Occultism and Science: Rivals, Allies and Rejected Knowledge

Occultism and science have been rivals, allies and mirror images of each other for more than three centuries. Early modern natural philosophers studied alchemy and occult qualities alongside mechanics; nineteenth-century occultists modelled their teachings on electricity, the ether and evolution; and twentieth-century writers enlisted radioactivity, the fourth dimension and quantum physics in support of mystical worldviews. Mainstream science has not confirmed the distinctive claims of occultism, but historians now treat the long conversation between the two as essential to understanding how modern ideas of legitimate knowledge were formed.

From Occult Qualities to Newton's Alchemy§

In medieval and Renaissance thought, the "occult" was a respectable part of natural philosophy: occult qualities were real powers, like magnetism, whose causes were hidden. Astrology was taught in universities and alchemy overlapped with pharmacy and metallurgy, as described in the occult sciences. The mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century set out to explain everything by matter in motion and turned "occult quality" into a term of abuse, yet the boundary was never as clean as later accounts suggested. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz complained that Newton's universal gravitation, acting at a distance without any mechanism, was itself an occult force.

Newton's own papers show how porous the boundary was. When a large collection of his manuscripts was sold at auction in 1936, buyers discovered how much he had written on alchemy, theology and biblical prophecy; his alchemical papers alone are commonly estimated at around a million words. John Maynard Keynes, who bought many of them, famously called him "the last of the magicians". Later historians, notably Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, William Newman and Lawrence Principe, have shown that Newton and Robert Boyle practised "chymistry", a field in which transmutational alchemy and experimental chemistry had not yet separated. Their work is part of the wider story of Western alchemy.

Spiritual Science: Fluids, Forces and the Ether§

The occultism of the nineteenth century grew up in the shadow of spectacular scientific success, and it responded not by rejecting science but by claiming to complete it. Mesmerists spoke of a magnetic fluid; the German chemist Karl von Reichenbach described a vital "od" force in the 1840s; Spiritualists called their séances a "spiritual telegraph" linking this world with the next. Éliphas Lévi's "astral light" and the Theosophists' subtle planes were presented as forms of matter or energy finer than those known to physics, awaiting discovery by better instruments.

Physics itself seemed to invite such speculation. The luminiferous ether, a weightless medium thought to fill space and carry light and electromagnetic waves, was a central concept of Victorian physics, and several physicists wondered whether it might also be the medium of mind or of the afterlife. The chemist William Crookes, discoverer of thallium and inventor of the radiometer, investigated the mediums D. D. Home and Florence Cook in the 1870s and spoke of a "psychic force"; the physicist Oliver Lodge, a pioneer of radio, became a leading advocate of survival after death. Both served as presidents of the Society for Psychical Research, whose investigations are described in clairvoyance and psychical research. The historian Richard Noakes has shown how seriously such questions were debated within British physics.

The Fourth Dimension and Hidden Space§

Mathematics supplied another bridge. The development of non-Euclidean geometry and of spaces with more than three dimensions suggested to some writers that the spirit world might simply be a higher dimension, invisible to beings confined to three. In 1877–1878 the Leipzig astrophysicist Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner held sittings with the American medium Henry Slade and claimed that knots tied in sealed loops of cord proved the existence of a fourth spatial dimension; his account appeared in English as Transcendental Physics (1880). Most of his colleagues regarded Slade as a conjurer, and Zöllner's reputation suffered.

The English mathematician Charles Howard Hinton developed the idea more soberly in A New Era of Thought (1888) and The Fourth Dimension (1904), proposing exercises with coloured cubes to train the imagination to visualise higher space. The Russian writer P. D. Ouspensky built a mystical philosophy on the same foundation in Tertium Organum (1912), and the art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson has documented how the "fourth dimension", in this popular hyperspace sense rather than Einstein's spacetime, inspired Cubist and other modern artists.

Radioactivity, Transmutation and Occult Chemistry§

The discovery of radioactivity at the end of the nineteenth century gave alchemy an unexpected afterlife. In 1901–1902 Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy showed that radioactive elements change into other elements, and according to a later account Soddy exclaimed that this was transmutation, only for Rutherford to warn him that they would be taken for alchemists. Popular writers and occultists seized on the parallel, and Soddy himself discussed the old alchemical dream in his lectures on radium. French occult alchemists such as François Jollivet-Castelot argued that modern chemistry was vindicating their tradition, and the playwright August Strindberg conducted alchemical experiments in Paris in the 1890s.

The Theosophists went furthest. Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater claimed to examine atoms by clairvoyant vision, publishing their descriptions in articles from 1895 and in the book Occult Chemistry (1908). Their diagrams, which showed elaborate structures built from "ultimate physical atoms", bore no relation to the atomic physics that emerged in the following decades, though admirers have periodically tried to match them to quarks or isotopes. Mark Morrisson's Modern Alchemy traces how occult and scientific discourse about transmutation shaped one another in this period.

Psychology, Synchronicity and Quantum Mysticism§

In the twentieth century the dialogue moved to psychology and the new physics. C. G. Jung interpreted alchemy as a projection of psychological processes, most fully in Psychology and Alchemy (1944), and with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli he published Naturerklärung und Psyche (1952), translated as The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, which proposed "synchronicity", meaningful coincidence without causal connection, as a principle alongside causality. The collaboration between a Nobel-winning physicist and a psychologist of the occult remains one of the most debated episodes in the subject.

From the 1970s, books such as Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) argued that quantum mechanics and relativity echoed the insights of Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist mysticism. A small group of physicists in Berkeley, later chronicled by the historian David Kaiser, explored quantum theory alongside parapsychology and Eastern thought. The resulting "quantum mysticism" became a staple of the New Age and of later self-help teachings, including the law of attraction. Most physicists reject such readings, arguing that quantum phenomena such as entanglement do not imply that consciousness shapes reality or that minds communicate at a distance. At a more practical level, the rocket engineer Jack Parsons (1914–1952), a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was also a devoted follower of Aleister Crowley, a reminder that scientific and occult careers could coexist in one life.

Demarcation, Testing and Rejected Knowledge§

Scientists and philosophers have repeatedly used occult disciplines as test cases for the line between science and pseudoscience. Karl Popper cited astrology as an example of a theory that evades refutation, and in 1975 a statement titled "Objections to Astrology", signed by 186 scientists, was published in The Humanist. Astrologers responded that their art had never been properly tested; Shawn Carlson's double-blind experiment, published in Nature in 1985, found that astrologers could not match natal charts to personality profiles better than chance. The French researcher Michel Gauquelin's claimed "Mars effect" linking planetary positions to sporting eminence provoked decades of dispute without being accepted. For astrology's own history, see astrology.

Historians and sociologists approach the question differently. The sociologist Thomas Gieryn described "boundary-work", the rhetorical and institutional labour by which scientists define what counts as science. Wouter Hanegraaff has characterised Western esotericism as the "rejected knowledge" of modern culture, set aside by Protestant theologians and Enlightenment thinkers alike, and Egil Asprem has studied how esoteric writers adapted to the scientific naturalism of the early twentieth century. On this view, occultism is not simply science's opposite but a body of ideas shaped by its exclusion, a theme developed in what is Western esotericism. Recognising that history does not imply that occult claims are true; it means that the borderline between them and science has a history worth understanding.

Frequently asked questions§

Was Isaac Newton an occultist?§

Newton wrote extensively on alchemy and biblical prophecy and took both seriously, but he did not belong to an occult movement in the modern sense, which did not yet exist. Historians now see his alchemy as part of the "chymistry" of his time, closely tied to his experimental work and his theology.

Did nineteenth-century scientists believe in the occult?§

Some did. William Crookes, Oliver Lodge, Alfred Russel Wallace and Johann Zöllner, among others, investigated mediums and defended at least some psychic phenomena. They remained a minority, and their colleagues often criticised their methods and conclusions.

What is quantum mysticism?§

It is the claim, popular since the 1970s, that quantum physics confirms mystical or occult teachings, for example that consciousness creates reality or that everything is interconnected in a spiritual sense. Most physicists consider this a misreading of quantum theory, though the parallels drawn by writers such as Capra continue to attract readers.

Sources and further reading§

• Transcendental Physics — Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, 1880
• Occult Chemistry — Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, 1908
• The Fourth Dimension — Charles Howard Hinton, 1904
• The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche — C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, 1955
• The Tao of Physics — Fritjof Capra, 1975
• The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art — Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 1983
• The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought — Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, 1991
• Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory — Mark S. Morrisson, 2007
• The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939 — Egil Asprem, 2014
• Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain — Richard Noakes, 2019