The Occult

Esoteric Revival of the 19th and 20th Century

History of the Occult · 11 min read

Between the 1770s and the 1990s, Western esotericism underwent its most concentrated revival since the Renaissance. A long list of independent currents — Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the religion of Thelema, modern Wicca, and Chaos Magic — together transformed the public presence of occult ideas, brought previously secret initiatory orders into the open, and produced the institutional and conceptual infrastructure from which contemporary Western Paganism, ceremonial magic, and the New Age emerged. To trace the history of the occult in the modern period is to trace this revival in detail, and to see how each of its currents responded to the science, politics, and religious crisis of its time. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Western Esoteric Traditions (2008) and Wouter Hanegraaff’s New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996) are the indispensable academic surveys.

Mesmer and Animal Magnetism

The revival began, in one of its strands, with the work of the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). Mesmer’s doctoral dissertation proposed that the planets exert an influence on the human body through a universal fluid, and he developed a clinical technique — the baquet and the magnetic pass — by which a trained operator could redistribute this fluid in a patient, curing illness. The technique produced dramatic trances, convulsive crises, and what later observers called somnambulism. Mesmer moved to Paris in 1778, set up a sensational practice, and was eventually investigated by a royal commission whose members included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier; the commission reported in 1784 that the effects were attributable to “imagination” rather than to any fluid. The full report of 1784 (Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal) is a fascinating early document of what we would now call the placebo problem.

The commission’s verdict did not end animal magnetism. The Marquis de Puységur, one of Mesmer’s students, discovered the artificial somnambulic state in which the subject entered a sleeplike trance and reported heightened sensitivity. Puységur’s somnambules spoke in voices not their own, prescribed for their own illnesses, and read the inner states of others. By the 1830s, mesmerism — as it was now called in the English-speaking world — was a medical and popular phenomenon, and its repertoire of trance, suggestion, and clairvoyant diagnosis became the technical basis of mid-nineteenth-century mediumship and the eventual emergence of the Spiritualist movement. Alan Gauld’s A History of Hypnotism (1992) is the standard scholarly account of how mesmerism fed into the broader nineteenth-century interest in dissociation.

Spiritualism and the Fox Sisters

In the winter of 1847–48, in the small town of Hydesville, New York, the family of John Fox began to hear unexplained rappings in their house. The rappings, the family concluded, were produced by the spirit of a murdered peddler buried in the cellar. Two of the Fox daughters, Kate (1838–1892) and Margaret (1833–1893), discovered that they could elicit the rappings on command, and the rapping answers to yes-or-no questions — a kind of telegraph from the dead — became the prototype of a generation of Spiritualist communication. By 1850, public demonstrations of “spirit rapping” were being held in major American and British cities, and the Spiritualist movement was established. On 21 October 1888, Margaret Fox publicly confessed that the rappings had been produced by cracking her toe joints; she recanted the confession a year later, leaving the question open.

Spiritualism spread rapidly. Séances, sometimes held in darkened rooms, produced raps, table-turning, automatic writing, and full materialization of figures. The most famous medium of the period, Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886), performed for sovereigns and scientists, including William Crookes, the discoverer of thallium. The Eusapia Palladino, the Margery Crandon case, and the Fox sisters’ later confession (and recantation of the confession) kept the question of mediumship’s genuineness in public debate for decades. The movement’s institutional residue is the subject of Spirit Communication and Mediumship, and the Ouija board became its most widely distributed consumer product. Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World (1985) is the best scholarly account of the movement’s cultural reach in Victorian Britain.

Theosophy and Blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), a Russian spiritualist who had traveled in India, the Americas, and (in her own contested account) Tibet, co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in November 1875 with the lawyer Henry Steel Olcott and the journalist William Quan Judge. The Society moved its headquarters to Adyar, Madras, in 1879, where it has remained. Theosophy, as Blavatsky formulated it, taught that all religions derived from a single ancient wisdom, that evolution operated on the soul as well as on the body, that the masters of this wisdom continued to guide humanity from beyond the veil, and that modern science and religion would one day be reconciled by esoteric philosophy. Her two great works, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), together with the magazine Lucifer founded in 1887, established the Theosophical canon. The Mahatma letters — purporting to be correspondence between Blavatsky and the hidden Tibetan masters Koot Hoomi and Morya — were a central feature of Theosophical practice; their authenticity was disputed in the 1884–85 Hodgson report for the Society for Psychical Research, and is still debated (Goodrick-Clarke 1994).

Theosophy’s institutional reach was enormous. It established lodges across Europe, India, and the Americas; it influenced the Indian independence movement; it shaped the modern Hindu and Buddhist revivals in Asia; and it seeded later movements including the Anthroposophical Society of Rudolf Steiner (founded at the Christmas Conference of 1912/13 in Dornach), the Arcane School of Alice Bailey, the I AM Activity of Guy and Edna Ballard (begun 1934 in Chicago), and a large part of the New Age. Theosophy also influenced the origins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the founders of the Golden Dawn read Blavatsky, and the Theosophical concept of the astral plane and the root races entered Golden Dawn teachings.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

The Golden Dawn, founded in London on 20 February 1888 by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and William Robert Woodman, was the most influential Western esoteric order of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The order’s graded curriculum of ritual, symbol, and meditation — drawing on the Hermetic tradition, on the Mystical Tree of Life, on astrological magic, and on Masonic ritual conventions — gave its members a structured course through the Western esoteric inheritance. The order attracted an unusual membership: the poets W. B. Yeats and Arthur Machen, the actress Florence Farr, the scholar and designer of the Rider-Waite tarot Arthur Edward Waite (who had briefly attended a few Theosophical meetings in 1891 but was never a formal Theosophist), the magician Aleister Crowley, the psychical researcher and Fellow of the Royal Society Sir William Fletcher Barrett, and many others. The schisms that began in April 1900, with Mathers’s attempt to rule from Paris and the London chiefs’ resistance, fractured the order into a constellation of successor groups that have continued to the present. Ellic Howe’s The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (1972) is the documentary account; R. A. Gilbert’s The Golden Dawn Companion (1986) supplies the biographical detail.

Aleister Crowley and Thelema

Crowley (1875–1947), the son of a wealthy Plymouth Brethren family, joined the Golden Dawn in 1898, broke with Mathers in 1900, and in April 1904 in Cairo received a text he called The Book of the Law from a discarnate entity named Aiwass. The book, Liber AL vel Legis (first published in full by Wieland & Co. in 1909; the standard Weiser edition is 1925), became the scripture of Thelema, the new religion whose central axiom was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Crowley founded the A∴A∴ (the Astrum Argentinum, a name he used interchangeably with the more familiar abbreviation) in 1906–07, and on 18 November 1910 was initiated as a Minerval of the Ordo Templi Orientis by Theodor Reuss in London. The O.T.O. itself had been founded around 1895 by the Austrian industrialist Carl Kellner as a masonic-style federation of independent high-grade orders, and was reorganized by Reuss in 1906 (Pasi 2014). Crowley eventually succeeded Reuss as Outer Head of the Order (O.H.O.) and produced a vast body of writings including Magick in Theory and Practice, The Book of Lies, the magical diaries, and the Equinox magazine. His life and work are the subject of Aleister Crowley: Life, Works, and Legacy, and his ritual magic is discussed in Ritual and Ceremonial Magic. The Thoth tarot deck he co-designed with Lady Frieda Harris, published posthumously in 1969, has become one of the most widely used tarot decks in the world. Lawrence Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (2000) is the most balanced modern biography; Marco Pasi’s Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (2014) is essential on the political and institutional context.

Dion Fortune and the Society of the Inner Light

Dion Fortune (1890–1946), born Violet Mary Firth, was trained in the Alpha et Omega, a Golden Dawn offshoot led by Moina Mathers. In 1924 she founded the Society of the Inner Light, which synthesized Golden Dawn ritual with the depth psychology of Carl Jung, with a Christian-inflected ceremonial practice, and with a clear ethical emphasis on the “Right Hand Path.” Her novels The Sea Priestess and The Goat-Foot God helped move Western esotericism toward the popular self-help register of the New Age; her theoretical works The Mystical Qabalah and Psychic Self-Defence remain in print. The Society of the Inner Light is still active. The historian of the Golden Dawn John Patrick Deveney has argued in his 1997 essay collection The Equinox that Fortune’s Christian-inflected ceremonial was as much a departure from Mathers’ Thelema-friendly ritual as a continuation of it.

Gerald Gardner and Modern Wicca

Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884–1964) claimed to have been initiated into a surviving coven of traditional witchcraft in 1939 by Dorothy Clutterbuck. His novels High Magic’s Aid (1949) and Witchcraft Today (1954) brought the new religion of Wicca to a public audience. Wicca, as Gardner formulated it, was a nature-based, Goddess-and-Horned-God-centered religion drawing on ceremonial magic, on folk magic, on the writings of Margaret Murray, and on the Romantic image of the witch. His early disciple Doreen Valiente (1922–1999) revised the Book of Shadows and produced the lyrical Wiccan liturgy that most modern Wiccans use. The historicity of Gardner’s “Old Dorothy” coven is now widely rejected (Hutton 1999), but the religion he created has been one of the most successful religious innovations of the twentieth century. The origins and spread of the religion are discussed in Origins of Modern Witchcraft and in Wiccan Beliefs and Practice.

Austin Osman Spare and the Prehistory of Chaos Magic

Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), an artist and occultist from a working-class London family, developed a magical system in which the magician creates a personal sigil by charging a glyph of intent in a state of gnosis and then forgets it, allowing it to work from the unconscious. Spare’s two key works, The Book of Pleasure (1913) and The Focus of Life (1921), lay out a system that influenced later Chaos Magic, though Spare himself was hardly a chaos magician. Spare’s reputation grew after his death, and his writings became canonical for a generation of British occultists. The best introduction to Spare’s thought remains Phil Hine and Stephen Mace’s The Secret Lore of Austin Osman Spare (1994); Frater U.:D.:’s Practical Sigil Magic (2007) is a useful companion for the working reader.

Chaos Magic and the Late Twentieth Century

In the 1970s and 1980s, two British practitioners, Peter Carroll (born 1953) and Ray Sherwin, founded the IOT (Illuminates of Thanateros) and published works that codified the system they called Chaos Magic. Liber Null (1978) by Carroll and The Book of Results (1978) by Sherwin set out a model in which belief is a tool, ritual is a pragmatic technology, the magician is a self-shaping operator, and traditional initiatory lineage is less important than results. Chaos Magic drew on Spare, on Crowley’s Thelema, on the science-fiction of writers like H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick, and on the popular spirituality of the New Age. It also opened the Western esoteric tradition to a wider audience by treating lineage with skepticism, by accepting a wide range of cosmological commitments, and by publishing practical manuals rather than initiatory oaths. Sherwin left the IOT early; the modern Chaos Magic lineage is contested and intentionally so.

The New Age movement of the 1980s and 1990s, overlapping with Chaos Magic, popularized the esoteric inheritance in a less disciplined form: crystals, channeling, healing, past-life regression, and a syncretic spirituality. Modern Paganism — Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, and other reconstructed or revivified traditions — grew into a recognized religious movement with a presence in many countries. The serious institutional infrastructure of the Western esoteric tradition — initiatory orders, scholarly associations, public museums — also expanded, and a generation of academics began to study Western esotericism as a coherent field, partly under the influence of the historian of religion Wouter Hanegraaff’s New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996) and the work of the scholar Antoine Faivre (whose Western Esotericism of 1992/2010 is the field’s founding methodological text).

The Afterlife of the Revival

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century revival is not a closed chapter. Its institutional descendants — Golden Dawn temples, O.T.O. bodies, the Society of the Inner Light, Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wiccan lineages, eclectic Wicca, Druid orders, Heathen kindreds, Chaos Magic cells, the New Age, and the academic study of Western esotericism — all remain active in the twenty-first century, alongside newer currents including various reconstructionist and folkish paths, and a renewed interest in grimoire-based ritual and ceremonial magic. The European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), founded in 2005, now sustains the journals Aries and Correspondences; the journal Esoterica has been published out of the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents since 1999. What the revival established is the modern public presence of the Western esoteric tradition: that, in the West today, the practice of magic, the celebration of the Wiccan sabbats, the reading of the tarot, the consultation of astrological charts, and the meditation on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life are all available to anyone who seeks them out, an inheritance traced in Witchcraft and Wicca and in The Occult in Popular Culture.

Sources and further reading

  • Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill, 1996).
  • Antoine Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History (SUNY, 2010).
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (OUP, 2008).
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Theosophical Enlightenment (SUNY, 1994).
  • Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Wicca (OUP, 1999).
  • Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History (Weiser, 1972).
  • R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Companion (Aquarian, 1986).
  • Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (St. Martin’s, 2000).
  • Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (Acumen, 2014).
  • Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge, 1992).