Show HN: The Occult Gatsby
occultgatsby.work
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.