ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the relationship that Surrealism entertained throughout its long trajectory from the 1920s onwards with such supposedly outmoded, unfashionable, disreputable or marginal forms of investigation into the human mind. Publicising the new phase of Surrealism and signalling the return of the movement to non-clandestine activity in Europe after the war, that exhibition had a ‘“initiatory” setting’ in Andre Breton’s words, including among its themes magic, the occult, alchemy, superstition, esoteric knowledge and myth. The chapter demonstrates how Surrealism’s involvement in such exchanges connected fatally with the idea of fantastic realism and subsequently informed The Morning of the Magicians. Surrealism’s later investigations into parapsychology in Medium in the 1950s were well known to Pauwels and Bergier, so it is to be expected that the same themes, issues and names should crop up with some frequency in The Morning of the Magicians, even if they have a different, more gullible and nebulous inflection there.
