On the poster for the fifth salon, Perseus holds a severed head aloft at a 45-degree angle. The legendary hero of Greek mythology looks non-plussed, smirking slightly, with his sword resting on his other shoulder. On closer inspection, the head he has severed is not that of Medusa, but rather the French novelist, Émile Zola, his close-cropped beard framing a lifeless mouth.
As far as Symbolist works go, it’s not subtle. Nor is it a particularly inviting sight for a promotional image. It’s a far cry from the first salon poster, featuring a pair of women in flowing gowns ascending a flower-covered staircase toward a bright light. But salon leader Joséphin Péladan was never one for subtlety.
There would be one final Salon de la Rose et Croix after this, with the promotional wing of Péladan’s Mystic Order of the Rose + Croix facing diminishing returns from one event to the next. For the sect’s founder and self-proclaimed Sâr, the half-dozen events were an opportunity to highlight the “esoteric arts,” as he vocally pushed back against the anti-religious positivism of the day, in favor of a unique hybrid of the occult and the Roman Catholicism of his youth.
Péladan reveled in the classical from Arthurian legends to the more recent work of Richard Wagner. In time, salon attendee and one-time Rose + Croix devotee Erik Satie would come to reject both Péladan and Wagner. Of the latter he would comment to friend Claude Debussy, “there is no need for the orchestra to grimace when a character comes on stage. Do the trees in the scenery grimace?"
It was, seemingly, a rejection of the dramatic symbolism of the era, as he gravitated toward the “furniture music” that would come to define him late in life.
In 1892, Satie founded his own church. The Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor was, in part, a rejection of his former Sâr, the "High Priest of Wagnerism.” Satie become the “Master of the Chapel,” as well as the church’s only known member. The tiny Parisian apartment he nicknamed “the cupboard” served as the church’s abbey. He paid 80 Francs a year for the residence, which had to no heating or running water and a ceiling he would bump his head against while standing up.
Its bed served three distinct purposes: a kitchen table, church altar and, on occasion, sleep. From here, the composer wrote letters, articles and pamphlet after pamphlet, extolling the virtues of his church, while happily eviscerating establishment religion of the era.
“We live in a troubled hour,” Satie explained in one, “when Western society, daughter of the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church, is overcast by the shades of ungodliness, a thousand times more barbarous than in Pagan times, and seems about to perish…We shall make a refuge where the Catholic faith and the Arts, which are indissolubly bound to it, shall grow and prosper.”
Satie spent the early days of the church wearing a priest-style habit, though an 1895 inheritance allowed him to upgrade his style of dress. The composer purchased 12 identical velvet suits, through which he would rotate for the remainder of his life. The wardrobe change earned him the befitting nickname, “The Velvet Gentleman.” Most of the rest of the money was spent on printing costs for his religious tracts, as Satie chose to remain in the cupboard.
By 1899, his pious religious principles had seemingly been abandoned. That year the musician wrote his brother,
Why should we attack God himself? He is just as unhappy as we are; since the death of His poor son, he takes no pleasure in anything, and just plays with his food. Although he has seated him at his good old right hand, he is still quite taken aback at men playing such a dirty trick on one whom he cherished; he spends all his time grumbling, in the most miserable fashion: that is really not very nice. I doubt whether he would even send one of his nephews into this world now; men have put him off sending his family traveling.
In a memoir penned toward the end of his life, Satie addressed his own peculiar eating habits, noting that was only capable of consuming white foods, including, “eggs, sugar, scraped bones, fat from dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, rice, turnips, things like pasta, white cheese, cotton salad and certain fish.” In spite of this eccentricity, however, he added, that he, unlike God, was never too unhappy to eat.
“I have a good appetite,” Satie wrote, “but never talk while eating, for fear of strangling myself.”
Sources:
Erik Satie's Trois Gnossiennes in the French fin de siècle https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/4344/1/Simmons13MMus.pdf
"I have never written a note I didn't mean." - Erik Satie http://music.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/0003_satie/satie.shtml
Erik Satie (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives) By Mary E. Davis
Joséphin Péladan: Occultism, Catholicism, and Science in the Fin de Siècle https://www.jstor.org/stable/42630792?seq=1
Mystical Symbolism at the Guggenheim, New York — kitschy https://www.ft.com/content/32105572-616f-11e7-8814-0ac7eb84e5f1