What is Occultism?

The history of a controversial idea

I study a variety of religion or spirituality which is known as occultism or esotericism.

Occultism is not a religion in its own right - it is better described as a way of being religious. Many religions contain occult or esoteric currents and movements.

What it means literally

The term occultism comes from the Latin occultus, ‘hidden’.

In similar vein, the word esoteric literally means something like ‘belonging to an inner circle’. It is related to the Greek esóterikos.

In line with these meanings, occultism or esotericism is often seen as a form of religion or spirituality which is practised by small, private groups of people and which involves mysterious hidden teachings. The words ‘occult’ and ‘esoteric’ may call to mind The Da Vinci Code, secret meetings of Knights Templars and Freemasons, or lurid ideas about Satanists practising black magic.

The first thing that we need to do is to separate fact from myth. You can safely forget any conspiracy theories that you may have heard about secret machinations, the Illuminati and so on. The reality of occult and esoteric religion is quite different. It often is practiced in small groups or by individuals, but they are unlikely to be Hollywood villains. And esoteric ideas sometimes become the basis of publicly visible mass movements: examples include Sufi Islam and Hasidic Judaism. In modern times, occult teachings are freely accessible in mainstream bookshops and on the internet. There are no real secrets.

Occult teachings aren’t fundamentally very mysterious or difficult to understand (although, as with all theological systems, they can be elaborated in highly complex and detailed ways). That said, the commitment required to carry out occult practices, such as meditation and rituals, does mean that not many people are committed occultists.

My definition

Scholars have attempted to define occultism and esotericism in different ways. For example, the scholar Antoine Faivre put forward a famous six-part definition. I prefer a simpler approach.

Occultism or esotericism consists of beliefs and/or practices based on the premise that the world is pervaded by supernatural energies which are directly accessible to the individual.

Occult and esoteric forms of religion tend to be pantheistic or panentheistic - that is, they believe that the entirety of the universe is divine or lives within the divine. This can be distinguished from the kind of theology that you find in mainstream Abrahamic traditions: i.e. there is a creator God who is radically separate from the material world that he created (and indeed confusing the two is a very serious sin: idolatry or shirk). Abrahamic traditions also tend to set limits to individual experience by outlawing certain kinds of direct engagement with the divine and/or restricting them to a professional priesthood. It is well known that orthodox Christianity stigmatises ‘the occult’: you can say all the prayers you want, but conducting rituals to interact practically with the spiritual world is forbidden, unless they happen to be the officially approved sacraments of the church.

There are several other features of occultism that tend to flow from the basic premise that I have set out above.

Magic. If the world is pervaded by supernatural energies which are accessible to the individual, it makes sense to believe that individuals can change aspects of the world by using supernatural methods - i.e. magic.

Psychic phenomena. Similarly, if the world is pervaded by supernatural energies that are accessible to the individual, it is reasonable to believe in phenomena like telepathy and clairvoyance.

Correspondences. This is a key occult idea. If the universe is not a random collection of lifeless atoms but rather a single whole which exists within and/or emanates from a divine source, it becomes possible to believe that invisible links exist between different elements of the cosmos and that certain patterns are repeated on different levels of existence. These ideas are linked with the concept of synchronicities - that is, coincidences which are not generated by ‘normal’ causal mechanisms.

An example of this style of thought is the theory of the macrocosm and the microcosm. This holds that the human person is a tiny reflection of the universe as a whole. A more specific example is that occultists might believe that there are mystical connections between fire, lions, the colour vermillion, the Last Judgment card in the Tarot, blood, and the Archangel Michael.

Beliefs in correspondences and synchronicities can also underlie a belief in divination. If patterns among heavenly bodies on the macro level can correspond to mundane events on the human level, astrology becomes a valid activity. The same can be said about patterns on a smaller-than-human level. The patterns formed by, say, a set of Tarot cards or tea leaves can be read to derive information about what is happening to the reader’s clients.

Finally, many occultists believe in reincarnation. This does not necessarily flow naturally from the premise that I have noted above, but it has tended to be a popular idea in occult circles, largely because it was promoted by the ancient Greek philosophers who founded the Western esoteric tradition.

History - The ancient Greeks and Neoplatonism

Occult and esoteric elements can be found in cultures all over the world. My own area of focus is what is known as the Western esoteric tradition - a bundle of varieties of esotericism that can, broadly speaking, be traced back to ancient Greece and other eastern Mediterranean cultures.

Various occultic movements existed in ancient Greece (I’m writing a book about this at the moment, as it happens). The first that we know of was a mysterious movement known as Orphism, which seems to go back to the sixth century BCE. This was closely followed by the school that grew up around the philosopher Pythagoras - in the ancient world, philosophy was linked to what we would today call religion and spirituality. The philosopher Plato also had a liking for esoteric ideas, and this hugely contributed to their popularity. Egyptian influence came in through a movement known as Hermeticism, which combined native Egyptian religious thought with ideas imported by Greek colonists. In addition, we may mention here the movement (or collection of movements) known as Gnosticism, which was more radical than most esoteric movements in regarding the material world as evil.

Of special importance to occult and esoteric history is a particular iteration of Plato’s philosophy which is known as Neoplatonism. This flourished from the third century CE onwards. The Neoplatonists believed that the cosmos emanates or flows from a perfect, ineffable divine principle known as the One (or God). The One is not an anthropomorphic deity, and it did not create the world like Jehovah in the book of Genesis. It overflows with superabundance and generates everything else, like a spring pouring forth water. There are various layers of reality that flow from the One, of which the lowest is the material world. But things in the lower levels experience an urge to return back towards the One (this is known as epistrophé or 'turning'). The human soul therefore desires to turn back and ascend to its source - although accomplishing this ascent may take more than one lifetime. The Neoplatonists were divided on how to bring about the return to the One. Some thought that contemplative meditation would suffice. Another view was that ritual was needed. This was known as theurgy, or divine magic.

History - The Kabbalah and the Renaissance

Occultic thought made its way into Christian theology, in part as a result of Neoplatonism merging into Christianity. It also made its way into Jewish thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through the esoteric system known as the Kabbalah, which was influenced by Neoplatonism (as well as by earlier traditions of Jewish mysticism).

Kabbalistic writers wrote of a transcendent God from which 10 divine powers (sephiroth) emanated. The sephiroth were in turn interlinked by 22 pathways. This model was connected with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the numbers 1 to 10; and also with the observations that the phrase “God said” is used 10 times in the opening sections of the book of Genesis and that God is said to have undertaken 22 other creative actions.

The Kabbalah had influence well beyond the boundaries of Europe’s oppressed Jewish minority. With the coming of the Renaissance, there rapidly developed a tradition of Christianised Kabbalah, led by the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522) and the Italian prodigy Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494).

More generally, the Renaissance saw a revival of interest in astrology, alchemy, magic and the other occult arts. Contemporary scholars discovered similarities between Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and Kabbalah, and they developed the idea that there is an essential core of philosophical and religious truth which represents the common denominator of all religions, or the basis from which all religions derive. The central figures of early Renaissance occultism were the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and the above-mentioned Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who was Ficino’s student. Like other Renaissance occultists, Ficino believed in working a magia naturalis or natural magic. This was influenced by the theurgy of the Neoplatonists. As Kocku von Stuckrad summarises it:

This ‘natural magic’ assumes that the cosmos is permeated with an energy integral to nature itself. As human beings are embedded in the energetic field of the universe, they can investigate this energy and use it to understand God’s dominion.

The Swiss doctor and alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541) put it more succinctly: “Magic is natural, because nature itself is magical”.

As for Pico, his major contribution to occultic scholarship was a collection of esoteric theories known as the 900 Theses. These derived from a mixture of Christian theology, Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, and other influences including Aristotle, Zoroastrianism and mediaeval Islamic thought. Pico planned to debate his theses in Rome with experts from all over Europe, but Pope Innocent VIII drew the line at this and he had to content himself with publishing them in written form. Pico and Ficino directly influenced the German writer Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535). Other prominent Renaissance occultists included John Dee (1527-1608/09), Sir Edward Kelley (1555-1597), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Robert Fludd (1574-1637), Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and Athanasius Kircher (1601/02-1680).

History - The Rosicrucians and Freemasonry

In 1614, a strange pamphlet entitled Fama Fraternitatis was published in Cassel in what is now Germany. This purported to be a manifesto of a order of mystics who traced their descent to a mediaeval character called Christian Rosenkreuz. Two further publications in the same vein followed. The pamphlets incorporated familiar occult themes, such as secret societies of adepts and invisible correspondences within the universe, within a utopian Christian framework. What was going on?

A hoax, in short. The ‘Rosicrucian’ movement was an invention (one of the prime movers was a Lutheran theologian called Johannes Valentinus Andreae). But the idea of a secret Rosicrucian order was too good not to put into practice. And so, inevitably, real-life Rosicrucian groups came into existence, some of which still exist. They were bound up with the growing social movement known as Freemasonry.

Freemasonry had its roots in the mediaeval craft guilds of ‘operative’ stonemasons. From the seventeenth century onwards, it developed into a network of fraternal lodges and orders for wealthy men who had no connection with the building trade. It incorporated occult ideas and symbols, although it is debatable how many of its members knew or cared about the significance of these. At once a social, religious, political and philanthropic movement, it developed numerous branches and offshoots, ranging from the somewhat staid English Grand Lodge to various exotic Continental European varieties.

History - The Occult Revival

The coming of the Enlightenment and its project of clear-thinking rationalism spelt the beginning of the end for occultism as a part of mainstream European culture - although some scholars continued to combine esoteric interests with interests in ‘real’ science, including G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716), who saw creation as a single large organism, and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), who inspired a tradition of Christian esotericism which is still going today.

Swedenborg would later influence the Spiritualist movement, which began in America in the late 1840s. Spiritualism was a kind of hybrid of occultism and Protestant Christianity. It took on esoteric beliefs in a world pervaded by spirits which could be contacted through psychic powers (and, in some variants, it accepted reincarnation). But it behaved like a radical Christian sect. It is an example of an esoterically-inclined movement which was exoteric in its operation. It turned into a mass movement, and in many of its expressions it developed a democratic or indeed socialist ethos.

One of the key figures of nineteenth-century occultism was the French magician Eliphas Lévi (1810-1875). Lévi considered himself a Catholic, and he initially planned on following a career in the priesthood. He was a prolific writer, and his work influenced generations of modern esotericists on both sides of the Channel. He both recapitulated the themes of the historic esoteric tradition and introduced developments of his own - promoting the Tarot deck as an occult tool, for example, and making creative use of the pentagram symbol. Lévi's works are filled with purple Romantic prose which is sometimes deliberately obscure. His most famous work begins with this passage:

Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvellous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed....

The later Victorian period saw a general increase in interest in esoteric subjects - this is sometimes known as the Occult Revival. As part of this trend, two particularly influential occultic organisations came into being: the Theosophical Society (founded 1875) and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888).

The Theosophical Society, whose guiding spirit was the Ukrainian occultist Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), did a great deal to shape modern esotericism - as well as Indian nationalism and the careers of Nehru and Gandhi. In Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky blended Western esotericism with Hindu and Buddhist teachings drawn from Britain’s expanding colonial empire. Like the Renaissance esotericists, she taught the existence of a universal religion from which all other religions descended. The influence of Theosophy, which continues in existence as a movement, was carried on into the twentieth century by figures including Annie Besant (1847-1933); Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who founded a Christian variant of it known as Anthroposophy; and the heretical bishop Charles Leadbeater (1854-1934).

The Golden Dawn emerged from Freemasonry, via a Rosicrucian society called the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA). Its leading figures included W. W. Westcott (1848-1925), who was a London doctor; A. E. Waite (1857-1942), who was a Christian mystic; and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918), who was a kind of general-purpose eccentric. The Golden Dawn was significant for combining Christian and pagan symbolism: its adherents venerated Jesus Christ alongside Isis, Osiris and other ancient deities. In a sense, it was perhaps the first pagan religious organisation of modern times. The Golden Dawn and its successor groups played a huge role in the development of the modern magical tradition, and their alumni included figures as diverse as the great Irish poet W. B. Yates (1865-1939); the psychotherapist and author Dion Fortune (1890-1946); and the notorious Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Crowley was the child of Christian fundamentalists who never really gave up rebelling against his upbringing. He wasn’t a very nice man, but his reputation as a devil-worshipper is largely the result of people taking his trolling too literally.

Occultism today

The occult tradition continued to gain strength in Western society as the twentieth century unfolded. To some extent, it broke out of its idiosyncratic corner of contemporary culture and into other fields. In particular, it found its way into broadly mainstream theories concerning mythology and psychology, including those of Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung. It also, unfortunately, found its way into radical right-wing politics. Esoteric ideas appealed to the extreme-right Italian writer Julius Evola, as well as to certain members of the Nazi Party (although Adolf Hitler, who regarded himself as a hard-headed man of science, regarded this sort of thing with contempt).

There are some fairly well-known expressions of occultism around today. Examples include the New Age movement, which became popular from the 1970s onwards; Wicca, the pagan religion that seeks to revive a creative interpretation of pre-modern witchcraft; and Thelema, the movement created by Aleister Crowley. Crowley is officially a mainstream figure since he appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). You can find occultism in some other slightly surprising places too, including the music of David Bowie, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and arguably Star Wars.

Occultism seems to be a persisting and ineradicable form of human religiosity and spirituality. It will probably exist for as long as humans exist.

May the Force be with you.

Resources

There are numerous resources available for learning about occultism and esotericism.

Books

The best introductory text is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions. It is also worth mentioning Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism.

Perhaps the leading scholar currently writing on occultism and esotericism is Wouter J. Hanegraaff, whose works include the entry-level text Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed; a history of esotericism in scholarship, Esotericism and the Academy; and the more specialised Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination on the Hermetic tradition.

Other prominent academics working on occultism and esotericism include (without limitation) Joscelyn Godwin, Egil Asprem, Christopher McIntosh and Henrik Bogdan. Among earlier scholars, Antoine Faivre and Frances Yates were also highly influential in the field.

The best popular writer on occult subjects is perhaps Gary Lachman, who once played bass for Blondie and has published a series of books on esoteric themes and personalities. From an earlier generation, we might mention Colin Wilson, a British author who wrote extensively on esoterica and the paranormal. The best popular writer who is explicitly coming from a practitioner’s perspective is the American occultist Lon Milo DuQuette.

If like me you happen to live in London, it is always worth visiting our main esoteric bookshops, Treadwells, Watkins and the Atlantis.

Academic centres

Here in Britain, the only dedicated university institution for the study of esotericism is the University of Exeter's Centre for Magic and Esotericism. However, there are also relevant collections of material in the University of London's Senate House Library and in the Warburg Institute, which has strong connections with esoteric scholarship.

Online

Disclaimer: I do not necessarily endorse everything mentioned below. Some sources are very reliable. Others provide good information alongside less edifying material. Discretion is advised.

Online libraries of occult and esoteric texts and other resources can be found at the Esoteric Archives, the Hermetic Library and the Digital Occult Library.

There are various podcasts and Youtube channels on occult and esoteric subjects, including the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP), Mystai, The Postmodern Iconoclast, What Magic is This?, Rune Soup and Arcanvm.

Ethan Doyle White published a fantastic series of interviews with scholars and practitioners of esotericism on his blog.

A number of scholars and practitioners maintain a presence on the internet, including Stephen Skinner, Amy Hale, Caroline Tully, Phil Hine, Sue Terry and Marco Visconti.