Arthur Versluis

Arthur Versluis is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Michigan State University. He is author of numerous books, including Magic and Mysticism, The New Inquisitions, Restoring Paradise, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renais...

Lee Irwin

John D. Richards

John D. Richards is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at West Virginia State University.

Melinda Weinstein

Melinda Weinstein is Associate Professor and Chair of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication at Lawrence Technological University.

Esotericism, Art, and Imagination

 Edited by

Arthur Versluis

Lee Irwin

John D. Richards

Melinda Weinstein

Esotericism, Art, and Imagination is a uniquely wide- ranging collection of articles by scholars in the field of Western esotericism, focusing on themes of poetry, drama, film, literature, and art. Included here are articles illuminating such diverse topics as the Gnostic fiction of Philip Pullman, alchemical images, the Tarot, surrealism, esoteric films, and much more. This collection reveals the richness and complexity of the intersections between esotericism, artistic creators, and their works. Authors include Joscelyn Godwin, Cathy Gutierrez, M. E. Warlick, Eric Wilson, and many others.


CONTENTS
• Introduction, Part I, John Richards
• Introduction, Part II, Arthur Versluis
ESOTERIC THEATERS
• Theater and Initiation: Euripides’s Bacchae, Melinda Weinstein
• Esoteric Cinema, Eric Wilson
• Hex and the City: Texts for Occult Performance in Late Capitalism, Lance Gharavi
ESOTERIC PAINTING
• Philosophic Mercury: Evolution of the Alchemical Feminine, M. E. Warlick
• Le Jeu de Marseille: The Breton Tarot as Jeu de Hasard, Giovanna Costantini
• The Esoteric Art of Cecil Collins, Arthur Versluis
ESOTERIC POETRY
• William Blake, George Cumberland, and the Visionary Art of Exotic Erotica, Marsha Keith Schuchard
• Vladimir Solovyov’s Poems of Wisdom, Mystery, and Love, George M. Young
• Mirror, Mask and Anti-self: Forces of Literary Creation in Dion Fortune and W. B. Yeats, Claire Fanger
ESOTERIC FICTION
• Esotericism without Religion: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Joscelyn Godwin
• "Knowing In Terms of Togetherness": D. H. Lawrence and Esotericism, Glenn Alexander Magee
• Faux Catholic: The History of a Gothic Subgenre from Monk Lewis to Dan Brown, Victoria Nelson
ESOTERIC PHOTOGRAPHY
• Dark Materials-The Chemical Wedding of Photography and the Esoteric, Chris Webster
• A Mirror with a Memory: Spirit Photography and the Future of Ghosts, Cathy Gutierrez
ESOTERIC GARDENS
• Enlightenment and Freemasonry in Eighteenth-century Venice: The Hermeticism of Querini's Garden at Altichiero, Patrizia Granziera
• Advent Garden and the Waldorf Imagination: Esotericism, Ritual, and Childhood, Sarah W. Whedon

Reviews

"The strength of the collection as a whole indeed seems to be the authors' more or less common realization of correspondences, with or without other purported esoteric associations, as the basis of practices, conducted both inside and outside the contexts of ritual and secret societies, that are means of investing meaning in all aspects of the human experience – and also form the substance of art."
MYTHLORE 107/108, Fall/Winter 2009

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