The Appearance of Religious Sensibility in Otherwise, Occult Narratives: the Religious Expression of Salvador Dalí in Novel Form.

Abstract

This project investigates how religious sensibility appears within ostensibly occult narratives, arguing that the modern novel becomes a laboratory for staging the sacred without abandoning the rhetoric of secrecy, concealment, and initiation. Centering Salvador Dalí’s Hidden Faces (1944), the thesis asks: if Dalí is simultaneously artisan and novelist, what religious tropes—tethered to occult tradition—invite his fiction into a religious-studies frame rather than a purely literary one? Building on Colin Wilson’s “Faculty X” (occult perception as latent purpose-sense), Peter L. Berger’s account of religion as everyday world-building, and Rudolf Otto’s phenomenology of the numinous, the study treats occult motifs not as superstition but as aesthetic and experiential technologies for negotiating sacred/profane polarities and “the tension between rationality and the ineffable” (Fraser, Wuthnow). Three additional scholarly interventions sharpen this framework. Yves Mühlematter and Helmut Zander’s Occult Roots of Religious Studies (2021) grounds the project historiographically, showing how the discipline’s categories and methods are entangled with esoteric lineages often disavowed as “rejected knowledge.” Cristóbal Serrán-Pagán y Fuentes’ Spanish Mysticism (2021) provides a crucial Iberian horizon for reading Dalí’s Catholic-inflected imagery and his aesthetics of concealment as a modern afterlife of mystical rhetorics of veiling, ecstasy, and ineffability. Robert Lima’s Dark Prisms: Occultism in Hispanic Drama (1995) extends the inquiry across Hispanic forms, demonstrating how occult symbolism operates as a prism that refracts theological, ethical, and cultural meaning through theatrical and literary artifice. Methodologically, the thesis combines religious-studies hermeneutics with narratology (classical and postclassical) and close reading to articulate an “occult poetics” in a religious-studies sense: fiction as a sacred mirror that encodes religious experience in narrative form.