{"id":11870,"date":"2022-07-04T05:20:45","date_gmt":"2022-07-04T05:20:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/cn\/?post_type=product&p=11870"},"modified":"2022-07-04T05:23:19","modified_gmt":"2022-07-04T05:23:19","slug":"victorian-occultism-and-the-art-of-synesthesia","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/cn\/victorian-occultism-and-the-art-of-synesthesia\/","title":{"rendered":"Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grounded in the theory that ideas, emotions, and even events, can manifest as visible auras, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater\u2019s\u00a0Thought-Forms<\/em>\u00a0(1901) is an odd and intriguing work. Benjamin Breen explores these \u201csynesthetic\u201d abstractions and asks to what extent they, and the Victorian mysticism of which they were born, influenced the Modernist movement that flourished in the following decades.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

\u201cI have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance \u2014 the revolt of the soul against the intellect \u2014 now beginning in the world,\u201d wrote William Butler Yeats to his mentor, the Irish nationalist John O’Leary, in 1892. Yeats believed that magic was central not only to his art, but to a dawning epoch when spirituality and technology would march together toward an uncertain future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

Thought-Forms<\/em>, a strange, beguiling, frequently pretentious, utterly original book first published in 1901, emerged from this ferment of late-Victorian mysticism. It was written by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, erstwhile members of the London Theosophical Society alongside Yeats, and it features a stunning sequence of images that illustrate the book\u2019s central argument: emotions, sounds, ideas and events manifest as visual auras.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

The book\u2019s grand ambitions are evident from the first page. \u201cTo paint in earth’s dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds,\u201d Besant laments, \u201cis a hard and thankless task.\u201d She insists that the images in the book \u201care not imaginary forms, prepared as some dreamer thinks that they ought to appear.\u201d Rather, \u201cthey are representations of forms actually observed as thrown off by ordinary men and women.\u201d And she hopes that they will make the reader \u201crealise the nature and power of his thoughts, acting as a stimulus to the noble, a curb on the base.\u201d This grandiloquence was typical:\u00a0fin de si\u00e8cle<\/em> occult leaders produced some of the most baroque writing in literary history, the purplest of purple prose.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

Yet what are we saying, exactly, when we call black words on a white page \u201cpurple\u201d?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

These sorts of underlying associations between words, colors and sounds were precisely what motivated\u00a0Thought-Forms<\/em>. In other words, the book was about\u00a0synesthesia<\/a>. The illustration of the music of Mendelssohn reproduced above, for instance, depicts yellow, red, blue and green lines rising out of a church. This, Leadbeater and Besant explain, \u201csignifies the movement of one of the parts of the melody, the four moving approximately together denoting the treble, alto, tenor and bass respectively.\u201d Moreover, \u201cthe scalloped edging surrounding the whole is the result of various flourishes and arpeggios, and the floating crescents in the centre represent isolated or staccato chords.\u201d Color and sound had become\u00a0commingled<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Breen<\/span>\u00a0is an Assistant Professor of history at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of the book\u00a0The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"