Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art 0813365570

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Surrealism and the Sacred Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art

Celia Rabinovitch

£) Icon Editions Westview Press A MEMBER

OF

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PERSEUS

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GROUP

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Copyright © 2002 by Westview Press, A Member ofthe Perseus Books Group Westview Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at The Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA 02142, or call (617) 252-

5298. Published in 2002 in the United States of America by Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877, and in the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 Hid’s Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ

Find us on the World Wide Web at www.westviewpress.com

A CIP Catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 0-8133-6557-0

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence ofPaper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 10

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This book is dedicated to Milton and Sheila Rabinovitch,

in appreciation of their love and support and

to the memory of W. O. Fudkins, “fud,”

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Contents

Illustrations

Preface Acknowledgments

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ONE

In Pursuit of the Uncanny

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The Weird, the Uncanny, the Epiphany: Capturing the Surreal

2

Naming the Unnameable

35

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At the Threshold of the Sacred

43

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Surrealism and the Politics of Knowledge

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Part Two

Surrealism and the

Politics of Knowledge

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. — WILLIAM

BLAKE

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3

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A New Mythology

UPON

ENTERING

THE

1947

Exposition Internationale du Surréal-

isme, a visitor moved through a threshold that included the “degrees of ideal

knowledge,” represented by a “red staircase made up of twenty-one steps in the forms of spines of books. The books’ titles—the Sermons of Meister Eckhardt, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Rousseau’s Les Réveries du promeneur solitaire,

Swedenborg’s Memorabilia—indicated the degrees of ideal knowledge.”! The theme of mystical insight was the central principle. The books comprised a history ofilluminated thought, visionary psychological states, and occult knowledge. According to Sarane Alexandrian, an

active surrealist during the postwar period who participated in the Exposition, the installation was conceived as a series ofinitiations into the myster-

ies of surrealism. For the surrealists, it expressed a search for a new myth for the modern world. Having ascended the occult staircase, viewers came to a

“Hall of Superstitions” and continued through several passages until they entered the “initiatory labyrinth, where visitors were guided by a transparent Ariadne’s thread.”? As an object lesson in illuminated knowledge, the Exposition expressed concretely the journey toward alternative vision through its ascending staircase

of rejected knowledge, which led obliquely through a labyrinth of initiation— to bizarre imaginary creatures, such as Wilfredo Lam’s Altar for “La Chevelure

de Falmer” and Vicktor Braumet’s Wolf table (Figures 9.14 and 9.8). With this event, the surrealists gave form to a new understanding of the transformative Ds

58

Surrealism and the Sacred

energy of matter. Through art, they could turn matter into metaphor—follow-

ing the efficacious impulses of magic and the logic of symbols. How do we know what we know? What is knowledge? Which faculty of mind has access to the truth? These questions constitute a theory of knowledge, that is, an epistemology. The phenomenon of the surreal state of mind or the special state created by surrealism demands this investigation of human

knowledge. Through its art, poetry, and philosophy, surrealism demands this investigation of human knowledge. The surrealists understood knowledge as an elusive, extraordinarily receptive state of mind that encompasses imagination, intuitive awareness, and reflective empiricism. In the latter half of this

book I will look at how the surrealists’ quest for new ways of knowing embodies these epistemological issues in their art. In the history of knowledge, different powers of mind, such as intuition, imagination, reason, and observation, have been elevated or rejected according to a culture’s frame of refer-

ence. Whether we think of knowledge as a received truth or as achieved comprehension, revealed insight or reasoned analysis, depends on which power of mind our culture values. In this sense knowledge is culturally defined. For example, in certain Native American and Asian cultures, knowledge or insight

can be manifested in nonverbal or nonrational expression, such as shamanic performance that works by association, or in the Zen koan that works through paradox. Aesthetic experiences generated through visual art, music, dance,

posture and gesture, performance, or by the force of presence, express knowledge across the entire spectrum of nuances of feeling and inductive logic. Such aesthetic experiences also create the rituals of transition between the sacred and mundane, privacy and intimacy, or of community and isolation. The surrealists recognized this imaginative aspect of knowledge as central to their art and philosophy. The concept of the supernatural, from which surrealism develops, played a key role in the history and politics of knowledge in modern Europe. As we have seen, the idea of the supernatural emerged from the domain of medieval mysticism and developed through later scholastic argumentation in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. Later, supernaturalism was eclipsed by the naturalism and empiricism that informed the Renaissance artists’ mirroring of Creation according to Franciscan theology. The fundamental tension be-

A New Mythology

59

tween revelation and reason was expressed historically from the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment through successive historical movements that em-

ployed elements of illegitimate and unorthodox knowledge including the occult, the natural sublime, perennial or mystical philosophies, and the intensity

of erotic or sensual experience. For mid-nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers

and artists, the supernatural signified the power of revelation and the imagination to resist the reasoned calculations of the Enlightenment. Visionary poets such as Blake, Baudelaire, and Nerval used these elements to create a new

mythos that challenged the prevailing order of European civilization. The battle for the mind and the meaning of knowledge lay concealed behind the struggle for intellectual legitimacy. Which faculty of mind was the true source of knowledge? If knowledge was functional, then it might also be quantifiable and

purposive. If, on the other hand, knowledge arose from insight, was it manifest in aesthetic expression, mystical insight, or self-realization? Powers of imagination or reason, logic or revelation, each were granted varying degrees of au-

thority according to European culture’s definition of knowledge at a particular historical moment. These forces compete in richly synthetic ways in history— for example, from the Renaissance artist’s use of empirical sources to create naturalistic art, to the insight of the Romantic poets, the Wordsworthian moment of self-realization, which reflected the sublime in nature.

From Romanticism to the symbolist movement, the concept of the supernatural drove the disaffiliated bohemian underground toward the occult, the archaic, and the heterodox in late nineteenth-century European culture. The

idea of the supernatural supported the Romantic resistance to the hegemony of reason, which denied human instinct and the power of imagination. The imagery of evil, an inverted French Catholicism with its attendant Cartesian ra-

tionalism, runs through poetry such as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857) and Huysmans’s novel Down There (La-bas, 1891). The prevailing trend in late nineteenth-century French avant-garde intellectual circles to embrace magic and mysticism set forth the historical trajectory from which surrealism emerged in the next century. Surrealism continued a long French tradition of revolt against Catholicism that combined medieval mystical anarchism and revolution.’ This tension between rejected and accepted knowledge frames surrealism’s place in history. Surrealism thrived on the tension be-

60

Surrealism and the Sacred

tween orthodox and alternative knowledge in modern European culture. Informed by its self-conscious place in the history of knowledge, the new surre-

alist frame of reference, developed with empirical experimentation with psychoanalysis, ironically synthesized various forms of illegitimate or rejected knowledge. Drawn from traditions of iconoclasm, surrealist philosophy often combined Cartesian logic with the mysticism of French symbolist poetry. A vision of a new millennium animates the early modern art movements including fauvism, cubism, futurism, and constructivism, with the progress of his-

tory toward ultimate utopian ends.* The archaic Golden Age and the future NewJerusalem frame the utopian vision of modernism.° The ambivalence experienced in the feeling of polarity of the extraordinary and ordinary, between what is felt as familiar and as weird, also manifests itself in these conflicting but

parallel views of history. The surrealists created a utopia of the imagination that found an endlessly evocative world in a special state of mind, the surreal. This surrealist utopia invoked instinct, eros, and reflections of the imagination as

paths to an original wholeness manifested first in the mind alone. From the perspective of Freudian theory, the surrealists redeemed this lost wholeness through dreams and images that illuminate the original oceanic state of mind before birth. The surrealists found this boundaryless wholeness through the oblique movements of the subconscious mind, the multifaceted dream experience, and the spontaneous revelations of imagination. The surrealists pursued this original unity as an existential state through experimental methods such as trance states, automatic writing and painting, free association, and the found ob-

ject leading to a prolonged moment of illumination—the epiphany. In their search for other indices of the surreal, the surrealists found ancestors

in the visionary poets and artists of the Romantic period who expressed a similar feeling for the irrational, the marvelous, and the supernatural.® In Gérard de Nerval, they found a kindred spirit whose poetry embodied a supernaturalistic dream state. They claimed these precursors as their own and paid homage to them in their writings and exhibitions.” For their own purpose the surreal-

ists assembled an ideal museum’ composed of works they admired, a large number of which were Romantic in origin. This selective adaptation of the art of the past compounded the conceptual confusion surrounding the origins of surrealism by identifying it with Romanticism. Archaic, indigenous, Asian, and

A New Mythology

61

medieval styles of art also provided unconventional sources inimical to European classical civilization. In the visionary art of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1615) and Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), the surrealists found a sympathetic vision whose grotesque and secret iconography was, by definition, a surrealist form of painting. Bosch’s

historical context provides some insight on the ideological origins of surrealism. His Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500) (Figure 4.1), presents an excess of sensuous and psychologically disturbing images that point the way toward the power of the dream and the imagination to create a new reality—a surreality. On another level, from the esoteric symbolism of Bosch’s work, the art historian Wilhelm Franger suggests that Bosch was associated with a heretical nudist sect called the Adamites, an even more radical faction of the Brethren of

the Free Spirits. The Free Spirits represented a type of heterodox, esoteric mysticism whose millennial teachings fell outside the dominion of the Catholic Church. They opposed church orthodoxy by commingling alchemical and pagan themes in a millennial vision of an earthly paradise, a New Jerusalem established in the present moment, and they advocated free conjugal love and nudity in worship. According to the theories of Franger, the hermetic symbolism of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights predicts a new spiritual paradise, a return to a primal state of innocence, which prefigured anarchist and egalitarian tendencies in medieval society.!° Within this heterodox tradition resides the modern bohemian, whose free-spirited dissent is inherited from the medieval esoteric tradition. This alternative path combines religio-utopian vision with subversive political aims and sets forth the development of a heretical,

hermetic mysticism that eventually became allied with political leftism in late nineteenth-century France.

We can distinguish the surrealists from other mythologically inspired visionaries in that they wanted to invent their own mythology,!! a mythology

that subverts the biblical typologies and Graeco-Roman content that were the backbone of the academic humanistic tradition and the discourse of art since the Renaissance.!2 The new mythology created by surrealism responded to Schlegel’s Romantic requisite for a new mythology to be formed “out of the uttermost depth of the spirit.”!9 The surrealists answered this need in a uniquely modern and ambiguous language.

62

Surrealism and the Sacred

Figure 4.1 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1500, (detail)

The “Flight from Reason” In 1837 John Stuart Mill wrote that Romanticism represented a reaction

“against the narrownesses of the 18th century.”!4 He referred to the European Enlightenment, which “accepted a world too narrow because of its addiction to geometric thinking and the allied doctrine of neo-classicism, or else to Lock-

ean empiricism.”!> The causal, mechanistic universe of Newtonian physics denied the Romantic conception of the range and grasp of human experience. This “clockwork universe” was only the sensible surface of perception, according to the visionary William Blake (1757-1827). Blake prayed: ... May God us keep From Single vision and Newton’s sleep!®

To Blake, scientific “single vision” was one-dimensional and could never

encompass the infinite potentiality of the world and its objects. For “if the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). In Jerusalem (1804), Blake

A New Mythology

63

imagines himself tortuously enwrapped by “Reasonings like vast serpents” and Albion, his England, inexorably and meaninglessly driven by a compulsive logic: For Bacon and Newton, sheathed in dismal steel, their terrors hang

Like iron scourges over Albion: Reasonings like vast Serpents, Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations

I turn my eyes to the schools and Universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose woof wages dire

Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation: cruel Works Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic

moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which

Wheel within wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.!7

In the Blakean universe, reason mechanistically drives the compulsions of tyranny and its mirror in industrialization; in its driving repetition, it denies the insight of imagination that finds grace and harmony in nature. Revived by Romanticism, medieval folk tales and romances stemming from Celtic, Swedish, and Gallic sources inspired the idealization of the “national temperament” into the Germanic cult of neo-barbarism and volkisch ideology in the early twentieth century.!§ Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious developed in this climate of late nineteenth-century nationalism and similarly arose from the Romantic cult of national temperament. It is telling that his original conception of the theory of an ur-kultur or original culture was based on the notion of the

“racial unconscious,” a concept that appealed to the purist ideology of National Socialism.!9 On the other hand, primitivism and exoticism suggested the myth of

the Golden Age—an original state of grace and innocence in nature from which humankind fell through overdependence on the “meddling intellect.” The concept of the noble savage, as expounded

by Jean-Jacques

Rousseau

(1712-1778), embodied the “goodness of nature and the original virtue of the

human heart”?° in an original state of freedom and innocence to which the

modern European might return. The Romantic pursuit of the origins of mind, culture, and knowledge ied to the development of historical reason as a philosophical and reflective method; this impulse to use the past to explain the

64

Surrealism and the Sacred

present fueled archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research for an original human culture well into the twentieth century. The Romantics pointed toward the supernatural as a special dimension of human life that transcends rational analysis. As a sign for this transcendent realm, the

supernatural became the banner under which Romantic thinkers embraced irra-

tionalism and occultism as antidotes to the hegemony of Reason. Both the nonrational and its ally, the occult, flourished in the medieval period in the form of magic, the occult sciences, and diabolicism. Esoteric forms of knowledge such as alchemy, the tarot, and hermetic or Gnostic philosophies, originating in antiquity, were relegated to the domain of secret rejected knowledge?! and degraded or abandoned in the Enlightenment spirit of empiricism and rationalism. The Romantic reaction against the limits of rationalism was a symptom of an historical development called the “Flight from Reason”—the reaction to a causal, mechanistic

universe symbolized by Newtonian physics. “The rejection of reason as a category of thought involved the rejection of a society whose weapon reason was.”?2 Ironically, Enlightenment anticlericalism fueled the independent path of Romantic spirituality, which envisioned the tangible world as a universe of secret

signs. These correspondences were drawn from Neoplatonic and kabbalistic

sources and from archaic and occult mythologies, especially the archaic mystery cults, where a material form—an ear of corn, a cluster of grapes, a pine tree,

or wheat—was a “sign” or epiphany of the god or goddess. Mircea Eliade ob-

serves that many French authors in the late nineteenth century “became attracted to the occult ideas, mythologies, and practices made popular by the occultist Elphas Levi, author of the esoteric text The Key of Mysteries, and the secret society of Rosicrucians including Papus and Joséphin Péladan, and Stanilas de Guaita.

From Baudelaire and Verlaine, Lautréamont and Rimbaud

... to André Breton and his disciples, all these artists utilized the occult as a powerful weapon in their rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ideology.”?3 Inspired by the high theater and egalitarian idealism of the French Revolution of 1789, the Romantic cult of the rebel identified the divinely in-

spired outsider with occult and anarchic tendencies. The curious affiliation be-

tween occultism and the political left at its furthest reaches developed into the uneasy marriage between surrealism and radical communism,** paradoxically is held together by the French term senzstre (sinister, uncanny), which refers to the directional left and also to the secret or occult.

A New Mythology

65

Primitivism, Exoticism, and the Pursuit of Origins The imagination opened the path to the supernatural and, liberated from au-

thoritarian reason, the archaic strata of thought expressed in the perceptions of the child, the madman, or the mystic. Romantic thought reasserted the value of

childhood experience against more rigid conceptions of reasoned adult knowledge. The characteristics of spontaneity, dream, and wonder were elevated in a

cult of childhood that became a key theme for the Romantic artist. In The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805), William Wordsworth traced his intimations of an immanent power in nature through childhood memories of the landscape—sensate epiphanies that empowered the poet’s creative imagination. Wordsworth found the child’s fresh vision of reality more authentic than the jaded sensibility of adulthood. The cult of the child, elevated by nineteenth-

century thinkers, anticipated the later development of primitivism in modern and surrealist aesthetics. The child’s clarity, freshness of perception, and directness inspired the Romantic poets, who found parallels to the child’s vision of reality in their own lives, for they identified with the child’s marginal status in nineteenth-century society. In “Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake illuminated how the direct

perceptions of childhood transcended the preconceptions that enslave the experienced mind. Underlying his apparently secular exaltation of the child lay an essentially mystical Christian vision of the simplicity and holiness of the child. This vision arose from the Gospels (Matthew 18, 3:5 “. . . unless you turn round and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven”). Blake voiced the suffering of the poor and disafhliated: “In every voice; in every ban, /

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” (“London,” Songs of Experience). Blake felt that the degree of marginality of the visionary artist dictated the degree of insight he or she could have. The vision of the exiled artist, disaffiliated from society and

national or political ideologies, became more powerful outside the bounds of the mechanized, Cartesian order of things. A madman painted empathetically by Théodore Géricault gazes into another reality; his liminal status makes him a

seer or visionary. The fool or trickster, the clown, magician, or mesmerist, the

madman or the child Alice created by Lewis Carroll, all can enter that mirror

reality in which the invisible veil of convention is pulled asunder and things are revealed as they are—that is, as Blake said, “infinite.”

66

Surrealism and the Sacred

The biblical paradigm of the divinity of the child supported Jean-Jacques

Rousseau’s ideal ofa state of grace in nature to which belong both the noble savage and the simple, free-spirited child. The confusion of pagan and biblical motifs overlapping the archaic myth of the Golden Age and the Judaeo-

Christian Kingdom of Heaven gave rise to the mythic character of the child/savage, uniquely creative and free. This image appears in early ethnological studies, which define the traditions of non-Western art as the

origins of a later, more “developed” (the studies would have said “progressive”) civilization. In The Grammar of Ornament (1868), Owen Jones wrote: “If we would return to a more healthy condition we must even be as little children or as savages.”?5 This peculiar mythic visage of original human innocence lies

behind all Romantic elevations of the child, mystic, or savage and impels the varying forms of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism that progressively saturate European culture.

Of these movements, exoticism appealed first to the European appetite for luxurious decoration, appearing as the vogue for chinoiserie in the interiors of the late eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, Near Eastern subjects and settings held sway and appeared in the paintings of Delacroix (1798-1863) and Ingres (1780-1867), who used exoticism as a vehicle to express both classical—that is, biblical or Graeco-Roman—and provocative— that is, exotic—themes. The proximity of North Africa and the colonies stimulated the interest in all things Oriental, leading to the idealization of tribal

(or “primitive”) and non-Western cultures as closer to original unrestricted nature. The Near East, too, inspired an interest in pre-Christian religions and mythologies. Isis and Seraphita, Cybele, and the New Testament story of

Herodias and Salome later dominated symbolist literature and art. Old Testament themes of the sea serpent Leviathan and the abyss captured the symbolist imagination with their Oriental, Mesopotamian origins and their violent elementality. The resurgent interest in the myths and cults of the Near East and Asia Minor developed in parallel form in the new fields of ethnology, archaeology, and, specifically in Germany, the new discipline of the history of

religions.?® In France, museums of ethnology sprang up to house the artifacts imported from the colonies, at first collected not for their formal or aesthetic qualities,

A New Mythology

67

but as curvosités, bizarreries. In 1878, a major ethnological museum, the Trocadéro, was founded in Paris.2” These museums were frequented not so much

by historians as by artists, who sought out the intensity with which they could express instinctual meaning. Artists such as Gauguin, van Gogh, Moreau, and

Picasso visited the Trocadéro to study the art of non-Western cultures and in this way brought it to the attention of art historians and the public in the early twentieth century. By the 1890s the assumptions of Darwinian evolutionary theory were implicitly applied in ethnological studies, where a progressive, evolutionary model from primitive to civilized (that is to say, European) devel-

oped. Scholars pursued the origins of language, myth, and religion; they believed that indigenous artifacts revealed the intrinsic patterns of thought itself. The initial aesthetic concern with ornament motivated a search for basic visual structures, such as the spiral, the circle, or the square, which were believed to

contain an innate significance according to theosophical theories propounded by the Russian theosophist Madame Helena Blavatsky or the English writer

and Indologist Annie Besant.?8 Explorations of the theme of origins inspired books such as the art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1907), which laid the ground for modern art theory, however speculative or even occultist in outlook these studies later proved to be.?9 The symbolist artists’ search for an arcadian vision through Asian or pre-Christian art and culture developed in part due to the new discipline of the history of religions. Symbolist poets, too, researched ancient mythological imagery to express their vision, inspired by research in ethnology and comparative religion from England and Germany.

Max Mueller and the History of Religions

The cross-fertilization of art history and the history of religions amplified the development of modernism at the turn of the century. This exchange between nations and disciplines involved the French poet Gérard de Nerval, who independently researched archaic myth, and the German scholar and Indologist

Max Mueller, the originator of the “science of religion.” Mueller’s pioneering work in comparative religion influenced such later figures as Freud and Jung

to pursue the origins of consciousness by postulating the notion of a primal

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Surrealism and the Sacred

unconscious mind. The rejuvenation of archaic myth in modern European cul-

ture developed from several Romantic and symbolist poets who creatively transformed comparative mythology. The concepts of Mueller and the poetry

of Nerval were mutually related through the burgeoning interest in the history of religions in Germany. Nerval synthesized Mueller’s history of religions into complex poetic visions, a relationship later echoed by the researches of Freud and Breton, who applied Freud’s free association with the intent only to stim-

ulate the imagination. The origin of religion was the central question in Mueller’s work. Mueller’s father was the Romantic poet Wilhelm Mueller (1794-1827), whose lyrics were celebrated for their pan-Hellenic imagery. This Romantic context influenced the younger Mueller’s pursuit of a centrality to the religious impulse, a kind of perennial philosophy that lent itself to universality of origins. Eric Sharpe, an historian of religion, observes: “In Max Mueller, three streams met. First, the stream of German Romantic idealism; secondly, the stream of com-

parative Indo-European philology; and thirdly the stream of post-Hegelian philosophy of history.”?° Mueller contributed to the rising interest in Eastern philosophy, pursued si-

multaneously by scholars and artists in Europe. Mueller defined religion much in

the way the Romantic poets before him did, as “the perception of the infinite.”3! For him, the Vedas contained the seeds of the one original religion. He wrote: We see in the Vedic hymns the first revelation of Deity, the first expression of sur-

prise and suspicion, the first discovery that behind this visible and perishable world there must be something invisible, imperishable, eternal and divine. . . .

these so-called deities and heroes became the centres of mythological traditions, wherever the Aryan speakers were settled, whether in Asia or in Europe. This is a result gained once for all, and this light has shed its rays far beyond the Vedic mythology and religion, and lightened up the darkest corners in the history of the

mythological and religious thoughts of other Aryan nations, nay of nations unconnected by their language with the speakers of Aryan speech.%2

Mueller established the academic study of Eastern religions through his edi-

tion of the Rag Veda, his translation in the series The Sacred Books of the East

A New Mythology

69

during the period 1849-1873, and his publication of Comparative Mythology. Mueller engaged an entire generation of scholars, editors, translators, and

commentators to publish The Sacred Books of the East. His elegant writing contributed to the popularity of his work. His research on Eastern religions, Hinduism in particular, included material that was previously unknown and caused unprecedented interest in the artistic and intellectual communities of France, England, Germany, and America.

Mueller’s Comparative Mythology was published in 1857, the same year as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire transformed the alchemical meaning of an archaic pagan text, Corpus Hermeticum, into an inverted metaphor for the transformation of the soul. The symbolist poets adapted Mueller’s comparative religion by finding sources in the archaic mythologies that the ethnologists unearthed. This pursuit of the origins of culture combined the scholar’s methods of the science of religion with the poet’s desire for revelation. The new discipline of comparative religion sought the underlying unity among all religions, taking a “scientific” approach by using induction, comparison, and an understanding of religion as mythology.?4 Empirical methods

legitimized the study of revelation, deemed specious by Enlightenment rationality and formalism. The science of religion (religione wissenschaftliche) drew from several methods: morphological studies, based on modes of classi-

fication like botany and zoology; archaeology, which provided the multiplicity of religious images; the study of myth and folklore, impelled by Romanticism and nationalism in Germany, Scandinavia, and England; and traditional theol-

ogy, which employed systematic logic and an a priori idea—the idea of the sa-

cred. The study of world religions remained at the fringe of academic respectability until the popularization of evolutionary theory in the 1860s, when Darwin’s discovery of biological evolution fired the historical imagination of the nineteenth century to pursue the origins of mind, art, and religion. From the bold influence of Max Mueller and Edward Burnett Tyler, R. R. Marett, Franz Steiner, and others who followed, the profoundly foreign con-

tent of the Asian traditions aroused a philosophical reification of mysticism.

Socially, Victorian sentiment supported pantheism and perennial philosophy. “Exotic” foreign cultures provided new material for the disafhiliated bohemian class of intellectuals that had challenged bourgeois values since the mid-1820s

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and the rise of Romanticism. In France and America, Hindu themes of Brahma

and Indra became popular among members of theosophical circles as well as among the American Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-1862) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). Emerson wrote, “I am the doubter and the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.”3> And in

Walden, Thoreau wrote of the necessity of rural isolation and simplicity to open the mind to a fresh vision ofreality. His model for this was based not only on traditional New England pragmatism but on the inward gaze of the Hindu mystic: “The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and

I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.”?°

Thoreau’s aim “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not

learn what it had to teach” pursued the origins of human experience through experiment. Similarly in the 1902 novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), the protagonist, Marlowe, journeys deep into the African Congo to uncover the hidden barbarism of himself and others, exposed in a raw context that uncovers their false assumptions about life. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) also exposes the corruption and longing for innocence at the heart of European civilization, as the dying Gustave von Aschenbach pursues his entranced vision of the Polish boy, Tadzio. In Europe

and in France artists and writers were equally radical in their assimilation of Hindu mysticism and foreign beliefs. In France, the painter Gustave Moreau

(1826-98) created Indological fantasies that elevated all things exotic to an erotic drama of the European imagination. Linguistic studies of Sanskrit were pursued early in his career by the famous Swiss linguist and semiotician, Fer-

dinand de Saussure; these ideas later provided material for Tristan Tzara’s experiments with pure sound in his avant-garde Dada poems. An apocryphal tale about the poet Stéphane Mallarmé illustrates the enormous artistic interest in the East: “Stéphane Mallarmé declared that a modern poet must go beyond Homer, because the decadence of Western poetry began with him. And when

the interviewer asked, ‘But what poetry existed before Homer?’ Mallarmé responded, “The Vedas.””?7

5 Poets of the Daemonic

THEMES

PREVIOUSLY

EMBRACED

by the Romantics—occultism, ex-

oticism, medievalism, supernaturalism, and the imagination—were transformed

into a new artistic language by the symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century. Previously dominated by supernaturalism, these elements combined to create a complexity of meaning in symbolist literature, radically and antitheti-

cally different from their Romantic origins. The symbolists inverted the Romantic natural sublime, its supernatural peaks emblemized by the ethereal images of Caspar David Friedrich, into the abyss of eros and evil, envisioned in the hothouse interiors of Gustave Moreau. They thereby reversed the traditionally negative symbolism of eros, evil, and the holy. They chose these rejected images

to depict spiritual illumination through chaos and dislocation of the senses. Three figures of the bohemian underground furthered the influence of occult and archaic sources in French culture: Gérard de Nerval, Charles Baude-

laire, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Baudelaire employed Swedenborg’s idea of correspondences between the real and ideal worlds in his poetry and art criticism, pointing the way from realism to the path of imagination. Nerval in turn renovated German Romanticism in visions of Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman gods and goddesses as modern embodiments of interior experiences. Huys-

mans was a disenchanted Catholic associated with a group of prominent occultists, who accelerated the growing rejection of Catholicism in France. His

mentor was a defrocked Catholic priest who performed Black Masses, the

Abbé Boulan. 71

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In their writings these three synthesized occult, esoteric sources with the

“ideist,” or idea-oriented, art of symbolism. As journalists and art critics, they played a central role in the positive evaluation of esoteric and daemonic elements in art. These three are the brightest stars in an entire generation of occult

practitioners and thinkers that also includes Eliphas Levy (1810-1875), Stanilas de Guaita (1861-97), and Joséphin (the Sar) Péladan (1858-1918), each of whom worked in France and had considerable influence on nineteenthcentury thought.! As a critic, Huysmans championed visionary art and introduced the art world to the paintings of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. Originally a literary movement, symbolism drew art toward mythological, dream-inspired images, in opposition to the dominant tradition of realism,

which by the 1880s had succumbed to bourgeois convention. Symbolism’s

preoccupation with the occult encouraged artists to express visual metaphors liberated from the strict adherence to the optics and materiality employed by impressionism. A new image of woman appears iconographically in the fin de siécle movement toward decadence. From Baudelaire and Nerval, the female image be-

comes colored with daemonic power as elemental and natural, or as evil and unnatural. Baudelaire held to the nineteenth-century view of women as closer to animals and children and therefore less moral than men. For him, because woman came from nature, she, even more than man, became the exemplar of a

fallen natural universe in which men were condemned to exist. For Baudelaire, relations with women were a descent into base animality. On the other hand,

Nerval imbues his images of women with the sacred power of the goddess and the muse. These conflicting views merge in the new image of the quintessential woman as the seductive femme fatale, the mystical alluring sphinx of symbolist

art.2 The sphinx appears, for example, in Ferdinand Khnopff’s The Caresses of the Sphinx, of 1896 (Figure 5.1). In this image, the sphinx draws the man in with her elevated position and narcissistically lowered eyes; while her face seems utterly contemporary, her feline body suggests the coiled energies of animal instinctual awareness. Khnopff was obsessed with his sister, with whom he was emotionally enmeshed. She was the female figure in many of his paintings, and in this one he painted her face as the unattainable sphinx’s.

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Ferdinand Khnopff, The Caresses of the Sphinx, 1896

More than a reaction to the growing social emancipation of women from a patriarchal society, many of these images reveal a fundamental ambivalence directed toward women. This shift—from seeing the woman, because she was of

nature, as lower on the spiritual plane than man, to seeing her as an emblem of chaos and earthly animality—challenged the implied order of society with a new awareness of the unruly power of eros and the imagination. Parallel ideas exist in Hindu myth, where the goddess Kali/Parvati expresses the contradiction of creation and destruction, but these were relatively new ideas for the Christian West, where the female energy of the femme fatale was the antithesis of the holy mother, the Madonna.

In the 1860s in England, the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) created ambivalent images of women that were both provocative and spiritual. Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix of 1876 depicts his lover, Elizabeth Siddall, with expectant upraised head, open hands, and half-closed

eyes. She precisely crystallizes the “Saint Teresa” look of soulful ecstasy and unbridled sensuality. His Astarte Syriaca of 1877 depicts his beloved Janie Morris, the fascinating wife of his colleague William Morris, in the guise of the

pagan goddess Astarte (Figure 5.2). Besides confirming the role ofindividual women such as Elizabeth Siddall and Janie Morris as the “soulmate”? or muse of the artist, the massive painting Astarte Syriaca conveys a layered image of the individual woman, the femme fatale, and the pagan goddess. The preRaphaelites used the Neoplatonic theory of correspondences to create this palimpsest of symbolic references.

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Figure 5.2.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

Astarte Syriaca, 1877

This generation sought for material evidence of the supernatural. Raised in an age of science, they found empirical proof in the raps on the séance table and the premonitions of the tarot cards. Hermetic philosophy, pagan images, and alchemical symbolism contributed to the aura of supernaturalism, yet oddly enough, a supernaturalism sea-changed by Enlightenment empiricism to prove parapsychology and the principle of the uncanny. The movement toward supernaturalism reversed the position of Carlyle’s “Natural Supernaturalism,” which saw the world of nature as beneficent and

awe-inspiring. The symbolists focused on the unpredictable, chaotic power of the imagination, provoking the possibility of madness which resisted confinement by conscious control. This gradually deepening reversal of meaning,

from Swedenborgian angelology to decadent demonology, provides the context for surrealism.

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Illuminations: Nerval

The seminal poetry of Gérard de Nerval bridges the Romantic background and symbolist foreground with the developing field of comparative religion. Within the history of visionary or illuminated knowledge, Nerval’s visionary

experience—what he defined as a “supernaturalistic dream state”—sets forth the trajectory of surrealism. Born in 1808, Nerval’s acquaintance with German Romantic supernaturalism began early. His father taught him German, and he first became known for translating Goethe’s Faust while still in his teens. A nomadic bohemian, Nerval became a protégé of the intellectual patron

Madame de Staél and was swept up in the French enthusiasm for German Romanticism.* As a travel writer, he visited North Africa and Germany and stud-

ied comparative religions to provide sources for his writing. Nerval visited Germany in 1839 and 1840 and for extended periods between 1844 and 1851. During these visits he would have absorbed Romanticism, then flourishing in Germany, and in this context might have made the acquaintance of Max Mueller. Similarly, Max Mueller also traveled to study in Leipzig, Berlin,

and Paris in 1845, leaving France for England in 1846 to set up the program in Sanskrit at Oxford. Nerval’s interest in the history of religions informed much of his life and work with allusions to pre-Christian deities, especially those goddesses such as Isis, Cybele, Demeter, and Venus, who personified the women in his own

romantic history. He transformed these archaic elements to plant the seeds of a new mythology that elevated the power of imagination, relating it to the re-

jected archaic images of the Great Mother Cybele and pagan pre-Christian gods and goddesses. By cross-fertilizing archaic and classical mythology with occultism and the visionary dream state, Nerval’s poetry anticipates the archetypal feminine image of Jungian depth psychology and the modern fascination with the self. Early in his career, Nerval translated German Romantic poetry including poetic ballads. He later also translated the work of Heinrich Heine during the late 1840s and early 1850s. While not proven, it is likely that Nerval was aware

of the popular romantic poetry of Wilhelm Mueller, Max Mueller’s father. Like Max Mueller, Nerval was fascinated by mythology and the history of religions

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and traveled extensively in pursuit of the perennial philosophy, the kernel of essential religious truth. Not only would Nerval likely have known of Max Mueller, but he would have pursued the new “science of religion” for his own

unconventional, imaginative purposes. Nerval evoked archaic Mediterranean mythology in his poetry, which revolved around

the pagan goddesses Cybele, Demeter, Persephone, and

Artemis—the romantic figures ofhis ideal woman/lover. In his poetry he intermingles these archaic elements with the Christian image of the Virgin Mary

and the symbolism of the tarot. Psychologically, Nerval was considered unstable, and he ultimately committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree in a Paris public garden. His romantic behavior was also unbalanced, and it must

have been overwhelming to the individual women whom he identified with Isis

and the Virgin Mary, for he experienced periods of “illumination” with later lucidity when he recorded his visions, which resonated with occult and mythological material. His adaptations of pagan mythology were part of a visionary synthesis of dream and reality that predicted surrealist practice. Surrealist poetry and art by Breton, Eluard, Masson, and Dali follow the same principle of

symbolic fusion in the cultivation of l’amour fou, which turns romantic love for one woman into a conduit for imagination.° Nerval’s peculiar personal mythology combined Gnostic and kabbalistic sources. In his 1854 collection of poems, Les Chiméres, he elevates the ancient

fertility religion of the Mediterranean, in particular the original Goddess Cybele, also called the Great Mother, and her prophetess, the Cumaean Sibyl, in opposition to the Christian doctrine of the Virgin Mary; Nerval presents the

struggle between robust archaic deities and a lingering, sickly Christianity.® Nerval records his visions in a hallucinatory tone that anticipates surrealism’s automatic writing. His journal Awrélia (1855) is a record of his descente aux enfers,’ a metaphorical descent into fire in a series of tests that allow him to achieve

illumination through fusing dream and reality. Aurélza contains a critical passage that suggests Nerval’s unconventional attitude to religion. He prays to the goddess Isis, to Venus, and to the Virgin, and for him they merge as manifestations of the eternal feminine.® His “comparative method,” like that of the history of re-

ligions, allowed him to evoke these images simultaneously and to transform

them into a new metaphor for sacred feminine power. In the central revelation

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77

of Aurélia, this quintessential goddess speaks and identifies herself with Mary, his mother, and his (the poet’s) imagination: all are emanations of her spirit. The larger conceptual framework of Nerval’s poetry creates layers of archaic, Gnostic, and mythological motifs that form a visionary tale: that of the

conflict between the chthonic forces of the earth (the pre-Christian deities) and the forces of sky (the angels of Jehovah and the Judaeo-Christian heritage).

These forces engage in a dramatic struggle between opposing histories: pagan circularity versus Judaeo-Christian linearity. Nerval interprets the linear biblical design of history as an eventual disintegration of European culture’s creative power. More than a clever imaginative conceit, Nerval’s strategy illustrates how his reimagining of history can transform it into a new mythology. Nerval’s mythology derives from his legend of the Children of Clay, who de-

scend from Adam, and the Children of Fire, who descend from Cain. Nerval

identifies the Children of Clay with Christianity, whereas the Children of Fire are linked to rejected pagan gods.!° Nerval’s Voyage en Orient describes the battle when the Children of Clay drive the Children of Fire beneath the earth’s surface, where they are sealed in to work their alchemical knowledge in the hidden depths.!! They dwell in caves and volcanoes, producing from deep within these recesses the fertility of the land and its natural rhythms, death and rejuvenation. Fire, earth, and matter link the Children of Fire, inseparable from

the elemental power of earth itself. For Nerval, the passionate Children of Fire have the potential to rejuvenate a dying civilization. In this mythic battle, he opposed Christianity with the daemonic as a subterranean potent force linked to pagan deities such as Pan and Cybele. Daemonic power is not evil; rather, it is an unpredictable, amoral energy that, like electricity, pervades both the holy and the daemonic. This is an important difference; the literary historian R. D. Stock writes, “The word dae-

mon or demon has several meanings. . . . Commonly today it means ‘fiend’ or ‘devil? and even in this sense it retains something of the weird and the uncanny. The Greek dazmon is something rather, but not altogether, different: it is neither god nor anti-god, but a kind of pre-god, ‘the numen, Otto says, ‘at a

lower stage.””!? The daemonic empowers the world of nature; from the chthonic energies of earth, it expresses the elemental natural forces of wind, water, earth, or fire, or

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takes the form ofaperson or animal possessed by a daemon, dybbuk, spirit, or

ghost. Again, Stock: “The daemonic, either in its personal or transcendental sense, is mysterious, energetic, non-rational, non-moral. Otto suggests that at

an early stage of religious consciousness the daemonic may [have been] closely joined with the numinous as expressing the Numen’s horrendousness and ethically ambiguous vitality. In the creature it is the ‘Dionysiac’ or frenzied ele-

ment, as contrasted with the rational, orderly ‘Apollonian’ side.”!3 The distinction between the daemonic, with its amoral power to rejuvenate, animate, or destroy, and the demonic, with its associations with evil and negativity, divides

pagan chthonic powers from their later identification by early Christians with fiends or devils, and thus with evil.

In pre-Christian times the Mediterranean region (populated by the Children of Fire in Nerval’s myth) was the geographical domain of an ancient nature religion. This religion of the Magna Mater or the goddess Cybele transmigrated from Asia Minor (present-day Turkey, but Nerval called it the Orient) in the

East west to Greece and Rome from 500 B.c. to A.D. 500.!4 Cybele became identified with Demeter-Persephone, Isis, Artemis, and the goddess of Fate or Fortune, Tellus Fortuna.!5 Cybele also became the goddess of fate or fortune

Tyche, who governs cities,!® and in this manifestation echoes the goddesses of

the wyrd—the Celtic Movrae—who govern men’s fates and the uncanny events

in their lives. Due to the transmigration of symbols and syncretism many of the mystery religions, at various times these deities are synthesized in the archaeo-

logical finds dating from 500 B.c. to A.D. 500.

In using the pagan myth of the cult of Cybele, Nerval synthesizes the ideas of the imagination, the muse, and the archaic goddess into a new female image

that informs the later symbolist femme fatale and the surrealist “cult of love.” The third sonnet of Les Chiméres, “Horus,” relates the birth of Horus, the son

of Isis, who is regenerated from the body of Osiris, with whom the poet identifies.!7 The most significant sonnet in Les Chiméres, “Delfica” of 1843, refers to

“matters delphic” and hence to the visionary prophecies of the Oracle at Delphi, consecrated to the mother goddess Demeter-Persephone. The poem predicts the return of the subterranean mysteries of the archaic Goddess that will

re-create a new Golden Age in a striking reversal of Christian myth. The Sibyl was a priestess of the goddess Cybele, also known as the Cumaean Sibyl, later

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depicted in the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo (Figure 11.1).!8 The epigraph of the poem alludes to a prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl that predicts a return of the Golden Age, cited in Virgil.!9

In the poem, Nerval senses in the earth the prophetic tremors ofthe ancient religion. Underneath the temple is a grotto where the goddess was worshipped in niches and in caves; these signify her fertile presence. The vanquished dragon that sleeps there slowly awakens, bringing with it the daemons of earth,

fire, and water. He prophesies that the archaic gods will awaken and return with the Golden Age.?? Meanwhile, the Latin Siby] still sleeps under the Arch of Constantine in Rome, waiting until the powers of earth and eros will rise again and bring down the Christian architecture.?! Nerval’s evocation of the return of the Latin Sibyl, la sebylle au visage latin, predicts a vital paganism that will reyuvenate decaying Western civilization. Nerval’s prescient poem is worth quoting at length: Delfica

Ultima Cumaei venit jam carminis aetas La connars-tu, Dafné, cette ancienne romance,

Do you know that old tale, Daphne, that love song

Au pred du sycomore, ou sous les laurters blancs, At the foot of the sycamore, or under white laurels Sous Volivier, le myrte, ou les saules tremblant Beneath the olive tree, the myrtle, or quivering willow

Cette chanson d’amour qui toujours recommence? This song of love that always begins again? Reconnais-tu le TEMPLE au peristyle immense,

Do you remember the TEMPLE with the huge peristyle Et les citrons amers ot imprimaient tes dents,

And the bitter lemons in which you sank your teeth? Et la grotte, fatale aux hétes imprudents, And the grotto, fatal to rash visitors,

Ou du dragon vaincu dort Vantique semence?.

. .

Where sleeps the conquered dragon’s ancient seed? . . .

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Ils reviendront, ces Dieux que tu pleures toujours! They will return, those Gods you still weep for!

Le temps va ramener Vordre des anciens jours; Time will bring back the order of old days,

La terre a tressailli d’un souffle prophétique . . . Earth has trembled with a sigh of prophecy. . . Cependant la sibyle au visage latin But still the sibyl with the Latin countenance Est encore endormie sous Varc de Constantin . . . Is sleeping asleep under the arch of Constantine. . .

Et rien n’a dérangé le sévére portique. And nothing has disturbed the severe portico.*?

In “Delfica,” Nerval reverses the paradigms of the Judaeo-Christian heritage,

calling forth the sacred power of the Mediterranean Sybil, a symbol of the chthonic feminine force. Usually an incarnation of evil and chaos, the dragon

will awaken from its ancient sleep to lead the rejuvenation of European culture

by paganism. The Sybil will pull down the Arch of Constantine, an emblem of Christianity, and with her awakening, the elemental passions of fire and earth will return.

Nerval’s pagan myth celebrates the original connection of mater and matter. Fodder for the alchemy of the imagination, the daemonic energy of these elements

leads beyond the symbolist elevation of evil and to a new phenomenology of the soul charted by the surrealists in the next century.’ Even though the intense mental state in which Nerval induced his visions would be central to later surrealist practices, his exploration of dream, imagination, and altered states of conscious-

ness proved premature. Contrasted with the symbolist poets who preferred the safer side of consciousness by using known images and myths, Nerval experienced the dream as the only true reality and created his own mythology, a position

that informs all his poetic works. In this, Nerval was prescient, so that although he wrote during the first half of the nineteenth century, he went beyond the inwardturning, self-conscious gaze of the symbolists at the end of that century.

The late nineteenth-century notion of the dandy, with his internal separation of appearance and reality, offers some insight about the limitations of the deca-

dent symbolist preoccupation with self. The dandy holds the immediacy of

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Aubrey Beardsley,

The Peacock Skirt, 1894

lived experience against an internalized, theatrical sense of self and narcissistically substitutes a fictional image for the mortal, fragile self. Baudelaire suggests that the dandy carries within him a reflection of the self, so that the theater of

pose and mannerism is self-conscious and deliberately amusing. The “S” curve, a line that turns back on itself in narcissistic self-admuiration, is the defining mo-

tif of symbolist art, embodied in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration to Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, The Peacock Skirt, 1894 (Figure 5.3). Symbolically and stylistically an emblem of narcissism, Salome seducing John the Baptist curls ravenously into her posture, embellished with peacocks and contained within the serpentine curve of the design. For the symbolist, the dandy mediates experience with the distance of artifice. On a psychological level, the irony of Baudelairean reflective dandyism prevents any loss of control, and so for the symbolist, the dream is always seen separate and framed within the picture as an

allegorical reference, akin to a comic-strip bubble, as in Pierre Puvis de Cha-

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Figure 5.4 _ Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Dream: “He sees appearing in his sleep Love, Glory, and Wealth,” 1883

vannes’s The Dream: “He sees appearing in his sleep Love, Glory, and Wealth,” 1883 (Figure 5.4). Distanced from the central figure, so often characterized by

a narcissistic backward tilt of the chin and eyes half-closed in self-involved reverie, the dream is present in the background, in the foliage or in images float-

ing in the azure sky, separated by an actual or implied inner frame that orders the symbolist imagination. Only in Nerval and then surrealism do we find the

complete interpenetration of dream and reality that removes the separate frame

of the dream, dispenses with the symbolist narrative, and achieves the complete fusion of dream and reality that is surrealism.

Spiritual and Corporeal Transformation: Baudelaire Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal published in 1857, introduced a new

beauty in corrupt and diabolical images. Baudelaire’s occult and supernatural

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themes caused a crisis in late nineteenth-century French culture that threatened the dominance of the Catholic worldview. He saw the material world not

in the robust physicality of his contemporary, Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), but as a deterioration of the flesh and the soul, once potentially wholesome and good but now unavoidably corrupted by melancholy, isolation, and en-

nui. All that was modern, “the modern city, with its ugliness, vice and misery, and the modern temperament, with its taste for the morbid, the unnatural, and the eccentric,”?4 fascinated him. Baudelaire invented himself as the first

art critic standing apart from considerations of church and state, one who championed new, increasingly radical ways of seeing. This stance at the periphery of legitimacy marks the beginning of the separation of the bohemian underground from the bourgeoisie with its materialism and its conventional religion. Baudelaire’s writings reflect an ambivalence toward “the horror or the ec-

stasy of life” (le horreur ou l’extase de la vie).?2> The polarity of the holy and the daemonic is characterized in his verse by an extraordinary moral elasticity. The descent into the daemonic, for Baudelaire, leads to excess and extremity,

to a renunciation of life itself. Baudelaire envisioned this descent—like the ancient mystery religions of Cybele and Attis, Hermes and Dionysus, or the

death and resurrection of Christ—as a U-shaped route— “the way up is the way down”—through which is achieved an ultimate, if mortal, illumination.

Drawn between the antagonism of“spleen and the ideal,” his poetry expresses the antithesis of a worldly “profound weariness and disgust” and the ideal order of art.26 Baudelaire divides the world in two: the world of nature

and carnality—bodily spleen and ennui, and the ideal order of art, which provides purity and the soul’s desire. The symmetrical worldview of Les Fleurs du Mal uses alchemical symbolism in the image of Satan Trismégiste, based on the archaic god Hermes Trismegistus, the messenger between the spiritual and the corporeal worlds.?7 Satan is the hermetic figure of alchemical transformation, moving between two worlds. “Like Heraclitus in reverse he declares that

the way down is the way up.”?8 For Baudelaire, God was Satan, and Satan inhabited women. Because men live in the corporeal world, they are fallen, and so is the God who created them.?9 The old proverb that “the devil is a woman” expresses Baudelaire’s description of relations with women as a “de-

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scent” into animality and corporeality: “the desire to invoke God or spirituality is a desire to rise; that of Satan, or animality, is the joy of descent. This 1s

what becomes ofthe love of women.”?° The late nineteenth-century identification of woman with eros and evil was manifested in Baudelaire’s rejection of materialism, embodied in the robust, earthly pleasures that his contemporary, Gustave Courbet, painted in fleshy

and graphic depictions of the female nude and in the rich surfaces of fruit or flowers. Baudelaire equates the woman, with her connection to nature and materiality, with whatever is chaotic or corrupted. The Madonna of 1895 (Figure 5.5) by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) strikingly manifests this negative vision. The Madonna has a sinister sensuality further amplified by the composition’s symbolic red-and-black coloring. The fetus in the left-hand corner recalls a death’s head, emphasizing the woman’s destructive power. As in much symbolist art, the S-curve of her figure and her flowing, serpentine hair pull the viewer into her pose and suggest organic natural forms such as seaweed, rushing water, and plants, as in much symbolist art. Here the image of the femme fatale extends to an extraordinary depth of meaning, for Munch depicts the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ, as innately sexual, therefore corrupt and evil.

Franz von Stuck’s Die Siinde (The Sin) (1893) (Figure 5.6) similarly depicts the biblical Eve, the “mother of men” as a decadent femme fatale, her evil na-

ture graphically expressed in the head of a snake, which she holds next to her and which punningly echoes her clinging, sinister tresses. The serpentine “hair that ensnares” belongs to the femme fatale, Keats’s “la belle dame sans

merci” who traps men in her sinister locks of hair, an emblem of sexuality and seduction. For Baudelaire, the fallen world was itself evil. All of nature partici-

pates in this original sin, all mental or corporeal chimeras stem from this source. Only a further descent through fire and materiality makes renewal pos-

sible. The attraction aroused by the daemonic amorality of sexual energy also inspired William Blake’s earlier description of the beautiful fallen angel, Lucifer, “Energy is Eternal Delight.”?!

Baudelaire suffered from incurable syphilis, an epidemic in late nineteenthcentury Europe that afflicted many of his contemporaries with a painful awareness of mortality. As the medical historian Roger Williams suggests in his in-

sightful study of Baudelaire, the poet justified this mortal condition in order to

85

FIGURE 5.5 Edvard Munch, Madonna,

FIGURE 5.6

Franz von Stuck,

Die Siinde (The Sin), 1893

1895

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transmute it into art.°? Baudelaire used alchemical imagery as a metaphor for the transformation of his corporeal being. The principle of alchemical transformation of base materiality, the lead of ordinary existence, into the gold ofthe

spirit, became a metaphor for the artistic process through which Baudelaire transformed his suffering, willing strength through his heightened awareness of decay. In the myth of the archaic god Hermes Trismegistus, from which Baude-

laire’s Satan derived, man emerges from the fusion of opposites. The Hermes Trismegistus of the Corpus Hermeticum informs Baudelaire’s image of Satan, who, in Les Fleurs du Mal, dissolves the personal will in the descent into

chaos.°3 In the Kabbalah, evil is separation. Hermetic philosophy, derived from kabbalism or Gnosticism, envisions the correspondence of all created

things that emanate from the first primal unity. According to the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, because of the fall of the original man, Adam Kadmon, the world shattered into multiplicity.34 This tragic separation

from original wholeness increases exponentially the suffering and isolation of each being. Everything in nature falls away from this original wholeness, and

separation rules. The literary critic M. H. Abrams describes the basic conceptual framework of hermeticism:

Hermeticism did not draw the modern sharp division between the animate and inanimate but applied the categories of living things to all nature; it also posited a correspondence between the human and the nonhuman but in such a way that the human serves as the paradigmatic form. With reference to hermetic writings,

therefore, it is more accurate to speak of the cosmos as a macro-anthropos than to speak of man as a microcosm. In this scheme there is a strong emphasis on polarity, conceived on the model of sexual opposites and regarded as the force that com-

pels all natural processes. In addition, the overall course of things is envisioned as a circular movement from unity into multiplicity and ultimately back to unity.°°

For Baudelaire, the created world manifests the fall from grace, and all mat-

ter necessarily emanates from a spiritual source. Through matter one returns to the spiritual condition of original oneness. Baudelairean supernaturalism, with

its curiously inverted religiosity, makes the poet a voyant, a seer who grasps

analogies between the material and supernatural worlds where others fail to see

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them. Baudelaire defines this corporeal realm as innately corrupt and degenerate, finding within sensuality, pleasure, and even romantic epiphany a subtle expansion of sinister forces. The power of the poet’s imagination lies in its capacity for transformation. Later, Rimbaud acclaimed Baudelaire “first seer, king of poets, a true god” (premier voyant; roi des poétes; un vrai Dieu),>® fur-

thering the religion of art in the late nineteenth century.37 Baudelaire’s conception of the artist as a divinely inspired visionary opened the path to occultism and parapsychological experimentation, which inform surrealism.38

Demonic Redemption: Huysmans Like Baudelaire, whom he idolized, Joris-Karl Huysmans craved the revolt of

the senses. His life expressed a bohemian reaction to Catholicism and its bourgeois implications; his elevation of evil and inverted use of satanism fused the supernatural and the supersensual into a single entity. His use of hermeticism and occultism created the background for later surrealist experiments with the dream state and alternative spiritual traditions. The occult became the vehicle through which Huysmans explored the excesses described in his satanic novel Down There (La-bas) of 1891. His earlier decadent novel, Against the Grain (A Rebours) of 1884, depicted a life of supersensuality (sursensual-

até) in which he envisioned an intensified reality. He describes a thinly veiled alter-ego, Durtal, a quintessential lapsed Catholic whose descent into hell forced his re-entry into Catholic spirituality. Seven years later, in 1891, Huysmans himself returned to Catholicism. Medieval Catholicism appealed to Huysmans because it was inextricably bound up with performance and ritual. Huysmans oscillated between the two extremes of sensual decadence and Christian ritual. For him, occultism provided a secret, extra-sensual shield

against conventional Catholic spirituality. In the 1880s, when Huysmans was the art critic for the major newspaper Le Figaro, he championed the impressionists and naturalism. He advocated the

work of Redon and Moreau, finding in Moreau’s Salomé of 1886 essential symbolist values. Moreau had also depicted Salomé as The Apparition in 1874 (Figure 5.7).°9 In his review of the Salon of 1880, Huysmans described the Oriental and mystical effect of Moreau’s art as reminiscent of both Hindu and

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FIGURE 5.7.

Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, 1874

Italian art, “with an intense coloring . . . whose disquieting flavour is at first disconcerting.” Years later, André Breton frequented the neglected Musée Gustave Moreau after symbolism had fallen into disfavor. Breton found in the seemingly ritualistic and phantasmagoric images of Moreau the dream and grace that he associated with surrealism. In 1890, referring to the context of the

French symbolist movement, Anatole

France observed that “‘a certain knowledge of the occult sciences became necessary for the understanding of a great number of literary works of this period. Magic occupied a large place in the imagination of our poets and our novelists.”40 Late nineteenth-century France took occultism very seriously, and one

of the most famous occult scandals of that period involved Huysmans. Public accusations were made in such major newspapers as Le Figaro with a gravity

that today seems astounding.4! The affair paralleled similar developments in

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Russia, whose mystical dramatis personae included the notorious Grigory Rasputin (1870-1916), who came to exert such a powerful fascination over the Russian royal family that he had to be eliminated, and was famously murdered; Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-91), who founded the Theosophical movement

from a synthesis of Hindu, Vedanta, Mueller, Emerson, and

Thoreau; and Gérard Encausse (1856-1916), known as “Papus.”

The Frenchman Encausse moved in the avant-garde circle of Huysmans, the Baron Stanilaus de Guaita, and other French decadents. He often traveled to Russia to see the Tsar and Tsarina, Nicholas and Alexandra, whom he had first

met in France in 1896.42 He was on the council of de Guaita’s Cabalistic Rosicrucian Brotherhood (Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix)*? and with the artist Joséphin Péladan formed part of the occult infrastructure against which Huysmans became embroiled in an escalating battle.44 Huysmans and his disciple, Jules Bois, publicly accused Guaita, Papus, Péladan, and Osward Wirth, as leaders of the Cabalistic Rosicrucian Brotherhood, of having murdered, by means of black magic, Huysmans’s mentor in matters occult, Abbé Boulan, a

defrocked Catholic priest who performed Black Masses.*° During the controversy, a strange thing happened: According to Huysmans, Bois, Boulan, and others involved, the supposed curses thrown by the Rosicrucian brotherhood manifested themselves physically as “fluidic hurlings,

cuffs about the head, and even attacks on the liver,”4° which caused Husymans

et al. actual suffering. This purportedly empirical evidence appealed to the spiritual longings of the many disaffiliated artists and writers who pursued the occult. Huysmans later learned that the accusations the Abbé had made against Papus and the Rosicrucian Brotherhood were fabrications intended to transfer Boullan’s sense of guilt about practicing black magic to de Guaita.47 Satanism combined the attraction of heresy with the supernatural rejection of bourgeois materialism. The satanic and the sensual provided escape from Catholicism and bourgeois convention. The trajectory of the occult runs from

Baudelaire’s 1857 Les Fleurs du Mal, whose censorship only served to increase its notoriety, to Huysmans’s 1884 novel A Rebours, whose hero, Des Es-

seintes, places Les Fleurs du Mal as a sacred text on an altar before a Byzantine triptych. The descent into satanism of La-bas presents Huysmans’s nostalgic attraction to medieval spirituality. La-bas struggles between doubt and belief,

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dandyism and naturalism, the occult and the Church. One senses a strange ambivalence in the historical observations of the protagonist, Durtal: ““What a queer age, said Durtal. . . . ‘It is just at the moment when positivism is at its zenith that mysticism arises again and the follies of the occult begin.””45 Huysmans’s exploration of occultism led him to return to Christian supernaturalism. In a related passage from Ld-bas, he describes this path of daemonic excess: “Mad? Why? The cult of theDemon is no more insane than that of God. One is rotten and the other resplendent, that is all. By your reckoning all people who worship any god whatever would be demented. No. The affiliates of Satanism are mystics of a vile order, but they are mystics. Now, it is highly probable that their exaltations into the extraterrestrial of Evil coincide with the rages of their frenzied senses, for lechery is the wet nurse of Demonism.”49

These themes are embodied in the essential image of the symbolist epoque: Salomé, the seductress who tries to tempt John the Baptist, once rejected, performs a lascivious dance with his severed head, bringing together sexuality, death, and the rejection of purity. In Moreau’s 1874 painting, The Apparition (Figure 5.7), Salomé is exotic, threatening, and destructive. She ruthlessly dis-

penses with male heroism and virtue, as she contemplates the head ofJohn. Tattooed with ornamental patterns drawn from Moreau’s improvisation with Hindu art, she dances exotically in the Hindu-inspired temple-like interior. As the embodiment of amoral, earthly energies, Salomé’s chaotic sexuality attracted her nineteenth-century audience, itself caught by the destructive power of the intellect, which severs the head from the body.

Finally, in an obscure painting by Georges Rochegrosse, we find a culmination of the symbolist reversal of Catholicism in an image based on a passage from Flaubert. Goddess and Chimera (Déesse et Chimére) (Figure 5.8) depicts a Babylonian goddess, encrusted in jewels like Moreau’s Salomé, riding the back of the sea serpent Leviathan, the beast of the Apocalypse ofthe Book of Reve-

lation. Here the imagery of the Christian Apocalypse is completely inverted: The ancient Whore of Babylon®® is none other than the archaic goddess, Cybele, Demeter, or Isis, arrayed in a fantastic exotic costume, her foot on the

head of the Beast from the Abyss. The chaotic energy of the Beast and the watery, roiling Abyss rise up carrying the goddess aloft, as if emerging from archaic memory and prehistory.

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FIGURE 5.8

Georges Rochegrosse, Déesse et Chimére, 1929

Although Rochegrosse’s image is an illustration to a literary text, the apocalyptic theme is pivotal. The daemonic goddess arising from the waters of chaos expresses a complete religious reversal of the biblical paradigm of the Apocalypse by depicting a triumphant pagan goddess. The goddess, the serpent, and the watery Abyss from which they rise reverse the moral order of the traditional New Testament, in which righteousness and order or logos triumphs. The Beast cast into the lake of fire and brimstone is identified with “the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan”®! who heralds the imminent Apocalypse in the Book of the Revelation. Satan, the dragon-like serpent, the waters of chaos, and the Babylonian goddess (the “Whore of Babylon”) are mutually identified with the daemonic energies of creation and destruction. In this startling image, we find the lineaments of a complete religious rever-

sal of Judaeo-Christian themes. The descent into erotic energy and chaos im-

pels a paradigm shift that finds full psychological expression in surrealism.

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Mapping the Imagination

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The Ethnographic Attitude

THE

TURN

OF THE

CENTURY witnessed the confluence ofseveral his-

torical tendencies that converged to create an environment uniquely predisposed to psychological questions. The primitive, exotic, and archaic tenden-

cies that preoccupied French symbolist artists and writers with mythic themes and literary painting encouraged an increasingly empirical attitude toward origins—a development that has been called the pursuit of historical reason. Questions of the origins of mind, language, society, and culture, formerly an-

swered by biblical paradigms, were examined through anthropological, ethnographic, and historical research that proposed a new global understanding. The tension between science and occultism, logic and intuition, materialism and spirituality, dominated the curiosity of artists and intellectuals alike in the

early modern period. In the visual arts, the passion for archaic art was initiated not only by historians of religion and anthropologists who commonly labored

under evolutionist notions of human culture but by visual artists such as Gauguin, van Gogh, and Picasso, who sought to understand the formal power of archaic art and to incorporate it into their own work. The popularization of evolutionary theory in many disciplines confirmed the belief in the progress of art. Modern art criticism expressed a “philosophical Darwinism,” evident simultaneously in literature and music as the “search

for origins.”! Evolutionary theory also formed the fledgling disciplines of comparative religion, anthropology, and ethnology, creating a fascination for an original “primal mind,” located in the far distant past, that might hold the key 95

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to the origin of thought and to the spiritual rejuvenation of human life in a utopian future. Apollinaire’s critical vision ofa utopian art of the “fourth dimension” contained the seeds of prophecy, linking the ideology of progress with both Darwinian evolutionary theory and theosophical, spiritualistic views of the development of human consciousness. The impulse toward abstraction in art could, in Apollinaire’s view, express the progress of human consciousness toward a

utopian “fourth dimension,” just as history itself would be ordered by progress toward a better, utopian, world. Apollinaire’s interpretations of modern art invoked the predictive ideology of progress. Progress was, by implication, an idea of order founded on logos, the New Testament ordering of history from

Creation in an optimistically linear succession of history. This notion of progress was also applied to the mind, reflected internally in the structure of human consciousness as described by the fourth dimension of theosophical thought. Building on nineteenth-century ideals of historical progress, modern art

movements such as Dadaism and surrealism produced manifestoes promoting the idea of a future transformation of human consciousness, which they con-

spired to bring about through artistic and spiritual revolution. Dada’s nihilism masked an intense desire to uncover innate and primal human experiences that were revealed by direct expressions of instinctual energy and untrammeled thought. In this utopian vision, the bifurcation of mind and feeling, dream and reality, would be destroyed and an original unity regained. The search for ori-

gins combined the Romantic tendencies of primitivism and exoticism, which sought a purer, more fundamental level of existence. This implicit Romanti-

cism became explicit in Tristan Tzara’s sound poems, rhythmic music, and Dada performance pieces, such as “La coeur au gaz,” which invoked the spiri-

tual persona of the “noble savage” redux.” Dada provided surrealism with the void of total negation, the tabula rasa that in turn enabled the surrealists to es-

tablish the principle of the surreal. The first Manzfesto of Surrealism pro-

claimed the power of the imagination and the dream “to solve all the principal problems of life.”> Here, the Manifesto of Surrealism parallels the utopianism of political manifestoes; each struggled to transform human reality through a

new spiritual or political orientation.*

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The Society for Psychical Research Two remarkable events mark a more empirical attitude toward the search for origins, the nature of the mind, and the constitution of knowledge. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Romantic ideal of the imagination as the primary faculty of mind was transformed into an examination of the all aspects of the psyche. From dream and myth, to clairvoyance, intuition, insight, and meta-

physics, the character of what earlier was called supernatural phenomena became a new point of departure for the many intrepid explorers of the mind who investigated the nature of thought itself. The first event suggesting this shift in emphasis was the founding in 1882 of the Society Parliament attitude to experience

for Psychical Research in London. The other event was the World of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, which marked a more open spirituality and the willingness to entertain the notion of religious separate from traditional religious forms.

The Society for Psychical Research brought together distinguished individuals from different disciplines in the common pursuit of parapsychological questions. As a serious intellectual association, it proposed to investigate the nature of psychic phenomena, including mesmerism, trance, telepathy, clair-

voyance, and spiritualism: in short, parapsychology. Among its original members, the society counted Frederic Myers, author of Human Personality and

Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), whose burning desire was to establish scientifically the actuality of the soul; the anthropologist Andrew Lang; and Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle, whose empirically minded Sherlock Holmes followed in the footsteps of Poe’s tales of the uncanny.’ At various times the society was joined by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), the French philosopher whose notion of the subjective experience of time as la durée or duration had a strong influence on literary artists such as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.

Bergson suggests the authority of the imaginative life over reason and the internal experience of time over its quantitative measurement; he was president

of the society in 1913. Sigmund Freud, drawn by an insatiable curiosity about the nonrational urges that drive human life, became a member of the London branch of the

Society for Psychical Research in 1911 and joined the American branch in

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1916.6 William James, a pioneer in the psychology of religion, helped to found

the American branch of the society; James’s distinguished work on the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), recognized the separate authority of mystical states that challenged the exclusive dominion of reason. The most significant aspect ofthe society was its insistence on the scientific

exploration and reification of subjective parapsychological experience; in short it was methodologically empirical, but substantively nonrational, focusing the inquiry on qualitative states of mind such as aesthetic or mystical states. This new domain of metapsychology explored alternative forms of knowledge, including previously forbidden domains of supernaturalism and sexuality. Discussion of sexuality was still taboo, unless submerged within theories of vitalism or élan vital, Freudian discussion of“instinct,” or D. H. Lawrence’s (1885-1930) passionate elevation of nature and the soul, as in his novels Sons

and Lovers (1913) and The Rainbow (1915). Metaphysics and supernaturalism had been dismissed as occultism or prescribed within the limits of Christian theology. While theological proofs were shaken by the emerging studies of comparative religion and ethnology in England and Germany, primarily under the aegis of the formidable Max Mueller, the entire world conception of the West

was under attack by physics, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis, on the other. Einstein formulated the theory of relativity in 1905; its publication in 1916

exploded the fixed frame of reference of the natural world that was established since the Renaissance. Quantum theory defined contradiction—the oscillation between polar frames of reference, waves, and particles—as the sustaining principle of the atomic structure of the physical world. Similarly, artists such as Picasso and Georges Braque (1882-1963) visualized fourth dimensional space— abstract space—in a fashionable confluence of Theosophical notions of the astral plane and non-Euclidean geometry.’ In 1906, the First International Congress of Psychoanalysis established Freud as the father of a new science and a rapidly dissenting movement. Even then, psychoanalysis existed on the

fringe of respectability that temporarily drew together researchers under the sway of Freud’s commanding personality. These developments in the history of ideas challenged the conventional values of Western civilization and increasingly impelled a crisis of faith in traditional religions and worldviews.

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The World Parliament of Religions The World Parliament of Religions of 1893 embodied in microcosm the new world order that developed from this crisis. The Parliament was a major part of the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to America. Recently, the

World Columbian Exposition has aroused interest through the debates of crit-

ical theorists about the relationship between the European colonizers and the indigenous peoples they colonized—the “others.” The Exposition’s utopian purpose was to create an interdisciplinary dialogue whereby the best of each religion would strengthen the others. As part of the Columbian Exposition, the World Parliament of Religions brought together the colonizers and the colonized in a discussion of spirituality under an ethos of dubious equality. The parliament included representatives of the major world religions, as well as some new ones, such as Baha’i. In their traditional dress and with their lively

accents, the participants must have created a refreshing and surprisingly modern—even postmodern—1multicultural presence. The ethnographic attitude of inclusivity, manifested in the random collections of ethnology that leveled cultural distinctions was present here first, in the collected peoples, attitudes, and

cultures brought together by the World Parliament of Religions. It was the first major experiment in comparative religion and interreligious dialogue.

But it was not all altruistic. The historian James Webb suggests that the purpose of the World Parliament of Religions was to redraw the spiritual map of the world.’ While the Christian delegates covertly employed the Congress to establish the superiority of their religion, bubbling beneath the surface was an emerging world culture with equally powerful agendas created by non-European

traditions. The dissolution of the Western world’s faith in the Christian ideal was felt by those attracted to the Congress who sought a perennial philosophy, a world truth basic to all religions. Earlier, the

New England Transcendental-

ists, notably Emerson and Thoreau, set a precedent for spiritual seekers with antimaterialism, rural retreats, and contemplation that suggested Hindu mysticism. Swami Vivekananda was one of the most outstanding figures attending the Congress; his modesty and reverence for other traditions allowed him to

strategically frame the universality of Hindu Vedanta to the audience.

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Vivekananda’s emphasis on the truth of all traditions and his translation of Hindu mysticism into Victorian sentiment won a following in Europe and America, where the Vedanta Society was established in 1894 in New York.°

Both East and West wished to draw out the best of each culture, impelling a new age of cross-reference and exchange, misperception, and synthesis.

The Apocalyptic Question Some twenty years later, these developments were ruptured by the apocalyptic impact of World War I, which shattered the hopefulness of the late nineteenth-

century search for origins. The terrifying vision of history manifested by the debacle of war created a sense of imminent doom, which confirmed the sec-

ular apocalyptic vision of historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936). Spengler believed that European or Western civilization faced a dying “winter” of fragmentation, unrelenting complexity, and dissolution of values—in short, the same dilemma faced by the crumbling Roman empire two millen-

nia earlier.!° Cyclic or sequential theories of history had preoccupied the Western imagination since the development of historical reason in the nineteenth century. From Hegel (1770-1831) to Spengler to Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), the notion of an apocalyptic or utopian end or goal of history dominated nineteenth and early twentieth-century historical reasoning, with motives for es-

cape or conclusion, ends that now seem steeped in ambiguity. The persistent millennial philosophy of inevitable regress was reflected in the decay of the social contract, the disrupted connection to religion, and the prolonged

trauma of war. These circumstances led European artists to return to a longstanding conviction of apocalyptic disorder culminating in an end of time it-

self. William Butler Yeats famously expressed this sense of doom with his apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming,” which recalls the chaos and flood

of the biblical apocalypse: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

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Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; . . . !1

Yeats’s poem expresses the desire for biblical revelation, but in World War I, Europe was caught up in a new, secular apocalypticism, a mood of inevitable doom that saw the linear pattern of history as a downward spiraling motion into a catastrophic abyss. For the European artist it was a primal chaos without order or meaning. The covert nihilism of the Dadaist hastened this release into chaos by spewing out the rubble of European civilization with its archaeological and psychological layers of repression. Old myths could no longer sustain society. As if in response, the surrealists created a new mythology, a mythology of the imagination. Zurich, 1916: The Dadaists, a bohemian group serendipitously composed of expatriate artists, poets, and thinkers conducted activities that railed against rationalism and destruction, which they saw as inextricably linked within the

European heritage. The Dada movement included the poets Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), Hugo Ball (1886-1927), Emmy Hennings (1885-1948), and artists and designers such as Hans (Jean) Arp (1887-1966), Sophie TauberArp (1889-1943), and Marcel Janco (1895-1984). In the informal setting of the Cabaret Voltaire, the Dadaists created the first performance art: the alliance

of theater, dance, design, and poetry predicted by Apollinaire, but now with an anti-art agenda. Jean Arp, who later became a surrealist, wrote of the origin of the movement:

Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves

to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages,

and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that could restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that a powermad gangster would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men’s minds.!?

Despite their nihilism, the Dada artists were enthralled by vague ideals of a return to a state of innocence, a primal “noble savagery,” through the destruc-

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tion of decadent European civilization. They sought a new beginning through a psychological tabula rasa. They rejected Western society, with its complacency, its bourgeois values, and its clichés, as hollow and suspect. They adopted prim-

itive art motifs and combined these with anarchistic typography and design to express the absurdity and senseless character of modern life. The Dada artists experimented with methods such as automatic writing and painting, later synthesized with Freud’s research in free association by the surrealists. They “disintegrated the word in the ‘sound poem’; in typography, traditional forms and

compositions were rejected; in music ‘bruitisme’ (noise music) appeared.”!% The iconoclasm of Dada prepared the way for later surrealist investigations by rejecting the dominance of all artistic conventions and of aesthetic formal-

ism in particular. Willy Verkauf, a participant in the Dada movement, observes that, “Dadaism was opposed to cubism, futurism, and expressionism; it refused them above all as ‘formalism, as a degeneration of anti-naturalism,

though it used their formal elements for the expression of its own message.”!4 The radical, anti-ideological stance of the Dada artist was more significant

than its rejection ofaesthetics. The only ideological position open to the committed Dadaist was negation of all ideology, politics, art, and religion of European culture. The vitality of the Dadaist gesture, however inarticulate or ab-

surd, was intended as a slap in the face of European bourgeois morality, which separated life from art.

Dadaism, Language, and Thought A fascination with the structure of language and the origins of thought impelled the Dadaists, who intentionally disrupted the conventional use of lan-

guage with the visual poem or the word-image that expressed meaning through multiple senses of sight and sound. The Dadaists believed that behind the signifying power of language lay the intrinsic meaning of certain sounds. In Zurich, 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire, Tristan Tzara performed his first poéme

neégre (African poem) accompanied by Hugo Ball and Marcel Janco reading simultaneously in English, French, and German. The performance included

wild drumming and dancing. Tzara based his experimental poetry on a misconception of foreign linguistics, a fascination with African rhythms, and a be-

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lef in the innate power of sound itself. The sound-poem, originated by Hugo Ball, used invented language to express the force of sound and rhythm to convey meaning and emotion. These Dadaist performances sought to reveal the innate structure of language by supplanting its conventional signifying power with the ambiguous meanings of primal sound and primal consciousness, manifested in Kurt Schwitters’s sound-poem “Die Ursonate,” roughly translated as “The First Sound.”!5 Like the ethnologists and anthropologists who sought the wr-kultur, the primary culture from which all others derived, early twentieth-century linguists

employed an evolutionary model to explain the progress of language from its origins to its later forms. The search for the origins of languages began as early as 1786, when explorer and anthropologist Sir William Jones (1746-94) addressed the Asiatic Society of Bengal, noting resemblances between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek, which, he said, “were stronger than could possibly have

been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”!® By 1862, the German linguist August Schliecher had reconstructed a proto-European language and “was so pleased with himself that he ceremoniously translated a short fable into the proto-language,” which was later discredited.!”? The Swiss linguist Ferdinand

de Saussure (1857-1913) initially studied Sanskrit as part of this search for origins because many believed that the first Indo-European language, Sanskrit,

provided clues to the signifying power of language. Thus Romanticism also exercised its influence on the development of semiotics, formulated from 1906

to 1913 by de Saussure in his Cours de linguistique générale and posthumously

published in 1916. The idea of “sign” as defined by de Saussure connects much of what is ofinterest here, for the “sign” encapsulates how Romanticism, occultism, and the

search for origins are connected. The concept of sign stems from the heritage

of the occult revival of the late nineteenth century with its formulations built on Swedenborg’s system of “correspondences” between the natural and supernatural worlds. Symbolism, occultism, and Theosophy each employed the

term “sign” to suggest such correspondences. The fundamental influence of Swedenborg furnished the notion of a secret code available only to those initi-

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ated into the system of correspondences. In the occult revival of the late nineteenth century, the idea of sign was employed by figures as diverse as Freud, Madame Blavatsky, and Joséphin Péladan, each of whom aspired in different ways to uncover the origins of the mind. In the work of Freud, as in Swedenborg and Baudelaire, the natural world contained symbols that the new science

of psychoanalysis might tease out. Early linguistics stems from a similar impulse to uncover the origins of the mind, thought, and language. Like other

manifestations of the occult, particularly in the teachings of the Theosophists or the works of Georges Gurdjieff (1877-1949) and the Russian philosopher and teacher P. D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), the idea of “sign” suggested the possibility ofa science of human consciousness. This assumption that all communication has a parallel “code” developed from occult origins to originate modern linguistics and this complex idea of“sign.” The Dadaists retrieved language from its fixed content to a new fluid and unpredictable state that showed how language might have originated. Similarly, the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) developed merz (roughly, “refuse” or “discards”) art with the use of valueless, rejected materials to which he gave new meaning, inspiring the surrealist “found object.” Schwitters questioned established aesthetic values and pointed to the inherent beauty of materials: “my final ambition is the unification of art and non-art to result in a universal merz philosophy of life.”!8 Through merz, the most mundane, homely, and worthless materials could be used to create a heightened appreciation of life in the viewer. In 1914 Marcel Duchamp invented the readymade, mass-produced industrial objects that he elevated and displayed as non-utilitarian art objects. This iconoclastic aesthetic of the banal radically disrupted the conventional notion of art by deliberately breaking the conventional frame of reference (Ready Made, Figure 9.2). Duchamp also created conundrums, riddles based on the “irony of affirmation,” “ absurd propositions intended to disturb rather than provoke laughter.”!9 Duchamp’s quixotic paradoxical statements provoke the sudden laughter of recognition that happens in a moment of illumination; these moments were isolated and called “the marvelous” by André Breton and the surrealists because the incandescent moment led to the eccentric percep-

tion of beauty through surprise.

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Duchamp’s riddles and conundrum objects link Dada and surrealism. Whereas the Dadaist used riddles and the absurd to negate all positions, the

surrealists used them to provoke laughter—that feeling of recognition that we call the surreal. The riddle—both playful and serious, absurd and profound— offers no literal or logical answers. The riddle’s essence is described by Johan

Huizinga in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture: A riddle is a sacred thing full of secret power, hence a dangerous thing. In its

mythological or ritual context it is nearly always what German philologists know

as the Halsratsel or “capital riddle,” which you either solve or forget your head. The player’s life is at stake. A corollary of this is that it is accounted the highest

wisdom to put (forth) a riddle nobody can answer.?° Dada differs from surrealism in this essential understanding of the riddle,

because its riddles anticipate a nihilist response, while surrealism aims for mystical illumination. Dada’s iconoclasm ultimately annihilated the movement itself. It was doomed to self-destruct, for after it had disrupted the aesthetic conventions of academic art, shocked the bourgeoisie, and triumphed with ab-

surdity, the committed Dadaist had “only two honest alternatives open to him: suicide or silence.”?! By 1919 Dada was co-opted by a jaded public hungry for new sensations and amusements, which the movement had initially provided;

after a while the Dadaist happenings acquired the unmistakable aura of a bohemian chic. Ironically, the movement whose mandate was to shock the mid-

dle classes (épater les bourgeois) became a diversion for a bored, stylish, wellheeled audience. In Paris, in 1919, Breton, Louis Aragon (1897-1982), and Philippe Soupault (1897-1991) founded an avant-garde magazine ironically titled Littérature as a spoof of aestheticism and “high art.” Dedicated to Apollinaire as the figurehead of the new movement, Littérature published Dadaist and avant-

garde literature along the order of Dada periodicals imported from Germany. Littérature rebelled when Dada was usurped by fashionable followers. Contentious encounters between Tzara, leader of the Dada movement, and

Breton occurred throughout their relationship from their meeting in 1919 until the ideological stand-off surrounding the 1922 Congrés International pour

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la Détermination des Directives et la Défense de Esprit Moderne. Consequently, Littérature under the guidance of Breton espoused a new philosophy of poetic inspiration and insight: surrealism. As envisioned by Breton, surrealism was a totally new activity—the play of the mind within the territory of the unconscious. Dada’s iconoclasm provided the platform from which the surrealist renewal of spirit could and did arise. Surrealism saw itself as “a negation of negation; a new affirmation,”*? a radical act of the mind that afforded regeneration to the impoverished European soul after the prolonged crisis of World War I.

Surrealist artists and poets employed occult methods such as séances, meditation, and alternative processes including Freudian or occult dream analysis, mesmerism, and trances. Above all, surrealism advocated an entirely new

method of insight, created by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis. Through psy-

choanalytic methods one could bypass the dominant demands of ethics and reason (Freud called it the superego) and enter the territory of the imagination

and the dream. The dream offered an elastic multiplicity of meanings that suggested a new state of mind—the “surreal.” The surrealist revelation shifted modern consciousness from an emphasis on rationality to a more intuitive wisdom of an obscure “sense of significance” revealed through the dream or epiphanic moment. The Freudian unconscious and the spontaneous revelations of epiphany became interfused in the surrealist movement.

A Geography of the Imagination By the early twentieth century, the surrealists were preoccupied with the mythic and sacred dimension of archaic art rather than its formal inventiveness. Its freshness, magic, and connotations ofinstinct suggested a renewed in-

tensity of experience and a strange beauty that they equated with the “marvelous.” This ethnographic attitude of inclusiveness promoted an intellectual eclecticism that linked the French avant-garde and the early social science researchers such as Marcel Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Franz

Steiner. Similarly, the vogue for primitivism opened the way for naive art, personified in the work of Henri Rousseau and popularized by Picasso and Apol-

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linaire. Primitivism made acceptable the elevation of the art of the insane,

whose cause was taken up by Breton and the surrealists. The cult of the child, introduced by Blake and Wordsworth in Romanticism and implicit in JeanJacques Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage, impelled a new appreciation of the unintentional distortions of naive art, previously thought of as “primitive”

or “naive.” The elevation of play as an artistic act meshed with the Romantic

cult of childhood to create a new appreciation of non-Western art, including the unconventional art of the insane, children’s art, and ethnographic collections. Primitivism—the emulation of archaic, traditional, or aboriginal stylistic

motifs, often without knowledge of the intrinsic purposes of these styles—became a dominant tendency in modern art. Primitive or indigenous art provided an ideal point of departure for surrealism. The surrealists were fascinated by its mythic content, which buttressed their rejection of the religion, culture, and values of Western society. Exotic art

offered a new visual vocabulary that spoke of the mythic and poetic dimension of life. While for the cubists the visual forms of archaic art offered a revolutionary approach that led toward abstraction, to others, archaic art offered an esoteric language removed from the literary quality of symbolism. In contrast to cubism’s emphasis on style, the surrealists proposed to create a new mythology through the same principles and methods of creation used by the tribal shaman or archaic artist: sympathetic magic, shamanic trance, fetishism, and

alchemical] transformation. African and Oceanic art provided equally compelling modes of expression that appealed to both cubism and surrealism, for formal and spiritual reasons respectively. To the surrealists, the hierarchical space of Oceanic, Eskimo, and Australian aboriginal art and of the outsider art of the insane or dispossessed artist represented a dream space, which, as described by Freud, is dramatically literal. Similarly, outsider art and the art of archaic societies used expressive, emo-

tive lines of tension rather than a structural simplification of anatomy. In 1913, a groundbreaking book, The Nature of Creative Activity, by the psychologist Viktor Lowenfeld, compared the art of children and of visually handicapped

individuals with the art of archaic cultures. From these studies, and comparisons with the expressionist art of Germany, Lowenfeld proposed that visual

abstraction of the figure was a projection of internal kinaesthetic sensation that

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emphasized sensations or nervous tension, rather than being mere abstract simplication of the muscles or skeleton.?? Lowenfeld showed that expression in the unschooled art of children or the blind depended on feeling. Earlier experiments with hashish, opium, and absinthe by Baudelaire and others in the bohemian underground questioned objective reality and demonstrated that re-

ality was only a manifestation of the mind itself. The Hindu transformation of psychological states in meditation was made public by Max Mueller’s translation of the Vedas—particularly the newly discovered subject of soma, the ancient Vedic substance exalted for its capacity to alter consciousness. The Confessions (1929) of Aleister Crowley popularized the Dionysian aspect of psychic experimentation which lay on margins between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge. Aldous Huxley’s books Brave New World (1932), The Doors of Perception (1954), and Heaven and Hell (1954) dramatize the idea of a

mind-altering substance (“soma”) available to archaic man and now recovered by science. The historical moment was uniquely predisposed to psychological experimentation. The possibility of an extraordinary state of mind drove the surrealists’ experiments with unconscious thought processes, excited through séance, trance, and automatic drawing. Simultaneously, psychoanalysis uncovered the dream as the key to understanding the origins of the mind, which Freud pos-

tulated was a tabula rasa subsumed by layers of civilization in necessary repression. Both Dada and surrealist artists employed the ideal of a return to a “state of innocence”—a primal “noble savagery”—through the destruction of

decadent Western values. The fundamental interest in archaic art pursued by these movements coincided with Freud’s investigations of human instinct,

even though the surrealist attraction to archaic art initially was based on the false preconception that traditional cultures were free of the secrecy, taboo, and guilt-ridden sexuality of modern Europe. In creating a revolutionary art, the surrealists became fascinated with the

function of fetishes and power objects in indigenous or archaic religions. They were especially drawn to the art of Oceania because of its fantastic imagery and

mythology.?4 The fertility themes of Oceanic religion became particularly relevant after World War I uncovered the apocalyptic potential of Western civilization. The surrealists preferred the art of Oceania to that of Africa for several

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reasons: The latter had been adopted by cubism, and its geometric abstraction

did not lend itself to the fantastic in the same way that Oceanic art did. The emphasis on fertility and feminine power in Oceanic culture resonated the-

matically with the surrealist preoccupation with l’amour fou. The surrealists found the resemblances between Freudian theory and ethnology mutually illuminating. They anticipated the development of Freudian anthropology through their research into myth and the human psyche. Several surrealists were active professional ethnologists. Wolfgang Paalen, a surrealist painter, was an ethnologist and collector involved in Haida Indian, Inuit, and

pre-Columbian art. The surrealist writer Michel Leiris was also an ethnologist who studied the Dogon language of West Africa and possession rites in Ethiopia.*> Kurt Seligmann, the Austrian-born surrealist artist, wrote an important book on magic and religion, Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion,

which still is considered a classic in the history of religions.?© The surrealist

preoccupation with non-Western cultures differs from the formal considerations that fascinated the cubists; by contrast, the surrealists remade these art

forms into a new mythic language by transforming the motifs and materials of primitive art (feathers, wood, fur) to evoke spiritual, symbolic power. The sur-

realist popularization of primitive art anticipated the interests of later anthropologists who developed symbolic anthropology. The way that the notion of fetishism was employed at the height of early modernism in France provides an interesting insight into the surrealist uses of

primitivism. Cultural anthropologist and critic James Clifford observes, “If the notion of the African ‘fetish’ had any meaning in the twenties it described not a mode of African belief but rather the way in which exotic artifacts were con-

sumed by European aficionados. A mosque or statue or any shred of black culture could effectively summon a complete world of dreams and possibilities— passionate, rhythmic, concrete, mystical, unchained—an ‘Africa.””?’ The history of religions and anthropology, linguistics, ethnology, and

ethnography provided grist for the artistic mill that sought the peculiar frisson of the culture of “the other.” While mythology, madness, and the

wondrous child preoccupied the romantic imagination, this new orientation required a way of making the ordinary extraordinary—what literary critic Ashton Nichols calls “the epiphanic imagination.” This receptive orientation

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heightens the perception of psychological significance. The modern literary epiphany offers a new form of meaning in which the moment ofinspiration 1s absolute and determinate while the significance provided by the epiphany is relative and indeterminate.?® This intensity, this heightening of meaning, this framing of ordinary experience into otherness is all that is required ofart. For the early modern artist, any

object or influence could trigger the neural chain leading to the epiphany, the explosive effect of a new imaginative state of mind. Similarly, the collective compounding of culture by the early social scientists heightened meaning through confounding known categories and fused the domains of the colonizer and the colonized previously separated by the European frame of reference. The ethnographic collections of the Musée de Trocadéro— or the “Troca,” as it was called—were irrational compoundings of objects from

different cultures that formed an irresistible mélange of imagery—culturally egalitarian on the one hand and surreal on the other. The avant-garde periodical Documents, edited by the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille, employed this fertile confusion of categories. The full title of the periodical—Documents: Archaeologie, Beaux Arts, Ethnographie, Variétés—

illustrates how ethnography “denoted a radical questioning of norms and . . implies a levelling and a reclassification of familiar categories.”?9 Ethnographic research before 1920 was characterized by inclusivity and collectivity as well as a passion for anything curious, unique, or strange. This

ethnographic approach was similar to the late Renaissance development of mannerism, when collectors coveted objects characterized by mastery or virti, and by the clever conceits or concetti of the artist. This innately Western stream of heroic mastery commingled with the exploration of the occult, the opposite of reason and formalism. The intellectual proclivities of surrealists such as André Breton, Michel Leiris, Michel Carrouges, Wolfgang Paalen, and Kurt Seligmann led them to study Eastern and alternative religions, occultism, mythol-

ogy, ethnography, and anthropology. Ethnographers and anthropologists such as Sir James Frazer, Edward Burnett Tylor, and R. R. Marett noted an aesthetic

quality to magic and the purposeful use of abstract design as meaning in archaic art, while the Western connoisseur collected these only as primitive cu-

riosités. Modern artists such as Paul Gauguin brought to public attention the

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beauty, quality, and relevance of archaic art considerably before it became appropriate material for the art historian. With the exception of the use of primi-

tive or archaic art motifs by artists such as Picasso or Paul Klee (1879-1940), these sources are seldom acknowledged in the history of art. In one direction, the myth of the modern artist emphasized emotional directness and intensity rather than intellectual statements; in another, the history of art remained parallel and separate from anthropology, ethnography, and the history of religions.

Often the artist’s inspiration arose from marginal or heterodox intellectual ten-

dencies that paralleled the marginal status of the artist in society. The idea of the fetish to which the surrealists were inevitably drawn developed from Western preconceptions of archaic cultures and the general vogue for primitivism. The surrealists were aware of the possibilities of fetishism and archaic magic through exposure to objects in the collections of the Musée du Trocadéro. Ironically, the understanding of fetishism in current criticism is prematurely precluded at the point of the 1913 publication of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu), a book predicated on research in fetishism conducted by turn-of-the-century ethnographers, anthropologists, psychologists, and historians of religion such as Wilhelm Wundt, Marett, Tylor, and Sir James

Frazer. Freud’s conception of the fetish is dependent on the limits and apparent empiricism of the psychoanalytic approach, which he brought to the ethnographic research of other scholars. For the surrealists, fetishism formed part of their long-standing interest in

supernatural and supranormal experience. The surrealist desire for the direct experience of illumination in the surreal drew from Romantic revelation and in this way eclipsed the intellectual distance of psychoanalytic theory. Although surrealist methods such as trance, free association, and automatic writing and

painting derived from processes used by psychoanalysis, they were employed by artists to activate the imagination and evoke a fertile confusion of images rather than to analyze the neurotic mind. The “profound occultation of thought” called for by Breton in the second

Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) shifted surrealism toward spiritual matters. Breton’s expressed interest in magic, chance, and simultaneity signaled the surrealists’ dissatisfaction with political—that is to say, communist—solutions to the problem of freedom. Communism was suspect because of the tenuous

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position of the artist in the Soviet Union of the Stalin era. All modes of rationalism were seen as empty, including the psychoanalytic adjustment to reality, rather than the more provoking special effects of the process itself—the dream images, associations, and uncanny reveries of the subconscious. The surreal-

ists argued for a new order of visionary knowledge that was part of a longrepressed history of rejected knowledge. Surrealist games such as the composite drawing or “exquisite corpse,” the found object, the belief in ghosts, and the use of trances and altered states all suggest magical assumptions. Publications as overtly occult as Breton’s Arcane Dix-Sept of 1947 (named for the star, the seventeenth card of the tarot) mixed romantic love with the meanings of the tarot cards. The surrealists sometimes minimized these occult sources in the pursuit of an intellectual high purpose for the movement. But the element of play, with its dimension of magic and its place in the intermediary zone between rational consciousness and the imagination, was energetically pursued

by central and peripheral surrealists alike, including Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Jean Arp, Kurt Seligmann, Wolfgang Paalen, and Giorgio de Chirico.

Paalen, a surrealist artist who exhibited in Paris, New York, London, San

Francisco, and Mexico City, wrote of how art transforms human consciousness.

His writings were distributed internationally through the art magazine DYN, which he founded and edited. He was also an ethnologist specializing in pre-

Columbian Mexican cultures and the Haida culture of the Pacific Northwest and lectured on them throughout North America. His ethnographic researches synthesize the principles of archaic art as he employed them in his own art. Paalen’s methods show a greater link between surrealist art and anthropology and ethnology than previously recognized in modern art history. Paalen was profoundly committed to art as a process of spiritual transformation. In a 1948 statement for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he wrote: “I believe we

can reach a new degree of consciousness which beyond all theologies is religious in quality and scientific in method. Art is an instrumental means to reach this state. I consider my paintings as a first ideography of this new consciousness.” Paalen’s emphasis on art to achieve a visionary “state of mind” exemplifies surrealism’s pursuit of a radical change in consciousness through art. The creation of magico-religious objects in surrealism was not an intentional historical return to primitive art motifs, as in the case of cubism. Rather, these

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objects illustrate the transformation of archaic, occult, and daemonic elements in modern art. Hence the seeming unrelatedness of most surrealist art to anything overtly archaic or primitive in form. Rather, the surrealists attempted to

return to the origins of mind through the creative practice of psycho-active transformation suggested by early twentieth-century researches in ethnography, anthropology, and psychology. Surrealist objects illustrate the principles of archaic magic as described by their contemporaries in the history of religions—hence the seeming unrelatedness of most surrealist art to anything overtly archaic or primitive in form. The surrealists were undeniably drawn to the idea of fetishism by Western preconceptions of archaic cultures and the vogue for primitivism, and they were aware of its possibilities through exposure to protective amulets or power objects in the ethnological collections of the Musée du Trocadéro. In the introduction to his 1948 Magic, Supernatu-

ralism, and Religion, Seligmann writes of his motives—a statement that is a paradigm for surrealist art in general: “As an artist I was concerned with the aesthetic value of magic and its influence upon man’s creative imagination. (The vestiges of ancient peoples tend to indicate that religio-magical beliefs have given a great impulse to artistic activities, a stimulus which outlasted paganism and produced belated flowers in the era of Christianity.)”?! The writings of these artists attempt to move away from the intellectual separation of theory and praxis, a separation that dilutes the immediacy of lived experience with its longed-for intensity. The history of religions attempts to create a vocabulary with which to describe this special state of mind. Within the politics of knowledge, the phenomenology of religions was often marginalized because of its concern with experience, insight, and revelation. The en-

thusiastic reception by artists and intellectuals of psychoanalysis and the history of religions within the first half of the twentieth century is characterized by this tension between experience and reason in the history of knowledge. Be-

cause these disciplines explore forms of knowledge that are initially expressed experientially and later systematized, conventional definitions do not apply. If

we make a distinction between insight-oriented or metaphorical language, with

its wit and compression, and the formal analysis traditionally employed by art history (in language initially drawn from the physical sciences of zoology and botany), then the qualities of different ways of knowing become apparent.

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Surrealism and the Sacred

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The politics and geography of knowledge, which separate the historical disciplines, make the writings of artists such as Seligmann acknowledged within

the history of religions and virtually ignored within the history of art. Because of this rift, the fabric of knowledge unravels. The geography of this new domain in which the European imagination created epiphanies of the extraordinary is pointedly described in the deliberately naive Surrealist Map of the World of 1929, which shows the new surrealist orientation to the world of Western culture (Figure 6.1). All the developed countries are depicted diminished in scale and importance, while what is currently known as the third world forms the central part of the map.%2 Not just a literal elevation of the primitive, the map demonstrates the surrealists’ recognition of non-Western civilizations. For them, the world originated in archaic strata of

thought, which coalesced conclusively with the new, surreal state of mind. The fabric of early modernism is drawn from these multiple threads of primitivism, historicism, and the pursuit of origins, woven through the newly emer-

gent disciplines of psychology, linguistics, ethnology, and art history. The image of surrealism that emerges from this complex and contradictory context is defined by two extraordinary figures, Sigmund Freud and Giorgio de Chirico. Their thought reveals a common

search for the origins of mind—Freud,

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through his empirical use of hypnosis, and de Chirico, through his experience

of the imagination as revelation. The surrealists’ investigation of consciousness used nonrational methods such as chance, free association, automatic writing, séances, trance, and reverie. They also employed the single-minded focus of

the psychoanalytic approach, with its use of a secondary level of awareness, and its ever more acute attunement to a nuance, gesture, or phrase. The un-

canny illuminations of de Chirico’s visual epiphanies and the laser focus of

Freud’s psychoanalytic approach provided the creative polarity from which surrealism could emerge.

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> Similarly Freud’s association with Otto Rank (1884-1939), whose work on the doppelganger contributed to Freud’s article “The ‘Uncanny’,” also was tense.°® And his relationship with Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933) split over method, as Ferenczi advocated a loving, empathic response to the patient that he called “reparenting,” Freud’s rejection of which has been interpreted as instrumental in Ferenczi’s suicide.>”

Freud and the Occult

143

In the occult revival in late nineteenth-century Vienna, Freud’s ideas form

one element within a broader context that includes alternative religions, parapsychology, and a distrust of conventional rationality and religion. Freud’s ac-

ceptance of the mistranslation of “the soul,” altered for the scientific predilections of his English and American audiences, was influenced by his own

ambition to establish psychoanalysis as science. Freud’s objectifying symptomatic treatment of women not only supports nineteenth-century ideals of feminine behavior but also illustrates his willingness to alter the reality of women’s actual suffering, transposing it into hysterical fantasy, and thereby assaulting

the truth. The juxtaposition of the “good women” of the bourgeois upper class and the erotic femme fatale also enters Freud’s ambivalent treatment of the resistantly unhappy women who were his patients. Finally, Freud’s choice of the archaeological metaphor for psychoanalysis and his employment of archaic myth and word etymology to create the theoretical substructure of the psychoanalytic method connect him to the ethnographic attitude that compares disparate cultures through ethnography, mythology, or religion. Freud was part of the protean Romantic pursuit of origins from which modernism arose, and thus his influence on surrealism is neither as extensive nor as singular as previ-

ously believed. Freud’s life was as strenuous, difficult, and ambiguous as the times in which

he lived. He struggled to define a new paradigm for the human mind, was bound by old traditions, and searched for scientific proof of the invisible on

the margins of the visible—the threshold between the hope and actuality of the modern soul. Like other radical thinkers of the late nineteenth century, he

was caught in the struggle between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge,

between an unapologetic sexuality and rigid Victorian mores, between science and occultism. These tensions are concealed in the Romantic myth of Freud as the heroic thinker, working in rebellious and solitary isolation.

Similarly, the twentieth-century ideology of progress employed psychoanalysis as the spiritual salvation of modern culture. Such progressive, Romantic assumptions have isolated psychoanalysis from its context in the history of knowledge, blinding us to its limits as well as its force. In the tension between

legitimate and rejected knowledge, psychoanalysis opened a range of insight-

oriented knowledge that understands the soul through wit, compression, metaphor, and myth.

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has an exact meaning, considered them as representations of devils conquered by

the church and made her slaves to perform menial tasks.” The archaic chthonic deities threatened the new world order, based on the separation of nature from spirit in supernaturalism, and on Christian patriarchy. In the medieval period, pagan lands were said to be beset by underworldly, chthonic beings such as the evil dragon or serpent that arose from the depths of earth.” The disruptive dragon, connected to paganism and the formless underground, established the geography of pagan chaos and Christian order. The unique contribution of Eu-

ropean Christian civilization—imposed through missions and crusades the idea of order or logos on the pagan geography of chaos. In the colonial period, the

European dominion over non-Western cultures and Third World countries was established on the premise that these cultures were more primitive, hence lower on the evolutionary scale, an ideological development that effectively continued

the marginalization and rejection of non-Western religious traditions. In Graeco-Roman myth the daemonic was an earthly energy that stemmed from the underworld, a configuration linking Hades, death, regeneration, dream, and oracular vision.’ In ancient Greece and Rome, daemons were said

to inhabit caves and the underworld. The daemonic serpent arose from matter and earth and guarded the watery sources of life. Caves, springs, and grottoes were zones of chthonic power united by daemonic energy that spontaneously rose from the Underworld. In archaic myth the dragon or serpent lived in

The Daemonic Goddess in Archaic and Modern Art

205

springs, rivers, or caves. The gargoyle and the grotesque personify archaic wa-

ter spirits who guard the flow of water, hence the grotesque’s association with caves or grottoes (the word grotesque’s Italian origin, grottesca, means a cave painting) and the gargoyle’s function as water bearer (throwing rainwater from the roof clear of the building) in the articulation of the Gothic cathedral.9 In the Renaissance, Michelangelo realized a pagan-Christian cross-fertilization in the Neoplatonic strategies of his Sistine Chapel ceiling; here, the Cumaean

Sibyl, the prophetess of Cybele, predicts the birth of a new religion (Figure 11.1). In the Medici gardens in Florence, Michelangelo studied recently unearthed Graeco-Roman sculptures and discussed classical ideas with Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and others. As an artist living during the High Renaissance and involved with Neoplatonic ideas, Michelangelo knew

that, in ancient Rome, Cybele was the goddess of Fate and the protector of cities. As the pagan Fortuna, she paralleled the three Moirae, the goddesses of the wyrd, who appear a century later in the Elizabethan Renaissance as the “weird sisters” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1605-6).!° The later sixteenth century reviled paganism, witchcraft, and the occult as heinous, blasphemous, and

repugnant in a reaction to the expansiveness of the Elizabethan period, although in The Tempest (1611-12) Shakespeare speaks through Prospero to elevate magic to supernatural power. In Shakespeare’s time the Christian Kabbala influenced original and unorthodox thinkers with what became known as white magic, including Edmund Spenser’s layered meanings in The Faerie Queene.!! Rembrandt’s 1651 etching The Inspired Scholar (Doctor Faustus) (Figure 11.2) shows Faustus as a scholar of alchemy and numerology conjuring a vision of an angel through the windows of his study. Faust was condemned as an occult magician by Christopher Marlowe in his play The Tragicall History of D. Faustus (1604). Marlowe presents a diabolical magus as the evil reflection of the magician Prospero rejecting occult magic.!? All that was synthesized in the Renaissance, with its pagan and Christian cross-references, was later perceived as neg-

ative and identified as blasphemous and chaotic in the Reformation. Similarly, images of women were stripped of their erotic or magical power, except the

power derived from their marginalization as witches or prostitutes. The threat-

ening daemonic energy of the ancient goddesses was suppressed during the Reformation but later became seminal for the symbolist image of the femme fatale.

FIGURE 11.1 Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling (The Cumaean Sibyl), 1508-12

FIGURE 11.2

Rembrandt, The Inspired Scholar (Doctor Faustus), 1651

The Daemonic Goddess in Archaic and Modern Art

207

In the early nineteenth century, the goddess Cybele, dear to Nerval, is resur-

rected through his collection of poems Les Chiméres—the Chimeras. As we have seen, in Nerval’s poem “Delfica,” Cybele is represented by the Latin Cumaean sibyl, her oracle who sleeps under the Arch of Constantine. She is associated with the earth, with caves and grottoes, and with the Underworld,

and she is known as “the Mother of Wild Beasts” or “the Great Mother of the

Gods.” Historically, the Great Mother, Cybele, was worshipped in caves and grottoes, especially at the Greek port of Piraeus, where her image is found in

the rocky niches of caves.!° Nerval creates a mythological alliance of woman, the underworld, and the grotto.

The connection of woman with the grotto-esque underworld and the grotesque appears in Roman caves and hotsprings, whose walls were decorated with fantastic transmogrified creatures that emerged from the rock or stone surfaces, discovered in archaeological excavations in the fifteenth cen-

tury. In paganism the feminine is identified with the source of life, with water nymphs and demigods who personify springs and caves. In archaic religions, the identity of the feminine with the underground powerfully connects woman and the chthonic energies of earth—in short, with disorder and evil in the

Christian opposition. In the mid-nineteenth century it is less a specific deity invoked than a composite of all ancient goddesses and gods who, Nerval predicts, will return. In “Delfica,” Nerval predicts that the Latin sibyl, prophetess of Cybele, will pull down the Arch of Constantine, symbol of the Catholic Church; formal religion and Christianity will be forsaken and a new dominion of energy and eros established. In Nerval’s vision, the ancient and Christian elements are sundered, and daemonic elements enliven the earth again. He calls

for the return of the goddess and the pagan rejuvenation of the earth that surpasses the decaying Christian order. Like the daemonic representations of hybrid beings or chimeras, the extraordinary state of mind of visionary illumination or chaotic madness also proved a

threat to Western civilization. In the geography of the social order, madness manifested the disruption and fallibility of that order over the unpredictable actions of nature. It was not until the eighteenth century in France that the insane

were separated from the rest of the community in walled prisons, predecessors

of today’s asylums. This development mapped the geography of reason by set-

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ting protective boundaries against its fearsome opposite, madness.!4 This geog-

raphy of order charts the spatialization of thought in which anything irrational, unfamiliar, or unusual was endowed with extraordinary powers that threatened the continuity of reason. The non-Western cultures of North Africa and Oceania, the secret sciences of the occult, the insane, sexual extremity or deviation—

all were marked out as chaotic or negative and placed in the zone of chaos for-

merly inhabited by the dragons of paganism. But madness and illuminated vision proved receptive to the rebirth of pre-Christian mythology employed by Michelangelo and Shakespeare, Nerval and Baudelaire, and by symbolist artists such as Klimt and Moreau. The altered states of mind accessed by many nineteenth-century artists had the added impetus of blasphemy to blast the comfort of the bourgeois mentality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the

correspondences of occult sciences and the themes uncovered by comparative

mythology were reformulated by the symbolists with a morbid focus on eros and the daemonic, with their potential for iconoclasm and blasphemy.

Woman in Symbolism and Surrealism The seductive femme fatale of symbolist art, portrayed by artists from the preRaphaelite Rossetti in England to the symbolist Munch in Norway, informs the surrealist imagination and takes a major role in surrealist iconography. Whereas the symbolists used recognizable images from pre-Christian mythology, the surrealists eschewed these esoteric references in pursuit of a new myth—a mythology of the imagination. Incorporated into the surrealist vocabulary, the dae-

monic image of woman assumes an original morphology that goes beyond known myths and predicts a radical change of orientation in the modern period. The difference between the symbolist femme fatale and the surrealist image of woman is strikingly clear in two works, Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1864 (Figure 11.3) and Max Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride, 1940 (Color plate 6), made seventy-five years later. If we compare these two paintings, we

find the difference is one of allusive reference in Moreau’s work as opposed to the immanent, innate power of Ernst’s shocking surrealist image. Oedipus and the Sphinx presents us with the moment in which Oedipus answers the Sphinx’s riddle: “What goes on four feet, on two feet, and on three, but the

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FIGURE 11.3

Gustave Moreau, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1864

more feet it goes on the weaker it be?” Oedipus answers correctly, destroys the Sphinx, and 1s spared the fate of strangulation that has earned her the name of “the throttler.”!° His potentially terrible fate appears in the chasm beneath his feet from which a man taken by the Sphinx vainly struggles to escape.

Moreau’s Sphinx is a hybrid figure from the established typology of classical myth. Despite his triumph, Oedipus is unaware of his destiny, prefigured by the gaping symbolist abyss, an ironic inversion of the mountainous natural sublime celebrated by Romanticism. As in other Romantic reversals ofbiblical or classical notions of order, an enigmatic female Sphinx governs the abyss,

suggesting the connection between female power and daemonic energy.

Myths of hybrid creatures such as the Greek sphinx, the harpy, the griffin, and the minotaur, demonstrate an ambivalent meaning that makes these imag-

inary creatures extra-ordinary, yet also repugnant and evil. Like the female

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Gorgon who guards the Temple of Artemis, they are the fearsome guardians of the sacred. Similar hybrid creatures called genies or lamassus originated in ancient Mesopotamian culture.!° These figures—composites of man, goat, bull, eagle, and lion—symbolically guard the palace of the king at the ancient Assyrian city of Dur Sharrukin, at modern-day Khorsabad in Iraq. These hybrids act

according to the principle of sympathetic magic, drawing the swiftness of the eagle, the strength of the ox, and the force of the bull from their component

parts. Such hybrid guardians surround sacred sites, palaces, temples, or regions with a protective magic that defined its boundaries and shielded it from malevolent forces. Without such protective daemons, the palace or temple was prey to violation by evil spirits or actual plunderers. These frightful daemonic powers manifest in actual space the geography of order, which holds limits

against embattlement by disorderly and chaotic forces. In shamanic religions, the shaman takes on the attributes of sacred ani-

mals, just as hybrid creatures express the qualities of the totemic animals with which they are identified. This process grants a sacred vitality to the mythic human-animal hybrid. Mesopotamian daemons, genies, or lamassus

were not conceived of as evil but were rather as literary historian R. D. Stock suggests, “a kind of pre-god, ‘the numen . . . at a lower stage.’. . . the most authentic form of these daemons are those strange deities of ancient Arabia,

which are properly nothing but wandering demonstrative pronouns, having no specific shape or mythology but nonetheless felt as mighty forces.”!” The daemon creates a zone of power, the extraordinary space of the in-between in which mundane rules no longer apply. The shaman enters a trance-state in

which he or she identifies with the spirit of the animal; hence the shaman is often depicted in art as half-human and half-animal—sometimes with upraised arms and horns or antlers, suggesting the extraordinary being born

from this altered state. Hybrid creatures mirror the psychological ambivalence they arouse. The daemonic hybrid embodies an archaic metaphor of birth from formless, undifferentiated nature and the matter-mater that forms and transforms all things. These monsters, from the sphinx, minotaur, her-

maphrodite, or androgyne in Graeco-Roman religion, to the entranced horned shaman, inspire fear as something extraordinary that disrupts the natural order ofthings.

The Daemonic Goddess in Archaic and Modern Art

et

By contrast, in Ernst’s 1940 The Robing of the Bride (Color plate 6), we pass through the symbolist abyss and enter uncharted territory. Ernst’s hybrid bride reverses the classical typology of the harpy and other chimeras. The artist’s figures undergo a bizarre transformation of their physiognomy that renders them unrecognizable by classical formulas. As in Hieronymus Bosch’s hellscapes, everything is in a state of flux, creating a feeling of morbid uncer-

tainty.!§ The illusionistic space itself employs reversals and repetition, for the “attendant of the bride” looks back at her mirrored image: a play on infinite regression that intensifies an anxious feeling of compression and enclosure.

The random process that Ernst employed as a way to arouse his imagination was decalcomania, which Oscar Dominguez!9 had used in 1937 to create un-

expected imagery as the artist slowly pulled away the imprint on a sheet of smooth paper against a randomly painted paper, leaving a painted residue of configurations and textures. Through this transfer method, Ernst evoked acci-

dental forms that became points of departure for his personal imagery. This method, like the psychological effect of the Rorschach blot, triggered the imagination of the artist. In The Robing of the Bride, Ernst used decalcomania to begin the image and achieve unusual textural effects. The central female figure in The Robing of the Bride is masked by a large, birdlike head. The owlish features of the bird look piercingly at the viewer. They bear a marked resemblance to those of the artist, who identified with

birds throughout his life. A human eye appears on the lower right side of the head. The bride’s robe of feathers flows down from her bird head, which renders the central figure generically feminine, but masked, nonspecific, and unrecognizable as an individual woman. Like the sphinx, griffin, or harpy, she re-

calls images of archaic hybrid deities. But this “Bride” is an entirely new creature, unrelated to any known figure. At her left, a female attendant, whose hair resembles feathers, looks back at a mirrored image of the entire scene (in

a kind of mode d’emploi or code for the work), while at the right a grotesque birdlike figure painted in shades of bilious green carries a spear, shielding the viewer from the powerful bride. In the lower right corner, a small creature with four breasts and bird’s wing suggests Diana, “the many-breasted” of Ephesus, or the Greek harpy, as well as an entirely new being. Ernst’s ornithological fantasy combines the human and bird to create a new symbol.

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According to the artist, a traumatic childhood event in 1906 triggered his identification with birds: His pet cockatoo died the same evening his sister was born.?2° This coincidence aggravated the young Ernst’s state of mental confusion, which fused the bird and the human in the artist’s imagination.

Later, Ernst’s personal myth of “Loplop, Superior of the Birds” manifests his totemic identification with birds: a recurrent motif of the artist’s work. Loplop was Ernst’s alter-ego, a kind of doppelganger.*! Instead of employing classical typology, Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride creates a mythology of the artist’s personal universe, where “Loplop, Superior of the Birds” reigns. While Moreau’s Sphinx refers to the iconography ofthe classical past, Ernst grasps the first principle of how the daemonic hybrid is created: metaphorical identification with the totem animal. Moreau’s Sphinx refers to pagan models, whereas Ernst’s creature simply zs. The artist creates a new being that does not merely allude, it works through metaphorical association. Dismemberment of the female body and its reconfiguration nh animal parts or foreign objects pose complex issues in surrealist iconography, because this reconfiguration of the body has the potential for violence as well as for power. In Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride (Color plate 6), Wilfredo Lam’s 1947 Altar (Figure 9.14), and Miro’s 1938 Head of aWoman (Color plate 7), the union of the female and the animal provokes a sense of the irrational and the holy. Whitney Chadwick suggests that the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx illustrates the “conflict between male and female creativity.”22 Both protective and destructive, “the sphinx also existed as a powerful symbol of the female principle, the source and destroyer of man.”

The Woman as Imagination In their works the symbolist artists consciously returned to antique typologies, especially that of the goddess, whose voluptuousness and erotic power unleashed the chaos that led to the terrifying abyss, with its implications of Satanic disorder. By contrast, the early surrealists did not use the arcane literary references of the symbolists; instead they tried to create a new mythology, a new return to origins. Surrealism united the dream and the underworld, re-

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leasing primitive repressed energies that suggested the descent into personal imagination rather than into satanic chaos. In the romantic poetry of Breton and Eluard, the surrealist image of woman

was linked to the underworld and the procreative essence. The idea of female procreative power became a metaphor for the creative process that worked through the energy of the unconscious with its capacity for symbolic transformation of the world. For these artists, the image of woman symbolized the potent change of the unconscious, the realm of dreams and memories. The am-

bivalence of the feminine in surrealist images of women expressed a fundamental tension between the artist’s conscious awareness and the primal energy of the unconscious mind itself. Woman came to represent the creative power of the unconscious and the imagination, both sought-after and a threat. L'Amour fou referred to the force of desire in romantic love that enabled the lover to transcend boundaries in his or her incorporation ofthe lover. The sur-

realist imagination linked female procreative power with artistic creativity.?4 Surrealism’s attitude toward the female image alternated between the call of eros and romantic exaltation with an individual woman (l’amour fou) to a negative and ambivalent fear of the archetypal woman who represented nature or the unconscious. Even these lyrical and daemonic representations were often intertwined in the perception of an individual woman. The surrealist movement accepted women as artists but never fully accepted them as co-creators or actors in the artistic world unless they had the status of lover or were as exceptionally beautiful, strange, or gifted as Leonor Fini, Leonara Carrington, Meret

Oppenheim, or Dorothy Tanning. For the surrealists, the individual woman inspired romantic love, whereas the idea of woman as a creative force threateningly linked her to the overwhelming, boundaryless, and destructive forces of

the imagination. Surrealists also represented the feminine through isolating

certain body parts in shocking and horrific ways. This way of re-creating the female (often objectifying her sexuality by isolating it) created intense feelings

of attraction and repulsion by combining eroticism and mechanization, as in the Marquis de Sade’s isolation ofsexual parts with an implicit threat. Surrealist images of women are always problematic and are justifiably critiqued by

feminist theory or even by contemporary women surrealists like Cindy Sherman, Nikki de St. Phalle, and Francesca Woodman. Feminist artists and critics

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find the traditional subservient and objectifying iconography of women demeaning, and so they find the surrealist use of the female body troubling and

disturbing. But the accusations of misogyny in certain surrealist images that employ dismembered or isolated parts of the female body fail to answer why these disturbing images occurred at this particular historical moment. Other writers have ventured some partial answers. Sidra Stitch suggests that, on one level, the surrealists’ interest in dismembered bodies was aroused

by the disturbing impressions of soldiers returning from World War I, whose blasted bodies and faces were shocking reminders of human violence.*° The scarring of the natural landscape, the mutilated soldiers of “The Union of Bashed Faces,”2® contributed to the insecurity and doubtful sense of human

limits in the Great War. On another level, Georges Bataille’s notion of the informé—the unformed—

connects the subconscious source of creativity with images of the body in continual transformation. Surrealist photography especially illustrates a visual range in depictions of the body from regeneration to decay, from emergent fetal forms to dismemberment. Eroticism in surrealist art splits between imaginative vitality and total consumption by the unconscious. The potential of the “unformed” allows these images to oscillate ambivalently on the threshold between life and death. The surrealists reconfigured the female body by using mannequin or doll parts to shock and convey violence, but they also employed the image of woman to evoke the creative power of the imagination. The female body depicted in many surrealist altered objects such as Kurt Seligmann’s Ultrafurniture (Figure 9.9) and Hans Bellmer’s La Poupée (Figure 1.3) creates an alchemical unity that is more than the sum of its parts. The surrealist object expresses the unity of opposites through the polarities of the natural and the industrial, the mechanical and the human, and the animate and the inanimate. In another direction, the

surrealists idealized woman as the procreative chthonic goddess. André Masson and Paul Delvaux link woman to earth, nature, and fertility; in their images, themes of mater and matter connect women, stones, or trees to express creative

imagination and fertility. In Delvaux’s 1937 The Break of Day (L’Aurore), woman literally is depicted as “rooted in the ground,” part of the earth and its

natural substance (Figure 11.4). Her body is full, erotically explicit, like prehis-

The Daemonic Goddess in Archaic and Modern Art

Ficure 11.4

215

Paul Delvaux, The Break of Day (L’Aurore), 1937

toric fertility deities. Her face, idealized, recurs in each of Delvaux’s paintings

that have a female in them. In The Break of Day, Delvaux’s idealized woman resembles archaic fertility deities represented in or with trees, as in the Hindu

yakshini—figures of women as the spirit personification of trees or other natural forms, linked to the earth and the origins of life.2”

While The Break of Day depicts woman linked to the earth, Delvaux’s Sleeping Venus, 1944, portrays the Greek goddess of love surrounded by figures whose postures and gestures ofpresentation or surprise suggest the revelations of Greek or Roman mystery cults (Color plate 8). These agitated figures wander about the luminous nocturnal atmosphere of “de Chirico city”—in a square surrounded by antique temples that employ different architectural or-

ders, suggesting different periods of time. Fear and omen fill the scene, a feeling enhanced by the distraught gesture of the woman at the right, while at the left a skeleton, harbinger of death, guards the sleeping Venus. In the foreground and the middle ground, women make supplicant gestures recalling the

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Ficure 11.5

Roman Villa of Mysteries

Second-style wall paintings, c.50 B.C.

ancient mystery rites of Greece and Rome. Indeed, the wild, gesticulating fig-

ures are nearly identical in posture and gesture to the ones depicted in the frescoes of the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeu (Figure 11.5), which describe rituals from what is probably the mystery cult of Dionysus.?® The crescent moon to which Delvaux’s devotees point also implies fate and the rhythms of nature, because the moon “measures” or “weaves” destinies. As Mircea Eliade reminds us, “the moon, because she is mistress of all living things and sure guide of the dead, has ‘woven’ all destinies.”?9

Phenomenological connections between the dream, the Underworld, and the woman

illuminate surrealism’s relationship to the unconscious. In

Greek myth, the Underworld is the home of the double goddess Demeter-

Persephone because both the dream and the Underworld are part of Perse-

phone’s sad journey to Hades. Persephone’s descent to Hades embodies a yearly resurrection mystery leading to the rejuvenation of nature, whose har-

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217

vest and bounty are signified by her mother, Demeter. Daemonic or chthonic power, eros, dream, and the occult originate within the invisible world of

Hades, the god hidden in the underworld, who, according to the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman, “presides over both the crypt and the cryptic.”?° The psychological connection between the dream and the Underworld informs vernacular life with hidden, occult meaning. Similarly, in another myth, when the princess Psyche, cursed by Venus because of her beauty, dreams of

Eros (Cupid), he is invisible. If she opens her eyes to gaze upon him, he vanishes. Freud suggests that desire or eros is the architect of dreams, hence his in-

visibility.?! Eros can only appear when Hypnos (sleep) descends on Psyche, allowing her desire for love to be fulfilled—that is, her soul is revealed when she

loses herself in the dark underworld of the unconscious. James Hillman concludes that dreams originate from the dark realm of the underworld:*? In Greek myth, Hypnos (sleep) and Thanatos (death) are twins: “in the Odyssey, Homer locates dreams in the House of Hades and as part of his realm. . . . Ovid says in his Metamorphoses (11.614) that dreams appear like creatures of the underworld without bodily life.” Meret Oppenheim’s Cannibal Feast (Figure 11.6), exhibited in the 1957 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, expresses the theme of woman as

source of fertility and abundance. This work, earlier titled Fertility Feast, con-

tained an actual woman, who, painted gold, therefore became precious, extra-

ordinary, and sacred. She lay on a table with her body opulently covered with fruit, food, and flowers that visitors sampled. In a later version of this performance piece, Oppenheim replaced the real woman with a gold-painted mannequin. This revival of archaic fertility imagery serves both as ironic comment about the woman being consumed, being served, and as a sacred image of fe-

male creativity and sexuality. The 1947 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme expressed the surreal-

ists’ search for a new myth for the modern period through the realm of illuminated visionary knowledge. As we have seen in Chapter 4, the Exposition was conceived as a series of initiations into the surrealist mysteries. Visitors entered

the Exposition through a threshold that represented the degrees of ideal knowledge ina red staircase of mystical and occult books. *4 From this passage,

viewers came to a Hall of Superstitions and continued through several thresh-

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Figure 11.6

Meret Oppenheim, Cannibal Feast, 1957

olds until they entered the “initiatory labyrinth, where visitors were guided by a transparent Ariadne’s thread.”%° Sarane Alexandrian, a surrealist and later historian of the movement, describes the labyrinth: “Here, twelve octagonal re-

cesses, like the cells of a honeycomb, were set out as altars, dedicated, after the

pattern of pagan cults, to beings or to objects capable of being endowed with a mythical life. So they were consecrated to animals . . . to phantom objects . . . and to fictional characters.” 3° The altars set apart invented creatures made from found objects, discards,

abandoned dolls, and mannequins. They included Wilfredo Lam’s Altar for “La Chevelure de Falmer” (Figure 9.14) and Viktor Braumet’s Wolf table (Figure 9.8). Lam’s Altar combined the ambivalence of the uncanny and the feeling of the sacred with eros and a threatening image of female erotic power. The ritualistic gesture of arms lifted in benediction or curse in Lam’s Altar occurs

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219

again in Joan Mird’s 1938 Head of aWoman (Color plate 7), which portrays a primordial beast, half insect and half human, flailing its limbs in a visual embodiment of aggression and rage. The same gesture of upraised arms occurs in

Max Ernst’s 1926 painting, The Virgin Mary Spanking the Infant Fesus Before Three Witnesses, André Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Artist (Figure 12.1),

which we will turn to shortly. The gesture recalls the ritual epiphanies of the ancient mystery religions of Greece and Rome, where a personification of the goddess appeared holding aloft the emblem of the goddess. All of these works employ the idea of the feminine as a sign for daemonic power. Painted in colors of black, red, and yellow, Head of aWoman gesticulates ferociously, invoking the idea of woman as a daemonic, destructive entity. Like the Gorgon Medusa, Miré’s Woman is grotesque and frightful but also

a protector and guardian. For Miré, this work was not only a fertility figure but a sign for a state of psychic menace: “When I make a large female sex image it is for me a goddess, as the birth of humanity. . . . It is a fecundity figure, but all the same it is menacing, on the right and on the left, above and below, we are menaced.”3” Like the Hindu goddess Kali, Head of a Woman presents the daemonic, destructive aspect of the female, combining fear, danger, and eros.

Miré was acquainted with prehistoric art through the writings of the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, from whom the artist derived the

idea of the sign. Mir6 understood his painting as an impulse toward metaphor derived from the origins of the thought process. In Mird’s art, nothing is veiled; all is conceived through the expressive sign language that he invented. Miré repeats patterns of waves or clouds, like traces of atom movement; he uses childlike symbols to represent stars, lips, orifices, or ap-

pendages to stand for people. He has mastered a key aspect of sympathetic magic: the part suggests the whole. Mird’s visual language was intentionally ambiguous; he created a new cosmology in his art based on experimentation

and his reading of the work of Lévy-Bruhl and other anthropological writings on prehistoric art.?® Mir6’s images of women from this period reflect his growing apprehension about the rise of fascism in Europe,°? but political ideology only partly ac-

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counts for the inspiration for his daemonic women from this period. The shift from the bourgeois patriarchal view of woman as a submissive, lesser

being connected to nature to the archaic view of woman as daemonic creative entity arose at precisely the same time as the accelerating crisis offaith in organized religion, doubt, fear, and chaos breaking through the Christian order

of the world, disturbing the long-held fixed frame of reference of the Western worldview.

12

Modernism

WE

LIVE

IN

TWO

as a State of Mind

CITIES. One is the city of historical time, which is

measured, recorded, and quantified as an entity composed of many parallel histories, with a commonly held beliefin its veracity. The other is the city ofexperiential time, in which the artist creates his or her works. The windows of the

latter city enclose interior experience marked by the ebb and flow of realization and loss. They look out onto the city of historical time. From this reflective point of view the artist gathers the spiritual, material, and sensual experiences that inform her or his art. When we see art only as the result of historical determinism, and not as a primary expression as original as the intellectual documents to which so many historians defer, the force of the experiential dimen-

sion is lost. But if the measurable forces of historical time were all that existed, then we would not be able to recognize the vitality of a work of art, communi-

cating across time and space. The internal sense of time expanding and contracting is found in Joyce’s epiphanies, de Chirico’s revelations, and Breton’s use of the surreal. It occurs when experiential time eclipses historical sequence

and time through its memoried expression. This is the contradiction between time and history. Thus modern art embodies both chronological history and the experience that grants us insight. By seeking the artist’s internal experience of time rather than measurable, historical time, we find how the creative work of art expresses insight beyond the historical record. In this book I try to show how art expresses an inner state of mind that contemporary art history ignores because it is not methodologically equipped for the exploration of this unknown territory. aed |

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Modern literature, by contrast, embodies insight or spiritual realization in

works by Joyce, Proust, and Eliot. Eliot’s collaged repetitions of phrases in

The Waste Land elevate moments of insight with verbal intensity. Joyce called this experience of insight or revelation the epiphany. The epiphany lies on the threshold of sacred and profane experience, suggesting, as Joyce af-

firms, the ordinary transformed into mystery that is found in the chance en-

counter or the mundane phrase. Epiphany is the moment ofpoetic insight that expands to encompass past and present and prismatically brings these together in moments of unexpected completion. Each thing has the potential to be a god, a source of daemonic energy, a locus for the imagination that symbolically transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. In surrealist thought, an inexhaustible series of fields of tension provoke a sense of the uncanny or the weird. Historically, these tensions occurred between supernaturalism and empiricism, between Christianity and paganism, and between rationalism and illumination. In the history of knowledge, similar

contradictions exist between the faculty of imagination—with its intuition of potentiality in all things—and that of reason, with its emphasis on forms and

limits—and between the Judaeo-Christian notion of Logos as order and the

chaos and energetic materiality of paganism. In surrealism, these tensions are provoked by the psychological and linguistic paradoxes of Magritte, the absurd changes of meaning generated by Duchamp’s Ready Mades, and the wit of repetitive action making visible and humorous the “lifelessness in life.” Contradiction establishes a sense of the uncanny by endowing any object of perception with ambivalent fetishistic significance—that 1s, with an excess of life or

meaning. This paradoxical presence with its heightened meaning creates a prescient sense of danger and uncertainty that prevails in our experience of surrealist art.

Our sense of the uncanny violates the accepted order of the world. The uncanny creates a deliberately ambiguous identity (the self and its double), exposes what is most private and intimate (sexuality), and casts doubt upon the meaning of everyday life. By revealing this sinister mirror world lying just under daily appearance, the uncanny became a key theme for modern artists struggling with spiritual conflicts, sexual identity, psychological awareness, and social deceit.

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Historically, the sense of the uncanny was explored by late nineteenth-century symbolist authors and artists who doubted empirical explanations of the world. Later, the uncanny sense of fateful recurrence became popular in art and literature between the two world wars. Isolated by Freud in his article of 1919, the un-

canny was noted as part of the phenomenology of the sacred in Rudolf Otto’s

The Idea of the Holy, Gerardus Van der Leeuw’s Religion in Essence and Manifestation, Franz Steiner’s Taboo, and R. H. Marett’s Anthropology. Filmmakers

such as G W. Pabst, F. W. Murnau, Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang, and especially Al-

fred Hitchcock embraced the uncanny emotion. Salvador Dalf designed the dream sequence in Hitchcock’s 1945 film about psychoanalysis, Spellbound.

Dalf was so commercially successful that his fellow surrealists nicknamed with an anagram of his name, Avida Dollars. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1954), with its genetically programmed automatons,

and in George Orwell’s

1984 (1945), with Big Brother, the doppelganger reappears. In these futuristic visions, the double violates the distinction between public and private space, exciting a sense of hypervigilance, doubt, and fear in the reader.

The uncanny appears in early films that directly refer to Freud and others that explore the uncanny mood as disturbing ambiance. G. W. Pabst’s 1924 Secrets of a Soul uses the Freudian theme of the dream, and his 1929 Pandora’s Box, which stars Louise Brooks, depicts the classic femme fatale as an amoral flapper capable of erotic and evil intensity. Brooks’s Lulu is unpredictable and seductive, provoking both attraction and fear because of her dual character. The

mood of Pandora’s Box is ominous with dark, uncanny overtones. Robert Wiene’s 1919 The Cabinet ofDr. Caligari depicts the mesmerist as a healer and

madman. Wiene’s film depends on a confusion of identity, sanity, and voice to evoke a disturbing sense of anxiety. Psychoanalysis was itself seen as part of an uncanny development that would reveal the true contents of the human mind. In 1925, a film on psychoanalysis was planned by Hanns Sachs and Karl Abraham (followers of Freud) titled “Psychoanalysis: Riddle of the Unconscious.”

Taboo, Eros, and the Sacred In surrealism, the relationship between figure and ground becomes intensified

by certain devices that, like framing, employ boundaries such as isolation of

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the image against empty space andjuxtapose it to change its meaning. Isolation within the boundaries creates a sense of imaginal or mythic space that transforms matter into metaphor. Frames isolate the image, creating a container for

power. The frame, which in film allows the audience to focus, also makes vivid

the essence of an event or action. Boundaries and containment protect and conceal the sacred. The choice of

the cave as a prehistoric site for ritual and painting, or the later Greek and Roman use of niches in cave walls where statues of gods and goddesses were placed for

worship, points to a phenomenology of sacred and profane space where boundaries purposely define power. The Greek temple similarly employs a series of thresholds from light to darkness through which the devotee moves from public

to private space, from daylight and continuous space, to the semi-shaded portico designed for ritual circumambulation, to the dark interior cella or sanctum (the interior room of an ancient Greek or Roman temple), symbolizing the transition from the secular zone to sacred mystery. The Church, having conquered the demons of paganism as gargoyles above and Black Madonnas below, also used space to create meaning. Later in Christianity, the Church forbade, but could not

prevent, transgressions of physical and moral boundaries. Blasphemy against the sacred included inadvertent or deliberate inattentiveness, a rebellious or jocular attitude, or a person’s ignorance of the sensitive boundaries of church, chapel, or altar, violated by profane chatter or seductive behavior. Just as situations of danger and risk are aroused by transgression or denial of boundaries, so too violation of the boundary excites the ambivalent power of the

boundary itself and casts the violator into a potentially dangerous territory of fear and risk. The inversion of religious covenant leads to extreme danger, be-

cause it breaks or blasphemes the inviolate nature of the sacred. The degree of violation dictates the degree to which the taboo is awakened, endangering the

person who transgresses. Psychology becomes geography. The spatial disorientation created by transgressing the limits creates an ambivalent state of mind liberating and exhilarating, and also guilty or destructive. This basic ambivalence hes at the heart of all surrealist provocations of family, church, and state.

Surrealism reversed the psychology of its predominantly patriarchal Judaeo-

Christian context by inverting the Catholicism that dominated France over the

centuries. This deliberately shocking reversal of accepted tradition is strikingly

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225

FicureE 12.1 Max Ernst, The Virgin Mary Spanking the Infant Fesus Before Three Witnesses, André Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Artist, 1926

apparent in Max Ernst’s 1926 painting The Virgin Mary Spanking the Infant

Jesus Before Three Witnesses, André Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Artist (Fig-

ure 12.1). The work depicts an enraged Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus, whose halo is falling to the floor. The upraised arms of Ernst’s Virgin echo the hieratic gesture of the Minoan snake priestesses, holding aloft their coiled

226

Surrealism and the Sacred

snakes. Related to the epiphany or manifestation of daemonic mystery, this gesture also appears in Wilfredo Lam’s Altar (Figure 9.14) and Miré’s Head of a

Woman (Color plate 7), where it is a gesture of threat as well of erotic energy. It is also found in much prehistoric art, in the horned shaman entranced by the animal, or Ishtar holding up a cornucopia. In surrealism, these images of

women elevate not the ear of corn or the beaker of wine but themselves. In the Ernst, the three surrealists look knowingly at each other. We see them

through an open window in the background, where only the artist, placed in the furthest background, also surveys us, the audience to this disturbing scene,

with lowered eyelids. Leo Steinberg suggests that Ernst gazes at us to measure our voyeuristic pleasure in the sacrilegious image, heightening our embarrass-

ment at being caught by his teasing glance. In Steinberg’s view, the painting is a test of our reaction.! With the ironic humor of this work, Ernst breaks the cultural, artistic, and social conventions of a religious icon, her significance am-

plified by the way Ernst depicts the Virgin Mary seated on a base—as if she were a Renaissance sculpture come alive. Ernst’s image does not merely break established rules or genres; it uses iconoclasm and blasphemy to shock and to invert accepted religious icons. It evokes the power of taboo. Feelings of omen and impending disaster result from the violation of religious and sexual taboos, made ever more available with the rise of modern media and secularism. The blasphemous wit of this image derives from the context of late nineteenthcentury French Catholicism. It draws from the antithetical stream of French anticlericalism that was present before the French Revolution with Voltaire and Rousseau. In Victorian psychology, socially sanctioned taboos rigorously restricted language, mores, and beliefs, including merely visual images that referred to bodies or body function: hence the skirted chairs, tables, and piano

legs of the Victorian period, or the shock of Marcel Duchamp’s inverted urinal. Like the curse or blasphemy, The Virgin Mary Spanking the Infant Fesus rages against accepted religious icons and uses the distance of ironic reversal. The root meaning of the word apocalypse is uncovering. The obscure sense of presentiment in surrealist art results in an apocalyptic feeling of potential disaster and uncovering that in part arose from its context between two world wars, as well as from surrealism’s rejection of conventional notions of sexuality. Ernst’s image has the incendiary potential to provoke and anger the viewer, in

Modernism as a State ofMind

227

the same way that curses use elements of worship, as in the Quebecois profanities calzce (chalice), hostve (host), or tabernac (tabernacle), or the Italian hosta, which is still a potent curse. Ernst takes a culturally defined icon and

breaks the taboo against its profanation by reversing the content of the holy image. The sensations of fear and danger in surrealism are precisely those excited by breaking taboos of the social order. Taboo generates danger. In Freud’s words:

Taboo is a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an authority)

and directed against the strongest desires of man: the desire to violate it continues in the unconscious; persons who obey the taboo have an ambivalent feeling toward what is affected by the taboo. The magic power attributed to taboo goes

back to its ability to lead men into temptation; it behaves like a contagion, because the example is contagious, and because the prohibited desire becomes dis-

placed in the unconscious upon something else.?

According to Freud, the ancient Roman word sacer—sacred—means the same as the Polynesian taboo, the converse of which is noa, meaning common

or generally accessible.* For Freud, taboo is a magical power that is transmitted

like electricity from persons to objects, and similarly it contains both positive and negative charges. The striking union of eros, blasphemy, and the sacred in surrealist art deliberately exploits the power of taboo, arousing sensations of danger and fear. Freud’s analysis of taboo derived from the anthropological and ethnological researches of early modernism. He confronted the rigid social taboos of the late nineteenth century by developing the analogous idea of repression in psychoanalysis. Freud’s early interest in sexuality offended much of bourgeois society even as it fascinated his wealthy or intellectual audiences. Franz Steiner,

in his book Taboo, delineates the connection between danger and power: “All situations of danger, not merely those created by taboo-breaking, are socially

or culturally defined. . . . Danger is not a quantitative concept. . . . To face danger is to face another power.”4 The English word danger earlier meant power, especially power over another. In short, danger possesses exactly the same quality of power that we found in the wyrd.

228

Surrealism and the Sacred

Taboo generates both power and danger. According to Elade, taboo contains “the ambivalence ofthe sacred . . . not only in the psychological order (in that it attracts or repels) but also in the order ofvalues; the sacred is at once ‘sacred’ and ‘defiled.’ In Freud’s view, “Taboo is a command of conscience, the

violation of which causes a corresponding sense of uncovery and impending doom.”® Traditionally perceived as a direct threat to the church, pagan motifs naturally played a large role in Christian iconoclasm and blasphemy. The revival of the daemonic goddess in surrealism effectively violated bourgeois Catholic taboos, at the same time as it elevated eros, l’amour fou, the body, and pagan images. The taboo imagery of woman as the daemonic pagan goddess of surrealist art, from that of Miré to Delvaux, draws from pagan remnants that had sur-

vived through the medieval period, were rejuvenated in the Renaissance, and were transformed in the nineteenth century. The symbol of the woman as archaic fertility deity or daemonic goddess in surrealist art evokes the emotions associated with transgression: a morbid exultation in a newly found freedom,

attended by feelings of fear and danger. This sense of threat or omen colors the emotional tone of much illusionistic surrealist painting by de Chirico, Tanguy, Dali, and Ernst, which emphasizes with hallucinatory clarity an ominous still-

ness and apprehension. The feeling of endangerment also is manifested in the threatening, jagged forms of the painter Roberto Matta (born 1911), in the voodooistic composites of Wilfredo Lam, and in the insect-like forms of Miré’s

art of the 1930s.

Ambivalence

Creates the Meaning

The ambivalence of the feminine, of the altered object or readymade, or of the illusionistic image arises from this fundamental ambivalence at the heart of

modern reality. Surrealism’s change of the object’s context, or the reversal of meaning in an icon or image, arouses fear and danger, manifesting “the sign of a force that however much it is to be venerated, may be dangerous.”” The vio-

lation impels daemonic dread—an oscillation between attraction and repul-

sion—which makes it fascinating. Hence the surrealist use of juxtaposition

(usually seen as a formal device) creates a new meaning that is more than the

Modernism as a State ofMind

229

sum of its parts. As in a gestalt, the contradictions are melded in such a way that one point of view could not exist without the other. The contradiction appears vividly in iconoclastic surrealist statements such as Ernst’s angry Virgin or the elevation of the banal in Duchamp’s Fountain urinal. The paradox, the contradiction, and the psychological ambivalence thereby created are them-

selves the very presence for which we search. The ambivalence creates the meaning.

And is this paradox not the positive new identity of modern art? My point is this: Ambivalence, contradiction, and ambiguity constitute the

meaning in modern art. The disordering of the senses called for by the surreal

state of mind deliberately invokes new cognitive resolutions, new ways of seeing the world. Surrealism tests the limits of human imagination by turning our awareness inward to the imagination and the creative process itself. Surrealist art, although sometimes shocking, is as full of mystery, the uncanny, and ab-

surd black humor as it is of despair. As a continuing phenomenon, surrealism

intentionally provokes disorder by breaking artistic conventions, confusing genres, and scrambling old orientations to create a heightened state of mind

that opens toward the capacity of things to change their meanings—from functional to magical, from erotic to spiritual or destructive, and from real to sur-

real.8 The meaning becomes infinitely flexible. This is not such a bad thing. Meaning detached from the object ofreligion allows the free play of the creative imagination, which seeks essences, truths,

and ultimate realities. For the artist, these realities participate in the fundamental tension of the sacred that allows one’s being to see through the temporary window of experiential time into that place where only being exists. Time becomes endlessly fluid, manifesting the mystery of ordinary things, something it

does as much in modern European art as in archaic Greek religion. Space as

well becomes variable, with zones that frame the presence of sacred power and create limits or boundaries to the continuity of ordinary space, ordinary perception. The resonances of surprise, ambiguity, historical reversals of meaning, and psychological ambivalence strikingly focus the meaning of the mod-

ern experience. Like quantum theory, surrealism tests the limits of a positivistic, causal approach. In modern science, such an approach had to be abandoned with the

230

Surrealism and the Sacred

advent of quantum physics, which illustrates a relativity of forces with unpredictable results. More recently, chaos theory suggests that any major change in a situation, and by extension in history, is a complex event composed of a sudden reconfiguration of multiple forces. The two truths of chronological history and experiential time are the quantum expression of the modern experience. Like quantum theory, which is the

expression of modern physics, the surrealist epiphany is paradoxical. To look at surrealism and modern art through the histories of art and religion, I have by necessity adopted two frames of reference, the historical and the experiential or phenomenological, which, like the waves and particles of modern physics, never appear simultaneously but oscillate in the mind’s eye in a state of contradiction. We began this book by examining how the phenomenology of the surreal and its associated expressions ofthe weird, the uncanny, fate, and the epiphany

each contain a fundamental ambivalence or contradiction expressed in surrealist art. This sense of ambivalence creates a particularly active yet fluid meaning in the mind of the viewer, which makes the image compelling and irreducible. During its historical period, surrealist iconoclasm uncovered previously rejected feelings and traditions of thought, including the perverse or daemonic aspects of erotic and imaginative power. The early surrealist artists delighted in the thrill of irrational fear and surprise and projected the feeling of an unspecified sense of significance and mystery in their art, just as today’s surrealistinspired artists employ the same methods of surprise, juxtaposition, and inver-

sion to provoke the feeling of the uncanny in their audience. Feelings of omen and impending disaster result from the violation of religious and sexual taboos,

made teasingly available with the rise of modernism and secularism. The apocalyptic presentiment of surrealist art drew from its context between two world wars, as well as from the surrealists’ iconoclastic approach to worn European cultural genres and social taboos, replacing these with a new myth of the power

of imagination and a new way of understanding the world as mystery. Through the imagination, the source of both surrealist myth and ways of knowing, the surrealist artist points to the possibility of the marvelous and shows that in reality, things are not determined by the common sense of the world. Surrealism marks the threshold between the sacred and the profane. It is a threshold between art and religion, between the imagination and reality, be-

Modernism as a State ofMind

231

tween metaphysics and materiality. The imagination leads through the para-

dox or the contradiction to the mysterious center, but there are multiple paths to reach that center. Each path crosses two worlds: between historical time and experiential time, between the mundane and the sacred, between the ordinary and the extraordinary. This boundary of the in-between zone is the surreal. Its unique vantage point opens to a magical, expressive view of the world where

functional objects are animated with uncanny power and physical space suggests the extent of the imagination. When we think of it with regard to the modern experience oftime, it is the epiphany, the moment of unexpected completion. Eros is one path, that of “mad love,” freely drawn and exalted. The occult is another path, that of subterranean knowledge that works alchemically, transforming matter to the rare mystery at the core. Neither good nor evil, dae-

monic power is another path. It is objectified in power objects, is transmutable in taboo, strong in mana, and as magic it is a force. The imagination is a mere sign of it, for it is the operative energy that creates, a source of changeable man-

ifestations. And, as Blake tells us, “Energy is eternal delight.”

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Notes

Chapter1 1. Ninian Smart, The Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 2. Robert Besséde, La Crise de la conscience catholique dans littérature et la censée frangaises a la fin du XIX siécle (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1975). 3. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millennarians

and Mystical Anarchists of the Middie Ages (London: Granada, 1978). 4. Kurt Seligmann, Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion (New York: Grosset

and Dunlap, 1968). 5. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 2d ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), p. 129.

6. This analysis is based on the definitive article on the wyrd: B.J.Timmer, “Wyrd in Anglo-Saxon Prose and Poetry,” Neophilologous XXVI (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1940), pp. 24-33, 215-28. Further quotes in this section on the wyrd are also from this article. 7. Ibid., pp. 24-33, 215-28.

8. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Meridian, 1974), p. 181. 9. The Anglo-Saxon idea of wyrd differs from the classical Latin concept of fate (fatum) because the former derives from the stem of weordan—“become,” whereas fate

is from fart, “speak.” Thus fate is “what has been spoken” by the personification of a superior power, whereas the wyrd is that which is or becomes. 10. In pre-Christian times, these powers were referred to as deities, and variously named Tellus Fortuna, the goddess of Fortune; the Moirae, Heimarmene (logos or the word) or the three Fates; and Tyche or Automaton, Nature, or chance.

233

234

Notes

11. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art and New York: Abbeville Press,

1985). 12. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,” Collected Papers, trans. James Strachey, vol.

IV (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), pp. 369-407.

13. Ibid., p. 370. 14. Ibid., p. 368. “The ‘Uncanny”’ was first published in German in Freud’s journal Imago, 1919. 15. James Webb, The Occult Establishment (Lasalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing,

1976), pp. 363-64. “In Germany, the term Okkultesmus was used up until the Second World War to describe both members of esoteric groups and parapsychologists (wssenschaftliche Okkultisten). . . . The phrase ‘psychical research, although its meaning

is now certain, merely shows the necessary interpenetration of supposedly normal, abnormal, and paranormal aspects of the mind.” 16. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,” p. 370.

17. Ibid.,p.371. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., pp. 376-77. 20. Freud, “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words,” Collected Papers, vol. IV, pp. 184-91.

21. Freud explains this duality of meaning (“The ‘Uncanny,” p. 375): “Among its different shades of meaning the word heimlzch (familiar) exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, wnhermlich (uncanny). What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. The word heimlich is not unambiguous but belongs to two sets ofideas,

which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand, it means

that which is familiar and congenial, on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight.” 22. Ibid. Freud cites Grimm’s dictionary on “the uncanny”: “Heimlich, as used of knowledge, mystic, allegorical: a hevmlich meaning, mysticus, divinus, occultus, figuraRis Pageds 23. Ibid., pp. 376, 394, citing Schelling.

24, Ibid., p. 371, cites definitions of “the uncanny” compiled by Theodore Reik. 25. Edward Tiriyakian, ed., On the Margin of the Visible: Sociology, the Esoteric, and

the Occult (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), pp. 7, 10.

26. The conflation of the term sznzster with magic and possible evil may also be related to the writings of Ludovicus Maria Sinistrari (1622-1701), a Franciscan theolo-

Notes

235

gian and expert on demons, whose treatise on demonism, Demoniality (De Daemontalitate), acquired some fame in occult circles. R. E. L. Masters, Eros and Evil: The Sexe

ual Psychopathology of Witchcraft (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), pp. 38, 191-267. 27. C. G.Jung, “Basic Concepts of Alchemy,” in Tirtyakian, On the Margin of the

Visible, p. 46. 28. Most likely by the Italian Trajano Boccalini. See Seligmann, Magic, Swpernaturalism, and Religion, p. 436.

29. Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Ark,

1983),p.173. 30. Seligmann, Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion, p. 447.

31. Jean Rhys, The Complete Novels: With an Introduction by Diana Athill (New York: Norton, 1985).

32. Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa’s Face (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 37.

33. Ibid., p. 40. 34. Andrew Gell, “Magic, Perfume, Dream,” in loan Lewis, ed. Symbols and Sent-

ments (London: Academic Press, 1977), p. 27. 35. Edward Tirtyakian, “Preliminary Considerations,” in Tiriyakian, On the Margin of the Visible, p. 10. 36. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,” p. 378. 37. Ibid., pp. 387-391, citing Otto Rank, Der Doppelgdnger. 38. Krauss and Livingston, L’Amour Fou.

39. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, “Sexual Doubles and Sexual Masquerades” (Syracuse University Department of Religion: Public Lecture, Fall 1989). Also published as “Sexual Doubles and Sexual Masquerades: The Structure of Sex Symbols,” the University Lecture in Religion at Arizona State University, April 10, 1986.

40. Ibid. 41. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 14.

42. Alfred Jarry, cited in Roger Shattuck, “Love and Laughter: Surrealism Reappraised,” introduction to Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 25.

43. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 237. 44. Henri Bergson, cited by Rudolf Arnheim in Art and Visual Perception: A Psy-

chology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 152. 45. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 47.

236

Notes

46. Joseph T. Shipley, A Dictionary of World Literary Terms, Forms, Technique, Criticism (Boston: Writer Press, 1970); James Joyce, cited in Ashton Nichols, The Po-

etics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Movement (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1987), p. 8. Also see Howard Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things

Past (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 17-31. 47. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. xi. 48. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 253.

49. Objective chance, for surrealism, is the impartial principle of chance operating impartially through the universe. The surrealists used random methods of artistic creation, based on the principle of chance. It was described in 1935 by Breton: “The attention that on every occasion I have endeavoured to call to certain disturbing facts,

certain overwhelming coincidences in works like Nadja, the Communicating Vessels and in various previous communications, has resulted in raising—with a wholly new urgency—the problem of‘objective chance, in other words, the sort of chance through

which is manifested—still very mysteriously for man—a necessity which escapes him although he experiences it as a vital necessity”. Jose Pierre, A Dictionary of Surrealism

(London: Methuen, 1974), p. 123. 50. Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), p. 18. 51. According to Shattuck, “like a secret opening in the fabric of ordinary experience ... the Surrealists . . . dropped everything else and affirmed these moments as

the only true reality, as expressive of both the randomness and hidden order that surrounds us.” Shattuck, “Love and Laughter,” Preface to Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, p. 21.

52. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 109.

53. Ibid.,p.111. Chapter 2 1. Ehade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 14, and Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), pp. 31, 32.

2. A break in space from the natural to the supernatural realms is implied by the Latin prefix super, from which the French sur is derived. Super refers to that which is

Notes

237

“set over and above the natural.” In a general sense, then, the use of the prefix super

signifies something “higher in rank or quality” and a final aspect of its meaning is “to the highest degree” or “in excess of.” This last, more qualitative aspect of its meaning informs the French prefix, sur. (Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology [1966 edition] s.v. “supernatural.”) 3. Oxford English Dictionary (1933 edition), s.v. “supernaturalism, ” p. 187. In

Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, Lafeu observes that “They say miracles are past, and we have our Philosophicall persons to make moderne and familiar, things su-

pernatural and causeless.” (1601) 4. Jack Stillinger, “Introduction” in William Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Pref-

aces (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). 5. Robert Ellwood, Alternative Altars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 86. 6. Claude Pichois, “La littérature frangaise 4 la lumiére du surnaturalisme,” Le

Surnaturalisme francais, actes du colloque organisé a Université Vanderbilt les 31

Mars et ler Avril 1978 (Neuchatel: A la Baconniére, 1979), p. 20. Nerval refers to “Représentants des différentes sectes qui se partagent l’Allemagne, et ont de temps en temps partage le monde”

[that is] “Un dogmatique, un idéaliste, un réaliste, un super-

naturaliste, un sceptique” (Pichois, “La littérature frangaise,” p. 20). According to Pi-

chois, “Le supernaturaliste. . . est ict par reprendre une expression connue, celui qui

croit au ciel.” Pichois adds, “... le mot est un caulk d’origine allemande plutét qu'un compose de ‘super’ et de ‘naturalisme’ ou ‘naturalaste’: il est en relation directe avec le surnaturel au sense théologique . . .” (Pichois, p. 21). Pichois says of Baudelaire: “Les répertoires etymologiques ... font honneur a Baudelaire d’avoir introduit dans la langue Frangais les mots ‘surnaturaliste’ en

1846, et ‘surnaturalisme’en 1855” (Pichois, p. 21). 7. Ibid. On German Romanticism, pp. 11-27; citing Gérard de Nerval, p. 20.

8. Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue Francaise: Le Robert (1979 edition) s.v. “sur.” Also Marc Eigeldinger, “Du Supranaturalisme au surréalisme,” in Le Surnaturalisme frangaise (Neuchatel: A la Baconniére, 1978). 9. “Huysmans use avec une prédilection évidente des préfixes sur, supra, extra qui traduisent sa passion des extremes et correspondent a son aspiration a sortir des orniéres

de son stécle. Il aime a multiplier les terms tel qui surhumain et surhumanité, surnatural et surnaturalisme, supranaturalisme et suprasensible, superessence et supernaturel, de méme qu’extrahumain et extranaturel. Ce gotit, sensible dans A rebours et dans la critique dart, s’accuse encore dans La-bas et dans les oeuvres postérieures, au moment

238

Notes

ou l’écrivain a rompu ouvertement avec le naturalisme de Zola et de ses disciples”

(Eigeldinger, “Du Supranaturalisme au surréalisme,” p. 109). 10. Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas: Dog Among the Fairies (London: Benn, 1957), Ch. 1, “Relations to Surrealism,” p. 23.

1l.... alliance de la peinture et de la danse, de la plastique et de la musique [which would produce] wne sort de sur-réalisme. (Eigeldinger, “Du Supranaturalisme au surréalisme,” p. 126.) 12. Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 57, 58, 63. Breton felt himself overcome as if by a revelation; he wrote later of Vaché

that “he released in me that conspiracy of obscure forces which leads one to believe in .

..a vocation.” Nadeau, History of Surrealism, citing André Breton, “La Confession

dédaigneuse,” Les Pas perdu. 13. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1930), cited by Nadeau, History of Surrealasm, p. 57.

14. Minor figures such as Ivan Goll and Paul Dermée claimed to be responsible for the word’s origin. According to Max Jacob, Pierre Albert-Birot suggested the term to

Apollinaire as an alternative to his vague use of supernaturalisme. 15. As if to fend off all pretenders, Breton conclusively appropriates the term in a polemical note: “Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREAL-

ISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along.” Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), p. 26. 16. “There are, as you know, certain storytellers who cannot invent without identi-

fying with the characters their imagination has dreamt up. . . .” Breton, citing Gérard de Nerval, dedication to Filles de Feu, in Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), p. 25.

17. Ibid. 18. Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Random House, 1967), Ch. II, “Swedenborgism and the Romanticists,” pp. 12-28. 19. Immanence is embedded in the construction of the term surreal itself. Its two components, sur and real, each diverge into ambiguous and even contradictory meaning

(Oxford English Dictionary [1933 edition], s.v. “natural,” “real”). In the late nineteenth century the prefix swr came to mean an excess of or intensification of a particular sensation or quality; the term réel in French includes all “that already exists and is real.” (Dic-

tionnazre alphabétique et analogique de la langue frangarse: Le Robert {1970 edition], s.v. “réel,” “actuel,” “naturel.”) In modern French, its usage is often interchangeable with

l'actuel. The “real is what is genuine, undoubted, or natural; that is, what is actually pre-

Notes

239

sent or involved as opposed to apparent.” (Oxford English Dictionary [1933 edition], s.v. “real.”) In “the real” we return to what is authentic and genuine and not merely apparent. This sense of recurrence or return is expressed by its source in the Latin re, which

has the general sense of “to return, back, or again.” (Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology [1966 edition], s.v. “re,” “real.”) It also refers to “riches, plenty,” suggesting the

fullness of the phenomenological universe to which surrealism points a return. 20. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), p. 25. 21. Nadeau, citing Breton, History of Surrealism, p. 37. 22. André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 46.

Chapter 3 1. Ehade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 11. 2. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), p. 14. 3. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in

the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 31. 4, William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930, rev. 1953 (New York: New

Directions, 1965), p. 240. 5. Otto, The Idea of Holy, p. 6. Otto refers to the numinous as something ethically neutral: “Holy means something quite other than good. Omen has given ‘ominous’

and there is no reason why from numen we should not similarly form a word ‘numinous.” He defines the numinous as “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.”

6. Ibid., p. 64. 7. The occult writings of Freud are discussed in this section, “The ‘Uncanny.” A

detailed discussion of Freud and occultism is found below in Chapter 7. 8. Wilhelm Wundt, Mythus und Religion (1906) and Elemente der Volkerpsychologie (1911), cited extensively by Freud in Totem and Taboo and by Otto in The Idea of the Holy. 9. James Webb, The Occult Establishment, pp. 383-84, referring to Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

10. Eric Sharpe notes that “it was not altogether a good sign that it so unerringly caught the spirit of the age.” Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth,

1975), p. 90. 11. Otto refers to the irrational tendencies of his time in the foreword to the English edition of The Idea of the Holy of 1923: “In this book I have ventured to write of that

240

Notes

which may be called non-rational or ‘supra-rational’ in the depths of the divine nature. I do not thereby want to promote in any way the tendency of our time towards an extravagant and fantastic ‘irrationalism,’ but rather to join issue with it in its morbid

form. ... This book, recognizing the profound import of the non-rational for metaphysic, makes a serious attempt to analyse all the more exactly the feeling which re-

mains where the concept fails” (The Idea of the Holy, p. xixi). 12. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, John W. Harvey, Introduction, p. xi.

13. Sharpe discusses the popularity of The Idea of the Holy in Comparative Religion, pp. 161-67. “As it is, The Idea of the Holy has by its very success obscured the personality of its author, and has thoroughly eclipsed his other works . . . it was not altogether a good sign that it had so unerringly caught the spirit ofthe age.” 14. Webb, The Occult Establishment.

15. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 12.

16. Ibid., p. 14. 17.J.D. Bettis, ed., The Phenomenology of Religion (New York: Harper and Row,

1969), p. 54. 18. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 14.

19. Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in

Phenomenology (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 80.

20. Ehade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 15. 21. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 18.

22. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), p. 38. 23. Ibid. (1930, second Manifesto), pp. 123, 124.

24. Ibid., p. 129. 25. Ibid! p24. 26. Meaning and etymology of the “real” from Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 1966 edition. (Clarendon Press: London, 1966)

27.R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (New York: Dutton, 1960), p. 49.

28. The Diamond Sutra, translated by A. F. Price and Wong Mou-ham (Berkeley, Cal.: Shambhala, 1969), Section 10, p. 37. 29. R. H. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1960), “The

Hsinhsinming,” pp. 102-3. 30. Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Spiritual Growth (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1985). 31. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 38.

Notes

241

32. Ehade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 25.

Chapter 4 1. Sarane Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, trans. Gordon Clough (New York: Praeger,

1970), p. 190. 2. Ibid. 3. This tradition is discussed with reference to the medieval period by Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium. 4. Christine McCorkel, “Sense and Sensibility: An Epistemological Approach to the Philosophy of Art History,” Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism (1981), pp. 37, 48. McCorkel connects modern art historiography with the “logical positivism of the nineteenth century, and with Victorian ideals of progress.”

5. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), Chap. 1, “The Design of Biblical History,” pp. 32-37. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Chap. 1, “The Tradition of Apocalyptic Prophecy,” pp. 19-36. 6. Anna Balakian, Literary Origins of Surrealism (New York: New York University Press, 1947). Balakian discusses the Romantic roots of surrealism. 7. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, Chap. 1, “Precursors,” pp. 9-27.

8. Ibid., p. 9. 9. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Chap. 8, “An Elite of Amoral Supermen

(u),” pp. 148-76; “The Heresy of the Free Spirit, The Sociology of the Free Spirit,”

pp. 148-63; Chap. 9, “The Doctrine of Mystical Anarchism,” pp. 176-86. 10. This thesis is presented by Wilhelm Franger, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch: Outlines of a New Interpretation, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). 11. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, p. 22; Whitney Chadwick, Myth in Surrealist Painting 1929-39 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980).

12. Evan Maclyn Maurer, “In Quest of the Myth: An Investigation of the Relationships Between Surrealism and Primitivism,” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1974. Maurer believes that a fundamental conflict between surrealist in-

dividualism and collective myth rendered the movement impotent. In Myth in Surrealist Painting,

1929-39, Whitney Chadwick discusses Graeco-Roman myths as the

inspiration for much surrealist work.

13. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 67.

242

Notes

14. John Stuart Mill, in an essay on Armand Carrel and Romanticism in literature,

1837, cited in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973 edition), s.v. “Romanticism,” p. 199.

15. Dictionary of the History of Ideas, s.v. “Romanticism,” p. 199. 16. Blake’s verse letter to Thomas Butts, Nov. 22, 1802, lines 87-88. From the fac-

simile edition of Letters from William Blake to Thomas Butts, 1800-1803 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1926). 17. William Blake, Ferusalem, Plate 15, lines 11-20.

18. The theme of neo-barbarism in Romantic thought is discussed by Robert Harbison, Deliberate Regression (New York: Knopf, 1980). Also Dictionary of the History of Ideas, “Romanticism,” s.v. “Volkgeist,” Frank L. Baumer, p. 203. 19. Harbison, Deliberate Regression.

20. Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1937 ed., vol. XII, s.v. “Romanticism,” p. 428. Also Dictionary of the History of Ideas s.v. “Romanticism and Post-Kantian Philosophy,” p. 206. 21. James Webb, The Occult Establishment, Chap. 1, pp. 9, 10, “The Struggle for

the Irrational.” Webb suggests that “the rejection of Reason as a category of thought involved the rejection of the society whose weapon Reason was. The Establishment of late 19th-century Europe . . . was confronted with a selection of idealisms whose kingdoms were not of this world, whose categories of thought were apocalyptic, were based

on visions of absolute values and drew sustenance from traditions of thinking that have, through historical accident, remained rejected throughout the course of Euro-

pean history. This underground of rejected knowledge, comprising heretical religious positions, defeated social schemes, abandoned sciences and neglected modes of speculation has as its core the varied collection of doctrines that can be combined in a bewildering number of ways and that is known as the occult.”

22. Ibid., pp. 7-20. 23. Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Com-

parative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 52. 24. R.S. Short, “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-36,” in The Left Wing Intellectuals Between the Wars, 1919-1939, W. Laquer and George Mosse, eds. (New York:

Harper, 1966). See also Herbert Gershman, The Surrealist Revolution in France (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974). 25. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 19. 26. See Sharpe, Comparative Religion and Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art,

Chaps. 1 and 2, “The Accessibility of the Material,” “The Preparation,” pp. 3-63.

Notes

243

27. Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, pp. xxii, 11.

28. The interest in fundamental visual structures as representations of the thought process was expressed in the theosophical belief in “thought-forms” and in Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Aesthetics, which led to nonobjective or abstract art. A source of these ideas for the early modern artist was Annie Besant, The Life of Thought Forms and The Ancient Wisdom (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1971). 29. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (New York: International Uni-

versities Press, 1953). 30. Sharpe, Comparative Religion, p. 36.

31. Ibid., p. 39. 32. Max Mueller, “Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy” (1889), in Sharpe,

Comparative Religion, p. 40. 33. Sharpe, Comparative Religion, p. 46. Sharpe discusses Mueller’s elegant writing style as part of the appeal of his work.

34. Ibid., pp. 40-46. 35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Brahma,” cited in R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Litera-

ture and Oriental Classics (New York: Dutton, 1960), p. 213. 36. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) (New York: Time, 1962), p. 97. 37. Eliade, Occultism, p. 53.

Chapter 5 1. Mircea Eliade, Occultism, “The Occult and the Modern World,” p. 53.

2. The idea of the femme fatale in art has been explored by numerous authors: Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1972), and

Philippe Julian, Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s (New York: Praeger, 1974).

|

3. Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, pp. 42-47.

4. Pichois, “La Littérature francaise,” pp. 19-23; Laurent Le Sage, The RhumbLine of Symbolism: French Poets from St.-Beuve to Valéry (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), p. 38. 5. Shattuck, “Love and Laughter,” pp. 19-30. Also André Breton, L’Amour Fou

(Paris: Gallimard, 1957); translated by Mary Ann Caws as Mad Love (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987). 6. John Porter Houston, The Demonic Imagination: Style and Theme in French

Romantic Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1969), p. 130.

244

Notes

7. John Senior, The Way Down and Out: The Occult in Symbolist Literature (New

York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 86. 8. “Fe reportai ma pensée a eternelle Isis, la mére et l’épouse sacrée; toutes mes asprrations, toutes mes priéres se confondaient dans ce nom magique, je me sentars revivre en elle, et parfois elle m’apparaissart sous la figure de la Vénus antique, parfors aussi sous

les traits de la Vierge des Chrétiens.” Cited in ibid. 9. “Fe suis la méme que Marie, la méme que ta mére, la méme aussi que sous toutes les forms tu as toujours aimée. A chacune de les épreuves, j'ai quitté l'un des masques

dont je voile mes traits et bientét tu me verras telle que je suis.” Nerval, cited in ibid. 10. Houston, The Demonic Imagination, p. 127. 11. Senior, The Way Down and Out, p. 80; also Houston, The Demonic Imagina-

tion, pp. 127-131.

12. R. D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 18.

13. Ibid., p. 19. 14. Celia Rabinovitch, “Cybele: Myth, Cult, and Iconogenesis, 300 B.c.-A.D. 500,”

research paper, McGill University, May 1981. 15. In this guise she wore the crenellated “mural crown” of cities and became the protectress of cities.

16. Maarten Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult, trans. from the Dutch by A. M. H. Lemmers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 37. 17. In “Horus,” the poet reclaims the robe of Cybele and becomes a devotee of the goddess. Le voyez-vous, dit-elle, il meurt, ce vieux pervers. .. L’aigle a d&ja passé, Vesprit nouveau mappelle, far revétu pour lui la robe du CybéleC’est Venfant bien-aime d’Hermeés et d’Osiris!From Nerval, “Horus,” cited in Senior, The Way Down and

Out, p. 87. In the sonnet “Mythro,” the Goddess and the Muse are combined into a single Ro-

mantic figure, who claims the wine-drunk poet as her own. The name “Mythro” signifies the myrtle plant held sacred to the goddess Aphrodite. Thus the poet is made one of the children of Greece by the divine enchantress Mythro. Crest dans ta coupe aussi que j’avais bu l’ivresse,Et dans l’clair furtif de ton oeil

sourreant,Quand aux preds d’Tacchus on me voyart priant,Car la Muse m’a fait Vun des fils de la Gréce. From Nerval, “Mythro,” cited in Le Sage, Symbolism, p. 44.

18. The cult of Cybele was carried to Rome through the advocacy of the Sibylline Oracles, who suggested in their epigrammatic books to bring the Goddess from Asia Minor.

Notes

245

In fact, this was actually accomplished in 205 B.C., when the Romans imported the cult and statue of Cybele to aid in the Punic wars with Hannibal. In about 205 B.c., the Ro-

mans were losing the Punic wars to Hannibal. At home they were beset with bizarre phenomena such as showers of stones. The Sibylline books were consulted, which told that

the enemy would be driven out if the Great Mother of Ida could be brought to Rome. Ironically, the Sibyls were from Asia Minor, and they recommended their own religion to

the Romans. Their injunction to “bring the Great Mother from Asia Minor” was successful; King Attalus of Pergamum was cooperative, and it is said that the original black meteorite in whose form she was worshipped was given to the Romans. 19. “Ultima Cumaei venit jam caminis aetas.” Le Sage, Symbolism, pp. 45-46.

20. They will return, these Gods for whom you always weep! Time will restore the order of ancient days. 21. Houston, The Demonic Imagination, p. 128. Houston comments, “Godhead

is female for Nerval; the figure of Apollo vanishes behind these feminine ones: one can sense an implied contrast with the overwhelmingly masculine deity of the JudaeoChristian tradition. Female gods are usually associated with nature and fertility,

whence that plant imagery and also that of the seed in the cave. Despite the fact that the Children of Fire are opposed to the Children ofClay, the former possess the fecund depths of the earth and the subterranean regions of grottoes and caverns. They have an emblematic beast, the fire-breathing and cave-dwelling dragon, who,

as in the myth of Cadmus, will be the author of their reborn race. The nexus of

analogies in the quatrains of Delfica seems to imply that the rite of Fire has gone underground during the Christian era, and has drawn new strength from its chthonic, female origins.” 22. Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings, translated and with critical introduction

and notes by Geoftrey Wagner (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Paperbacks, 1957), p. 221. Nerval, ““Delfica,” also cited by Le Sage, Symbolism, pp. 12-13. 23. The phenomenology of fire also appears in Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), The Psychoanalysis of Fire (La Psychoanalyse de feu), trans. Alan C. M. Ross, preface by Northrop Frye (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). Elemental forces were a preoccupation for the surrealists and Bachelard alike. 24. Le Sage, Symbolism, p. 66.

25. Ibid. 26. Roger Williams, The Horror of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1980), p. 17. 27. Senior, The Way Down and Out, pp. 89-97.

28. Ibid., p. 24.

246

Notes

29. “Qu’est ce que la chute? Si c’est Vunit devenue dualité c’est Dieu qui a chut. En d'autres termes, la création ne serait-elle pas la chute de Dieu?” Baudelaire, Fournaux Intimes, p. 1209, cited in Senior, The Way Down and Out, p. 92.

30. “L’invocation & Dieu ou spiritualité est un désir de monter en grade; celle de Satan, ou animalité, est une joie de descendre. C'est a cette derniére que doivent étre rapportées les amours pour les femmes.” Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes, p. 1203, cited in Senior, The Way Down and Out, p. 24.

31. William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Voice of the Devil,” Blake:

The Complete Poems, 2nd ed., ed. W. H. Stevenson (London and New York: Longman,

1989),p.106. “But the following contraries to these are true:

1. Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this area. 2. Energy is the only life and is from the body, and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy. 3. Energy is eternal delight.” 32. Williams, The Horror of Life.

33. C’est Satan Trismégiste Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté Et le riche metal de notre volonté Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste.

(Senior, The Way Down and Out, p. 95.) 34. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 156. 35. Ibid., p. 158. According to Gershom Scholem, “moral evil according to the Zo-

har is always something which becomes separated and isolated, or something which enters into a relation for which it was not made. Sin always destroys a union.” Cited in Abrams, p. 157.

36. Le Sage, Symbolism, p. 5. 37. Besséde, La Crise de la conscience catholique. “The Religion of Art” in late nineteenth-century France is covered in his last chapter. 38. The symbol and the supernatural were reunited in Baudelaire’s personal vision: Dans certains états de l’dme presque surnaturels, la profondeur de la vie se révéle tout

entiére dans le spectacle, si ordinaire qu’tl sort, qu’on a sous les yeux. Il en devient le symbole. (In certain states of the soul that are almost supernatural, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely within the spectacle, seemingly so ordinary, in front of our eyes. It therein becomes a symbol.) Baudelaire, Jowrnaux Intimes, p. 1189, cited in Senior,

The Way Down and Out, p. 94.

Notes

247

39. Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, pp. 55-85, 67. 40. Eliade, “The Occult and the Modern World,” Occultism, p. 51.

41. Joanny Bricaud,7.K. Huysmans et le Satanisme (Paris, 1913), cited in Senior, The Way Down and Out, pp. 120. In an interview Huysmans related that: “II est indis-

cutable que le Guaita et Péladan pratiquent quotidienment la magie noire. Ce pauvre Boullan était en lutte perpetuelle avec les esprits méchants qu’ils n’ont cess pendant deux ans de lui envoyer de Paris. Rien n'est plus imprécis que ces questions de magie; mais il est tout fait possible que mon pauvre ami Boullan ait succomb un envouement supréme.”

42. Webb, The Occult Establishment, pp. 167, 174.

43. Ibid., p. 168. 44. Senior, The Way Down and Out, pp. 118-123. 45. Ibid., p. 118. Consequently, a duel was fought between the Marquis Stanilas de Guaita and Jules Bois (a disciple of Huysmans), which was followed by yet another duel with swords between Bois and Papus, an associate of de Guaita. 46. Ibid., pp. 121. 47. Ibid., pp. 118-23. 48. “Oh, but its always been that way. The tail ends of all centuries are alike. They’re always periods of vacillation and uncertainty. When materialism is rotten-ripe magic takes root. This phenomenon reappears every hundred years. Not to go further back, look at the decline of the last century. Alongside of the rationalist and atheist you

find Saint-Germain, Cagliosto, Saint-Martin, Gabalis, Cazotte, the Rosicrucian societies, the infernal circles, as now.”J.K. Huysmans, La-Bas (Down There), trans. Keene

Wallis (London: Sphere Books, 1974), p. 227.

49. Ibid., p. 216. 50. Revelation 17:1-18. 51. Ibid. 20:2.

Chapter 6 1. Sharpe, Comparative Religion, pp. 26-35; Chap. 3, “Darwinism Makes Possible,” pp. 47-71. 2. For an analysis of utopianism and Dada, see Alan C. Greenberg, Artists and

Revolution: Dada and the Bauhaus 1917-1925 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979), Chap. 4, “The Quest for Unity and Direction: Individual Community, and

Utopia,” pp. 77-107. 3. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), p. 128.

248

Notes

4. For a discussion of manifesto as a genre, see Sorel Thompson, “Manifesto: A Preliminary Model for Discourse Analysis,” M.A. Thesis, McGill University, 1981. 5. For a discussion of“the uncanny,” see this book, Chapter 1, “The ‘Uncanny.” 6. Webb, The Occult Establishment, p. 365. 7. Linda Henderson and Tom Gibbons, “The Artist, “The Fourth Dimension, and Non-Euclidian Geometry 1900-1930:

A Romance of Many Dimensions,” Ph.D. Diss.,

Yale University, 1975. 8. Webb, The Occult Underground.

9. Ibid. 10. Charles Van Doren, The Idea of Progress (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,

1967), Chap. 7, “Denials of Progress: Theories of Regress and Cycles,” Chap. 9, “Cosmogenic Regress,” pp. 113-97, 326.

11. W.B. Yeats, Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1969), [Oo OO).

12. Jean Arp, “Dadaland,” cited in Hans Richter, DADA: Art and Anti-Art (London:

Thames and Hudson, 1964), p. 25.

13. Willy Verkauf, ed., Dada: Monograph of aMovement (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), p. 13.

14. Ibid. 15. William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage (Greenwich, Conn.:

New

York Graphics Society, 1967); Judi Freeman, Dada and Surrealist Word-Image, with a

contribution by John C. Welchman (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 16. Robert Wright, “Quest for the Mother Tongue,” Atlantic Magazine, April 1991, vol. 267, no. 4, p.42.

17. Ibid., p. 44. 18. Verkauf citing Kurt Schwitters, Dada: Monograph of a Movement, p. 92.

19. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, p. 34. 20. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 109. 21. Roger Cardinal, Surrealism: Permanent Revelation (London: Studio Vesta,

1970), p. 16. 22. Treece, Dylan Thomas: Dog Among the Fairies, Chap. 1, “Relations to Surrealism,” p. 23.

23. Viktor Lowenfeld, The Nature of Creative Activity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939). 24. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, pp. 22-24.

25nlbids p. 22;

Notes

249

26. Seligmann, Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion, “Introduction.”

27. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: 20th-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, “Ethnographic Surrealism” (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University

Press, 1988), p. 137.

28. Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany, p. 5. 29. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, p. 129. 30. Wolfgang Paalen, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1948, in the biography

of Wolfgang Paalen by Celia Rabinovitch, Dictionary ofArt, (London: Macmillan) 1992. 31. Seligmann, Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion.

32. Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, n.d.), pp. 24-25.

Chapter 7 1. Aldous Huxley, Point-Counter Point (London: Doubleday, 1928). 2. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, p. 160. 3. Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, June 12, 1900.

4, Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), p. 26. 5. Ibid., pp. 22-23. 6. Browder, André Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism; and Rubin, Dada, Surrealism

and Their Heritage, pp. 197-216. 7. Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, pp. 13, 26, 56-57, 61, 64, 78, 111, 178,

184)222,254, 241, 8. Browder, André Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism, p. 21. 9. Freud, letter to Stefan Zweig, 1938, Sigmund Freud: His Life in Pictures and

Words, p. 299. 10. Ellwood, Alternative Altars, “Mesmer,” pp. 91-92; “Blavatsky,” pp. 107-11. 11. Celia Rabinovitch, “Occultism and the Idea of Sign: The History of an Idea in

Modern Art, Architecture, and Culture,” Penn State Fournal for Contemporary Criticism, University Park: Penn State Press, 1992. The study of visual semiotics was thor-

oughly developed by the Prague School (c. 1920-40), but the terminology for the

study of signs first originated in the Cours de linguistique générale of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (posthumous publication, 1916). His “sémzologie” referred explicitly to language and was later extended by other theorists to include art, music, and other constructs. The Prague School of Semiotics adapted this approach (c. 1920). 12. Etienne Gilson, Foreword to Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1969), p. ix. 13. Breton, Mantfestoes of Surrealism, 1924, p. 38.

250

Notes

14. Webb, The Occult Establishment, p. 350.

15. Tiriyakian, On the Margin of the Visible, pp. 7, 10. On Freud’s break with Jung,

see Webb, The Occult Establishment, Chap. 6, “The Hermetic Academy,” pp. 363-64. 16. Ellwood, Alternative Altars, “Mesmerism,” pp. 91-92. 17. Ibid. 18. Webb, The Occult Establishment, pp. 353-55. See also Ellwood, Alternative Al-

tars, “Shakers and Spiritualists,” pp. 65-103. 19. Webb, The Occult Establishment, pp. 352-53. 20) Ibid. p..356:

21. Ibid., p. 364. 22. Ibid., p. 384, citing C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe

(New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 178, 179. 23. Webb, The Occult Establishment, p. 384, citing Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflec-

tions, pp. 173-74. 24. Webb, The Occult Establishment, p. 365.

25. Freud, “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy,” 1921, Collected Papers, Vol. IV (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), pp. 158-62. A discussion of Freud within the context of the occult revival of the late nineteenth century is found in Webb, The Occult Estab-

lishment, pp. 345-416. 26. Webb, The Occult Establishment, p. 365. See also Freud, “Dreams and Telepathy,” Collected Papers, vol. IV, pp. 408-35; and “The Occult Significance of Dreams,”

Collected Papers, vol. V, pp. 158-62. 27. Bruno Bettelheim, “Freud and the Soul,” New Yorker, March 1, 1982, pp. 51-93.

28. Ibid., p. 51.

29. Ibid., p. 84. 30. Ibid., p. 86. 31. “Psyche ist ein griechisches Wort und lautet in deutscher Ubersetzung Seele. Psy-

chische Behandlung heisst demnach Seelenbehandlung. . . . Psychische Behandlung will vielmehr besagen: Behandlung von der Seele aus, Behandlung—seelischer oder Korper-

licher Storungen—mut Mitteln, welche zumachst und unmittelbar auf das Seelesche des Menschen einwirken.”

32. John Leo, “Away with ‘Ego’ and ‘Id’: An Analyst Contends That English Translators Distort Freud,” Time, March 22, 1982, p. 76.

33. Bettelheim, “Freud and the Soul,” p. 71.

34. Ibid., pp. 72-73.

Notes

251

35. Janet Malcolm, Jn the Freud Archives (New York: Knopf, 1984). 36. Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words, letter from Freud to Martha Bernays, June 19, 1884.

37. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), pp. 57, 59. 38. Ibid., p. 64. 39. Jeffrey Masson, Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth ofPsychological Healing (New York: Atheneum, 1988), “The Prehistory of Psychotherapy,” pp. 11-45. 40. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Boston: Feminist Press,

1973), Afterword by Elaine R. Hedges. Finished in June 1890, and published in The New England Magazne of January 1892. Small, Maynard, and Company issued a monograph of The Yellow Wallpaper in June 1899. 41. Masson, Against Therapy, p. 41. 42. Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, eds. Lyn

Gamwell and Richard Wells, with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York: State University of New York, Freud Museum, London in Association with Harry N. Abrams).

43, Ibid. 44. Letter to Stefan Zweig, February 7, 1931, in Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words. 45. Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words, p. 234. 46. Lyn Gamwell, “The Origins of Freud’s Antiquities Collection,” Sigmund Freud

and Art, p. 27. 47. Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words, p. 235. See also Sigmund Freud and Art, “Freud’s Library and an Appendix of Texts Related to Antiquities,” pp. 184-92. 48. Sigmund Freud and Art, p. 185.

49. Ibid.,p.186. 50. On Freud and art, see Sigmund Freud, On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), pp. 11-43.

51. Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words, p. 315. 52. Ibid., p. 215 (Hesse).

53. Ibid., p. 215 (Rilke). 54. Ibid., p. 269. 55. With reference to Freud and Reich, see Reich Speaks of Freud: Wilhelm Reich Discusses His Work and His Relationship with Sigmund Freud, ed. Mary Higgins (New York: Noonday Press, 1967); also see Janine Chassequet-Smirgel, Freud or Reich: Psychoanalysis or Illusion? (London: Free Association Books, 1986).

252

Notes

56. Freud spoke of Rank to his friend Lou Andreas Salomé as “a faithful son” for fifteen years but one who, in 1924, was becoming rebellious. Angela Livingstone, Salome

(New York: Moyer Bell, 1984), p. 178. 57. Masson, Against Therapy, Chap. 3, “Ferenczi’s Secret Diary and the Experiment in Mutual Analysis,” pp. 75-93. See also Webb, The Occult Establishment, pp. 369-70, 373 on Ferenczi’s experiments with thought transference.

Chapter 8 1. De Chirico, cited in Breton, Surrealism and Painting, pp. 16-17. Also in James Thrall Soby, Georgio de Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955). From a manuscript by de Chirico, “On Music,” p. 245.

2. The copyright of the letters went to Jean Paulhan after Eluard’s death. The originals are now in the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, James Thrall Soby

bequest. 3. James Thrall Soby, The Early Chirico (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 42. 4. He studied under a Greek teacher named Mavrudes and at the age of twelve went

to the Athens Polytechnic Institute. Isabella Far, de Chirico (New York: Abrams, 1968).

5. “... from that extremely remote memory of my infancy, from that dark and gloomy room which I see again as one sees a dream again within the mind, there

emerges a symbol that is minute and precious, a symbol of perfection: the little gilded discs, each with a hole pierced in the centre, from my mother’s oriental headdress.” Giorgio de Chirico, The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, trans. M. Crosland (Miami:

University of Miami Press, 1962), p. 14. 6. Ibid., p. 55. 7. Soby, The Early Chirico, p. 82.

8. Apollinaire, cited in Maurizio

Faiolo

dell’Arco, “De

Chirico

1911-1915,” De Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), p. 19. 9. See Chap. 2 above, “Naming the Unnameable.” 10. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 16.

11. “De Chirico in Paris, 1911-1915,” pp. 20-28. 12. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 16.

13. Soby, The Early Chirico, p. 12. 14. Ibid., p. 47.

15. Ibid., p. 14. 16. Gordon Onslow-Ford; cited in ibid., p. 31.

:

in Paris,

Notes

253

17. Ibid.,p. 47. 18. Ibid., p. 38. 19. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, pp. 58-59. 20. William Rubin, “De Chirico and Modernism,” De Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), pp. 72-75.

21. De Chirico, The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, p. 67. 22. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 63. 23. Ibid. 24. Soby, The Early Chirico, p. 93.

25. In ibid., p. 246. 26. The English version of de Chirico’s letters is from the translations in Soby’s Grorgio de Chirico. I had access to the original French version from the manuscripts in the Museum of Modern Art Library Archives, New York, James Thrall Soby archives.

I cross-referenced the hand-written letters against the typescript in the MOMA library.

The English version of the Manzfestoes of Surrealism is from the translation by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974) as are all other English quotes from the manifestoes found in this book. For the French version, I used André Breton, Manzfestes du Surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).

27. Breton, Manzfestoes of Surrealism (1930), p. 178.

28. Ibid., p. 173. 29. All quotes hereafter unless accompanied by an endnote are taken from Giorgio de Chirico’s Meditations published in Soby, Giorgio de Chirico by James Thrall. 30. Rubin, De Chirico. The article by Laura Rosenstock, “De Chirico’s Influence on the Surrealists” (pp. 111-30), supports the conventional wisdom that Freud was the central theoretical influence on surrealist art. 31. Rosenstock, “De Chirico’s Influence on the Surrealists,” p. 111. 32. Rubin, “De Chirico and Modernism,” pp. 70-71.

Chapter 9 1. A thorough discussion of religions is found in W. Dupré, Relagion in Primitive Cultures:

A Study in Ethno Philosophy (The Hague: Mouton, 1985), pp. 43-52,

308-29. Various definitions of fetishism as a religious and psychological phenomenon are in Vergilius Ferm, ed., An Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), p. 277; in Geoffrey Parrinder, Dictionary of Non-Christian Religions (London: Hilton Educational Publications, 1971), p. 98; and in Leslie Shepard, ed.,

254

Notes

Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984), pp. 461-62.

2. Mana is a Melanesian term that suggests “a mysterious but active power which

belongs to certain people, and generally to the souls of the dead and all spirits. . . . It is a force different in quality from physical forces and it works arbitrarily.” Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 19-25. For other interpretations of this term, see Otto, The Holy, pp. 120-21 and Freud, Totem and Taboo, pp. 19-20, 33-34.

3. The idea of fetishism in the history, psychology, and phenomenology of religion derives from ideas later related to psychoanalytic theory. This interrelationship proposes that (1) a fetish is a material object, (2) it is employed for magico-religious purposes, (3) it operates according to principles of sympathetic magic, and (4) it is out of the ordinary in a positive and attractive or negative and repellent manner. 4. Dictionary of Non-Christian Religions, p. 98.

5. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, pp. 60-65. See also Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, p. 80. 6. Gell, “Magic, Perfume, Dream,” p. 27. 7. Breton, “The Crisis of the Object,” Surrealism and Painting, p. 280.

8. Jean Bazaine, Notes sur la peinture d’aujourd’hut (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1953) %p..124; 9. Marcel Duchamp in Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 36.

10. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1945), p. 56. Henceforth referred to as Cassirer, Language and Myth. 11. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 23.

12. Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (New York: Mentor, 1958), p. 111. 13. Ibid.,p. 100. 14. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 46.

15. Cassirer, Language and Myth, p. 87. 16. James G. Frazer, “Sympathetic Magic,” Reader in Comparative Religion, eds.

William Lessa and Evon Vogt (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), pp. 415-25. 17. Breton, “The Crisis of the Object,” Surrealism and Painting, p. 279.

18. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” pp. 369-407. See also this book, Chap. 1, section on “The Uncanny.” 19. Freud, “The Uncanny’,” pp. 378-81; refutation of theory of the uncanny as “intellectual uncertainty.”

Notes

255

20. See Chap. 11, below, section on “Woman in Symbolism and Surrealism,” for further discussion. 21. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, p. 190.

Chapter 10 1. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 46.

2. Ibid. 3. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 55. 4. Calvin Tomkins, The World of Marcel Duchamp, 1887- (New York: Time,

1966), p. 120. 5. William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. with an

introduction and notes by Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). There

are precedents for this animistic world view in earlier traditions; the resonances of Wordsworth’s Romantic pantheism are expressed earlier in Chaucer’s moving poetry about “daysies”: Of alle the floures in the mede

Than love I most these floures whyte and rede, Swiche as men callen daysies in our town. To hem I have so great affection As I sayde erst, whan comen is the May

That in my bed ther daweth me no day That I nam up, and walking in the mede To seen these floures again the sonne sprede,

Whan hit upryseth erly by the morwe;

That blisful sighte softneth al my sorwe. (Chaucer, cited in Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, p. 82)

The same isolation of the object that endows it with a curious sense of significance

is expressed in Chaucer’s perception of the daisies, haloed against the sun’s rays. 6. Gérard de Nerval, in Senior, The Way Down and Out, p. 88.

7. Josephine Withers, “The Famous Fur-Lined Teacup and the Anonymous Meret Oppenheim,” Art Magazine (1977), pp. 94-95. 8. Rabinovitch, “Cybele: Myth, Cult, and Iconogenesis.” See also Maarten Ver-

maseren, The Cult of Cybele (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), pp. 10.

9. The phenomenon of the “Black Madonna” has been explored by Gilles Quispel, a Jungian psychologist.

256

Notes

10. Krappe, Genése, cited in Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 181. See also

Timmer, “The Wyrd,” and this book, Chapter 1, section on “The Weird.”

11. Withers, “Meret Oppenheim,” p. 94. D2 sibide p95. 13. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 168. 14. Ibid., p. 165. 15. Louise W. Lippincott, The Unnatural History of Dragons (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1981), p. 4. Henceforth referred to as Lippincott, Dragons. 16. Withers, “Meret Oppenheim,” p. 96. 17. Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, p. 119. 18. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, p. 104.

19. Shattuck, The Banquet Years, p. 336. 20. Dali, cited by Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, p. 138. 21. Elias Ashmole, ed., Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, a reprint of the London edition, 1652, with a new introduction by Alan G. Debus (New York and London:

Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967). Cited in Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype

(Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), pp. 262-63. 22. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, pp. 262, 263, 265. 23. Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), p. 63.

24. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, pp. 262, 263, 265.

Chapter 11 1. Many of the ideas of the Corpus Hermeticum are detailed in Senior, The Way Down and Out, pp. 23-29. Also in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism and in Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. 2. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, pp. 72-82. 3. This development is forcibly delineated by

Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the

Millennium, pp. 157-62; also by Frances Yates in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 4. Lester B. Bridaham, Gargoyles, Chiméres and the Grotesque in French Gothic Sculpture (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1930), p. xiii. 5. E. P. Evans, Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture (London: W. Heinemann, 1896; reprint by Gale Research Company, 1969), p. 180. 6. Bridaham, Gargoyles, p. xiii.

Notes

257

7. Samuel Noah Kramer, ed., Mythologies of the Ancient World (New York: Dou-

bleday, 1961), pp. 30, 150, 155, 200, 201, 210, 254, 298, 299, 386, 387, 424. See also Lippincott, Dragons. 8. James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper and Row,

1979), pp. 23-68. 9. Bridaham, Gargoyles, p. x.

10. Timmer, “Wyrd in Anglo-Saxon Prose and Poetry,” p. 25. 11. Yates, The Occult Philosophy, pp. 83-96.

12. Ibid., pp. 116-17. 13. Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis. 14. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Random House, 1988).

15. James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 228. 16. A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of aDead Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 119-206.

17. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic, p. 18. 18. Gilbert Highet, “The Mad World of Hieronymus Bosch,” Horizon, Spring

1970, vol. XII, no. 2, pp. 66-80. 19. Pierre, “Decalcomania,” A Dictionary of Surrealism, p. 50. 20. Ernst’s obsession with birds and his ornithological alter ego, Loplop, are men-

tioned in the following studies: Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, p. 88,

and Pamela Pritzker, Ernst (New York: Leon Amiel, 1975), pp. 20-26. 21. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, p. 88. 22. Whitney Chadwick, “Eros or Thanatos: The Surrealist Cult of Love Reexamined,” Artforum, no. 14 (November 1975), p. 55.

23. slbid., pa53: 24. Ibid., pp. 45-56. 25. Sidra Stitch, Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art, with essays by James Clifford,

Tyler Stovall, and Steven Kovacs (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990).

ZO.1bid, pc 72 27. These ancient spirit figures are discussed in most books on Oriental art. See Benjamin Rowland, The Art and Architecture of India: Buddhist, Hindu, Fain (England: Penguin, 1977).

28. Mortimer Wheeler, Roman Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981). Henceforth referred to as Wheeler, Roman Art and Architecture.

258

Notes

29. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 163-82.

30. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 29.

31 Abidsp. 33. 32. Ibid., Chap. 3, “Psyche,” Depth-Hades-Underground and Underworld-Dream, pp. 23-68.

33. lbid-)p.i33. 34. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, p. 190.

35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Sidra Stitch, oan Miré: The Development of a Sign Language (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1980), p. 30.

38. This ambiguous term, “sign,” cannot be understood as the semiotic model, “signifier-signified,” but in the work of Miré must instead be recognized as the mystical sign or gesture that has multiple connotations. Stitch, Joan Miré. 39. Ibid., pp. especially 35-40.

Chapter 12 1. Leo Steinberg, ”This Is a Test,” New York Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 9, May 13,

1993, p.24. 2. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 48. 3. Ibid.,p. 19. 4. Franz Steiner, Jaboo (London: Cohen and West, 1956), p. 146.

5. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 14. 6. Freud, Totem and Taboo. 7. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 18.

8. See Morse Peckham, Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts (New York: Schocken, 1973); and also Van Rensselaer Potter, “Disorder As a Built-in Com-

ponent of Biological Systems: The Survival Imperative,” Zygon Fournal of Religion and Science, 1977, pp. 135-49.

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Index

Abrams, M. H., 86

anarchism, 9, 64

Abstraction and Empathy (Worringer), 67

animism, 181-83, 190

absurdity, 27-28, 40

Apollinaire, Guillaume, 39-40, 96, 125

Adamites, 61, 203

African art, 107-9

Against the Grain (A Rebours) (Huysmans), 87, 89 alchemy, 19-20, 36, 131 of matter, 191-99

apocalypticism, 9, 100-102, 226-27 de Chirico and, 146-47, 149-50, 157

Apparition, The (Moreau), 87, 88, 90 Aquinas, Thomas, 35 Aragon, Louis, 12, 105

archaeological metaphor, 137-43 archaic art, 11-12, 16, 95, 106-7, 112.

as metaphor for corporeality, 83-87 philosopher’s stone, 197-98 Alchemy (Burckhardt), 199

archetypes, 19, 46-47, 75, 118, 202

Alexandrian, Sarane, 57, 218

Arch of Constantine, 207

Altar for “La Chevelure de Falmer”

Arp, Hans (Jean), 101

See also Primitive cultures;

Primitivism.

(Lam), 57, 183-85, 184, 212, 218,

art history. See Modern art history

226

Ashmole, Elias, 197

ambivalence, 4, 12-13, 26-27, 228-31 sacred and, 44-45, 48-49 American Committee for Aid to Intellectuals, 118

American Psychoanalytic Association

(APA), 129

Assault on Truth, The: Freud’s

Suppression of the Seduction Theory

(Masson), 133 Astarte Syriaca (Rosetti), 73, 74

astral plane, 123, 130 asylums, women in, 133-34

amour fou, 4,32, 76, 109, 213

Atget, Eugéne, 154

Amour Fou, L’: Photography and

“Auguries of Innocence” (Blake), 65 Aurélia (Nerval), 76

Surrealism (Krauss), 25

275

276

Index

automatic writing, 76, 147 automatism, 120-21, 123-24

Bottle Rack (Duchamp), 104, 171, 171-72

Boullan, Abbé, 71, 89

Bachofen, Johann, 192

boundaries, 48-52, 223-24

Ball, Hugo, 102-3

Bourgeois, Louise, 159

Basho, 51

Braque, Georges, 98

Bataille, Georges, 110, 199, 214

Brauner, Victor, 57, 178, 179, 184, 218

Baudelaire, Charles, 11, 29, 52, 246n.38

Break of Day, The (Delvaux),

71-74,supernatural, view of, 38-39, 41, 83-87

Les Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs de mal),

59, 69

214-15,

BUSS

Brethren ofthe Free Spirit, 61, 203

Breton, André, 5, 10-12, 29, 40, 49-50,

88, 104-6, 118, 213, 238n.12.

Bazaine, Jean, 171-72

on absolute reality, 27

Beardsley, Aubrey, 81

“The Crisis of the Object,” 171 de Chirico and, 146-47, 150-51,

Beja, Morris, 30 Belle Dame Sans Merci, La (Keats), 202

Bellmer, Hans, La Poupé, 24-25, 25, 214

156-58, 160-61

found object and, 187-88 Freud and, 16, 120-21

Bergson, Henri, 28, 97

on marvelous, 44

Bernays, Martha, 131-32

Surrealism and Painting, 42, 150-51,

Bernheim, Hippolyte, 126 bethel stone, 192 Bettelheim, Bruno, 128-30

biblical imagery, 10, 65-66, 77, 90-91,

195

157-58 See also Manifesto of Surrealism. Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even of 1915-23 (Duchamp), 22-23, 28

Black Madonnas, 192, 224

Bronté, Charlotte, 21

Blake, William, 9, 10, 62-63, 65-66, 84, 231, 246n.31

Buddhism, 5, 9, 51-52

blasphemy, 12, 226

Bureau des Recherches Surréalistes

Blavatsky, Helena, 89, 123

Bloch-Bauer, Adele, 136

Burckhardt, Titus, 199

(Bureau of Surrealist Research), 122-23, 147

Bocklin, Arnold, 153

body, 18, 21-22

Cabalistic Rosicrucian Brotherhood, 89

alchemical transformation of, 83-87

Cabaret Voltaire, 102

dismemberment, 23-25, 213-14

Campbell, Joseph, 46 Cannibal Feast (Oppenheim), 217, 218 Caresses of the Sphinx, The (Khnopff), 12578

bohemianism, 9, 12, 59, 61, 71, 83 Bois, Jules, 89 Bosch, Hieronymus, 61, 62, 211

277

Index

Carlyle, Thomas, 37, 74 Carra, Carlo, 156

relationship with surrealists, 156-58,

162

Cassirer, Ernst, 174, 177

uncanny in work of, 151-53

cast shadows, 196

Works The Child’s Brain, 147-48,

Catholicism. opposition to, 59, 61, 71, 83, 87, 208,

226

148

The Disquieting Muses, 154-56, 155, IU7/

return to, 87, 89-90

The Enigma of the Day, 150, 151

See also Christianity.

Meditations, 124-25, 146, 150,

Caught Hand (Giacometti), 181-83, 182

158-61, 164

cave art, 207, 224

Memoirs, 148-49, 157

Celtic deities, 13-14

The Mystery and Melancholy of a

Chadwick, Whitney, 212 chance, 30-32, 236n.49 Chaplin, Charlie, 28

Charcot, Jean-Martin, 126

Chateau des Pyrenees (Magritte), 189, 190

Street, 152, 152-53

Portrait of Guillaume Apollinarre, 150

The Red Tower, 150 Christianity, 90-91, 195, 222.

opposition to paganism, 201-8, 222

Chemical Nuptials, The (Ernst), 20

symbolist view of, 76, 80

Chemical Wedding, The, 19-20

weird and, 13-14

childhood, cult of, 65-66, 107

Children of Clay/Children of Fire,

77-78, 245n.21

See also Catholicism.

Clifford, James, 109 Cocteau, Jean, 39

Child’s Brain, The (de Chirico), 147-48,

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 37

148 Chirico, Giorgio de, 4, 10, 26, 29, 43,

colonialism, 125-26

114-15, 145-64, 176, 252n.5 Apollinaire and, 146-47, 149-50, I S7/

Breton and, 146-47, 150-51, 156-58, 160-61

Columbian Exposition (1893), 99 communism, 10, 18, 64, 111-12 Comparative Mythology (Mueller), 69

Confessions, The (Crowley), 108

Congrés International pour la Détermination des Directives et la

early paintings, 146-53

Défense de l’Esprit Moderne,

imagination, view of, 160-61

105-6

later work, 153-56

Conrad, Joseph, 70

Memoirs, 148-49, 157

consciousness, xvi-xvii, 4-5, 63, 96,

metaphysical paintings, 145-46, 154, Sa

poetic conception of art, 158-64

115, 213. Rationalism boundaries, 48-52

278

Index

nonrationality, 4, 11, 15-16, 44-45,

in symbolist art, 208-10

47, 64 poetic, 158-64

transformation into demonic, 203-4 uncanny and, 18-23

surrealist state of mind, xvu, 42-44,

woman as, 72-74, 77-80, 83-84,

48, 50-53

201-8, 213-20

unconscious mind, 63, 67-68

See also Epiphany.

See also Deities; Goddesses; Mythology; Occultism

contradictions, 44-45, 48-50, 98,

daimon, 77

228-29 conundrum objects, 104-5 Corpus Hermeticum (Hermes

Dali, Salvador, 4, 26, 29, 157, 187, 223

Trismegistus), 86, 203

Acommodations of Desire, 197-98, 198

Drawing of Freud, 121-22, 122

correspondences, 37, 123, 130, 189

Freud, meeting with, 121-22

Courbet, Gustave, 83, 84

Lobster Telephone, 178, Portrait of Gala, 26

179

Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure), 103 Crises of the Object, The (Breton), 187-88 “Crisis of the Object, The” (Breton), 171

Death in Venice (Mann), 70

Crowley, Aleister, 108

decadence, 72-74, 80-82

cubism, 107, 109, 153

decalcomania, 211

Cumaean Sibyl, 205, 206

“De Chirico And Modernism” (Rubin),

Cybele (Cumaean Sibyl), 75-80, 90, 192-93, 203-7, 244n.17, 244-45n.18 Dadaism, 70, 96, 101-2, 171-73

language and, 102-6 daemonic, 77-78, 201-3. Baudelaire and, 82-87

The Rainy Taxi, 23-24, 24

dandy, 80-82 danger, 52, 224, 227-28

death, 13, 24-26

162-63

Déesse et Chimére (Goddess and Chimera) (Rochegrosse), 90-91, 91 deities, 4, 233n.10. chthonic, 77-78, 204-5 weird and, 13-14

See also Daemonic; Goddesses;

Mythology; Occultism

Christian conception of, 203-4 hybrid deities, 209-11

Delacroix, Eugéne, 66

imagination and, 212-20

Delvaux, Paul, 26, 27,

redemption and, 87-91

Demian (Hesse), 134

Satan, 84-86, 91, 203

Diaghilev, Sergey, 39

serpent imagery, 193-95, 225-26

Diamond Sutra, 51

in surrealist art,

Diana (goddess), 211

211-12

“Delfica” (Nerval), 78-80, 207, 245n.21 214-16, 215

Index

279

discards, 104

Eliot, T. S., 30, 46, 222

Disquieting Muses, The (de Chirico), 154-56, 155, 157

Eluard, Paul, 10, 12, 147, 156, 213

Elizabethan Renaissance, 19, 205

Documents, 110

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 70, 99

Dods, John Bovee, 125

emotion, 3-4, 6, 180-81

dolls. See Mannequins

empiricism, 7, 36, 58,95

Dominguez, Oscar, 118, 119, 181, 182,

oH |

of Freud, 123-24, 126-28, 130, 147, 160

double/doppelganger, 22-26, 181, 212,

surrealist use of, 122-23

225 Down There (La-bas) (Huysmans), 59,

Encausse, Gérard, 89

87, 89-90 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 97 Dream, The (Puvis de Chavannes), 82

Enigma of the Day, The (de Chirico),

dream-photographs, 195-97

epiphany, xvu, 4-5, 6, 12, 29-33, 43, 60,

dreams, 107-8, 124, 130-31 de Chirico’s view, 159-61 symbolist movement and, 72, 76,

150, 151 Enlightenment, 21, 38-39, 59, 62, 64

Lobe 222031 chance and, 30-32

in de Chirico’s work, 145-46

imagination and, 109-10

80-82

underworld and, 216-17

Duchamp, Marcel, 10, 32, 171-73, 222 Bottle Rack, 104,

enigma, 145, 148-50

171, 171-72

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even of 1915-23, 22-23, 28 Green Box, 22

The Large Glass, 22-23, 28

DYN, 112

modern, 29-30 Ernst, Max, 4, 10-11

The Chemical Nuptials, 20 The Hat Makes the Man, 173

The Robing of the Bride, 208, 211-12 The Virgin Mary Spanking the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses, 219, 224-27, 225, 229 CTOSH Onl lie/aee salle

alchemy and, 19-20 Early Chirico, The (Soby), 162

amour fou, 4, 32,76, 109, 213

Eastern philosophy, xvi, 5, 9, 51-52,

daemonic and, 10, 71

68-69

fetishism and, 23-28, 183-85

Echo, The (Delvaux), 26, 27

matter and, 191-93, 197

Eckstein, Emma, 133, 134

taboo and, 223-28

ecstasis, 52

uncanny and, 18, 23-26, 28

Einstein, Albert, 98

woman as femme fatale, 4, 73, 78,

Eliade, Mircea, 43, 49, 53, 64, 174, 189, 216

136-37, 143, 194, 205, 208 See also Sexuality.

280

Index

ethnographic exhibits, 187-88

“Flight from Reason,” 64

ethnography, 11, 63

Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs de mal)

archaic art and, 108-11

search for origins, 95-96, 103-4

(Baudelaire), 59, 69, 82-87, 89

Fludd, Robert, 19

evolutionary theory, 67, 69, 95-96

form, 113

exoticism, 66-70, 202

formalism, 7, 102, 158

experience, xvi, 6-7, 15-16, 113

found objects, 187-88

Exposition Internationale du

Fountain (Duchamp), 172, 172-73, 226,

Surréalisme (1947), 57, 184,

217-19 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (1957), 217 Exposition Surrealiste d’Objects, (1936), 187 expressionism, 84, 85, 107

extraordinary, 3-4, 15, 42, 48-49,

167-69

229 fourth dimension, 96, 98, 122, 130 frames and framing, 25-26, 49, 167, 176-85, 223-24

France, Anatole, 88

France, occult revival, 16-17. See also

Catholicism. Frances of Assisi, 36 Franger, Wilhelm, 61 Frazer, James, 45, 46

familiarity, 17-18, 23

free association, 32, 68, 120-21, 124

fantasy, 133, 137-38, 141

Free Spirits, 61, 203

fate, 13-14, 78, 192-93, 205, 233n.10

French Revolution, 64

Faust, 205

Freud, Magus of Dream (Dominguez),

Faust (Goethe), 38 feminist criticism, 213-14 femme fatale, 4, 73, 78, 136-37, 143,

194, 205, 208

118-20, 119 Freud, Sigmund, 3-4, 10-11, 23, 97-98,

104, 106, 114-15, 162. archeological metaphor and, 137-43

fertility, 191-92, 212-15, 217

automatism and, 120-21, 123-24

fetishism, 8, 50, 108-9, 111, 113,

colleagues, 141-42, 251n.56 collection of antiquities, 137-40

167-73, 170, 222, 253-54n.3 eros and, 183-85

power of, 168-70, 177-78, 183 in surrealist art, 167-73

empiricism of, 123-24, 126-28, 130,

147, 160 free association and, 68, 120-21, 124

Figaro, Le, 87,88

legitimacy, 126-28, 130

Filles de Feu, Les (Nerval), 40-41

mythic principles, use of, 139-41

films, 223

occultism and, 45, 125-28

First International Congress of Psychoanalysis, 98 Fliess, Wilhelm, 124, 130-31, 133

secrecy and, 131-37 self-image, 118-20, 131-32 soul and, 128-31, 143

Index

surrealists and,

117-25

281

Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 38

on taboo, 227, 228

Golden Age, 60, 63

translations, 128-30

Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 46

uncanny, view of, 15-17, 140, 223,

Goldwater, Robert, 159

234nn.21, 22

Graeco-Roman thought, 201-2, 204-5

women and, 131-37

Grammar of Ornament, The (Jones), 66

Works, 128

Gramophone Sculpture (Dominguez),

The Interpretation of Dreams, 125

181, 182

Totem and Taboo, 49,111

Great Mother, The (Neumann), 192 Green Box (Duchamp), 22 Green Spectator (Oppenheim), 193, 193-95

“The ‘Uncanny”’, 15-16, 25

grottoes, 77, 207

“On Male Hysteria,” 126 “Psychical Treatment,” 129

The Psychoanalysis of Dreams, 118

See also Psychoanalysis. “Freud and the Soul” (Bettelheim), 128-30

Guaita, Stanilaus de, 89

Friedrich, Caspar David, 43, 71

Gurdjieff, Georges, 104

Fur-Lined Teacup (Oppenheim), 174, B75, 177:

hagios, 35

Guilbert, Yvette, 141 Guillaume, Paul, 150

Gauguin, Paul, 11, 110

Hamlet (Shakespeare), 20 Hat Makes the Man, The (Ernst), 173 Head of aWoman (Mir6), 212, 218-19, 226 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 70

Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzen, 19

heimlich, as term, 17-18

Gell, Andrew, 21, 170

Hermes Trismegistus, 83, 86, 203

geography. See Spatial concepts Géricault, Théodore, 65

hermeticism, 86

German Romanticism, 63, 71, 75

Germany, 16, 63

hierophany, 43-44 Hillman, James, 217

Giacometti, Alberto, 181-83, 182, 183

Hinduism, 69, 70, 99-100, 215

Gift (Ray), 177, 178 Guorgio de Chirico (Soby), 162

historical reason, 16,95

goddesses, 14, 72, 75-80, 212, 216-17.

history.

Garden of Earthly Delights (Bosch), 61, 62 gargoyles, 204, 205, 224

Cybele, 75-80, 90, 192-93, 203-7, 244n.17, 244-45n.18 See also Daemonic; Mythology; Occultism.

Hesse, Hermann, 134, 141

historicism, 5, 7,9, 164, 221 of knowledge, xvi, 8-9, 113, 175-76

of religion, 67-70

See also Modern art history. Hitchcock, Alfred, 223

282

Index

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Huizinga), 105 Houston, John Porter, 245n.21 Huizinga, Johan, 31, 105

Inspired Scholar, The (Rembrandt), 205,

206 International Exhibition of Surrealism

(1938), 23

Hu-neng, 51

Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 125

Huxley, Aldous, 108, 117, 223

isolation, 49, 223-24

humor, 27-28, 40, 123, 222

Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 39, 71-72, 87-91,

of object, 43, 167-68, 173-74

247nn.45, 48

Down There (La-bas), 59 Against the Grain (A Rebours), 87,

89 hybrid deities, 209-11

hypnosis, 123, 125-26

James, William, 45, 46, 97-98 Janco, Marcel, 102

Jane Eyre (Bronté), 21 Jarry, Alfred, 27-28, 40

Jerusalem (Blake), 62-63 Jones, Ernest, 129-30

iconography, 162-64, 201 Idea of the Holy, The (Otto), 16, 44-45, 47-48, 239-40n.11, 240n.13

imagination, xvi, 6, 60, 106-15, 167 de Chirico’s view, 160-61

epiphany and, 109-10 geography of, 106-15

Jones, Owen, 66

Jones, William, 103 Joyce, James, 4-5, 29, 222

Judith (Klimt), 136 Jung, Carl Gustav, 46-47, 63, 124-25,

127, 130 juxtaposition, 228-29

magic and, 110-11 mythology of, 10, 208

Kabbalah, 19, 86, 131, 205

play and, 31-32, 112, 118-20

Keats, John, 202 Key of Mysteries, The (Levi), 64

political solutions and, 111-12 Romantic view of, 37, 97

Khnopff, Ferdinand, 72, 73

sacred and, 50-53

kinaesthetic sensation, 107-8

scientific study of, 97-98

Klimt, Gustav, 134-36, 135, 136

woman as, 212-20

knowledge, 7, 36, 46.

Imago, 16

cultural context, 58-60

immanence, 42, 65, 176, 188,

history of, xvi, 8-9, 113, 175-76

238-39n.19 informé, 214 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 66 Inquisition, 19

mysticism and, 59-60

insanity, 65, 107, 207-8

insight, xvi, 8-9, 51, 57

origins, 65-67, 70 politics of, 58-59, 113, 117-18 rejected, xv-xvi, 10, 19, 57-58, 59-60,

64, 242n.21 Romantic view of, 59-60, 62-64

283

Index

supernatural and, 58-59 See also Mythology.

Magritte, René, 168-69, 222

Lacan, Jacques, 16

Chateau des Pyrenees, 189, 190 The Listening Chamber, 168, 169 The Perfidy (or Treachery) of Images, 173, 174

Lam, Wilfredo, 57, 183-85, 184, 212,

Personal Values, 168-69

Krauss, Rosalind, 15, 25

218, 226, 228

The Rape, 21-22, 22

lamassu, 203, 210

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 70

Lang, Andrew, 97

language, 102-6 Large Glass, The (Duchamp), 22-23, 28

Mama, Papa Is Wounded! (‘Tanguy), 195-97, 196 Mamelles de Tirésias, Les (Apollinaire), 39-40

Langer, Suzanne, 175-76

Lawrence, D. H., 98

mana, 35, 169, 178, 253n.2

leftism, 10, 12, 64

manifestoes, 5, 8-9, 19, 96

Leiris, Michel, 109

linguistics, 103-4

Manifesto of Surrealism I (Breton), 16, 28, 35, 40-42, 49-50, 96, 120-21, 147, 153, 159-61 Manifesto of Surrealism II (Breton), 50-51, 111-12, 160

Listening Chamber, The (Magritte), 168,

Mann, Thomas, 70

Lettres de guerre (Vaché), 40 Levi, Eliphas, 64 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 11

169

mannequins, 23-26, 28, 154-57,

literature, 20-21, 29, 222

180-83, 214 Marlowe, Christopher, 205

Littérature, 16, 105-6

marvelous, 5,37, 44, 104

Lobster Telephone (Dali), 79, 178

Masson, André, 10, 23, 214

logos, 13, 96, 222

Lowenfeld, Viktor, 107-8

Masson, Jeffrey, 133 materia prima, 197-99

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 14, 20

matter, 50, 80.

literary criticism, 162-64

Matta, Roberto, 228 machine art, 28

alchemy of, 191-99

Madonna (Munch), 84, 85

daemonic and, 210, 214-15

magic, 11, 18, 205. See also Alchemy;

fertility and, 191-92

Occultism.

magico-religious objects, 112-13 sympathetic, 177-78 Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion

(Seligman), 11, 109, 113 Magna Mater. See Cybele

meaning and, 36, 192

natural objects, 187-90 transformation of, 57-58, 123 See also Object. meaning, 40

in abstract design, 110-11

284

Index

ambivalence and, 228-31

Mueller, Max, 10-11, 45-46, 67-70,

matter and, 36, 192

75-76, 98, 108

meaning, reversal of, 40

Mueller, Wilhelm, 68, 75

mechanistic universe, 39, 62-64

Munch, Edvard, 84, 85

meditation, 51, 138

Muse, 201-2

Meditations (de Chirico), 124-25, 146,

Musée de Trocadero, 67, 110, 111,

150, 158-61, 164 Mediterranean mythologies, 5, 75-80,

78, 202-7

BS Musée Gustave Moreau, 88

Museum of Modern Art, 158, 159, 162

Medusa effect, 25

museums, ethnological, 66-67

Memoirs (de Chirico), 148-49, 157

Mutt, R.. See Duchamp, Marcel

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung),

127 merz art, 104

Mesmer, Franz Anton, 125-26

Metamorphoses (Ovid), 217 metaphor, 4, 58, 177-78

Myers, Frederick, 97 mysterium tremendum et fascinans,

43-44, 47-48 Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, The (de Chirico), 152, 152-53 mysticism, 65, 69-70

alchemy as, 83-87

Myth, Religion, and Mother Right

archaeological, 137-43

(Bachofen), 192 mythology, 57, 61.

Michelangelo, 78-79, 205, 206

Mill, John Stuart, 62

Freud’s use of, 139-41

Minoan religion, 194

goddesses, 14, 72, 75-80, 212

Minotaur, 192

in history of religions, 67-70

Mir6, Joan, 11, 212, 218-20, 226, 228

images of women, 72-74, 77-80,

Mitchell, S. Weir, 134 modern art history, xvi-xvil, 3-9, 114,

LN7G15S artists’ writings, 162-64 modernism, 60, 67, 150, 154-55

85-84

of the imagination, 10, 208

See also Biblical imagery; Knowledge. Mediterranean, 5, 75-80, 78, 202-7

sacred and, 45-46

Modern Times (Chaplin), 28 Moirae, 14, 78, 205

Nadeau, Maurice, 42

moral insanity, 134

naive art, 106-7

Moreau, Gustave, 70-72, 87-88

narcissism, 26, 81-82

The Apparition, 87, 88, 90

naturalism, 58-59, 63

Oedipus and the Sphinx, 208-10, 209,

natural objects, 187-90

212 Salome, 87,90 Morris, Janie, 73

“Natural Supernaturalism” (Carlyle), 37,

74 natural world, 36-37

Index

Nature of Creative Activity, The

285

occult revival, 16-17

Neoplatonism, 19, 37

psychoanalysis and, 45, 118, 125-28

Nerval, Gérard de, 11, 38, 60, 67-68,

symbolist movement and, 71-74,

(Lowenfeld), 107-8

71, 75-82, 190

87-91

Aurélia, 76

uncanny and, 18-19

Les Chiméres, 76, 78-80

See also Alchemy; Daemonic;

Les Filles de Feu, 40-41

Mysticism; Parapsychology. Oceanic art, 107-9

Voyage en Orient, 77

Neumann, Erich, 192

Oedipus and the Sphinx (Moreau),

NewJerusalem, 60, 61, 195 nihilism, 40, 96, 101-2

208-10, 209, 212 “On Male Hysteria” (Freud), 126

noble savage, 63, 66, 96, 101-2, 107

Oppenheim, Meret, 10, 191-95

nonrationality, 4, 11, 64.

Cannibal Feast, 217, 218

sacred and, 44-45, 47

Fur-Lined Teacup, 174,

uncanny and, 15-16

Green Spectator, 191, 193, 193-95

See also Rationalism.

That Old Snake Nature, 194

175, 177

Urzert Venus, 191

numen, 47

numinous, 35, 45, 47, 78

origins, 10-11, 16, 202-3

ethnography and, 95-96, 103-4, object, 10, 28.

114-15

conundrum objects, 104-5

of knowledge, 65-67, 70

crisis of, 171-76, 178-80

return to, 212-13

extraordinary, 167-69

sacred and, 44-47

fetishism in surrealist art, 167-73

Otto, Rudolf, 10-11, 78-77, 170

found objects, 187-88

The Idea of the Holy, 16, 44-45, 47-48, 239-40n.11, 240n.13 Ouspensky, P. D., 104 Ovid, 217

frames and framing, 167, 176-85,

223-24 isolation of, 43, 167-68, 173-74

magico-religious, 112-13 natural, 187-90

perception of, 174-76 transformation of, 171, 173-75,

177-80 See also Fetishism. occultism, 5, 9-10, 64, 234n.15, 242n.21. aesthetic qualities,

110-11

Paalen, Wolfgang, 11, 109, 112 pagan and Christian oppositions, 201-8,

222 pagan deities, 203-5 paganism, symbolist view, 72, 74-80 Palace at Four A. M., The (Giacometti), 182-83, 183 Parade, 39

286

Index

parapsychology, 45, 97-98, 123, 126.

Poupée, La (Bellmer), 24-25, 25, 214

See also Occultism. pataphysics, 27

power, 4-8, 14, 50, 181

crisis of object and, 173-74

Pater, Walter, 29

daemonic, 77-78

Peacock Skirt, The (Beardsley), 81 Péladan, Joséphin, 89

of fetishism, 43, 49, 168-70, 177-78,

perception, 174-76

hierophany, 43-44

Perfidy (or Treachery) of Images, The (Magritte), 173, 174 periodicals, 16, 105-6, 110, 122-23, 151

isolation and, 173-74

Perkins-Gilman, Charlotte, 134

Persephone, 216-17

Personal Values (Magritte), 168-69 perspective, 153 Philosophy in a New Key (Langer), 175-76 Piaget, Jean, 154

Picasso, Pablo, 39, 98, 153

play, 31-32, 112 playing cards, surrealist,

118-20

Poe, Edgar Allan, 21, 29

poéme négre, 102-3 poetry, 11, 30, 51, 68, 213

symbolist, 71-72, 75-82

Point-Counterpoint (Huxley), 117 politics, 9 communism, 10, 18, 64, 111-12 Pompeii wall paintings, 216, 2/6

Portrait of Gala (Dalt), 26 Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire (de Chirico), 150

183

of matter, 191-99 of stones, 192, 197-99 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 37, 65, 189-90

pre-Raphaelites, 73 “primitive” art. See Archaic art primitive cultures, 11. knowledge and, 65-67 See also Archaic art; Noble savage. primitivism (naive art), 106-7. See also Archaic art. progress of art, 95-96 Proust, Marcel, 29

“Psychical Treatment” (Freud), 129 psychoanalysis, 98, 106, 108, 115, 117, 223: occultism and, 45, 118, 125-28

uncanny and, 15-17 women and, 123-37, 143 See also Freud, Sigmund.

Psychoanalysis of Dreams, The (Freud), 118

psychological experimentation, 107-8 Punic Wars, 192, 244-45n.18

Portrait ofMargarethe StoneboroughWittgenstein (Klimt), 135

Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 82

Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (Joyce), 30

quantum theory, 98, 122, 229-30

positivism, 7, 129-30, 164

Rank, Otto, 26, 251n.56

postmodernism, 9

Rasputin, Grigory, 89

Index

rationalism, 7,9, 11, 123, 159-60,

242n.21.

287

Rochegrosse, Georges, 90-91, 91 Romanticism, 5, 9, 12, 96

historical reason, 16, 95

cult of childhood, 65-66, 107

rejection of, 5, 62-64

knowledge, view of, 59-60, 62-64

supernatural, view of, 38-39

natural imagery, 189-90

us. revelation, 35-36

poets, 30, 68

See also Consciousness; Nonrationality.

supernatural, view of, 37-39 woman, view of, 208-9

Ray, Man, 177, 178

Rosenkreutz, Christian, 19

readymades, 28, 104, 123, 171-73, 196,

Rosenstock, Laura, 162

222 redemption, 87-91

Rosetti, Dante Gabriel, 73, 74 Rosicrucian movement, 18-19, 64, 89

Red Tower, The (de Chirico), 150

Rousseau, Henri, 43, 106

Reformation, 19, 205

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 63, 66

religion, xvil, 3, 6, 50-52, 113.

Rubin, William, 153, 162-63

archaic,

169-70, 210

comparative, 46, 67-70, 75, 99

sacred, 3, 69.

science of, 69, 97-98

ambivalence of, 44-45, 49-50

world religions, 99-100

boundaries, 48-52

See also Catholicism; Christianity;

imagination and, 50-53

Fetishism; Mythology; Sacred. Rembrandt, 205, 206

Remembrance of Time Past (Proust), 29 Renaissance, 19, 36, 58, 110, 202, 205 repetition-compulsion, 24, 26, 28, 140,

180, 183, 222 repression, 141 retablos, 197 retinal vision, 7, 10, 42 revelation, 35-36, 38, 161-62, 164. See

also Epiphany.

mythology and, 45-46

nonrational aspect, 44-48 taboo and, 223-28 See also Religion. Sacred Books of the East, The (Mueller), 68-69 Sade, Marquis de, 22, 213 Salomé/Judith II (Klimt), 136 Salome (Moreau), 87, 90 Salon des Indépendants, 149 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,

Rhys, Jean, 21

Ey Sanskrit, 103 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 37

riddles, 31, 104-5

Satan, 84-86, 91, 203

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 141

Satie, Erik, 39

Robing of the Bride, The (Ernst), 208,

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 70, 103, 123,

révolution surréaliste, La, 122-23, 151, 191

211-12

249n.11

288

Index

Savinio, Alberto, 149

Sleeping Venus (Delvaux), 215-16

Schelling, Friedrich, 18

Soby, James Thrall, 149, 154, 155,

Schlegel, Friedrich von, 61

158-59, 162

Schliecher, August, 103

social science, 106

Schloss Belle Vue, 118, 119

Society for Psychical Research, 97-98,

Scholem, Gershom, 86

27

Schwitters, Kurt, 103, 104

soma, 108

science, 122-23, 239-30

Songs of Experience (Blake), 65

study of religion, 69, 97-98

soul, 128-31, 143

S curve, 81, 84

sound-poem, 102-3

“Second Coming, The” (Yeats),

spatial concepts, xv, 114, 155, 197-98,

Self-Portrait (de Chirico), 145, 146

224 geography of social order, 207-8 spatial discontinuity, 196-97 Spellbound, 223

Seligman, Kurt, 109, 113, 214

Spengler, Oswald, 100

100-101 secrecy, 22-23, 131-37

self, 23-26

on The Chemical Wedding, 19-20

Spiritualism, 125-26

Magic, Supernaturalism, and

Staél, Madame de, 75

Religion, 11

Steinberg, Leo, 226

Ultrafurniture, 180, 180

Stitch, Sidra, 214

Will 0’ the Wisp, 180-81, 181

Stocks RaDe/7a78,2 10

semiotics, 103-4, 123, 249n.11

serendipity, 31

serpent imagery, 193-95, 225-26

stones, surrealist use of, 187-90, 192, 195-99

Stuck, Franz von, 84, 85

sexuality, 18, 21-23, 98. See also Eros.

sublime, 37

seduction theory, 133, 137

Stinde, Die (Stuck), 84, 85

Shakespeare, William, 14, 20-21, 43,

supernatural

205 shamanic religions, 210

Baudelaire’s view, 38-39, 41,

83-87

Sharpe, Eric, 68

natural world and, 37-38, 74

Shattuck, Roger, 196, 236n.51

politics of knowledge and, 58-59

Sibylline Oracles, 192 Siddall, Elizabeth, 73 significance, sense of, 8, 168

signs, 103-4

Romantic view of, 37-39 surrealism associated with, 40-42 as term, 35-39, 236-37n.2, 237n.3

surrealism.

sinister, as term, 18, 54, 234-35n.26

epistemology, 8-10

Sinistrari, Ludovicus Maria, 234-35n.26

origin of term, 35, 38-42, 238nn.14,

Sistine Chapel, 78-79, 205, 206

15

Index

periodicals, 16, 105-6, 110, 122-23,

151 return to origins, 212-13

as state of mind, xvii, 3, 5-6, 40-44,

48, 50-53 See also individual artists.

Surrealism and Painting (Breton), 42, 150-51, 157-58 surréalisme, 39-40

Surrealist Map of the World (1929), 114 Surrealist Tray of Objects, The (Dalf), 187

Swedenborg, Emanuel, 36-37, 41, 47,

103, 189 symbolist art, 5, 9, 19, 67, 136, 212

daemonic in, 208-10

289

threshold, xv, 6, 15, 48-49, 53, 57,

230-31. See also Epiphany. time, 30-31, 221. See also Epiphany. Timmer, B.J., 13 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 49, 111 Tragicall History of D. Faustus (Marlowe), 205 Transcendentalists, 70, 99, 125 transformation, 8-9, 51, 203-4

alchemy as metaphor for, 83-87 of matter, 57-58, 123

of object, 171, 173-75, 177-80 Trocadero, Musée de, 67, 110, 111, 113 turning, 13-14 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 11 Tzara, Tristan, 70, 96, 102-3, 106

woman in, 72-74, 208-12 dandy, image of, 80-82

Ultrafurniture (Seligman), 180, 180, 214

dreams and, 72, 76, 80-82

uncanny, xvii, 3-4, 15-29, 43, 140, 169,

symbolist movement

occultism and, 71-74, 87-91

poetry, 71-72, 75-82 symbols, xv-xvi, 11, 32, 58, 104

222-23 absurdity, 27-28, 40 ambivalence of, 26-27

animate/inanimate, 180-83 taboo, 48-49, 223-28

in de Chirico’s work, 151-53

Tanguy, Yves, 29, 157

double and, 22-26, 181, 212, 223

tarot, 76, 118-20, 192

emotion and, 3-4, 180-81

Tellus Fortuna, 14, 78, 192, 205, 233n.10

familiarity and, 17-18, 23 humor and, 27-28, 40, 123, 222

Tempest (Shakespeare), 21, 43, 205

isolation of object, 167-68, 173-74

temples, 224

in literature, 20-21, 29

tension, 12, 15, 44-45, 113, 222

occultism and, 18-19

That Old Snake Nature (Oppenheim), 194

theosophy, 67, 70, 89, 96, 130, 243n.28 language and, 103-4 Thoreau, Henry David, 45, 70, 99

psychology of, 15-16 unheimlich, 17-18 ““Uncanny, The” (Freud), 15-16, 25 underworld, 204-7, 215-17 ur-kultur, 16,63, 103 “Ursonate, Die” (Schwitters), 103

290

Index

Urzeit Venus (Oppenheim), 191 utopianism, 10, 60, 96

as daemonic, 72-74, 77-80, 83-84, 201-8, 213-20 as femme fatale, 4, 73, 78, 136-37,

Vaché, Jacques, 40, 121

Varieties of Religious Experience, The

(James), 98

143, 194, 205, 208 Freud and, 131-37 as imagination, 212-20

Vedanta Society, 100

as muse, 201-2

Vedas, 68, 108

procreative power, 212-15, 217

Verkauf, Willy, 102

psychoanalysis and, 133-37, 143

Villa of Mysteries, 216, 216

in surrealist art, 10, 12, 208-14,

Virgin Mary, 76-77, 84, 192

Virgin Mary Spanking the Infant Fesus Before Three Witnesses (Ernst), 219, 224-27, 225, 229 Vivekananda, Swami, 99-100

219-20 in symbolist art, 72-74, 208-12 See also Daemonic; Eros; Goddesses.

Wordsworth, William, 30, 37, 65,

189-90, 255n.5

Voyage en Orient (Nerval), 77

World Parliament of Religions, 97,

Walden (Thoreau), 70

World War I, 100-101, 214

99-100 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 30, 46, 222

Worringer, Wilhelm, 67

weaving, 192-93, 216

Wundt, Wilhelm, 45, 46

Webb, James, 99, 242n.21

wurd, 192

weird, 3, 13-14, 192

wyrd, 13-14, 78, 169, 198, 205,

Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 21

233n.9

Wilde, Oscar, 81 Williams, Roger, 84-86

Yates, Frances, 19

Will 0’ the Wisp (Seligman), 180-81, 181

Yeats, William Butler, 100-101

wissenschaftliche occultisten, 17, 126

Yellow Wallpaper, The (Perkins-Gilman),

Wolftable (Brauner), 57, 178, 179, 184,

218 woman. Baudelaire’s view, 83-87

134

Zen Buddhism, 51-52

Zweig, Stefan, 121

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