FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

SPECIAL THANKS TO


New Age "Asiatic" thought ... is establishing itself as the
hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. (Zizek)

SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 2006

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

Came across a book today that was published just a year ago by Cambridge University Press: Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism 1917-1945. Bummer that it costs 80 bucks. No wonder nobody ever hears about these things.




Saul Friedlander of Tel Aviv University says...
Kellogg's work succeeds in introducing a dimension never so thoroughly explored: the essential impact on early Nazi world-view of ideological elements and political themes carried over to Germany by White-Russian émigrés.

Hmmm... And an Amazon reader-reviewer writes: "I strongly recommend this book which should be read alongside Karla Poewe New Religions and the Nazis" -- which I first mentioned a month ago in connection with the esoteric Yoga "scholarship" of Nazi German Faith Movement leader Jakob Wilhelm Hauer.

There is also much fascinating occult -- and just plain bizarre -- Russian background in the literally wonder-full Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, including, lots of stuff about Madame Blavatsky.

Russia... double hmmm. In my post of 27 December last year, The Russians Are Coming, I included a quote from Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts about the proliferation of occultism in Russia. Here it is again...
Moscow and St. Petersburg were centres for the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occult revival. From 1881 to 1918 thirty occult journals and more than 800 occult titles were published in Russia, reflecting interests in spiritualism, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, alchemy, psycho-graphology, phrenology, hypnotism, Egyptian religions, astrology, chiromancy, animal magnetism, fakirism, telepathy, the Tarot, black and white magic, and Freemasonry (Carlson 1993: 22). Gurdjieff took notice of contemporary interests and presented his teaching accordingly. The cosmological form of his teaching was fully outlined between 1914 and 1918 in a form that takes account of the occult revival in Russia.Tournament of Shadows certainly corroborates that statement, and adds much detail. For instance (p. 234):
At Tashilhunpo, seat of the Tashi or Panchen Lama, [George] Bogle heard about "Shambul." Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, kept the legend alive, offering a geographic variation in The Secret Doctrine (1888), writing that "fabled Shambhallah, the headquarters of the Mahatmas, the sacred brotherhood" was located "somewhere in the Gobi."

To see where I, up-close-and-personal-like, came in on all this -- and part of the reason I'm writing this book -- clap your hands together while repeating "I want to Tinkerbell to live!" Then click the graphic...




Whoops, sorry. Looks like you didn't clap hard enough.

But back to Tournament of Shadows, the story continues (p. 242) with a description of a trip to Ceylon in 1891 by the young Tzar-to-be, Nicholas II, and his considerable entourage...
Now his imperial highness informs the Russian Consul in Colombo that he wishes to "have the honor of meeting" Colonel Olcott (1832-1907), a retired American officer who sports an enormous Santa Claus beard and is the champion of a worldwide Buddhist revival. It happens that Henry Steel Olcott, now resident in Colombo (the Sinhalese are Buddhists), is also the "chum" and associate of the Tsar's compatriot Helena P. Blavatsky. Together in 1875 they founded the Theosophical Society.

Imagine: Madame B. hangin' with the Tzar. Who knew?

The answer to that one, apparently, is damn few -- then or now. The history is there if you know what you're looking for and you dig for it like a demented dog. That would be me, rabidly indefatigable in the cause of grinding new lenses for a credulous world so awash in the occult it can no longer see the trees for the forest. Carl Solomon, I am with your mother, baby, standing in the shadows. Howl on that.

One more clip from Tournament, this one concerning the set designer (and so much more) for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes production of Rite of Spring (p. 450)...
The ballet's composer, Igor Stravinsky, claimed Roerich looked "as though he ought to have been a mystic or spy." In fact, recently opened intelligence archives suggest that at points in his career, he was both.

Nicholas Roerich was a worthy successor to Madame Blavatsky. A Russian mystic with a devoted following, he managed like her to baffle the intelligence departments on three continents. Like her, he was a Theosophist in quest of Shambhala who eventually made his home in India. But in two respects he surpassed HPB. Roerich gave his name to an an international treaty and in America he played an off-stage role in two Presidential campaigns.

And then there's a highly specialized treatise called No Religion Higher Than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922 by Maria Carlson. Its publisher (Princeton UP) says...
Among the various kinds of occultism popular during the Russian Silver Age (1890-1914), modern Theosophy was by far the most intellectually significant. This contemporary gnostic gospel was invented and disseminated by Helena Blavatsky, an expatriate Russian with an enthusiasm for Buddhist thought and a genius for self-promotion. What distinguished Theosophy from the other kinds of "mysticism" -- the spiritualism, table turning, fortune-telling, and magic -- that fascinated the Russian intelligentsia of the period? In answering this question, Maria Carlson offers the first scholarly study of a controversial but important movement in its Russian context.

Carlson also wrote a paper called "Fashionable Occultism: Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Hermeticism in Fin-de-siecle Russia," which was collected in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. In this piece, Carlson writes:
Mme Blavatsky's new Theosophy seemed to offer an alternative to the dominant materialism, rationalism, and positivism of the nineteenth century. Sometimes called Neo-Buddhism, Theosophy strikes the modern student as an eclectic, syncretic, dogmatic doctrine, strongly pantheistic and heavily laced with exotic Buddhist thought and vocabulary. Combining bits and pieces of Neoplatonism, Brahminism, Buddhism, Kabbalism, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, and other occult doctrines, past and present, in a frequently undiscriminating philosophical mélange, Theosophy attempted to create a "scientific" religion, a modern gnosis, based on absolute knowledge of things spiritual rather than on faith. Under its Neo-Buddhism lies an essentially Judeo-Christian moral ethic tempered by spiritual Darwinism (survival of those with the "fittest spirit" or most advanced spiritual development). One might describe Theosophy as an attempt to disguise positivism as religion, an attempt that was seductive indeed in its own time, in view of the psychic tension produced at the fin de siècle by the seemingly unresolvable dichotomy between science and religion.In The New York Review of Books (subscription required), Frederick C. Crews reviewed Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. After describing the strange attraction Blavatsky held for William Butler Yeats -- who was similarly drawn to many forms of occultism and ritual magic -- Crews writes:
If Yeats's case were unique, we could dismiss it as a curious footnote to modern cultural history. But from the 1880s straight through the 1940s an imposing number of prominent figures, from Kandinsky and Mondrian through Gandhi and Nehru to Huxley and Isherwood, intersected the Theosophical orbit long enough to have their trajectory significantly altered by it.

Following is Publishers Weekly brief review of Blavatsky's Baboon...
Around the turn of the century, renegade Russian aristocrat Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky declared herself the chosen vessel of the wisdom of the East through her reputed contact with a dematerializing Tibetan master, who unveiled a Hidden Brotherhood located in the Himalayas and Egypt. The Theosophical Society, which she cofounded in 1875 in New York City with Civil War veteran Col. Henry Olcott, attracted a wide following with its amalgam of Hinduism, Buddhism and occultism. In this enormously entertaining, witheringly skeptical, highly colorful chronicle, British journalist Washington deflates the self-mythologizing and woolly philosophizing of theosophists and rival schools and gurus, including flamboyant Armenian-Greek mystic George Gurdjieff, Austrian philosopher/holistic healer Rudolf Steiner and Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian ex-theosophist turned California sage. Those who came under their influence include Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Isherwood, W.B. Yeats and Frank Lloyd Wright, making this a heady intellectual adventure as well as a clear-sighted saga of human foibles, charlatanry, bizarre antics and genuine spiritual hunger extending to New Age cults from the 1950s to the present.Am I making notes for a book that's been written dozens of times already? In my darker moments, I can begin to think so. But if that's so, why do so many people continue to be surprised by this sort of material? To wrap this up on no less depressing a note, in the end, it seems, people believe what they want to. Which I guess is why we live in the best of all possible worlds.
http://mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com/2006/03/from-russia-with-love.html

An Occult Art History of the American West

A new book charts Theosophy’s influence on Western modernism

FBY FIGGY GUYVER IN CULTURE DIGEST | 12 SEP 19

Emil Bisttram, Dualities,1938, oil on canvas. Courtesy: © The Estate of Emil Bisttram and Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University

During the 19th century, the American frontier moved ever-westward. The so-called new territories quickly became rich sites for innovative forms of Western spirituality, which operated outside of organized religion. One such practice, Theosophy – established in New York in 1875 by occultist Helena P. Blavatsky – proved influential in the development of abstract painting and Western modernism more broadly. A new book, titled Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts and the American West (2019), charts the religious movement’s influence on art history.

Raymond Jonson, The Mystery, 1937, oil on board. Courtesy: © The Estate of Raymond Jonson and University of Arizona Museum of Art

Lauren Harris, Painting No. 48, 1938-1941, oil on masonite. Courtesy: © The Estate of Lawren Harris and Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University

In 1938, in the small town of Taos, New Mexico, a number of artists formed the Transcendental Painting Group. Inspired by occult teachings, including theosophical literature, they conducted experiments in abstraction. Writing in their 1938 manifesto, the group’s stated aim was to use this new style to ‘carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, colour, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual’.

Agnes Pelton, Nurture, 1940, oil on canvas. Courtesy: © The Estate of Agnes Pelton and Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University

Agnes Pelton, The Primal Wing, 1933. Courtesy: © The Estate of Agnes Pelton and San Diego Museum of Art

One member of the group, Agnes Pelton, moved to the California desert in 1932, where she began to create surreal, luminous paintings. Among Pelton’s influences was Blavatsky’s core text, The Key to Theosophy (1889), and her works are suffused with occult symbolism. Pelton never fully gave up figuration – a fact that made her an outlier to mainstream modernism. Speaking in 1934, she described her works as existing between these two poles: ‘My abstract pictures are just as real to me as nature, but they are not material, but mental images.’

Oskar Fischinger, Blue Cristal, 1951, oil on masonite. Courtesy: © The Estate of Oskar Fischinger and Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University

The German artist, animator and filmmaker Oskar Fischinger is perhaps best-known for his pioneering contributions to abstract cinema: he collaborated with Fritz Lang on his 1929 film Woman in the Moon and influenced Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). Although not a member of the Transcendental Painting Group, Fischinger was particularly influenced by Theosophical ideas after moving to Hollywood in 1936. His late paintings depict abstract illustrations of music, which can be read as attempts to resonate spiritually with viewers

.

Henrietta Shore, Two Worlds, c. 1921, oil on canvas. Courtesy: © The Estate of Henrietta Shore and Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University

Occult art from the American West did not just respond to the region in which it was made; it helped to create a mystical idea of the West that lives on in the popular imagination to this day.

Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts and the American West is published by Fulgur Press

‘Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist’ opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art on 13 March 2020

FIGGY GUYVER
Figgy Guyver is editorial assistant of frieze, based in London, UK. She is co-founder and editor of CUMULUS journal. Follow her on Twitter: @FiggyGuyver.

 Opinion

Symposium marks 130th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s arrival in the United States

Swami Vivekananda’s tour of the United States would mark what would become the first exposure most non-Hindus in the West had with Hinduism.

Swami Vivekananda, seated second from right, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Sept. 11, 1893, in Chicago. Others seated on stage are Virchand Gandhi, from left, Hewivitarne Dharmapala and possibly G. Bonet Maury. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons

April 25, 2023

By 

Murali Balaji

(RNS) — In July 1893, a young Hindu monk from Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, arrived in the United States. His goal was to make the West aware of Hinduism, one of the world’s oldest faiths yet one that had been largely misunderstood, misinterpreted and vilified by the West.

Swami Vivekananda’s tour of the United States would mark what would become the first exposure most non-Hindus in the West had with Hinduism. Swami Vivekananda, born Narendranath Datta, was barely 30 years old and transformed into an international ambassador of the faith, thanks to his electrifying speeches at the 1893 Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago and in invited lectures across the country.

Vivekananda became known as Hinduism’s missionary to the world, despite not seeking to convert others. His teachings were widespread around the United States, particularly through the propagation of Vedanta philosophy, the core of the Vedas, and the establishment of Vedanta Societies.

To mark the 130th anniversary of his arrival, the Free Library of Philadelphia and followers of Vivekananda’s philosophy have organized a symposium on his teachings, his message and his impact this Saturday. The April 29 symposium, which will be both in person and virtual, will feature talks by Swami Tyagananda, the head of the Vedanta Society in Boston and the Hindu chaplain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard; Deven Patel, associate professor of South Asian studies at the University of Pennsylvania; and Jeffery D. Long, professor of religion, philosophy and Asian studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. The Rev. Stephen Avino, executive director of this year’s Parliament of World’s Religions, will also provide remarks on Vivekananda’s impact in understanding faith beyond an Abrahamic lens.

Long said Swami Vivekananda has an enduring legacy because he articulated the idea of religion and spirituality being a personal quest of self-improvement rather than collective tethering to dogma and doctrine.

“Swami Vivekananda spoke to universal concerns which are likely to remain relevant in all times and places: the quest for spirituality, and for a deeper meaning and purpose in life, and issues like the nature of consciousness, the nature of self, and the foundations of ethics,” he said. “Swami Vivekananda advocated for the freedom of individuals to pursue questions fearlessly, without being bound by dogmatism. His teaching is reflected in the emergence of the ‘spiritual but not religious movement.'”

Swami Vivekananda in Chicago during the Parliament of the World’s Religions in September 1893. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons

Divya Nair, a member of the Vedanta Society and a key organizer of the symposium, said Swami Vivekananda’s message of pluralism and personal connection to the divine remains powerful today.

“Often we think of religion as something apart from us but Swamiji teaches us to dive deep inward, tap into our innate strength and change our perception of what we are seeing,” Nair said. “As we encounter calamities of various scales and magnitudes today, this lesson is so important: We gain the strength to bear witness calmly and persevere patiently in our search for peace, reality and truth, no matter who or where we are.”

Leading up to the symposium, organizers have held weekly sessions on Vivekananda’s teachings, led by Patel. Nair said attendees have shared how much they have been inspired by the lessons and how much they learned about the pioneering monk.

A philosopher and activist ahead of his time

What made Swami Vivekananda so influential to Hindus and non-Hindus was his marriage of Hindu philosophy with practice. A disciple of the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda explained the idea of yoga to the West. While the physical practice of yoga would become slowly separated from its Hindu philosophical roots in later years, Vivekananda was important in demystifying it to curious Westerners.

He was also one of the first international visitors to the United States to speak out against racial injustice. During one of his tours in the American South, Vivekananda spoke out against the segregation of train cars and other facilities, refusing to sit in the “whites only” section of a train, a privilege initially made possible by a white benefactor who sponsored his speech in Tennessee.

In India, Vivekananda spoke forcefully against the caste system, arguing it went against Hindu scriptures and was not indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. Though Vivekananda’s message was not different from that of hundreds of well-known Hindu sages, reformers and lay leaders who came before him, his impact was more pronounced because of his ability to articulate ideas to both Hindu audiences and British colonial authorities. Caste only became a legal identity in India during the British Raj in the 1800s, but Vivekananda argued any form of casteism ran counter to the core of Vedic philosophy, which teaches the oneness of all beings.

He also argued against the politicization of religion, particularly as it became weaponized to divide different groups. 

“Swami Vivekananda spoke against fanaticism, bigotry and intolerance and argued for a harmony of religions,” Long said. “This message is still desperately needed as religion continues to be used as a way to divide humanity against itself and to justify violence.”

Though he died shy of his 40th birthday in 1902, Vivekananda’s legacy in the Indian subcontinent and across the world endures more than a century later, Long said, highlighting the “many scholars and artists who found inspiration in his teachings: writers like Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley and J.D. Salinger; scholars like Joseph Campbell, whose work inspired George Lucas to create the “Star Wars” films, which contain echoes of Swami Vivekananda’s thoughts in the teachings of the Jedi; and musicians like George Harrison, who read Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga early on in his own journey, and who himself inspired millions to look into Indian philosophy and meditative practice.”

Long added that despite this influence, Vivekananda is still largely unknown to many, especially in the internet age.

“I would say that Swami Vivekananda’s full impact on the world has yet to be fully felt and appreciated,” he said.

Murali Balaji. Photo via University of Pennsylvania

Organizers of the symposium hope they can help teach a new generation of learners about the legendary monk’s impact. For more information and to register for the symposium, visit the Free Library’s symposium page.

(Murali Balaji is a journalist and a lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of “Digital Hinduism” and author of “The Professor and the Pupil,” a political biography of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.) 

STRAY REMARKS ON THEOSOPHY

(Found among Swami Vivekananda's papers.)

The Theosophists are having a jubilee time of it this year, and several press-notices are before us of their goings and doings for the last twenty-five years.

Nobody has a right now to say that the Hindus are not liberal to a fault. A coterie of young Hindus has been found to welcome even this graft of American Spiritualism, with its panoply of taps and raps and hitting back and forth with Mahâtmic pellets.

The Theosophists claim to possess the original divine knowledge of the universe. We are glad to learn of it, and gladder still that they mean to keep it rigorously a secret. Woe unto us, poor mortals, and Hindus at that, if all this is at once let out on us! Modern Theosophy is Mrs. Besant. Blavatskism and Olcottism seem to have taken a back seat. Mrs. Besant means well at least — and nobody can deny her perseverance and zeal.

There are, of course, carping critics. We on our part see nothing but good in Theosophy — good in what is directly beneficial, good in what is pernicious, as they say, indirectly good as we say — the intimate geographical knowledge of various heavens, and other places, and the denizens thereof; and the dexterous finger work on the visible plane accompanying ghostly communications to live Theosophists — all told. For Theosophy is the best serum we know of, whose injection never fails to develop the queer moths finding lodgment in some brains attempting to pass muster as sound.

We have no wish to disparage the good work of the Theosophical or any other society. Yet exaggeration has been in the past the bane of our race and if the several articles on the work of the Theosophical Society that appeared in the Advocate of Lucknow be taken as the temperamental gauge of Lucknow, we are sorry for those it represents, to say the least; foolish depreciation is surely vicious, but fulsome praise is equally loathsome.

This Indian grafting of American Spiritualism — with only a few Sanskrit words taking the place of spiritualistic jargon — Mahâtmâ missiles taking the place of ghostly raps and taps, and Mahatmic inspiration that of obsession by ghosts.

We cannot attribute a knowledge of all this to the writer of the articles in the Advocate, but he must not confound himself and his Theosophists with the great Hindu nation, the majority of whom have clearly seen through the Theosophical phenomena from the start and, following the great Swami Dayânanda Sarasvati who took away his patronage from Blavatskism the moment he found it out, have held themselves aloof.

Again, whatever be the predilection of the writer in question, the Hindus have enough of religious teaching and teachers amidst themselves even in this Kali Yuga, and they do not stand in need of dead ghosts of Russians and Americans.

The articles in question are libels on the Hindus and their religion. We Hindus — let the writer, like that of the articles referred to, know once for all — have no need nor desire to import religion from the West. Sufficient has been the degradation of importing almost everything else.

The importation in the case of religion should be mostly on the side of the West, we are sure, and our work has been all along in that line. The only help the religion of the Hindus got from the Theosophists in the West was not a ready field, but years of uphill work, necessitated by Theosophical sleight-of-hand methods. The writer ought to have known that the Theosophists wanted to crawl into the heart of Western Society, catching on to the skirts of scholars like Max Müller and poets like Edwin Arnold, all the same denouncing these very men and posing as the only receptacles of universal wisdom. And one heaves a sigh of relief that this wonderful wisdom is kept a secret. Indian thought, charlatanry, and mango-growing fakirism had all become identified in the minds of educated people in the West, and this was all the help rendered to Hindu religion by the Theosophists.

The great immediate visible good effect of Theosophy in every country, so far as we can see, is to separate, like Prof. Koch's injections into the lungs of consumptives, the healthy, spiritual, active, and patriotic from the charlatans, the morbids, and the degenerates posing as spiritual beings.

Complete Works - Index - Volumes (ramakrishnavivekananda.info)

Swami Vivekananda’s Philosophy Of Yoga And Its Prevalence In Crowley’s Thelema

 - April 19, 2020

by Lani Milbus

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This piece is an excerpt from Lani Milbus’ forthcoming book Effing the Ineffable.

---

The kind of person who would open a book such as this, a seeker, is usually someone who has a question about the nature of existence. More specifically, we want to know; what is the cause of suffering?

One does not come to these philosophical questions until there is a problem one wishes to overcome. That suffering is what gets the mind moving. We suffer from thirst; so, we begin to think about where to find water. In the same way, we live long enough to begin to question why we have to suffer through fear, insecurity, loss, pain and all of the things that appear to separate us from bliss.

I recall one such awakening that happened when I was about nine years old. There appeared, in the mind, a sudden awareness of the inevitability of the death of the body. I felt terrified. It caused the mind to apply this knowledge to my mother and all those whom I loved and depended upon. I asked my mother about what this meant. Her response was to reassure me that we all go to heaven when we die, establishing a comfort in the continuity of existence beyond death. While this consoled that 9-year-old child, that comfort came and went like the seasons until I broke down all of the barriers to understanding within the faculties of my being.

I have a very stubbornly skeptical mind. To break down barriers to realization would require me to answer for every contradicting philosophy within all of the religions, atheism, material science and everything. I was not satisfied with any explanation that only held my fancy in limited aspects. I needed an answer that encompassed all that exists or could ever exist. I needed to experience, not pontificate, speak nor hear about, but to actually experience for myself, the infinite.

It turns out that I am not alone in this insistence.

Swami Vivekananda and Gnana Yoga

While the masses argue about which God is real, or even if God is unreal, it turns out that a philosophical proof to settle this conflict has existed and already withstood at least 1600 years of attacks. It is called the Mandukya Karikas and contains the Mandukya Upanishad. The problem arising from the solution is that these 12 verses of the Upanishad are so perfectly simple and sublime; yet, they defy our most common conception of the nature of Self. So, it requires a profound paradigm shift to get beyond a superficial understanding of its claim to the point of experiential realization.

Swami Vivekananda, a Vedantic monk who lived at the turn of the 19th Century and is known as the modern father of Raja Yoga, described the path to enlightenment with an analogy of the flight of a bird. He said, “gnana yoga is one wing of the bird and bhakti is the other. Raja yoga is the tail that keeps the balance.” Vivekananda only partially elucidated the meaning of this analogy, perhaps assuming that those who would hear it were already accomplished yogis. Or, perhaps, he wanted to save the beauty of full realization for his audience to discover on their own. 120 years later, the analogy is at risk of obscurity, so I will elaborate.

Gnana means “knowledge,” so gnana yoga means “union (esp ‘union with God’) through knowledge.” There is a profound relationship between gnana yoga and bhakti yoga, translated as “union with God through devotion,” as opposing wings of our bird. The bird cannot perform its function, flight, without both wings. What Vivekananda did not provide in the analogy was the quality of attainment for each of these yogas. Therein lies the paradox we will need to carry over into enlightenment. This paradox is the contraindication between the attainments of gnana and bhakti, respectively.

In gnana yoga, one attains to the truth of the Mandukya Upanishad. If God is infinite and all-pervasive, God cannot be divided and must be omnipresent. If God is omnipresent, there is no part of me, or the world that I experience, that is not-God. I, and my experience, are all that I can ever truly know; therefore, I am one with God. Or, as is found in the Bible, “I Am That I Am.” This is the yoga of gnana, or knowledge.” It is called Advaita, in Sanskrit, meaning “not two.” This seems easy enough to conceptualize, but we need to be able to do more than just talk about “all is one….I am one with God.” Repeating the words is not realization. Realization comes when our every experience after realization is seen in this light.

Another Swami, Sarvapriyananda, put it plainly: “enlightenment never becomes a memory.” It changes the way we experience the world. To truly realize advaita, we have to dispel the ignorance of division, of a “this” and a “that.” There is only “I.” As Jesus Christ said, “I and my Father are one.” Aleister Crowley again says, “I am alone; there is no god where I Am.” This Upanishad says, “Tat Tvam Asi (That thou Art).

This is the revelation that all objects are false and that only pure subject exists. This is Brahman, the supreme reality. It is the one essence of every religion. Brahman, existence/consciousness/bliss, alone exists, nay is existence itself. All else is appearance, called maya (space/time/causation), whose essence is ignorance. Maya is ignorance itself as Brahman is consciousness/awareness itself.

You might ask, “but are these not two?” They are not. Ignorance is not really anything. It can be removed. And when ignorance is removed, all that remains is awareness, Brahman. This is the summit of gnana yoga. Now that we have our right wing flapping, why are we not flying?

Simply put, that which seeks enlightenment, the seeker, the bird, is just another appearance in maya. Anything that can be known, any object, is of maya. So, for the seeker to pronounce “I am God and it is finished” did not make the appearance disappear. You are still reading just as I am still writing. I still appear as this body and you still appear as that body. The world is still going on in what appears as “outside.” Nothing has changed. But if I see all of this and still know, not believe but know, that the I of my consciousness, that Brahman which is my true Self beyond my body/mind and all division, is my true nature, there is a danger that I will just give up my life. I will resent the appearance of the body/mind and will not see any point in living. Within maya, ignoring karma does not make it go away. To take up this attitude is not actually enlightenment and will only increase my attachment to samsara and delay liberation. It makes me become even more lost within the appearances of maya.

So long as I am experiencing karma, the body mind and life that appear in experience, there is still work to be done. The enlightened person does this happily. They live life after enlightenment the same as they did before, only they know it is not the absolute reality. Just as a chess-player could physically move any piece in any direction on the chessboard without limitation, if that player wants to enjoy the experience of the game they do not do so: they will follow the rules and limitations of the game. In that way, the enlightened person does their human karma within maya and by the rules of maya because they, as they are identified as appearing with a body/mind, are subject to the power of maya.

It is a theory within yoga that the purpose of this apparent individuality is to realize our true nature over many lifetimes. In each life we decrease ignorance by burning up the karma that created the appearance of each life.

Alan Watts described this, as Brahman got bored being alone and without change, so Brahman created a universe within. In that universe, because Brahman is very good at things, Brahman began to walk about as the objects of the universe and became confused. In this confusion, Brahman then spent all possible lifetimes looking for Brahman.

The danger in gnana can be found here. Living out the karma within may can be confusing when one begins to realize the truth. It can feel frustrating to know “I am Brahman” and still feel very small and powerless in our waking experience. It can lead to depression, suicide and all sorts of entanglements. The most efficient way to navigate maya is to actually be the omnipresent, all pervading creator of this universe too. Within maya, that is God or whatever we refer to as our own highest ideal. The reason this is a paradox is that we know, from the perspective of ultimate reality that no god exists outside our true Self. But at the level of maya, we need God, or a highest ideal, to which to aspire and become. That is the business of bhakti yoga.

Again, bhakti means devotion, which is a kind of love. We love God through devotion of ritual, prayer, adoration, offering, service and any other way our chosen religion or spiritual path prescribes. Bhakti requires a deep commitment and passion. Whereas gnana yoga demands experience and shuns belief, bhakti requires faith. When an enlightened person practices bhakti, they do so with the knowledge that this is not the supreme reality. However, is as real as any other appearance including hunger, pain, sexual pleasure, thought or any experience that can be had in the body. It is every bit as real as those and, at the same time, not real at all. Loving God, contemplating God, serving God; these are the flapping of the left wing. The bird flies only when these opposites are both working together.

Vivekananda and Raja Yoga

Swami Vivekananda called raja yoga “the tail.” Raja yoga is a series of methods for using the body/mind to overcome the body/mind. The paradox is extremely difficult to maintain as a perspective on reality while the aspirant is identifying the body/mind as self. The mind cannot grasp ideas about pure unchanging consciousness that are beyond mind. Mind thinks of itself as the source of consciousness, “I think therefore I am.” Raja yoga eventually subjugates, mind, body, ego and all of the faculties for experiencing consciousness to consciousness itself. The attainment of raja yoga is samadhi. Raja is loosely translated as “the highest” and raja yoga unites the gross and subtle, which enables, through a purification of the gross, for one to balance the paradox of gnana and bhakti. Since there is only one more yoga in Vivekananda’s philosophy, I will mention it here. It is called karma yoga and it is yoga through action. Karma yoga is like the actual flight of the bird. In karma yoga, our deeds, our thoughts our very life is meant to unite us with the ideal. In other words, the bird flies to its destination instead of aimlessly wandering through maya.

The European iteration of this philosophy, which is a thorough examination into the true nature of Self and the aligning of all that we do we do with the quality of that nature, was presented by Aleister Crowley in the early twentieth century. He imbedded Vivekananda’s philosophy of yoga into his own spiritual system, called A:.A:. In fact, the first order of this system manifests Vivekananda’s “bird” within its grades.

If one were familiar with the grades of this system and their corresponding positions upon the Qabalistic Tree of Life, a superimposition of this bird can be seen when the various yogas are viewed according to the grades in which the three yogas are prescribed. Raja yoga is focused in the first two grades on the middle pillar, while bhakti and yoga are in the right and left pillars, respectively, formulating the wings.

Crowley stated the accomplishment of these attainments, knowledge of Self and performing actions in accordance with that true nature, as the central law of his Philosophy, “Do what thou Wilt,” derived from the word “Thelema,” which in Greek translates as an expression of inevitability similar to the English, “It is God’s will.” Crowley simply translated Thelema to mean “Will,” with a capital “W” to differentiate it from desire or whim. 

First, the mind and body are purified in order to deal with the required paradigm shift that is knowledge of our true identity as atman/Brahman. Only after these two, can we make choices for action that are in harmony with out True Will. That is the point of Thelema and Vivekananda’s philosophy of yoga.

In Search of a Common Core of Theosophy in Celtic Myth, Yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism: Walter Y. Evans-Wentz’ and the Comparative Study of Religion

Jens Schlieter

Buddhism, 

Comparative Religion, 

Tibetan Buddhism,

Occultism,

Theosophy

(pre-print, please do not quote)  https://tinyurl.com/yd5h77kr

A b s t r a c t. 

The contribution will discuss the impact of American Theosophist Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) on the emerging "science of religion." Evans-Wentz first pursued Celtic studies, concluding in his The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Here, in line with theosophical doctrines and Psychical Research, he claimed a "Fairyland" as "a supernormal state of consciousness into which men and women may enter temporarily in dreams, trances, and in various ecstatic states." "Fairies" are nothing less than the "intelligent forces now recognized by psychical researchers." Already in his early work, he drew freely on various other religious traditions in comparative perspective, aiming to corroborate evidence that the idea of rebirth has been advanced as a "common core" of the earliest strand of esoteric traditions. Later, he became attracted to Indian Yoga traditions, and, after periods of intensive practice and study in India, published a translation and commentary of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927). Being the first translation into a Western language, this work was a groundbreaking contribution, yet loaded with theosophical ideas projected into Tibetan Buddhism. An esoteric reading of the Book, Evans-Wentz argued, offers an almost scientific proof of reincarnation, but also a theory of karmic hallucinations that helped to explain cultural variants of after-death imagery. However, even though Evans-Wentz did offer an array of comparative remarks, he never advanced a methodology or system of religious thought, ritual, or a history of religion that overcomes the speculative assumptions of Theosophy. Therefore, the contribution argues that the innovative aspect of Evans-Wentz' studies should be seen in his appreciation of informants belonging to the respective traditions, but also in being a catalyzer for the emerging field of the study of esoteric traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.

A New Hilma af Klint Documentary Traces the Extraordinary True Story of the Mystical Artist Who Invented Abstract Painting—Watch the Trailer Here

The film debuts on April 17.

Sarah Cascone, April 13, 2020

A scene in Beyond the Visible, a film by Halina Dyrschka. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

The visionary Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a pioneering abstract painter, but her place in the art history books is only now being assured. The first major step in cementing her legacy was the blockbuster 2019 exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York, and now, a new documentary film coming out this week, Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, is the latest attempt to chronicle her contributions to abstract art.

Hilma af Klint began creating her colorful, spiritually guided canvases in 1906—five years before Wassily Kandinsky made his first abstract work—yet she was all but forgotten after her death. That was partly by her own design—her will prohibited the exhibition of her work for decades—but it is also symptomatic of larger tendency in art history to under-recognize the accomplishments of women artists.


In this case, neglecting to acknowledge the primacy of af Klint is a massive omission from perhaps the most important artistic development of the 20th century.

“If you compare her to the supposed genius men, their steps toward abstraction were very timid,” says artist Josiah McElheny in the film’s trailer. “In order to tell the history of abstraction, now you have to rewrite it, because basically all the people who said ‘it happened in this year,’ well no, it didn’t.” (In 2011, McElheny incorporated historical works by artists including Klint into his solo show at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet.)

Hilma af Klint, as seen in Beyond the Visible, a film by Halina Dyrschka.

The film’s director, Halina Dyrschka, first discovered af Klint in 2013, in a newspaper article about the exhibition “Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction,” which originated at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. Dyrschka saw the show when it traveled to Berlin, and was blown away by the artist’s work.

“I almost felt personally insulted when I read that this was a new discovery and the paintings have been hidden for decades,” she said in a statement. “Who would be interested in marginalizing this artist’s accomplishments? And why?”

What Dyrschka found was that the art establishment has long been content with a male-dominated narrative that overlooked a pioneering woman artist. As recently as 2013, a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art titled “Inventing Abstraction: 1910–1925” deigned even a mention of af Klint.


A scene in Beyond the Visible, a film by Halina Dyrschka.

“Hilma af Klint would cause such an upheaval in art history, that some would say ‘It’s better to leave her outside,'” says art critic and historian Julia Voss in the movie’s trailer.

And yet, the rediscovery of af Klint’s work has been hailed around the world, her practice resonating with audiences and breaking attendance records at the Guggenheim. Now, her journey of rediscovery can be followed in film form, accessed online via theaters across the country beginning April 17.

“It is more than time,” said Dyrschka, “to tell the untold heroine stories.”

See the film’s trailer below.

Here’s How the Hilma af Klint Show Played Perfectly Into the Current Zeitgeist to Become the Guggenheim’s Most-Visited Exhibition Ever

The show made history with more than 600,000 visitors.

Ben Davis, April 19, 2019

Installation view of Hilma af Klint's "The Ten Largest." Image courtesy of Ben Davis.


With four days to go until the closing of “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” at the Guggenheim, the New York museum has announced that the show has already become its most-attended exhibition of all time. More than 600,000 visitors have come to see the Tracey Bashkoff-curated survey of the Swedish mystic painter.

For comparison, last year’s Giacometti show at the Guggenheim drew half that number of visitors, according to the Art Newspaper, with a little over 314,000, a total that put it in the top 10 most-visited museum shows for the “Impressionist and Modern” category worldwide. To be fair, the Hilma af Klint blockbuster has had a much longer run (October to April, instead of Giacometti’s three-month June to September run). It has also benefited from the Guggenheim’s decision to throw its doors open seven days a week to celebrate its 60th anniversary at the beginning of 2019.


Still, the record-smashing attendance numbers are a remarkable feat for an artist who until very recently was an outsider to the mainstream canon of art. Just six years ago, af Klint’s prescient abstract art was not even mentioned in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Inventing Abstraction: 1910–1925.” So what accounts for the show’s popularity?

Af Klint’s lush, cryptic paintings have been almost universally praised by critics as a breath of fresh air. And, at a time when personal narrative is more important than ever in terms of how audiences engage with art, she also has a compelling biography (though the timeline of her life is, in truth, still filled with enigmas). Born in 1862, af Klint turned to spiritualism after the loss of her sister. Working with a group of women called the Five, she committed herself in near-secret to an epic cycle of mediumistically inspired abstract paintings—only to be nearly forgotten and then discovered by a new generation.

Installation view of Hilma af Klint’s “The Dove” paintings. Image courtesy Ben Davis.

The artist’s work is resonant with the long-celebrated styles of more famous male artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, but also stemmed from female-centered spiritualist spaces. The show thus reads as a satisfying feminist expansion of the art canon. In some ways, the unexpected drawing power of “Paintings for the Future” feels like the museum blockbuster equivalent of recent movie blockbusters like Wonder Woman, Black Panther, and Crazy Rich Asians. Like them, its commercial and critical success will almost certainly inspire new directions for future programming.

The af Klint show has also benefited from its connections beyond the typical art audience. Witchcraft has been trending in popular culture in recent years. The Swedish artist may not have been widely taught in art history courses, but her work has a large presence in contemporary occult communities (in the 2016 indie film Personal Shopper, Kristen Stewart’s character discovers af Klint’s paintings, inspiring her to attempt to communicate with her dead brother). During the Guggenheim show, devotees have even offered free “psychic tours” where visitors are taught to “practice receiving spirit messages through select paintings as a group.”

Attempts by the likes of Sephora and Urban Outfitters to cash in on the demand for witch-themed lifestyle products have provoked backlash. For its part, the Guggenheim eagerly took the opportunity to merchandise, with a very successful “Hilma af Klint Capsule Collection.” During the run of the show, af Klint-themed products have accounted for some 42 percent of sales at the Guggenheim store, according to the museum.


The “Buddha Pullover Sweatshirt, Grey with Black & White Circle,” on male model. Image courtesy Guggenheim Store.

Offerings range from a $42 Hilma af Klint Watch, featuring one of her circular, diagram-like black-and-white paintings; to a $310 hand-painted Eye Altarpiece; to the $360 cotton Hilma Radial Kimono.

The “Paintings for the Future” catalogue has also set a record, selling more than 30,000 copies. That total surpassed the previous record-holder, the 2009 catalogue for af Klint’s fellow spiritual-abstractionist, Kandinsky.

For the remainder of the show’s run, the Guggenheim has extended its hours until 8 p.m. to accommodate the crowds.

“Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, New York, October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019.

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Why Hilma af Klint’s Occult Spirituality Makes Her the Perfect Artist for Our Technologically Disrupted Time

At the Guggenheim, "Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future" makes you rethink what it means to be modern.

Ben Davis, October 23, 2018

Installation view of Hilma af Klint's "The Ten Largest." Image courtesy Ben Davis.

I can’t help but agree with all the praise being heaped on the Guggenheim’s big Hilma af Klint show. It’s great, great, beyond great.

Assembled in a chronological progression up the museum’s spiral, the show feels like both a transmission from an unmapped other world and a perfectly logical correction to the history of Modern art—an alternate mode of abstraction from the dawn of the 20th century that looks as fresh as if it were painted yesterday.

It’s hard to quibble with the sheer level of painterly pleasure of af Klint’s sui generis style. So instead I’ll take a moment to focus on why this show feels so right for right now.



Hilma af Klint, Altarpieces: Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece (1915). © Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk.

A Style of Her Own

Part of that has to do with her status as a powerfully convincing and long-underappreciated voice. Now happens to be a very exciting moment in art history, with loads of new scholarship disrupting the old Paris-to-New York, Modern-to-contemporary throughline, reconsidering the stories of minorities and the colonized, “outsiders” of all kinds, and also of women.

Af Klint’s body of work really only began receiving attention in the 1980s and is only now getting the kind of widespread acclaim it really deserves—she doesn’t even feature as a footnote in the catalogue for MoMA’s “Inventing Abstraction” show, and that was just five years ago! She therefore fits comfortably within the rediscovery zeitgeist.

Born in Sweden in 1862 and descended from a distinguished clan of naval heroes and maritime cartographers, she trained formally as a painter at Stockholm’s official academy. The Guggenheim exhibition opens with a small sample of her landscapes and portraits, which show a deft, accomplished naturalism.


Hilma af Klint, Untitled Series: group IV, the Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood (1907). © Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk.


But the works she turned to in her forties, like “The Ten Largest” (1907), are something else again. The suite of 10 wall-filling paintings represent an abstract symbolic depiction of the cycle of life: the first two represent childhood, followed by panels representing youth, adulthood, and old age. Full of wheeling abstract figures, they are nevertheless wonderfully balanced, both in their individual compositions and within the broader series.

They are also, to a contemporary eye at least, very feminine, in a way that stands as a pre-rebuttal of the machismo that later came to dominate abstract rhetoric as it rose to art historical preeminence. The works of “The Ten Largest” are not figurative, but the forms they channel—the blossoms, lacy garlands, and curlicues; the looping, cursive lines of cryptic text that surge across the surface; the palette of pinks and lavenders, peaches and baby blues—draw freshness, to a contemporary eye, from their symbolic associations with feminine iconography.


Installation view of “The Ten Biggest.” Image courtesy Ben Davis.

At the same time, all this is splashed at such a brazen scale that it also undoes period stereotypes of feminine modesty and decorum—though this unleashed expressive freedom was probably itself made possible by the fact that af Klint hardly ever showed these works publicly.


Channeling Abstraction

So there’s that: Hilma af Klint’s example shows the symbolic power that a woman artist could draw both in spite of and because of the constraints put on her by her time period and her culture, making her a convincing heroine for today. But there is another aspect of Hilma af Klint that makes her oeuvre enter into harmonic relation with the present.


That is her occultism.

Af Klint’s interior life, I gather, remains a bit of an enigma, glimpsed through hints and fragments in her journals. What is definitely known is that she had begun attending séances as a teenager, using them as a way to contact her younger sister, who had died young. Af Klint’s turn to abstraction grew from experiments with contacting the dead, particularly as part of a group of women who christened themselves the Five, going into trance states or channeling with a machine called a psychograph.


Example of automatic drawing created by The Five. Image courtesy Ben Davis.

The spirals, percolating patterns, and scrawled text fragments of the Five’s automatic pencil drawings appear like the primal chaos out of which the bold abstraction of “The Ten Largest” emerged.

The Five believed they had been contacted by the “High Masters,” spirits called Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg, and Gregor. One of these would give af Klint the mission that would become “The Paintings for the Temple,” the multi-part cycle that occupies most of the Guggenheim show. “Amaliel offered me a commission and I immediately replied: yes,” she wrote. “This became the great commission, which I carried out in my life.”


Occult Modernism

Though unique and all her own, af Klint’s spiritualist passions were fertilized in the larger developments in European fin de siècle culture. Early on, the Swedish artist found a home as a Theosophist, shortly after that movement opened a lodge in Stockholm.


Founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), a Russian émigré to the United States, Theosophy was a New Age philosophy avant la lettre. It combined three pillars: advocacy of a universal brotherhood of man; interest in non-Western philosophy and religion as a source of renewing wisdom; and a belief in communing with ghosts. The last, according to Blavatsky, was the least important—but very clearly appealed to the spiritualistically inclined af Klint.


Hilma af Klint’s “Primordial Chaos” series. Image courtesy Ben Davis.

This improbable synthesis captured the hearts of Americans and Europeans disoriented by the 19th century’s concussive changes, in a time when science was crowding religion, and electric light, the telegraph, the phonograph, and other world-changing developments were altering the textures of life, making the once-miraculous seem abruptly possible.

In rapidly evolving Sweden, Lars Magnus Ericsson would found his telephone company in 1876; less than 10 years later the Scandanavian nation had the world’s most complex network and Stockholm had the most telephones in the world. In that febrile moment, no wonder people believed that it might also be possible to rig a system to listen to voices from beyond!

Hilma af Klint, The WU/Rose Series: Group I, Primordial Choas, No. 12 (1906-07). Image courtesy Ben Davis.


(Af Klint had good company in Theosophy among Europe’s Modernist big guns. Wassily Kandinsky, for one, also counted Theosophy as an inspiration, citing Blavatsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the pamphlet he wrote that provided the basis for his “non-objective art.”)

Among other things, the Theosophist craze fed on interest in older secret societies that had shadowed the Enlightenment, especially the legend of the Rosicrucians, supposedly a secret order promising spiritual knowledge to reform mankind, involving both study of ancient mystic traditions and a belief in alchemy.

The esoteric philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who passed through Theosophy before founding his own doctrine of Anthroposophy, reclaimed the ideas of Rosicrucianism as a “spiritual science,” capable of returning a sense of the purpose of humanity to a world grown disenchantingly materialist. Steiner in particular was a huge influence on af Klint—in fact, he was the only person she sought out to show her paintings to (though when she finally convinced him to see them, in 1909, he was shatteringly underwhelmed).


Signs of All Times

All of these interests are key to understanding Hilma af Klint’s aesthetic. For instance, in 1920, she made a series of small works that begins with a single circle, half black and half white, called “Starting Picture”—the world as a balanced duality, physical and material, dark and light.

Subsequent entries in the series offer similar circles, differently divided up between black and white: one divided into four alternating slices; one with black crescents framing a white center; etc. The titles suggest they are supposed to represent different graphs of the great spiritual traditions: “The Current Standpoint of the Mahatmas,” “The Jewish Standpoint at the Birth of Jesus,” “Buddha’s Standpoint in Worldly Life,” and so on.

Hilma af Klint, Series II, Number 2a: The Current Standpoint of the Mahatmas (1920) © Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk.

What specifically this means, I have difficulty grasping. But the idea quite clearly emerges out of the syncretic foment of the greater intellectual milieu—that all world religions are permutations of one spiritual background pattern that is revealing itself.


Theosophy was obsessed with esoteric symbols—its seal famously mashed together the swastika and the ankh as well as the ouroboros and a hexagram formed of interlinked white and black triangles. The latter recurs frequently in af Klint’s paintings.


Hilma af Klint, The Atom Series: No. 1 (Nr 1) (1917). Photo by Albin Dahlström, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation and the Guggenheim Museum. Note the black-white hexagrams at bottom right.

So do astrological symbols, another major interest thrown into the era’s great melting pot of occult interests. You see them arrayed around the borders of paintings in her “The Dove” series.


Hilma af Klint, The SUW/UW Series: Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 14 (1915). Clockwise from top left, the symbols are for Aquarius, Pisces, Capricorn, and Sagittarius. Image courtesy Ben Davis.

Af Klint’s gorgeous series “The Swan” is among the least abstract of her great cycle of works, which generally have the feeling of diagrams being permutated. “The Swan” centers on the image of the titular bird, but mirrored and repeated, transforming it into a hieratic emblem. (In Blavatsky’s 1890 essay “The Last Song of the Swan,” she had described the symbol of the swan as being particularly important, representing “the tail-end of every important cycle in human history”; in alchemy, it stands for the union of opposites.)


Hilma af Klint, The SUW/UW Series: Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 7 (1915). Note the heart pieced by a cross at the center, a Rosicrucian symbol. Image courtesy Ben Davis.
Painterly Alchemy

While today af Klint’s paintings strike us as forcefully individual, they were certainly first appreciated as icons of mysticism. She had but one real public showing of her work, at a meeting of the 1928 World Conference of Spiritual Science and Its Practical Applications in London, where a program noted that the Swedish painter considered her works to be “studies of Rosicrucian symbolism.” (It is not known which of her paintings were shown.)

As a font for artistic inspiration, the spiritualist and esoteric domain was certainly fertile. Crack open the 1785 compendium Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, a classic of European occult literature, and its plates appear as a treasure trove of figures that predict af Klint’s graphic interests: hexagrams and sigils, sunbursts and spirals, mirrored animals and abstract figures diagramming the unfolding of the divine light.


Compare the graphics in Secret Symbols’s illustration of “The Tree of Good and Evil Knowledge” to a work from Hilma af Klint’s own “Tree of Knowledge” series, which offers gnomic variations on the same theme. You can definitely see both the inspiration, even as you see how much more rarified af Klint’s version is.


Left: Hilma af Klint, Serie W, Nr 5. Kunskapens träd (1915). © Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Right: Plate from Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucianians of the 16th and 17th Centuries (1785).

Even Hilma af Klint’s mandate that her work be kept secret for decades after her death until the world was spiritually ready for it is a spin on the myths of Rosicrucianism, which introduced itself in its manifestos as a secret order that had stayed hidden until the world was ready for its spiritual reform.

Unless you are a believer in otherworldly visitation yourself, you would probably expect that the cosmic voice within would actually, when decoded, boil down to ideas imprinted from the ambient social environment. This demystifies, but in no way undoes, the magic of Hilma af Klint’s art.


Message to the Future

So: What to do with Hilma af Klint’s art? Can we separate out those aspects that make it prophetic of Modern art from those aspects linked to an actual mystical-prophetic belief system?

The impulse is understandable: The former puts this vibrant artist in the company of the most revered artistic figures of the century to come; the latter emphasizes elements that connect her more to “kitsch” spiritual aesthetics, fortune tellers and crystal healers and chart readings and all of that.


Installation view of Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim. Image courtesy Ben Davis.

“Taking af Klint seriously as an artist, in my view, actually requires us to take some critical distance from the mysticism that might have enabled her to make such innovative work,” art historian Briony Fer argues in the catalogue. I think it undeniable that the sense that af Klint’s “Paintings for the Temple” are straining to connect the dots of an invisible order is part of their allure. Even so, I do get that a more formalist reading, focusing on her as an inventive individual, seems the most promising way to make the case for her in the present.


My argument, though, is that all that occult stuff is what makes her particularly interesting in the present—probably more interesting than modernists who were outwardly more individualistic and purely formal.

We live today in a time of almost universal domination by the mercenary values of profit, immersed in the cheerful ideology of high-tech disruption and economic creative destruction. We also happen to live in a time of unleashed irrationalism and improbable conspiracy theories of all kinds, welling up everywhere.

So it’s very instructive to be reminded that all that proto-New Age, occult symbolism that af Klint drew upon did not simply represent a lapse back into pre-Enlightenment superstition. In fact, for thousands upon thousands of people (including many artists), this was the specific form that modernity took.

And it was also not, by and large, the form it took for the poor or unlettered. Theosophy and its kindred philosophies, with their grandiose spiritual pseudo-science and their remixing of the world’s myths and religions into a master code, appealed, on a profound intuitive level, to people who believed in the authority of scientific knowledge, but still felt that the emergent modern world left a hole to be filled in terms of purpose or meaning.

This included relatively well-off and intelligent people like Hilma af Klint, who had time for study and travel, and resources to embark on a personal artistic-spiritual journey.

Installation view of Hilma af Klint’s “The Dove” paintings. Image courtesy Ben Davis.

Her beliefs are out there—but on the whole pretty benign and of course self-contained. I’m not trying to compare af Klint to the more disreputable type of present-day conspiracists or toxic myth-makers.

I’m more trying to say that the example of her work’s allusive magnetism can help us see one function that obsessions with secret signs and improbably all-connecting codes serve, one that makes them harder to dislodge than if you simply believe they are logic errors. And that is that they can be beautiful. They return a sense of mystery and order to a world that seems dispiriting and beyond control.


Hilma af Klint wanted her art hidden from the world until society was ready for it. What exactly that would have meant to her remains elusive. And nevertheless, she has surfaced right on time.

“Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” is on view at the Guggenheim, through April 23, 2019.

Ben Davis
National Art Critic

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