The first step towards an understanding of the political dimensions of magic, then, is to remember that Harry Potter has as much to do with real magic as the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein has to do with real science. Dion Fortune, one of the 20th century’s leading theoreticians of magic (and a crackerjack practitioner), is a better source of insight here. She defined magic as the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. That definition is trickier than it looks. Whose consciousness? Whose will? Those are crucial questions, and they are political in nature.

Let’s start with a straightforward example. At some point during the last 24 hours you probably saw an advertisement for fizzy brown sugar water. That’s not what the ad called it, of course, and that distraction — think of it as a spell of invisibility — is an important part of the sorcery we’re discussing. Notice that the ad didn’t try to convince you of the alleged merits of the syrupy goo it was pushing at you, nor did it aim anything else at your rational mind.

No, the ad deployed imagery meant to set off emotional reactions that have nothing to do with the product. Here’s a group of people on a billboard. They’re young, they’re attractive, they look healthy, they’re wearing clothes that tell you they have plenty of money, they’re having a great time, and they’re all clutching cans of fizzy brown sugar water. If I tried to convince you that guzzling the contents of one of those cans will make you young, attractive, and the rest of it, you’d roll your eyes. Yet that’s the message the deep levels of your mind absorb, and your behaviour shifts in response. In magical terms, the ad cast a spell on you: that is, it caused change in your consciousness in accordance with the advertiser’s will.

This works because the rational mind is a thin veneer on the surface of a standard primate nervous system. Scratch that veneer, and you’ll find all the raw biological cravings and vague associative thinking that most people in industrial societies like to pretend they’ve outgrown. Repeated exposure to a spell — that is, a set of emotionally charged images and words designed in accordance with the rules of magic — punches straight through the veneer and speaks to the archaic primate-mind underneath it. Unless you’re aware of the effect and adjust for it, the images affect you, and you reach for that can of fizzy brown sugar water, even though you know perfectly well that the only thing you’ll get from it is tooth decay.

This kind of sorcery is pervasive in today’s industrial societies. Back in 1984, in his brilliant book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano pointed out that most countries in the industrial world had discarded the jackboots and armbands of old-fashioned authoritarianism for subtler methods of social control rooted in magic. The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states” in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media. It’s a persuasive analysis and does much to explain the nature of power in modern societies.

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Not all of the magic that surrounds us, after all, focuses on goals as straightforwardly mercenary as the example just discussed. Consider the vacuous slogans brandished by the three most recent presidents of the United States: “Yes We Can”, “Make America Great Again”, “Build Back Better”. All three incantations are meant to manipulate voters using the same kind of magic applied by manufacturers of fizzy brown sugar water. They target a different set of emotions, those that work on the contrast between dreams of a better future and the increasingly miserable conditions of life in today’s America, but they use the same strategy of exploiting non-rational emotions to market an unappealing product.

Widespread as it is, this approach to magic is far from omnipotent. Sometimes it fails because the spell is badly designed: Hillary Clinton’s impressively clueless slogan “I’m With Her” flopped, for example, because she lacked the charisma to make the prospect of identifying with her appeal to the emotions of enough voters. Sometimes it fails because a competing spell is stronger: “I’m With Her” also had to contend with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, which drew on much more powerful emotional drives.

Yet the mass-produced sorcery of advertising suffers from another critical weakness. No two people have exactly the same structures and content in the deep places of their mind, and their responses to magic varies unpredictably. Advertisers try to get around this by targeting a handful of simple biological drives linked to sex, safety, and status, which are common to all social primates and affect most people in something like the same way. Magic aimed at these drives, using suitably crass stimuli, tends to be successful enough to push products and sway elections, and so long as that’s all that matters, no more focused magic is needed.

But pushing products and swaying elections is not always enough. Here we need to draw a distinction between the political class of a society — the people who have a significant and privileged voice in public decisions — and the rest of the population. The political class is always a minority, and often a very small minority, however enthusiastically it may wrap itself in rhetoric of majority rule. Its hold on power depends on its ability to come up with reasonably effective responses to pressing social problems. So long as it fulfils this problem-solving function, the rest of the population shrugs and goes on with life.

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Now and then, however, the political class of a society fails to address the most pressing problems of the time. Sometimes this is a matter of simple incompetence, but more often it happens because those problems are caused by policies that benefit the political class, which the political class is unwilling to abandon. Arnold Toynbee, whose 12-volume opus A Study of History explored this process in detail, coined a neat turn of phrase to describe the change. He terms a political class that is still fulfilling its problem-solving function a creative minority; when it abandons that function, it becomes a dominant minority, and the society it manages tips into decline.

Certain social phenomena reliably show up whenever a political class loses the ability or the desire to solve the most pressing problems of its era, and tries to cling to power anyway. The one that’s relevant to our present purpose is that in such an era, magic explodes in popularity — and the kind of magic that becomes popular is the kind that individuals practise on themselves, using rituals, meditations, affirmations, and other traditional occult tools to change their behaviour and affect how other people respond to them. Look at a period when personal magical practice flourishes and you’ll find that era dominated by a failing elite in charge of a society full of problems that are not being addressed.

In the United States, for example, occultism had its first golden age between the end of the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties. During those years the robber barons of Wall Street treated the federal government as their wholly owned subsidiary and the majority of the population knew from hard experience that their concerns would go unheard and their needs unmet. That helped drive a widespread interest in magical workings of all kinds, ranging from rootwork spells for prosperity to magical lodge initiations aimed at higher states of consciousness. When the Great Depression and the New Deal brought that era of blatant kleptocracy to a close, interest in magic and occultism dropped off sharply.

Thereafter, magic stayed unfashionable until the late Sixties, when the managerial aristocracy that rules the United States today started treating the issues that mattered to most people as annoyances to be brushed aside. A second golden age of American magic followed promptly, partly drawn from the legacy of older American occultism and partly inspired by half-understood imports from other culture. Yes, it’s still ongoing. Magic will thrive in the United States despite the fulminations of rationalists until the managerial state either learns how to listen to the people it claims the right to lead, or has the levers of power wrenched from its hands.

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Two significant social forces drive the rise of magic in a society ruled by a failing political class: one affecting the population as a whole, the other affecting the political class. Among the underprivileged majority, magic becomes popular because it offers a way of bettering your life when all other options have been slammed shut. Even when you can’t change anything else, after all, you can change your consciousness in accordance with your own will.

That has several advantages. First, using magic allows you to evade the effects of sorceries directed at you by institutions controlled by the political class, so that you can pursue your own goals rather than being subservient to theirs. Second, because human consciousness isn’t as tightly confined to the insides of individual skulls as currently fashionable philosophies like to claim, changes in your consciousness can affect how other people react to you, and that offers various avenues for improving your own life. Third, magic — like its more respectable twin, religion — also offers the possibility of attuning consciousness to sources of energy and meaning that transcend humanity. Discussing these sources and their implications would take us far afield from the present theme, but the higher and deeper dimensions of occult tradition are central enough to magic that it’s worth acknowledging them here.

So the underprivileged have good reasons to embrace magic. So do the overprivileged. Here the problem is simply that no political class wants to face the reality of its own decadence. Central to the self-image of every political class is the notion that its members deserve their privilege by some combination of practical competence and moral virtue. Even — or especially — when this isn’t actually the case, members of the political class base their identities on the idea that they are the good people, the capable and compassionate people, whose wealth and privilege are nothing more than they deserve. Magic, in turn, is one of the ways they prop up that illusion.

Some of the spells in question are charmingly simple. It’s standard practice, for example, for a dominant minority to pretend to fill their ostensible role as society’s problem-solvers by going through the motions of solving problems, choosing for this purpose problems that matter to no one outside the political class itself. (The antics of today’s corporate wokesters offer plenty of examples here.) Yet this sort of expedient rarely does an adequate job of shielding members of a decadent political class from an uncomfortable awareness of their own failure, and so the overprivileged — like the underprivileged — turn to individual magical practice.

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American society today offers a bumper crop of examples. Consider the various forms of watered-down Buddhism, carefully stripped of the robust moral self-examination and ascetic habits that play such important roles in traditional Buddhist teaching, which are marketed so assiduously to corporate clients as non-chemical tranquillisers. Consider the cult of positive thinking so neatly eviscerated by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-Sided, which serves the function of convincing the comfortable that all is well with the world, especially when it’s not. There are plenty of other examples, from weekend-workshop shamanism to the more lucrative ends of goddess spirituality and the New Age movement.

It’s easy to make fun of the embarrassing features of these social phenomena, but they serve a serious purpose. Most members of the political class in today’s America would be appalled if they let themselves realise just what the policies they support have inflicted on working people and the poor. Half a century ago, it bears remembering, a family of four in the United States with one working class income could afford a home, three square meals a day, and all the other necessities of life, with a little left over for luxuries now and then. Today a family of four in the United States with one working class income is probably living on the street.

That immense shift, which plunged tens of millions of people into poverty and misery, did not happen by accident. It was the direct result of policies enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the American political class: the offshoring of America’s industries, the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages and working conditions, and the metastatic growth of government regulations that crushed small business for the benefit of huge multinational corporations, among others. That is a thought that the American political class cannot allow itself to think. Magic — the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will — is an essential tool for keeping that realisation at bay.

That said, there are definite drawbacks to a set of practices that encourage the dominant minority of a society to bumble blithely along, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while the society they govern plunges down the steep slope of decline around them. It bears remembering that magic was practiced with great enthusiasm by the overprivileged and underprivileged alike in France in the decades leading up to 1789, Russia in the decades before 1917, and Germany in the decades that led up to 1933. I think most of us remember what happened thereafter in each of these cases.

According to his friend, film producer Damon Bryant, one of the first on the scene, the flat was pristine: “He put flowers in every vase. He was as sober as a judge. There were no drugs. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

His funeral about a month later was spectacular, even by Soho’s flamboyant standards. A horse-drawn cortege inched its way around the tight grid of streets. Thousands of mourners followed; among them Sienna Miller, Sadie Frost, Alfie Allen, Noel Fielding, Robert Elms and Jaime Winstone. All of them knew the little man who was lying there, silent, and alone.

Bernie Katz was the man they called the Prince of Soho. For 27 years, he had worked as front-of-house manager of the Groucho Club, the long-established and exclusive private members’ club in Soho where, in the 90s, Princess Diana went to lunch and Bill Clinton once played saxophone: a dizzily decadent playground for the rich, the famous and the not-so-famous.

The term “Prince of Soho” was marked out in flowers on the horse-drawn hearse; his title was coined by the actor and writer Stephen Fry, who was closer to Bernie than most.

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Bernie’s funeral made the BBC News at 6pm; he would have been thrilled, everyone said. As TV and radio presenter Robert Elms put it: “He was the essence of this place. He was preposterous, he was gorgeous, he was five foot nothing and had a heart bigger than this square… Bernie knew everybody. If you were touched by Bernie — and it probably meant he touched your bottom — you stayed touched.” Noel Fielding described him as “always in a leopard-skin jacket, whirling around like a windmill. He was a character. I don’t think those people exist anymore.”

Yes, he was a character — but what kind of character? As a member of the Groucho, I knew him a bit, but not well. One person told me that Bernie was the sort of person who was your friend for 60 seconds — and would then disappear. The circumstances of his death — and the strange events that led to his demise, from the moment he left the Groucho in unexplained circumstances a few months before — are explored in my podcast series, Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho?.

Bernie’s death was a shock to many. But it was also a motif — an acknowledgment of another death; that of old Soho itself.

Nowadays, Soho’s spirit has been sold to the highest bidder; the developers have got their way. Independent restaurants are few and far between — on Broadwick Street, there is now a branch of the Ivy, unthinkable 20 years ago. Berwick Street market, for years an impeccable source of all manner of questionable items has been gentrified. The fruit vendors have made way for stalls selling flat whites and falafels.

These streets were once Bernie’s manor: he had worked in the West End pretty much from the moment he left school. Born in 1967 to a Jewish family in south London, as a teenager he witnessed the murder of his father, a gangster called Brian “Little Legs” Clifford. Bernie would later write of his “gangster father” whose life ended with a bullet in the head: “So used was I to a life of drive-by shootings, I thought nothing of the sound of that gunshot, except that it intruded upon my viewing of the Price Is Right.”

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That murder has never been solved. And neither was Bernie’s own demise. Indeed, the latter, as I discovered, was never properly investigated.

Bernie had joined the Groucho as barman in 1990, just before Cool Britannia when the club was at its drug-fuelled zenith: even though the management had — and still has — a strict zero-tolerance policy of drugs.

The Groucho is the kind of place that is guaranteed to divide opinion; there are those, like me, who are long-standing members, and won’t have a word said against it. Others are less enamoured, dismissing it as pretentious and elitist. (To which members reply: isn’t that the point of a club?)

Founded in 1985, the Groucho began as a club for the media and publishing worlds. By the 90s, it had become an infamous celebrity haunt. Inevitably, some members did drugs; the upstairs snooker room was occasionally known as the “Peruvian Procurement Department”. In 1996, the room was the scene of a furious showdown between actress Patsy Kensit and her then-boyfriend, Liam Gallagher. Glasses and snooker balls were thrown, and Gallagher ended up trashing not just the table but the room itself.

Other moments, too, became Groucho legend: Melvyn Bragg chatting to U2; Friends star Matt LeBlanc propping up the bar alone one Saturday night; Dancer Wayne Sleep once took Princess Diana there for lunch — and handed her the bill. On one memorable night in 1995, Damien Hirst put his £20,000 Turner Prize money behind the downstairs bar.

And throughout it all, Bernie was there. He would sashay from table to table, clad in leopard skin and Cuban heels, soothing the pampered members, dealing with their tantrums, dropping in a witty or caustic remark. The Bernie stories, like the man himself, were outrageous, lurid and always true. He proved his chutzpah by once ejecting Madonna for being rude.

Stephen Fry, a founder member of the Groucho, was closer to Bernie than most. “My first impressions were of a huge, vibrant and outgoing personality,” he told me. “All hugs, grins, extravagant language and wild attire.” But, he went on: “There probably was something sad about Bernie …  It may seem glamorous… but in fact there was a lot of work, very little money and too many temptations into addiction and late nights.”

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I talked to dozens of Bernie’s friends, family members and Groucho regulars: all spoke warmly of him, though some were curiously reluctant to go into detail about the last weeks of his life. Others were deeply puzzled. Actress Alison Steadman told me: “Bernie was fun and kind. When he walked in, the room lit up. I have never been able to establish exactly what happened and why… but whatever it was, it was so wrong.”

So what did happen to Bernie? Bernie’s tragedy, his surviving family and friends told me, was that after he left the Groucho, with no regular job, he had begun to succumb to the addictions that had dogged him through his life.

The precise reasons for his departure were never properly explained, though many believe his self-indulgent figure ran counter to Soho’s sanitised new world. Whatever the truth, without that job he lost his own sense of worth. He soon found himself short of money, and ended up taking small loans from friends.

And then, his close friends told me, things quickly escalated. Put bluntly, he got on the wrong side of the wrong type of people — specifically, it was whispered, Albanian gangsters and their constant demands for repayment over drug debts. As one friend said: “He had a lot of debt, and that debt was related to buying cocaine, which there were rumours it was an Eastern European gang. That was being spoken about a lot… thirty grand to the Albanians, or whatever it was.”

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The drug trade in Soho, for most of Bernie’s life, was dominated by Italians and Maltese gangsters. But sometime in the last decade, the Albanians squeezed them out. They were frighteningly ruthless, violent and brooked no dissent. Bernard Clifford Katz — camp, easy-going and sweet-natured — would not have stood a chance.

Certainly by the time of his death, the Albanians had cemented their control in London. Even now, four years after Bernie’s death, they are still at the forefront of the cocaine trade in this country which is worth billions.

Perhaps if the Albanians had stayed out of Soho, just at the time Bernie was working there, he might never have fallen out with gangsters. If he hadn’t been such a gregarious soul, he might have kept his job. And if he’d have kept his nose clean — in every sense of the phrase — he might still be welcoming guests into reception and charging across the room in his Cuban heels.

But that wasn’t to be. For Bernie, Soho was a timeless neighbourhood of decadence and debauchery. Until it wasn’t.

After his death, the Groucho renamed its downstairs restaurant “Bernie’s” in his honour. On one wall sits a beautiful portrait of him; he looks strangely relaxed and at peace — a memory to a golden era of Soho that has since decayed.

Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho is available at now.

But if this is true, how could we ever translate anything without hopelessly mangling it? If a translation risks twisting or ruining the original, stripping it of nuance or even misrepresenting an idea, then it must be done only with the greatest sensitivity and skill.

This isn’t a problem that concerns only dilettantes and art mavens; ideas, even in translation, can be revolutionary. The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei describes how his father sought to evade accusations of being anti-communist during the Cultural Revolution by burning the family’s books, including poetry by Pablo Neruda and Rabindranath Tagore. Likewise, just as translated works can be subversive, so they can be evangelical: the world’s most translated text today is the Bible. Whether encouraged in order to spread ideas, or forbidden in order to suppress them, translation is difficult to separate from power.

Predictably, then, the politics of translation have become a culture-war battleground today, with reports that the Dutch writer and poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has pulled out of translating Amanda Gorman’s poem for the Biden inauguration. Translation rights to Gorman’s work were hotly contested, and Meulenhof, the publisher that secured them, described Rijneveld, an International Booker Prize winner, as the “dream translator”.

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But Rijneveld’s selection was quickly seized upon by self-styled “cultural activist” Janice Deul, who wrote that Meulenhof should instead “choose a writer who is — just like Gorman — a spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black”. The implication was that Rijneveld, who is white, would have less insight into Gorman’s life than a Dutch writer who is black. In response, critics of Rijneveld’s decision to step down have objected to this firewalling of cultural artefacts on the basis of skin colour. But such well-trodden culture war arguments can easily obscure the complex power dynamics of translation.

Rabindranath Tagore, whose work Ai Weiwei remembers reading before his father burned the family library, was the first non-white person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gitanjali (or Song Offerings) was Tagore’s own translation of 103 of his Bengali verses into English prose, and was described by William Butler Yeats as “the work of a supreme culture”.

Tagore’s Nobel Prize in 1913 certainly widened the previously Eurocentric focus of such awards. Yet despite Tagore’s prolific artistic output and status as giant of the Bengali Renaissance, Gitanjali remains his best-known work outside the subcontinent, the subject of Pinterest pins and YouTube content, precisely because Tagore translated it to English. For, in no small thanks to the political legacy of two successive Anglophone empires, English remains the dominant global language.

This fact sits uncomfortably with the post-imperial and (officially at least) anti-imperialist perspective of modern Britain. Today it is common to feel, somewhat queasily, that the English language has been an irreversible and sometimes harmful imposition on the world: this sentiment even appears in the GCSE English syllabus, in the form of Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations.

Translations depicts the exercise of English colonial power in 1833 rural Ireland, as represented by a group of military surveyors who anglicise Irish place names while making a new map. It directly addresses the fundamentally violent process of using military force to impose a foreign language, and translating the cultural (and physical) terrain of an occupied people into that language.

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Although we decry Britain’s former imperial aggression today, the process Translations describes didn’t come to an end with the dissolution of the British Empire. In Hong Kong, the anglicisation described in Translations has been taking place in reverse since the return of the island to Chinese rule in 1997. As Beijing has tightened its hold, street names and signage have undergone a slow but sure shift from English to Chinese, which is framed explicitly as a process of erasing the British colonial legacy.

The cultural inroads made by empire — and the violence this often entails — are more visible yet when it comes to “translating” people from their native culture to the imperial one. This dates back to ancient Egypt and Rome, when hostages were routinely taken among the children of conquered aristocracies and educated in their conquerors’ culture. The Ottoman Empire turned such translation into a fine art, with the devshirme or “child-levy” system, which took children from subject nations and raised them as the empire’s elite governing class.

Nor was the practice of coercive assimilation abandoned in more modern empires: America in the 19th century saw the creation of boarding schools for Native American children, who were separated from their parents and compelled to study “the habits and arts of civilisation”. And a similar process is underway in China today, with reports emerging of boarding schools in Xinjiang where Uighur children are taught to forget their heritage and embrace loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.

The mixed feelings such assimilationist cultural policies produced among those who experienced them can be seen in the writing of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a Bengali contemporary of Tagore. Born in 1897, Chaudhuri’s boyhood coincided with the burgeoning Indian independence movement, which by then was trickling into schoolbooks.

But far from cheering this process on, in Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) Chaudhuri describes envying the excerpts of English poetry in his older brother’s textbooks, which he found far more interesting than his own “Indianised” study material. And in The Continent of Circe (1965), Chaudhuri is even more explicit, claiming that “English is not a mere instrument for us but a force shaping and moulding personality”. That is, to argue for a language is to argue for a worldview.

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Having learned to translate my own worldview twice as a child, I never felt entirely “English” even after our return. Indeed, as the ebb and flow of translations follows that of politics, those who have been translated (voluntarily or otherwise) into a hybrid culture can be left radically adrift when the currents change. Chaudhuri was one such: he left India altogether in 1970 for England, explaining: “England is decadent, the young people are savages, but here I can still live according to the lights I have always known.”

The landscape of cultural and imperial power thus flows across places and cultures via literal and figurative processes of translation. And when we think of translation in these terms, it becomes clear that the quarrel over who translates Gorman’s poem isn’t a matter of race or marginalisation at all, so much as of imperial court politics.

Amanda Gorman’s work has been broadcast around the world from the nation that remains — in however battered a condition — the world’s pre-eminent superpower. She is not marginalised. In terms of pure cultural clout, she’s a heavy hitter, in the world’s top nation, writing in the world’s dominant language. Rijneveld, on the other hand, is a relatively obscure writer and poet, working in a language spoken by a mere 23 million people.

Being a trendy figure in Dutch literature has nothing on being America’s premier court poet. And so winning the job of translating Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem is less white appropriation than the scoring of an immense honour — one that was, in fact, conferred by Gorman herself, who personally selected Rijneveld for the job.

Deul’s intervention was not a move to amplify marginalised people so much as the use of a fashionable argument to redirect a desirable opportunity toward her own social network. (Her article names several of her personal friends whom she thinks would be more suitable than Rijneveld.) That is, it was less a fightback against imperial power than an intra-class skirmish for perks and status.

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Much of the currently fashionable “decolonisation” agenda that excites so much conservative commentary can be understood in a similar framework; as a process of imperial translation, with a new order reorganising the ideas and artefacts of alien cultures to suit its own priorities.

The lesson to draw from this isn’t that all empires are evil by definition, but that all of them exercise power literally, via coercive means, and also culturally via the spread and translation of ideas and ways of life. We may bridle at the new woke American anti-imperialist imperialism, gasp at the ruthlessness of the Chinese drive to assimilate its minorities, or recoil at the atrocities committed by the British empire. But the uncomfortable fact is that such forces are also the deep drumbeat of the most long-lasting achievements in human history.

The only way to avoid this drumbeat, in all its brutality, would be to end imperialism full stop, which history suggests isn’t going to happen. And even if it did, it would likely mean the end of art and culture. Is that a price worth paying? The intense competition for the right to cling to Amanda Gorman’s coattails suggests not even today’s self-styled woke anti-imperialists really want to give up the imperial power of literature. They’re just fighting over who gets to wield it.

What do you think of when you read the word “decadent”? Liza Minnelli showing her stocking tops while fascism looms in the shadows? Gatsby laying out his shirts to reclaim Daisy’s love? Julia Flyte’s gift from her rich lover, a tortoise whose shell bore her initials in diamonds? Or was it best embodied by notorious porn purveyor Larry Flynt, who died this week?

Merriam-Webster defines it both as “appealing to self-indulgence — a rich and decadent dessert” and “marked by decay or decline  — an increasingly decadent society.” In other words, it is considered either good or bad depending on your point of view. Not many words take in both the fall of the Roman Empire and a chocolate ganache.

Its meaning has, of course, changed over the years. Certainly things seem to have moved on since the late 19th century, when writers and artists favouring outré subjects became known as the Decadent Movement. As always there was a sizeable gulf between the French and the English; they had the deadly serious Joris-Karl Huysmans, we had the savage amusements of Oscar Wilde.

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A magazine, Le Decadent, was founded in 1886 to bring order to their principles, but even then your average self-obsessed, opium-eating onanist wasn’t exactly a team player. A lot of it was little more than a Perve’s Charter. But the Decadents shrewdly saw that hedonism could be dignified with a backbeat of tragedy, and portrayed their excesses as a sane reaction to a mad world. As Baudelaire put it: “Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters… Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.” With virtue? Yeah, right.

With the twentieth century, the alibis for acting out ramped up as we entered the Age Of Excuses. The barbarism of the First World War was widely accepted as the trigger for the Roaring Twenties, and by the 1950s psychology had found a deep-seated reason for every last bit of bad behaviour.

Then rock and roll came — and the genie was truly out of the bottle. Girls had always hung around entertainers, but never like this. Not so much starry-eyed fans as scalp-hungry maenads, the groupies of the 1960s and 70s cut a swathe through the equally wanton rock stars of the age.

Many of them found their El Dorado in David Bowie, a rock star who seemed to exude decadence with each breath. Could that explain why he was allowed to have sex with underage girls and watch his popularity soar, while other men in his position would have been pilloried?

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Perhaps it was simply because he didn’t seem to be enjoying it that much. His decadent behaviour was soundtracked by the splendid output of his cocaine-zombie soul-in-torment period; if he’d acted that way during his “Laughing Gnome” days, he’d have been bang to rights. But played smartly, the decadent card is enough to make people feel sorry for the most egregious of rogues. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” William Blake wrote. “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”

But what about those times when it doesn’t lead to a “palace of wisdom”? Today’s decadents seem far more likely to end up in a shack on a cliff edge. “It’s just so lonely at the top,” squeals every showbiz biography ever written, from Charlie Chaplin to the Chuckle Brothers. And judging from the publicity for his Stories I Only Tell My Friends, the actor Rob Lowe seems unlikely to be striking out in a new direction. Lowe had it all: fame, success, teenage girls and even Princess Stephanie of Monaco. But that’s all fine — he just wasn’t happy.

No doubt Marilyn Manson — currently the centre of a huge storm concerning his sexual behaviour — will attempt to go down this more-in-sorry-than-in-salaciousness route if he ever follows up his 1998 autobiography The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell. Perhaps he’ll try to persuade us that he only behaved unpleasantly towards women because he was sad, rather than bad. (Though, while obviously feeling sorry for his partners, one does wonder what they expected from entering into a relationship with a self-confessed Satanist. Foot-rubs and rom-coms?)

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The whole saga reminds me of the English dandy and decadent Sebastian Horsley, with whom a prostitute friend of mine fell in love, having been wooed by his assurances that the relationship between hooker and client was the purest possible. He called himself an artist and the prostitutes his muses — but as he produced very little art, it appears the only thing these muses inspired him to do was to go with more prostitutes. When my friend found out that she was one of many, she was (amusingly) outraged.

But Manson and Horsley both surely illustrate something sobering about decadence: that as you get older, you really need to get over it. A jaded palate appears to make the Decadent “up the ante”, and thus turn from something merely silly into something potentially sinister. Surely, for example, we can all agree that sexually bullying the handicapped is never a good look? Yet Horsley ended up in a foreign brothel having sex with a prostitute who literally had no limbs, while Manson once boasted of urinating on a deaf fan. (Having heard his music, it’s a wonder they all weren’t.)

Still, if you know when to get off, there’s nothing wrong with youthful day-trips to Decadence. It’s one of those things, like love bites and Maoism, which you can indulge in when young and pretty, but look rather sad trying to sustain into middle age. Worst of all, it can make you profoundly boring. Its 19th-century adherents went on to embrace everything from Catholicism to anarchy. I started volunteering in a charity shop.

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Is that really so surprising, though? Not when you consider that the same waywardness which leads lost souls to decadence will eventually lead them out again — unless pleasure has destroyed them before they get the chance to break free. Because while pleasure, whether induced by pornography or cocaine, appears at first to open up a new world, hold it a beat too long and it ends up shrinking that new realm until you become not a Decadent but a lab rat, scurrying about in your own personal sewer searching for the next lever to pull.

When this happens, people begin to ceaselessly lie to themselves about their behaviour in order to continue it. And perhaps there’s a psychological reason for this: being wicked is always going to seem a lot more attractive than being weak. In every branch of the arts, for example, wicked people are glamourised, whereas the weak are portrayed as deserving nothing but contempt. This often leads to self-deception, as the Decadent insists that the source of their chosen indulgence — be it drugs or porn — is magically free of the misery and broken lives which litter its production.

By any standards, one of the most decadent people who ever lived was the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, a cross-dressing, sex-mad tyrant who ruled between the ages of 14 and 18. The Praetorian Guard, however, were not impressed and he ended up headless and floating in the Tiber. And we all know what happened to the Roman Empire; brought down, in part, by a religion rooted in humility and self-denial — the very opposite of decadence. One can only imagine what will suddenly spring up to wash away the dirt of today’s Augean Stables. But whatever it is, no doubt we’ll pose for selfies while society burns.

Let me just come out and say it. Decadent proclivities brought me to The House of Ulloa. My initiation took place in New Cross, South London, at an academic conference where the souvenir tote bags depicted the Goat of Mendes cavorting with a tortoise. In rooms at the Stuart Hall building of Goldsmiths College, guests of the Decadence Research Unit gave papers on the literature of auras, telepathy, astral projection and Satanism.

A South Korean Shakespeare professor talked about tantric philosophy and W. B. Yeats’s vasectomy. A dapper Swedish lecturer in religion spoke of Méphistophéla (1890), a French novel in which lesbian demon-worshippers offer baskets of severed penises to a female succubus. A Spanish researcher, Leire Barrera-Medrano, described the fiction of Emilio Pardo Bazán, decadent, feminist, theosophist, aristocrat and the author of The Black Siren (1908), the story of a devil-worshipping dandy with the power to compel people to commit suicide.

I was reeling. Suddenly, Proust’s mental time travel and Freud’s interest in telepathy made sense. Here was the lost, weird context of European modernism. Most of it, frustratingly, untranslated into English.

With one notable exception. Emilio Pardo Bazán’s The House of Ulloa (1886). A novel from her early period, written long before she developed an interest in hypnotism and the Black Mass. Back in the 1880s, she considered herself a naturalist in the style of Flaubert. But she was also a state of the nation novelist. That nation was her native Spain, and its state was decay.

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The hero of The House of Ulloa is a mimsy young priest, Father Julián Alvarez, who is despatched to a crumbling estate in the Galician sticks to inject a little order and piety into the affairs of its resident marquis. Some hope.

As he arrives at the manor like a comic, clerical version of Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Dracula, he sees a dirty four-year-old boy, the marquis’s illegitimate son, being bitten by a dog from whose bowl he has attempted to snatch a hunk of meat. The marquis consoles the lad by sluicing wine down his throat. The boy seems delighted to be drunk. “On certain feast-days,” stammers Father Julián, wondering if he is about to witness a sudden death, “I don’t dislike a little anisette with my coffee.”

Like many great novels, it’s possible to read The House of Ulloa for the food. Bazán doesn’t mind tarrying in the kitchen. Her flavours are strong and she gives us all the details. Chicken casseroled in an egg-yolk sauce. Cauliflower salad and quince jelly sent in from the local convent. Mataburrillo, a stew of goat’s tripe, liver and lungs. Bread soup, cooked slowly in fat with red sausage, chickpeas and sliced hard-boiled eggs.

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The political background, though, is just as piquant. We’re in a period of turmoil and uncertainty. The Glorious Revolution of 1868 has propelled Queen Isabella II from the Spanish throne. A Provisional Government has been formed. Its Prime Minister, Juan Prim, has been shot by an unknown assassin. Radicals have declared a republic, brought swiftly to an end by the installation of Isabella’s son, Alfonso XII, as constitutional monarch. Local politicians – as far as Bazán is concerned – are hopelessly self-interested. Spain is sinking into a post-imperial dream-state, while these men manoeuvre for power.

A pair of figures receive Bazán’s cool attention. Barbacana is a lawyerly bigwig who fights his battles from behind a desk, leaving the violent stuff to a wall-eyed henchman from Castrodorna. (Clearly bandit territory.)

The more dangerous of the two is Trampeta – “the Trickster” – a man so promiscuous in his deceptions that the electorate simply can’t keep track of them. (“Thanks to the extent of Trampeta’s machinations,” we’re told, “many of the things he did were winked at, or a blind eye was turned to them.”)

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There is strong music in his name. When Bazán’s narrator declares that Trampeta “felt certain of impunity, even if he were to burn down half the town and beat up, sue or imprison the other half”, you wonder if this part of Galicia has a Fifth Avenue. You may also find yourself speculating about how to inhabit a culture like this, which seems not to know whether it is alive or dead.

Bazán was in in love with death. As time went on, her passion increased. She was one of those writers who greeted the fin de siècle by embracing the outré and the esoteric. Despite her devout Catholicism, she even defended the practice of Satanism. “To believe in the devil is to believe in God,” she wrote in 1911. On my day with the Decadence Research Unit, Leire Barrera-Medrano offered a way to interpret Bazán’s position. Her engagement with the occult, she suggested, “was a necessary spiritual expurgation”.

These, I suppose, are the seductions of decadence. To gaze upon the process of decay, feel a melancholy pleasure, and nurse the idea that at some point in the future, new life will flower.