Love Strikes a Devil

Author’s NoteIn the second half of the nineteenth century in France there was a boom in the publishing of books on magic. Church authorities were worried by a vogue for the supernatural at a time when anticlericalism was widespread throughout the country. One consequence of this craze for the occult was that Paris acquired a sinister reputation as a centre for Black Magic. Many literary young men were talking about magic, but after a while something even more horrifying came into being, which was Satanism. One of the best-known literary personalities was Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, the poet, who became obsessed with magic after reading the books by Eliphas Levi and founded the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose Cross. Guaita eventually undermined his health and his reason with prolonged nightly vigils as he surrounded himself with old spell books, magic manuscripts and occult apparatus. Both he and a poet called Dubus took drugs. Dubus, as I describe in this book, had hallucinations and died half-mad in a Paris convenience after injecting himself with an overdose of morphine. Catholic hostility to Satanism became joined with their dislike of Freemasonry. In an encyclical by Pope Pius IX in 1873 it was stated that Freemasons were working on Satan’s behalf throughout the world. There is no doubt that the Belle Époque, as the period was called, was deeply affected and smeared by the rise of Black Magic. When the controversy over the scandal of the Dreyfus affair exploded in 1898, there were widespread fears that sinister attempts were being made in secret to destroy the social order of the nation and even its civilisation.