons his father taught him seriously throughout his career. Two degrees in Greek later and with a lifelong fascination with mythology, folklore, and the transformative power of gossip, he built a career on teasing high society by implying that their speculations were no different from those of the lower orders.

The blend of rumor with fact is as essential in his work as the battle of genders or the sniping of duchesses. In Salomé he put the miracles of Christ in the mouths of the disaffected nobility as common rumor-mongering. Wilde appears to have borrowed the idea that the Christian miracles could have been an exaggerated fact from one of his favorite books, Ernest Renan’s Life of Christ (1863). This hotly debated book by one of France’s foremost nineteenth-century historians²² Renan was a somewhat contradictory figure. His politics ping-ponged back and forth between support for aristocracy and for liberal democracy. Though at one point an arch-reactionary in politics who wanted France to adopt feudal institutions and a society catering to an aristocratic elite after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, he was nevertheless a contributor to the very secularizing scholarship which made such a return culturally impossible. Moreover, he was somehow not a biological racist and actually helped innovate social-constructivist theories of nationhood and ethnicity that would later influence the anarchist Benedict Anderson in his famous Imagined Communities (1983). For the fully fleshed-out story of the intellectual formation of “Renan, with his great belly, his pudgy hands, his round and puffy face, his heavily-drooping porcine eyelids,” see Edmund Wilson’s chapter on him in To the Finland Station (1940). –Eds.  was an early modern attempt to reposition Jesus of Nazareth as a human man rather than the literal son of God. Using Roman and Palestinian texts of the period, Renan pieced together a greater historical context for the New Testament. 

This speculation on the tension between fact and fiction played into Wilde’s lifelong fascination with the plastic, artificial nature of human knowledge, which remains the bedrock of his body of work. That understanding itself was a human invention was a lifelong source of fascination to him. As a colonial subject his earliest childhood memories were of his parents fighting the Empire to recognize landmark historic events. As Young Irelanders the Wildes fought to be recognized as a political vanguard with an agenda, not members of a mob. A survivor of the Famine, Sir William was credited by his son’s biographer, Robert Sherard, with collating the final census on the Famine’s death toll. Even after the dead were counted, the matter of adding the event to history was a topic of debate for decades. As an adult, and moreover as a queer man in Victorian London, Wilde encountered the limits of men of science who studied and classified homosexuals, intersex people, and publicly transgender individuals. In his final years he complained, “the fact that I am a pathological problem in the eyes of German scientists is only interesting to German scientists: and even in their works I am tabulated, and come under the law of averages!” 

~

The basic human urge for narrative and artistry offered opportunities outside of mere boring fact. Occultism is a faith, but it could also be considered part of the literary landscape of the fin de siècle period. In a post-Darwin world, many people turned to religion to find meaning and structure, but saw traditional Christianity as falling just short of covering the modern world. Another of Wilde’s favorite books, Flaubert’s Temptations of St. Anthony (1874), toyed with the separation between faith and fact by exposing the twelfth-century priest St. Anthony of Padua to the horrific reality of nineteenth-century social sciences, culminating in a demonic ride through the cosmos narrated like one of Milton’s visionary fantasies. 

Typically, Wilde biographies seek to keep Wilde firmly ensconced in British canon, relating his work to British text, connecting him to British writers, and ignoring the connections he made outside of the country. But really the Aesthetic tradition of Wilde, Walter Pater, and Aubrey Beardsley was just the British wing of the Decadent movement that had taken root in the salons of Paris at the same time, extending its influence across poetry, art, and criticism. Artists of this tradition walked such a fine line between art and occultism that distinguishing two separate camps is difficult for historians. One of Wilde’s contemporaries, Josephin Peladan, was an art critic, novelist, and occultist whose most lasting artistic contribution came from heading the Ordre du Temple de la Rose + Croix and an accompanying Salon. Many Symbolist artists got their start at Rose + Croix Salons, while established artists from the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements were invited to speak and exhibit their work. Rosicrucian orders lived and died every day in the fin de siècle Paris of Wilde’s day. J. K. Huysmans, the unelected pilot of French Decadence, engaged in open spiritual warfare with the Abbé Louis van Haecke, a defrocked priest and practicing Satanist. Huysmans gave his perspective on Satanism in his first success, À Rebours (1884): 

This condition, at once fascinating and ambiguous, can not arise in the soul of an unbeliever. It does not merely consist in sinking oneself in the excesses of the flesh, excited by outrageous blasphemies, for in such a case it would be no more than a case of satyriasis that had reached its climax. Before all, it consists in sacrilegious practice, in moral rebellion, in spiritual debauchery, in a wholly ideal aberration, and in this it is exemplarily Christian. It is also founded upon a joy tempered by fear, a joy analogous to the satisfaction of children who disobey their parents and play with forbidden things, for no reason other than that they had been forbidden to do so.

Wilde’s own Salomé (1893) is a landmark example of the femme fatale, but it is also very heavily and very obviously inspired by the Queen of Sheba scene in Flaubert’s Temptations of St. Anthony. There is an entire chapter in the Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890) written in the same style as À Rebours, the original Decadent novel. Wilde’s use of a capital A when talking about Art is usually dismissed as a Wildean eccentricity, when really it was part and parcel of the package of Parisian decadence. This tendency was so well known, in fact, that Proust, in the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time (1921), has the out-of-touch old Brichot comment on it:

I have no wish to be damned as a heretic and renegade in the Mallarmean chapel in which our new friend, like all the young men of his age, must have served the esoteric mass, at least as an acolyte, and have shewn himself deliquescent or Rosicrucian. But, really, we have seen more than enough of these intellectuals worshiping art with a big A… 

In Wilde’s “The Fisherman and His Soul,” the Fisherman approaches his local priest to get rid of his soul. The priest is horrified by his proposal, but doesn’t answer any of the Fisherman’s questions about how the soul works or how it helps him:

The young Fisherman’s eyes filled with tears when he heard the bitter words of the Priest, and he rose up from his knees and said to him, “Father, the Fauns live in the forest and are glad, and on the rocks sit the Mermen with their harps of red gold. Let me be as they are, I beseech thee, for their days are as the days of flowers. And as for my soul, what doth my soul profit me, if it stand between me and the thing that I love?”

“The love of the body is vile,” cried the Priest, knitting his brows, “and vile and evil are the pagan things God suffers to wander through His world. Accursed be the Fauns of the woodland, and accursed be the singers of the sea! I have heard them at night-time, and they have sought to lure me from my beads. They tap at the window, and laugh. They whisper into my ears the tale of their perilous joys. They tempt me with temptations, and when I would pray they make mouths at me. They are lost, I tell thee, they are lost. For them there is no heaven nor hell, and in neither shall they praise God’s name.”

 In contrast to the priest’s admonishments, the local witch both recognizes the value of the Fisherman’s soul and has a solution ready for him. She’s as materially useful as Mr. Podgers, the palm reader from “Lord Savile’s Crime,” who has regular hours of operation and a group rate for families. That he’s a fraud doesn’t have any effect on the story. 

The anatomy of the soul in Wilde’s oeuvre also points to Wilde’s education in spiritualism. “The Fisherman and his Soul” pivots around the Fisherman giving his heart to a mermaid while severing his soul and sending it to walk the earth without him. In this story, Wilde combines common elements of Western European folklore with Egyptian symbolism. Human-adjacent creatures like mermaids, nymphs, and fauns are described as being without souls, but still relatable.They have hearts to empathize with but not, as Wilde describes it, “the shadow which is the soul of the body.” This echoes ancient Egyptian cosmology, where the heart is separate from the shadow. The Greeks and Romans also split the soul into wandering and ideological pieces, but connecting the heart to the shadow, and the shadow to the memory of a dead man, was specific to Egyptian theology. In this way depictions of a dead person were imagined as part of their shadow, therefore part of their soul, thus keeping a piece of them alive. The Shut is described as the shadow of the body, the slim projection of the physical form after an individual dies, while the heart, the Ib, acts as the seat of emotions. In Wilde’s story, when the Shut wanders the world without a heart it grows bitter and cruel. While on its travels it learns how to perform miracles that attract followers and holds sway over them by being invulnerable to harm. When it reconnects with the Fisherman it still doesn’t have access to his heart. The Shut continues to live the same cruel life it lived without the Fisherman, but now in his body, where the Fisherman watches it inflict pain on others in horror. 

Minor characters in the “Fisherman and His Soul” mistake the Soul for a djinn, but within the story it more closely resembles a Qareen, the invisible companion that every human has in Islamic folklore. In some belief systems the Qareen’s sole duty is to influence each individual human to do evil, though notably the prophet Muhammad had a moral Qareen. 

There are many potential places where Wilde could have picked this information up. He was an avid follower of Lord Byron, who had his own interests in Islam. Wilde’s father Sir William Wilde dabbled in Egyptology. The previously mentioned Edward Heron-Allen, popular Egyptologist, could have been another resource. So too could Oscar’s wife Constance Wilde, who like other Aesthetes was interested in an informed agnosticism fueled by reading into other spiritual practices. (Some scholars have suggested that all her interests were really Wilde’s, and her studies were just a pretext to get him books, but he had no problem joining the Freemasons or telling strangers that he was proudly superstitious.)

The Contessa Anne de Beaumont, a friend of both Wildes who was dedicated to the Order of the Golden Dawn at the same ceremony as Constance, believed that Constance discussed the Order’s secrets with Oscar. De Beaumont even claimed that teachings from the order inspired the plot mechanics in his famous novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray. 

The Portrait of Dorian Gray concerns itself with the nuts and bolts consequences of what happens to a man who doesn’t age. By keeping the conceit of a devil’s bargain but leaving out the devil, Dorian Gray has evolved into a precursor for modern literary fiction. As de Beaumont pointed out in her memoirs, Oscar Wilde and His Mother, the Portrait relies on popular nineteenth-century occult theories: 

The story of Dorian Gray is built on the mysterious force of suggestion. The metamorphosis of the picture of Dorian Gray illustrates the occult doctrine that inanimate objects can be imbued with the good or evil influence of their possessor by the powerful magnetism of the aura of spiritual atmosphere.²³ Anna Duphy Comtesse De Bremont, Oscar Wilde and his Mother (Everett & Co. 1914), p. 99.

Dorian Gray’s bargain with the devil isn’t purely speculative: it is, in fact, a thought experiment on the Law of Attraction, where speaking desires out loud puts them into effect. Hence, Dorian doesn’t need to meet the Devil at the crossroads or sacrifice babies to make the painting age, but only to cry out for what he wants. 

~

Constance Wilde ran the gauntlet of her interest in the Golden Dawn in two years, afterward letting her membership lapse, and Wilde never joined at all. Nevertheless, rumors spread of his activity. Aliester Crowley and Theodore Reuss claimed in their book, OTO Rituals and Sex Magick, that Wilde participated in something called a “Vampirism ritual” with the notorious occult fraud Anna O’Delia Diss Debar and another con artist only remembered by history as “Theodor Horos.” O’Delia and Horos nearly tore the Order of the Golden Dawn out by its roots, but it’s easy to imagine Wilde enjoying their company. He probably enjoyed Blavatsky’s company as well, despite her having been introduced to him as a fraud rather than a mystic. 

Wilde prioritized the human imagination as the source for monsters. His fidelity to Hegelian materialism would have made him much more interested in what the human mind was capable of, and we can tell by his statements on the nature of the truth that for him lying was just another aspect of understanding reality.²⁴ See for example Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” collected in Intentions (1908) and widely available online in the public domain. There is no argument to be made that he was as devoted to esotericism as many of his contemporaries, but rather that he had his own creed summed up from disparate parts of his upbringing and interests. Wilde was part of the wave of early syncretic explorers, but he did not want anything to do with the positivism of some of his contemporaries, least of all as they applied the scientific method to record and track people’s experiences. Instead, he was much more interested in the liars and charlatans who made the experience harder to study. His affinity was not for scientists who wanted to measure the boundaries between the supernatural and natural, but for the people who manipulated that boundary for their own reasons.

On March 25th, 1895, Oscar Wilde addressed a letter to Ada Leverson in response to her concern over his recent lawsuit declaring the Marquess of Queensbury, Sholto Douglas, had committed libel by calling him a sodomite. In his letter, Wilde assured his friend: “Thanks for the charming letter. We have been to Sibyl Robinson. She prophesied complete triumph and was most wonderful.” Robinson was a palm reader; apparently, her prophecy influenced his ill-fated decision to pursue a lawsuit. Only a month later, on April 9th, Wilde wrote to Mrs. Leverson again, this time from Holloway Prison. Though he spoke mostly of his mental state and the last of his hopes, he briefly addressed his shock at the turn of events, adding: “With what a crash this fell! Why did the Sibyl say fair things?”²⁵ Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters (HarperCollins UK 2010). The letters suggest only the lightest responsibility placed on the palm reader Mrs. Robinson. Like a Hellenic general, Wilde consulted his oracles right at the dawn of war, after the battlefield was already laid and the plans marked up. The final fortune helped bolster his confidence, but when the fight was over he was more preoccupied with securing his estate, providing for his mother, locating his wife and children, and contacting his lover. The supernatural would have to wait another few years.²⁶ Emer O’Sullivan, The Fall of the House of Wilde (Bloomsbury Books, 2016) 

His first year in Holloway Prison was spent almost entirely in isolation, broken only by prison staff and monthly visits from friends. He was not allowed to read or write. He faced frequent physical discipline for not keeping his cell in prescribed order. He made appeal after appeal to the governor and medical examiner to be transferred to a mental institution to be better treated for the “pathological problems” he was convicted of. After being transferred to Reading Gaol, the new warden in charge of the facility gave him approved books to read and an unlimited amount of writing paper – provided he wrote only during the time allotted to prisoners once a week to write to their friends and family. While he had technically violated the regulations, some of the pages Wilde had written were later returned to him so he could review them or expand on an earlier thought. He worked on the letter that would become De Profundis for the final six months of his sentence – a love letter, a breakup letter, and the first piece of modern queer Christian theology, tinged on all sides by the mysticism of fin de siècle Paris.

While in Dieppe in Wilde’s final years, Gideon Spilett reported in the November 22nd, 1897 edition of Gil Blas that Wilde wore an emerald ring on each pinky, one with the kabbalistic symbol for joy and the other for sorrow. They were green because he associated green with Hell: “To enter Paradise you only have to knock once at the door, but you must knock three times to get into Hell. Believe me, love the green, love Hell. The colour green and Hell are both made for thieves and artists.”²⁷ G Spilett, “An Interview with Oscar Wilde.” In: E.H. Mikahil (ed.), Oscar Wilde (Palgrave Macmillan 1979).

There are no clear analogues for “joy” and “sorrow” in Kabbalah, and Spilett didn’t ask any follow-up questions that might better explain what he meant. Wilde’s explanation is either the way he remembered details about the Kabbalah, what he personally got out of those symbols, or what he thought would be the best story to tell Spilett. All that’s clear is that he knew what Kabbalah was and embroidered whatever he knew to make a conversation more interesting. ~