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Adepts of Modernism: Magical Magazine Culture, 1887-1922
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- Author / Creator
- Beauchesne, Nicholas L.
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Abstract
This tome is both a “solar” dissertation and a “lunar” grimoire that performs its own argument. Adepts of Modernism argues that the infamous “little magazines” of modernism conjured their own enlightened, reading “counter-publics” by exploiting the same strategies and tactics of initiation and exclusion mobilized in occult circles. Figures from the literary and occult spheres from the Fin de Siècle and through the Great War converge in a network of adeptship. The magazines in this network disseminate knowledge from the occult “wisdom tradition” and share a common adept attitude that sets them apart from the public and the exoteric, mainstream media they consume.
Chapter 1 analyzes The Little Review and shows how Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s editorial posture of insouciance reflects their initial commitment to both anarchism and esotericism, culminating in a thwarted mystical anarchism. A comparison of memoirs by Huntly Carter and Algernon Blackwood reveals how, for this magazine, poetry and spirituality go hand in hand.
Chapter 2 focuses on co-editors of The Egoist, Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, along with Leonard A. Compton-Rickett, Richard Aldington, H. D., and Ezra Pound. These figures have a complex, ambivalent relationship with mysticism, but their common investment in individualism and an elitist, exclusive, classical modernism holds them together. Olivia Shakespear’s translation of the occult story, Le Comte de Gabalis, embodies these investments.
Chapter 3 considers the distinct “presentative” style of The New Age magazine in relation to editor A. R. Orage’s mystical socialism. A series of articles by Florence Farr provides a feminist corrective to Orage’s masculinist “brilliant common sense.” This idiosyncratic, “Luciferian” socialism appeals to an audience of modernists, Fabians, and occultists alike, and its threads lead back to the great French magus, Eliphas Lévi.
Chapter 4 examines Aleister Crowley’s Equinox in the context of modernist periodical culture. The Equinox is most committed to occult subjects and offers readers a course of study and a method of self-initiation. Esoteric literature, in the form of a magical diary and a short story, “The Dream Circean,” complements Crowley’s formal program of initiation and blurs the boundaries between objective and subjective ‘reality.’Chapter 5 shows how Lucifer magazine, edited by H. P. Blavatsky and Mabel Collins, utilizes the same techniques of occult initiation replicated in the modernist little magazines that followed, thus revealing a continuity of esoteric editorial practice from the Fin de Siècle through the Great War. Blavatsky’s controversial “Luciferian” editorials and Collins’s serialized esoteric novella, “The Blossom and the Fruit,” exemplify the adept attitude that inspired subsequent generations of adept writers.
Adepts of Modernism concludes with a personal reflection on occult pedagogy before outlining the legacy of these magical magazines and gesturing towards some new directions for future research.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Modernism
- Mysticism
- Occult
- Magic
- Adept
- Periodical
- Little magazine
- Yeats
- William Butler
- Crowley
- Aleister
- Farr
- Florence
- H. D.
- Pound
- Ezra
- Gurdjieff
- George
- Shakespear
- Olivia
- Heap
- Jane
- Anderson
- Margaret
- Carter
- Huntly
- Blackwood
- Algernon
- Marsden
- Dora
- Shaw Weaver
- Harriet
- Shaw
- George Bernard
- Wells
- H. G.
- Orage
- Alfred Richard
- Lévi
- Eliphas
- Aldington
- Richard
- Compton-Rickett
- Leonard A.
- Villars
- abbé de (Nicolas-Pierre-Henri)
- Nihil
- Nix
- Blavatsky
- Helena Petrovna
- Collins
- Mabel
- The Little Review
- The Egoist
- The New Age
- The Equinox
- Lucifer
- Theosophy
- Thelema
- Fourth Way
- fin-de-siècle
- Great War
- The English Review
- The Dream Circean
- The Blossom and the Fruit: The True Story of a Magician
- Agrippa
- Henry Cornelius
- Fin de Siècle
- Memoirs of a Charming Person
- Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
- A Vision
- Initiation
- Western Esotericism
- Ritual
- Pedagogy
- literature
- poetry
- New Modernist Studies
- counter-public
- public sphere
- Hermes Trismegistus
- Master
- Apprentice
- Seeker
- Neophyte
- Initiate
- Great Work
- Alchemy
- Secret Society
- Wisdom tradition
- Perennial Philosophy
- Harry Potter
- Nicolas Flamel
- Soror Mystica
- Neo-Platonism
- Gnosticism
- Hellenism
- Spiritual
- Religion
- Heterodox
- Kabbalah
- Pagan
- Practical Person
- Solar
- Lunar
- Gnome
- Sylph
- Salamander
- Undine
- Imagism
- Symbolism
- The New Freewoman
- Eliot
- Thomas Stearns
- Socialism
- Anarchism
- Feminism
- Harlem Renaissance
- Apocalyptic
- Surrealism
- Definition of the Godhead
- The Theosophical Review
- The Theosophist
- The Quest
- The Occult Review
- Jackson
- Holbrook
- Egoism
- Individualism
- Montfaucon
- Moonchild
- Ordo Templi Orientis
- Underhill
- Evelyn
- Tagore
- Rabindranath
- Fuller
- J. F. C.
- Correspondences
- Elements
- Astral
- Blast
- Lewis
- Wyndham
- Christ
- Satan
- Exoteric
- Esoteric
- Media
- Fleta
- Estanol
- Hilary
- Abyss
- Capitalism
- New Woman
- Cixous
- Hélène
- Victoria
- Doolittle
- Hilda
- Magick
- The Path
- Besant
- Annie
- Mead
- G. R. S.
- Harrison
- Austin
- Wallace
- Lewis Alexander
- Leisenring
- Winifred
- Eliade
- Mircea
- Rowling
- J.K.
- Beauchesne
- Nick
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2021
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.