"Happy Birthday, Man Ray!" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Occulture: The Unseen Forces That Drive Culture Forward"
August 27
Happy Birthday, Man Ray!
On
August 27th, 1890, a tailor's son named Emmanuel Radnitzky was born in
Philadelphia, a name he would spend the rest of his life quietly erasing. By
the time he'd become one of the twentieth century's most influential
photographers, he answered only to Man Ray, a self-made identity he guarded so
closely that his own 1963 autobiography barely mentions a date. Decades later,
that same reinvented artist would turn up, camera in hand or simply as one face
in the crowd, at the occult seminars of a Russian mystic calling herself the
“Satanic Woman” of Montparnasse, sitting alongside a future architect of
Traditionalist philosophy and the founder of Surrealism itself.
Whether
Man Ray believed a word of what he heard in that room is a genuinely open
question, and it's worth sitting with honestly rather than assuming either
answer…
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The Radnitzky family's own reinvention came first, and for entirely practical reasons. Around 1912, facing the antisemitism common to Jewish immigrant families in early twentieth-century America, Emmanuel's brother Sam chose to anglicize the family name to Ray. Emmanuel, already nicknamed “Manny” by those close to him, gradually shortened his own first name to Man and began presenting himself, in every professional and social context, simply as Man Ray, refusing for the rest of his life to acknowledge he'd ever had another name at all. It's a small, very American story of assimilation and self-invention that predates, and in some ways prefigures, the far stranger reinventions his art would later pursue.
By
1929, settled in Paris and moving in Dada and Surrealist circles, Man Ray's
social orbit brought him into contact with Maria de Naglowska,
the Russian occultist this very blog covered on August 15th, whose seminars on
sexual magic in Montparnasse drew upward of forty listeners at a time. Man
Ray's attendance is well documented across multiple publisher and biographical
sources on Naglowska, placing him in the room alongside Julius Evola, André
Breton, and the writer William Seabrook,
part of an eclectic, genuinely notable audience for a woman who called herself,
without irony, “a Satanic woman.”
What
isn't documented anywhere in that same record is Man Ray's own belief, or
disbelief, in what Naglowska was teaching. Nothing in the surviving accounts
suggests he became an initiate of her Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow,
contributed to her newspaper La Flèche, or practiced her “Third Term of
the Trinity” in any serious way. The far more likely explanation, consistent
with everything else known about the Montparnasse art scene of the period, is
that Naglowska's salon functioned as a genuinely fascinating piece of theater
and provocation, exactly the kind of transgressive, boundary-pushing atmosphere
Dada and Surrealist artists were already actively seeking out elsewhere.
Attending is not the same as believing, and nothing in Man Ray's own extensive
writing about his life and influences suggests occultism ever became a serious
personal practice for him.
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Around 1922, Man Ray began producing what he called “rayographs,” camera-less photographs made by placing ordinary objects directly onto light-sensitive paper and exposing it to light, images he described, only half-jokingly, as created by the objects themselves rather than by his own conscious hand. That framing, art produced by removing the artist's deliberate control, sits remarkably close to the central technique the Surrealists were simultaneously developing in written form: automatic writing, a practice explicitly borrowed from Spiritualist séance culture, where mediums claimed to produce text and drawings while a “controlling” spirit guided the hand.
André
Breton, Surrealism's own founder and a fellow attendee at Naglowska's seminars,
was explicit about this lineage, drawing directly on the vocabulary and
practice of nineteenth-century mediumship to build automatism into the
movement's core method. Man Ray's rayographs weren't presented as literal
spirit communication, and there's no evidence he intended them that way. But
they emerged from the same cultural moment, one where an entire generation of
avant-garde artists found the language of séances, mediums, and automatic
transmission genuinely useful for describing what happened when they
deliberately loosened their own conscious control over the creative process.
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the porous
boundary between the avant-garde and the esoteric that Man Ray himself walked,
we're recommending a book that maps that exact borderland across the whole of
cultural history…
Occulture: The Unseen Forces That Drive Culture Forward
By
Carl Abrahamsson, with an introduction by Gary Lachman | Inner Traditions
Carl
Abrahamsson, a writer, filmmaker, and self-described magico-anthropologist
active in occult circles since the mid-1980s, built Occulture around
exactly the phenomenon today's post traces through Man Ray and the Surrealists:
the liminal space where art and magic have always overlapped, whether or not
the artists involved considered themselves practitioners. Abrahamsson moves
from Renaissance Hermeticism through nineteenth-century Symbolism and directly
into the occult interests of the Surrealists themselves, examining figures from
Carl Jung to Aleister Crowley to Rudolf Steiner as case studies in how esoteric
currents have shaped culture from behind the scenes.
What
makes the book a genuinely useful companion to today's post is its refusal to
draw a hard line between belief and influence. Abrahamsson treats the occult's
cultural footprint as real and consequential whether or not any given artist
was a sincere initiate, precisely the nuance this piece has tried to hold onto
regarding Man Ray's own presence in Naglowska's audience. Gary Lachman's
introduction, drawing on his own decades of writing on Western esotericism,
situates Abrahamsson's argument within the broader scholarly conversation about
occulture as a genuine driver of artistic innovation.
The
book began life as a series of conference papers rather than a single
continuous narrative, and readers wanting a tightly linear history should be
prepared for a more essayistic structure. But for anyone who finished today's
post fascinated by how thoroughly occultism and the avant-garde kept crossing
paths without fully merging, Occulture offers the widest-angle view of
that exact dynamic currently in print.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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