Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition (review)

Despite a great deal of historicist criticism on modernism in recent years, critics have been slow to brave Isis Unveiled or Thrice-Greatest Hermes, and there have been relatively few responsible accounts of the influence of the occult on modern authors. This collection of essays therefore offers a welcome reevaluation of its role in literary modernism from W. B. Yeats to Ted Hughes. Although occult sources have been well documented in the case of Yeats, for instance, these critics would argue that the significance of its influence has been underestimated. By relegating Yeats’s psychical research to “source material,” it has most often been considered inessential to reading the poetry. As Peter Liebregts observes, “many Yeatsians have attempted to rationalize Yeats’s apparently embarrassing belief in spirits and Daimons” (71). Helen Vendler, for instance, has translated the occultic system of A Vision into acceptably rational aesthetic terms, drawing a fine distinction between formative influence and raw material. ¹ In his preface, Leon Surette argues against what he perceives as the practice of both New Critical and post-structuralist critics by advocating a literary-historical rather than hermeneutic approach to literary modernism. In these terms, he suggests that many modernist texts have become both reasonable and readable at the expense of a true account of their visionary and ecstatic topoi.

Surette’s own essay on Jessie Weston and The Waste Land exemplifies this point most effectively. He begins by arguing that Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, an acknowledged source for much of the mythological framework of Eliot’s poem, is occultic rather than conventionally anthropological in its provenance. Surette goes on to discuss the manner in which Weston’s Theosophical bent informs the original draft of The Waste Land. The fertility myth so central to the poem, for instance, can be read as referring to an initiation rite rather than simply the quest for the Holy Grail. In these terms, Surette suggests, Eliot originally intended to emphasize sexual union as the exoteric form of divine union, albeit largely through negative example according to which sexuality is debased in the modern world. Surette’s reading is compelling, if not altogether convincing, in seeking to overturn the entrenched image of Eliot as both orthodox and prudish.

In the best essays, which include Surette’s essay on Eliot as well as Timothy Materer’s discussion of alchemy in Ted Hughes’s “The Cave Birds,” historical sources reveal a fascination with the occult that does not simply manifest itself as committed belief. Rather, most authors discussed in this volume evince ambivalence, irony, or even bad faith in regard to the supernatural. Further, these modern authors often express mourning for a time in which occultic belief was more available. Philip Rahv, in a passage quoted by Materer, identifies this dilemma faced by modern authors in regard to the occult: “If the road back to genuine mythic consciousness is closed,” it is irresponsible for artists “to deny historical time and induce in themselves through aesthetic and ideological means a sensation of mythic time” (176).

More than simply anachronistic in modern society, the occult tradition is difficult to locate in historical terms. In a helpful overview of the occult tradition as defined by the authors discussed in this volume, Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos explains that this occultism is essentially a composite invention of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He focuses on Helena Blavatsky and G. R. S. Mead as its most influential practitioners, and traces the emergence of an occult tradition by way of Theosophy. In compiling a canon of Rosicrucian, Cabalistic, Gnostic, Hermetic, and Buddhist texts, “Mead claims that these occult activities represent a ‘repetition’ of the past; but the claims of direct ancient lineage and historical continuity, which permeate all of Mead’s works as well as the works of other occultists, are a constantly rediscovered fiction” (22). Yet the integrity of historical claims was clearly less important to these modern...