Some scholars have claimed that “Theosophy was Gauguin’s world view.” Not all agree, as Swedenborg and the Spiritualist comparativist Gerald Massey were equally important influences.
March 29, 2025
Until June 29, the Cittadella Museum in Torino, Italy, hosts the exhibition “Paul Gauguin: The Journal of Noa Noa and Other Adventures.” It features only an oil on canvas painting by Paul Gaguin (1848–1903), whose attribution is doubtful, “A Woman of Tahiti,” plus a watercolor and two sculptures, including the beautiful mask of a Tahitian woman, in fact his young common law wife Teha’amana (Tehura).
However, the exhibition’s aim is to document Gauguin’s interest in Polynesian culture and religion through manuscripts, drawings, and the xylography that accompanied the book “The Journal of Noa Noa,” written in 1893–94 and published in 1901.
While the captions of the exhibition never mention Theosophy, they document Gauguin’s approach to Polynesian beliefs as a valuable expression of “universal religion.” We know that in Tahiti Gauguin had among his books “The Secret Doctrine” by the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891). There is, however, a debate on when he was first introduced to Theosophy.
Having decided to become a full-time painter in 1883 (he had been previously a stockbroker), Gauguin started spending time in Brittany’s artist colony of Pont-Aven in 1886. He had been raised Roman Catholic, but had abandoned the faith under the influence of Darwinism and positivism. However, while he shared the anticlerical criticism of the Roman Catholic Church popular in France’s intellectual milieus of his time, he appreciated the simple faith of Brittany’s peasants whom he often depicted in his paintings.
In Pont-Aven, Gauguin came into contact with a younger generation of artists, including Émile Bernard (1868–1941) and Paul Sérusier (1864–1927). The latter was both a member of the Theosophical Society and an associate of Paris painter Paul Ranson (1864–1909), a disciple of Theosophist writer Édouard Schuré (1841–1929). Eventually, a painting Sérusier produced in 1888 in Pont-Aven following a suggestion by Gauguin, “The Talisman,” came to be regarded as the origin of a group meeting in Ranson’s home in Paris and called Les Nabis (“The Prophets”).
The Nabis were not just an artistic group, but a “secret society of mystical inclination,” according to Catholic painter Maurice Denis (1870–1943), who joined them for a while. They had rituals, and possibly costumes and scepters, inspired by Schuré’s immensely popular book “The Great Initiates.” Ranson’s wife, France (1866–1952), was titled “the Light of the Temple,” but not allowed in the all-male rituals. In 1906, Sérusier portrayed himself as “The Inspired Prophet,” likely based on a vision from “The Great Initiates.” Sérusier scholar Caroline Ross Boyle claims that, after he discovered it in his Nabi period, “Theosophy would govern the rest of his life.” It also influenced his theoretical writings.
Another older artist who was a close friend of Gauguin, like him a stockbroker-turned-painter, Émile Schuffenecker (1851–1934), visited the artist colony of Pont-Aven. He was a member of the Theosophical Society and designed covers for “Le Lotus Bleu,” the journal of its French section. Both Gauguin and Schuffenecker participated in Nabis meetings in Ransom’s studio in 1890 and 1891.
There is no hard evidence that Gauguin had read Theosophical literature before sailing for the first time to Tahiti in 1891. On the other hand, the Nabis’ gathering had a clear Theosophical flavor and it is unlikely that Sérusier and Schuffenecker, both Theosophists, had not shared their enthusiasm for Blavatsky’s work with Gauguin. They might have formally joined the Theosophical Society shortly after Gauguin left for Tahiti but clearly were interested in Theosophical ideas even before.
Some scholars date Gauguin’s direct access to Theosophical literature to his time in Tahiti, where he had as a neighbor and friend the socialist French government bureaucrat and Theosophist Jean Souvy (1817–1913). They believe that some esoteric ideas Gauguin had previously cultivated in France did not derive from Theosophy but from the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Gauguin learned about Swedenborg by reading the esoteric novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), but studied the Swedish mystic’s texts directly, and explicitly acknowledged Swedenborg’s influence.
Another subject Gauguin studied with passion in Polynesia was comparative religion. He also wanted to settle scores with Christianity. He believed that Christian missionaries were destroying Polynesian culture. He wrote that Protestant missionaries, who attacked him by calling his paintings of Polynesian women “pornographic” and criticizing his common law marriages with three subsequent Polynesian teenage girls, first in Tahiti and then in the Marquesas Islands, with their intolerable puritanism were much worse than their Catholic rivals. He was befriended by the Marquesas Islands Catholic bishop, Rogatien-Joseph Martin (1849–1912), who however had no illusions about Gauguin’s attitude to Christianity.
Gauguin’s approach to comparative religion heavily relied on British poet and Spiritualist Gerald Massey (1828–1907), an author who had also interested Blavatsky and whose works he read in Tahiti. Massey’s and other works in comparative religion guided Gauguin in his own exploration of Polynesian beliefs.
Massey is also the source of Gauguin’s conclusion in the manuscript “The Modern Thought and Catholicism,” which he wrote in 1902 shortly before dying, that “the Jesus Christ of the Gospels is none other than the Jesus Christ of the Myth, the Jesus Christ of the astrologers.” With a provocative frontispiece depicting Mary Magdalene in the brothel where, according to a tradition not supported by the Gospels, she had worked before converting, the book never found a publisher. It has been made available only in 2024 by the Saint Louis Art Museum, which owns the manuscript, through a website offering both the original manuscript, a French transcription, and an English translation. The text is Gauguin’s strongest anti-Catholic tirade, and sees Jesus Christ, in Massey’s tradition, not as a historical figure but as the embodiment of a myth of Egyptian origin.
Gauguin sent the manuscript to Bishop Martin, who criticized it but answered respectfully. The bishop could appreciate that Gauguin still believed that many valuable teachings could be found in the Gospels, although they had been betrayed by both Catholic and Protestant churches.
Where was Theosophy in all this? Scholars have looked for traces of Blavatsky’s influence in Gauguin’s writings but most have rather seen it in its paintings. The Jesuit priest and art historian Father Thomas Buser was the first scholar who claimed, in 1968, that Theosophy was a decisive influence on Gauguin. Through an astute exegesis of “Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake” and “Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan,” both from 1889, Buser concluded that “when it came time for Gauguin to think about a subject, he thought theosophically… Theosophy was his world view.” He also examined different works of Gauguin featuring Jesus and concluded that his was a “theosophical Christ.”
The Israeli-American art historian Ziva Amishai-Maisels in her 1969 dissertation “Gauguin’s Religious Themes,” published as a book in 1985 (New York: Garland) also concluded that Theosophy was a key influence on Gauguin. So did Katherine C. Scalia in a M.A. thesis of 2007 at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, which focused on Gauguin’s 1891 painting “Ia Orana Maria” (Ave Maria).
Other scholars, such as Robert P. Welsh (1932–2000), did not entirely dismiss Theosophical influences, but argued that Swedenborg and Massey were more important for Gauguin than Blavatsky. Be it as it may be, the anticlerical Gauguin was certainly a man with multiple esoteric and spiritual interests. In “Cahier pour Aline,” written in Tahiti in 1892, he wrote, “There is in the firmament a book in which the eternal law of harmony and beauty is written. The men who know how to read this book, says Swedenborg, are the favored of God.”
Source: bitterwinter.org
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