AtD: not as weird as history

[Monte Davis]

Too recent to be a source for Against the Day, but surely drawing on the
same scholarly/documentary sources: Alex Butterworth's The World that Never
Was (2010) is an entertaining narrative history of anarchist, communist,
and more or less revolutionary socialist groupuscules -- and secret-police
infiltration of them -- from the Paris Commune to 1917. This passage is
from the feverish Boulanger years in France (late 1880s):

"While Juliette Adam [feminist, anti-Bismarck editor and writer, sought to
foster] a Franco-Russian alliance, others in her circle took a more purely
esoteric approach to international affairs. The occultists’ first foray
into geopolitics had been to court the maharajah Dalip Singh to stage an
insurrection against British rule, offering the inducement of a
Franco-Russian alliance that they were in no position to deliver. Their
fanciful aim then may have been to facilitate access to the technologically
and spiritually advanced Holy Land of Agartha, buried deep under the
mountains of Asia, from whose Grand Pandit their own guru [Alexandre
St-Yves] d’Alveydre claimed to have learned the secrets of synarchy. In
1887, however, they turned their attention to matters closer to home.

"Gérard Encausse, the scientific hypnotist at the Salpêtrière [see Pinel,
Charcot, Freud, Janet] who was now beginning to establish himself as a
mystical visionary under the name ‘Papus’, had, together with Paul Adam, a
bon viveur, Boulangist and literary acolyte of Fénéon’s decadent movement,
been engaged for some time in the investigation of consciousness, and the
possible interpenetration of times past, present and future. History as it
was experienced, they had come to understand, was merely an echo of strife
and turmoil in the spiritual realm, and France’s defeat at the Battle of
Sedan was the clear consequence of the superior invocatory powers of
Prussia’s scryers. At a personal level, Encausse fought duels over
accusations that he had attacked his enemies with volatised poison, but was
alert too to conflict on a larger scale. If Boulanger was going to wage
war, they must have concluded, then it was the patriotic duty of France’s
psychic brigade to be in peak condition and free of earthly distractions..."

Sometimes I imagine Pynchon must have a sampler above his desk with the
words of the great singer-comedienne Anna Russell as she explained the plot
of the Ring Cycle: "I'm not making this up,. you know."
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