The Psychonauts, born from 1874 to 1883, are a generation of expatriates, strangers in a strange land, emigrés and internal exiles. Discontented with the familiar, some of them were intrepid adventurers: Howard Carter, Shackleton, and Jack London, for example, not to mention extreme balloonists Jean and Auguste Piccard [honorary]. Others — like Carl Jung, Houdini, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Cayce, Peter D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Charles Fort, Gerald Gardner, and William E. Riker — wandered without compass or rudder through uncharted territories of the mind and spirit.

HiLobrow members of the Psychonaut cohort were argonauts and astronauts boldly going where no man had gone before: across, through, and deep into psychic, esoteric, and paranormal phenomena of the most uncanny sorts. They roamed far and wide in search of signification, discovering (and/or inventing) meaning in the unlikeliest of locations. As the images on this page in which a Psychonaut is juxtaposed with cryptic runes, codes, or formulae suggest, they were code-breakers and browbeaters, often mocked and ignored — but regarded as visionaries and inspirational examples today, at least by HiLobrow.com.

Aleister Crowley

A reminder of my generational periodization scheme:

1824-33: [Gilded Generation] Post-Romantics
1834-43: [Gilded Generation] Original Decadents
1844-53: [Progressive Generation] Prometheans
1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians
1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists
1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts
1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists
1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds
1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans
1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods
1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists
1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians
1944-53: Boomers
1954-63: [Boomers, Late Boomers, Post-Boomers, Generation Jones] OGXers
1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Reconstructionists
1974-83: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists
1984-93: [Millennial Generation] Throwbacks
1994-2003: [Millennial Generation] TBA

LEARN MORE about this periodization scheme | READ ALL generational articles on HiLobrow.

Psychonaut scientists grappled with invisible forces: Einstein (relativity), Marconi (radio), Maurice de Broglie, Max von Laue, Charles Glover Barkla (X-rays), Francis W. Aston (the mass spectograph), Hans Geiger, Victor Francis Hess, and Frederick Soddy (radiation, radioactivity), Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner (nuclear fission), Hans Berger (electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (infrared spectroscopy), and Karl Schwarzschild (black holes).

HiLobrow authors, poets, painters, and musicians of the 1874-83 cohort refused to accept any limitations on their respective mediums. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Apollinaire, Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Marie Vassilieff, Klee, Malevich, Wyndham Lewis, Umberto Boccioni, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, Edgard Varèse, and Arnold Schoenberg were experimentalists ahead of their own time and perhaps even our own.

Psychonauts also tended to have exciting, evocative, spooky-kooky names and monikers. I realize that I’ve said something similar about the Plutonians, but I’d really like to see Mata Hari, Houdini, Zapata, Gurdjieff, Einstein, Apollinaire, Picasso, and Atatürk star in their own League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style story.

Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry

Meet the Psychonauts.

Honorary Psychonauts: J. D. Beresford, Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes) (all born 1873).

1874: Harry Houdini (best-known magician and debunker), Charles Fort (Scientist, prophet of the Unexplained), Arnold Schoenberg (Composer), Howard Carter (Archaeologist, Tutankhamun’s Tomb), Ernest Shackleton (Antarctic explorer), W. Somerset Maugham (Novelist, Of Human Bondage), Robert Frost (Poet), Charles A. Beard (Historian, The Rise of American Civilization), Winston Churchill (WWII Prime Minister of England), Clarence Day (Author, Life with Father), Gustav Holst (Composer, The Planets), Herbert Hoover (31st US President, 1929-33), Charles Ives (Composer), James L. Kraft (inventor of processed cheese), Guglielmo Marconi (Scientist, inventor of the radio), Lucy Maud Montgomery (Novelist, Anne of Green Gables), John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (Built Rockefeller Center), Honus Wagner, Thomas J. Watson (Founder of IBM), Chaim Weizmann (First President of Israel). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: G. K. Chesterton (Author, The Man Who Was Thursday), Amy Lowell (Poet, What’s O’Clock), Gertrude Stein (avant-garde writer, saloniste).

1875: John Buchan (Author, The Thirty-Nine Steps), Edgar Rice Burroughs (Novelist, Tarzan, Pellucidar, etc.), Aleister Crowley (Wickedest man in the world), Rainer Maria Rilke (Poet, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus), Carl Jung (Psychiatrist, inventor of the collective unconscious), Thomas Mann (Novelist, Buddenbrooks), Walter P. Chrysler (Founder of Chrysler Corporation), D. W. Griffith (Film Director, The Birth of a Nation), Masujiro Hashimoto (Founder of Nissan Motor Co.), Maurice Ravel (Composer), Albert Schweitzer (Humanitarian and theologian), Edgar Wallace (highly prolific English novelist), Perley Poore Sheehan (American pulp writer, screenwriter), Albert I (King of Belgium, 1909-34), Maurice de Broglie (Physicist, X-ray spectroscopy)

1876: Jack London (Novelist), Sherwood Anderson (Author, The Triumph of the Egg), Constantin Brancusi (Sculptor), Mata Hari (Spy), Max Jacob (Poet), Pope Pius XII (signed treaty with Hitler).

A Gurdjieffian icon

1877: G. I. Gurdjieff (Esoteric philosopher, The Fourth Way), Isadora Duncan (Mother of modern dance), Hermann Hesse (Author, The Glass Bead Game), Francis W. Aston (Chemist, invented the mass spectograph), Charles Glover Barkla (Physicist, X-Ray scattering), Edgar Cayce (performed “paranormal” readings), Charles Coburn (Actor), Frederick G. Cottrell (Inventor, Electrostatic precipitator), Raoul Dufy (French Fauvist painter), Henry Norris Russell (Giant stars and dwarfs), Frederick Soddy (Investigated radioactivity, isotopes), Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein’s lover).

1878: Martin Buber (Philosopher), Upton Sinclair (Novelist), Pancho Villa (Revolutionary, invaded United States), Don Marquis (archy and mehitabel), Lise Meitner (Physicist, discovered Nuclear Fission), Peter D. Ouspensky (Esoteric philosopher, Tertium Organum), Joseph Bushnell Ames (American novelist), Reza Shah Pahlavi (Shah of Iran, 1925-41), Carl Sandburg (Illinois poet, Lincoln biographer), Stalin (brutal dictator, Soviet Union), Joel Stebbins (Astronomer, photoelectric photometry), John Watson (Psychologist, founder of Behaviorism), Jean de La Hire (French SF author), Ernst F. W. Alexanderson (Inventor, developed radio and television at GE and RCA), Lionel Barrymore (Actor), Harry Carey, Sr. (Actor), Louis Chevrolet, André Citroën, George M. Cohan (Composer, “Yankee Doodle Dandy”), Glenn Curtiss (American aviation pioneer), Alfred Döblin (Novelist, Berlin Alexanderplatz), Jack Johnson (first black heavyweight champion), Kazimir Malevich (Painter, Founder of Suprematist school)

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)

1879: Paul Klee (German-Swiss abstract painter), Albert Einstein (Physicist, Theory of relativity), E. M. Forster (Author), Wallace Stevens (Poet), Leon Trotsky (Bolshevik exile murdered by Stalin), Emiliano Zapata (Mexican patriot, revolutionary), James Branch Cabell (Novelist, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice), Sydney Greenstreet (Actor), Otto Hahn (Chemist, demonstrated fission), Joe Hill (Labor leader), Max von Laue (Physicist, diffraction of X-rays on crystals), Vachel Lindsay (Poet), Mabel Dodge Luhan (Author), H. B. Reese (peanut butter cups), Will Rogers (cowboy, humorist), Margaret Sanger (birth control advocate), Edward Steichen (Photo-Secessionist), Victor Rousseau Emanuel (British pulp author), Ethel Barrymore (Actor)

1880: Guillaume Apollinaire (Poet), H. L. Mencken (anti-lowbrow critic who described middlebrows as the “booboisie”; unlike later anti-middlebrows, he blamed the audience for its lack of interest in serious culture), Robert Musil (Novelist, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), Alexander Blok (Russian Silver Age poet), Oswald Spengler (Historian, The Decline of the West), Lytton Strachey (Author, Eminent Victorians), W. C. Fields (Comic), David H. Keller (SF writer), John Oliver La Gorce (Antarctica explorer, National Geographic editor), Albert Wallace Hull (Physicist, inventor of the magnetron tube), Helen Keller (deaf and blind activist), Douglas MacArthur, Joe May (Film Director), Tom Mix (silent movie cowboy), Sean O’Casey (Playwright), Mack Sennett (Film/TV Producer), Carl Van Vechten (Novelist, Patron of the Harlem Renaissance), Leonard Woolf (British memoirist, husband of Virginia), Bertram Atkey (British writer, The Strange Case of Alan Moraine)

Pablo Picasso

1881: Pablo Picasso (abstract painter and sculptor), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Philosopher), P. G. Wodehouse (Author), Franklin Pierce Adams (Columnist), Kemal Atatürk (President of Turkey, 1923-38), Bela Bartok (Hungarian composer), Padraic Colum (Novelist), Clinton Davisson (Physicist, diffraction of electrons), Cecil B. DeMille (pioneering film director), Alexander Fleming (discovered penicillin), Pope John XXIII (Roman Catholic Pontiff, 1958-63), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (father of modern social anthropology)

1882: Virginia Woolf (novelist), Wyndham Lewis (Painter, Vorticist movement), Bela Lugosi (Actor), Umberto Boccioni (Italian Futurist painter and sculptor), James Joyce (Author), Ion Antonescu (Pro-Nazi dictator of Romania), Harold D. Babcock (Astronomer, solar radiation), John Barrymore (Actor), Noah Beery, Sr. (Actor), Max Born (pioneer of quantum mechanics), Georges Braque (Artist, co-Founded Cubism), Tod Browning (Film Director, Freaks), Arthur Eddington (Astronomer, Eddington luminosity), E. R. Eddison (Novelist, The Worm Ouroboros), Felix Frankfurter (US Supreme Court Justice, 1939-62), Hans Geiger (Physicist, co-Inventor of the Geiger Counter), Eric Gill (Typographer), Robert Goddard (father of modern rocketry), Samuel Goldwyn (Film/TV Producer), Edward Hopper (Painter), Rockwell Kent (Painter), Inayat Khan (founder of Universal Sufism), Fiorello LaGuardia (New York City Mayor, 1934-45), Jacques Maritain (Philosopher), A. A. Milne (Author), George Jean Nathan (Author, Editor: American Mercury), Franklin D. Roosevelt (US President during WWII)

1883: Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (Actor), Faisal I (King of Iraq, 1921-33), Victor Fleming (Film Director), Khalil Gibran (Poet, The Prophet), Jaroslav Hasek (Author, The Good Soldier Svejk), Sax Rohmer (British/American author), Coco Chanel (Fashion Designer), Wild Bill Donovan (founded the OSS), Max Eastman (socialist writer, later embraced McCarthyism), Victor Francis Hess (Physicist, proved cosmic origin of radiation), John Maynard Keynes (Economist), Frank King (Cartoonist, Gasoline Alley), Frank Mars (invented Milky Way and Snickers bars), Edgard Varèse (Composer, Poème électronique), Edwin Balmer (American author). Honorary Modernists: Franz Kafka (Expressionist novelist), Rube Goldberg (Cartoonist, designer of impossible contraptions), Karl Jaspers (Existential philosopher), Anton Webern (Expressionist composer), Lon Chaney (Actor), Walter Gropius (Architect, founder of the Bauhaus school), William Carlos Williams (Poet), Benito Mussolini (Fascist dictator of Italy)

HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS (born 1884): A. Merritt (SF writer), Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca), Emil Jannings (Actor, The Last Command), Amedeo Modigliani (Cubist Italian sculptor and painter), Marie Vassilieff (Russian Cubist painter, atelier hostess), Jean and Auguste Piccard (extreme balloonists).

Radium-Age SF writers of this generation include: Edgar Rice Burroughs (SF includes Barsoom series, Pellucidar series, The Land That Time Forgot, The Moon Maid, some of the Tarzan books), E. R. Eddison (The Worm Ouroboros), Sax Rohmer (Grey Face, She Who Sleeps, The Day the World Ended), Jack London (The Iron Heel, The Scarlet Plague), E.M. Forster (“The Machine Stops”), Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Aelita, The Death Box), John Taine (pseudonym of Eric Temple Bell) (Green Fire, The Iron Star, The Purple Sapphire, Quayle’s Invention), Reginald Glossop (The Orphan of Space), George Allan England (The Air Trust, Darkness and Dawn, The Flying Legion, Out of the Abyss, The People of the Abyss), William Hope Hodgson (The House on the Borderland, The Night Land), David Lindsay (Sphinx), Maurice Renard (The Hands of Orlac, New Bodies for Old), S. Fowler Wright (The Amphibians, Dawn, Deluge, The New Gods Lead, The World Below), Charles Fort (A Radical Corpuscle), Victor Rousseau (pseudonym of Victor Rousseau Emanuel, The Messiah of the Cylinder, “Draft of Eternity”), Joseph Bushnell Ames (The Bladed Barrier), Bertram Atkey (The Strange Case of Alan Moraine), Edwin Balmer (Flying Death, co-authored When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide), Perley Poore Sheehan (The Copper Princess, The Ghost-Mill, co-author of Blood and Iron), Jean de La Hire (Nyctalope series), Guillaume Apollinaire (“Remote Projection,” “The Disappearance of Honore Subrac”), John Buchan (The Gap in the Curtain, The Moon Endureth), A. Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Metal Monster, The Moon Pool), J. D. Beresford (Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder), and Luis P. Senarens (“Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder,” et al).