Humanity has always sought to understand its place in the universe. She appealed to the divine, to the stars and to animal, vegetable and mineral nature to interpret the world or predict the future; she created symbols to translate her intuitions and discoveries into images and words. And although science has largely discredited beliefs in the spiritual and the supernatural, we have witnessed a marked return to popular culture in recent years of the occult, which can be explained as a direct reaction to the state of extreme anxiety caused by climatic upheavals, health crises and international conflicts. The artistic milieu also responds sensitively to this state of mind and today suggests a sort of occult turning point in art. This manifested itself first in a renewed interest in works long left on the margins of art history, then in a reappropriation of esotericism by a new generation of artists, both in their daily lives and in their practice.
Let’s immediately abandon an excess of skepticism or any form of judgment that could hinder an open and curious reading of these practices, to focus on what motivates them and how they manifest themselves in art. We will see a powerful desire to re-enchant the world, to recognize the agency of matter and to militate against the destruction of the Earth and the living – but also against the destruction of the ability to think, an effect of what the philosophers Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre call “capitalist witchcraft”. In their book of the same title, she and he suggest that ” [l]neopagan witches have learned that the technique, or art, of craft what they call magic is not first and foremost what needs to be rediscovered, in the sense of an authentic secret. That’s what it’s all about reclaim, to reactivate”. This reclaim — alternately used in the sense of healing, reclaiming, relearning, and struggling — if it does not appear explicitly in the record new new age, is hidden behind each text, like a sort of silent incantation. At the heart of these approaches, the figure of the witch is making a comeback. Taken up by feminist and ecofeminist movements, it symbolizes the “empowerment” of women within patriarchal and neoliberal society. This new generation of witches combine art, science, technology and magic to reinvent rituals that aim sometimes to reconnect with the sacred, sometimes “to untie the historic alliance between technoscience and patriarchy, which continues to shape the global structures of power” ( Gwynne Fulton). While loudly claiming this takeover, let us remember that the word “witch” carries a heavy history of ostracization of women and minorities and that it should be used with caution. Chris Gismondi, for example, points out that “predominantly white and Eurocentric discourses of (neo) new age magic and witchcraft are likely to usurp Indigenous ceremonials and presence.” There is, indeed, a dark side to the popular revival of the new age. Often based on self-healing and personal growth, its therapeutic individualism can contribute to the expansion of forms of human, territorial and cultural exploitation, which will be successively called spiritual colonialism and spiritual capitalism. […]
To counterbalance the dark side of a superficial and consumerist new age, the artists and authors of this dossier are above all interested in what is luminous and performative in this philosophy and its rituals. These are, in many cases, works motivated by a holistic and benevolent approach, and by a desire for social and ecological justice. What encourages us to speak of a “new” new age is perhaps due to a desire to distinguish itself from the therapeutic individualism mentioned above while renewing the forms of activism that the movement already carried within it; a collective movement where human beings have an active role to play in bringing about a new era. Let’s hope that activists do not remain confined to prayer circles or symbolic rituals, but that their voice carries more concretely to the economic and geopolitical spheres, to the current decision-makers (the use of the masculine is voluntary, here ) who still invest themselves with the power to possess and destroy.
As for the occult forces and the magic that the new age invokes, it is up to each to believe it or not. But whether we understand it as a divine or magical word, or as the logical language of biology, nature speaks to us of our destiny. Thus the swallow which, symbol of fertility among the Celts or of the arrival of spring since Antiquity, is in the process of disappearing due to intensive agriculture and the use of pesticides. The swallow’s silence is a bad omen that we must urgently ward off.
Comments or suggestions for Ideas in Review? Write
at [email protected].