For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. –Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and present, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived as contradictions…” – André Breton
The surrealist movement was launched in 1923 – the year James Joyce, after making cryptic notes for several months, finally wrote the first three-page fragment of “Finnegan’s Wake”, and the year Hitler was initiated in the Thule Society, an occult secret society with a paranoid dread of all other occult secret societies, which it claimed were run by Jews and Freemasons – anyway, that year, the First Surrealist Manifesto promised or threatened “total transformation of mind and all that resembles it.” Among the founders was Raymond Roussel, former associate of Aleister Crowley and Father Sauniere in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light , and among the later recruits was Jean Cocteau, who eventually became 23rd Grand Master of the Priory of Sion.
Image from CrystalRhino