Surrealism and Operative Alchemy: The Secret Language at the Origins of the Surrealist Movement - Hardcover

Lepetit, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798888501672

Publisher: Inner Traditions, 2026

Synopsis

Discover the links between European surrealism and the alchemical tradition

• Draws on rare primary documents to reveal the connections between surrealism, 20th century alchemy, and 19th century occultism

• Explores Éliphas Lévi, Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, and Hermeticism to show how surrealist symbology contained an initiatory dimension or “secret teaching”

• Details collaborations between surrealists André Breton, Bernard Roger, and Salvador Dalí and alchemists René Alleau, Eugène Canseliet, and Fulcanelli

Over the last century the symbols and strangeness of the surrealists have become world-renowned, but what isn’t so well-known is the hidden relationship between surrealism and alchemy. The works of both traditions not only had a decisive influence on each other but created a unique path for alchemy to leave its underground workshops to shine in the light of popular culture.

Patrick Lepetit draws on rare primary documents to reveal the connections between surrealism, 20th-century alchemy, and 19th-century occultism. He examines the hidden subtleties of surrealism to see the esoteric messages embedded in its vision of the self and cosmos. Exploring the writings of Éliphas Lévi, Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, and Hermeticism, Lepetit shows how surrealist symbology contained an initiatory dimension, a “secret teaching” that was integral to its expression and deeply inspiring to the surrealists. Early alchemists used codes and word games, such as the perfect and divine “language of the birds,” to discuss the work in ways that would baffle the uninitiated and evade the suspicions of the church. Readers will learn about the artists André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Irene Hillel-Erlanger, Bernard Roger, and Jorge Camacho and how they worked with alchemists Fulcanelli, René Alleau, and Eugène Canseliet.

Surrealism and Operative Alchemy is a deeply researched study that situates the surrealists in their proper place as members of an age-old tradition of wisdom.

About this title

About the Author

Patrick Lepetit has written several books in French on esoteric traditions and surrealism. He is a member of the Grand Orient de France and of the Mélusine Network of scholars interested in surrealism. He lives in Mons en Baroeul, France.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

Alchemy of the Word

There is no reading after which we cannot continue seeking for the philosopher’s stone.

Andre Breton,

Les pas perdus (The lost steps)

Born at the end of the nineteenth century, a period often considered the golden age of esotericism and “occultism” (a rather catch-all term* coined shortly before by Eliphas Levi), the intellectual development of the first generation of surrealists was truly immersed in the cerebral ferment that characterized this prewar period. A reaction against the prevailing positivist hegemony, this ferment shook the esoteric world, as evidenced by the emergence of a number of more or less secret societies. These included the various Rosicrucian orders in France, such as Sar Peladan’s Aesthetic Rosicrucian Order Emerging from the Shadow of Martinism,1 and the Golden Dawn in England, as well as the publications of individuals such as Levi himself, Papus, or Helena Blavatsky, to name but a few.

As noted by Patrick Kremer, Andre Rolland de Reneville, a prominent member of the Grand Jeu (a group organized by two young seers from Reims, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Rene Daumal, and their Czech friend Joseph Sima), emphasized in Univers de la parole* that “the fight of the Encyclopedists against religious dogmas had its counterpart in the freedom they gave to certain minds to devote themselves to the study of the philosophies and religious messages of all times and all countries, from which the obstacle of a traditional prohibition had just been removed.”2 He formulated the hypothesis that “the crisis of agnosticism that turned the Western world upside down was overshadowed by a leap toward the marvelous and a passion for the so-called forbidden sciences, something that could be seen in the most educated classes of society.”

From this point of view, and considering that this crisis lasted throughout the nineteenth century and only really ended in 1914, how could we not be struck by the blinding evidence that the surrealists were, at least in part, the heirs of these “accursed poets” who were engaged in the elucidation of what Baudelaire calls “the immense universal analogy”? Moreover, are they not cursed “by virtue of the fact that they follow a direction similar to that of the so-called accursed sciences . . . from which they draw the very basis of their thought”?3 These “accursed sciences” are those, Breton notes in his Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto, “with which a tacit contact has always been maintained through the intermediary of ‘accursed’ poetry.” Likewise, in “Before the Curtain,” the preface to the catalog of the 1947 exhibition at the Maeght Gallery, he observes that “it cannot be a coincidence that recent research has discovered at the intersection of poetic and social transformative thought (the great figures of the Convention, Hugo, Nerval, Fourier) the continuing vitality of an esoteric understanding of the world (Martines, Saint-Martin, Fabre d’ Olivet, the Abbe Constant).” And he adds that their more or less direct influence can be seen, crystalizing around Saint-Yves d’ Alveydre, on “the Rimbaud, Mallarme, Jarry).” Rolland de Reneville, author of The Poetic Experience, went further, saying: : “It is now possible to feel that the assertions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets about the meaning of symbols, the power of the word, and the infinite richness of the unconscious will be remote but undeniable consequences of the currents of thought expressed in the Martinist and Swedenborgian doctrines* at the dawn of Romanticism.” In support of his claim, he cites “Nerval, Baudelaire, and Poe,” but also Hugo,† Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Jarry, not to mention Balzac and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam,‡ who were influenced by Martines de Pasqually,** the founder of the Order of the Mason Knights Elect Cohen of the Universe. There were also Blake, Swedenborg, and several other “accursed philosophers [who] created their personal works in the secret radiance of the Kabbalah,* and thereby, without seeking it, earned credit as initiators of Romanticism.”

In the same spirit, Breton (in the third part of Ajours, the section that concludes Arcane 17), hails in a footnote “the publication of a major work entitled La symbolique de Rimbaud,” which definitively establishes that “the influence of Eliphas Levi, about which A. Viatte had shown the predominant role it played in the development of Victor Hugo, was experienced by Rimbaud with equal importance.” Breton did this despite the fact that the author was “a young Jesuit” named Jacques Gengoux.† As a sign of his possible approval, he quoted the following sentences: “Fourier and Levi formed part of a massive trend of thought that we can follow from the Zohar to its diversification in the visionary schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We then find it at the base of the idealistic systems, including that of Goethe, and in general in all those who refuse to believe that a mathematical identity is the ideal unifying principle of the world.” Breton emphasized Eliphas Levi’s ties to the Phalansterian bookshop on Quai Voltaire, while pointing out that Fourier had insisted on “the symbolism of colors” before Rimbaud.

In words close to Breton’s, but which will not surprise anyone who is aware of the closeness of the two men, Pierre Mabille mentions in his preface to the new French edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (published by Stock in 1947),* two works which he said “were almost as widespread in English speaking countries as the Bible,” “the initiatory nature of Art” that “can never be stressed too highly” (art in the sense he gives it), even if “membership in secret societies is not enough in itself to awaken poetic genius.”† Referring to the works of Auguste Viatte,‡ he writes: “To explain the extraordinary success of certain books, signed or not, the occultists of the end of the last century, Eliphas Levi, Saint-Yves d’ Alveydre, [and] Schure stated that these works were initiatory and that their authors belonged to a kind of occult chain or, more exactly, a fraternity that has passed down a secret teaching since the dawn of time.” Then, recalling in passing Etiemble’s study of “the singular readings of Rimbaud at the Charleville Municipal Library when he was a child,” he concludes that while “definitive proof” has “not been produced”—how could it be?—“disturbing facts have been discovered.” This should come as no surprise, since “the poet expresses the resolution of that ancient conflict to which the initiate claims to hold the key through knowledge of the Arcana,” and since “poetry seeks through the word (words and images) to express the ceaseless communication between the world of external phenomena and that of the internal representation animated by the violence of our passions.”

This happens in the secret radiance of the Hebrew Kaballah, as Breton puts it, and of the Zohar, but certainly also of Hermeticism, whose foundational text, the Emerald Tablet, establishes precisely this analogy, that “targets the intelligence of the heart and its creativity,” as the manifestation of a universal law. In addition, as Rene Alleau points out, this analogy “arises from the poetic and forms the basis of traditional alchemy.”4 “It is one of the paths of the Living,” says Jean Bies, whose “definitions mutually converge, intersect, and fertilize each other and whose inexhaustibility leaves the seeker forever dissatisfied.”5 Alleau, in his Aspects de l’ alchimie traditionnelle (Aspects of traditional alchemy), also pointed out that Hermeticism was based on the myth of Hermes Trismegistus, whom Neoplatonists and Christians, under the influence of Euhemerist ideas, considered to be an ancient Egyptian king and the inventor of all sciences, whose secrets he had enclosed in mysterious books. Their solemn procession was described by Clement of Alexandria.* This “thrice great figure”† whom “the ancient Egyptians,” Camacho tells us, “worshipped under the name of Thoth,” is the one “who knows the Word with which the gods gave birth to the universe, which they considered to be the heart of the god RA, and who possessed the knowledge of the secret language. This is the figure whom the Greeks . . . called HERMES, who by his nature corresponds to the Artist of our Hermetic Science” (italics and capitalization in the original).6 Meanwhile Henri Hunwald shares the view of Rolland de Reneville and writes simply and clearly: “It has thus been decided to designate in this way a set of doctrines, which according to tradition go back to Ancient Egypt in the figure of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. All of those doctrines and the practical applications they promoted find a common denominator in the theory of correspondences according to which the entire universe is composed of a number of analogous realms, whose elements correspond to one another, and can thus be used mutually as symbols, to reveal their respective properties, or even to act upon one another.”7

Edition details

• Publisher: Inner Traditions
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798888501672
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360