MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

“The Order of the Temple of the Rose and the Cross", founded by Josephin Peladan by inspiration of the Green Fairy, was just one of the numerous occultist Orders that proliferated at the end of the 19th century. Its members practiced Occultism, which mean that they had to be hidden for many hours, crouched behind a door, waiting for some unwary chap to come out, then jumping on him and tattooing on his chest the symbol of the Order (in this case, a rose and a cross). From that moment, he was "ordered", which implied seeming circumspect, stop eating meat and stop participating in mundane entertainments such as sack races, boules, dances and backflips. Nor could he wear garments of flashy colors that would draw attention to him, since the whole thing consisted of going unnoticed, which the occultists also achieved by walking stooped, on tiptoe and with their faces covered by a mask. When Josephin Peladan captured Eric Satie for his Order, the young pianist had begun to de...

We could define Bernard Puy de Cabannes as a paranormal poet. In the sense that his verses were the result of automatic writing. You know how it works? It consists of placing the pen gently on the paper and let a disembodied spirit guide your hand. Some people affirm that Shakespeare wrote his immortal works in this way: limiting himself to holding the pen. Well, Puy de Cabannes belonged to this class of poets. Only that in his case there was an insoluble problem. The spirit that guided his hand wrote in a strange language, unknown not only to Cabannes but to all the linguists he consulted. In fact, these linguists pointed out that his writings lacked grammatical and orthographic rules. To which Cabannes replied angrily that there resided precisely the difficulty and the beauty of such language. To a linguist who dared to contradict him affirming that this was not a language but a string of meaningless words, Cabannes gave him such a slap that made him reconsider his opinion and desc...

When summer came, the bohemians loved to go swimming at La Grenouillère, on the banks of the Seine. They went every Sunday, but when they arrived and saw the calm waters, they remembered that were not able to swim and returned running to Montmartre. Then, normally they would go dancing, arguing and hanging out at the Moulin de la Galette. Or they went to the Chat Noir to listen to the hypnotic music of Eric Satie, who limited himself to playing a single key from time to time. Sometimes they dated girls, but they were too shy to say or do anything, so girls stopped dating them. That is why they got keen on voyeurism: they spent whole Sunday afternoons squatted, peeking through the keyhole of their own rooms in the hope of seeing a girl pass by the stairwell. That is also the reason why they drank so much absinthe. After a few liters of this drink, the Green Fairy used to appear, all naked from the neck up. Although, sometimes, an imp of the same color appeared instead of the Fairy. This...

Eric Satie, the pianist of the cabaret "Le Chat Noir" (The Black Cat), would eventually become one of the most exquisite composers of the French “Fin de Siècle”. But at the beginning, his piano technique was so scanty, and his shyness so great, that he restricted himself to pressing the same key for an entire evening. This exasperated the bourgeois clients, but delighted the artists because, combined with the ingestion of absinthe, it made them enter a kind of hypnotic trance. During an evening at Le Chat Noir, the painter and artists' model Suzanne Valadon fell into a deep hypnotic trance triggered by Satie's music. When at dawn Satie returned home, he received the unexpected visit of Suzanne who, to his amazement, fell into his arms. It’s thought that this was the first and last love affair of Satie, who maintained his whole life an almost supernatural love for Suzanne. This was the most pleasing incident that his minimalist music caused to the shy pianist and comp...

The bohemian Green Fairy was very playful and she loved to create confusion among the artists who were under her influence. In his memoirs, Marcel Rochechouart recounts several curious episodes in this regard. It seems that the Green Fairy drove Manet and Monet nuts taking advantage of the similarity of their names. When the two painters were present in any of the places where the bohème met, there was often a psychophony consisting of the suggestive pronunciation of one of their names. I say “one of their names” because the psychophony was ambiguous enough for both to feel alluded to, and as a result they both rushed to meet the owner of that sexy female voice that called them. Of course, the voice lacked an owner or at least it was an invisible one. However, they never stopped falling into the trap, which motivated the funny comments of their colleagues, all of whom had a very strong sense of humor and did not mind laughing even at themselves. This enviable sense of humor was also sh...

Vincent van Gogh's relationships with the other Impressionist painters were very unstable. In all cases, his tragic death was a turning point that marked a before and an after. For example, his relationship with Rochechouart, which from the beginning was one of frank enmity, softened a lot after van Gogh’s decease. On the contrary, his friendship with Toulouse-Lautrec, which had been extremely close during his lifetime, became turbulent after his passing. On the other hand, Gauguin's love-hate relationship with van Gogh was abruptly interrupted as a result of his death and they never spoke to each other again. It is speculated that Gauguin felt a sense of guilt when he learned of van Gogh's suicide, as he had already felt when he learned that his friend had cut off his ear, and even earlier, when one day both were walking through the countryside and van Gogh stumbled upon a stone and got scratched on his knee. Maybe Gauguin had placed the stone there expressly so that his f...

While, in Britain, paranormal phenomena were subject to rigorous scientific study by some of the greatest minds of the English turn of the 19th century, at the French “Fin de siècle” (there is only a time difference of a few minutes between the entry into the English turn of the 19th century and that of the French “Fin de siècle”), this kind of phenomena was left to people who not only lacked rigorous scientific studies but often had got rigorous anti-scientific studies. Naturally, I mean the bohemian artists: that which, as a whole, has been called “la bohème”. “La bohème” wasn’t an institution endowed with a good provision of funds and a perfectly organized structure such as the London Society for Psychical Research. Its members wore no fock coat, suit, vest, bowtie and top hat, but were often practically naked or, if cold, dressed in garments that would have blushed the distinguished members of the SPR. The headquarters of the Parisian “bohème” were located in the hill of Montmartr...