This book offers a new perspective on a long-debated issue: the role of the occult in surrealism, in particular under the leadership of French writer André Breton. Based on thorough source analysis, this study details how our understanding of occultism and esotericism, as well as of their function in Bretonian surrealism, changed significantly over time from the early 1920s to the late 1950s.
- Cover
- Contents
- Introduction: The Occultation of Surrealism
- Prelude
- Staking out positions
- Occult traces in romantic and symbolist precursors
- Further sources
- Some final comments on Bretonian Surrealism’s occult sources
- Occultism and brief outline of this study
- 1. The Time of Slumbers: Psychic automatism and surrealist research
- Introduction
- Surrealism, psychiatry, automatism
- The sleeping sessions: Lucid dreaming
- The sleeping sessions: The psychical research-connection
- Surrealist psychical research
- (Auto-)suggestion and the conflation of subject and object
- Simulation and the reality of thought
- 2. The Period of Reason: Mediums and seers
- Introduction: Nadja
- Mad, mediumistic, clairvoyant
- Surrealist painting and the medium-painters
- I say one must be a seer
- Seeing Nadja
- Surrealist vision
- Schaulust, psychic voyeurism, or woman as seen
- Visionary alchemy
- The Automatic Message: The state of grace
- 3. The ‘Golden Age’ of the omnipotent mind
- Introduction
- To conceal, to distinguish, to occult
- Agrippa, Flamel and Abraham the Jew
- Bringing about the ‘occultation’
- Prophecies, premonitions, predictions – surrealist correspondences
- Correspondences: Objective chance
- Magical thinking and Surrealism as myth
- Paranoia, analogy, the uncanny
- 4. Magic in exile
- Occultism in Surrealism on the eve of the Second World War
- The Marseille Game
- Magus of love: Novalis
- In exile abroad: The artist as magician
- Surrealist myth ‒ primitives, magicians, fools
- Arcanum 17: Magical woman
- In conclusion and the Ode to Fourier
- 5. Arcanum 1947: Poetry, liberty, love
- Introduction
- The exhibition: First stage
- Second and third stage
- The beginning of the end? Or initiation into… liberty
- Going backwards
- L’Art magique ‒ magic art
- One in the other: Analogical metaphors and other games
- The language of birds and phonetic cabala: Alchemy’s prime matter
- Conclusion
- Notes
- List of plates
- Bibliography
- Primary sources
- Secondary sources
- Film
- Index of names
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