In the context of art and literature, the term "weird" refers to a sense of anxiety or terror regarding an ecological force seemingly acting on indeterminate motivations with little or no concern for people. A diversity of factors contributed to the 1890s flourish of the weird, including the growing economic investment in environmental policy, the rise of popular occulture, and the strong general interest in the biological, geological, meteorological, and astronomical sciences that were inspiring new notions of, among other subjects, the possibility of nonhuman consciousness. While not part of an overt environmentalist initiative, the weird nevertheless brings forward perspectives on animal, vegetal, and atmospheric ontology in which natural elements are subjects worthy of recognition and respect. The fin-de-siècle weird was driven not by the question of what protections or rights should be extended to nonhuman elements of the ecologies in which we participate, but rather, more disconcertingly for many, by considerations regarding what agency these other forces – many mysterious or yet unrecognized – enact and perhaps even assume for themselves.

In her writings, Vernon Lee at times formulates the spirit of place as a transhistorical, gynocentric paganism, but a number of her contemporaries took on a more explicit consideration of the pagan as a site of feminist self-realization. Chapter 5 turns fromworks about the spirit of moving through place to works addressing another form of movement: actual pagan ritual. Enmeshed within both the London decadent community and New Woman politics, Moina Mathers and Florence Farr were also among the most influential occultists of the pagan revival. These two leaders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn developed ecological models in which human-centred measures of space and time are replaced by an understanding of the self as an evanescent engagement within an occult ecology. Taking a lesson from painter Frederick Sandys, this chapter is not about searching for occult symbols in decadent art or literature. Rather, it addresses the decadent spirit within occult works aimed, in part, at destabilizing modern gender inequality.

In Chapter 2, I explore Walter Pater’s turn to Classical paganism to formulate his vision of the individual subject as dissipated through a range of spaciotemporal landscapes. Situating Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885) within the context of scientific claims by Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and Antonio Stoppani, the chapter articulates the way in which Pater’s paganism melds the Classical with recent scientific developments to present a sympathetic fusion of humans, other animals, plants, atmosphere, landscape, cultures, and even architecture. In the process, the chapter also address the ways in whih people such as Stoppani turned to metaphors and methods of comprehension rooted in Classical mythology to formulate, in his case, a pseudo-scientific, Christian conception of the rise of the Anthropocene.

Decadence turned to paganism to grasp not only animal intimacies but also engagements with the environment more generally. Building on the queer trans-species intimacies articulated by Swinburne, Pater, Solomon, and Field, Chapter 4 addresses Robert Louis Stevenson’s and Vernon Lee’s renderings of the environment as genius loci. As I argue, for Stevenson and Lee the genii locorum are not fixed locations in nature but ecological entanglements among animal and vegetal species, geographic formations, and climate. Stevenson and Lee extend Pater’s ecological correspondences by presenting the immersive experiences of the peripatetic as sensual and psychological engagements with nature that result in a more vital identification outside the self. And in situating their analyses within the growing cultural practice of the nature walk, their writings redefine the genius loci as a dynamic engagement suggestive of early environmentalism.

The discussion of occult feminism in Chapter 5 shifts the foundations of Decadent Ecology to a reality beyond the veil. The last chapter of this study returns to the turf from which it began with my ruminations on Holywell Cemetery. Chapter 6 examines works by George Egerton, Arthur Machen, and William Sharp, each of whom introduces a different form of paganism to their earthy decadent ecologies. The authors find in paganism scalar distortions and other forms of eco-excess that problematize distinctions between the spiritual, secular, and scientific. At the same time, while all are, today, recognized as part of the urbane, fin-de-siècle culture of Wilde and Beardsley, each, in fact, turns to the local and the rural as the site of their decadent intimacies. We hear in their often conflicted renderings of the pagan landscape voices for sexual, eco-spiritual, and regionalist politics.

Chapter one defines and historically situates the intersections among decadence, ecology, and the pagan revival in literature and art. Noting ecological, scientific, classist, nationalist, and imperialist aspects of decadence in its earliest articulations, focus is given to the shifting formulations of modern decadence in particular by such influential writers as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Bourget, and Max Nordau, the chapter offers close analyses of works by Algernon Swinburne such as his poem ‘The Leper’ (1866) and the Pre-Raphaelite artist Frederick Sandys such as his painting Medea (1868) that demonstrate the complex interplay across these concepts.

The introduction raises the intricate cross-influences among ninetheenth-century science, paganism, and the arts by noting the many renowned experts whose bodies are buried at Holywell Cemetary, Oxford. These include Walter Pater, Kenneth Grahame, botanist George Claridge Druce, zoologist George Rolleson, Celtic scholar John Rhys, Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith, and comparative philologist Max Müller. This intermingling of earth sciences, paganism, and the arts, I argue, captures the ecological foundations of decadence, despite its more popular conception as defined by artifice, dandyism, and shocking non-conformity. The final section of the itnroduction summarizes the monograph’s chapters.

The discussion of the term ‘new paganism’ in Chapter 1 notes the homophobic intimations that some critics made when addressing Algernon Swinburne’s andWalter Pater’s decadent works. However, as Swinburne’s ‘The Leper’ (1866) and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) make apparent, the intimacies that construct ecological communities are often far more amorphous or unprecedented than homophobic innuendos suggest. Chapter 3 addresses decadent desires as modes of perspectival code-switching accomplished through trans-species intimacies. Focussing on the strategic paganism in works by painter Simeon Solomon and poets Michael Field, I offer two queer models of what Henry Salt theorized, in Animals’ Rights (1892), as imaginative sympathy.

This short epilogue uses Algernon Blackwood’s short story ‘Special Delivery’ as a closing example of the ease with which decadence, queer politics, environmentalism, and eco-paganism were, by the early twentieth century, being readily intermingled. The cultural equations that make up the key arguments of Decadent Ecology had, by this time, become quite familiar.

This chapter traces a history of British Decadent sexualities as elemental, pre-normative attractions and fulfilments, considering how early sexological discourse encouraged conceptions of Decadent sexuality to arise and then likewise feed into more recent, posthumanist notions of eco-sexuality. But recognizing a non-binary Decadence of dissemination, proliferation and contagion requires one to imagine attractions and repulsions that do not merely decentre the human, but operate with a conceptual core that itself is not built in response to human identity, culture or politics in the first place. One possibility lies in Heinrich Kaan’s theory, articulated in his study Psycopathia Sexualis (1844), that a natural excess of imagination fosters realms of ‘chaos’ in plant and animal (including human) sexualities. Early sexological works such as Kaan’s encourage one to understand non-normative sexuality not as one of various deviations characterizing the Decadent movement, in fact not as a deviation at all, but as a natural phenomenon that preceded and gave shape to the cultural paradigms that Victorians and those who followed came to see as Decadent.