By Patrick Lepetit
A profound figuring out of the surrealists’ connections with alchemists and mystery societies and the airtight aspirations printed of their works
• Explains how surrealist work and poems hired mythology, gnostic rules, tarot, voodoo, alchemy, and different airtight sciences to find unexplored areas of the brain and recuperate misplaced “psychic” and magical powers
• offers many examples of esoteric impact in surrealism, akin to how Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon was once initially titled the tub of the Philosophers
Not in simple terms a creative or literary flow as many think, the surrealists rejected the labels of artist and writer bestowed upon them via outsiders, accepting as an alternative the titles of magician, alchemist, or--in the case of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo--witch. Their work, poems, and different works have been created to find unexplored areas of the brain and recuperate misplaced “psychic” and magical powers. They used inventive expression because the automobile to achieve what André Breton known as the “supreme point,” the purpose at which all opposites stop to be perceived as contradictions. This preferrred element is located on the center of all esoteric doctrines, together with the nice paintings of alchemy, and allows communique with better states of being.
Drawing on an in depth diversity of writings through the surrealists and people of their circle of effect, Patrick Lepetit indicates how the surrealists hired mythology, gnostic rules, tarot, voodoo, and alchemy now not easily as reference issues yet as major components in their ongoing investigations into the basic nature of recognition. He presents many particular examples of esoteric impact one of the surrealists, similar to how Picasso’s recognized Demoiselles d’Avignon used to be initially titled the bathtub of the Philosophers, how painter Victor Brauner drew from his father’s spiritualist vocation in addition to the Kabbalah and tarot, and the way medical professional and surrealist writer Pierre Mabille was once a Freemason excited about discovering initiatory paths the place “it is feasible to believe a brand new process connecting guy with the universe.”
Lepetit casts new gentle at the connection among key figures of the move and the circle of adepts collected round Fulcanelli. He additionally explores the connection among surrealists and Freemasonry, Martinists, and the select Cohen in addition to the Grail mythos and the Arthurian brotherhood.
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Extra resources for The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic, and Secret Societies
Sample text
The social and political agitation surrounding questions of democracy, suffrage, women’s rights, organized labor, and the complex amalgam of issues arising from late-Victorian economic and industrial change, was shot through with seemingly quite different considerations about the place of “spirit” in modern society. Committed advocates of social transformation during this period were often as concerned with the idea of spiritual regeneration as political change, and socialism itself was by no means the strictly secular movement that some of its late-Victorian and subsequent proponents claimed.
Some groups promoted an unmediated experience of the divine. Much of this found its way into a nondenominational (often non-Christian) “esoteric philosophy” or occultism that often incorporated elements of each of these practices. The effect was to blur the distinction between what was occult and what was not, a trend perhaps most clearly illustrated in orthodox terms by William Ralph Inge’s famous lectures at Oxford in . In these lectures, fondly known as “Inge’s Bamptons,” Inge (later to be appointed dean of St.
Theosophists and other occultists nevertheless spoke of themselves as “scientists,” believing that they were engaged in the true mission of science—a thorough and open-minded investigation of the mysteries of the universe. ” What Theosophists and scientists meant by “science” and the “laws of Nature,” however, were not necessarily the same thing. ” For Victorian occultists, science and metaphysics were one and the same and found expression in the ancient wisdom. They used phrases like “occult philosophy” and “occult science” coterminously, and when they spoke of the latter they were referring not only to a science dedicated to knowledge of natural law but also the “true” constitution of the human entity and the Absolute.