Theosophy & Modernism, pt. VIII
“…The first essay, Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art, by Maurice Tuchman, makes an attempt at explaining this dynamic. Tuchman argues that while the early Modernists were clearly influenced by occult systems and mystical schools of thought, experiencing ‘emotions of recognition’ with other similarly inclined artists and thinkers throughout history, that influence was superceded by formalist criticism (and a perceived break with the past) in the years following the Second World War. The primary reason for this, according to Tuchman, was the fact that many of the early abstractionists (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich) were directly involved with and influenced by Helena Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, founded in 1875.
I’m not an expert in the tenets of Theosophy, but my vague understanding is that they espoused a mix of Eastern metaphysics and western hermetic occultism, with the scientific worldviews of evolution and the electromagnetic spectrum. Basically, they retrofitted a roughly ‘Vedic’ cosmology, that of a holistic universe permeated/made up of energy vibrations, with the language of late 19th, early 20th Century physics, thereby concocting a type of mysticism for modernity. Erik Parker, in his book Techgnosis, sums it up nicely:
The Theosophical cosmos was a giant hum, whose lowest and most coarse ‘vibrations’ made up the material world and whose ‘higher’ planes were carried on ‘higher’ frequencies, all of which interpenetrated simultaneously and invisibly in the here and now, just like Maxwell’s (the physicist who translated Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction into the equations that describe the electromagnetic spectrum) spectral waves…”
Gordon Terry, from a conversation with Erik Bakke
