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Modernism and the Occult / John Bramble, Emeritus Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

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Modernism and the Occult / John Bramble, Emeritus Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 © John Bramble 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identifi ed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–46577–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bramble, J. C. Modernism and the Occult / John Bramble, Emeritus Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. pages cm.—(Modernism and—) Summary: “Building on art-historian Bernard Smith’s insights about modernism’s debts to the high imperial occult and exotic, this book explores the transcultural, ‘anti-modern vitalist’, and magical-syncretic dimensions of the arts of the period 1880–1960. Avoiding simplistic hypotheses about ‘re-enchantment’, it tracks the specifi cally modernist, not the occult revivalist or proto-New Age, manifestations of the occult-syncretic-exotic conglomerate. The focus is high empire, where the ‘Buddhist’ Schopenhauer cult and Theosophy, the last aided by Bergson, Nietzsche and neo-Vedanta, brought contrasting decreative-catastrophic and regenerative- utopian notes into the arts. Another instance of the Eastward turn in modernist esotericism, the Fifties ‘Zen’ vogue is also considered. This is the fi rst overview of what modernists, as opposed to sectarian occultists, actually did with the occult. As such, it reframes the intellectual history of the modernist era, to present the occult/syncretic as an articulative idiom – a resource for making sense of the kaleidoscopic strangeness, fl uidity and indeterminacy of modern life”—Provided by publisher. ISBN 978–1–137–46577–1 (hardback) 1. Occultism. 2. Modernism (Art)—Infl uence. I. Title. BF1429.B73 2015 190—dc23 2015002150 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 CONTENTS Series Editor’s Preface ix Preface xv Acknowledgments xviii 1 Empire and Occultism 1 The Shock of the Old: Empire and Myth-making 1 The Crisis of the Modern World 8 Bernard Smith’s High-Imperial, Occult-Exotic Theory of Modernism 10 ‘Symbols of the old noble way of life’ 16 Imperial Gothic 21 2 Modernist Interworlds 28 Codes of the Soul and the Culture of Trance 28 Psyche, Cosmos, Mythos: The Modernist Canon 29 The Modernist Unconscious 34 The Self-Ancestral 37 ‘Alternate’ Consciousness: Critique from the East 42 The German Expressionist Cultic Milieu 45 Modernist Meta-languages 49 3 Destruction–Creation: From Decadence to Dada 55 Destruction–Creation: A Bipolar Rhythm 55 Decadence: Decomposition in a Foundationless World 57 ‘Occult Revival’ 63 The ‘Disintegrative Vibration’: Nordau and Bely 65 ‘Creation’ in Whitman, Expressionism and Cubo-Futurism 68 Ordinary Magic: Dada 76 4 Call to Order, Occultist Geopolitics, Spirit Wars 81 Out of Asia: Prophecy and World Politics 81 Pan-coloured Exoticism: The Rest against the West 85 Wild Jews and Muslim Pretenders 86 vii Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 viii CONTENTS Germano-Asiatic Offensive against the West 89 Tantra in Bloomsbury 100 Genuine Fake: The ‘New Jersey Hindoo’ Ruth St Denis 102 5 ‘Zen’ in the Second Abstraction 107 Pacific Axis Art 107 East Asian Influences on Pre-forties Modernism 110 Suzuki Zen 111 The Second Abstraction: A Synoptic Approach 116 American Pioneers 120 European Intermediaries 126 From Myth and Symbol to the Ground of Being 129 Conclusion: A Turbid Transmission 131 6 Owning, Disowning and Trivializing the Occult 134 The Downfall of the Modernist Culture of Soul 134 The Modernist Meta-world 139 Notes 145 Select Bibliography 163 Index 168 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 1 EMPIRE AND OCCULTISM The Shock of the Old: Empire and Myth-making Whatever secular rationalists say, magic and the occult, like their big-brother religion, refuse to go away. Histories of the occult, best defined as irregular/heterodox knowledge, a one-time bedfellow of religion and reason, fight shy of its transnational/transcultural dimensions. These were pronounced in post-classical antiquity, dur- ing the Crusades, in the Renaissance, Baroque and Romanticism, and under European high empires – where the older, Muslim- Christian-Jewish esotericism began to cede to enthusiasms for India and the Far East. ‘Syncretism’, the pluralistic and accommodatory opposite of fundamentalism, is the name given to the products of religio-magical confluence between different cultures. Syncretism is most observable in those laboratories of the ‘religion-making imagination’, borderlands, backwaters and ‘contact zones’.1 In Mikhail Bakhtin’s words, ‘The most intensive and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries’.2 Occultists and explorers like Richard Burton spent their life in such places. This study’s aim is to foreground European high empire, for the indelible transcultural mark it left on the ‘Western occult’. The last pops in and out of histories, when their authors choose to see it, usually on a nation-by-nation basis. This is unsatisfactory, in that magic and occultism respect neither national boundaries nor ‘orthodox’ prohibitions. At journey’s end, travelling magics and gods could be said to fall to three main constituencies: first, inter- ested parties in the populace at large, second, occultist professionals 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 2 MODERNISM AND THE OCCULT or magi, and third, the literary and artistic worlds of the day. The last two constituencies were important for religio-cultural mixing in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world and the other periods men- tioned above. They are equally important for modernism, which, coinciding as it did with high empire, was open to syncretism – especially East–West syncretism. Rivalry between Eastern and Western forms of esotericism is found in the 1890s ‘occult revival’. Paying more attention to the new, interloper form of the occult, with its Hindu-Buddhist empha- ses, I propose to trace the history of modernist resort to East– West syncretism (the high-imperial occult) as a tool for exploring the sometimes threatening, sometimes captivating condition of modernity. Modernity’s strangeness partook of the ‘marvellous’, an occultist staple which covered both the unnerving and seductive faces of the wondrous.3 (Significantly, Decadent Paris had a Librairie du Merveilleux.) The same wonder and awe surrounded high empire, the factor which transformed Western occultism. Both faces of the marvellous, the uncanny and the alluring, at home and abroad, will figure in this study, which also develops arguments made by Roger Griffin relating to modernity’s loss of transcendental coordinates.4 In opting for deus absconditus (a ‘withdrawn god’) as the patron saint of modernism, Griffin comes close to my concerns.5 Like nihilism, modernist syncretism, a way of pursuing this ‘occulted’, hide-and-seek god, baulks at systematic definition. Born in an age of creative chaos from a union between pre-existent Western occultism, newly expanded imperial horizons, a ‘second oriental renaissance’ and new/old ways of construing ‘religion’ (those of the ‘history of religions school’, with it roots in the ‘ancient theology’ and ‘perennial philosophy’), this syncretism was a sophisticated, fluctuating composite, hastily put together and rife with assump- tions.6 Like myth, the occult/syncretic was ‘good to think with’, and those modernists who enlisted it to rethink, dismantle or recre- ate modernity were usually more talented than the era’s practising occultists. The role of occult sects in modernism was largely sub- sidiary, contributing to magical common-stock, to a mystico-occult koine, which eventuated, inter alia, in the modernist idea of a ‘new Myth’ (a ‘new nomos’, in Griffin’s terminology). After Baudelaire’s distinction between artistic ‘imaginatives’ and ‘realists’, one of the occult conglomerate’s functions in modernism was to take the imagination to new heights – and depths. Another Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–46577–1 EMPIRE AND OCCULTISM 3 was to explore modernity as a turbulent lived condition, sometimes rejecting it outright, sometimes (modernism’s ‘new Myth’ enthu- siasts) ‘overcoming’ it in utopian ways. Different sects and systems competed for attention: but in that magic and the occult served less as a form of ‘belief’ for modernists than as an inventive, heuristic tool, eclecticism was mostly the rule. Exceptionally, the artist Piet Mondrian remained constant to Theosophy to the end of his days. Including its ‘mystic East’, modernist syncretism was an ever- accretive co-creation of many different figures.
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