THE PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW: "Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia"

In honor of what would have been Annie Besant's 175th birthday, I recommend reading Benjamin Breen's 3-19-14 article entitled "Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia." Here's a brief excerpt:

Thought-Forms, a strange, beguiling, frequently pretentious, utterly original book first published in 1901, emerged from this ferment of late-Victorian mysticism. It was written by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, erstwhile members of the London Theosophical Society alongside [William Butler] Yeats, and it features a stunning sequence of images that illustrate the book’s central argument: emotions, sounds, ideas and events manifest as visual auras [...].

 

Besant and Leadbeater were quite aware that this was heady stuff for a society that remained deeply conservative. On New Year’s Day in 1901, the year Thought-Forms was published, Queen Victoria still ruled England. Oscar Wilde had died a broken man five weeks before. The British Empire was still expanding. “Modernism” as a movement or even a concept did not exist. 

 

When we consider this world of 1901, it becomes difficult not to believe that Besant, Leadbeater and their milieu deserve a more prominent place in the annals of both abstract art and the history of modernism. As the art critic Hilton Kramer has observed, “what is particularly striking about the outlook of the artists primarily responsible for creating abstraction is their espousal of occult doctrine.” Kramer points to the period between 1910 and 1920 as the key moment — as it undoubtedly was, given the confluence of World War One, the Dadaists, and technological changes celebrated by the Italian Futurists. 

 

But perhaps we should look backward as well, to the twilight of the Victorians, in tracing these origins. It actually isn't at all surprising that figures like Yeats and T. S. Eliot — not to mention Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian — dabbled with theosophy. It was, as Kramer notes, “a widely established component of Western cultural life” in the first decades of the twentieth century. 

 

But where did it go? Casting a wider net in the shadowy realms of fin de siècle mysticism offers up some surprising answers. Jack Parsons, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech and an early pioneer of rocketry, counted himself as an adept of Alesteir Crowley — and so too, at one time, did Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Robert Openheimer famously quoted Vedic scripture (“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds”) when he witnessed the first atomic bomb blast. But in the context of figures like Besant and Leadbeater, Oppenheimer’s fascination with Eastern mysticism seems less like a personal quirk and more like a thread in a larger tapestry: an interweaving of mysticism, technology, and art that began at the turn of the last century and is still with us in the twenty-first. 

 

Yeats imagined a looming “revolt of the soul against the intellect.” In truth, Victorian mysticism never took over the world. But it also didn’t go away. One strand wove into the history of science and technology; another became the New Age Movement; another is emerging in the techno-utopian transhumanists of Silicon Valley, who (seemingly unwittingly) borrow themes and aims from theosophy.

To read Breen's entire article, click HERE.