This volume examines the relationship between occultism and Surrealism, specifically exploring the reception and appropriation of occult thought, motifs, tropes and techniques by Surrealist artists and writers in Europe and the Americas, from the 1920s through the 1960s.

Table of ContentsList of ContributorsList of PlatesList of IllustrationsIntroduction: In Search of the MarvellousTessel M. Bauduin, Victoria Ferentinou and Daniel ZamaniPart I: Alternative Modes of Knowledge1 Spiritual Surrealists: Séances, Automatism, and the Creative UnconsciousClaudie Massicotte2 The Vertiginous Pursuit of the Grand Jeu: Experimental Metaphysics, Paramnesia, and Creative InvolutionDonna Roberts3 Palmistry as Portraiture: Dr. Charlotte Wolff and the SurrealistsM. E. Warlick4 Occulted Un-Knowing: Bataillean Approaches to the Sacred in Gellu Naum’s Ceasornicãria Taus and Alejo Carpentier’s El Siglo de las LucesVivienne Brough-EvansPart II: Myth, Magic and the Search for Re-Enchantment5 Melusina Triumphant: Matriarchy and the Politics of Anti-Fascist Mythmaking in André Breton’s Arcane 17 Daniel Zamani6 Esotericism and Surrealist Cinema: Wilhelm Freddie’s Films and the New Myth Kristoffer Noheden7 Disenchanted Ground, or Antonin Artaud, Vincent van Gogh and Magic in 1947 Gavin Parkinson8 Kurt Seligmann, Surrealism and the Occult Gražina SubelytėPart III: Female Artists, Gender and the Occult9 The Quest for the Goddess: Matriarchy, Surrealism and Gender Politics in the Work of Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington Victoria Ferentinou10 On the True Exercise of Witchcraft in the Work of Remedios Varo María José González Madrid11 Clear Dreaming: Maya Deren, Surrealism and Magic Judith Noble12 Harbingers of the New Age: Surrealism, Women and the Occult in the United States Susan AberthBibliography

"The various essays shed light on how esoteric/occult ideas, assumptions, and intuitions evolved within and through surrealist artistic creations. The book presents a fine collection of original scholarship. Recommended to those interested in the intersection of art and alternative religiosity."--Religious Studies Review