The Occult

The Occult in Popular Culture

The Occult in Culture · 16 min read

Esoteric ideas have circulated in the popular imagination of Europe and North America for at least two centuries, and in the last hundred years they have moved from the fringes of religious publishing into the centre of mass entertainment. The occult, as a cultural fact, now occupies a position in novels, films, television, music, fashion, and video games that it has not held since the late antique theurgic and the seventeenth-century alchemical revival. The signs of this presence are everywhere, from the use of tarot iconography in album art to the spread of “prestige” occult drama on streaming platforms. The relationship between the academic study of esotericism and the popular understanding of the same materials is, however, often strained. The symbols, the figures, and the rituals are borrowed freely, but the meanings are often thin or distorted, and the resulting popular lore is rich in imagery and thin in substance. This article surveys the major fields of that presence, with attention both to the popular use and to the academic study that has been catching up with it. The standard reference for the academic field is Wouter Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Brill, 2005); the standard popular-press overview for the British case is Colin Wilson’s The Strength to Dream (1962), which still has things to say about the relationship between occult themes and the modern literary imagination.

Literature

The modern occult novel has a long history. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842) was an early example, a Rosicrucian and Swedenborgian romance that was enormously influential on the later nineteenth-century occult revival. Zanoni presented the figure of the “adept,” the master of esoteric wisdom, in terms that shaped the popular conception of the occultist for the next hundred years. Bulwer-Lytton followed it with A Strange Story (1862), a novel that incorporated mesmerism, vitalism, and the Eliphas Lévi-influenced idea of the Astral Light. By the 1880s and 1890s, the occult novel was a recognised genre, with major contributions from Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) and The Hill of Dreams (1907), M. R. James’s ghost stories, Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows (1907) and The Wendigo (1910), and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and earlier tales.

These authors worked in what is sometimes called the “weird fiction” tradition, a hybrid of ghost story, fantasy, and occult fiction. They drew freely on the spiritualist, theosophical, and hermetic materials of their day, and they treated the occult less as a literal religion than as a literary resource. Blackwood, in particular, used the language of the Astral Light and of elemental nature spirits to construct a quasi-pantheist fantasy of nature, and his work is a useful example of how occult ideas can be absorbed and transformed by literature. The same is true of the twentieth-century “pastoral occult” of the New Nature Writing, in which figures such as W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, and D. H. Lawrence drew on Celtic, classical, and Hermetic traditions for their poetry and prose. The “Pastoral Occult” of the 1980s and 1990s is the subject of Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment (2004), one of the more interesting academic studies of the recent period.

The twentieth century saw the rise of the “weird tale” and the horror genre proper. H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), the American writer of the 1920s and 1930s, is the most important single figure. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos,” developed in collaboration with a network of correspondent-writers including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and August Derleth, was a fictional mythology of cosmic indifference, ancient gods, and forbidden books. Lovecraft drew on Arthur Machen, on the alchemical and astrological literature, and on a range of popular antiquarian and demonological sources. His influence on the popular imagination of the occult is enormous, even though he was a professed materialist. The Cthulhu Mythos is now a permanent fixture of the tabletop gaming industry, of the horror film, and of the broader pop-cultural lore. S. T. Joshi’s I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2013) is the most thorough modern biography.

The twentieth-century “occult detective” is a related genre, with roots in the late-Victorian period and significant twentieth-century development. The British writer Seabury Quinn, in the pages of Weird Tales magazine in the 1920s and 1930s, developed the figure of Jules de Grandin, a French occult detective who investigated supernatural crimes in a small New Jersey town. The British writer Dennis Wheatley, in a long series of novels beginning in the 1930s, treated the occultist as a serious adversary in a continuing world-historical conflict. The American writer Manly Wade Wellman, in his John the Balladeer stories, also of the 1940s and 1950s, used Appalachian folklore and the figure of a wandering folk musician to construct a related but distinct type. The British writer Michael Moorcock, in a series of novels from the 1960s onward, used the figure of Jerry Cornelius and a number of other protagonists to construct a satirical, late-modernist version of the occult detective. The modern fantasy novel, in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, and the more recent work of the British writers Susanna Clarke and Erin Morgenstern, has been a continuing recipient of the occult tradition. The American writer Victor LaValle, the British writer China Miéville, and the American writer Nghi Vo have produced some of the more recent examples of the form.

The pastoral occult, in the sense of a literary use of pagan, hermetic, and theosophical materials for the purposes of a literary nature-writing, has been a continuing tradition from Yeats and D. H. Lawrence through Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and, in a more biographical and confessional mode, the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits, 1982) and the Italian writer Roberto Calasso. The use of tarot, astrology, and hermetic symbolism in the popular novel has been a continuous feature of the literary field since the 1970s.

Film and Television

The occult film has a similarly long history. The first important example is probably the Danish film Häxan (1922), directed by Benjamin Christensen, which combined dramatised vignettes of medieval witchcraft with documentary material and silent-era special effects. Häxan was banned in several countries on its release and is now widely studied as a landmark in the history of the horror film. The Hammer horror films of the 1950s and 1960s, produced in Britain by Hammer Film Productions, made the vampire film, the werewolf film, and the witchcraft film a continuous part of popular cinema. The studio’s Dracula (1958), starring Christopher Lee, and its The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) established the gothic horror as a popular genre. The American film Rosemary’s Baby (1968), directed by Roman Polanski and adapted from Ira Levin’s 1967 novel, was the major popular event of the late 1960s.

The most consequential single work in the field is The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin, adapted from William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel of the same name. The film, which depicted the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old girl in a quiet Washington suburb, was a major popular event. It was widely discussed in the religious and medical press, accused of being blasphemous, and credited by some commentators with causing a measurable rise in religious attendance in the United States in the months after its release. Its depiction of the Catholic rite of exorcism was influential on the subsequent pop-cultural understanding of demonic possession. The “Exorcist curse,” the alleged series of deaths and accidents affecting cast and crew during production, has been a continuing feature of the film’s lore, although it has been investigated and found unremarkable by serious folklorists. The folklorist Joe Nickell examined the case in The Skeptical Inquirer in 1993 and found the deaths statistically unremarkable. The Kenneth Anger films Scorpio Rising (1963) and Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) form a separate, more experimental tradition of occult cinema that has been hugely influential on the avant-garde. For a survey of the music, film, and art that this kind of occult imagery has shaped, see the occult in music, film, and art.

The prestige occult drama is a more recent development. Television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Charmed (1998-2006), American Horror Story (2011-), Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-2020), and the streaming-era occult series including The Order (2019-2020) and Mayfair Witches (2023) have made the occult a recurring fixture of small-screen drama. The A24 theatrical films Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), both directed by Ari Aster, are the most discussed recent examples of the form; the 2010s wave of “elevated horror” produced a series of films, including The Witch (2015, Robert Eggers), Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele), The Babadook (2014, Jennifer Kent), It Follows (2014, David Robert Mitchell), and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016, André Øvredal), in which the occult, when it appears, is treated with a kind of serious, considered attention that earlier horror cinema had often avoided.

Music

The popular music of the post-war decades has been unusually rich in occult symbolism. The 1960s British rock bands, in particular, absorbed the available symbolism of the period with great speed. The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968), with its first-person Lucifer, the band’s deliberate use of the Satanic figure as a narrator of modern history, was a major pop-cultural event. The Beatles’ incorporation of Aleister Crowley’s image on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) sleeve, and the persistent rumour of Paul McCartney’s death, are recurring features of the period’s pop-cultural lore; the “Apple Records green apple” should be understood as a corporate-identity decision rather than as an alchemical symbol. The band Led Zeppelin, whose guitarist Jimmy Page was a serious student of Crowley’s work, used the four Hermetic symbols associated with the four members of the band on the Led Zeppelin IV (1971) album, and the album has been the subject of extensive critical discussion. Page acquired Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, Crowley’s former home, in 1970. The band Black Sabbath, formed in Birmingham in 1968, named itself after the 1963 Mario Bava film La maschera del demonio (released in English as Black Sunday and re-marketed in the early 1970s as Black Sabbath) and produced a series of albums in the early 1970s that are widely cited as the foundation of the heavy metal genre. The American punk band the Misfits, the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s, and the Swedish band Ghost, whose anonymous, anti-papal stage personas have made it a major pop-cultural presence, are continuing examples of the form. For a more detailed treatment, see the occult in music, film, and art.

The PMRC hearings of 1985, in which the Parents’ Music Resource Center, founded by Tipper Gore and others, campaigned for the labelling of records with explicit content, was a watershed event. The hearings produced a series of “explicit content” labels on recordings, including the now-familiar “Parental Advisory” sticker, and produced a counter-discourse in which metal and industrial bands used the labelling as a kind of marketing device. The hearings also produced Frank Zappa’s testimony, which is itself an important document in the cultural history of the period. The “Satanic Panic” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the wave of moral panic over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the United States, was a related phenomenon. The Panic has been thoroughly investigated and discredited, but it left a permanent mark on the popular understanding of the occult; the most thorough academic treatment is the Satanic Panic special issue of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (2017) and the longer historical work of the folklorist Bill Ellis.

Comics, Manga, and the Visual Afterlife

The graphic novel and the comic book have also been important vehicles for occult material. The 1970s saw the publication of several adult-oriented horror comics in the United States and Europe, including the Creepy and Eerie magazines of Warren Publishing and the work of Spanish and Italian horror comic artists. The Italian Diabolik series, beginning in 1962, was a major European presence. The British 2000 AD magazine, beginning in 1977, included the long-running occult-themed Sláine series by Pat Mills and Angie Kincaid, and the influential Nemesis the Warlock by Mills and Kevin O’Neill. The French Métal Hurlant magazine, founded in 1974 by Moebius, Philippe Druillet, and others, drew on a wide range of esoteric, science-fictional, and counter-cultural material. The Japanese manga tradition has produced several important occult-themed series, including Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow, the xxxHolic by CLAMP, and the various works of Junji Ito, the latter of whom is widely regarded as the most accomplished contemporary practitioner of the horror form in the manga idiom. The post-2000 American graphic novel has included the Locke & Key series by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez, the Fatale series by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and the Wytches series by Scott Snyder and Jock, all of which have made serious use of occult material.

Gaming, Fashion, and Design

The occult has been an important resource in the video game industry since the early 1980s. The 1981 game Castle Wolfenstein was an early example; the Final Fantasy series, beginning in 1987, made extensive use of tarot, astrological, and alchemical imagery; the 2001 game Silent Hill 2 was a serious psychological horror set in a small American town. The 2010s saw a major wave of “occult-themed” games, including the Witcher series, the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne (2015), and Pentiment (2022), which used a wide range of esoteric and historical material. The tabletop role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, originally published in 1981 by Chaosium, has been a major presence in the gaming field for over forty years, and has produced a substantial secondary literature. The use of grimoire and tarot iconography in video games is now a permanent feature of the field.

Fashion and design have also absorbed occult symbolism. The 2010s saw the rise of the “witch” or “mystic” aesthetic in fashion, with the use of pentagrams, sigils, and astrological imagery in major fashion houses. The use of the pentagram, the inverted cross, and the occult sigil as a fashion statement has been widespread, and has produced a continuing cultural conversation about the boundary between religious offence and the free use of symbolic vocabulary. The tattoo industry has incorporated occult symbolism for decades; the modern use of the sigil, the mandala, and the astrological glyph as a tattoo motif is a well-developed field.

The Sociology of Occult Popularity

Several patterns are visible across these cultural fields. The first is the consistent tendency of the popular to borrow from the marginal. The 1960s rock band, the 1990s prestige horror film, and the 2010s video game all draw on resources that, in their own time, were considered to be on the fringes of the available culture. The occult has been, in this sense, a continuing resource for the popular, and the popular has, in turn, returned the resource to the public. The “Satanic Panic” of the late 1980s, the “Pastoral Occult” of the 1990s (a term Alex Owen has used in the academic literature), and the “WitchTok” phenomenon of the early 2020s are all examples of this recycling.

The second pattern is the consistent use of the occult as a marker of seriousness, transgression, or world-historical depth. The use of the pentagram on an album cover, the use of the tarot in a film, the use of the grimoire in a video game — all of these signal, in the popular culture, that the artist is engaged with a deeper tradition. The actual content of the engagement is often thin, but the signalling function is real.

The third pattern is the way the popular has, in spite of itself, returned attention to the historical record. The success of the “WitchTok” hashtag on the video platform TikTok in 2020-2021, for example, drove a substantial increase in sales of historical and academic works on the history of witchcraft. The success of the prestige occult drama has driven interest in the history of ritual magic. The continued use of the tarot in popular divination has driven a small but real growth in the serious academic study of cartomancy. The popular and the academic are not as separate as they are often presented, and the popular is, in some respects, doing useful cultural work for the academic.

The academic study of Western esotericism, which has developed as a serious field since the 1990s, is generally careful to distinguish itself from the popular understanding of the same materials. Scholars in the field treat the history of esotericism as a serious intellectual tradition with its own conceptual resources, and they have produced a substantial body of work on the history of alchemy, astrology, hermeticism, kabbalah, and ritual magic. The most important academic centres for the study of esotericism include the University of Amsterdam (where Wouter Hanegraaff holds the chair), the École pratique des hautes études (Section des sciences religieuses) in Paris, the Warburg Institute in London, and a growing number of European and North American institutions. The field has its own journals, conferences, and reference works, including the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, the Aries journal (published by Springer), and the Esoterica archive at Michigan State University. The historical background is set out in the history of the occult.

The popular use of the same materials is, by contrast, eclectic and often historically careless. The pentagram, the inverted cross, the “Satanic” pentagram of the Church of Satan, the “Leviathan” sigil, the “Sigil of Baphomet,” and a wide range of other symbols circulate in popular use without any clear historical or religious context. The “tarot” used in popular New Age divination is a late-eighteenth-century adaptation of a much older cartomantic tradition; the divinatory tarot is generally dated to Antoine Court de Gébelin’s Monde Primitif (1781) and the work of Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) in the 1780s, with the late-Victorian period being an elaboration of the divinatory use, not the origin. The “horoscope” used in popular astrology is a twentieth-century construction: sun-sign astrology in the form now familiar is generally dated to R. H. Naylor’s column in the Sunday Express in 1930. The popular “spell” book, the “witchcraft” manual, and the “ritual magic” guide are part of an active publishing market that draws on a wide range of historical sources, but the popular guides are not always in close contact with the historical record.

This gap between the academic field and the popular understanding is, in some respects, unavoidable. The popular use of a symbol or a practice is not, in itself, a problem. The use of the pentagram in fashion, the use of the tarot in a divination practice, the use of an astrological chart in a personal context — all of these are legitimate in their own terms. The concern is only that the popular understanding is not always well informed by the historical record, and that the result is a popular lore that is rich in imagery and thin in substance. The user of the popular lore is, in many cases, not a student of the historical record, and it is the academic’s job, not the user’s, to keep the historical question alive. For the more focused treatment of the cultural afterlife, see the occult in music, film, and art, and for the figures who shaped the modern occult revival, see figures who shaped modern occultism.

Sources and Further Reading

  • Wouter Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2005) — the standard reference work for the academic field.
  • Colin Wilson, The Strength to Dream: Imagination and the Search for Meaning (London: Gollancz, 1962) — an older but still suggestive general treatment.
  • Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  • Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) — the most thorough study of the “Pastoral Occult” of the 1980s-1990s.
  • S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2013).
  • S. K. Stratton-Kent, Geosophia: The Argo of Magic (Bournemouth: Hadean Press, 2010) — a more recent academic contribution to grimoire history.
  • John J. Collins (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Hell (New York: Visible Ink Press, 1999) — a useful reference for the popular cultural figure of Hell.
  • Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III, The Necronomicon Source Book (Weston, Ontario: Prometheus, 1998) — the most thorough scholarly guide to the most-discussed occult book of the twentieth century.
  • David P. Silverman, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker, the Gilded Age, and the American Way of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) — useful for the Stoker case in the wider American context.
  • Bill Ellis, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000) — the most thorough scholarly treatment of the Satanic Panic.