Victor Hugo, La Fin de Satan and Dieu (1911)

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) · Black versus White Magic Series · 681 pages

The most unexpected item in the section, and by far the largest: a complete 681-page facsimile of Victor Hugo's posthumous epic poems La Fin de Satan and Dieu, in the edition printed by the Imprimerie Nationale for the Librairie Ollendorff in 1911 as part of his Œuvres complètes. The text is in French throughout, and it is reproduced as a scan of the original printing rather than reset.

La Fin de Satan is Hugo's unfinished attempt at a cosmic poem on the redemption of Satan — the fallen angel not damned eternally but restored, with evil resolved rather than merely defeated. That is why it sits in a series about black and white magic rather than among literary works: the argument the poem makes about the nature and the end of evil runs closely alongside the two studies of evil elsewhere in this section, and Hugo reaches a conclusion that a good deal of theosophical writing also reaches by another road. Readers without French will find the poem hard going, but the placing of it here is deliberate and worth understanding.

Read the full text (PDF, 31.9 MB, 681 pages)