Modernism and the Occult

John Bramble

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137465788
• Thema: History
• Thema: European History

This study of modernism's high imperial, occult-exotic affiliations presents many well-known figures from the period 1880-1960 in a new light. Modernism and the Occult traces the history of modernist engagement with 'irregular', heterodox and imported knowledge.

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, during 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, interested parties in the populace at large, second, occultist professionals 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 mentioned 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 emphases, 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 assumptions.⁶ Like myth, the occult/syncretic was ‘good to think with’, and those modernists who enlisted it to rethink, dismantle or recreate modernity were usually more talented than the era’s practising occultists. The role of occult sects in modernism was largely subsidiary, 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 was to explore modernity as a turbulent lived condition, sometimes rejecting it outright, sometimes (modernism’s ‘new Myth’ enthusiasts) ‘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. Including religio-cultural backwash from empire, the ‘reconvergence’, in the scholarly world, of classics, oriental studies and theology, as well as themes from what Griffin calls ‘social modernism’ (life-reform, naturism, the simple life), the occult-syncretic conglomerate, still visible in the countercultural sixties, stood variously for pluralism, diversity, regionalism, utopianism, the fantastic, the indeterminate, sometimes the dark and uncanny, its enemies and opportunities bureaucratic reason and ‘orthodox closure’.⁷

Of this, the bid to ‘put an end to religious “mutations” or … to radically control them’, Eric Mahoney writes, ‘In part, syncretism is a response to … orthodox closure; it offers a type of open-endedness in order to respond to change and crisis. As such, it has a marked flexibility that is not found in orthodox traditions’.⁸ The early modernist period fits Mahoney’s formula perfectly: it witnessed changes and crises for which orthodoxies, both rational and religious, had no solution. In a globalizing world in need of a spiritual lingua franca, an open-ended and flexible syncretism accordingly had its attractions: though this could serve as a seed-bed for new orthodoxies, even within esoteric sects. Orthodox heresy, after all, is commonplace in the New Age.

Turn-of-the-century occult revival, not synonymous with modernist syncretism but one of its tributaries – others were the just-mentioned ‘second Orientalism’ and Religionsgeschichte school, both of them related to Cambridge Ritualism (James Frazer, Jane Harrison) – was intertwined with Decadence and Symbolism, the matrix of the different modernisms. To be able to know the world differently – as a kind of Gnostic, a stance which entailed mystical nihilism as much as affirmative transcendence – was an asset for modernism’s quarrel with positivism, uniformity, bourgeois master-narratives, materialist progress and the Westernization of the earth. Heretical to ‘legal-rational’ liberals and positivists, an anti-canonical, ‘prophetic-charismatic’ turn, which operated outside conventional classical and Christian boxes, lies at modernist roots.

The post-1880 influence on the arts of Arthur Schopenhauer, champion of Meister Eckhart and Buddhism, who wrote about sexuality and Mesmerism, forestalling hypotheses about an ‘unconscious’, explains much of the mystical nihilist component in modernist syncretism. Another influential counter-movement was Theosophy, a rambling system devised, with Henry Steel Olcott from 1875, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a peripatetic spirit-medium who knew Mazzini.⁹ From mesmero-spiritualist and Hermetic/neo-Egyptian origins, Theosophy, like Schopenhauer, looked to the religions of India and Tibet – less so to the Near East, which inspired an older, Gnostic-Sufistic-Cabalistic strain in Western occultism, important for Rosicrucians, Templarists, ‘mystical’ Freemasons and their like.¹⁰ Under Blavatsky’s successors, Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant, Theosophy became a messianic movement, its concern the advent of a clairvoyant super-humanity.¹¹ To find its way into modernist manifestos, the originally Cabalistic idea of a universal restoration (tikkun olam, ‘repairing the world’) now took on Indianist colours. With its freewheeling eclecticism, suspicions of Christianity and liberalism, partiality to the left-overs of respectable scholarship and orthodox religion, and new avatar Krishnamurti, Theosophy was well adapted to the multi-ethnic age of high empire and the many new questions it raised.

Without necessarily joining the Theosophical Society – its ‘brains’ the Neoplatonists Alexander Wilder and G. R. S. Mead – modernists developed its ideas in their work in ways that upset standard Western art procedures.¹² The artistic avant-garde, which could anyway behave like an esoteric order or secret society, relied less on formal occultist organizations than hearsay, reading, travel and ‘cultic milieu’. Among its aims we can count the augmentation and rearrangement of knowledge to explain the paradox of a simultaneously modern/progressive and atavistic/imperial world-dispensation, as well as the twilight, in-between states of mind and experience (the ‘uncanny’, the Surrealist merveilleux) generated by the clash between modernization and tradition. This clash was most pronounced in Meiji Japan, where ‘professors of civilization’ declared war on folk beliefs (and vice versa), but the conflict of the daimonic with ‘civilization’ is a Western theme too.¹³ The ‘ancient indecencies and monstrosities’, the fantastic and grotesque, served as weapons in modernist warfare with the bourgeoisie.¹⁴

Modernist studies generally overlook religio-cultural backwash from the colonies, as that revolutionized Western occultism and the arts. The Romantic vision of empire was a counter-force to modernity: the genius of Theosophists – their headquarters, from 1883, in India – was to link their system to the new mysterious worlds disclosed by European imperial expansion. The natives and cultures of these last were on view at ‘World’s Fairs’ and colonial exhibitions. Of these Paul Greenhalgh writes, ‘World’s Fairs were the single most important vehicle for the internationalization of visual culture between 1851 and 1940’.¹⁵ As a vehicle of the ‘colonial syncretic’ – which included far more than the fringe Islam and mystical Judaism cultivated by older occultist groups – the spread of Theosophy was responsible for a similar internationalization of the occult.¹⁶

Where it encouraged the cult of what T. S. Eliot called ‘strange gods’, the Romantic vision of empire bears on Griffin’s insight about the centrality of deus absconditus to modernism. Prevalent images of foreign deities were mystical, erotic and bursting with a ‘life’ now deserting the modern world. Patterned on Symbolist art, the scene of Greta Garbo dancing for Siva in the 1931 film Mata Hari enacts this erotic-vitalist dream. In matter-of-fact ways, ancient empires had regularly adopted the gods, learning and arts of the defeated. Modernist enthusiasms for ‘strange gods’ were less down-to-earth: florid, theatrical, oppositional, tending like D. H. Lawrence to embellish their pantheons as they went along. Short of clear theological bearings, modernists, when faced by ‘strange gods’, fell back onto something akin to Griffin’s deus absconditus: an intangible, withdrawn deity, apparently in hiding or ‘occultation’, pending the methods chosen, histrionic or quietist, to persuade him to appear. Looked at thus, occultism, twinned with vitalism, becomes the soft underbelly of modernist nihilism, the other side of Das Nichts.

From the modernist perspective of the Bergson-inspired French Annales school of history, empires had existed since time immemorial (the historical longue durée), modernity had not. Likewise, as ways of mapping and manipulating the world, magic and the occult had long pre-existed positivist science. It is no coincidence, then, that modernity’s last turn-of-the-century discontents were drawn to magic and the occult (and in museums to the ‘curious’) as ways of mastering life derived from a less stifling and much older world. In the arts, the distinction between moderns and ancients – partisans of the new and upholders of the old – goes back to Greco-Roman times. So does deliberate archaism, one of the Romantic tradition’s favoured tools for evoking the distant past and the geographically faraway. With its implication that the old could be new or modern under certain circumstances, this third way between hoary antiquity and the pristinely new was adopted by modernists in their attempts to contest and reframe modernity.

Taking the occult, folkloric, primitive and oriental as allies, and developing a broader, Romantic hinterland in imperial culture into a critique of bourgeois modernity, modernists, like earlier archaizers, turned the ‘shock of the old’ into something new. Thus, Ezra Pound’s Scriabinist lady-friend, Katherine Ruth Heyman, equated the ultra-modern with the very ancient; American composer Charles Griffes declared that modern music relies increasingly on ‘the archaicism of the East’; Janet Flanner spoke of Pound’s ‘weighty, ancient, mixed linguistics’; while Constantin Brancusi asserted that his ‘new I’ came ‘from something very old’.¹⁷ This sophisticated counterpart of the ‘revitalization movements’ studied by anthropologists – a return to the ancestral past, so as to inject new life into a failing present – was heavily reliant on what literary critics call ‘myth’. The new non-classical/non-biblical antiquities now filling Western museums were crucial to such mythopoeia, not to mention the living legatees of those antiquities, as studied by ethnographers or paraded at colonial exhibitions.

Modernism has been described as a ‘continuation of Romanticism by other means’.¹⁸ There had been various, Romanticism-related attempts to oppose or counterbalance earlier phases of modernity. For want of a developed imperial culture at home, medievalism (Pugin, Ruskin) was a favourite anti-modern ploy. But ‘life’, that subtle, erotic force of Bergson and Lawrence, was unlikely to benefit greatly from gazing at Gothic-revival stained-glass windows. From the 1880s, however, primitive-oriental backwash from empire, as displayed in museums or colonial exhibitions, or elaborated in imperial romances, began to take the conqueror captive, and to turn the tide against modernity more effectively than Pugin or Ruskin.¹⁹ On show at the colonial exhibitions – and in no mood of mission civilisatrice – here was the living pre-modern. Felt affinities between the imperial primitive and oriental with Western folklore and occultism soon led to eclectic and ‘polymythic’, cosmopolitan art styles like Symbolism and Art Nouveau. Not simply decorative or nostalgic, these art styles, with their ‘outsider’ sources and layers of multi-ethnic mythic allusion, far surpassed medievalism in their celebration of ‘life’ by way of the shock of the old.

In its portraiture, the Enlightenment had tended to squeeze its noble savages into a Greco-Roman corset which may have enhanced their dignity, even if it strangled their ‘life’. Delacroix and Baudelaire were among the first to remedy this straight-jacketing of the primitive with a wildness that was truly Romantic. But in an age of the unruly mass, high-imperial culture was less concerned with wildness than the communitarian and collective. Whether spontaneously or deliberately, this public imperial culture promoted the exotic, wondrous and vital – and Aboriginal ‘good taste’ in arts and crafts – as correctives for loss of social cohesion in the anomie-stricken West.²⁰

It is unlikely that this culture’s architects had anarcho-communitarian agendas, or that its consumers heard any Kropotkin-like message. At this public level, romantic conservatism – a vicarious, rearguard restoration of nomos – was nearer the point. But the archaic-oriental, folkloric-occult thematics of this same imperial culture are certainly reworked in modernism into a vision of community revivified by anarcho-communitarian return to the pre-modern animistic and organismic: not to mention the pre-modern orgasmic. Like the German Expressionist group, die Brucke, Lawrence was an adept of the primitive communitarianism motif, mostly done quite well. Done badly, it could...