Synopses & Reviews
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 specifically 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 first 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, fluidity and indeterminacy of modern life.
Review
'A brilliant and revelatory study of the central importance for European modernism of the syncretism of Eastern and Western in the occult revivals during the age of the high European empires.' - Philip Hardie, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
John Bramble, an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College Oxford, lectured in Classics at Oxford University, UK. His publications as a classicist include Persius and the Programmatic Satire (1974, reissued 2010), and contributions to The Cambridge History of Classical Literature Vol. 2 (1983). As a historian of mystical syncretism and religio-cultural mixing, he has contributed to The Subtle Body in Asia and the West (2013).
Table of Contents
1. Empire and Occultism
2. Modernist Interworlds
3. Destruction-Creation: from Decadence to Dada
4. Call to Order, Occultist Geopolitics, Spirit Wars
5. 'Zen' in the Second Abstraction
6. Owning, Disowning and Trivializing the Occult
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index