Do we prefer the unworldly to the world we currently live in? While the spiritual, the mystical and the magical have tended to exist at the fringes of contemporary art, they’ve always bubbled away at the centre of what’s cooking in the alternative and radical subcultures around which that art has circled, and often drawn from. Throughout the modern era, ever since the Symbolists and ‘decadents’ of the late-nineteenth century, Western artists, bohemians and intellectuals have rebelled against the moral and religious orthodoxies by adopting invented or rediscovered occultism from the past, and borrowed from non-Western spiritualism of all kinds: it’s there in the Symbolist artists’ celebration of Satanic iconography; in Aleister Crowley’s neo-paganist ‘religion’; in the Surrealists’ enduring fascination with occult practices, with artists like Maya Deren, who took on the identity of the witch and art as magic; in the adoption of Zoroastrianism by Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten and of Zen Buddhism by the Beat Generation of John Cage and Allen Ginsberg; in how the Beatles got into the Maharishi and his Transcendental Meditation; in Joseph Beuys’s adoption of the figure of the shaman; in Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch’s creation of his ‘Orgies Mysteries Theatre’, bacchanalian celebrations full of purgative ritual and blood-soaked animal sacrifice. Even conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, in his Sentences on Conceptual Art (1968), felt impelled to declare that ‘Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach’. But throughout the twentieth century, though these various countercultures embraced spiritualism and the occult, the contemporary art mainstream has tended to downplay or ignore these artistic interests, as they were often put in the category of ‘outsider’ art, and non-Western spiritual art was relegated to the status of ethnography and superstition.