Customer Reviews

Surrealism and the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, and the Birth of an Artistic Movement

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Nadia Choucha's book "Surrealism and the Occult" is a failure on every level, partly because she fails to do more than skim the surface of the surrealists interest in the occult and even that inadequately. She fails to even mention Victor Brauner, obviously hasn't the faintest idea of the connections between surrealists such as Jorge Camacho and Martin Stejskal and alchemy, nor the importance of figures such as Malcolm de Chazal, the great philosopher of analogy. She substitutes a clumsy and fictitious tie-in with Kenneth Grant and Austin Spare and although a comparison between Spare's automatism with the surrealist concept might have been interesting, she largely botches this because she simply has not done her research properly.
I am told that Choucha originally wrote this as an undergraduate dissertation. It should have stayed that way. It could have been the starting point for a much better book if only she had bothered to find out enough to write the book that it should have been. A silly book, written out of ignorance. What a shame. And what a shame that there is no other book that covers the whole of this underesearched area that could replace Choucha's. There is a great opening here for any real scholar, or better still, surrealist, who cares to make the effort.

This slender book has an excellent first chapter that does an good job of describing the Romantic era mythos of the visionary artist, who attains wisdom by excess, by disordering the senses, and by breaking through conventional barriers. Chouda shows how this image of the artist continued throught he Surrealist period, and was congenial to an interest in magic and the occult. Subsequent chapters cover a lot of ground quickly, and presuppose a certain familiarity with both major and minor Surrealist artists. The style of these chapters reads like an Ph.D. thesis. More illustrations of actual artwork would have been helpful, but would've driven up the cost of the book.

I can't say enough good things about this book. All those New Agers, Witches, Shamans, and Occultists who are buying up the mass-produced mind numbing/information-concealing books for the masses are missing the few real books available which might allow one to come to a deep and real understanding of that which they are seeking. This is most definitely one of those few real books.

There is really no point in me talking about the contents of the work. If you are serious about wanting to understand the extraordinarily important relationship between surrealist art and magick (or witchcraft, or shamanism, or voudun, or mind control, or whatever) this would be the place to start. Written for the intelligent individual, but you're smart, aren't you?