Patrick Lepetit

Discover the links between European surrealism and the alchemical tradition • Draws on rare primary documents to reveal the connections between surrealism, 20th-century alchemy, and 19th-century occultism • Explores Éliphas Lévi, Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, and Hermeticism to show how surrealist symbology contained an initiatory dimension or “secret teaching” • Details collaborations between surrealists André Breton, Bernard Roger, and Salvador...

Explains how surrealist paintings and poems employed mythology, gnostic principles, tarot, voodoo, alchemy, and other hermetic sciences to seek out unexplored regions of the mind and recover lost "psychic" and magical powers. Provides many examples of esoteric influence in surrealism, such as how Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon was originally titled The Bath of the Philosophers. Not merely an artistic or literary...