Decadent Chronicles 1: Introduction

by Christian Chensvold

Arktos Journal is pleased to unveil a new series entitled Decadent Chronicles by Christian Chensvold, whose work combines Traditionalist metaphysics with three decades’ connoisseurship of the Decadent Movement, which examined the effect of the decline of the West on “aristocrats of the soul.” He is a college fencing champion, third-generation astrologer, founder of Dandyism.net (2004), and author of The Philosophy of Style (2023) and Dark Stars: Heroic Spirituality in the Age of Decadence (2024). He is currently writing a work of 21st-century mythology, a Hyperborean Gothic fantasy that seeks to inspire Europa at the time of its greatest crisis.

The Decadent Movement (1880-1914) wrestled with the problem of Western Civilization having reached its peak and facing imminent decline. Complex states of mind emerged with the acute consciousness of societal dissolution, including impotent rage, spiritual longings, escape into fantasy and myth, and acts of transgression. The result is a specific kind of sensibility, a word that encapsulates the total feeling of existence, from thoughts and feelings to analysis and action — or more often inaction — that arose from the civilizational situation.

The Decadents warned against science and technology, materialism and capitalism, the “yellow peril” and rise of the masses, and the New Woman, or, as she was portrayed throughout Decadent literature, the femme fatale. Facing these threats on the material plane, the Decadent artist summoned all the myths and fables, gods and archetypes, angels and demons of the European imagination, which were unleashed in an orgiastic artistic output of Wagnerian “Twilight of the Gods” proportions. “I am the last of my kind” became the key phrase of the period.

It is important to understand that the Decadent sensibility is twofold. First, society is in decline — “decadent” comes from the Latin meaning “to fall away from” — moving away from spirit, aristocracy and hierarchy towards materialism and egalitarian sameness. Thus, society is “decadent,” lowercase d, while the Decadent with an uppercase D, for which the literary movement is named, stands in opposition to this process. The Decadent represents the world that is crumbling, and his various reactions and copings are called “Decadent” because he is in revolt against the modern world. Decadence, then, can be seen as two sides of the same coin: the negative side is the civilizational fall, while the positive is the defense of what is being lost.

It’s also important to understand just what was ending, with help from the later writings of Julius Evola, who in his youth was fascinated by the Decadent Movement. What was ending was the second caste in the traditional Indo-European system, that of the warrior nobles and landed gentry, as well as the caste of artists in their role as guardians of the soul of the culture. Art was peaking and would soon cease to pursue beauty as an end — atonal classical music and abstract painting from the year 1900 onwards are but two examples — and the influence of the aristocracy on Western Civilization would be all but wiped out in 1914 with the Great War. Pictured for this introductory column is La Mort de la Poupre (The Death of the Imperial Purple) by Georges Rochegrosse. Painted in 1914, it is the actualization of the scene of Babylon surrendering to advancing barbarians, which the artist had painted 20 years before.

According to Evola, the merchant caste, no matter how economically powerful, can never transmit the supra-individual spirit of its people simply because this faculty is not active in the merchant personality. Only the spiritual leaders (including artists) and nobles have rites, honor, and contact with both the cultural lifeblood of which they are caretakers, as well as the divine and archetypal dimensions of reality. In short, the blood carries the spirit and the spirit carries the race. A society without spirit loses its race and leads to where we are now in the 21st century.

Decadent Chronicles will contextualize how the West arrived at the present crisis while serving as guide to some of the most visionary work in the history of art and literature, all aimed squarely at the man of 2025, wrapped up in Baudelairean “spleen” or angry melancholy, while sitting in front of his computer watching a world on fire.