SURREALISM AND ESOTERICISM

par Patrick Lepetit

February 23, 2020

In the letter he addresses to me on April 15, 2012, shortly after the publication of my book Le Surréalisme, parcours souterrain, Pierre Dhainaut, who had been a member of the surrealist group at the very beginning of the 1960s and had maintained extensive correspondence with André Breton then Octavio Paz, writes to me: "You remind us of order, the secret order of surrealism, which is summed up by the word 'magic', when the author of L'Art magique spoke of 'recovering lost powers'. This was his essential bet". And these words undoubtedly echo those held by Jean Schuster in the sixth issue of Docsur, in the summer of 1988: "Breton will have spent his life forcing the locks of reasoning and reasonable reason with all the keys that an 'attraction proportional to his destiny' has put in his hands"2. As for Bataille, he will go so far as to speak of "the quasi-religious or even magical atmosphere of surrealism", as Michel Camus reminds us in his preface to the reissue of Acéphale by Jean-Michel Place in 1995. One could not better emphasize the importance, indeed, of esotericism in all its forms in the genesis and development of surrealism as a system of apprehending the world. It must nevertheless be very clear that this undeniable attraction to esotericism cannot in any way imply adherence to a belief, whatever it may be, in a transcendence. If the famous phrase from the Second Manifesto, "Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point of the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived contradictorily"3 leads to reflection, in a certain way, the "There is another world, but it is in this one" attributed to Eluard[1] closes the debate.

If it is obviously not a question of denying the contribution of Marxism or psychoanalysis to surrealism, although it is indispensable in this area to relativize, the spirit of the movement, in the political domain, being fundamentally libertarian4 and the contact between the surrealists, Breton in the lead, and Freud having hardly gone beyond the stage of courtesy – not to mention the rejection of Jung by most members of the groups, with the notable exception of Elie-Charles Flamand, precisely, and certain personalities, like Tzara, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo -, it is appropriate to recall that Breton and his friends firmly and consistently place themselves in the continuity of the Symbolists, for example, like5 Saint-Pol Roux, the Romantics and even the Illuminists of the 18th century, Martinès de Pasqually and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin6 in the lead, both cited in texts by Breton[2], but also personalities like André Rolland de Renéville[3] or Pierre Mabille. And we know very well the friendship that André Breton maintained with Eugène Canseliet, the disciple of Fulcanelli, Robert Ambelain, alias Aurifer, freemason, gnostic and martinist or even7 Robert Amadou, alias Ignifer, also a freemason, esotericist, founder of the journal La Tour Saint-Jacques and collaborator of the International Metapsychic Institute. Now this attraction to occultism in all its forms which emerges from the first issues of Littérature and up to the present day, in the dozens of groups around the world that still claim surrealism, this attraction to the "certain extra-religious sacred" cited by Breton in the Entretiens that8 all the great Seers of the 19th century went to seek in the fallows of reason, irrigates the movement in depth. This cannot fail to throw an interesting light on the conception of the Literary and Artistic Avant-garde as rupture...

Astrology, divination, magic, alchemy, freemasonry, Celtism, understood as the survival of an authentic "Western Tradition" prior to Romanization, rare are the so-called traditional sciences, esoteric practices, that have not been at least touched upon by the surrealists.

The "period of sleeps", for example, in 1922-1923, shows them venturing onto the – very irrational – terrain of mediumship and if Breton personally puts an end to the experience, it is because he thinks that "on this path, past a certain limit, disintegration threatens"[4] and we even brush against the abyss... Mediumship which will always be at the heart of the surrealists' interrogations, alongside divination which sees, for example, André Breton address in 1925 a9 "Letter to the Seers" – not to mention the implausible portrait of Madame Sacco as a hallucinated madonna that appears in Nadja. Astrology, "a very great lady, very beautiful and come from so far away that she cannot fail to hold me under her charm"[5], he writes again, in the last years of his life, seems to him to "hold the highest secrets of the world"[6] – even if he takes the precaution of specifying that "there are all sorts of means of knowledge and (that) certainly astrology could be one on condition that its premises are controlled and that what is postulate is held as postulate"[7]... But we know that he liked to draw up10 the astrological charts of his close ones, since there were still in the Atelier at the time of the dispersal no less than nineteen of these documents, including those of Nush and Paul Eluard, of Saint-Exupéry, of Valentine Hugo, Robert Desnos, Charles Baudelaire, Yves Tanguy, of Alfred Jarry, of Aragon, of René Char, Crevel, Picasso, Soupault, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Hugo and Lautréamont, not forgetting Benjamin Péret... And if Aube's had been drawn up by Pierre Mabille, a renowned doctor who had delivered her, we know that André Breton had also realized that of Yves Elléouët!

This vestige of a primordial Western tradition that is Celtism, revealed to Breton – but the terrain was propitious – by objective chance which makes appear in his life at very short intervals11 Jean Markale and the Lancelot Lengyel of L'Art Gaulois dans les médailles, all against the backdrop of the organization of the great exhibition Pérennité de l'art gaulois at the pedagogical museum in 1955, is not to be outdone, especially since Julien Gracq had, shortly before, emphasized its proximity to surrealism in his foreword to his play12 Le Roi pêcheur, published in 1948 and performed in 1949. "The companionship of the Round Table", he wrote, "the passionate quest for an ideal treasure which, however obstinately it eludes us, is always represented to us as within reach, figuring quite easily in the background a counterpart – with indefinite resonance – for certain of the most typical aspects of contemporary phenomena, among which surrealism"... As for Jean Markale, a member of the group until 1976 at least and his contribution to Vincent Bounoure's book, La Civilisation surréaliste, he declares in 1978, in an interview with Gérard Bodinier:13 "Surrealism and Celtism, it's the same thing, but there are nuances. They have parallel approaches: they both refuse dualism and Socratism. Surrealism is a vision of the real freed from Mediterranean acquisition, a detonator for the future. It arrives at the same conclusions as Celtism"[8]. Among other things, the surrealists will also be numerous in their interest in intersigns, these messages of misfortune coming, for the Celts, from the Beyond. The episode of Fort Bloqué, in Mad Love, and the theory of the "malevolent halo" can be related to this, as can Breton's propensity to recall his own prediction of a second world war that would break out in... 1939!14 Pierre Mabille, also, writes about the enucleation suffered by Brauner in 1938 and which the painter had so often anticipated in his canvases!

And speaking of Brauner,15 it is he especially, very marked by occultism in his Romanian childhood, that I will retain as representative of the numerous surrealists who have looked into magic. A passionate reader of Jean Marquès-Rivière's book,16 Amulettes, talismans et pantacles dans les traditions orientales et occidentales (1938) of which he owns a copy that he will give to Sarane Alexandrian, Victor Brauner has always felt the most vivid interest in magic as a way of acting on the material world through rituals and his teraphim, the17 Héron d'Alexandrie[9] of 1939 or La Palladiste of 1943 already testify very well to this inclination. But, during the war, Victor Brauner, isolated and taking refuge at Les Celliers de Rousset, in the Hautes Alpes, will go further and conceive what he calls counter-enchantment objects "very impressive", as Breton says in Surrealism and Painting, in order to fight against the evil that is spreading over the world.18 The Counter-Enchantment Object, but also Les Amoureux, Image du réel incréé, Le Talisman or Le Portrait de Novalis, all from 1943, stem from this inspiration. On a more serene mode, perhaps, the Charms that he addresses (or not) to loved women, in particular to Laurette Séjourné, proceed from the same approach...

Among the traditional sciences that hold a significant place in the mythical landscape of surrealism, I will, given the particular links that Elie-Charles Flamand maintained with it, dwell particularly on alchemy. After19 Michel Carrouges, in his André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme, Richard Danier has shown in his book L'Hermétisme alchimique chez André Breton[10] the quasi-structural character of the relations between surrealism and alchemy through three of the main books of the author of the Manifestos. Nadja, Mad Love and Arcanum 17 – even if it seems to me that the impregnation can go back even further, since in the "Letter to the Seers", one can already read:20 "The invention of the Philosopher's Stone by Nicolas Flamel meets almost no credence, for the simple reason that the great alchemist does not seem to have enriched himself enough. Besides, however, the scruples of a religious nature that he may have had in taking such a vulgar advantage, it is worth wondering what the obtaining of more than a few particles of gold could have interested him, when above all it had been a question of building such a spiritual fortune". And I want to emphasize in passing the use of this word, spiritual! And to insist on the last part of the quotation, often omitted: "We are in search, we are on the trail of a moral truth"[11]... Danier's book clearly establishes that the iconography and, beyond that, the alchemical thought that underlies them and which can be symbolized by this quotation from Mad Love, "On the flank of the abyss, built in philosopher's stone, opens the starred castle", form a veritable red thread that runs through the three narratives... If it is moreover true that alchemical texts, as has often been pointed out, easily resonate with automatic texts, if it is undeniable that the use of analogical thought is common to surrealism and alchemy, we note that, on a symbolic level, the Tour Saint-Jacques is undoubtedly for the surrealists the most emblematic monument of Paris.

In Paris the tottering Saint-Jacques tower Like a sunflower From the forehead sometimes comes to hit the Seine and its shadow slides imperceptibly among the tugs...

It emerges at the turn of numerous texts by Breton himself, like this one, from The White-Haired Revolver to Mad Love passing through Arcanum 17,21 while Brassaï gives in 1937 a photo with strong oneiric charge, and that Elie-Charles Flamand devotes a booklet to it in 1973...

Breton, however, never claimed to work on the elaboration of the "universal medicine" and "was not an initiate" because "pursuing his alchemical knowledge would have been for him to privilege a particular path"[12]. He therefore never went himself "to the furnace", as is customary to say, and goes so far as to write to René Alleau, in 1959, that he "persists in stumbling against the necessity that (he) does not manage to make (his) own organically of this 'practical work' of alchemy", that he is aware that "understanding it – this necessity – can only be the fruit of an illumination decidedly lacking to (him)" and that he "does not bear so well being reduced to a purely poetic apprehension of alchemical texts"[13]. Breton's taste for occultism and alchemy, however, followed him to the Batignolles cemetery.22 His tomb, indeed, is adorned with the Starred Castle, a stone in the shape of a three-dimensional Seal of Solomon that the poet had found shortly before his death at Domme, in Dordogne. This keen interest in the Star, the 17th arcana of the Tarot, but also the first manifestation of the Great Work for the Artist, only reinforces the alchemical "profession of faith" of the author of Fata Morgana: "I seek the gold of time".

Just as troubling, and yet little known, is the relationship that several members of the surrealist group, and not the least, maintained with operative alchemy, for the occasion, through the intermediary of Fulcanelli's disciple, Eugène Canseliet – whom Breton seems to have known, as well as his anonymous Master, in the Lesseps salon, avenue Montaigne. Eugène Canseliet, the "Master of Savignies" seems to have been THE key figure of this adventure. If we still wonder today about Fulcanelli's real identity, it is indeed Canseliet who writes under the Adept's dictation, prefaces then publishes the two mythical works that are23 Le Mystère des Cathédrales in 1926 then Les Demeures philosophales in 1930. There should have been, according to Canseliet, a third work, Finis gloriae mundi, before Fulcanelli recovered the manuscript, since disappeared. Following their meeting with René Alleau who gave lectures on the classical texts of alchemy[14], in 1952, at the Salle de Géographie, in the Latin Quarter, several surrealists will set to the furnaces – or at least approach them. An engineer by training, author of a thesis on Alchemy in the 17th century under the direction of Gaston Bachelard24, who, while remaining a philosopher of science, was interested in alchemy and considered it as a path of moral initiation where "the symbols of objective experience translate immediately into symbols of subjective culture"[15],25 René Alleau, who qualified alchemy as an "experimental religion", was also, according to Canseliet, a disciple of Fulcanelli. All to his desire to restore Culture to the occult", as Amadou says, Alleau then becomes the director of the Bibliotheca Hermetica at Denoël-Retz editions. Dedicated to the edition or reissue of the great classics of magic, astrology and alchemy, this mythical collection had the merit of renewing the approach to traditional knowledge. Also a member of the surrealist group,26 the future author of Paris et l'alchimie Bernard Roger, another "lover of Science" who became one of these "competent specialists (charged) with preparing and reviewing the works to be published, by comparing the different versions of ancient editions", should also have largely contributed to it as translator and prefacer. Other surrealists, more or less active members of the group, more or less involved in a very demanding operative approach,27 Elie-Charles Flamand, but I will return to this, the painter28 Jorge Camacho and his accomplice Alain Gruger, who in the Los Parajos laboratory will at least reach the first Work or29 Maurice Baskine and to a lesser extent Philippe Audoin30 are part of this small group of surrealist alchemists. In an interview with Gérard Durozoi in 1998, Camacho declares: "My interest in Alchemy, I can situate it around the year 1968.(...) It goes without saying that the hermetic science to which I began to be interested at that time fitted well within the framework of a revolt, this time of a philosophical order, against any dogmatic and academic conception of Nature. If surrealism plays an essential role in this other conception of reality, as vast and profound as one can imagine, it is striking to note a certain parallelism between their respective quests. Since then, I have never been able to separate the word 'Alchemy' from that of 'freedom', even if it may seem paradoxical! I moreover had the chance to meet at the beginning of my studies of the science of Hermes, Bernard Roger, Eugène Canseliet and René Alleau. Thanks to them, I entered without detours into the path of traditional Alchemy, keeping from my path all speculations of an occultist order and other pseudo-mystical doctrines that always graft themselves onto the admirable body of this science and denature it"[16]... With his friend Gruger, Camacho will publish in 1978, at Soleil Noir, the magnificent Héraldique alchimique nouvelle, a 20th century alchemical treatise adorned31 with emblems struck with the coin of surrealist marvelous and garnished with mottos drawn for the most part from the surrealist literary corpus. Maurice Baskine, for his part, who died in 1968, realized a work, preserved for the most part at the museum of Cordes sur Ciel, profoundly and almost integrally marked by operative Alchemy, notably the very large triptych32 Fantasophe–Roc ou l'édification de la pierre de Fantasophopolis from the mid-1950s where ALL the alchemical operations allowing to reach the Great Work are represented. We should also say a word about the magnificent33 Bourges, cité première[17] by Philippe Audoin which testifies to a great knowledge, to say the least, of the Art of Hermes.

We cannot conclude this too brief overview of the relations between surrealism and esotericism without speaking of freemasonry, for it is very present in the movement, notably through Dr. Mabille, a member of the Marie-George Martin lodge of Le Droit Humain. It is he, a high dignitary of his obedience, who will try to attract, without success, Breton into masonry – and it is doubtless to his attention that Breton writes, in his poem "Pleine Marge", in 1940,34

I am not for the adepts

I have never lived at the place called the Grenouillère

The lamp of my heart runs out and soon hiccups at the approach of the parvis

I have never been carried but towards what did not keep to the square,

subtle as much as discreet allusion, it seems to me to the Mosaic Paving of the Temples...

But it is also through the intermediary of Mabille that Breton, passing through Haiti at the end of his American exile, will try to locate the tomb of Martinès de Pasqually, founder, in France, of a very important para-masonic order before the Revolution, the Order of the Elect Cohens of the Universe35 – and whose life Breton knew very well, since he writes: "We both inclined to discover in it (in the voodoo cult) traces of mesmerism, which was made plausible – and fascinating to wish for – by the fact that in 1772 landed at Saint Domingue, accompanied by a black endowed with 'psychic powers', a personality in my opinion of the most enigmatic and captivating: Martinès de Pasqually. The latter will endow the island with a 'sovereign tribunal', found a lodge at Port-au-Prince and another at Léogaire and will definitively finalize there his statute of the Order of the Elect Cohens before dying there in 1774. We did not despair of a cross-checking of oral information which on the spot could make us find the place of his burial, remained unknown, and who knows, lift the phosphorescent veil that covers it"... But there is even more troubling. After the Second World War, a whole group of discreet young surrealists, among whom36 Bernard Roger, René Alleau, Roger Van Hecke,37 Guy-René Doumayrou, Elie-Charles Flamand and Jean Palou adhere, under the guidance of another doctor, Dr. Hunwald, to the Thebah lodge, of the Grande Loge de France, which had briefly been René Guénon's lodge38. All, except Jean Palou who, passing from the Grande Loge to the Grand Orient via the Grande Loge Nationale Française, will know a fulgurant career and will go to mount lodges and chapters in the Iran of the Shah before dying prematurely, will remain members until the end. Regarding René Guénon, a French esotericist who needs no introduction, it is appropriate to know that as early as 1925, Breton, who admired him as much as Artaud and Queneau, had sent Pierre Naville to propose to him to join the surrealist movement, which the author of The Crisis of the Modern World had refused by considering them as perfect representatives of that counter-initiation that he denounced in all European esoteric societies. In 1953 still, in an article entitled "René Guénon judged by surrealism", and while no doubt remains about the reactionary nature of Guénonian thought, Breton will still say: "Always soliciting the spirit, never the heart, René Guénon carries away our very great deference and nothing else. Surrealism, while associating itself with what is essential in his critique of the modern world, while relying like him on supra-rational intuition (rediscovered by other paths), even while strongly undergoing the attraction of this so-called traditional thought that, with a master's hand, he has rid of its parasites, distances itself as much from the reactionary that he was on the social level as from the blind contemner of Freud, for example, that he showed himself to be. He nonetheless honors the great solitary adventurer who repelled faith by knowledge, opposed deliverance to SALVATION and freed metaphysics from the ruins of religion that covered it". We have known more virulent condemnation.

Many other examples could be taken, we could speak of Malcolm de Chazal,39 for example, of the relationship of surrealism to Catharism, more generally to gnosis... But in any case, it proves totally impossible to minimize the contribution of esotericism to surrealist thought. And in this perspective, Elie-Charles Flamand, surrealist poet, freemason and passionate about alchemy appears as a figure as emblematic as it is unavoidable.

[1] "There is certainly another world, but it is in this one and, to reach its full perfection, it must be well recognized and professed. Man must seek his future state in the present, and heaven, not above the earth, but in himself". This quotation from Ignaz-Vitalis Troxler, cited by Albert Béguin in

The Romantic Soul and the Dream, is therefore a borrowing from Paul Eluard...

[2] Notably "Pont-Levis", his preface to the reissue of Pierre Mabille's Le Miroir du merveilleux.

[3] André Rolland de Renéville: Sciences maudites et poètes maudits. Le Bois d'Orion, L'Isle sur le Sorgue. 1997.

[4] André Breton: "Sur Robert Desnos" in Perspective cavalière. Complete works, vol. IV. Gallimard. 2008.

[5] André Breton: "Sur l'astrologie", ibid.

[6] André Breton, ibid.

[7] André Breton: Les Vases communicants in Complete Works, vol.II, Gallimard. 1992.

[8] Gérard Bodinier: "Celtie et surréalisme- L'antre des bardes" in Le Domaine poétique international du surréalisme. Le Puits de l'Ermite n°29-30-31. Chantilly. March 1978.

[9] Due to his automata.

[10] Richard Danier: L'Hermétisme alchimique chez André Breton. Editions Ramuel. 1997.

[11] André Breton: "Lettre aux Voyantes" in Complete Works vol. I, Gallimard. 1988.

[12] Richard Danier: "André Breton et l'hermétisme alchimique", journal Question de, n°15. November-December 1976.

[13] Letter of October 11, 1952, cited in: Hester Halbwachs, Léona, héroïne du surréalisme, op. cit. According to Alain Joubert, however, who also cites these phrases, the letter is from 1959. Bernard Roger, who was very close to him, confirmed to me Breton's interest in alchemy, while emphasizing that he had "not practiced it himself".

[14] Lectures which will be published for the most part, with a preface by Canseliet, at Minuit, in 1953, under the title Aspects de l'alchimie traditionnelle.

[15] Gaston Bachelard: La Formation de l'esprit scientifique. P.U.F., Paris. 1938.

[16] Interview of Jorge Camacho with Gérard Durozoi, in Jorge Camacho, Works 1964-1996, catalogue realized on the occasion of the exhibition Jorge Camacho, les Détours de Soi, Idem+Arts. Maubeuge. 1996.

[17] Philippe Audoin: Bourges, cité première. Julliard, Paris. 1972.