The Impermeable Image:
Revelation and Riddle in Modern Occult Cosmograms

PhD Project by Chloë Sudgen

Aesthetic expressions of world-versions by European, fin de siècle occultists, artists and writers are the subject of this study. Occult movements arose across Europe and America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, adopting distinctive worldviews across multiple modernities, and constructing specific models of the world, which synthesise science and occultism with particular aesthetic modes. In my dissertation, the epistemological problem that the occult entails is the attempt to aestheticise revelatory authority and occult knowledge. Through what concrete, formal representations do occult cosmologies depict and construct the image of the world? My study focuses on a specific aesthetic mode that modern individuals turned to in seeking to positivise occult cosmologies that cannot otherwise be seen: the cosmogram. I seek to understand the complex forms and functions of the cosmogrammatic image under scrutiny.  My interest is in the semantic structure, epistemic implications, aesthetic formalisation, and performative theatricality in the representation of occult cosmologies: how do occult cosmograms perform and incite their promise of occult knowledge? I investigate the idea of a “moment of revelation,” as enigmatically conveyed through occult cosmograms, which are abbreviated, abstracted, spirallic expressions of claimed occult knowledge replete with riddles, hieroglyphs, humour and elusion. The focus of the dissertation is this tension between communicability and impermeability within the occult cosmogram.
Interconnections between cosmological diagram theory, fin de siècle occultism, revelation reception, and art history are not clearly researched, though scholars have touched on various aspects of this intersection. Cosmograms are, however, useful as they denote abstract functions that make up a system, lying between the visible and the incorporeal, representation and the inarticulable, idea and image, form and matter. They can establish a symbolic and material connection between the interior and the exterior.^[1] As conceptual images by nature, cosmograms capture flux states, social and cultural forces, and “the movement towards actualisation.”^[2] The tangibility of the occult cosmogram makes it a useful object for analysis: it puts the totality of a world-whole in a “concrete form as the basis for new interpretations and action.”^[3]
All images are, however, unstable objects of knowledge, and paradoxically, cosmograms are uncertain images that in their diagrammatic nature suggest certainty. Specific occult cosmograms depict in diverse and ambiguous ways, with variable affect, the order of the cosmos in one all-encompassing, condensed image, confined within distinctive borders. My project interrogates this antinomy: occult cosmograms are at once elusive, abbreviated and impenetrable, while at the same time highly communicative as diagrammatic visual mediums. By virtue of their impermeability, they communicate occult knowledge; they resist legibility, while attempting to materialise epistemic forms. Their power is evinced in that they are unmistakably discursive—they voice cosmic world-images that are visually and symbolically transfixing. I seek to analyse their visual power of speech. I approach the occult cosmogram as a formalised mode of esotericism, with its revelatory narrative hieroglyphically abstracted.

^[1] Tresch, John. “Cosmogram.” In Cosmograms, edited by Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux, 67–76. New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005, 71.

^[2] Zdebik, Jakub. Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization. Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012, 1.

^[3] Tresch, “Cosmogram,” 69.