Oliver St John

The Magical Art of Surreal Romanticism Oliver St John

Perfect bound paperback edition. The book includes six high quality full colour reproductions of fine art, including rarely seen drawings and paintings by Austin Osman Spare and Ithell Colquhoun. A study of automatism in the arts and the Left-hand path of retroversion of the senses typified by the work of Austin Osman Spare and Kenneth Grant. True automatism is a condition of mind and soul exercised outside and beyond the will of the person, whether they are destined to become a magus or merely another victim swallowed up by an incomprehensible universe. Automatism was not an invention of the Surrealists or of Sigmund Freud, but has always existed in magick and alchemy. The book vindicates the work of English scholar and mystic, Thomas De Quincey, who spoke of a more sublime form of divination by which magnetism may call up from the darkness, "sentiments the most august, previously inconceivable, formless, and without life", so exalting their character as to "lodge them eternally in human hearts".