• 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 FulcanelliOver the last century the symbo...

A profound understanding of the surrealists’ connections with alchemists and secret societies and the hermetic aspirations revealed in their works• Explains how surrealist paintings and poems employed mythology, gnostic principles, tarot, voodoo, alchemy, and other hermetic sciences to seek out unexplored regions of the mind and recover lost “psychic” and magical powers• Provides many examples of esoteric influence in surrealism, such as how Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avig...