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mmorganw about 2 hours ago 4 commentsRead Article on occultgatsby.work

FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

The Occult Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby Annotated for Esoteric Content: The Fourth Way, Alchemy, Tarot, and Kabbalah

Author is my father, Jon Woodson. I'm the web guy who wanted to bring this to a wider audience with a more interactive way to pop-up the notes about esoteric content.

Author's blurb from Amazon self-publishing page:

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, is a manual for spiritual development. It is not a unique text, for many American modernist novels of canonical stature are similarly grounded in the occult. Fitzgerald was a follower of A. R. Orage who not only taught the Gurdjieff Work (the Fourth Way) but organized a vast literary network to further its goals.

The chief reason that this occult literary tendency has remained in the shadows is that the arbiter of the movement has been poorly understood and critically neglected.

The Great Gatsby belongs to a genre of the novel invented by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten’s novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923) was the model for The Great Gatsby and for many other modern masterpieces. My annotated presentation of Fitzgerald’s novel performs three functions. Since emblematic novels are all written using the same phonetic-syllabic code, the alchemical cabala, I have decoded the novel and presented a running account of the coded subtext in footnotes. The actual texts that have decrypted are presented in italics.

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Discussion (4 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

pringk02•about 2 hours ago
I want to believe, but scanning the bibliography I couldn’t find the source that suggested Fitzgerald’s following of Orage.

An interesting reading all the same, though I’ve only scanned it a little

goodmythical•about 1 hour ago
Appears to be an original claim by the author defended in https://www.academia.edu/147021487/An_Esoteric_Reading_of_Th...
marginalia_nu•about 1 hour ago
Just because one can do an occult exegesis for a text doesn't necessarily mean there is substance there. This is a very common problem with this type of analysis, and has been for as long as we've been at it.

You can demonstrably shake the Enneads out of Plato's dialogues by sketching in their negative spaces, even though Plato himself would probably have many pointed questions about the neoplatonists' work.

pigeons•about 2 hours ago
needs more sources and variety