In this chapter, I examine fictional and real-life examples of the double, in which there is no identifiable independent other. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the principal example of this approach. It provides the basis for discussing the real-life examples of Deacon Brodie and William Sharp. Here, the complexity of personality and the possibility of distinct but contradictory aspects of personality are examined.

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.

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.