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There’s always been something quietly esoteric about surrealism — not just in its imagery of melting clocks or impossible dreamscapes, but in its treatment of language itself. The surrealist poets and painters weren’t merely exploring the unconscious for aesthetic novelty; they were experimenting with the mechanics of meaning, attempting to break language open and let something irrational, magical, or numinous leak through.
If you read André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism or Robert Desnos’s automatic poems, you can feel that intention. Words are not used to describe; they are used to summon. Breton called surrealism “pure psychic automatism,” a process of writing or creating that bypasses rational control — the same condition occultists would later call gnosis. In both cases, the goal is the same: to short-circuit the conscious censor and allow forces beneath language to shape new patterns of awareness.
To write in this way is to engage in a kind of linguistic magick. Each phrase becomes an invocation, each image a sigil of association. When a surrealist poet juxtaposes “the voice of the sea in a glass of milk,” the act is not merely aesthetic — it’s disruptive. It dissolves the usual hierarchies of meaning and for a moment reprograms how the mind connects things. Chaos magicians later developed similar methods: belief as a tool, symbol as trigger, language as self-altering mechanism. In that sense, surrealist poetry can be understood as a form of chaos magick avant la lettre — a technique for rewriting the psychic code by disrupting the syntax of consensus reality.
This was also where linguistics and the occult briefly brushed against one another. Language determines what we can think; what we can think determines how we live. To disturb language is to disturb reality. Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty expressed this with a disarming bluntness: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” That single line contains the seed of poststructuralism, the surrealist method, and magical practice alike. Derrida and Deleuze would later articulate this philosophically, but the surrealists had already been performing it psychically, intuitively, ritually.
Dreams were their natural territory. Surrealism’s obsession with dream imagery was not just about symbolism, but about treating the dream state as a laboratory of consciousness — a field where words, images, and identities melt into one another. Breton’s Nadja, Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method, and the dream journals of Desnos all echo the same approach: record the unconscious, then let its logic infect the waking mind. Jung’s Red Book follows the same pattern — dreams as gateways to archetypal communication, symbols as living beings that alter the psyche when engaged with consciously. Both Jung and the surrealists viewed imagination not as escapism but as participation in an underlying psychic reality.
The parallels extend into the mid-20th century with the development of the cut-up technique. Initially conceived by the artist Brion Gysin and later adopted by William S. Burroughs, the method involved slicing and rearranging existing texts to produce new, unexpected combinations. Burroughs treated it as a literal magical technology — a way to reveal hidden meanings and manipulate probability. From there, the technique found its way into the practices of Genesis P-Orridge and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who regarded the cut-up not merely as a literary device but as a means of altering consciousness and destabilizing the “control system” of language itself. The cut-up was a ritual of disobedience against the tyranny of syntax, a demonstration that meaning is not fixed but fluid, manipulable, alive.
This looping back between surrealism, magick, and language is not coincidental. Both the magician and the surrealist seek to unbind the structures that define perception. Both use symbolic manipulation to reshape consciousness. And both rely on the principle that belief — or meaning — is not static but created through attention and intention. In chaos magick terms, surrealist poetry functions as an anti-sigil: instead of compressing meaning into a single glyph, it explodes it outward, scattering it through the psyche until something new organizes itself from the debris.
Entheogens offer a similar dissolution. The psychedelic experience mirrors surrealist logic — boundaries collapse, symbols merge, and the structures of language fail to contain the flood of perception. Many describe psychedelic states as “surreal,” but perhaps it’s the other way around: surrealism was an early attempt to reproduce psychedelic consciousness through language, to chemically induce altered perception by linguistic means. Both involve the same alchemical process: the dissolution of form, the death of the familiar, and the reconstitution of meaning on a higher or more fluid level.
The surrealists were, in a sense, proto-chaos magicians. They used linguistic deconstruction as a means of psychic transformation. They believed in the autonomy of images and words — that symbols were alive, capable of action. Magick, after all, has always been the art of using symbols to affect change in consciousness. Surrealism simply performed that magick through the medium of art and poetry.
For those who want to explore this convergence more deeply, a few texts stand out.
To write surrealist poetry — to practice automatism, cut-ups, or dream transcription — is therefore to engage in a subtle act of reprogramming. It’s an invitation for the subconscious to speak its own language, unmediated by habit. It’s the reshaping of consciousness through the dissolution of meaning.
And perhaps that’s the real work behind all of it: not just to create strange art or clever wordplay, but to use language as a mirror to consciousness itself — to realize that meaning is not something given to us, but something we continuously invent. Surrealism, magick, chaos, and dreamwork are all different faces of that same operation: the ongoing attempt to wake up from the spell of the world by casting a new one.
I will open up a little poetry thread in the Arts section soon!
If you read André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism or Robert Desnos’s automatic poems, you can feel that intention. Words are not used to describe; they are used to summon. Breton called surrealism “pure psychic automatism,” a process of writing or creating that bypasses rational control — the same condition occultists would later call gnosis. In both cases, the goal is the same: to short-circuit the conscious censor and allow forces beneath language to shape new patterns of awareness.
To write in this way is to engage in a kind of linguistic magick. Each phrase becomes an invocation, each image a sigil of association. When a surrealist poet juxtaposes “the voice of the sea in a glass of milk,” the act is not merely aesthetic — it’s disruptive. It dissolves the usual hierarchies of meaning and for a moment reprograms how the mind connects things. Chaos magicians later developed similar methods: belief as a tool, symbol as trigger, language as self-altering mechanism. In that sense, surrealist poetry can be understood as a form of chaos magick avant la lettre — a technique for rewriting the psychic code by disrupting the syntax of consensus reality.
This was also where linguistics and the occult briefly brushed against one another. Language determines what we can think; what we can think determines how we live. To disturb language is to disturb reality. Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty expressed this with a disarming bluntness: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” That single line contains the seed of poststructuralism, the surrealist method, and magical practice alike. Derrida and Deleuze would later articulate this philosophically, but the surrealists had already been performing it psychically, intuitively, ritually.
Dreams were their natural territory. Surrealism’s obsession with dream imagery was not just about symbolism, but about treating the dream state as a laboratory of consciousness — a field where words, images, and identities melt into one another. Breton’s Nadja, Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method, and the dream journals of Desnos all echo the same approach: record the unconscious, then let its logic infect the waking mind. Jung’s Red Book follows the same pattern — dreams as gateways to archetypal communication, symbols as living beings that alter the psyche when engaged with consciously. Both Jung and the surrealists viewed imagination not as escapism but as participation in an underlying psychic reality.
The parallels extend into the mid-20th century with the development of the cut-up technique. Initially conceived by the artist Brion Gysin and later adopted by William S. Burroughs, the method involved slicing and rearranging existing texts to produce new, unexpected combinations. Burroughs treated it as a literal magical technology — a way to reveal hidden meanings and manipulate probability. From there, the technique found its way into the practices of Genesis P-Orridge and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who regarded the cut-up not merely as a literary device but as a means of altering consciousness and destabilizing the “control system” of language itself. The cut-up was a ritual of disobedience against the tyranny of syntax, a demonstration that meaning is not fixed but fluid, manipulable, alive.
This looping back between surrealism, magick, and language is not coincidental. Both the magician and the surrealist seek to unbind the structures that define perception. Both use symbolic manipulation to reshape consciousness. And both rely on the principle that belief — or meaning — is not static but created through attention and intention. In chaos magick terms, surrealist poetry functions as an anti-sigil: instead of compressing meaning into a single glyph, it explodes it outward, scattering it through the psyche until something new organizes itself from the debris.
Entheogens offer a similar dissolution. The psychedelic experience mirrors surrealist logic — boundaries collapse, symbols merge, and the structures of language fail to contain the flood of perception. Many describe psychedelic states as “surreal,” but perhaps it’s the other way around: surrealism was an early attempt to reproduce psychedelic consciousness through language, to chemically induce altered perception by linguistic means. Both involve the same alchemical process: the dissolution of form, the death of the familiar, and the reconstitution of meaning on a higher or more fluid level.
The surrealists were, in a sense, proto-chaos magicians. They used linguistic deconstruction as a means of psychic transformation. They believed in the autonomy of images and words — that symbols were alive, capable of action. Magick, after all, has always been the art of using symbols to affect change in consciousness. Surrealism simply performed that magick through the medium of art and poetry.
For those who want to explore this convergence more deeply, a few texts stand out.
- Maurice Nadeau’s The History of Surrealism traces the movement’s philosophical undercurrents.
- Anna Balakian’s Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute explores the metaphysical dimensions of its poetics.
- Tessel M. Bauduin’s Surrealism and the Occult and Katharine Conley’s Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism both examine the movement’s explicit links to occultism and hermetic thought.
- The works of Ithell Colquhoun, a surrealist painter and member of the Golden Dawn, offer a firsthand bridge between surrealism and ceremonial magic.
- On the magickal side, Austin Osman Spare’s The Book of Pleasure anticipates surrealist automatic techniques and later chaos magick principles.
To write surrealist poetry — to practice automatism, cut-ups, or dream transcription — is therefore to engage in a subtle act of reprogramming. It’s an invitation for the subconscious to speak its own language, unmediated by habit. It’s the reshaping of consciousness through the dissolution of meaning.
And perhaps that’s the real work behind all of it: not just to create strange art or clever wordplay, but to use language as a mirror to consciousness itself — to realize that meaning is not something given to us, but something we continuously invent. Surrealism, magick, chaos, and dreamwork are all different faces of that same operation: the ongoing attempt to wake up from the spell of the world by casting a new one.
I will open up a little poetry thread in the Arts section soon!