More heat than light

Press, 21 October 1978, Page 11

More heat than light

Art and the Occult. By Paul WaldoSchwartz, Unwin Paperbacks. 168 pp. $9.50. (Reviewed by Ralf Unger)

“Occult revivals come about at many periods in modern history,” says the author. “When the collective mind unexpectedly turns from the outer husk of experience which men choose to call reality, the eye turns from material semblance to a sudden inner realisation, and the springs of other ‘realities’ are invoked.” Such an upsurge is described in art, using as the point of departure the classical deck of Tarot cards. Symbolism is interpreted from their complex woodcut designs and then associated with numerous artists who have transformed the Tarot designs in their own esoteric ways. To a heated mind, like that of the author, a passage describing in 1900 a first meeting with an electric dynamo (which compares it to a moral force to which one feels inclined to pray as being supersensual and occult) becomes not poetic fancy, but complete reality. He quotes with deep belief leaders of the physical sciences who say that in the twentieth Century history is one of “progressive emancipation from the purely human angle of vision.”

The suicide of Van Gogh is seen as a pure spiritual act on which Artaud, an art critic, commented, “He did not commit suicide in a fit of insanity, but to the contrary, he had just succeeded and discovered who he was and what he was, when the collective conscience of society, in order to punish him for tearing himself away from it, suicided him.”

Such opaque statements became the main light-rays on which the book is built and an avenue for free association into the darkness between, with the author projecting his fevered perception into small details of paintings which he relates one to another in a reckless unmethodical way, baffling to the outside reader and

almost certainly to the artists themselves. For example, he draws a parallel between Goya and Beethoven who, he states, looked alike, were akin in “symphonic” temperament — whatever that may mean — and both suffered infirmities in old age. The various “magicians” are reintroduced such as the somewhat pathetic Aleister Crowley who used similar wide-open terminology in his leading statement of “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

The “fragrance” of the lunar consciousness in art which comes through to the artist from primeval sources is constantly illustrated, as is the re-iterated opposition of male and female symbols. Joined together by the author are cubism, atomic science and occult experimentation understood in “hermetic symbols accessible only to the initiate.” These perceivers seem to conclude that man is process, not reality, and that vision is what shapes the world. The great challenge, the author concludes, is precisely the manifestation of that vision through will.

The deprivation of the “outer eye” will demand a new acclamation of the “inner I.” The outer light has to be dimmed to near blackness to attune the mechanism to other worlds within, a process used by the mystic, the poet and the magician. The scientist, similarly, with his study of sub-atomic quarks will have to abandon his concept of fundamental elementary particles and accept universal symmetries. Mankind will have to develop a capacity of the mind that permits a leap beyond induction and deduction to a magnified sense of reality to grasp things whole. Finally we come back to the Tarot for which a process of study is not sufficient. There has to be an instinctive sympathy. Similarly, an appreciation of this book requires a suspension of logical analysis and an acceptance of overlapping, pounding verbal waves that may have some object in an indiscernible master design.