Occult Surrealism as “Profane Illumination”: Mina Loy, Leonora Carrington, and Ithell Colquhoun

Abstract:Walter Benjamin in his 1929 essay “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” regarded the supernatural dimension of Parisian surrealism with suspicion: as a “profane” distraction from its more politically engaged aesthetics. Commenting on André Breton’s obsession with the “telepathic girl” of Nadja, Benjamin opined, “the most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena . . . will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena.” A second generation of feminist surrealists, however, propeled the movement toward revisionary “illumination” precisely through a deeper engagement with the occult. Coming after Breton’s Parisian circle of the 1920s, Mina Loy, Leonora Carrington, and Ithell Colquhoun from the 1930s onward mined the resources of fin de siècle precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, spiritual alchemy, and sex magic: opening surrealism to a posthuman biopolitics of community, embodiment, and deep ecology that is yet to come.