Infernal Creatures (2019) is, as the cover says, “A collection of rare occult artworks, 1880-1970,” drawn from the Century Guild collection in Los Angeles, which specializes in Symbolist and Art Nouveau works. It does indeed contain many images I’ve never seen before. Carlos Schwabe’s work is a particularly eye-opening discovery.

I’m a little hung up on that abstract though. Occult artworks. What does that mean, exactly? To be sure, devils and demons are all over the pages of Infernal Creatures, but does that automatically make it a collection of occult art, just because it portrays things popularly associated with the occult? Because the vast majority of the work in this book is commercial in nature — advertisements, movie posters, political cartoons. Certainly not hidden, certainly not the product of magickal operations or thinking. The closest, I think, is Schwabe, whose work as a Symbolist is pregnant with potential meaning in a way similar to the tarot. They’re also fairly terrifying.

So, I got to thinking, what is occult art, really? And I think Infernal Creatures presents the public face of it, the occult as filtered through the popular imagination. That’s valid and often beautiful, even if it means sometimes using Lucifer to sell light bulbs (or demons to populate Monster Manual pages, or undead popes to front heavy metal bands). But I want to dig deeper…