The Alchemy of August Strindberg
In 1894, after years of painful struggle and almost universal rejection by his countrymen, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg suffered a spiritual collapse, an emotional breakdown that left him incapable of creative work. That Strindberg had reached a dead end isn’t surprising. Vilified in his homeland for naturalistic works like Miss Julie and The Father, he had already been through two divorces—a third was yet to come—as well as many years of impoverishment and the loss of his three children from his first marriage. His second marriage, to the Austrian journalist Frida Uhl, had just ended bitterly. This meant estrangement from yet another child and the loss of Frida’s considerable dowry. At forty-five, penniless and alone, it’s unsurprising that Strindberg questioned the point of going on. Yet he was a man who possessed demonic persistence, and the route out of his impasse led through one of the strangest episodes in the turbulent life of a master of modern literature.
After his failure in Sweden and a stint in Berlin, Strindberg looked to Paris for a last assault on fame. Paris was the cultural capital of the nineteenth century, and by 1893, some of Strindberg’s works had already been performed there. But it wasn’t just literary glory that attracted him. Like London, St. Petersburg, and other European capitals, the Paris of the fin de siècle had been bitten by the occultism bug. Ever since 1856, when Éliphas Lévi invented modern occultism with the publication of Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Dogma and ritual of high magic), Paris had been a haven for the esoterically inclined. Although a founder of naturalism, Strindberg had a deep interest in magic, mysticism, and other forms of the occult. He was also fascinated by science, considering himself equal to its professionals. In 1893 he published his first work of speculative natural history, Antibarbarus (Antibarbarian), a work that pitted the man of genius against the academic plodders, arguing that the poet’s eye saw more deeply that the professor’s methodical squint.
When it came to the occult, Strindberg’s pet practice was alchemy. According to one account, by 1894 there were an estimated 50,000 alchemists in Paris. Whether this is an exaggeration or not, in the last years of the nineteenth century, Paris was undoubtedly a place where occultism mixed with the avant-garde. In 1891, J.-K. Huysmans, onetime follower of Émile Zola and author of the decadent classic À rebours (Against nature), had shocked the literary public with his graphic depiction of a Black Mass in his satanic novel Là-Bas (Down there). Huysmans’s involvement with the Parisian occult underground popularized what was already a well-tenanted demimonde; it also fueled a growing fad for returning to the safe embrace of the church after a titillating walk on the dark side. After finding himself in the middle of an occult feud between the notorious Abbé Boullan and the self-styled Rosicrucian Joséphin Sar Péladan, full of astral attacks and, as Huysmans called them, “fluidic fisticuffs,” the man who kicked off the Yellow Decade ended his days at a Benedictine monastery.
Such Rosicrucian roistering wasn’t unusual. A few years before, the decadent poet Stanislas de Guaita, a devotee of Baudelaire, morphine addict (he would die of an overdose in 1897), and onetime student of Sar Péladan fought an extended battle with his ex-master. Most of the fighting took place in print, but the recognition that magical warfare was not uncommon in fin de siècle Paris adds a depth to Strindberg’s uncanny adventures, one that commentators sometimes miss. Undoubtedly, between 1894 and 1896, Strindberg came close to, and probably did experience, a schizoid episode. But it is just possible that the weird experiences he recounts in his obsessive record Inferno—based, in part, on his even more bizarre Occult Diary—did not solely originate in a great mind’s pitiable crackup. Without doubt, the ingredients for a complete mental breakdown are there: intense stress, loneliness, poverty, and an uncertain future, abetted in no small part by Strindberg’s devotion to a popular magical elixir of the day, absinthe. But the strange events that make up Strindberg’s Inferno are precisely the sort that fueled one of the burning questions of the age: the thin line between genius and madness. A line that, by all accounts, Strindberg passed over frequently.
Throughout his career, Strindberg had periodic bouts of revulsion against literature. His artistic credo practically ensured this. “I regard it as my dreadful duty to be truthful,” he wrote, “and life is indescribably ugly.” Such sentiments prompted his plunge into alchemy. It may seem strange that, considering himself a scientist, Strindberg chose alchemy as his path to immortality. But his approach to science was anything but orthodox. His aim in Antibarbarus was to “explain” the nature of sulfur, the transmutation of carbon and other elements, and the composition of water and air. Claiming to be a “transformist” like Darwin and a monist like the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, Strindberg declared: “I have committed myself to the assumption that all elements and all forces are related. And if they derive from one source, then they sprang into existence by means of condensation and attenuation, of copulating and crossbreeding, of heredity and transformation…and whatever else one cares to suggest.”
This cavalier attitude didn’t win the critics’ approval. When the book appeared, Strindberg’s pretentions to science were dismissed as a sign of monomania, its author lambasted for his lack of logic and incapacity for experiment. But for the alchemist, transformation is the key, and Strindberg’s speculative approach is in the great magical tradition. Writing to his young botanist friend, Bengt Lindforss, Strindberg said: “I doubt all experiments…. I believe rather in the depth of my conscious thought, or more correctly, my unconscious thought.” His method was to put himself “into a state of unconsciousness, not with drink, but by distractions, games, cards, sleep, novels, without bothering about results or acceptability, and something emerges that I can believe in.”
Weird as it seems, Strindberg’s “science” was right in line with the latest developments in art. Before his descent on Paris, he had published an essay, “The New Arts, or the Role of Chance in Artistic Creation.” This, along with another article on “Deranged Sense Impressions,” deals with the curious power of the mind to alter its perceptions—in a word, to “recreate” reality. Like many other artists and poets, Strindberg rebelled against the neat, orderly, “objective” universe being revealed by an increasingly triumphant rationalist science. In its place, he argued for a world open to strange forces, and the influence of consciousness itself, a position made commonplace decades later with the rise of quantum physics. In “The New Arts” he describes the “oscillations of his sense impressions” and recounts how, seen from a certain angle, a cow becomes two peasants embracing each other, then a tree trunk, and then something else, and how the figures at a picnic are really a plowman’s coat and knapsack thrown over his cart. Strindberg would later describe his own method of writing as something like a trance state. It begins, he said, “with fermentation or some sort of agreeable fever which passes into ecstasy or intoxication.” His considerable absinthe intake surely had a hand in this. Nevertheless, by the next century, with Dada and Surrealism, the notion that reality is plastic, and that consciousness and chance affect what we experience, would become standard components of aesthetic theory.
But Strindberg was interested in more than a new approach to art. He took his alchemy seriously and, soon after his arrival in Paris, turned his back on the literary world and got to work on the archetypal alchemical project: making gold.
His first step was to obtain experimental proof of his ideas about transformation. He set out to prove the presence of carbon in sulfur. “Back once more in my miserable student’s room,” he writes, “I delved into my trunk and drew forth from their hiding place six crucibles of fine porcelain which I robbed myself to buy. A pair of tongs and a packet of pure sulfur completed the apparatus of my laboratory. All that remained was to make a fire of furnace heat in the stove.”
He did. The flame from his makeshift furnace was so great that he soon suffered appalling burns, the skin on his hands “peeling off in scales.” After more experiments, the burns worsened, and his chapped, cracked hands, irritated by coke dust, oozed blood. The pain was intolerable, yet, convinced of his success, Strindberg continued. The next step was to show the presence of hydrogen and oxygen. But his apparatus was inadequate and his funds were dwindling. Destitute and in agony, Strindberg had reached another dead end. When the veins in his arms started to swell from blood poisoning, friends collected money and put him in the Hôpital de Saint-Louis.
There Strindberg made friends with a pharmacist who took an interest in his pursuits and allowed him to work in his laboratory. Urged on, he sent the results of his experiments to a firm of chemists to be analyzed. Their tests proved positive: the sulfur he submitted did indeed contain carbon. More encouragement followed. A summary of Strindberg’s scientific work appeared in Le petit temps, followed by long articles on “Strindberg the scientist” in the highly respected periodical La science française and the widely read Le Figaro. On the strength of these, Strindberg petitioned to conduct further experiments using the laboratory at the Sorbonne. Although the faculty thought little of his work, he was granted permission, and he carried out his tests. Further signs of success appeared. An engineer at a chemical factory in Rouen who read of his experiments wrote to him saying that they threw light on “hitherto unexplained phenomena in the manufacture of sulfuric acid and sulfides.” At the same time, a correspondence with the distinguished chemist Marcellin Berthelot suggested to Strindberg that he was on the right track.
Soon Strindberg believed he had succeeded in extracting gold from iron. It was around this time that he came into contact with the Parisian alchemical underground. A young man named François Jollivet-Castelot, the author of La vie et l’âme de la matière (The life and soul of matter), which Strindberg had read with enthusiasm, had heard of Strindberg’s work and approached him, convinced the great playwright had actually succeeded in the alchemical dream. Jollivet-Castelot later became the editor of an alchemical journal, L’hyperchimie, and published Strindberg’s account of his alchemical work “The Synthesis of Gold.” A rising star in the alchemical subculture, Strindberg’s celebrity was assured when Gérard Encausse, better known under his occult pseudonym Papus, published an account of his work in the periodical L’initiation. “August Strindberg,” Papus wrote, “who combines vast knowledge with his great talent as a writer, has just achieved a synthesis of gold from iron.” His work, Papus continued, “confirms all the assertions of the alchemists.”
This was high praise. The author of several influential works, as leader of the Groupe Indépendant d’Études Esoteriques and Grand Master of the Martinist order, Papus was a powerful figure in the Parisian occult underground. He was also indirectly involved in the magical feud between Huysmans, Sar Péladan, and de Guaita. When Papus elected Strindberg an honorary master of La Société Alchimique de France, it’s understandable the accolade went to his head. After years of obscurity, rejection, and accusations of madness, to be accepted as a genius by men whose intelligence he respected must have given him some satisfaction.
Yet his alchemical adventure wasn’t purely benign. Nurtured by his occult obsessions, his “deranged sense impressions” began to get out of hand. At first he chalked his weird perceptual mutations up to chance and the vagaries of his unconscious, but increasingly he recognized in them the hands of an occult intelligence he called “the Powers” and “the Unseen.” The world these occult forces led him through soon turned into a kind of waking dream—or nightmare.
On a walk to the Luxembourg Gardens he spied his initials, A. S., painted on a shop window, rising out of a silver-white cloud, surmounted by a rainbow. He took this as a positive omen. At a stall on the Boulevard Saint Michel, “by chance” he picked up an old chemistry text by the Franco-Spanish toxicologist Mateo Orfila. Opening it at random, he hit on a passage that confirmed his alchemical intuition. “Sulfur has been included among the elements,” Orfila wrote, and certain experiments “seem to prove that it contains hydrogen and oxygen.” Later, during a walk in the Montparnasse Cemetery after his experiments at the Sorbonne, “chance” drew Strindberg to Orfila’s grave, which he didn’t know was there, and a later walk down the Rue d’Assas found him oddly drawn to a monastery-like building. It turned out to be the Hotel Orfila. Strindberg soon settled in for a short stay in purgatory.
Never easy on himself, Strindberg felt he was being tested. He talked to “the Powers,” thanked them, and asked them advice. He saw their work everywhere. Money appeared miraculously, allowing him to buy instruments. Observing the embryo of a walnut under a microscope, Strindberg was convinced that he could see two tiny hands, clasped in prayer, emerging from the seed. Another sign. On a “chance” trip to the country, a stone was transformed into a statue of a Roman knight. Pleased with this effect, he looked in the direction in which the “statue” was pointing. On a wall he saw the initials F and S. He first thought of his second wife, Frida Strindberg. But then he realized that it was really the chemical symbols for iron and sulfur (Fe and S), the ingredients, he believed, for alchemical gold (but also for iron pyrites, or fool’s gold). The weirdness continued. A crumpled pillow became a Michelangelo bust, then a likeness of the devil. A shadow in his room became a statue of Zeus. He had precognitive dreams. A dead friend appeared, offering a large American coin. When Strindberg reached for it, the friend disappeared. The next morning he received a letter from America. Arriving months late, it informed him of an offer of twelve thousand francs to write something for the Chicago Exhibition. But the deadline had passed, and the money, a fortune for Strindberg, was lost.
A host of strange simulacra followed. In a zinc bath that he used for making gold by the “wet method,” he saw a remarkable “landscape.” There were “small hills covered with conifers…plains, with orchards and cornfields…a river…the ruins of a castle,” all formed by the evaporation of salts of iron. It was only a month later, during a visit to his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen for two years, that he recognized his vision as the landscape around his mother-in-law’s house. Making gold by the “dry method” produced its own terrors. Destitute once again, Strindberg felt he had to succeed. But “the Powers” had decreed otherwise. After melting borax in terrific heat, all he found was a skull with two glistening eyes. On another occasion a chunk of charred coal revealed a bizarre formation: a body with a rooster’s head, a human trunk, and distorted limbs. It looked, he remarked, “like one of the demons that used to perform in the witches’ Sabbaths of the Middle Ages.” Later discoveries included two gnomes in billowing garments embracing each other, and a Madonna and Child, done up in Byzantine style.
A reading of Swedenborg convinced Strindberg that his alchemical experiments were unholy and that for his “salvation,” “the Powers” had consigned him to hell. His torments took the form of various magical attacks. Strindberg was undoubtedly highly strung and thin-skinned, and some of his “tortures”—such as finding that his hotel room window opened on the toilets of the neighboring building—smack more of inconvenience and discomfort than anything else. But some are more in line with the magical goings-on familiar to the time. Strindberg began to feel there was an occult conspiracy against him. Letters he discovered in the Hotel Orfila convinced him someone was spying on his alchemical activities. The sound of pianos playing eerie, disturbing music followed him everywhere. He was convinced that the Polish decadent writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski had come from Berlin to kill him.
Something like a persecution complex developed. His “supersensitive nerves” detected strange subterranean vibrations. The idea that he was the target of evil emanations obsessed him. Baffling “coincidences” appeared everywhere. Mysterious noises from the rooms next door tormented him, and he was convinced that someone was trying to kill him using an “electrical machine.” He walked around Paris in a state of tense expectancy, awaiting “an eruption, an earthquake, or thunderbolt.” Friends and acquaintances now became demons, sent by “the Powers” to show him the error of his ways, and each night he suffered anxiety attacks in which he endured the recurrent onslaughts of his torturers. For some time, because he had rejected the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, he was convinced his assailants were a group of Theosophists. As with his numerous simulacra, once the restraints of reason were lifted—“I no longer try to find a motive for my actions. I act extempore”—he saw signs of his persecution everywhere.
Eventually, through Swedenborg’s philosophy, Strindberg passed through his ordeal, convinced that “the Powers” had put him through the mill in order to aid his spiritual evolution. By 1897, his interest in alchemy abated, and the urge to write had returned, one product of which was Inferno. In 1898 he began work on To Damascus, perhaps his greatest play. His belief in “the Powers” remained for the rest of his life.
It’s possible that Strindberg’s taste for absinthe was the real reason for his strange experiences. As consumed in his day, absinthe contained oil of thuja, a powerful and addictive hallucinogen. Habitual use resulted in anxiety, fear, hallucinations, a sense of paralysis and paranoia—all symptoms clearly experienced by Strindberg. And yet his occult episodes included periods when he apparently went without drink. So what happened?
Strindberg was an enormously creative individual, with incredible powers of imagination, a terrific will, and an ability to withstand blows that would destroy most people. Like many other creative individuals, he at times gained access to hitherto unknown potentials—hidden powers. Yet, for a variety of reasons, he was also plagued by a paralyzing sense of guilt. My own belief is that, dammed up as they were by his perpetual self-revulsion, Strindberg’s creative energies emerged in other ways—some paranormal, some simply mad—and the “persecution” he endured was the work of his own unconscious, rebelling against the abandonment of his real task. As he himself wrote, “In the great crises of life, when existence itself is threatened, the soul attains transcendent powers.”
This is not to say that Strindberg’s alchemical experiences were worthless but rather that they were a distraction from his real work. I’m inclined to think Strindberg himself knew this. Without the artist’s hand to guide them, Strindberg’s “deranged sense impressions” became eerie, oppressive fantasies aided, if not actually created, by a powerful intoxicant. “The Powers,” however, knew better, and the “unseen hand”—Strindberg’s own—showed him the error of his ways.