Mystical Writings from Antonin Artaud, 1933–1937
The New Revelations of Being & Other Mystical Writings collects texts and letters by Antonin Artaud from a concentrated four-year period, drawing on tarot, alchemy, Christian ritual, astrology, and what Artaud called "oriental" philosophies. The selection resists systematization — these are not doctrines but pressures, each text pushing against the limits of coherent thought.
The volume is anchored by The New Revelations of Being, in which Artaud writes as the "Revealed One," a figure aligned with the Tarot's Fool: someone who claims knowledge of destruction as transformation, who insists on a world remade rather than reformed. The writing is urgent and unresolved — closer to invocation than argument, closer to confession than manifesto.
Infinity Land Press presents the book as a hardbound working dossier. Fragments, essays, and letters are kept intact rather than reframed into a tidy occult reader. For collectors of surrealist and apocalyptic texts, the appeal lies in that directness. Translated with an introduction by Peter Valente, with illustrations by Martin Bladh.
These writings belong to the period between Artaud's break with Surrealism and his eventual institutionalization — years when his engagement with metaphysics, ritual, and cultural mythology intensified. They sit alongside his Theatre of Cruelty writings as documents of a mind working at the edge of its own categories, resistant to stable interpretation. Readers drawn to Critical Theory & Philosophy will find in these texts a sustained challenge to the boundary between thought and act.
About Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was a French writer, poet, and theorist associated with Surrealism and best known for formulating the Theatre of Cruelty — a concept that sought to strip performance of narrative convention and confront audiences with raw sensation. His work crosses poetry, criticism, performance, and radio, and has consistently resisted stable interpretation or disciplinary containment.
The texts gathered here come from the years 1933–1937, a period of intensifying engagement with metaphysics, ritual, and cultural mythology. Situated between his rupture with the Surrealist movement and his later institutionalization, these writings read as a record of thought under acute pressure — addressed less to a contemporary audience than to an imagined future.
