Modernism’s occult roots

Modernism has its background in theosophy. Understandably, adherents today are not keen to talk about this. Modernism has a heroic tale of its own. It seems obvious which characters should have the longest chapters: Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, the two who laid the foundation for the scientific worldview; Immanuel Kant, who liberated humankind from its self-inflicted helplessness; Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, who freed humankind from theology and gave them their own history; and Albert Einstein, who reunited cosmology and physics.

And now the heroic tale continues towards an ever-open ending in the hope that new heroes will come forth, ready to uphold the supremacy of science over the conditions of existence. But are there likewise fallen heroes, ones that seemed to have opened up new fields of science at least during part of their lives before being repudiated or at least half forgotten? Indeed there are, and they are numerous. Franz Xaver Mesmer was one such innovator. In the late 18th century, he developed a theory of magnetism as the principle behind both the living world and the dead, to the fascination and delight of the whole of Europe.

Or take the theory of “hysteria,” whose foremost propagandist, the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, combated women’s mental problems between 1860 and 1890 by exhibiting hypnotised women to the general public. He was one of the most prominent doctors of his time, but the medical diagnosis of “hysteria” disappeared with his death. Yet there is one theory that was more influential than all these speculations, and while today it is almost completely forgotten, the consequences and impact of it are still part of our worldview and continue to colour most attitudes to modernism. I am thinking of theosophy, a sacred jumble of more or less beautiful thoughts from the great religions, from Platonism, astrology and mysterious cults. The movement was founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, a medium of Russian-German origins, and Henry Steel Olcott, a former American Civil War officer and successful lawyer.

The first Theosophical Society in New York was quickly followed by similar groups in Liverpool, London and Corfu, in Mumbai and Germany. Even before the movement splintered in 1910, it had made inroads into the world of artists: James Joyce and Arnold Schönberg, the Italian Futurists and the Bauhaus movement, Frantisek Kupka and Kasimir Malewitsch. A large part of modernism in the visual arts, music, literature and architecture was inspired by theosophy, to such an extent that it is difficult to think of one without the other.

There is a great misunderstanding regarding occult movements: that they were anti-modern and represented escape from an increasingly industrialised, technological and enlightened world. On the contrary, most came into existence as attempts to translate the scientific worldview into non-material reality, and their origin is tied to a given historical situation. When Hans Christian Ørsted discovered that every electrical current is surrounded by a magnetic field, when André Marie Ampère realised that a magnetic field exerts a force on an electrical current, when Michael Faraday found that electricity or magnetism was not contained in given objects but produced between them in an electromagnetic field, when James Clerk Maxwell figured out that this field must move in waves, a new physical dimension was opened which immediately elicited metaphysical speculations.

For electromagnetism is a physical reality that can neither be observed with the human senses nor understood in pictures. And didn’t Maxwell himself believe in a special “ether” as the carrier of electromagnetism? Couldn’t these electromagnetic waves be physical expressions of a metaphysical being that inherently held the world together in the form of a “world ether,” a “fluid” or a “soul”? By the mid-19th century, the discovery that there was a force that was both abstract and kinetic, that was capable of penetrating everything and found everywhere, had an impact on people’s imaginations that must have been as utopian, as hope-instilling and as terrifying as the discovery of nuclear power a century later.

When “knocking ghosts” (“table spirits” that are something other than “poltergeists”) made their spectacular entrance in the Western world beginning in the United States in 1848, they mirrored the developments in physics and its practical applications: not so much because it was the first time that people thought that they could communicate with the dead, but mainly because the form of communication in question resembled the telegraph that was conquering the world in those years.

Instead of speaking or conveying messages by means of thought transfer, spiritualists used a technique that was recognisable from Samuel F. B. Morse’s code from 1837. This arrangement, which was the very condition necessary for calling spirits, was also similar to what was taking place in the natural sciences. For the occult séance is always an experiment as well: it proceeds according to a strict method, it is removed as far as possible from all outside influences, it resembles a journey where the outcome is uncertain. These knocking ghosts were an incredible success. With the help of newspapers, they first swept the whole of North America. Then they conquered Europe, where the movement began in middle-class drawing rooms, before making its way down the social hierarchy. In 1923, Thomas Mann took part in a séance in Munich, after which he wrote a story about “the impossible that nonetheless happens.”

Theosophy has its own theories about these “vibrations” (the expression comes from this movement, the inspiration of all those “good” and “bad vibrations”). It went far beyond the “knocking ghosts” with their simple spiritualist experiments, and explained electromagnetism as a higher form of “matter”: still material, but already spiritual. And it embraced to as great an extent as possible the new discoveries in physics and chemistry. When photography – generally an eerie medium because it can present the past as something alive – burgeoned in the 1870s, it was immediately employed to establish spiritual truths by documenting the material presence of the dead: attempts to photograph supernatural beings, ghosts and spirits became one of the first major areas the new technology was applied to. Documentation of the importance of occultism in early photography is now available in the extensive exhibition catalogue The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (Yale University Press, 2004), published by Clément Chéroux and Andreas Fischer.

Granted, Honoré de Balzac was perhaps not really in his right mind and half drugged when he became so interested in Emanuel Swedenborg that he wrote Louis Lambert and Seraphita, and August Strindberg was perhaps half-crazy when he tried to make gold in his shabby little hotel room in Paris. But what about William James, the brother of the writer Henry James and one of the founders of modern psychology? He tried to speak with the dead. Why did Arthur Conan Doyle dedicate all of his energy later in life to spiritualism, becoming the spokesman for a large number of occult associations? What made Robert Musil dream about “the other condition” in his Man without Qualities, and how was it that Franz Kafka attended Rudolf Steiner’s lectures in Prague and found him “very stimulating”? And why did the “masters” of the Bauhaus movement gather in séances, trying to create “the new man” by having him live in completely pure forms?

No, occultism was – and still is, despite all the secularisation – the strongest driving force in modern art. And, contrary to all the talk about innovativeness and the avant-garde, it is thoroughly conservative in nature: it takes a stand against “superficiality,” “modern man” or the “industrialised world,” even though, as in Futurism or the Bauhaus movement, it seems intrinsically linked to progress in science, technology and society.

When in 1910 Wassily Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art – his artistic manifesto – he mentioned theosophy not only as his main fellow combatant against a world that was far too materialistic but also as the messenger of a “new form of expression,” accorded a completely new “truth” that could only be conveyed in abstract forms. The Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911, found the “vibrations of the soul in” Arnold Schönberg’s “pure sound.”

The list of writers who tried to give form to the teachings of theosophy could go on and on. One can get a sense of just how impressively large this movement was by leafing through the enormous book of photographs Okkultismus und Moderne, the catalogue of an exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, published in 1995. Neither the book nor the exhibition attracted the attention they should have because they addressed an uncomfortable truth: that one could see here the foundation of the approach to art that was to prevail in intellectual culture throughout the West after the second world war. Abstract art may strive to give form to the supreme freedom of humankind, but it rests on a foundation of ghosts. The British historian James Webb was to learn that this was not a particularly popular truth when he published his pioneering studies The Occult Underground (1974) and The Occult Establishment (1976) with little success.

When “classical modernism” is celebrated today as the great breakthrough of subjectivity in society, it must be remembered that a good deal of the aesthetic avant-garde was influenced by occultism. Every attempt to break through to a new dimension in art had a crypto-theological background – in music as well as in literature and the visual arts. Early modernism was a critical, even revolutionary movement, and when it destroyed the figurative approach to painting, when it picked apart its grammar and syntax to focus on fragments of sentences and verses, or when it replaced the rules of harmony that had been grounded in physical conditions up until then with an arbitrary (or mathematically organised) progression of notes, it did so in the hope of fighting its way to complete devotion – that is how the German theosophist Christoph Türcke described the movement in his book Fundamentalismus (2004).

They strove for the “essential,” for the meeting of souls, something so immediate that nothing in traditional art could compare. The motivation was thus religious, which no one admits; it belongs to a theology with no church. Instead, art functions as a kind of aesthetic proof that not only is there a spiritual purpose in life but also that this spirit really exists. It is to be embodied in a higher truth, even though one has no notion of what that entails.

The visual arts have thus ceased to depict objects and people; they are thus first an abstraction and then a concept. What they now want to depict is far too “fine” (Wassily Kandinsky) to be rendered in more or less everyday forms, using traditional harmonies or basic words and sentences. Four hundred years after the visual arts in the Protestant world – which included the likes of Hans Holbein the younger, Albrecht Dürer and Tilman Riemenschneider – renounced the sacred (which was to live on for two more centuries in Catholic countries, albeit under increasingly soft or “Baroque” forms), artists demand faith, devotion, total immersion.

So paintings cease to be pictures, sculptures have been diluted into installations, sentences are no longer sentences but fragments, and the rules of harmony have lost their hold on music. Instead, all these modern works of art pretend to be the Spirit itself in its immediate incarnation. But the Spirit is not made manifest, despite the finest technology, and the more artists try, the more spiritual they aim to be, the more they are forced to do something that they previously would have preferred to avoid: explain themselves, grasp the words to make clear what should have been clear from the very beginning. The bolting semantics, the endless talkativeness that characterise so much of aesthetic modernism have their origin in this dilemma between wordlessness and faith in the supernatural.

And if there was still hope in the beginning that the new art would achieve its aims if only the time were ripe, that was hardly to be the case; the almost sub-cultural existence it was relegated to for many decades is a clear sign of this. In actuality, modern art’s way of navel-gazing has been more successful than modernism itself. Its well-known claims to “go against expectations,” to “meet the human behind the mask” or set free “one’s inner self” have become a fixed attitude in what is otherwise such an ever-changing world of art.

But with this attitude, all artists today are heirs to esoterically inspired aesthetic modernism, and with this attitude, avant-gardism itself is a past that is not going away – despite it now being a hundred years old and despite the fact that breaking general conventions and traditions became a convention itself a long time ago. “It is difficult to penetrate the shell of loneliness,” Anna Odell wrote last spring when she tried to justify her work of art, which wound up in court and on trial. “What is it that makes some people make a person feel a live? How does a person get close to another?” Can you hear how she is still waiting for an encounter with that knocking ghost, and isn’t it apparent how old-fashioned this appeal is? The list of esoteric adherents in art continues to this day.

The Australian writer Katherine Mansfield, one of the most clear-sighted, illusionless delineators of humans ever, spent her final days with the Greek-Armenian spiritualist Georges I. Gurdjieff in Fontainebleau – the same “teacher of wisdom” who inspired the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the director Peter Brook and the pianist Keith Jarrett. And we need not mention how the whole of popular culture is filled with shamans, revivalists and speakers in tongue. Yet oddly enough, most artists – and even more critics – believe that they live in a completely secularised world. How can they be so blind to themselves? Not to see theology as the driving force behind art today is like looking at a giant land mass on a map and not noticing the name “Russia,” written in big letters across the entire page.

There was a period, and it was not a short one, when modern art was synonymous with upheaval, with the new, the other, with rebellion. For more than two hundred years, it had revolted against every establishment institution, had devised its own autonomy time and time again, had broken with the academies and ceaselessly pushed forward, in continual conflict with the public, with critics, with the art market. But nowadays that rebellion is at an end, on every front, and when modern art is arranging its great fairs, from Documenta in Kassel to the Biennale in Venice and the sculpture park in Wanås, people flock there as if it were a county market. Modern art is sustained by such a heavy consensus of critics, viewers, government officials, curators, professors, gallery owners and buyers that there is no room for substantial criticism. There has never been an art as academic, as established, as government-supported as that today.

It has taken five hundred years for art to reach this state – or rather to return to this state. That is because the Renaissance’s break with the normative, with the relatively straightforward artisanal agreement between client and artist, was tied to an intellectualisation. Thus, from the late Middle Ages until our own era, art was sustained by an idea of higher import, of something symbolic. It was then that all the conflicts over art began. If one looks back to the last century, it seems that the turn toward the abstract and the esoteric was a critical step away from intellectualisation. Art now seems to once again be an art with a power very much all its own. Giving form to a message that is more or less profound or secretive no longer appears to be a goal. Instead, art is imagined, from Damien Hirst to Ai Wei Wei, from Jeff Koons to Neo Rauch, as a kind of mirror raised to the state of the world.

That may consequently be why recent art so often looks to the banal and the ordinary, to objets trouvés and everyday situations. But it also means that it has become sacred again, without knowing it or wanting to know it. For only religious art needs no explanation or clarification. It is, after all, a clear expression of a higher power. And it is met simply with piety, in the belief that people can meet God themselves with and through the artistic object. This is how the esoteric belief that people come into contact with a metaphysical, holy sphere through art is realised: in worshipping the completely banal. But that does not mean art is cheap or easily accessible.

On the contrary: when Ai Wei Wei invited 1,001 Chinese to Documenta in Kassel two years ago, when a flight to chef Ferran Adrià’s restaurant near Barcelona can be considered a work of art, then the immense respect for such art is already reflected in the costs. The amount of money and hard work required to cast a sculpture in bronze in the early 17th century looks fairly modest after diversions like that. It thus becomes more plausible to compare it with pilgrimages or religious services for great multitudes of people.

So evaluating these works should no longer be a task of the art critic. We instead await the return of critical theology.