The Occult

Figures Who Shaped Modern Occultism

The Occult in Culture · 11 min read

The period between the 1850s and the 1970s was, in the Western world, the most significant period of occult revival since the Renaissance, and it produced a relatively small number of figures whose influence is still felt. Some were serious scholars; some were theatrical performers; some were outright frauds. Most were somewhere in between, and the historical judgment of each has shifted over time. The standard scholarly account of the wider field is Antoine Faivre’s Western Esotericism (2010, English trans.) and Wouter Hanegraaff’s edited Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005); the most thorough journalistic biography of the central figure is John Symonds’s The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley (1951; rev. 1971), which has now been supplemented by a more serious academic literature, of which Marco Pasi’s Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (2014) is the most important recent contribution. The figures discussed here are the ones whose work continues to be read, taught, and practiced today; the selection is conservative and the omissions are deliberate, not accidental.

Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875)

Éliphas Lévi, the pen name of Alphonse Louis Constant, 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. Lévi drew on the Kabbalah, on the Christian Kabbalistic tradition of the Renaissance, on the Tarot de Marseille, and on the Hermetic tradition of the late antique period to construct a system of “high magic” that has influenced almost every subsequent Western occultist. His most famous single image is the Baphomet, the goat-headed winged figure that he introduced in Dogme et Rituel and that has since become one of the most discussed images in the modern occult. Lévi’s ideas about the Astral Light, the correspondence between the planets and the Tarot trumps, and the polarity of magic and religion shaped the Theosophical and Golden Dawn traditions of the late nineteenth century. His influence is most direct on MacGregor Mathers, who translated Lévi into the ritual corpus of the Golden Dawn.

Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891)

Helena Blavatsky, a Russian-born American (born in Yekaterinoslav in the Russian Empire, now Dnipro in Ukraine), was the founder of the Theosophical Society (1875) and the author of The Secret Doctrine (1888), one of the most influential occult texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Blavatsky claimed to have received her teachings from a group of “Ascended Masters” or “Mahatmas” living in Tibet, and her system drew on a wide range of Eastern and Western esoteric traditions, including Hindu, Buddhist, and Egyptian material. The Theosophical Society, which had a substantial following in Europe, North America, and India, became a major source of ideas for the early twentieth-century occult revival. The Society adopted the swastika as a sacred symbol in the early twentieth century, prior to and independent of its later Nazi appropriation; it is also the principal conduit by which the Indian “chakra” system entered popular Western occultism, although the specific modern formulation owes more to C. W. Leadbeater’s writings than to Blavatsky’s own. Blavatsky is the most important single figure in the history of the modern Theosophical tradition. The most thorough biographical study is the Blavatsky volume in the standard academic series (Beversluis, 2000), and the Mahatma Letters (Barker ed., 1974) is the indispensable primary source for the controversy over the Mahatma transmissions.

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)

Aleister Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley on 12 October 1875 in Royal Leamington Spa, was an English occultist, mountaineer, poet, and founder of the religion of Thelema. He is the most influential and the most controversial figure of the twentieth-century Western esoteric revival, and his ideas have continued to circulate in popular music, in literary fiction, and in the modern magical revival. He is best known as the author of The Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis), dictated in Cairo in April 1904 and first published in full in 1909, the central scripture of the religion of Thelema, and for the slogan “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Crowley was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in November 1898, took the Neophyte grade in January 1899, reached the Adeptus Minor grade in 1900, and broke with Mathers over the question of authority. He founded the A∴A∴ in 1907, and in 1910 he took over the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis), a German-derived fraternal and magical order that he reoriented around the law of Thelema. He was the author of Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), a textbook synthesis of the Western magical tradition. His work has been a continuing influence on the modern occult, on popular music, and on contemporary magical practice. The detail of his life and work is treated in Aleister Crowley: life, works, and legacy.

Gerald Gardner (1884–1964)

Gerald Gardner, an English civil servant, was the founder of the modern Wiccan tradition. His 1954 book Witchcraft Today and his 1959 book The Meaning of Witchcraft are the foundational texts of Gardnerian Wicca. Gardner claimed to have been initiated into a surviving coven of traditional witches in the New Forest, and the Gardnerian tradition was the basis for most of the modern Wiccan and Neopagan movements of the late twentieth century. Gardner was influenced by the works of Margaret Murray, the Egyptologist and anthropologist whose controversial witch-cult hypothesis held that the medieval European witch trials were the suppression of a surviving pre-Christian religion. The hypothesis has been thoroughly criticised by historians — most thoroughly by Norman Cohn in Europe’s Inner Demons (1975) and by Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) — but it was influential on Gardner and on the early Wiccan movement. Gardner’s relationship to the actual history of European witchcraft is treated in the discussion of witchcraft and Wicca. The most balanced recent scholarly treatment of Gardner is Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon (1999), the standard work on the history of modern Wicca.

Dion Fortune (1890–1946)

Dion Fortune, the pen name of Violet Mary Firth, was an English occultist, psychologist, and author. She was a member of the Alpha et Omega, a Golden Dawn offshoot, and the founder of the Society of the Inner Light, an organisation that continues in operation. Her novels, including The Sea Priestess (1923) and The Goat-Foot God (1936), are major works of occult fiction, and her non-fiction, including Psychic Self-Defense (1930) and The Mystical Qabalah (1935), are standard introductions to the Western magical tradition. Fortune’s work combined the Golden Dawn tradition with Christian mystical theology, and her writing has been a continuing influence on the Western esoteric tradition of the twentieth century. The standard biography is Gareth Knight’s Dion Fortune and the Inner Light (2000).

Israel Regardie (1907–1985)

Israel Regardie, born Reginald Alec Gerald Christie in London in 1907, was an American occultist (he emigrated to the US in 1938) and former secretary and student of Aleister Crowley. He is best known for his transcription and publication, in 1937-1940, of the complete Golden Dawn ritual corpus, a substantial body of material that had previously been kept secret. The publication, titled The Golden Dawn, made the entire ritual system of the Golden Dawn available to the general public for the first time. Regardie’s other works, including The Middle Pillar (1938), The Tree of Life (1932), and A Garden of Pomegranates (1932), are standard introductory texts of the modern Western magical tradition. Regardie’s transcriptions are the basis of most of the subsequent Golden Dawn-derived magical orders of the twentieth century.

Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956)

Austin Osman Spare, an English artist and occultist, was one of the most original figures of the early twentieth-century Western esoteric revival. He was briefly a member of the Golden Dawn in his youth, between 1903 and 1906, and he developed his own system of “sigilization” and “atavistic” magic, described in his 1913 pamphlet The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Anatomy of Ecstasy and developed further in his post-war writings, including the 1921 work The Focus of Life. Spare’s ideas about the unconscious, about the use of magical sigils, and about the body as a magical instrument have been a major influence on the modern chaos magic movement (founded by Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin in the late 1970s, after Spare’s death in 1956 — he is therefore a precursor rather than a co-founder, as some popular accounts have it) and on the contemporary use of sigil-based magic. The wider system of magic and ritual that he proposed is treated in ritual and ceremonial magic. The standard biography is Phil Baker’s Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (2011).

Manly P. Hall (1901–1990)

Manly P. Hall, a Canadian-born American author and lecturer, was the founder of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles (1934) and the author of The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928), a substantial encyclopaedia of Western esoteric symbolism. The book has been in print continuously since its publication and is one of the most widely read single volumes in the modern Western esoteric tradition. Hall also produced a substantial body of astrological, alchemical, and philosophical writing, and the Philosophical Research Society continues to operate as a research library and a centre for the study of Western esotericism.

Anton LaVey (1930–1997)

Anton LaVey was the founder of the Church of Satan (1966, on Walpurgis Night, 30 April) and the author of The Satanic Bible (1969), one of the most widely read modern occult texts. LaVey drew on a wide range of Western esoteric material, including the Baphomet of Éliphas Lévi, the ritual magic of the Golden Dawn, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, to construct a system of “LaVeyan Satanism” that has had a substantial popular following. The Church of Satan is one of two modern Satanic organisations that the popular reader is most likely to encounter; the other is the Satanic Temple, co-founded in 2012 in New York by Lucien Greaves (Doug Mesner) and Malcolm Jarry. The two organisations are not related and have very different aims. The Church of Satan is a religious and philosophical body, organised around the personal authority of its founder and his successors. The Satanic Temple is a political and secular activist organisation that uses the iconography of Satan as a rhetorical device in campaigns for the separation of church and state. The two are often confused in popular reporting, but they are not the same institution and they do not cooperate.

Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki (1929–2024)

Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, an English occultist, was one of the major figures of the post-war Western magical revival. She was a member of several Golden Dawn-derived orders and the founder, with her husband, of the Servants of the Light, an organisation that continues in operation. She was the author of several major works, including The Tree of Life: An Illustrated Study in Magic (1993), Inner Magic (2000), and The Shining Paths (2002), and she was a major teacher of the Western magical tradition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She died in 2024.

Starhawk (1951–)

Starhawk, the pen name of Miriam Simos, is an American writer, activist, and teacher who has been one of the most influential figures in the modern revival of feminist witchcraft and the Wiccan tradition. Her 1979 book The Spiral Dance is one of the most widely read modern Wiccan texts, and her subsequent work has combined Wiccan ritual theology with environmentalist and feminist politics. The Reclaiming tradition that she helped found continues as a major presence in the modern Wiccan and Neopagan revival.

W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and the Golden Dawn Founders

Two omissions from the standard popular list deserve to be repaired here. The first is W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), the Irish poet and Nobel laureate, who was a member of the Golden Dawn from 1890, who produced a substantial body of automatic writing with his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees beginning in 1917, and whose system of esoteric correspondences in A Vision (1925; rev. 1937) is one of the more interesting intellectual products of the early-twentieth-century Western esoteric revival. The second omission is the trio of founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — William Wynn Westcott (1848-1925), Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918), and William Robert Woodman (1828-1891) — whose work in the 1880s and 1890s produced the most influential single ritual corpus of the modern Western magical tradition. The Golden Dawn was founded in 1888, and its publication of the Cipher Manuscript and the associated rituals gave the modern revival its core vocabulary. Mathers, in particular, is the figure who translated the operative material into a working ceremonial system, and his work is the most direct ancestor of almost every subsequent Western magical order of the twentieth century. The standard scholarly treatment of the Golden Dawn is R. A. Gilbert’s The Golden Dawn Companion (1986).

The figures discussed here are not the only ones of importance in the modern occult revival. A serious study of the field would also include the founders of the Anthroposophical Society (Rudolf Steiner, 1861-1925), the founder of the French Martinist tradition (Papus, Gérard Encausse, 1865-1916), the post-war chaos magic movement (Peter J. Carroll, b. 1950, and Ray Sherwin, b. 1947), the founders of the Wiccan Alexandrian tradition (Alex Sanders, 1926-1988, and Maxine Sanders, b. 1946), and a great many others. The figures discussed here are the ones whose work has been most widely read, most widely taught, and most widely practiced in the modern Western esoteric tradition. For a focused treatment of the long historical background, see famous occultists through history.

Sources and Further Reading

  • Wouter Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
  • Antoine Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010).
  • Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (London: Acumen, 2014).
  • Colin Wilson, The Strength to Dream: Imagination and the Search for Meaning (London: Gollancz, 1962).
  • John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley (London: Routledge, 1951; rev. 1971).
  • Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) — the standard scholarly history of modern Wicca.
  • R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Companion (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1986).
  • Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2011).
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  • J. Gordon Melton, The Oxford Handbook of Religious and Spiritual Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) — the standard reference for the modern religious landscape including the occult.