This book argues that the aesthetic experiments of the first half of the twentieth century that we call modernism drew on the discourses of the occult dominant during the period – in particular on spiritualism and theosophy – because in them it saw the possibilities for a reconceptualisation of the mimetic. While these discourses have been much investigated in critical works of the last few decades, what neither recent scholars nor many practitioners, or indeed critics, at the time have admitted is the extent to which they have magic at their heart. Yet these occult discourses provided possibilities for experiment for writers, filmmakers and artists because in them resided a productive magic; productive because it was a magic that fundamentally understood that the mimetic is able to produce, not just an inert copy, but an animated copy powerful enough to enact change in the original.

That the period encompassing the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century experienced an occult revival is now well established. There have been numerous cultural histories of this over the last thirty years or so, establishing occult beliefs, magical thinking or belief in the survival of the individual beyond death as central to the construction of modernity during this time (Oppenheim 1985; Owen 1989; Thurschwell 2001; Luckhurst 2002; Owen 2004; Warner 2006). Rather than embarrassing aberrations, in these works such beliefs are claimed as central to the production of what was considered modern.