The esoteric in art: magic, alchemy and the occult

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Magic, astrology, alchemy and the occult have left a deep mark on art. Some images were made to teach these ideas, some were made to warn against them, and some have had secret meanings read into them centuries later. On this page I take you on a short tour, from medieval star charts to the abstract paintings of Hilma af Klint, and I keep one question in front of us the whole way: what is evidence, and what is interpretation?

Three layers of meaning

The distinction between evidence and interpretation matters most in esoteric art, where enthusiasm runs high. I use three layers on this site.

• Historical What documents and objects show that artists and viewers believed and did.
• Later tradition What scholars, occultists and popular writers have since read into the works.
• Modern How people today use art in their own spiritual lives. That can be valuable, but it is not history.

If you have not yet tried slow looking, start with how to look at a painting. The five steps there work on every image below.

Astrology in the open

Historical Astrology was part of mainstream learned culture in the Islamic world and in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and it appears in art openly, not in secret. The eighth-century bathhouse at Qusayr ʿAmra in Jordan has a dome painted with the constellations. Medieval physicians used the “zodiac man,” a figure with each sign ruling a part of the body, and a famous one appears in the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry.

The frescoes of the months at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, painted around 1469 to 1470, combine the labors of each month with its zodiac sign and its decan figures. The art historian Aby Warburg decoded their astrological imagery in 1912. The hall was decorated for Duke Borso d’Este, and Francesco del Cossa painted several of the months. Each month runs in three bands: the duke’s court at the bottom, the zodiac sign with its three decan figures in the middle, and a triumphal procession of a classical god at the top.

This is historical evidence in the strongest sense. These images were made to show astrological ideas, and people at the time understood them that way.

Melencolia I

Historical Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of 1514 is one of the most discussed images in Western art. A winged female figure sits, chin in hand, among scattered tools of measuring and building: a compass, a plane, a saw, nails, a sphere, a strange many-sided stone, an hourglass, scales and a bell. On the wall behind her hangs a magic square of four by four numbers in which every row, column and diagonal adds up to 34, and the two middle numbers of the bottom row give the date, 1514. A bat-like creature in the sky carries a banner with the title. The Met’s impression is in its open-access collection.

Later tradition The classic interpretation, by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl in Saturn and Melancholy (1964), links the image to the idea that melancholy, the temperament ruled by Saturn, was the temperament of creative genius. That idea is found in Marsilio Ficino and in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s On Occult Philosophy, written by 1510 and printed in 1533. In the astrological magic of the time, a four-by-four magic square was associated with Jupiter, whose influence was thought to temper Saturn’s. It is a strong scholarly reading, supported by texts of the period. Claims that the print contains coded messages from secret societies are speculation.

Medieval magic in books

Historical Much of what we know about medieval magic comes from books, and many of them are illustrated. Grimoires, handbooks of ritual magic, were copied by hand and often included drawings of circles, seals and figures for the operator to copy. Their art is practical. A seal had to be drawn correctly for the ritual to work, so the drawing was an instruction, not a decoration. When you look at the seals of the Ars Goetia in the 1904 edition, you are looking at the descendants of those diagrams. I write about that tradition on the Goetia hub.

Alchemy: a language of pictures

Historical Alchemy, the art of transforming matter and, for many practitioners, the soul, produced a rich tradition of illustrated manuscripts and printed books. The Splendor Solis, a sequence of alchemical paintings first made in Germany around 1532 to 1535, survives in several copies, including a lavish one of 1582 in the British Library that you can view free online. Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617) combines fifty emblematic engravings with short poems and musical fugues.

These works were made to express alchemical ideas. Their symbols formed a shared language among alchemists: the king and queen whose union stands for the joining of opposites, the green lion devouring the sun, the pelican feeding its young with its own blood, the ouroboros serpent eating its tail. A word of care if you go looking: many alchemical emblems include nude figures, so I describe them here rather than show them.

Later tradition Alchemical meanings have also been read into works whose makers left no evidence of alchemical intent, such as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and the sculpture of Gothic cathedrals. The writer known as Fulcanelli argued in The Mystery of the Cathedrals (1926) that the sculptures of Notre-Dame encode alchemical secrets. That book tells us about twentieth-century alchemy, not about medieval intentions.

Diagrams of the cosmos: Fludd and Kircher

Historical Three anonymous manifestos published in Germany between 1614 and 1616 announced a secret brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. Whether it ever existed is doubtful, but the idea inspired centuries of esoteric groups. The English physician Robert Fludd, who defended the Rosicrucians, illustrated his cosmological works from 1617 with elaborate engraved diagrams of the macrocosm and microcosm, the great world and the human being as a small copy of it.

The engraving at the top of this page comes from the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus, published in the 1650s. It shows the Kabbalistic Tree of Life: ten circles, the sephirot, joined by twenty-two paths. Kircher was a Catholic priest and a collector of every kind of knowledge, and his book tried to gather Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek wisdom into one system. His diagram became one of the most copied images of the Tree, and versions of it still shape the way the Tree is drawn in modern magic and tarot.

Witches in art

Historical Images of witches became a popular subject in German prints around 1500. Hans Baldung Grien’s chiaroscuro woodcut The Witches (1510) shows women around a steaming pot while one rides a goat through the air, and Dürer engraved a witch riding backward on a goat around 1500. Both images contain nudity, so I describe them rather than show them. Three centuries later, Francisco Goya returned to the subject.

Many of the etchings in his series Los Caprichos (1799) show witches, and he painted witches’ sabbaths, including one of the late “Black Paintings” he made on the walls of his own house between 1819 and 1823, now in the Prado. Goya’s witches are not sympathetic portraits from the inside. They are Enlightenment satire, aimed at the superstition and cruelty that witch beliefs and the Inquisition stood for. Popular stories say he went mad. His deafness is documented, but the madness is speculation.

These images were made mostly by men and largely for male buyers. They mix eroticism, humor and moral warning. They reflect what their makers and buyers believed or feared about witches, not what any real practitioner did. For modern witches looking for our history in art, that is an important distinction: these images are evidence of the witch-hunting imagination. The real history of the trials is on the history of witchcraft.

Later tradition By the nineteenth century, the witch had become romantic. John William Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle (1886) shows a dignified sorceress drawing a protective circle, a Victorian dream drawn from literature and legend. I read it step by step on how to look at a painting.

The occult revival and Symbolism

Historical The late nineteenth century saw an occult revival across Europe: Spiritualism with its séances, the Theosophical Society founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and others, and ceremonial orders such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888. Artists were part of it. In 1890s Paris, Joséphin Péladan’s Salons de la Rose+Croix gave Symbolist art an explicitly esoteric frame, favoring dreams, myth and mystical subjects over everyday life.

The occult revival also produced the most influential tarot deck of the modern era, drawn in 1909 by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. That story has its own page, the art history of tarot.

Hilma af Klint

Historical Hilma af Klint (1862 to 1944) trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in the 1880s and worked as a respected painter of landscapes, portraits and botanical illustrations. She was also involved in Spiritualism. From 1896 she met regularly with four other women in a group called The Five, holding séances, practicing automatic drawing and receiving messages from guides they called the High Masters. She joined the Theosophical Society in 1904.

In 1906 she began a vast cycle she called The Paintings for the Temple, which she said the High Masters had commissioned. Between 1906 and 1915 she made about 193 works in the cycle. Among them are The Ten Largest (1907), ten paintings roughly three meters tall, showing the stages of human life through spirals, petals, circles, letters and soft, unexpected colors: pink, orange, lavender. They are abstract, or nearly so, years before Kandinsky’s abstractions.

She instructed in her notebooks that the Temple paintings should not be shown until twenty years after her death. They reached a wide audience only from 1986, and the Guggenheim’s exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (2018 to 2019) drew more than 600,000 visitors, the most in that museum’s history. Her biographer Julia Voss found evidence that she presented some work at a conference in London in 1928, so the old idea that she never showed it is being revised.

Later tradition Was she the “first abstract artist”? The question is less useful than it seems. She did not use the word. Others were moving toward non-representational art around the same time, and the English Spiritualist Georgiana Houghton exhibited swirling watercolors in London in 1871 that she said were made under spirit guidance. What af Klint’s story shows clearly is that spiritual ideas were one important root of abstraction.

Kandinsky and the inner sound

Historical Wassily Kandinsky (1866 to 1944) was the most influential theorist of spiritual abstraction. His Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in December 1911 and dated 1912, cites Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society by name. In Michael Sadler’s 1914 English translation he wrote: “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.” He believed colors and forms had inner sounds and that painting could work on the soul as music does. The Theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms (1901), which pictured the shapes thoughts supposedly take, influenced several abstract painters, and Piet Mondrian joined the Theosophical Society in 1909.

Carrington, Varo and after

Historical Leonora Carrington (1917 to 2011) joined the Surrealists in Paris and settled in Mexico City in 1942, where she became close friends with Remedios Varo (1908 to 1963). Both studied alchemy, Kabbalah, tarot and mythology, and their paintings are full of hybrid creatures, kitchens that work like alchemical laboratories and powerful older women. Carrington also designed a set of tarot Major Arcana in the 1950s. Other artists who engaged with the occult include Ithell Colquhoun, Austin Osman Spare and Rosaleen Norton.

Witches in contemporary art

Modern Witchcraft, ritual and the occult have become prominent themes in contemporary art. Exhibitions have revisited the witch hunts, Spiritualist and visionary women artists, and goddess imagery. The Swedish painter Monica Sjöö, whose painting God Giving Birth (1968) once caused a scandal, was the subject of a retrospective at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Some contemporary artists describe themselves as witches. That self-understanding is part of their work, but it should not be confused with an unbroken historical tradition.

How to spot invented history

Books, websites and social media posts often claim that a famous painting hides occult codes, or that a symbol is “ancient” when it is modern. Before you share a claim like that, ask five quick questions.

1. Who says so? Is the claim from a museum, a scholar, or an anonymous post?
2. How old is the source? A reading first written in 1926 tells you about 1926.
3. Did the artist leave evidence? Letters, notebooks, contracts and libraries count. A feeling does not.
4. Does the symbol appear elsewhere in that time and place? If the same image is common in ordinary art of the period, it probably had an ordinary meaning.
5. Which layer is this? Label the claim historical, later tradition or modern, and the confusion usually clears.

These questions are not meant to spoil the magic. They protect it. When you know that Dürer’s magic square really does come from Renaissance astrological magic, the print becomes more wonderful, not less.

Looking at sacred and esoteric art with respect

Modern If a work moves you spiritually, that experience belongs to you, and it can be valuable. But it is not evidence about what the work meant to its makers. “This painting speaks to me of transformation” is a statement about you. “The artist intended an alchemical message” is a historical claim that needs evidence. Much sacred art is still holy to living people, so learn a tradition’s own meaning first, do not take what is closed, and be a good guest in museums and places of worship.

Try it: read one image on three levels

Choose Melencolia I in the Met’s online collection, or a work by af Klint on a museum website. Write three short paragraphs and label each one.

1. Historical evidence. What do documents from the artist’s time tell us about what it meant?
2. Later interpretation. What have scholars or writers argued since?
3. Your response. What does it mean to you?

The goal is not to rank them, only to keep them apart. When you are ready for more, return to the art history hub or explore how these ideas shaped tarot on the art history of tarot.