The Occult

History of the Occult

History of the Occult · 18 min read

Western esotericism, the long and uneven attempt to grasp hidden causes behind visible events, to communicate with non-human intelligences, and to transform the practitioner in the process, is one of the more contested categories in the academic study of religion. Wouter Hanegraaff has argued that the very term “Western esotericism” is a scholarly construction, an umbrella that gathers together currents as different as the temple mysteries of ancient Greece, medieval grimoire magic, Renaissance Neoplatonism, nineteenth-century Spiritualism, and the Chaos Magic of the 1990s into a single field of study (Hanegraaff 2013). Antoine Faivre’s working definition, proposed in 1992 and still debated, locates esotericism at the intersection of four “intrinsic” characteristics: an emphasis on correspondence between the visible and invisible worlds, the doctrine of living nature, the transmission of hidden wisdom through initiation, and the experience of transmutation (Faivre 2010). What follows takes that definition as its starting point while acknowledging that the practitioners whose lives we are reconstructing rarely described themselves as “esoteric” in the modern sense.

The story runs from the Egyptian and Greek temple traditions of antiquity, through the grimoire and Kabbalistic inheritance of the Middle Ages, into the Renaissance recovery of the Hermetic and Neoplatonic texts. It passes through the Enlightenment’s reaction against esoteric claims, into the nineteenth-century revival that produced Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and onward into the twentieth-century currents that shaped modern Paganism, ritual magic, and Chaos Magic. The pattern repeats: texts are copied, hidden, rediscovered, and reused; secret societies form, split, and reform; and a continuous dialogue runs between religion, science, philosophy, and the arts. As Kocku von Stuckrad has shown in his Locations of Knowledge in Renaissance Esotericism (2010), the lines between “esoteric” and “exoteric” were drawn and redrawn at every period by competing claimants, which is one reason a single narrative is hard to sustain.

Antiquity: Mystery Religions and Hermetic Origins

The deepest roots of Western esotericism lie in the religious cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. The Egyptian temple tradition preserved a body of priestly knowledge about the gods, the soul’s journey through the underworld, and the symbolic workings of the cosmos; this tradition, recorded in temple libraries and in texts like the Book of the Dead, fed later ideas about ritual power and divine naming. In Greece, the mystery religions, most famously the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, offered initiates a direct encounter with death and renewal, while the Pythagorean communities of southern Italy experimented with number symbolism, dietary discipline, and harmonic theory as ways of ordering the soul. These pre-Christian currents are surveyed in Ancient Esoteric Roots, which traces how Egyptian temple wisdom, Hermetic texts, Gnosticism, the mysteries, and Pythagorean thought seeded the soil from which later Western esotericism grew.

Late Antiquity: Neoplatonism and Gnosticism

As the Roman world aged, two parallel intellectual traditions took shape. The Gnostic movements of the second and third centuries — represented by texts like the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, and the Pistis Sophia — described a cosmos trapped beneath flawed archons and a spark of divine light imprisoned in matter, salvation coming through hidden knowledge offered by a redeemer from above. Schools such as the Valentinians, the Basilideans, the Sethians, and the Manichaeans each elaborated their own cosmogonic myths, but they shared a conviction that the visible world was the work of a lesser or hostile power and that true gnosis — experiential, salvific knowledge — was needed to liberate the inner self. Whether Gnosticism was a Christian heresy, a pre-Christian religion, or a family of related movements is still debated; the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 reshaped the field by putting original Gnostic texts into modern hands, but the older Hans Jonas / Hans Leisegang reading of Gnosticism as a late-Hellenistic Religion des späthellenistischen Erlösungsbedürfnisses has been partially eclipsed by more historically careful work from Michael Allen Williams (Rethinking “Gnosticism”, 1996) and others.

Neoplatonism, founded in the third century by Plotinus in Rome and developed by Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Damascius in the schools of Athens and Alexandria, offered a different but compatible picture. Reality emanates from a single ineffable source, the One, through successive layers of being — Nous or Mind, the World Soul, and matter — and the soul’s task is to ascend by contemplation, ritual, and theurgy back toward its origin. Plotinus emphasized contemplative union; Iamblichus in his De Mysteriis insisted that ritual was not a metaphor but a real operation linking the human and divine orders, with statues, hymns, and invocations functioning as conduits of higher power. This framework, blending metaphysics with practice, supplied the conceptual grammar of Western esotericism for the next fifteen centuries, and the Athenian school of Proclus became a direct ancestor of the Renaissance Florentine Academy. The closing of the Academy of Athens by Justinian in 529 is often taken as a symbolic end of the ancient world; in fact, the Neoplatonic inheritance survived in Syriac, Arabic, and Latin translations, and re-emerged in full force at the Renaissance.

The Medieval Period: Grimoires, Kabbalah, and the Hermetic Corpus

The Latin Middle Ages inherited two great esoteric reservoirs. The first was the practical tradition of ritual magic preserved in grimoires — books of procedures for conjuring spirits, making talismans, and compelling celestial influences. The Picatrix, translated from Arabic into Castilian in 1256 under Alfonso X of Castile and into Latin in the late thirteenth century, gathered astrological image-magic from the schools of Arabic Spain. The Sworn Book of Honorius (Liber Iuratus) and later texts like the Ars Notoria promised knowledge and memory through angelic conjuration. The grimoire tradition, eventually culminating in the Lesser Key of Solomon, treated the magician as a microcosm of the heavens, using seals, circles, and divine names to negotiate with the unseen world.

The second was Jewish Kabbalah, developed in Provence and Spain from the twelfth century onward. The Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) and the Zohar, with its doctrine of the ten sephirot and the four worlds, gave Western esoteric thought its most influential symbolic structure. Kabbalah was absorbed by Christian kabbalists in the Renaissance, including Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin, and later by Hermeticists of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; it remains a central element of the Western esoteric tradition, as described in Kabbalah and the Mystical Tree of Life.

Alongside these, the so-called Hermetic texts — the Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius, and the fragments collected under the name of Hermes Trismegistus — circulated in Greek before being translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in 1471. Though most were later dated by Isaac Casaubon, in his De Rebus Sacris et Ecclesiasticis Exercitationes of 1614, to the second or third century CE rather than to ancient Egypt, their medieval and Renaissance readers took them at face value, and they became a foundational scripture of Western esotericism. As Faivre has stressed, the dating matters less for the history of effects than for the history of origins: Renaissance readers acted on a chronological error, and the consequences of that error run forward through the entire tradition.

The Renaissance: Recovery and Synthesis

The Renaissance was, in many ways, the great era of esoteric synthesis. Ficino’s translations of Plato, the Neoplatonists, and the Hermetic corpus circulated in manuscript and print, while scholars like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola attempted to harmonize Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and Christian theology in works such as the Oration on the Dignity of Man and the Heptaplus. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa synthesized the magical tradition in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), drawing together natural magic, celestial magic, ceremonial magic, and Kabbalah into a single encyclopedic system that remained the standard occult reference for the next two centuries.

The Renaissance also saw the first sustained European engagement with alchemy as a spiritual as much as a protochemical discipline. The symbolic journey recorded in alchemical texts, with its stages of nigredo, albedo, and rubedo, eventually fed the larger Western tradition described in Hermeticism and Alchemy and in The Alchemical Journey. This period should not be imagined as a uniform revival of hidden knowledge. Renaissance magic was also controversial, attacked by churchmen and humanists alike, and the boundary between legitimate natural philosophy and forbidden occult practice was contested throughout the period. The Italian inquisitor Girolamo Tartarotti’s Congresso notturno delle lammie (1749) and Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum (1487) are different moments in the same long negotiation between magic, religion, and the state (Levack 2015).

The Early Modern Period: Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and the Republic of Letters

In the early seventeenth century, two mysterious manifestos appeared in Germany: the Fama Fraternitatis (1614) and the Confessio Fraternitatis (1615), announcing the existence of a hidden brotherhood of Rosicrucians devoted to the reform of knowledge, medicine, and society. Whether or not an actual Rosicrucian order ever existed, the manifestos ignited a trans-European movement. Rosicrucian ideas shaped the writings of Robert Fludd, Michael Maier, and the Hartlib circle (the Comenius-era Invisible College in London), and they left a permanent mark on later Western esotericism as a model of a secret society working for human and divine renewal.

Speculative Freemasonry emerged in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, drawing on operative stonemason guilds, Rosicrucian motifs, Hermetic symbolism, and Enlightenment ideals of brotherhood and moral self-cultivation. After 1717 and the founding of the Premier Grand Lodge in London, Freemasonry spread rapidly across Europe and the Americas, and the higher degrees developed in the eighteenth century absorbed increasingly elaborate esoteric content — Kabbalistic, Hermetic, alchemical, and chivalric. The Masonic lodge became a major institutional vehicle for esoteric ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and later orders, including the Golden Dawn, modeled themselves consciously on Masonic structure and ritual. Margaret Jacob’s Living the Enlightenment (1991) and The Origins of Freemasonry (2006) have done the most to relocate eighteenth-century Masonry inside the broader intellectual history of the Enlightenment rather than treating it as a relic of the occult.

The Enlightenment and Reaction

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its commitment to public reason, empirical evidence, and the secular state, was largely hostile to esoteric claims. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert dismissed magic and divination as relics of superstition. The French Revolution attacked the Catholic Church and its sacramental system, and conservative religious reaction in the early nineteenth century answered by reasserting orthodox claims.

Yet the Enlightenment did not destroy the esoteric tradition; it transformed it. The continued vitality of alchemy in eighteenth-century Masonic and Rosicrucian circles, the persistence of folk divination, and the writings of maverick figures like Emanuel Swedenborg — whose Heaven and Hell (1758) claimed to describe the spiritual world visited in vision — show that the esoteric current never broke off. Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism in the 1770s and 1780s, dismissed by official medicine, fed directly into the Spiritualist movement half a century later. The question of how far Swedenborg was “really” a visionary or simply an unusually productive literary inventor is one the academic literature has never settled (see, e.g., Bergquist 1999), but his effect on later esotericism is not in doubt.

The 19th-Century Revival: Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Theosophy

The nineteenth century is the great revival century of Western esotericism. Three linked movements prepared the ground.

Mesmerism and animal magnetism. Franz Anton Mesmer’s theory of a universal fluid acting on the body and a corresponding technique of “magnetic passes” produced a trans-European craze in the 1780s. Mesmer held that disease arose from obstructions in the flow of this fluid and that a trained practitioner — sometimes called a magnétiseur — could restore equilibrium by passing the hands over the patient’s body, by direct gaze, or by means of a baquet, a communal tub from which magnetized rods extended. Although the French royal commission of 1784 — whose members included Benjamin Franklin and the chemist Antoine Lavoisier — dismissed animal magnetism as imagination, the practice survived in popular and medical culture. The Marquis de Puységur’s discovery of “somnambulic” trance, in which the magnetized subject fell into a sleeplike state and reported heightened sensitivity, anticipated the phenomena of hypnosis, mediumship, and dissociation that would dominate nineteenth-century occultism. By the 1830s, “mesmerism” was widely practiced in Britain, Germany, and the United States, and its repertoire of trance, suggestion, and the magnetized somnambule became the technical basis of later mediumship, surgical mesmerism, and the early stages of psychology (Gauld 1992).

Spiritualism. In 1848, in Hydesville, New York, the Fox sisters — Kate and Margaret — reported a series of rappings they attributed to the spirit of a murdered peddler, and the Spiritualist movement was born. Within a decade, séances, spirit cabinets, table-turning, automatic writing, and materialization were practiced across Europe and America, and public mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, and the Léon brothers became celebrities. Spiritualism’s claim to provide empirical evidence of survival after death gave it a quasi-scientific posture that fascinated the age; even some prominent scientists, including William Crookes and Alfred Russel Wallace, defended the reality of mediums’ phenomena. Crookes’ 1874 Quarterly Journal of Science report on Home is the most cited defence; the Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882) treated the question with more procedural care than its critics usually allow (see Oppenheim 1985). Spiritualism also produced a vast body of channeled texts, the most famous being The Book of the Spirits dictated to Allan Kardec in Paris, the precursor of A Course in Miracles and the work of Edgar Cayce in the twentieth century, and many of these texts were later absorbed into the Theosophical and New Age traditions. The movement remains a major subject of Spirit Communication and Mediumship.

Theosophy. Helena Blavatsky, a Russian émigré who had spent years in Tibet, India, and the United States, co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 with the lawyer Henry Steel Olcott and the journalist William Quan Judge. Blavatsky’s two great works, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), transformed the esoteric revival by combining Eastern religious systems — Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian — with Western occultism and an evolutionary cosmology involving hidden masters (the Mahatmas), root races, and the post-mortem journey of the soul through the astral light. Theosophy also gave the West a vocabulary for talking about karma, reincarnation, and the aura, and it housed research into the esoteric traditions of every culture. Its institutional heirs, including the Anthroposophical Society founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1912, the Arcane School of Alice Bailey, and various Point Loma and Pasadena offshoots, kept the Theosophical framework alive. Theosophy’s influence on the origins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, on later Wicca, and on the New Age was enormous, even where it was eventually repudiated. Goodrick-Clarke’s Theosophical Enlightenment (1994) remains the indispensable history of the Blavatskian current.

The Golden Dawn and the Hermetic Resurgence

Founded in London in 1888, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was the most influential Western esoteric order of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on the Hermetic tradition, on the Mystical Tree of Life, on astrological magic, and on the ritual conventions of speculative Masonry, the Golden Dawn gave its members an extensive graded curriculum of ritual, symbol, and meditation. Its members included William Butler Yeats, the poet and Nobel laureate; Aleister Crowley, who was received into the Minerval grade on 18 November 1898 and initiated as a Neophyte of the First Order on 6 January 1899; the actress and ritualist Florence Farr; the Irish poet and mystic George William Russell (AE); the writer Algernon Blackwood; the publisher John Watkins; and the psychical researcher Sir William Fletcher Barrett. The order’s schisms, beginning with the “Battle of Blythe Road” raid of April 1900, seeded a generation of successor organizations — the Stella Matutina, the Alpha et Omega, the Whare Ra — that carried the Golden Dawn system into the twentieth century. Ellic Howe’s The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (1972) remains the indispensable documentary study; R. A. Gilbert’s The Golden Dawn Companion (1986) is the standard biographical reference.

The Golden Dawn is the single most important institutional bridge between Victorian occultism and the twentieth-century currents described in Esoteric Revival of the 19th and 20th Century. It also cemented the place of the tarot and the sacred symbolism and geometry of Western esotericism in the ritual imagination of the period. The historiographical question — how far the order was an organic product of Victorian occultism and how far it was a creative project of Westcott and Mathers, working from a Cipher Manuscript whose authenticity is now widely rejected — is still debated.

The Early 20th Century: Crowley, Fortune, Gardner, and the Birth of Modern Paganism

The early twentieth century saw the consolidation of the revival’s most visible currents.

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), a Cambridge-educated Englishman and mountaineer, was received into the Golden Dawn as a Minerval in November 1898 and initiated to the Neophyte grade in January 1899, breaking with Mathers over the question of authority in 1900. He traveled through Mexico, India, and the Middle East, and in April 1904 in Cairo received The Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis, dictated by the discarnate entity Aiwass; first full publication Wieland & Co. 1909; standard Weiser edition 1925). The book’s central injunction, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” became the cornerstone of the religion of Thelema. Crowley drafted the founding documents of the A∴A∴ in 1906–07, and in November 1910 was initiated as a Minerval of the German-run Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) by Theodor Reuss, eventually succeeding Reuss as head of the order. The O.T.O. itself had been founded around 1895 by the Austrian industrialist Carl Kellner and reorganized by Reuss in 1906 (Pasi 2014). Crowley’s writings, including Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), the numerous Equinox publications, and the first full edition of The Book of the Law, brought ceremonial magic, sexual magic, and a self-consciously modern idiom into the esoteric mainstream, an inheritance examined in Aleister Crowley: Life, Works, and Legacy and in Ritual and Ceremonial Magic. His reputation as “the wickedest man in the world” — a tabloid coinage — ensured that he remained in the public eye long after his death; the Thoth tarot deck he co-designed with Lady Frieda Harris is now a working tool for many contemporary readers.

Dion Fortune (born Violet Mary Firth, 1890–1946) founded the Society of the Inner Light in 1924, having been trained in the Golden Dawn offshoot of the Alpha et Omega. Fortune’s synthesis of Golden Dawn ritual with the new depth psychology of Jung, with a Christian-inflected ceremonial practice, and with a clear ethical emphasis on the “Right Hand Path” helped move Western esotericism toward the popular self-help register that would characterize the New Age. Her novels The Sea Priestess (1938) and The Goat-Foot God (1936), her theoretical works The Mystical Qabalah (1935) and Psychic Self-Defence (1930), and the ongoing activity of the Society of the Inner Light kept the Golden Dawn lineage alive through the twentieth century. The literary critic John Symonds’ The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley (1951) and his later collaborations with Kenneth Grant did much to set the popular image of Crowley; it is a partial image, and modern biographers (Boer, Sutin, Pasi) have complicated it substantially.

Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884–1964), a retired colonial civil servant, claimed to have been initiated into a surviving coven of traditional witchcraft in England in 1939 by Dorothy Clutterbuck, and his novels High Magic’s Aid (1949) and Witchcraft Today (1954), together with his Book of Shadows, became founding texts of modern Wicca, a nature-based, Goddess-and-Horned-God-centered religion drawing on ceremonial magic, folk magic, the writings of Margaret Murray, and the Romantic image of the witch. The historicity of Gardner’s “Old Dorothy” claim is now widely doubted (Hutton 1999), but his success at creating a public religion is undeniable. Gardner’s legacy, traced in Origins of Modern Witchcraft and in Wiccan Beliefs and Practice, opened the way to the public emergence of modern Paganism, a religious movement that now numbers in the millions worldwide.

These three currents did not exhaust the period. Dion Fortune’s Society of the Inner Light, the Astrosophical and Rosicrucian orders of the period, the survival of Theosophical lodges, the burgeoning Golden Dawn offshoots (Stella Matutina, Alpha et Omega, Whare Ra), and the steady stream of new grimoires and magical handbooks all kept the practical and theoretical traditions alive. The early twentieth century, in short, was a period of unusual density in Western esoteric history, a moment when several independent traditions were being codified simultaneously and were about to become the source material for the late twentieth-century spread of modern Paganism and chaos-magical practice.

Late 20th Century: Chaos Magic, Wicca Goes Public, and the New Age

After the Second World War, the esoteric landscape shifted again. The 1950s and 1960s saw the popularization of Wicca through Gerald Gardner’s followers, including Doreen Valiente, and the spread of initiatory covens across the English-speaking world. Wicca’s public profile rose sharply in the 1970s and 1980s, helped by sympathetic works by historians like Margaret Murray (later disputed) and by the broader countercultural interest in Goddess spirituality, ecology, and the ritual year captured in The Eight Sabbats of the Wiccan Year.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Austin Osman Spare’s earlier magical writings, combined with the work of Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin, produced Chaos Magic: a current that treated belief as a tool, ritual as a pragmatic technology, and the magician as a self-shaping operator. Chaos Magic, summarized in Esoteric Revival of the 19th and 20th Century, placed itself deliberately outside the traditional orders and emphasized results over lineage. The anthropologist David Hume’s Lucidly Quaffing the Nectar of Death (unpublished, cited in Hine 1995) and Phil Hine’s Condensed Chaos (1995) are the practical working texts.

The New Age movement of the 1980s and 1990s popularized large parts of the esoteric inheritance in a more diffuse, less disciplined form: crystals, channeling, healing, past-life regression, and a syncretic spirituality drawing on Theosophy, Spiritualism, and various Eastern sources. The New Age also brought the occult to a mass audience previously unfamiliar with the Golden Dawn or with ceremonial magic. Hanegraaff’s New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996) is the standard academic account, and the historian J. Gordon Melton’s New Age Encyclopedia (1990) is the encyclopedic reference.

The 21st Century: Scholarly Western Esotericism and Digital Practice

The history of Western esotericism did not end in the twentieth century; it migrated into the academy. From the 1990s onward, the academic study of Western esotericism has become a serious scholarly field, anchored in the work of Antoine Faivre (who proposed the field’s working definition in 1992), Wouter Hanegraaff, Kocku von Stuckrad, and the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), founded in 2005. The field now has dedicated journals — Aries, Correspondences, Esoterica — book series, and university positions at Amsterdam, Exeter, and elsewhere; the categories of “Western esotericism” used here — Hermeticism, Gnosis, theurgy, grimoire magic, theosophy, occultism — are themselves products of this scholarly conversation. Wouter Hanegraaff’s Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2013) and Kocku von Stuckrad’s Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (2005) are the standard short introductions. The Hermetic tradition is read by readers who may never join an order; the Ouija board, once a parlor diversion or a séance tool, is sold as a board game; the tarot has a market of thousands of decks and a digital subculture of readers on social media; modern Pagan festivals draw tens of thousands of attendees. The deep structure of the tradition, the conviction that hidden correspondences link the human and the divine, persists in new idioms and new publics, and is now read historically and critically by scholars as well as practised by initiates. Whether the academic category of “Western esotericism” will hold together, or whether it will fragment into more traditional period-based and regional specialisms, is a question the field is still working through.

Sources and further reading

  • Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013).
  • Antoine Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History (SUNY, 2010).
  • Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (Equinox, 2005).
  • Wouter J. Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (Brill, 2006), two volumes.
  • Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (3rd ed., Routledge, 2015).
  • Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (OUP, 1999).
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (OUP, 2008).
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Theosophical Enlightenment (SUNY, 1994).
  • Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History (Weiser, 1972).
  • Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (Acumen, 2014).