Codes of the Soul and the Culture of Trance 28 Psyche, Cosmos, Mythos: The Modernist Canon 29. Instead, this series is based on the empirically oriented hope for a purposeful expansion of the semantic field of “modernism.” The ultimate goal of the “Modernism and…” series is to reshape the common-sense connotations of the term “modernism.”
PREFACE
The collapse and disintegration of specifically modernist forms of the occult is discussed in Chapter 6, which concludes with some suggestions about the operation of 'unknown forces' – interpreted as epiphenomena of the modern condition itself – within the supernatural 'other side' of modernism . imaginary world, or 'in-between state'. Together with the "magical cultures" it brought to public attention, not to mention the many parallels in the syncretism of the culturally globalizing world after Alexander the Great, the fluid and free-for-all cosmopolitanism of the high empire was a ideal idea. starting point for such a search. This brings me to the discussion in my first chapter about 'empire and occultism' as formative ingredients in the 'aristocratic' modernist quarrel with bourgeois realism and materialism, a leitmotif of the entire book.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EMPIRE AND OCCULTISM
Electricity was also associated with Indian prana, thus creating space for a synthesis of the scientific and the occult. Of the 'two main features behind the emergence of early modernist art', the first 'comes from the so-called primitive and oriental art' and is formal or iconographic. We treated writers and artists like playing cards'.44 This was the age of the 'second Oriental Renaissance', the first having ended with Romanticism.
MODERNIST INTERWORLDS
For example, there is the period topos of lost wisdom and unmediated vision – the 'childhood of the race' or 'self-ancestral'. Entitled 'Gods and Devils in the Light of Racial Memory', the speech 'summarized the evolutionary steps in its production. Hugo Ball's version of what he calls the 'aesthetic gnosis' of the teenagers combines sharpness with ambivalence.
DESTRUCTION–CREATION
FROM DECADENCE TO DADA
The teenagers torn by war and revolution saw the consolidation of 'expectations' – the death of the bourgeois subject. Mathers waited for 'a magical Armageddon' from 1893; in 1896 Yeats wrote his apocalyptic 'The Valley of the Black Pig'; in 1895, after Blavatsky's prophecy of a revival before 1897, AE. Because destruction and creation are two faces of the same coin, modernist utopias suffered from a catastrophic dark side rooted in Schopenhauerian decadence.
Anxiety about a disappearing subject and object – Schopenhauer speaks to the haze of the modern – overlaps with insecurities from other periods. These include entropy, degeneration, and the perceptual impact of the era's new material culture. But like the Golden Dawn, French occultists generally preferred Western esotericism – the 'restoration' tradition of irregular, kabbalistic Freemasonry – and made less use of the Blavatskyite 'Oriental occult' than of their English-language, Germanic and Russian contemporaries.
Nordau could write about magic spells or diagrams—the "glyphs" of Blavatsky, the "mystical figures and signs" of Lawrence, the idiolects of "another state." Enthusiastic about electromagnetic revelation like Poe, Goethe claimed that "electricity is the pervading element accompanying all material existence" and called it "the soul of the world." Kierkegaard.63 In the 1929 English translation, Wilhelm's The Secret of the Golden Flower influenced the Abstract Expressionists.
Long before Cage's interest in random procedures, Dada envisioned 'reality as infinite process', based on the 'creative flow of the universe' and.
CALL TO ORDER, OCCULTIST GEOPOLITICS, SPIRIT WARS
A translator of Dostoevsky', Møller was assured of 'the coming triumph of the "East", from Bolshevism to Islam over the fallen cultures of the West. Germany and Russia were 'seeking, experimenting nations', with barbaric origins (the primitivist myth of 'the rest' again). Chaotic and irrational - in Massis's words, 'une vision catastrophique de l'univers' - the worldview of the German-Asiatic faction was the antithesis of the orderly vision of Action francaise.
Similar to the "magical eclecticism" of the Expressionists, this fashion included countercultural wandering, Wandervogel antics, and Atlantean speculations such as Lawrence's "wild pilgrim." Lawrence's Tartary is the perfect anti-Western symbol, attuned to the mytho-historical, Spenglerian mood of the post-war radical right. Likewise, members of the 'catastrophic' Norse-Asian mythology were not satisfied with merely overturning the once predictable external world.
Four points arising from the Asian offensive against the West could be highlighted, all of which are relevant to the controversial modeling of space. First, there was the perceived Eastern threat to autonomous individuality (my twenties debates); second, a comparable threat to the common sense structure or "self" of the universe in general; the third (arising from these two points), pre-Nasophic/. The Hindus seem to have tapped the power of the woman as a well of fire into the Kundalini – at the base of the spine.
With her dance form associated with New Thought, the talented and self-taught artist at St Denis subscribed to the occult beliefs of the pre-World War I and 'twenties "mystical movements".
ZEN’ IN THE SECOND ABSTRACTION
The tendencies of the Kyoto School to which Suzuki belonged were modernist (Jamesian, Nietzschean, Heideggerian) and right-wing. Finally, he taught the complex interdependence of the Avatamsaka Sutra in New York in the fifties, further promoting Zen. Cage's choice of Suzuki was one thing, that of the Beats and Abstract Expressionists another.
As 'timeless mysticism' and 'freedom', Zen also aided Doris's 'automatic writing of the American unconscious', aka the rebellious and increasingly aniconic American Sublime. This very religion helped the Kyoto School to package its Zen in terms of the 'rhetoric of immediacy' that became central to Abstract Expressionism. Much of the tragedy was real, as witness Pollock's alcoholism and the suicides of Arshile Gorky and Rothko.).
Before meeting him in 1947, Graves echoed Coomaraswamy in 1941 by speaking of the 'spiritually realized form'. With its background in the 'cosmic/vibrating' atmosphere of the Theosophical Halcyon (below), a legacy of the musical teacher-pupil relationship was Cage's prepared piano. Scottish painter Alan Davie, drawn to Zen, was another Surrealist mythmaker with a coloristic flair for the mind-altering nuances of the 'warehouse of images'.66.
This theo-ontological upgrading of the 'house of images' to what Klee called 'the forces that do the shaping', evoking techniques such as those of Wols and the later Masson, is inscribed in Paalen's concept of the 'Dynaton' (Pole practice). Yoga and was interested in modern physics).
OWNING, DISOWNING AND TRIVIALIZING THE OCCULT
Instability was central to modern and sub-modernist ways of reframing the world. To trace the degradation and decline of modernist soul culture, with all its weaknesses (and strengths), would require another book. Not just invented tradition, some of the respective figures of romantic and modernist backgrounds on the sleeve of Sergeant Pepper's 1967 album.
One of the Colin Dexter novels describes the anthropological Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford as 'the place where myths go to die'. Ironically, the devaluation of myths and symbols by the philistine bourgeoisie was one of the things that modernism reacted against – the twisted, mid-Victorian mythologies (Gothic revival, pre-Raphaelitism) of the runaway, idle hour. With its links to the Victorian vernacular (Varney the vampire, Spring-heeled Jack) and its afterlife in horror films, Surrealists were exceptional at keeping this Gothic subcategory of the occult alive.
Both examples of the 'wonderful', science and occultism are still not clearly distinguished: whence techno-occult or science fiction-like experiments in depicting the strange forces, 'vibrations' and force fields by which modernists felt haunted. Futurists turned to spiritualism to explain this supernatural aura of the modern, while Gabriele Buffet-Picabia noted that the idea of 'non-observable forces'. A compilation, among other things, of the 'electro-hysteria' released by Strindberg's trams or Ball's 'turbines, boiler houses, iron hammers, electricity' as they 'created fields of force and spirits', modernity's own ghostly. 'following.
Both are valid expressions of the human spirit, the historical conflict or oscillation between the West.
NOTES
Rupert Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, Africa and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, 2011). Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press. Beongcheon Yu, The Great Circle: American Writers and the Orient (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 61.
In general, Sophie Treitel, Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of German Modernism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Beongcheon Yu, The Great Circle: American Writers and the Orient (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1983), ch.
Stephen Schwartz, From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (New York: Free Press, 1998). Rupert Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley in Los Angeles: . University of California Press, 1951); Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno in hermetična tradicija (University of Chicago Press, 1964).
Gary Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (Londen: Sidgwick en Jackson, 2001).
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Gospel in the 19th and 20th centuries. Turn off your mind: the mystical sixties and the dark side of the age of Aquarius. Working Papers in Australian Studies, Sir Robert Menzies Center for Australian Studies, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1992.
INDEX
