1944/03/01 by Edward D. Seeber · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Historical and Literary Studies #Historical and Literary Analyses #French Literature and Criticism #MAGIC (telescope) #Occult #Period (music) #Romance #History #Art #Literature #Philosophy #Aesthetics
paper · doi:10.2307/458845
openalex publication_date 1944/03/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Over the centuries, a varying but persistent interest in magic and the occult sciences has reached, by way of devious paths, the culture and literature of Western Europe. In France, the vigor of this natural human bent was manifest even during the Age of Reason; Swedenborgians, Rosicrucians, martinistes , and Freemasons, together with a host of educated persons with no particular philosophical alliances, became pleasurably entangled in what Diderot disdainfully termed “ce tissu indigeste et ridicule de suppositions.“ “Le culte du merveilleux,” says a historian of that period, Constantin Bila, “n'épargnait aucune classe de la société.” The heightened interest in the marvelous, the supernatural, and the fantastic throughout the Romantic Period and the later nineteenth century is, of course, familiar.