Liber XXII · Occultism · Chapter VIII: The Occult Revival
The Occult Revival: Magic and Hidden Wisdom in the Modern Age
The occult revival of the nineteenth century: mesmerism, Spiritualism, Lévi, Theosophy and the Golden Dawn, and why magic flourished in an age of science.
The occult revival is the name historians give to the remarkable growth of interest in magic, spirits and hidden wisdom in Europe and North America between roughly the 1840s and the First World War. It drew on older currents such as mesmerism and Swedenborgianism, gathered pace with Spiritualism after 1848, and reached its classic form in the writings of Éliphas Lévi, the Theosophical Society of 1875 and initiatory orders such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn of 1888. Far from being a relic of the past, it was a thoroughly modern response to science, religious doubt and social change.
What Historians Mean by the Occult Revival§
The phrase "occult revival" suggests that something old was brought back to life, and nineteenth-century occultists certainly saw themselves as restorers of a lost wisdom. Historians, however, stress how much was new. The revival produced new words (occultisme is first recorded in the 1840s), new institutions (the Theosophical Society, the Golden Dawn, the Martinist Order), a new publishing industry of journals and cheap textbooks, and new syntheses that joined Kabbalah, tarot, astrology and Hindu or Buddhist concepts in ways no earlier age had imagined.
James Webb, in The Occult Underground (1974), interpreted the movement as a "flight from reason" by those disoriented by modernity. Later historians, notably Alex Owen in The Place of Enchantment (2004), argued instead that occultists embraced modern ideas of the self, of psychology and of individual experience, and that occultism was one of the ways modernity itself was formed. For definitions, see what is occultism.
Roots: Illuminism, Swedenborg and Mesmerism§
The revival had a long eighteenth-century prehistory. Masonic lodges spread across Europe after 1717 and spawned "high degrees" with chivalric, Rosicrucian and alchemical themes. In France the illuminist circles of Martinès de Pasqually and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin cultivated a theurgic and mystical Christianity. The Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) described journeys through heaven and hell and a doctrine of correspondences between spiritual and natural things, and his followers founded a New Church in the 1780s.
The most important bridge to the nineteenth century was mesmerism. Franz Anton Mesmer's theory of a universal magnetic fluid, and the discovery by his disciple Puységur of a "magnetic sleep" in which subjects seemed to diagnose illness and see at a distance, gave the revival both a model of invisible forces and a technique for exploring altered states. German Romantic philosophers and physicians, writing on the "night side" of nature, fused magnetism with older Paracelsian and theosophical ideas.
Spiritualism and the Democratization of the Supernatural§
In 1848 the "rappings" associated with the Fox sisters at Hydesville, New York, launched modern Spiritualism. Within a decade home circles, table-turning and trance mediums had spread across America and Europe. Spiritualism mattered to the occult revival in several ways. It demonstrated a vast public appetite for evidence of a world beyond the senses; it gave women a public voice as mediums and lecturers; and it posed questions about the nature of spirits and the mind that occultists answered in their own way. In France, Allan Kardec's Spiritism (1857) added reincarnation and a moral philosophy.
Many occultists were critical of Spiritualism. Lévi and Blavatsky argued that most séance phenomena were produced not by the dead but by the medium's own forces or by lower entities of the astral plane, and they presented occultism as a disciplined science in contrast to the passive receptivity of the séance room.
Lévi, Blavatsky and the Search for an Ancient Wisdom§
The intellectual centre of the revival was the claim that a single ancient wisdom underlay all religions. Éliphas Lévi, in Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–1856) and Histoire de la magie (1860), set out a doctrine of the "astral light", a universal medium of imagination and will, and linked the twenty-two tarot trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. His work inspired the French occultists of the 1880s and 1890s and, through translation, the British magical orders.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) widened the horizon to Asia. With Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge she founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875, published Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), and moved the society's headquarters to Adyar in India. Theosophy taught of hidden Masters, cosmic cycles, root races and the evolution of the soul through reincarnation, and it popularised concepts such as karma for Western readers. Its global reach made it the most influential single organisation of the revival.
Initiatory Orders of the Fin de Siècle§
The final decades of the century saw the founding of orders that offered structured initiation in occult knowledge. In England the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (1866) admitted Master Masons to a Rosicrucian system; the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (active from about 1884) taught practical occultism by correspondence; and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, created a graded curriculum of Kabbalah, astrology, tarot, geomancy and ritual magic. In Paris, Stanislas de Guaita's Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (1888) and Papus's Martinist Order (organised by 1891) played a similar role, as described in French occultism. German orders followed in the early twentieth century.
These groups were small, often a few hundred members at most, but they included writers, artists and professionals, and their teachings outlived them through publications. The family tree of their successors is traced in magical orders.
Why the Occult Flourished: Science, Doubt and Modernity§
Historians offer several explanations for the revival's success. The challenge of geology and Darwinian evolution to traditional Christianity left many educated people seeking a spirituality that did not depend on biblical literalism. At the same time, the triumphs of science, from electricity and telegraphy to X-rays, made invisible forces plausible and suggested that the universe held more than the senses revealed. Occultists presented their teachings as "spiritual science" that could reconcile faith and reason.
Social change mattered too. Cheap printing, railways and the post allowed small groups to communicate internationally. Colonial contact with India and Egypt fed a fascination with the "wisdom of the East", though often in idealised forms. Women, excluded from most churches' ministry, found leadership roles in Spiritualism and Theosophy, a theme explored by historians such as Joy Dixon. And the cult of individual experience in late nineteenth-century culture favoured religious paths based on personal initiation rather than institutional authority.
After 1914: War, Mourning and a Second Revival§
The First World War brought a surge of interest in Spiritualism as bereaved families sought contact with the dead; the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge's book Raymond (1916), about his son killed in Flanders, became a bestseller. Between the wars occult movements fragmented into new forms, from Dion Fortune's Society of the Inner Light to Aleister Crowley's Thelema and the racial occultism that flourished on the German far right (see German occultism).
A second great revival came in the 1960s and 1970s, when the counterculture rediscovered the writings of the first. Its story is told in contemporary occultism.
Frequently asked questions§
When was the occult revival?§
Most historians date it from the mid-nineteenth century, often taking Spiritualism (1848) or Lévi's Dogme et rituel (1854–1856) as starting points, to the First World War. Its peak is usually placed in the 1880s and 1890s, the decades of the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn.
Was the occult revival a rejection of science?§
Mostly not. Occultists generally claimed that their teachings were scientific, borrowed the vocabulary of physics and evolution, and welcomed investigations by scientists. What they rejected was materialism, the view that matter and its laws were the whole of reality.
Who were the most important figures of the occult revival?§
Key figures include Éliphas Lévi, Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, Anna Kingsford, Papus, Stanislas de Guaita, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, William Wynn Westcott and, at the end of the period, Aleister Crowley and Rudolf Steiner.
Sources and further reading§
- Histoire de la magie — Éliphas Lévi, 1860
- Isis Unveiled — Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 1877
- Raymond, or Life and Death — Oliver Lodge, 1916
- The Occult Underground — James Webb, 1974
- Madame Blavatsky's Baboon — Peter Washington, 1993
- Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England — Joy Dixon, 2001
- The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern — Alex Owen, 2004
- Occultism in a Global Perspective — Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic, 2013