SOURCE: "Mysticism as the 'Tie That Binds': The Case of Edward Carpenter and Modernism," in Art Journal, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp..29-37.

In the following excerpt, Henderson profiles Carpenter as a pioneer of modernist ideas who exerted a discernible influence on a number contemporaries.

Lay the conscious and controlling and selective power of the upper mind at rest, in the trancecondition, and you have in the depths of the subliminal self this primal creative power exposed. Offer to it the lightest suggestion, and there springs forth from that abyss a figure corresponding, or a dozen figures, or a whole procession!¹

Even though the language of this passage differs from André Breton's discussions of "pure psychic automatism" in the early 1920s, the message is the same: the unconscious mind is a rich source of creative possibilities.² Yet this statement was made not in the era of Surrealism but rather...