Futurism vs retrofuturism: what's the difference?

In 1909, a red racing car crashed into a ditch outside Milan. The driver, F.T. Marinetti, emerged unharmed and later described the accident as a revelation. “I felt the urge to break the world’s absurdity with a violent leap,” he wrote. That leap became the Futurist Manifesto, a document that declared “a roaring car” more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. It was not art criticism. It was a new kind of prophecy. Futurism is an early 20th-century movement that glorified speed, technology, and violent rupture from the past. Retrofuturism, by contrast, looks back at those past visions of the future — often with irony or longing — and imagines what might have been.

The Definition: Two Futures, One Broken Timeline

Futurism demands we destroy the past to build the future. Retrofuturism preserves the past’s idea of the future as a museum of lost possibilities. One is a revolution; the other is a dirge. For the occult practitioner, both function as maps of the imagination — ways to project the will into a desired timeline, whether that timeline is the gleaming chrome of a 1910s aerodrome or the brass-and-leather airships that never were.

The raw difference is temporal. Futurism inhabits its own present, looking forward. Retrofuturism stands in a later present, looking backward at a future that never arrived. But beneath that simple contrast lies a deeper conflict about how we understand time, progress, and the nature of reality itself.

Where Futurism Came From: Speed, Violence, and the Machine as Deity

Futurism was born in Italy in 1909. F.T. Marinetti published his manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro on February 20. It called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and academies. “We will sing of great crowds excited by work, pleasure, and riot,” he declared. “The powerful power of the machine.”

Within months, artists joined: Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla. They painted motion, a dog on a leash with multiple legs, a woman’s face blurred by speed. Russolo built noise machines called intonarumori to replicate the sounds of industry. By 1914, the movement had spread to Russia, where Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky experimented with “transrational” language, disrupting grammar as the Futurists disrupted form.

What is less often told is the occult undercurrent. Marinetti’s accident, the crash that inspired him, was a mystical experience for him. He later wrote of being “sucked up by the machine” and claimed that the car crash opened his mind to the “fourth dimension of speed.” The Futurist obsession with simultaneity (seeing all sides of an object at once) echoed the theosophical concept of the akashic record, a field where all moments coexist. Balla’s painting The Hand of the Violinist (1912) divides motion into serial images, a technique Blavatsky described as the “unfolding of the eternal Now.”

Yet Marinetti explicitly rejected the supernatural. He called religion “a dead weight.” The Futurists wanted to replace god with the machine. But that replacement carried its own theology: the machine was not just a tool but a transcendent entity, a source of ecstasy and power. When Boccioni wrote that “the engine of the automobile is the modern ideal,” he was not being metaphorical. He was describing a new object of worship.

By the 1920s, Italian Futurism had allied itself with Fascism. Marinetti ran for office, praised Mussolini, and wrote the “Manifesto of the Fascist Revolution.” The Russian Futurists, by contrast, were crushed by Stalinist realism. The movement died, but its children lived on.

Retrofuturism: The Past’s Future, Reclaimed as Myth

The term “retrofuturism” first appeared in a 1983 article by T.R. Hinchliffe in the magazine Retrofuturism. It described a growing subculture that collected and reimagined older visions of tomorrow, 1950s jetpacks, Jules Verne’s submarines, the streamlined trains of the World’s Fairs. But the impulse is older. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is a retrofuturist text in reverse: it looks forward to a future that has already decayed into pastoral feudal.

What distinguishes retrofuturism from mere nostalgia is its self-awareness. It knows the future it depicts never happened. The artist looks at a 1900 postcard of Paris in the year 2000, flying cabs and underwater hotels, and sees not naivete but a lost branch of possibility. That branch can be reoccupied. Steampunk, dieselpunk, and cyberpunk (in its retro-fixation) are all retrofuturist genres, each mining a specific era’s imagination.

For the esotericist, this is familiar territory. The Hermetic axiom “as above, so below” treats the cosmos as a set of correspondences. Retrofuturism does the same with time: it treats past futures as alternate dimensions, each with its own laws and potentials. When a modern occultist designs a ritual based on Victorian science, using an electrostatic generator to charge a talisman, they are engaging in retrofuturist magic. The technology is obsolete, but its symbolism still works.

What They Mean: Progress, Nostalgia, and the Occult Cycle

Futurism is a faith in linear progress. The timeline is an arrow: you burn the past, accelerate through the present, and arrive at a future that is faster, cleaner, stronger. This mirrors the modern Western esoteric idea of spiritual evolution, the soul advancing through incarnations toward perfection. Blavatsky wrote of root races rising toward a seventh stage. The Futurists simply replaced the soul with the engine.

Retrofuturism is a distrust of that arrow. It says progress is not inevitable; the future we expected was stolen, and perhaps that lost future was better. It operates on a cyclical or branching model of time. The past is not dead; it is a source of unactualized timelines. This echoes the esoteric concept of the aeon: a finite time-sphere with its own character and ending. When the aeon closes, its possibilities are not erased but archived. Retrospectrum, as the poet Robert Duncan wrote, “is the light of the broken wheel.”

Practically, this difference shows in how each movement treats objects. A Futurist sees a steam engine and wants to replace it with a turbine. A retrofuturist sees that same steam engine and wants to polish it, pair it with a brass telescope, and use it to navigate an invented world. The Futurist destroys the museum. The retrofuturist rebuilds it.

Who Practiced These Visions: From Marinetti to Sun Ra

We have already met Marinetti. But the most important figure for the esoteric intersection of these two futures is Herman Poole Blount, better known as Sun Ra (1914–1993). Born in Alabama, Sun Ra claimed to have been abducted by aliens and taken to Saturn, where he was told to preach peace through music. He called his music “space jazz” and dressed his Arkestra in futuristic costumes that mixed Egyptian pharaonic regalia with 1950s sci-fi rockets. His mythology was a hybrid: ancient Atlantis, black Egypt, and a future where black people would colonize the stars.

Sun Ra’s work is both futurist (break with the past, technology as liberation) and retrofuturist (his future is powered by solar energy, not nuclear; his spaceships look like pyramids). He drew on the esoteric tradition of the “age of Aquarius”, a future golden age that had been prophesied by the ancients. In his cosmology, the future is not new; it is the restoration of a lost past. That is the occult heart of retrofuturism.

Less well known is the influence of Theosophy on early science fiction. The Futurist magazine of the 1920s (no relation to Marinetti) was a digest of “prophetic” stories, many written by Theosophists who believed in clairvoyant visions of the future. William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908) depicts a future world that has been consumed by cosmic entropy, a retrofuturist nightmare before the term existed.

Common Misconceptions

Retrofuturism is just steampunk. Steampunk is one flavor, the 19th century British Empire imagined with steam-powered computers and clockwork robots. Retrofuturism also covers the 1930s art deco future, the 1950s atomic future, and the 1970s space-colony future. Each has its own symbolic palette.

Futurism is simply optimistic about technology. It was also violent, misogynistic, and authoritarian. Marinetti’s manifesto calls for “contempt for women.” The movement’s embrace of war as “the world’s only hygiene” has echoes in modern accelerationist thought, which some occult groups have adopted.

Retrofuturism is only for nostalgia. At its best, it is a critical tool, a way to ask why certain futures failed and what they reveal about the fears and desires of their time. For the occultist, it offers a concrete method for constructing alternate histories that can be used in ritual space.

Futurism died in the 1940s. It survived in architecture, advertising, and cyberpunk. The neon-soaked megacities of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) are pure retrofuturism of a 1980s vision of 2019, but they also contain the Futurist love of vertical density and machine energy.

FAQ

Is retrofuturism the same as steampunk?
No. Steampunk is a subset of retrofuturism that focuses on Victorian-era future visions. Retrofuturism also includes dieselpunk (1930s–1950s), atompunk (1950s–1960s), and other period-specific genres.

Was futurism connected to the occult?
Most Futurists rejected organized religion, but their language of speed, transcendence, and the “fourth dimension” echoed theosophical ideas. Marinetti later wrote a “Futurist Bible” (1937) that bordered on mystical.

What is the opposite of retrofuturism?
Strictly speaking, radical futurism, the belief that the future will be completely unlike anything the past imagined. In occult terms, the opposite is “presentism”: the conviction that only the current moment is real, and the future is empty.

The Broken Future, Still Spinning

The Futurists were wrong. The future did not arrive at the speed they demanded. The wars they praised consumed them. The machines they worshiped grew into the digital labyrinth we now inhabit, and no one calls it beautiful. Retrofuturists are not wrong, they are wistful. They know that every future we imagine is already a ghost, and that the best we can do is build museums for futures that never were.

For the occultist, both visions remain useful. Futurism teaches us to cut the cord, to stop worshipping ancestors and manufacture our own gods. Retrofuturism teaches us to listen to those gods, even when they speak in vacuum tubes and tick slowly. Between them is the tension that makes time malleable. And the library we keep holds the keys to both.

For further reading, explore the aesthetics hub where we trace how different eras have imagined the invisible. The glossary entry on time breaks down cyclical vs. linear models in esoteric thought. And if steampunk captured your attention, our guide to steampunk symbolism explores the occult roots of brass, steam, and the Victorian occult revival.