A 1925 Parisian stood before the Hôtel du Collectionneur at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes and saw a future that had already arrived: machined gears rendered in rosewood, fountains lit from within, geometry so precise it seemed to hum. Forty years later, a different visionary drew rocket ships with riveted seams and fins like the skulls of prehistoric birds, calling it “retro-futurism.” The two movements look at first like strangers. Look closer at the grille of a 1936 Cord 810 or the lobby of the Chrysler Building, and you see the same hand. The relationship between retro-futurism and Art Deco is not stylistic coincidence: Deco provided the architectural vocabulary for a future that retro-futurism later remembered, and both borrowed their deepest symbols from the esoteric revival that ran beneath Western design from 1890 to 1940.
Retro-futurism is the future as it was imagined before it arrived. Art Deco is the machine age rendered in luxury. One looks backward at a future that never came; the other looked forward at a present that was already obsolete. The occult thread that binds them is the belief that geometry, light, and material form can reveal hidden orders.
Where the Two Futures Meet
In 1922, Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun. The discovery sent Egyptomania through every studio in Europe, but Art Deco was already pregnant with the pharaonic. The stepped pyramid forms of Ziggurat architecture (the American Radiator Building, 1924) and the stylized lotus motifs that covered Deco furniture did not come from archaeology alone. They came from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where initiates memorized the correspondences between Egyptian deities, planetary spheres, and geometric figures. The same people who designed Deco buildings often belonged to the same lodges that published the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a spiritual manual.
Retro-futurism inherits this directly. When pulp magazines of the 1930s depicted Martians standing before stepped pyramids, they were drawing on a visual language that had been codified in occult lodges forty years earlier. The Martian cities of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series (first serialized 1912) are Deco fantasies: symmetrical, tiered, clad in impossible metal. Burroughs wrote from his own reading of Theosophy, which taught that ancient Atlantis and Lemuria had built exactly these structures.
History and Origins: From the Occult Revival to the Atomic Age
The first Art Deco exhibition in Paris (1925) was not a clean break from Art Nouveau. It was a response to the same spiritual crisis that produced Aleister Crowley’s esoteric order of the A∴A∴ (1907) and Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical architecture (the Goetheanum, 1913). Steiner designed the Goetheanum as a double dome of concrete, a material that had never been used for sacred architecture. Its forms were organic but machined. It was the first building that looked like retro-futurism before retro-futurism had a name.
Steiner believed that geometry was a spiritual practice. He traced the spirals and intersections of his buildings to the same golden ratio that the Golden Dawn used for temple furniture. When later architects like John C. Portman Jr. (the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, 1985) built atria that resembled a UFO landing, they were working from Steiner’s conviction that form expresses the invisible.
Retro-futurism as a named category arrived in the 1960s, coined by the science fiction critic Bruce Sterling in his 1986 short story “The Gernsback Continuum” (later collected in Mirrorshades, 1988). Sterling was describing a specific aesthetic: the streamlined trains, zeppelins, and flying wings of the 1930s and 1940s that never entered mass production. He called it “the future that died.” But that future had been designed by men who believed in vibration, resonance, and correspondence. Norman Bel Geddes, who drew the flying-wing airliner in his 1932 book Horizons, was a student of Theosophy and read Helena Blavatsky on the evolution of consciousness. His designs were not just aerodynamic. They were vehicles for spiritual progress.
Symbolism and Meaning: What the Chrome Conceals
Art Deco symbolism revolves around three figures: the stepped pyramid, the sunburst, and the chevron. Each has an exact correspondence in occult practice.
The stepped pyramid (zikkurat) represents the ascent through planetary spheres. In Golden Dawn teaching, the initiate climbs the Tree of Life through sephiroth that correspond to planets. The physical form of the ziggurat was used in Mesopotamian temples to reach heaven, and Deco architects reproduced it in limestone and steel. The Chrysler Building (1930, architect William Van Alen) has seven tiers of arches at its crown. Seven is the number of classical planets. Above them stands a triangular spire shaped like a pyramid but made of Nirosta steel. The building is a talisman for the ascent of commerce, but the geometry is initiatic.
The sunburst (the emblem of the 1925 Exposition, the front grille of the Cord 810, the crest of the Normandie ocean liner) is the central symbol of Hermeticism: the light that radiates from the One. In the Hermetica, the sun is the visible image of the Supreme Mind. Deco put it everywhere because it was already inside the visual vocabulary of the Rosicrucians, who had used the radiant sun as their seal since the 17th century.
The chevron (the zigzag motif on Deco carpets, jewelry, and skyscraper lobbies) represents the lightning bolt of enlightenment. It appears in the Tarot Trump The Tower (Marquess of Case’s 1910 deck) as a bolt of fire that shatters false structure. Deco borrowed its boldest visual pattern from the same source.
Retro-futurism strips these symbols of their cosmic meaning and re-presents them as engineering. The fins on a 1950s Cadillac are sunbursts cut into metal. The rivet patterns on a Buck Rogers spaceship are chevrons repeated to form a surface. The retro-futurist does not know he is looking at an esoteric diagram. That is the relationship at its most direct: Deco was built by initiates; retro-futurism was built by engineers who copied the initiates’ forms.
Practices and Traditions: How the Aesthetic Was Used
Art Deco was not designed for ritual spaces. It was designed for lobbies, movie palaces, and ocean liners. But these spaces were understood by their architects as temples of modernity. The Radio City Music Hall (1932, architect Edward Durell Stone, interior designer Donald Deskey) is a Deco temple to mass entertainment. Its stage proscenium is a sunburst. Its walls are covered in aluminum leaf. Deskey explicitly said he wanted the audience to feel they had entered “a new world.”
The same logic governed the liner Normandie (1935), whose first-class dining room was longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and lit by a single chandelier of Lalique crystal that weighed 10 tons. Travel was not transportation. It was transformation. The passenger ascended from steerage to first class through spaces that grew more geometrically complex with each deck. This is the initiatic path rendered in teak and brass.
Retro-futurism did not build temples. It built icons that never existed (the flying wing, the moon base, the continental highway) and let them stand as symbols of a future that had been promised and revoked. The 1939 New York World’s Fair, themed “The World of Tomorrow,” is the clearest example. Its centerpiece, the Trylon and Perisphere, was a pure geometric form (triangle and sphere) that had no function except to symbolize the perfect union of heaven and earth. It stood for six months and was demolished. The same fate awaited most retro-futurist visions. They were never meant to be built. They were meant to be remembered.
Comparisons: Streamline Moderne, Googie, and the Esoteric Continuity
Art Deco’s closest adjacent style is Streamline Moderne (1930s-1950s), which removed Deco’s ornament and kept its geometry. Streamline is Deco stripped for speed: the Greyhound bus, the Plymouth sedan, the chrome diner. Retro-futurism often remembers Streamline more than Deco because Streamline looks faster. But Streamline removed the esoteric content. A 1938 Chrysler Airflow has no sunburst. It has a teardrop. The teardrop is aerodynamic but spiritually empty.
Googie architecture (1940s-1960s) is the retro-futurist style that kept Deco’s symbolism without knowing it. Googie restaurants (the 1954 Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport, Annie’s Gasthof in Oakland, California) used boomerangs, starbursts, and angled rooflines that are direct copies of Deco motifs. The owners wanted to look futuristic. They did not know they were building temples to the Hermetic sun. That is the relationship at its most ironic: the occult content survived because the forms were too beautiful to abandon.
Common Misconceptions
“Art Deco was purely secular.” It was not. Architects like William Van Alen, Raymond Hood, and Ely Jacques Kahn either belonged to esoteric orders or worked in a milieu saturated with occult thought. The Radiator Building (1924) by Raymond Hood has a crown of stepped arches that exactly replicates the Golden Dawn’s diagram of the Thirty-Two Paths. Hood never confirmed the connection. He did not need to. The vocabulary was standard.
“Retro-futurism is just 1950s nostalgia.” It is older. The term belongs to the 1980s, but the aesthetic is visible in the 1900 Paris Métro entrances by Hector Guimard (Art Nouveau, but already anticipating retro-futurist organic mechanics) and in the 1910 dream cities of Alberto Santos-Dumont. The nostalgia is for a future that was lost, not for a past that was lived.
“The two movements have nothing to do with each other.” They share the same root: the belief that geometric form expresses hidden truth. Deco said it in marble and gold. Retro-futurism said it in aluminum and fluorescent light. The content is the same. Only the budget changed.
FAQ
Is Art Deco really “occult” architecture? Not all Deco buildings were designed with esoteric intent, but the visual vocabulary (ziggurats, sunbursts, chevrons) comes directly from 19th-century occult orders and their use of Egyptian and Babylonian temple forms.
Why does retro-futurism look so similar to Art Deco? Retro-futurism inherited Deco’s streamlined geometry and symbolic motifs (stepped forms, radiant arcs) but stripped away the luxury materials and esoteric context, presenting the forms as engineering rather than initiation.
Did the designers of retro-futurist objects know they were using occult symbols? Some did (Norman Bel Geddes read Theosophy). Most did not. They copied Deco’s visual language because it looked “futuristic,” unaware that its power came from older sources.
What stopped the Art Deco future from arriving? The Second World War. Deco was already in decline by 1939, and post-war austerity favored functionalism (the International Style) over ornament. Retro-futurism commemorates the future that was cancelled.
The relationship is not a matter of influence. It is a matter of survival. Art Deco preserved esoteric geometry in plain sight, inside the lobbies of capitalist power. Retro-futurism preserved that same geometry by putting it on the cover of pulp magazines and the tailfin of a car. One built temples to the sun. The other built monuments to a dream. Both believed that form could express the order of the universe. They were right, even if they forgot why.
For more on how hidden geometry shapes visible culture, see our guide to sacred geometry in architecture and the entry on Hermetic correspondences. The broader current that carried both movements can be traced in our collection on esoteric aesthetics.