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From Pat Deveney's database:
Isis Moderne, L'.
Revue des Sciences Nouvelles.
Hic piscis non omnium
1896—1897 Monthly
Paris, France. Language: French. Publisher: Librairie de l'Art Independant. Editor: G. Morand and Bussiere.
1/1, October 1896-March 1897. 64 pp. 6 x 10. Articles by Swami Vivekananda, "Jules Bois" (Henri Antoine Jules-Bois) (on Naundorff), S.L. MacGregor-Mathers (on the Kabbalah), Louis Menard (on oracles), V.E. Michelet ("Un drame d'Eliphas Levi"), Emile Bournouf, Edmond Bailly, and P. Braun (an adaptation of an article by him on the power of thought from Metaphysische Rundschau, "notre vaillant confrere allemand"), et al. The journal prided itself in its introductory "Aux Lecteurs" on the variety of its collaborators and presented a rather aristocratic face to the world, reflected in its motto: "Not everybody's cup of tea." Despite these pretensions, it soon took to padding its pages with the likes of a translation of Abraham H. Dailey's breathless Mollie Fancher: The Brooklyn Enigma. An Authentic Statement of Facts in the Life of Mary J. Fancher, the Psychological Marvel of the Nineteenth Century. Unimpeachable Testimony of Many Witnesses (Brooklyn, N.Y, 1894). Dailey, an ardent spiritualist and former judge, related everything knowable about Fancher , a young girl who became bedridden and blind at 17 years of age, spent nine years without (it was claimed) eating, all the while acting as the vehicle for various other personalities. Although she recovered physically, she remained subject to spirit possession. The journal was published by Edmond Bailly's Librairie de l'Art Independant which had earlier published the literary-occult Le Coeur and other occult and Theosophical journals and was widely influential in both the symbolist and occult worlds of France in the 1890s.
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Isis Moderne was a French review of 1896 and 1897, published at the height of the Parisian occult revival and standing on the border between occultism and spiritism. Its dominant subject is initiation — the word appears more often than any other in its esoteric vocabulary — which places it among the reviews serving the initiatic orders that proliferated in the Paris of Papus and his contemporaries, with Kabbalah, magic and the figure of the adept as its standing furniture. Alongside that runs genuine engagement with the Spiritists next door, whose doctrine and whose founder it names, and with the psychical and clinical questions of the Charcot era, in which hysteria and neurosis were being described in ways that bore directly on the trance. Comparative essays treat the cult of the dead as a continuous development of human feeling rather than as an error to be corrected. Its own literary register was high, complaining of an age that streamed with vocabularies and, like the ancient pythonesses, uttered tempestuous verses without understanding them.
Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
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