Kurt Seligmann - The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World

Note from the Publisher on the Collectors Edition

It is our privilege to offer this Collectors Edition of Kurt Seligmanns masterwork The Mirror of Magic in its original form. We chose to preserve and reproduce the impressive 1948 first edition layout, typography, and most important, all 250 of Seligmanns illustrations from his rare and private collection.

We have added a foreword by Celia Rabinovitch, director of research for the Seligmann Center, who describes Seligmanns life journey and its influences on his work, and a preface by Graina Subelyt, who examines the transformative power of magic and the occult that inspired Seligmann to create his visual and literary works.

The original text block of The Mirror of Magic starts with a rendering of the quotation and artwork that opened the 1948 edition, followed by Seligmanns dedication, acknowledgments, and table of contents, where the pagination of the original edition begins.

TO ARLETTE

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is herewith made to the following publishers for their kind permission to quote from titles published by them: to D. Appleton-Century Co., Inc., publishers of Ian Ferguson's Philosophy of Witchcraft; to CIBA Pharmaceutical Products, Inc., Summit, N. J., publishers of William J. Wilson's "The Greek Alchemical Papyri," which appeared in CIBA Symposia, vol. 3, No. 5 (1941.); to the Columbia University Press, publishers of A. V. William Jackson's Zoroastrian Studies; to the Dial Press, publishers of C. L'Estrange Ewen's Witch Hunting and Witch Trials; to Houghton Mifflin Co., publishers of The Making of the Modern Mind, by John H. Randall, Jr.; to the Macmillan Co., for material from Folklore in the Old Testament and The Golden Bough, both by James G. Frazer; to Charles Scribner's Sons, publishers of James H. Breasted's A History of Egypt.

The quotations from Philostratus are reprinted by permission of the publishers from the Loeb Classical Library edition of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Volume I, translated by F. C. Conybeare, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1917; for which kindness grateful acknowledgment is herewith made.

Thanks are also due to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The University Museum, Philadelphia, and The Yale University Art Gallery for their courtesy in allowing the reproduction of some of their pictorial material.

FOREWORD

The Artist behind the Mirror of Magic

By Celia Rabinovitch

The Mirror of Magic was as unique as its creator. Kurt Seligmann (19001962) was born at the turn of the century in Basel, Switzerland, during the height of the symbolist movement and the occult revival in Europe. An artist, he rejected the bourgeois life of his parents and sought the transformative power of imagination to turn matter into metaphor through alchemy and art. Kurt Seligmann saw through the mirror of magic and revealed its manifestations in supernaturalism, religion, and the sacred.

His father, Gustav, was originally from Prussia and arrived in Basel in 1895. His mother, Helene, was from Lengnau, one of only two Jewish towns in the canton of Aargau where Jews were allowed to settle in Switzerland prior to 1866. They established a furniture store at 19 Falkenstrasse, near the city center. Historically, Basels stance toward its Jewish population was stained. In 1349, the Jews were blamed for the Black Death and burned or expelled from Basel, and were again exiled in 1549. The Jewish community was allowed to return to Basel in 1862 and given civic rights in 1874, but this marginal position cannot have escaped Kurts assimilated parents, reminded by the World Zionist Congresses led by Theodore Herzl that sought solutions to the persecution of Jews in Europe.

As a child, Kurt absorbed elements of the fantastic art and symbolism of earlier Swiss artists such as Johann Heinrich Fssli and Arnold Bcklin. The costumes and pageantry of the Catholic Carnival in Basel captured his childhood imagination and continued to haunt him as an artist. However, as a Jewish boy in a Catholic environment, he could only witness this spectacle, rather than participate. From 191819, Kurt attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, where drawing the draped figure co-mingled with memories of Carnival and images of the draped furniture in his fathers store. This compounding of imagination released a trajectory of symbols that he explored in painting.

In 1920, he returned to Basel during his fathers illness to manage the business. Longing to develop his art he finally left for Florence in 1927 to attend the Accademia de Belle Arti. There he discovered themes from the Christian Cabbala in the layered symbolism of Renaissance artists, presented in a deep space composed with sublime color. These artists were adepts at the Neoplatonic cross-referencing of pagan, Christian, and Old Testament themes, a process that became an essential element of Seligmanns imagination.

Kurt Seligmann arrived in Paris in 1929entering a milieu effervescent with original ideas connecting symbolism, dreams, and myth with the psychoanalysis of Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Jung. With a small inheritance, received in 1935 from his father, he collected rare books in Italian, Latin, Greek, and German, concentrating on the Neoplatonists and the Christian Cabbala, including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Robert Fludd, Johannes Reuchlin, and Paracelsus. Seligmann unearthed sources that provide the spectacular images in The Mirror of Magic. He synthesized ideas from Sir James Frazer, E. B. Tylor, Carl Jung, and Herbert Silbermanalthough he avoided their cultural Darwinismand he associated with artists Hans (Jean) Arp, Alberto Giacometti, and the surrealists. Andr Breton accepted him into the surrealist movement in 1934, and he was welcomed to their daily meetings in 1937.

Kurt and Arlette left Paris in 1938 to conduct field research in totemism with the Gitxsan and Tsimshian peoples of northern British Columbia, Canada. He obtained a monumental totem pole for the anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss, then an assistant director of ethnology at the newly formed Muse de lHomme in Paris. Seligmann became one of the first European artists in exile, and when he and Arlette left for his exhibition in New York in 1939, they remained there.

During the War, he helped others to escape, including Andr Breton, who arrived with Lvi-Strauss in 1941. But in 1943 Breton expelled Seligmann from the surrealist movement over an argument about the meaning of a tarot card. It is ironic that Seligmann, who studied totem and taboo, was shunned, made taboo, by Breton. Likely, The Mirror of Magic became his strength in exile. If he was surrounded by an odor of rejection, then he would be distinguished by wisdom. These events drove Seligmanns sense of personal exile, first from his native Switzerland, then from Paris, and finally from surrealism.

The Mirror of Magic, first published in 1948, prefigured writings by the great historian of religion Mircea Eliade, whose Patterns in Comparative Religion was published ten years later, or Joseph Campbells Hero with a Thousand Faces, published a year after Seligmanns book. These thinkers sought a primal story or