London: Uma Press, 1949

8vo, pp. 101. Original red boards, lettered in white to both panels and spine. Printed red dustwrapper, lettered in white. Offsetting to endpapers, corners bumped, spine ends a little worn, a very good copy in a very good dustwrapper with a little wear at folds and corners.

First edition.

The Dutchman Jean Michaud [1884-1961] was a composer and poet, and the London agent of the music publishers Universal Edition and Leukhart, publishers of the music of Frederick Delius. In 1929 he played a part in founding the first Delius Society, of which Thomas Beecham was the President and Keith Douglas the Secretary.

Interested in spiritualism and the occult from the mid-1920s, Michaud was also a Rosicrucian, a friend and associate of the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, and founder in 1940 of the Order of Hidden Masters, a secret occult society. By 1946 he was running the London School of Health, a consultation-by-post psychotherapy clinic. He had one of the largest private butterfly collections in the country. In 1961 he finished writing a book on Transpersonal Astrology, and then died. He's buried in Wandsworth.

Michaud was the author of five books on the occult, all published by the Uma Press between 1946 and 1950. Symphonie Fantastique is the fourth, It follows classical symphonic form, and is set 427,000 years in the future '...at the close of the Kali Yuga or 'Black Age', and describes the final battle between the Powers of Light and the forces of darkness which will usher in the 'Golden Age' longed for by so many mystics.'

Extremely scarce: WorldCat locates only two copies worldwide (Cambridge University Library; Boğaziçi University, Istanbul).