A work of art can be esoteric in two senses. It can be private: made for a few, kept from view, understood by initiates if at all. Or it can be coded: carrying, under its visible surface, a doctrine that only the prepared viewer will recognize. Many works said to be esoteric are the first kind and are read as the second. The difference matters, because the second kind of reading can be applied to almost anything, and usually is.
This guide describes the long tradition of esoteric art, looks at the most debated modern case, and offers six tests for judging a hidden meaning. It is written for readers who are curious about such interpretations and would like to be able to tell a discovery from a projection.
An old tradition
Coded images are much older than modern art. The alchemists, as described in Nigredo, recorded their processes in emblems: the king and queen in the bath, the green lion devouring the sun, the hermaphrodite standing on the dragon. These pictures were designed to be read by those who knew the code and to baffle those who did not. Renaissance painters drew on Hermetic and Neoplatonic ideas, and their patrons sometimes commissioned allegories that only a circle of learned friends could fully decode. The tarot, whatever its origins as a card game, became in the nineteenth century a book of images believed to contain the whole of the occult sciences.
In all these cases the code is real. We have the texts that explain the emblems, and we know that the makers intended them to be decoded.
Abstraction and the unseen
The modern case is harder, and more interesting. Several of the painters credited with inventing abstract art in the early twentieth century were serious readers of Theosophy and its offshoots. They believed that the visible world was a veil over a spiritual reality of forces, vibrations and higher planes, and that painting could depict those forces directly, without the mediation of objects. Color and form, freed from representation, would act on the soul as music does.
One Swedish painter produced a large series of abstract canvases from 1906, years before abstraction had a name, under what she believed was the guidance of spirits. She showed them to almost nobody and asked that they be kept from the public for twenty years after her death. In her case the esoteric content is documented in her own notebooks. In others it is suggested by letters, library records and the movements their makers joined. The relationship between modern art and modern occultism is one of the great under-told stories of the twentieth century, and scholars have spent the last few decades telling it.
The work on glass
The most argued-over case is a large construction on two panes of glass, begun in 1915 and abandoned, in its maker's words, as definitively unfinished in 1923. Its title speaks of a bride stripped bare by her bachelors. The upper pane holds the bride, a mechanical, insect-like form, and the lower pane holds her suitors, rendered as a chocolate grinder, a water mill and a row of empty uniforms. The glass cracked in transit a few years later, and the artist, on discovering the cracks, declared them an improvement.
The artist was known for elaborate notes and deadpan jokes, and when asked late in life what he believed in, he answered: nothing, of course. That has not prevented a century of esoteric decoding.
- An alchemical reading identifies the bride and bachelors with the alchemical marriage of opposites, and the grinding and distilling machinery with the stages of the work.
- A geometrical reading connects the work with the popular fascination, around 1910, with a fourth spatial dimension, and treats the bride as the shadow of a higher being projected into our space.
- A tantric reading, more recent and carefully argued, relates the work's erotic machinery to the nondual philosophy of medieval Kashmir, in which creation is the play of a divine couple and desire is the engine of liberation. It points out that ideas from that tradition were circulating in European esoteric circles at the time, and that the artist's most important patron was a Theosophist.
The artist himself, asked about the alchemical reading, remarked that if he had practiced alchemy, it was in the only way it could be done now: without knowing it.
If he had practiced alchemy, it was in the only way it could be done now: without knowing it.
Six tests
None of these readings can be proved, and none can be dismissed. What can be done is to weigh them. The following tests are adapted from the ones historians use for any claim of influence. No single test is decisive. A reading that passes most of them deserves attention; one that passes none is telling you about the reader.
- Access
- Could the maker have known the source? Was the book in print, in a language they read, in a city they lived in? Did their friends or patrons know it?
- Testimony
- What did the maker say, in notes, letters or interviews? Allow for jokes, evasions and later revisions, but do not ignore a flat denial without good reason.
- Specificity
- Does the reading explain particular details that other readings leave unexplained? Circles, triangles, groups of three and the union of opposites are found in every tradition, and in most kitchens.
- Economy
- How many further assumptions does the reading need? A reading that requires a secret initiation, a lost manuscript and an unrecorded journey is more fragile than one that requires a library card.
- Control
- Apply the same method to an unrelated work by a maker with no esoteric interests. If it finds the same doctrine there, it is finding the method, not the work.
- Return
- After reading the interpretation, go back and look. Does the work become more interesting, more coherent, more alive? A reading that leaves the object duller than it was has failed, whatever its evidence.
The occupational hazard
Esoteric readers are especially vulnerable to over-reading, and the reason is structural. The traditions they study are built on the doctrine of correspondence, the conviction, explained in Hermeticism: An Orientation, that everything is secretly linked to everything else. A mind trained in correspondence is a mind trained to find connections, and it will find them whether or not they are there. The same habit fuels the conspiracy theorist, as described in Why Conspiracy Theories Feel True, and the two have more in common than either would like.
The remedy is not to stop looking for hidden meanings. Some are real, and the history of modern art is incomplete without them. The remedy is to hold them lightly: to state the evidence, to admit the gaps and to prefer the reading that asks least of the facts.
Looking through the glass
There is a last point, and the work on glass makes it better than any argument. Glass is transparent. Standing in front of it, one sees the bride and the bachelors, and also, through them, the gallery behind, the other visitors and one's own faint reflection. The work cannot be seen without the room and the viewer becoming part of it.
Its maker wrote, in one of his rare statements of principle, that the spectator completes the work. Esoteric interpretation is one way of completing it, and an honorable one. It should simply be remembered that the face visible in the glass, among the machinery, is the interpreter's own.