Julien Langendorff, Spell Rider

The roots of cosmic occultism stretch back as far in time as humans have been able to communicate. There is a hermetic order to the universe that has bewildered and engaged the species, giving license to conjecture, theory, and spiritual whim that exceed what lies before our faces. It is a non-material discussion about life, about chaos, divinity, and phenomena that has elicited responses as far ranging as hope to its antithesis in fear. The cosmic and collected dust that has settled in human form —the stardust of human birth —reminds us of a world out there, away from our toil here in the present, and it sends us the signal to worship.

Julien Langendorff, Spell Rider

The desire to understand and parse the universe — to understand its reasons, its secret order — has been the quest of many individuals who yearn to unlock its reality. Hermed Trismegistus, Giordano Bruno, Tycho Brahe, Robert Flood, Johannes Kepler, John Dee, Helena Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Manfred P. Hall, and others have undertaken vast expositions, summaries, and studies regarding the cosmic order of creation. Their work has inspired lesser-acclaimed figures to discuss, in varying degrees of understanding, their beliefs and, in doing so, have acted as proponents of alternative spiritual, alchemical, and scientific reasoning. Though such details are presented as hermetic, sealed, or unknown, and are based on belief, there have been attempts to illustrate the beliefs and rituals of these endeavors.

Julien Langendorff, Spell Rider

The earliest such pursuits are laden with grotesques, the fusing of animal, plant, and man to create mythological creatures and demons from the ancient world of Babylon to the Bronze Age celts. Each successive empire or era has its own take on the cosmos and the spiritual order it inspires. The Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and all that follows in their wake, including Christian mysticism, Jewish mysticism, and the mythologies they present, have been illustrated to varying degrees. The pre-Judeo-Christian orders of Paganism are particularly rife with mystically driven symbolism, mythologies incorporated into the material world, creating a world shaped by fire, flood, and the elemental, alongside their more fantastic counterparts, from Bacchian orgiastic hedonism to the study of the planetary forces regulating all manner of tales.

Julien Langendorff, Spell Rider

Tales of Gods, war, lightning, great and brave journeys against all odds, leaving in its wake charged stories that Joseph Campbell would come to understand as typologies. The heroes return, prodigal sons, etc. Despite 200 years of linear rule by three archetypal religions, we continue to be inspired by what we cannot see, by polytheism, and by the possibility that another path exists, hidden under the leaves of Yggdrasil. We understand the planet’s geography to have portals leading to underworlds and hells, and to crossing many rivers to find them, with our compasses distorted and dancing clumsily naked under glass. The world is, and is not, what it presents itself as.

Julien Langendorff, Rotten Gold

What strikes me as interesting about spiritual matters is not only that we choose to labor under their influence, but that we are drawn to not only the celebration of their cause, but also go as far as to find ways to communicate, in visual terms, that which is invisible, or that travels as tales from mouth to mouth. These efforts seem to move in cycles and, by way of esoteric thought and practice, are on the rise again as a topic, cropping up in conversations about fashion, music, and art. The last time the cycle of illustrating these esoteric tendencies occurred was during the 1960s and 70s before tailing off in the early 1980s.

Julien Langendorff, Rotten Gold

During this period, numerous counterculture movements brought to light what might be termed Wiccan and Occult practices. The free love movement, a rejection of conservative moral codes, and the rise of the psychedelic experience gave those outside the boomer generation playful fodder for spiritual inspiration. Despite missteps in the late 1960s with The Family and Charlie Manson’s insistence on leaving “something witchy” during the Tate/LaBianca murders, the gravitation toward aesthetics related to occultism, folk horror, or other pathways toward a dark enlightenment was in the global mix. By the 1970s, a commendable market in Tarot cards, astrology charts, occult magazines and books, and their influence on culture, was widely disseminated to a greater or lesser extent. This explosion of interest led to a general new-age awareness, a refusal to be co-opted into wars, conservative spiritualism, instead opting for commune living, and a refusal of organization, furthered by a reluctance and outright condemnation of the war machine in Vietnam.

Julien Langendorff, Rotten Gold

By the early 1980s, the winds began to shift. Through the rise of the Age of Aquarius, to the political changes in the air leading to neoliberalism and a hardline conservatism during the Cold War, under Regan, attitudes began to change as the baby boomer generation matured. Sun dresses gave way to slacks, and Haight-Ashbury gave way to Wall Street. Throughout the transition from the 70s into the 80s, other tendencies in music, popular culture, and film would continue the cultural push toward esoteric thought, flowing through the pipeline of heavy metal, role-playing games, and horror movies. These pursuits were most apparent in the draconian measures taken to silence their trends with Satanic Panis peaking in the mid-80s as a stalwart against the last bastions of free thought and progressivism in spiritual matters, toward a hardline co-opting of the liberties associated with former movements.

Televangelism, the golden age of serial killing, and the media’s sensationalisation of topics related to this found their way onto daytime television and proto-TV reality culture through Geraldo, into paperback culture with Michelle Remembers, and the like. It was a period of demonization and exaggeration, a closed moral curse of essentialized indignity imposed by the ruling capitalist class, which led to an attempt to normalize and flatline culture by purging it of its outliers. The public trial of music would lead the way to the PMRC in the 90s, and its stranglehold on moral authority would eventually pass and, as it did with me, lead younger people to great albums by Slayer, The Ghetto Boys, and N.W.A by their censor code found on cassette and CD packaging.

Julien Langendorff, Rotten Gold

But before this, during the 70s and 80s, there was a fascinating moment when publishing books about witchcraft, demonology, pagan worship, and the oft-satanic titles were in full throttle, the whirlwind of production coping with the demand for alternative beliefs, and methods of living. Gone was the idealism found in the late 60s counterculture. The late 60s, 70s, and early 80s mode of cultural production incorporated ritualistic sex, satanism, and occult worship directly in the literature. The Church of Satan and Anton LaVey were key cultural figures, and the Necronomicon mass-market paperback was in full-scale printing by 1980. Previously, Eliphas Levi’s Transcendental Magic, published in January 1968, was also widely circulated. This, along with a flurry of other books and magazines, brought the aesthetics of esoteric traditions into full view and consciousness.

Julien Langendorff, Under Blood Red Rain in Marble Maze

Time’s June 1972 issue on The Occult Revival, as well as Douglas Arthur Hill’s Witchcraft, Magic and the Supernatural: The Weird World of the Unknown, presented early attempts to illustrate what was thought previously as hermetic, unseen, and with this, ushered into popular consciousness the aesthetics of the esoteric transition to the printed page. With this in mind, the material ranged from salacious illustrations and pulp erotica to more serious studies of metaphysical thinking, illustrated with drawings and photographs. Figures such as Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, and Helena Blavatsky were quoted in literature, on album covers, and in the general thinking and illustration of occult matters.

Julien Langendorff, Under Blood Red Rain in Marble Maze

The adjacent interest in science fiction and fantasy art by Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo also added to the mix. Perhaps a remnant of the psychedelic experience and the push for psychedelic visuals, the occult aesthetics of the 70s infused the widespread interest in non-traditional, often Easter-facing forms of dogma, that would leverage fantasy and worship into a lush and saturated world of imagry that would be felt at the time, but that would also provide, in retrospect, subject matter of interest for generations to come in the same way the detective novels and pulp art from the 40s and 50s would inspire proceeding genertions with beatnik impulses.

Julien Langendorff, Under Blood Red Rain in Marble Maze

Among contemporary artists working with material rooted in the occult, there are a few. It would be worth mentioning that I find most of the crossover occurring with music bands such as Coil, Salem, Death in June, Current 93, Mater Suspiria Vision, Nusrse With Wound, Chelsea Wolf, Cult of Youth, Jay-Z, and other seminal bands from the 1980s until the present have used the subject matter and aesthetics. There are whole genres of electronic music, doom metal, black metal, and neo-folk that incorporate occult aesthetics and living into their praxis. Films such as Midsommer, arguably Possession, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, and other lesser-known films have all catered to popular culture’s obsession with the subject.

The Illuminati in popular culture has also sparked interest in the subject, with speculation about Adrenochrome and Pizza Gate. However, any serious occult-minded individual understands that what happens in Bohemia Grove is more a repressed urge to discuss subjection, which stands out as outside any true occult intentions other than the cremation of ker. Alex Jones, David Icke, NWO—these tenets are far less interesting than the historical discussion of occult matters. As such, the popularization of the subject is not enabled by conspiracy but instead defies its seriousness, its past, and its potential for fruitful discussion.

Julien Langendorff Rotten Gold

Recent catalog surveys on Hilda AF Klint, August Strindberg, Alfred Kubin, as well as a plethora of exhibitions on spiritualism, spirit photography, William Mumler, Albert von Keller, Gabrielle von Max, Edvard Munch, the Symbolists as a whole, also Gustave Moreau, and books such as The Occult in Art by Own Rachleff have all delved deep into the subject. There is a rich tradition of books dealing with the aesthetics of the occult. In terms of photography, Maja Daniel’s books Elf Dalia and Gertrude both examine the effect of persecution of witchcraft through the archive of Swedish enigma Tenn Lars Persson. A resurgence of interest surrounds Jack Parsons’s ties to Crowley and the JPL, as well as his untimely death.

Presently, French artist Julien Langendorff has invented a style of collage, zine, and bookmaking that presents these topics within his oeuvre. I first came across Julien’s work when his Black Mirrors book was launched in 2012. Published by Shelter Press, the book presented a fascinating foray into the world of painting, with Langendorff’s abstract, saturated, floating forms on a black background. The images are simple, eloquent, and rely on symbolism to situate them alongside some of the artist’s earlier colleagues in the book. Langendorff, a musician and visual artist, has a sense of control in his painting and early collages that executes his interest in the occult with a steady and controlled hand. The work found in Black Mirrors is tasteful but does not yet fully reveal his later, more energetic collage work. The foundation is there, but it’s fascinating to see his evolution through his later books and zines.

From Black Mirrors to his more recent book Spell Rider, Julien has made refining his collage work a principal endeavor.. You begin to see his subject matter present itself in a more cohesive form. His paintings are referenced less in the later books, and the concentration on atmosphere — the heavy cosmic and often terrestrial use of phenomena from stars to earthly phenomena like volcanoes — begins to enter the work as a field in which his figures and statues frequently seem to be birthed. It is this, his cosmic studies, which allude to esoteric human spirituality, that have a heavy psychedelic feel to them, but are not lost to pattern or “trippy gestures” for their own sake. Instead, the artist opts for darker material, often sexualized, but not always to suggest an orgiastic affair. I mention this in passing as I do not feel the work is erotic per se, but motifs of sexuality and the body do crop up between other, more stoic images.

I gravitate toward Julien’s books and collages because they exemplify the tendencies above: producing matter from the unknown and visualizing a cool aesthetic based on past tropes and cycles of aesthetic history. Though the work is not tongue-in-cheek, there is a playfulness about it, something rock ‘ n ‘ roll and unashamed to look at the aesthetics of occult imagery as ripe fodder for the production of new works that feel timely, whether it is a reflection on society as it stands presently or as it stood half a century before. I believe, as children of the 80s and 90s, these aesthetics are woven into both of our pasts, and it is easy to understand the angle that Julien is pursuing through his work. I feel at home with his rituals of world-building and know that they are sacred in order as I might wish them to be, nothing more, nothing less.

Julien Langendorff, Black Mirrors

The zine is also a suitable format for the artist, as it showcases not only the artist’s associations with music, a form of art often associated with zine culture, but also the origin of the images themselves, being culled from books and magazines—the tear sheet effect finding its way into Langendorff’s cutaways. I maintain that Langendorff’s work is entirely fascinating. After speaking with him for Nearest Truth, we connected on many of our shared histories, as well as on forays into esoteric traditions and interests along the way. I might suggest starting with the artist’s zines or his most recent book, Spell Rider, which feels like the most mature version of his collage construction. It aligns with many previous works, but it has a more palpable energy. From there, I might work backward toward Black Mirrors—fantastic stuff and well worth the time spent sourcing the material.