Famous Occultists Through History
The Western esoteric tradition is long, and the figures who have shaped it are numerous. This article offers a short tour, in chronological order, of twelve of the most important figures from antiquity to the modern period. Each entry is a brief biographical sketch and a clear statement of the contribution. The treatment is necessarily compressed; the figures are best understood in the longer historical context provided in the history of the occult. For the academic study of the wider field, the standard reference is Wouter Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Brill, 2005); for a more biographical approach, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (2008) is the most useful single-volume treatment.
Zoroaster (Date Uncertain)
The prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, is the founder of the Zoroastrian religious tradition, dominant in the Iranian plateau from the Achaemenid period (sixth to fourth century BCE) until the Islamic conquest. The Gathas, the hymns attributed to Zoroaster, are among the oldest texts in the Iranian religious tradition. The Zoroastrian cosmology of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, of light against darkness, of a cosmic battle that will be resolved at the end of time, has been enormously influential on later Western and Middle Eastern religious thought, including on Judaism, on Christianity, and on the Manichaean tradition. The figure of the maguš has sometimes been identified as the ancestor of the “magician” in the Western sense, although the linguistic relationship is more complex than the simple folk etymology suggests.
Apollonius of Tyana (c. 15–c. 100 CE)
Apollonius of Tyana, a Neopythagorean philosopher of the first century CE, was the subject of an extensive biography by Philostratus, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, which was written in the early third century. The biography presented Apollonius as a wandering sage, miracle worker, and wonder-worker, a kind of pagan saint, and it is one of the most important early examples of the biographical hagiography that would later be applied to Christian saints. The historical Apollonius is difficult to recover, but the figure of Apollonius became, in the Renaissance, a symbol of pre-Christian wisdom and of the natural magic of the classical world.
John Dee (1527–1608/9)
John Dee, an English mathematician, astronomer, and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, was one of the most important figures of the early modern period in the Western esoteric tradition. He was the author of the Monas Hieroglyphica (1564, Antwerp), a hermetic-mystical treatise, and of the “Mystical Hymns” of the 1580s. Dee’s work with the medium Edward Kelley, including the so-called “Enochian” language and the conversations with the angels, is the most discussed feature of his later career. The Enochian system has been a continuing influence on the Western esoteric tradition, including on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the nineteenth century and on the modern chaos magic movement. The standard biography is Peter J. French’s John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (1972).
Edward Kelley (1555–1597)
Edward Kelley, an English medium, was Dee’s assistant in the angelic conversations of the 1580s. Kelley claimed to be able to communicate with spirits, and was responsible for the messages of the angels, including the elaborate “Enochian” vocabulary, and for the dramatic instruction, in 1587, that Dee and Kelley should share their wives. Kelley was imprisoned in Prague in 1592 and died in 1597 in an attempted escape.
Paracelsus, Nostradamus, and Agrippa
Paracelsus (1493–1541), born Theophrastus von Hohenheim, was a Swiss-German physician, alchemist, and astrologer. He is one of the founders of modern Western medicine, the author of a substantial body of alchemical writing, and the inventor of the doctrine of “signatures,” the principle that the appearance of a plant or mineral indicated its medical use. Nostradamus (1503–1566), born Michel de Nostredame, was a French apothecary and astrologer whose collection of prophecies, Les Prophéties (1555), has been in continuous print since the sixteenth century. The prophecies, written in quatrains, are deliberately obscure. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) was a German polymath, the author of De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (1533), one of the most influential single works of the early modern Western esoteric tradition, treating natural magic, celestial magic, and ceremonial magic. Agrippa was also the author of De Vanitate Scientiarum (1530), a sceptical attack on the very magical tradition that the De Occulta Philosophia defended. For the wider context, see hermeticism and alchemy.
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600)
Giordano Bruno, an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, and cosmological theorist, was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for a combination of heretical theological and philosophical opinions. Bruno is a major figure in the history of Western esotericism because of his combination of Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and Lullian material into a cosmological system that posited an infinite universe, the plurality of worlds, and a magical theory of the universe’s intelligibility. His work was drawn upon by the later Hermetic tradition. The standard biography is Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), one of the foundational works of the academic study of Western esotericism.
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499)
Marsilio Ficino, an Italian philosopher, priest, and translator, was the head of the Platonic Academy in Florence under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. He translated the complete works of Plato from Greek into Latin (published 1484), and the Corpus Hermeticum from Greek into Latin (published 1471), the latter translation bringing Hermeticism into the Western intellectual tradition.
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and Nobel laureate (1923), was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1890, an active participant in the order’s Dublin chapter, and the author of A Vision (1925; rev. 1937), the most ambitious literary work to emerge from the Golden Dawn tradition. The automatic writing sessions with his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees, beginning in 1917, supplied the material that A Vision organised into a cyclical theory of history and of the human personality.
Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875)
Éliphas Lévi was a French occultist whose two-volume Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1855-1856) is one of the foundational texts of the modern Western esoteric tradition. He is discussed in more detail in figures who shaped modern occultism.
Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891)
Helena Blavatsky was the Russian-born American founder of the Theosophical Society and the author of The Secret Doctrine (1888). She is also discussed in figures who shaped modern occultism.
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
Aleister Crowley was an English occultist, the author of The Book of the Law (1904) and Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), and the founder of the religion of Thelema. He is discussed in detail in Aleister Crowley: life, works, and legacy.
The figures discussed here are not a complete list. Other important figures include the Neoplatonist Iamblichus (c. 245-325 CE), the gnostic Valentinus (fl. 140 CE), the medieval Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1240-1291), the alchemist Nicolas Flamel (c. 1330-1418), the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the French Martinist tradition of the late eighteenth century, the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), the nineteenth-century French occultist Papus (Gérard Encausse, 1865-1916), and the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (William Wynn Westcott, 1848-1925, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, 1854-1918). For the focused treatment of the post-medieval period, see figures who shaped modern occultism. For the more specific treatment of one of the most important modern figures, see Aleister Crowley: life, works, and legacy.