Date: Monday, May 23rd
Time: 7pm
Admission: $8
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn

Tickets Here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2529163

From mysterious Black Masses held in underground crypts to occult bookstores frequented by the literary élite to mad monks and their possibly-insane lovers dominating literary salons, the time of the Moulin Rouge was also a time of magical exploration: where the possibility of new industrial technology gave rise to a firmly “anti-modern” obsession with the macabre.

And in the decadent world of 19th century Paris, few knew black magic as intimately as the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose odyssey (ostensibly for the purposes of literary research) into Paris’s underbelly of occultists, Satanists and practitioners of black magic — a group that essentially doubled as a Who’s Who of bohemian artists and poets of France’s Decadent movement — became legendary. Encountering such luminaries as the Abbé Boullan, a defrocked priest accused of human sacrifice; the morphine-addicted poet Edouard Dubus; and the sultry Berthe Courrière: Satanist, séance-hosted, and lover to half of Paris’s literary elite and a sizable proportion of its priests, Huysmans memorialized his journey into the underworld of Paris’s artistic demimonde in his 1891 novel Là-Bas.

A story about the early days of sex, drugs, duels to the death, and early celebrity journalism —  op-eds alleging sorcery in political and literary opponents — this lecture explores the seedy world of black magic among Paris’s fin de siècle literati — blending scandalous historical anecdote with more general reflections on what made occultism so attractive to 19th century Parisians, and the way in which a burgeoning celebrity culture intensified these magical rivalries.

Tara Isabella Burtons work on religion, culture and place — from 19th century Parisian occultism to Christian street preachers of Las Vegas to the last remaining Jews in Uzbekistan — has appeared at JSTOR Daily, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and more. She is completing her DPhil in the theology of fin de siècle French decadence as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford.”

Image: Bat-woman, Albert-Joseph Pénot,1890

Tickets are non-refundable unless the event is canceled.