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Throughout his life, Scriabin’s harmonic language underwent an evolution. His late period style featured a radical break from traditional harmony. This article examines some of the innovations to be found in Scriabin’s late works. A general theoretical background on Scriabin’s late period harmonic language is presented, as it is needed in order to understand the subsequent analyses. Likewise, main philosophical ideas pertaining to mysticism and theosophy, distilled from Scriabin’s notebooks (recently published in 2018 in an English translation by Simon Nicholls and Michael Pushkin), are summarized. A detailed analysis of his Etude Op. 65, No. 3 pinpoints the unique features of his late style and attempts to link certain compositional procedures found late period works after Op. 60, to general mystic ideas. Lastly, implications for further Scriabin research are presented. Keywords: Alexander Scriabin, Late Period, Etudes Op. 65, Mysticism, Theosophy, Harmony.

Part of a larger project interrogating literal and discursive translation in late-colonial Vedāntic thought, this paper focuses on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society and its key ideologue. Blavatsky grounded her articulation of Theosophical teachings in a mysterious source text, purportedly written in a sacerdotal language known as the Senzar. In presenting herself as its translator, Blavatsky deftly maneuvers between competing philosophies of language and knowledge paradigms, from philology to occultism. This allows her to simultaneously frame Theosophy as continuous with Vedāntic and Buddhist thought and as superseding them, thus effectively articulating a new—universal—teaching. Utilizing translation theory as an analytical and hermeneutical lens, this paper examines some of Blavatsky’s more notable discursive mechanics and their textual afterlives, tracing the tensions between authorship and authority, tradition and innovation, the particular and the universal. It is proposed that attending to such translational practices (or claims thereof) points to broader questions of meaning-making and commensurability implicated in any project of articulating a tradition across linguistic, cultural, temporal and geographical spaces—as well as its limits and challenges.

Luigi Capuana (1839–1915) and Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) were two of the most important Italian writers who lived between the XIX and XX century. Capuana was an author, poet and journalist influenced by the works of Émile Zola, French author and founder of Naturalism, who was also one of the most important members of the Verist literary movement in Italy. Pirandello was a novelist, poet, short story writer, dramatist and author of 40 theatre plays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, and his work is famed worldwide. Both authors were also influenced by Western Esotericism, especially by French Spiritualism and Theosophy, which is noticeable not only in their novels and theatre plays but also in their writings about the theory of literature and related articles. This paper deals with the presence of Esotericism and Occultism in the works of these authors and in the overall culture in fin de siècle Italy, in order to show just how important these topics are to better understand their poetic opus and ideas about literature, culture and society at that time.

In the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysses, Bloom overhears a conversation linking the “ends of the world” with a “twoheaded octopus” (U 8.520–21). The apocalyptic mollusk reappears later in Ulysses, resurfacing in the “Circe” episode. This essay examines these passages and thematically linked sections of Joyce’s work within the contexts of censorship, Freemasonry, Theosophy, and the occult. The intertextual relationship between the octopus sections of Ulysses and W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is also studied here, alongside genetic analysis of the “Lestrygonians” section. Joyce’s sea monster is a symbol of sexual intercourse, of the convergence of Stephen and Bloom, and of Ulysses itself. The two octopus passages also undermine the certainties of religious and spiritualist teleologies by linking time with space and coastal geography, and through mixing eschatological language with aquatic, animal, sexual, and cyclical imagery. The two-headed octopus is part of a theme in Joyce’s work that depicts the animal world, and the “end” or purpose of the human world, as essentially unknowable.

This paper explores the concept of “Sufism” or “mysticism” (the two terms are used interchangeably herein) in the works of Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore (1940 - 2016), an American Sufi poet, essayist, artist and playwright, who is referred to as "American Islam's Poet Laureate". The first part of the paper sheds light on the concept of “Sufism” or “Islamic mysticism” and highlights its central tenets. Using a theoretical framework informed by the Sufi theosophy of Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) and the writings of two important modern western scholars of Sufism, Annemarie Schimmel and William Chittick, the second part of the paper will study a selection of Moore’s poems from his collections The Soul’s Home (2014) and The Blind Beekeeper (2001). The aim of the paper is to show how Moore’s poetry reveals the major concepts of Sufism. In this regard, Ibn Arabi’s Sufi concepts act as a point of reference that helps clarify the interplay between the poems under study and Sufism.

For cosmopolitan religious thinkers, especially in Germany, Goethe personified the omniscient intellect, the persona who had comprehensively and successfully fused all knowledge-making fields—science, religion, philosophy, and literature—into a cohesive whole. Faust, Goethe’s tragic philosopher-healer, embodied the scientist’s resolve, status, and purpose to effectively and creatively explore the depths of life’s secrets. In their spiritual-scientific vision, Goethe’s Faust and his willingness to explore and indulge his thirst for knowledge in the dark caverns of Lucifer’s sphere ideally captured the harmonious material-spiritual expedition that they sought to recapitulate. Goethe’s engagement with the arcane world as a source of erudition reverberated among cosmopolitan spiritual thinkers. One of Theosophy’s first journals in England was called Lucifer, and its two editors, Madame Blavatsky and the occult novelist and anti-vivisectionist campaigner, Mabel Collins (1851–1927), justified the title with the following comment in its initial issue in 1887:From this viewpoint, what was judged as the unholy and cryptic, despite their rejection by society’s intellectually coward, manifested a salient means to shed light on life’s full spiritual essence. According to these cosmopolitan spiritual pundits, their concept of Lucifer, like Goethe’s Faust, provided an efficacious source for reconstituting complete knowledge about human life—“to look truth straight in the face.”

Although suffused with occult tropes and themes, the fin de siecle Gothic—at least in its canonical, and almost exclusively male-authored, formulation—typically takes a hostile view of the various esoteric movements which swept through late Victorian Britain, emphasizing again and again the horrific consequences of dabbling with illicit forms of knowledge. Yet this verdict changes dramatically in the prolific if neglected body of gothic fiction produced by women writers working within the fold of the era’s occult movements, the most successful of which being Theosophy. My chapter examines how the Theosophical tale of terror, as practiced by occultists Rosa Caroline Praed and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, sought to replace the paranoia and negative epistemology of the popular Gothic with an occult optimism which lauded the spiritual benefits of magical practice and cultural miscegenation for women in particular.

Heinrich Khunrath’s 1609 Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom) was the first published work that described itself as “Christian Kabbalist.” Khunrath was a highly innovative thinker who claimed that supreme wisdom was achieved through the conjunction of Cabala, magic, and alchemy, exemplified by common notions such as “greenness” or the Philosophers’ Stone. Khunrath’s attempt at unifying knowledge further led him to an innovative use of language: the Amphitheatre’s full title contains three neologisms, the compound words Christiano-Cabbalisticum, divino-magicum, and physico-chymicum (Christian Kabbalist, Divinely Magical, and Physico-Chymical). This chapter considers Khunrath’s evident fascination with new experimental combinations, composites, and conjunctions in his idiosyncratic blend of early modern theosophy.

This chapter offers an analysis of recurrent, generative vogues in the recesses of Egyptophilia, as a subset of darker Egyptian manias found in erotic, cultic, religious, and various speculative gothic forms in the Victorian era. Through nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers, and canonical and lesser-known pulp and literary gothic fiction, such as Frank Frankfort Moore’s (1895) The Secret of the Court, it examines the movement of Egyptophilia into the popular imagination of Victorian England, with critical aftershocks in the fringe that offer insight into variations of a gothic cult from sociological to occult in the long nineteenth century, and that resonate with increasingly deviant versions of the aesthetics of curiosity.

In his famous Râja Yoga (1896), Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) outlines a cosmology that employs the concepts of prāṇa, or “energy, force”, and ākāśa, or “ether, matter” (in his translation, respectively). Although scholars have interpreted these concepts mainly in the light of mesmerism and nineteenth-century ether theories, this chapter pursues a different approach. It traces them to two sources influencing Vivekananda, the medieval Yogavāsiṣṭha and the tantric Śivasvarodaya, the latter translated by the Theosophist Rama Prasad in his Occult Science: The Science of Breath (1884). It thus positions Vivekananda’s cosmology at the confluence of Indian mediaeval sources that integrated yoga into Advaita-related movements and of literature influenced by Theosophy.

Rudbog’s chapter analyzes and contextualizes Blavatsky’s innovative concept of a “Wisdom-Religion,” the original unity of all religions, which was central to her conceptualization of Theosophy. Rudbog outlines how notions of ancient wisdom or the so-called ancient wisdom narrative has changed throughout Western history in relation to the specific contexts it was formulated in. Platonism supported the narrative of ancient oriental wisdom philosophized by Plato. Many Christian apologists envisioned a pre-Christian Christianity, a notion that was revived and expanded upon during the Renaissance. From the early modern period, with the discovery of Asian literature, the narrative in fact continued in a number of important European studies of mythology and, as this chapter demonstrates, these studies became the immediate background for Blavatsky’s formulation of a “Wisdom-Religion.”

Finnish spiritualist and theosophical journals of 1905–20 brought esoteric teachings and vernacular belief traditions into dialogue with each other. Theosophical journals, in particular, released interpretations of Finnish mythology and the national epic the Kalevala, connecting them with the Ancient Wisdom. Both spiritualist and theosophical journals published belief narratives, which ranged from traditional migratory legends taking place in rural environments to the personal histories of urban residents. In mainstream thinking of the modern era, belief traditions were valuable only as vanishing traces of the nation’s past. In esoteric journals, they proved the existence of a spiritual reality. The narratives could be published as such, but traditional interpretations, especially those involving Christian morals, could be revised and replaced with explicit esoteric interpretations.

This article is about a cultural-philosophical movement called Russian cosmism (Russky kosmizm) and its current status in the Republic of Kalmykia, southwest Russia, home to Buddhist Kalmyks, a people of Oirat-Mongol origin. Emerging in Russia in the early twentieth century and suppressed during the Soviet period, this movement proliferated openly across Russia with the beginning of perestroika. Promulgated as an original product of the Russian mind, cosmism positions itself as a ‘science of the truth and soul searching’ and purports to address various issues, including—but not limited to—the spiritual, psychic, and paranormal anxieties that are on the rise in Russia. Although Russian cosmism is an all-encompassing movement combining various elements of theosophy, philosophy, poetry, theories of evolution and energy, astrology, cosmology, ecology, and even science fiction, this article focuses upon its more cosmic topics—that is, those that are related to outer space, cosmic energies, and alien visitations, as well as responses to these ideas in Kalmykia. The story of Russian cosmism is not just a story of this particular movement, but also that of science in Russia.

This work deals with an important aspect of the writings of three 19 th -century authors - Joseph de Maistre, Honore de Balzac and Charles Baudelaire. They were followers of the theory of correspondence, or ‘universal analogy’, which suggests that each visible thing is a symbol of the invisible world and each material phenomenon is in correspondence with the Divine laws. The author of this article highlights that it is impossible to reflect on the artistic legacy of these authors – ‘prophets’ and ‘clairvoyants’ – without understanding the mystical idea that is fundamental for their writings. They formed their own bonds with the mystics Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin and Emanuel Swedenborg. Balzac's novels contain numerous reminiscences of Swedenborg’s mystical works such as Arcana Coelestia (Heavenly Mysteries) and L’Homme de Desir , the influence of the ‘unknown philosopher’ Saint-Martin is evident in J. de Maistre’s ‘ Les Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg (Saint Petersburg Dialogues) , while Charles Baudelaire repeatedly mentions Emanuel Swedenborg in his essays. The author of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) can also be regarded as a follower of Joseph de Maistre’s aesthetics, since Baudelaire’s revolutionary pathos contains a tinge of de Maistre’s political theosophy, which is based on the concept of Divine Providence that governs the material world. In so far as the concept of the Divine Proportion is concerned, the basic ideas of de Maistre’s providentialism are in line with philosophical theses of Balzac, another follower of the theory of correspondence. However, when it comes to the concept of matter, their views differ. According to the author of the Mystical Book , both the invisible spiritual world and the visible physical world consist of the same matter, which can transform itself but does not disappear. De Maistre, on the other hand, believed that matter is but a sign of the almighty Spirit. During their lifetime, the writers avoided owning that they were fascinated by mystical philosophy. However, their writings have proved that their knowledge of mysticism was indeed profound. By virtue of their powerful imagination, they were able to use the metaphor and convey their idea of the fundamental nature of the Divine idea. Each of them yearned to renovate the Christian religion and was looking for the possible ways of regaining the lost Unity, the poet’s role being that of a clairvoyant and an interpreter of the sacred signs.

The study explores the character and meaning of the imagery of the kiss in theZoharas an expression of dynamic union. In order to demonstrate the formation of a specific structure of ideas and their dynamics within Kabbalistic theosophy, theZoharicimagery found in the pericopeTerumahhas been situated here within the context of numerous sources, from which theZohar, through direct or indirect transmission, could have drawn its key elements. The metaphor of the kiss, which allows the Zoharic homily to embrace several central Kabbalistic concepts of love, presents love as a universal power, being comprised of two Neoplatonic notions, the hypostatic relation and the principle of “being contained in each other.” The analysis of the various sources across ancient Greek, medieval Islamic, and Christian traditions amounts to a different characterization of the meaning adduced thus far in scholarship regarding eros in Jewish mysticism and suggests a more plausible trajectory of influence of Greek sources in the early Kabbalah.

In his bookApparitions and Thought-Transference:An Examination of the Evidence for Telepathy(1895), Frank Podmore relates what might at first seem a humdrum occurrence of settling into bedtime reading. The diary he has transcribed, of a woman he calls D, records on January 6th, “Tried several books . . . finally took to ‘Villette.’” But D’s choice was not completely autonomous. She was clearly influenced by her friend, “X.” As Podmore wrote, “From Miss X's diary it appears that she willed D to readThe Professor,” which he notes, portentously, was “also by Charlotte Brontë.” X got luckier – or honed her skills – a few weeks later, when D recorded “Sonnets by E.B.B. 10:30 p.m.” and “In Miss X's diary, written at about 10 p.m., appears the entry, ‘Sonnets viii-ix., E.B.B.’” Assessing the records, Podmore found X's influence over D's literary taste to be “presumably telepathic” (122–23). Although the phenomenon was sensational, the circumstances surrounding it were decidedly mundane, ranging from bedtime reading to hearing X's piano-playing at a distance of miles, and meeting specific people at certain times. At a second glance, the phenomenon remains humdrum. Gauri Viswanathan has described how the institutionalization of Theosophy created reality effects that routinized its mysticism, rendering it ordinary (7). Similarly, though psychical research studied the numinous, its institutions ensconced it in bureaucracy, making it mundane. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Britain, the oddly interesting-yet-boring phenomenon of thought-reading became a cultural activity that ranged between scientific research, domestic pastime, and popular entertainment. Could people read each other's minds? If so, how was it done? Thought-reading arose to compete with Spiritualism, the practice of contacting the dead through séances. Its most mysterious public persona, and one of the more intriguing historical figures of the period, was Podmore's aficionado of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the presumed telepath known as Miss X.

Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) developed a program of salvation that she called “double evolution,” which was elaborated in a system known as root race theory. Human souls were seen as traversing through progressive reincarnation a series of seven “races,” or body types, ranging from gigantic amorphous and ethereal bodies and transitioning through hermaphroditic into gigantic gendered ape-like humans, modern humans, and thereafter adepts and divine beings. Although root race theory drew from the scientific racism of its day, it did not equate root races with human races, but to stages of human emanation from and return to divinity. The sources of root race theory have been sought in Eastern contexts due to its use of Hindu and Buddhist terminology, though scholars have noted its Western esoteric influences. This article argues that the primary structure of root race theory is based in the Corpus Hermeticum. It identifies some of Blavatsky’s Hermetic sources, showing that she referred not only generally to a perennialist “Hermetic philosophy” that incorporated Western esoteric tropes, but also to specific Hermetic texts. These texts provided the organizing matrix of root race theory, specifically its creation mythology, support for prior androgyne human existence, a “fall into matter,” and the initial ensoulment of humans with mind, ornous. It also provided a template for the future transformation of humans into divine beings. The article builds on the suggestions of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (2013) and Brendan French (2001) to elaborate on the role of Hermetic influence in Blavatsky’s reconfiguring of evolution as a novel form of salvation for an empirically-oriented nineteenth century audience.

My article discusses the influence of Emanuel- Swedenborg on a Finnish female author, Kersti Bergroth (1886–1975) through one of Bergroth’s novels Eläviä ja kuolleita (‘The Living and the Dead’, 1945). Bergroth was a prolific author with an anthroposophical bent, and an admirer of German idealism. In this particular novel Bergroth refers explicitly to Swedenborg and the story discloses a number of Swedenborgian themes: the doctrine of correspondences; a world divided into material, spiritual, and divine realms; and communication with the spirits of the dead. As Bergroth was an active member of the anthroposophical movement, I will also consider the route, spread, and place of Swedenborg’s ideas within anthroposophy and theosophy in the twentieth century.

The paper discusses Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s philosophy as it can be reconstructed from his writings of two kinds, the academic papers and the works generally, though not always correctly, classified as science fiction. It is stressed that Tsiolkovsky belongs to the large school of Russian philosophers known as the Cosmists, and he is placed within the group of 20th century academic-minded Cosmists. The first part of the paper reconstructs Tsiolkovsky’s cosmic philosophy on the basis of his philosophical works, which amount to half of his published works. The second part of the paper discusses all the works by Tsiolkovsky available in English under the science fiction label. The paper also contains comparisons of Tsiolkovsky’s views with the philosophicalreligious system propagated by Nicholas and Helena Roerich, known as Agni Yoga, and its ancient Indian roots. It is also mentioned that Tsiolkovsky played an important role in the development of the early Russian, or more properly Soviet, science fiction movies. The paper stresses that Tsiolkovsky always based his writings on solid scientific foundations, so that the label “science fiction” does not always apply to them.

The paper focuses on the magical dimension of the poetic work of Boris Poplavskii (1903–1935), an emblematic figure of the “lost generation” of Russian emigres in Paris. In his youth, Poplavskii was much influenced by anthroposophist and theosophist doctrines, and later manifested a deep interest in occult and magical writings. In this article, I analyze the magic in Poplavskii’s work from a number of perspectives, including those of concrete rituals and techniques (witchcraft, invocation, alchemy, meditation), as well as practical mysticism (Christian and Jewish) and different patterns of “divine-working” (theurgy) which have had an explicit or implicit impact on Poplavskii’s poetic and narrative texts. In particular, I highlight the visual component of various magical practices referenced by Poplavskii.

Fin-de-siècle occultism is usually regarded within the context of an “occult revival” that implies the modernization of an older esoteric tradition. However, this notion is rooted in esoteric identificatory discourses at the end of the nineteenth century. This article will discuss two major aspects of these discourses. First, French esotericists polemically distanced themselves from the “Eastern” esotericism of the Theosophical Society by constructing an ésotérisme occidental. It will be shown that this separation of “East” and “West” occurred as a reaction to the T.S., and should thus be seen as a “nationalist” response to a global phenomenon. Second, another major aspect of occultist identity formations will be highlighted: socialism. It will be shown that fin-de-siècle occultists were deeply involved with socialist theories in the July Monarchy vein but ambiguously distanced themselves from contemporary “materialist” socialisms. An analysis of this context will further help to understand the construction of an esoteric tradition.

This chapter analyzes the origin and meaning of the notion “esoteric Buddhism” as it was used in the early Theosophical Society, especially in the work of Helena P. Blavatsky and Alfred P. Sinnett. Both Sinnett and Blavatsky primarily conceptualized Buddhism in relation to the notion of an esoteric doctrine, while scholars of Buddhism disregarded the existence of any esotericism in Buddhism. Based on an analysis of the debates about “esoteric Buddhism,” this chapter shows how differences between Orientalists and Theosophists can be contextualized in their specific imaginings of Buddhism and also in their receptions of Buddhism.

This paper focuses on Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “The Ray of Displacement” which appeared in The Metropolitan Magazine in October 1903. The story deals with a crystal structure and the adventures of an unnamed scientist falsely accused of stealing it. The scientist’s invention of a Y-ray, capable of separating atoms and molecules so that solid bodies can penetrate one another, leads him to the discovery of disembodiment and invisibility. The story indirectly refers to St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians where Revelation is shown as a riddle or enigma reflected on a looking glass. Spofford offers a hybrid narrative which fuses philanthropy, ethical concerns, and the power of sympathy, typically attributed to the female gender, with scientific forms of perceiving transcendence dominated by male consciousness. Inverting the angelic rhetoric present in the conception of the “Angel in the house,” Spofford displays a complex story that engenders the supernatural.

Book synopsis: The question "An age of faith or an age of doubt?" has become familiar to many of those studying the Victorian era, and the debate about the impact of science has assumed a central place in scholarly and popular literature. This volume does not ignore these important topics, but instead emphasizes questions about the kind of religion in the 19th century as opposed to the quantity of religion in the 19th century. This book aims to introduce the most important varieties of Christianity in the Victorian era and to consider their interactions with other aspects of western culture and society. Part one of this volume explores the main varieties of Christianity under the headings "transcendent" and "liberal", and discusses alternative forms of spirituality like Transcedentalism and theosophy in their relation to Christianity. Part two is concerned with the interactions between Christianity and literature, Christianity and gender, and Christianity and science. This book covers the reinvention of Christianity in Britain and North America and no attempt is made to cover Christianity in the rest of the world.

Reviewing scholarly materials pertinent to prominent Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), one faces perplex interpretations of his essays based on Western thought such as Hegelism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and Theosophy. This research strives to shed a novel light on Mondrian's esoteric essays in respect to the pivotal notion of "pure intuition" in Neo-Plastic art from antirational standpoint of Zen Buddhism. To this end, the concepts of "inferior intellect" and "pure intuition", discussed in Mondrian's essays, are confronted with an anti-rational approach of Zen in disclosure of truth. Moreover this paper chronologically depicts the kinships between the pivotal Zen concept of mu-shin (no-mind) and Mondrian's notion of pure intuition as a universal vision which is further exemplified through three Neo-Plastic artworks representing three phases of Mondrian's artistic career. The results of this paper illuminate Mondrian's quasi-philosophical essays within the role of "pure intuition" through ideology of Zen Buddhism.

Studies of Aleister Crowley’s followers have tended to focus on unconventional or bohemian figures. This article examines a different type of person—Neville Foreman, an insurance clerk and family man who lived in the unfashionable Clapton district of Hackney, East London. Several years’ correspondence between Foreman and Crowley sheds light on the profile of a Crowley acolyte from a more conventional background. Whilst Foreman was no bohemian, this lower-middle class office clerk was nonetheless an esoteric seeker. Dissatisfied with his previous explorations in New Thought, Theosophy and Anthroposophy, Foreman arrived at Crowley and Thelema hoping for spiritual guidance and personal development, and also seeking some resolution to his sexual difficulties.

Starting with Henry Corbin’s suggestion that phenomenology can be approached as “the unveiling of the hidden,” the phenomenon is what appears to a consciousness that unveils it as meaningful. Now, in Sufi theosophy, the world is none other than the intentional object of God: “I was a hidden treasure, and I wanted to be known, so I created the world.”

CYRIL Scott produced five volumes all on the same subject. They are The Way of the Childish (1916); Childishness: A Study in Adult Conduct (1930) , Man is my Theme (1939), The Rhymed Reflections of a Ruthless Rhymer (unpublished but completed c . 1943–4) and finally Man the Unruly Child (1953). In addition to these five books, there is another one to be considered: The Real Tolerance . The question arises as to what induced him to repeat the same basic premise for almost forty years? The answer could be he was so aware that the problems he pointed out in the first book had been totally ignored, as had his suggestions for resolving them; perhaps he saw himself as a present-day prophet crying in the wilderness, compelled to proclaim his warnings even though his audience was heedless to them. Despite the devastation and horrors of World War 1, adults, Scott insisted, continued to behave like children. Could a post-war generation do better? The basic argument never alters. It can be summed up in a passage from The Way of the Childish : Mankind has never grown up. With few exceptions, lost like needles in haystacks, the world is peopled by millions of souls who, despite their age and stature, behave like children in the nursery. The only difference is that, whereas the nursery behaviour of children may be on a small and comparatively harmless scale, the nursery behaviour of mankind is on an extensive and devastating one. Scott published a number of books anonymously and sometimes a little detective work is needed to ascertain if he is the author. For instance, The Way of the Childish appears to have been written by Shri Âdvaitâchârya, but on the flyleaf below the title in smaller letters we find: ‘Written down by the author of The Real Tolerance ’. Five years later, in 1921, it ran to a second edition, but this time the flyleaf read ‘Written down by the author of The Initiate ’. Clearly both books were written by Cyril Scott. The Way of the Childish is significant because it is the first notice we have of Scott's interest in theosophy. He explains that the book had been dictated to him and states: ‘The great Initiates, known as “Masters” in the Theosophical literature, instruct their pupils mostly from another plane but there are lesser Initiates who instruct them by word of mouth.’

Introduction: Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the Kabbalah in Spain reached its creative peak with the emergence of Sefer ha-Zohar ‘The Book of Splendor’ (henceforth referred to as the ‘Zohar’ or ‘Zoharic literature’), Judaism’s most important corpus of mystical texts. The Zohar owes its name to Daniel 12:3: והמשכלים יזהרו כזהר הרקיע ‘The enlightened shall shine like the splendour of the sky’. It is a voluminous work of over twenty treatises mainly written in Aramaic (the tractate Midrash ha-Neʿelam ‘The Concealed Midrash’ is partly written in Hebrew). The majority of its mystical doctrines and esoteric teachings are presented within the framework of a commentary on the Torah. For comprehensive introductions to the Zohar, see Tishby (1989: 1–126) and Green (2004). An extensive overview of the structure of the Zohar can be found in Tishby (1989: 1–7; cf. Green 2004: 159–161). Over the centuries, the Zohar has aroused mixed feelings among its readership, which initially was rather limited. Both lavish praise and immense scorn have fallen to this Jewish mystical magnum opus. Many readers have been left bewildered by the obscurity of its language, style, and contents, considering it an inscrutable work, whereas others regard its wildly fragmented and opaque nature as a genuine reflection of life’s ‘spiritual turbulence’ (quoting Tishby 1989: 8). However, once the veil that obscures its contents is lifted, the Zohar discloses an esoteric theosophy, depicted in symbolic imagery, which covers all aspects of life, from the most mundane of matters to profound divine secrets. The Zohar’s origins and the transmission of its mystical lore were shrouded in mystery. The Spanish Jewish kabbalist Rabbi Moses de Leon, who lived in Castile and died in 1295/1305, was one of the first to bear witness to the existence of the Zohar, which initially circulated only in fragments among the kabbalists in Castile and Aragon. De Leon claimed to have an ancient Aramaic manuscript – the Zohar – in his possession that had circulated for centuries and originated from the Holy Land. It was believed that the Zohar’s main protagonist, Rabbi Simeon bar-Yochai, was its author – a belief that is still held among traditional kabbalists and Orthodox Jews. Rabbi Simeon bar-Yochai, also known under his acronym Rashbi, was a Palestinian sage who lived in the second century CE. However, shortly after the Zohar’s mysterious appearance in late-thirteenth-century Castile, the claim of Rashbi’s authorship was already met with suspicion. Some of de Leon’s contemporaries seem to have doubted the ancient, Palestinian provenance of the Zohar, rather believing that it had been pseudepigraphically written by de Leon himself. A review of the traditional and scholarly opinions on the origins and authorship of the Zohar can be found in Tishby (1989: 30–55). In more recent times, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the founding father of modern Kabbalah scholarship, went to great lengths to prove that Moses de Leon was indeed the main author of the Zohar (1941: 156–204). Under the influence of Scholem’s academic authority, it was henceforth commonly accepted as axiomatic that the Zohar was composed in late-thirteenth-century Castile by de Leon, who had attributed his work to the second-century Palestinian sage Rashbi to give it authoritative status. Scholem’s single-authorship theory drastically shifted the cultural context in which the Zohar had been written: it was no longer second-century Palestine, but thirteenth-century Spain. Not only was the Zohar rooted in rabbinic thought and kabbalistic concepts which dated all the way back to the high Middle Ages, it was also influenced by the intellectual exchange of ideas with the surrounding Christian and Muslim cultures. More recently, the prevalent scholarly opinion on both the authorship and the coherence of the Zohar has undergone a drastic revision. It is now commonly accepted by researchers that the Zohar was written by multiple authors, although, in all probability, Moses de Leon is likely to have contributed to the bulk of the Zohar. The multiple authorship theory had already been briefly touched upon by Jellinek (1851), but it was properly advanced by Liebes (1993) (see also Meroz 2016). Because the Zohar seems to have been composed, extended, and changed throughout several generations, it is nowadays generally viewed as a collective literary product, hence the increasingly popular reference to this corpus as ‘Zoharic literature’. Nevertheless, although contemporary scholarship has tackled fundamental questions regarding the provenance and authorship of the Zohar, this Jewish mystical corpus still poses many a riddle, especially when it comes to its Aramaic idiom.

Huseyn Javid’s works creating a complete impression about his views of being, mind, his attitude to life reveal his thoughts about society and person. When speaking about the existence with God, relations between a person and God in the thinker’s creation it is more expedient to pay attention to his verses. When choosing any theme the poet tried to present sound logical results dealt with a person, spirituality, society and he succeeded. The great master knowing the Islamic notions dealt with creation of man and his position very well realised that the humanity’s tragedy is greediness that can’t be ruled and looked for salvation in real love. From this standpoint his verse “Hubuti Adam” (Fallen Adam) attracts special attention. Adam, a man who harmed the highest love was held away from paradise, his beauty was taken away from him, too. Emphasizing Adam’s yellow face Huseyn Javid is deeply impressed. According to the mythical thought yellow colour is considered to be a symbol of separation. In “Hubuti – Adam” Adam and Eve were informed about their exile from the paradise and overthrow on the Earth by the beautiful Fairy by order of God. From Fairy’s words turn out that Adam’s descendants’ life on the earth won’t be pure like the flowing water at all. Describing the first prophet’s careless days in Edem in his verse “Hubuti-Adam” H.Javid tells about story happened before Adam’s lowering on the earth. The poet tells about hard, fatal human life in this world by Fairy’s words. He thinks that the only salvation is not to be a slave of insatiability and is mental purity. Evidently H.Javid appealing to the Koran story expresses his ideas about the society and person. Presenting the important human idea he uses expressive words caused by his, artistic imagination and theosophy as means of artistic self- expression.

Hitherto, interpretative criticism of Arnold Bax’s tone poem Tintagel (1917–19) has been pictorial and biographical: the work has been interpreted both as a sea picture and as a record of the composer’s affair with the pianist Harriet Cohen in Cornwall in 1917. This article offers a new, ‘Irish’ reading of the work, suggesting that it can be considered an implicit response to the 1916 Easter Rising. In doing so, it aligns Tintagel with Bax’s contemporaneous pro-Republican poetry, and links its narrative to a revolutionary impulse to revive the ideals of an ancient heroic age in a post-1916 Ireland. Crucial to all these interpretations are Tintagel ’s Wagnerian connections. The first part of the article considers how Wagnerism, along with the often closely associated movement of Theosophy, had an impact both upon Bax and the artistic and nationalist figures with whom he associated in Ireland. Drawing on James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s Sonata Theory, a formal analysis of Tintagel is presented, arguing that the work’s process of ‘teleological regeneration’ complements the theosophical idea of cyclical evolution and the characteristically Wagnerian narrative of ideal–corruption–redemption. The article concludes that Tintagel both reflects and acts out a broader aesthetic shift that took place in Bax’s musical output at the time, one that marks a farewell to a feminine conception of Ireland and looks forward to a heroic, masculine Ireland to be realized in the near future.

This is an article on the history of religion and mathematics, which explores the origins and uses of geometric terminology in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century esoteric discourses, and inquires as to whether or not such adaptions are instances of the discursive strategy identified by Olav Hammer as terminological scientism. For the situation regarding spheric terminology, I argue that the context is not scientistic, being rather an example of the decontextualised modern appropriation of antique terminologies. In the case of planar terminology, I conclude that while its origin with Emanuel Swedenborg as an adaption of anatomical vocabulary does indeed fit Hammer's definition of scientism, modern usage stripped the term of Swedenborg's scientistic rationale — making the scientistic designation something of a vestigial atavism. In dealing with dimensional terminology, my conclusion is that from Johann Zollner's initial formulation to the broader Spiritualistic and Theosophical applications, it exemplifies terminological scientism through and through.

This is an introduction to the intimate correspondence between the head of the publishing house “Musaget” E. Medtner and artist, anthroposophist M. Sabashnikovaa, published in the present issue. Ideas that lived within the publishing house “Musaget”, including that of the Rosicrucian brotherhood, which A. Mintslova wished to establish, based on Steiner's theosophy, are briefly discussed. Mintslova had acquainted Sabashnikova with Medtner in 1910 and promised him that Steiner would heal his psychological and physical ailments. Later Medtner found his healing in Jungian psychoanalysis. The correspondence covers the period of 1911–1913, which passed for them under the sign of Steiner's Theosophy.

The conclusion traces a path through the responses to Schelling in British fin de siecle literature into modernist and twentieth century readings of his philosophy. Beginning with Max Muller and Walter Pater on Schelling’s positive philosophy and the unconscious ground of being, Schelling’s reception in the discourses of late nineteenth century psychology and theosophy is discussed, before a path is traced through William James and Freud to psychoanalysis. The conclusion shows the ways in which some of the most influential recent approaches to Schelling, developed by figures such as Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze, are in certain ways foreshadowed in the nineteenth century British reading of Schelling.

Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination, 1897- 1947. By Nalini Ghuman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. [xv, 345 p. ISBN 9780199314898 (hardcover), $49.95; (e-book), various.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index, companion Web site: http://global.oup.com/us/companion .websites/9780199314898/.In Resonances of the Raj, Nalini Ghuman examines the role of English rule in India as it influenced musicians during its final fifty years. To that end, she includes six chapters spanning the period, which need not be read in order. She includes a broad range of musicians: Maud MacCarthy (1882- 1967), Edward Elgar (1857-1934), Gustav Holst (1874-1934), Amy Woodforde-Finden (1860-1919), Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988), and John Foulds (1880- 1939). Ghuman includes a short introduction, but no conclusion. She explains "I have chosen to focus on musical case studies involving six figures who, I believe, are both representative of the era and significant in their own right" (p. 3). Resonances of the Raj is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on oriental influences on British music. Other recent books include Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s-1940s, edited by Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (Aldershot, Hampshire, Eng.: Ashgate, 2007), and Bob van der Linden's Music and Empire in Britain and India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Each has a chapter about the musicians Ghuman includes in her book.Four of the six chapters are revisions of Ghuman's 2003 dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley (Anna Nalini Gwynne, "India in the English Mu - sical Imagination, 1890-1940" [Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003]). The two new chapters on Maud MacCarthy and John Foulds, the first and last, respectively, are among the strongest of the book. Little has been written about MacCarthy as an individual or on her collaborations with her husband, Foulds. For example, there is no entry in Grove Music Online on MacCarthy, and she is only mentioned in the article about her husband. Ghuman's contribution in the first chapter focuses on MacCarthy's work as an ethnomusicologist in India from 1907-9 (before she met Foulds) and her lecture recitals on Indian music presented in England and Paris from 1910 to 1930.In the last chapter of her book, Ghuman focuses on the final years of Foulds's life (1935-39) when he lived in India and worked as Director of European Music at All India Radio in Delhi. The compositions considered include Gandharva-Music, Three Mantras, Essays in the Modes, and pieces written for his Indo-European Orchestra. Ghuman outlines Foulds's struggles in getting his music published, performed, and broadcast; his motivation for moving to India; his untimely death from cholera in 1939; and his possible influence on later musician Ravi Shankar. Previous work on the couple includes a chapter in Bob van der Linden's Music and Empire in Britain and India, which focuses on theosophy as an influence on MacCarthy and Foulds.Perhaps the strongest chapter of the book is dedicated to Amy Woodforde- Finden's Four Indian Love Lyrics (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1902). Here Ghuman studies both the music and the texts by Violet Nicolson (written under the pseudonym Laurence Hope). The Indian influence is in Nicolson's texts and the illustrations on the early editions, more so than in the music itself. The Indian Love Lyrics were popular in 1902 and remain so today, especially "Kashmiri Song," with its tale of forbidden love on the banks of the Shalimar. Ghuman also examines "The Temple Bells" and "Less than the Dust," but not "Till I Wake." Comparisons are drawn between the Eastern elements in Cyril Scott's Lotus Land and Liza Lehmann's "The Snake- Charmer" from the Golden Threshold, both of which were composed a few years later. As a scholar of Cyril Scott and his music, I must say I disagree that Scott's Lotus Land was inspired by his impression of India. …

London artist Ethel Le Rossignol produced a series of forty-two images, symbolic of events that take place between ethereal and material planes of existence, that explicate fundamental philosophical precepts of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century adherents of Theosophical philosophy. Her series of mediumistic images present a complex interweaving of textual, symbolic, and pictorial devices meant to encourage viewers to spend time meditating on possible meanings embedded in her narrative. Although not as well-known today, in the early part of the twentieth century her pictures were appreciated, and she displayed them at various functions before her 1929 exhibition held at London Spiritual Alliance were she provided information in the form of writings and lectures of the significance of her symbolic narrative.

This essay addresses the ideas and schemas of reincarnation as used in the poetry and prose of William Butler Yeats, with particular focus on the two editions of A Vision. It contrasts the metaphysical system as given in A Vision (1937) with a number of inconsistencies found in Yeats’s poetic corpus, with an emphasis on how one might interpolate an escape from the cycle of lives, in at least one possibility while still maintaining corporality. The justification for this last comes from an analysis of complex cabalistic metaphors and teachings that Yeats learned as a member of MacGregor Mathers’ Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Elisabeth Lutyens's music of the 1940s and 1950s provides one important, but frequently overlooked, link between British music and modernism before the so-called Manchester School. I argue that the main reason that the composer and her music have not yet received much attention is that early twentieth-century modernism, as it is commonly understood, has been gendered masculine. This article engages with the composition, texts, and reception of Lutyens's 1946 cantataO saisons, ô châteaux!in the context of other Lutyens pieces in order to argue that the composer sought to transcend what she perceived as a complex of disadvantages in the reception of her music (both regarding her gender and composition technique): the Cantata is an essentially melodic piece of ‘magical serialism’. Rather than ‘taming’ or ‘feminizing’ her serial music, Lutyens thus carves out a place for herself as Arthur Rimbaud's magician, reflecting on the set text ofO saisons, ô châteaux!and anticipating her later ‘credo’, in which she declares her music's allegiance with secret science rather than note counting or personal branding.

Abstract: Ten years before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum produced two editorials calling for the death of all Native American people. These editorials have affected how both Baum’s novel and its 1939 MGM adaptation are interpreted. For some, the tale is a utopian vision that vindicates its author, while for others it clearly embodies Baum’s genocidal impulses. This essay explores this hermeneutical issue, arguing that The Wizard of Oz—like “religion” itself—can support opposing interpretations because the world it depicts is complex and contradictory.

Few people around him knew that Marcel Proust had developed a passion for investing and that he spent considerable time and energy trading Latin American stocks. (1) After the death of his parents--his mother died in 1905, two years after his father--Proust inherited a considerable fortune that was invested in blue-chip stocks and bonds and was managed by Leon Neuburger, a family friend who worked for the Rothschild Bank. When the novelist began purchasing exotic financial products, Neuburger asked his nephew Lionel Hauser, who was almost the same age as Proust, to take charge of his friend's portfolio. Starting in 1906 and continuing through 1921, Proust wrote frequent, elaborate letters to Hauser. The style and form of these missives could not be more different from those he sent to Reynaldo Hahn, Proust's one-time lover and life-long friend. Proust's notes to Hauser conveyed instructions to buy and sell stock, asked advice about possible investments, and often veered into extended meditations on life, politics, and literature. Proust treated Hauser not only as a financial adviser but also as a psychoanalyst and a guru of sorts; he seems to have been under the impression that Hauser, given his line of work, could accurately predict the rise and fall of securities and the general tendency of the world markets. The two had met as children, and Hauser was one of the rare people whom Proust addressed using the informal tu. Hauser, for his part, was no ordinary broker. He was the scion of an illustrious banking family--several of his relatives worked for the Rothschild Bank--who had a passion for literature, philosophy, and the arts. His letters to Proust include long discussions of operas, novels, poems, and paintings. More intriguingly, Hauser was a theosophist, and some of his financial advice is intermingled with meditations on karma and the effects of greed on the chain of reincarnation. In 1920 he wrote a book summarizing his views. The Three Levers of the New World: Competence, Probity, Altruism, published by the London Theosophical Publishing House, called for the creation of a "league" of ethical professionals. ("The member of the League who is a banker," he wrote, "must regard the interests of his clients as his own and never suggest an investment to them which he would consider too risky for himself" [110]). He sent Proust a copy, and a lively debate ensued as the two friends compared views on the best way to live an ethical life. As an investor, Proust had a special interest in exotic securities. His purchases--or at least his intended purchases--included bonds issued by Holland, Spain, Serbia, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Chile, Argentina, and the United States; railway stock in Switzerland, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Argentina, Brazil, and Tunisia; gold, nickel, and diamond mines--including those exploited by De Beers; oil and shipping companies from around the world (including the Port of Rosario, Argentina); and random securities, such as shares in Societe de l'Azote, a nitrogen producer; Societe Pop, a firm specializing in compressed air; Malacca Rubber, a company based in Malaysia; and Oriental Carpet, a Russian venture. Scholars have offered different interpretations for Proust's puzzling obsession with the stock market. Philip Kolb--who first published the Proust-Hauser correspondence and wrote an article called "Marcel Proust, Speculator"--judged that "when he occupied himself with financial matters, Proust behaved less as a businessman than as a poet, with a particular imagination" (179). Jean-Yves Tadie adds that Proust belongs to the category of small-time speculators who buy high and sell low. [...] It is not a matter of incompetence on Marcel's part, but of character traits: he sells when he feels bored or anxious, and buys to amuse himself. Speculating breaks for an instant his daily toil: and the more he works, the more the stock market [. …

In 'The Sabbath Guests,' a story attributed to Rabbi Eizik of Kallo, a famous Hungarian master[,] the Shekhinah and the Messiah arrive unexpectedly at Rabbi Eizik's house on the Sabbath as a couple wishing to be married. The rabbi recognizes them, but his guests, visiting Hasidim, do not recognize the bride and groom and do not assent to the marriage, thus losing another opportunity to unite the Messiah and the Shekhinah, repair the universe, and ultimately usher in the messianic age. --KARLA SUOMALA Though only one strand of a multiplicity of mystical traditions that informs his oeuvre, the Kabbalah has been documented as influential in D. H. Lawrence's writings. Lawrence may have encountered Kabbalah literature as early as 1908, including techniques for mystical and magical practice. According to Charles Burack, Lawrence got most of his Kabbalic understanding from the theosophists Helen Blavatsky and Annie Besant, but also possibly from members of the Golden Dawn Society in London, like A. E. Waite and S. L. MacGregor Mathers, both of whom translated a few Kabbalistic works (53). Even while she argues that Kabbalic references in Lawrence's work are legion, Nanette Norris notes that Lawrence made use of Kabbalic portions sparingly in his work and left no written statements concerning the Kabbalah. T. R. Wright points out that Lawrence's engagement of a variety of religions into his work resembles a form of postmodern bricolage, in the way he deploys Judeo-Christianity, Frazer's religious anthropology, and "theosophical revampers of rabbinic and Kabbalistic traditions" by less scientific religious writers like Madame Blavatsky (2). His letters and records of his conversations are full of references to the Bible, from Genesis to the Apocalypsis. Robert E. Montgomery documents Lawrence's fascination with theosophy (in which the Kabbalah plays a prominent role) as a way to reconcile poetry and philosophy, religion and the mind. Concerning messianism and eschatology, we see already a tension between destruction and reconstruction in Lawrence's writings. As Burack argues, in Lawrence's vitalist phase (in The Rainbow, for example), he tends to use Kabbalic mystical concepts, while in his "destruction" phase he uses magical terms. Burack goes on to argue, "The mysticism-magic distinction is important because Lawrence associated mysticism with an unselfconscious, receptive, unitive experience while he identified magic with selfish, manipulative, knowledge-driven action" (52). The relationship between mysticism and magic is more complex in The Plumed Serpent, however. Before her conversion, Kate appears to regard the fascination Cipriano exercises upon her as a type of magic of charm and seduction and she finds herself in opposition to what she deems to be a form of manipulation and control on the one hand, while experiencing an inexplicable attraction on the other. Burack argues that while mysticism focuses on a reverent and obedient union with God, magic emphasizes the human endeavor to wield the human will and intellect in order to gain knowledge and control that leads to an imbalance of power (76). Because magic is functional and instrumental, it favors the intellect and the will over the soul and intrudes upon the mystical that magic destroys, whereas mysticism puts humans in contact with God and restores the lost spiritual balance (85). Further, Burack sees mysticism as associated with spiritual ascension, the union with the Shekhinah, and the entrance into the paradise of knowledge. Such an entrance "symbolizes a sustained state of mystical union with the immanent God" (57). Magic, on the other hand, is usually conflated with scientific discourse and a system of oppositions--attraction and repulsion--whose mechanistic processes prove destructive when applied to human relationships and sex (Burack 85). However, Moshe Idel approaches the issue of theurgism more comprehensively, as the task of "fully activating] both the spiritual and the corporeal components of . …

This article explores the genesis of the apparently disparate fields of colour psychology, chromotherapy, and colour forecasting. They came to the fore during the 20th century, and while ostensibly unrelated, their common ancestry lies in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This period witnessed the discovery of such strange forces as magnetism, electricity, X-rays, and radio waves—in addition to odic forces and the colour aura. These were all invisible, mysterious, and to the public and many prominent scientists, equally plausible. This article traces a major influence back to spiritualism and Theosophy: both privileged colour and attributed powerful influences to it. This legacy remains, though not in the scientific domain. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 99–106, 2015

Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer by Lara Vetter Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 219 pages Lara Vetter's Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse describes the merging of religion and science into a discourse that was used by modernist writers to navigate new bodily experiences, particularly the vulnerability of the body to penetration by technologies. Many scholars of modernism have postulated a crisis of the body, but Vetter's approach is new in its emphasis on women writers and writers from racialized minorities--groups that have been denied control over their bodies, often with the support of religious and scientific establishments. H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer all invoke the uneasy nexus of religion and science with varying degrees of ambivalence to explore constructions of bodily and spiritual subjectivity. While these writers were interested in spiritualism and the occult, they were never involved in the formal theosophical societies of the period. Vetter argues that in spite of the emphasis on theosophy in modernist studies, it is just one metaphysical system among many that merged religious and scientific discourses in a way that influenced modernist writers (20). Vetter's book is truly interdisciplinary, drawing from literary studies, histories of science and religion, and gender and sexuality studies to describe a major and heretofore neglected trajectory of modernism. Vetter convincingly demonstrates that modernists' fascination with and adaptation of religio-scientific discourses was not a "fringe phenomenon" (23). Her study is organized into three main chapters, each of which examines a different combination of her three writers in relation to a central topic within religio-scientific discourse: electromagnetism, the physical culture movement, and evolutionary theories of race. Each chapter opens with a section that traces the history of extraliterary engagements with these topics. Occasionally these sections read like an overlong list of quotes from diverse and seemingly unrelated figures, but they are always based on extensive and original research into cultural phenomena that influenced modernism. Vetter does occasionally treat H.D., Loy, and Toomer's writing the way she treats her extraliterary sources, that is, as religio-scientific discourses and evidence for her project. I would have appreciated additional close readings and discussions of how the project might encourage new approaches to the authors' major works. That said, her book opens up many avenues for further research sure to enrich our understanding of modernism. Vetter's introduction amply demonstrates that religion and science found considerable, and occasionally bizarre, common ground at the turn of the twentieth century. Scientific researchers and religious leaders alike advanced theistic and occult explanations for important scientific advances: the discovery of radium by Marie Curie in 1898, Max Planck's theory of quantum particles, Einsteinian relativity, and other developments that may have sounded like science fiction to the general public (3). Vetter introduces a sometimes bewildering number of figures with diverse interests in religion, science, and occultism, but this strategy underscores the extensive reach of the nexus she describes. Modernist artists, she shows, demonstrated widespread interests in scientific discoveries, compared their work to that of scientists, and used science to develop new aesthetic techniques and modes of perception (11). Chapter Two, "'The electric incitement of Eros': Electromagnetism, Sexuality, and Modernism," demonstrates the extent to which electricity was thought to be the divine spark of the body, linking humanity to the heavens and humans to each other. H.D. and Loy, along with D. H. Lawrence and other modernists, used the language of electricity, particularly the notion of charged poles, to characterize the erotics of heterosexual attraction. …