Fundamentos

With the ‘media revolution’ of the eighteenth century and the dwindling ability of church and state to censor or prohibit dissent-ing voices, all the bodies of traditional literature discussed above became available to larger and larger audiences. Next to a stream of sceptical literature that dismissed ‘the occult’ as ridiculous superstition, publishing entrepreneurs catered to the public’s curi-osity about ancient secrets and mysteries. The ‘modernist occult’ is marked by complex and multifaceted attempts at coming to terms with modern science and Enlightenment rationality, combining a deeply felt resistance against the ‘disenchantment of the world’

with an equally strong attraction to modern scientific models. As

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Europeans and Americans entered the nineteenth century, nobody could deny that society was moving with accelerating speed into new directions, and thus the question became relevant of whether

‘progress’ meant a radical break with ‘tradition’ or, rather, entailed a transformation that allowed ancient truths to be perceived in a new light.

It is no coincidence, then, that the two most influential forces of innovation in Western esotericism during the nineteenth cen-tury had their origins in the work of Enlightenment scientists. The Swedish naturalist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) studied philosophy, mathematics, physics and applied mechanics and went on to produce an impressive oeuvre in the physical and organic sciences. Trained in the Cartesian philosophy of his day, with its strict separation between matter and spirit, he experienced a deep religious crisis in 1744: forced to admit to himself that his scien-tific explorations led him to the ‘abyss’ of pure materialism, he prayed to God for help and was granted a vision of Christ. After this pivotal event, he spent the rest of his life writing visionary works, in Latin, on the true meaning of the bible and the spiritual realities of heaven and hell. Deeply influenced by Pietist concepts of ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ levels of reality, his theory of cor-respondences claimed that the visible world mirrors the invisible one without any need for causal relations between the two; and his works were filled with matter-of-fact descriptions of his visionary travels to heaven and hell and his conversations with spirits and angels. While followers created a Swedenborgian ‘New Church’

after his death, the influence of Swedenborg’s writings is by no means limited to that community: they have inspired a wide range of major writers, poets, painters and even composers, and its basic ideas were picked up and developed in new directions, as will be seen, by spiritualist, occultist and metaphysical authors and practi-tioners during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The second major innovation came from a German physician, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who invented a theory and practice of healing known as Animal Magnetism, later also known as Mesmerism. Mesmer claimed that an invisible ‘fluid’ permeated all organic bodies, and all illnesses were caused by disturbances or blockages in the flow of this universal life force. By making ‘passes’

over the patient’s body, the normal circulation of energy could be restored, and the resulting transition to health and normality was

typically marked by a short but violent ‘crisis’ in which the patient made uncontrollable movements and sounds. One of Mesmer’s many followers, a Marquis de Puységur, discovered that mesmeric treatment could induce a strange condition of sleeplike trance, in which many patients displayed remarkable ‘paranormal’ abilities and entered visionary states in which they claimed to communicate with spiritual beings on other levels of reality. This phenomenon, known as artificial somnambulism, has exerted an incalculable influence on the history of Western esotericism during the nine-teenth century.

No less than three major new developments have their origin in Mesmerism. First, somnambulist trance became central to the vogue of Spiritualism. In the wake of a media hype in 1848, around the Fox sisters in Hydesville who claimed to be in contact with a poltergeist, spiritualist séances became a popular pastime in America and Europe. The technique of somnambulic trance induc-tion now made it possible for any citizen to satisfy his or her curi-osity about the ‘invisible world’ and survival after death without any need for mediation by the church. Much of spiritualism was a practical affair with little theoretical depth, but influential authors such as Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), who was strongly influenced by Swedenborg’s writings, or the French spiritualist Allan Kardec (ps. of Hippolyte Rivail, 1804–69), whose work has become a major religious tradition in Brazil, developed full-blown theologies and cosmologies on spiritualist foundations. Scientific curiosity about the phenomena and spectacular claims of spiritual-ism, finally, led to the development of psychical research or what would now be referred to as parapsychology.

Secondly, artificial somnambulism is at the origin of the new disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, as physicians were quick to realize that it opened up unheard-of possibilities for studying the human soul and its mysterious powers on an empirical and experi-mental basis. The concept that we now refer to as the ‘unconscious’

emerged in the literature of German Romantic mesmerism during the first half of the nineteenth century, originally under the label of the ‘nightside of nature’; and the development of psychological investigation based on somnambulism can be traced in straight lines from there to the experimental psychology of Charcot, Flournoy and others, and finally to Carl Gustav Jung and his school. In all these developments, psychology was inextricably entwined with

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study of ‘the occult’: it is only during the twentieth century, with the rise of psychoanalysis and behaviourism, that academic psy-chology distanced itself from its deep historical involvement with Western esotericism.

Thirdly and finally, the American career of artificial somnam-bulism led to a widespread milieu of religious innovation known as New Thought, based upon a radical doctrine of ‘mind over matter’.

This development had its origin in the work of a Mesmerist called Phineas P. Quimby (1802–66), who abandoned Mesmer’s ‘fluidic’

theory as the explanation for somnambulic healing in favour of a radical emphasis on the universal and omnipotent power of belief.

Eventually it was claimed that not only all forms of illness could be cured by means of changing one’s beliefs, but other negative conditions, such as poverty, as well. Also known as Mind Cure, the basic doctrines of New Thought have been institutionalized in new religions such as Christian Science and a series of similar churches, and they have become deeply ingrained in American popular cul-ture. In contemporary ‘New Age’ contexts, this development is basic not only to an endless series of ‘self-help’ books but also to the widespread claim that we literally ‘create our own reality’ by means of our beliefs.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, all the ancient, medieval and Renaissance traditions discussed above were redis-covered and reconceptualized by groups and individuals who had been influenced by spiritualist and somnambulist practice and tried to find a ‘third way’ between traditional Christianity and positiv-ist science. This phenomenon is usually referred to as occultism, and it comes in different forms. The ‘occultism of the right’¹² that was dominant in France was very strongly influenced by Roman Catholicism: it was frequented by countless abbés, pretended or real, who were trying to come to terms with the legacy of the Revolution and its sensationally successful assault on the tradi-tional authority of ‘altar and throne’. Politically, their approaches varied from deeply conservative to progressive, but they all shared an obsessive nostalgia for the lost unity of a universal ‘Tradition’

that had expressed itself by means of spiritual symbolism. Among the most important figures, representing successive generations in French occultism, are Eliphas Lévi (ps. of Alphonse-Louis Constant, 1810–75), whose works on magic and kabbalah were highly influential within the occultist revival, and Papus (ps. of

Gérard Encausse, 1865–1916), the ‘pope of occultism’, who played a central role in a whole range of occultist organizations and net-works that flourished during the fin de siècle and left important traces in the art, literature and music of that period.

This concern of French occultists with ‘Tradition’ found its most extreme expression in the work of René Guénon (1886–1951).

During his younger years he was deeply involved in a range of occultist organizations, but he finally rejected all of them as mis-guided products of compromise with modernity. Guénon claimed the existence of one single, universal Tradition, based on meta-physical ‘first principles’ that were beyond any critical debate or refutation. He rejected the modern world and all its values as the absolute antithesis of Tradition, and spent the last decades of his life as a Sufi recluse in Egypt. Guénon’s many writings are at the ori-gin of an independent esoteric tradition known as Traditionalism (sometimes Perennialism). In its very rejection of modernity in all its aspects it is, ironically, a typical product of the modern world.

In cases such as the major Traditionalist author Julius Evola (1898–

1974), contempt for modern democracy and social egalitarianism led to open sympathy for Fascist and National Socialist politics;

in other cases, such as that of Frithjof Schuon (1907–98), perhaps the most influential Traditionalist after World War II, it inspired the creation of new organizations and communities that allowed its participants to follow ‘traditionalist’ lifestyles in relative seclu-sion. Yet other post-war Traditionalists, such as notably Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) and Huston Smith (b. 1919) have been vocal defenders of Traditionalism in academic settings.

In contast to nineteenth-century France, the anglophone world was characterized rather by an ‘occultism of the left’, strongly indebted to anti-Christian mythographical traditions grounded in the work of Enlightenment libertines who had argued that religion had its origin not in divine revelation but in a ‘natural religion’ of solar worship and phallicism.¹³ The ‘occult tradition’ came to be perceived as an ancient and superior wisdom grounded in pagan traditions opposed to the exclusivism and dogmatism of estab-lished Christianity. Erstwhile spiritualist mediums such as Emma Hardinge Britten (1823–99) and Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–91) had become disillusioned with what they saw as the superficiality of spiritualism, and found inspiration in all the major ‘hermetic’,

‘occult’ and related traditions prior to Swedenborg. In their view,

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the universal ‘occult science’ of the ancients, both east and west, should be revived against the narrow materialism of positivist sci-ence. The major classic of this new approach was Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877), later followed by The Secret Doctrine (1888), in which the sources of occult wisdom were moved from Egypt to the Far East. Blavatsky presented ‘occult science’ as the central, ancient and universal tradition of superior knowledge and wis-dom that should be revived, in the modern world, as an alterna-tive to traditional Christianity and positivist science. In 1875 she co-founded the Theosophical Society, which became the most influential occultist organization at least up to the 1930s. Under the leadership of Annie Besant (1847–1933) and Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934), modern theosophy was reinterpreted increasingly in terms of an ecumenical esoteric Christianity, culmi-nating in a long phase of messianic fervour around the Indian Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), who was raised as the coming ‘World Teacher’ but finally rejected that role in 1929. Largely in response to the Krishnamurti cult, most of the German theosophists under the leadership of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) broke away from theosophy in the 1910s. The resulting Anthroposophical Society was based upon a Christian interpretation of theosophy bolstered by Steiner’s claims of superior clairvoyant access to the spiritual world, against a background of philosophy in the German Idealist tradition.

Magical traditions had been reduced to mere objects of antiquar-ian curiosity by the mid-nineteenth century, but occultists began to cultivate magical practice in the decades thereafter. The result was an entirely new understanding of ‘magic’, claiming ancient roots but in fact based on highly innovative concepts and interpretations.

An important pioneer was the American Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–75), who was the first to argue that sexual energy and psy-choactive drugs could be harnessed to magical ends. In England by the end of the nineteenth century, an initiatic Order called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn cultivated an elaborate and sophisticated system of symbolism and ritual practice, based upon the kabbalistic system of the sefirot, that has become a major source of inspiration for many magical groups up to the present.

The most notorious occultist magician of the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), broke away from the Golden Dawn and went on to join Theodor Reuss’s Ordo Templi Orientis, which

eventually developed under his leadership into an order with a strong emphasis on sexual magic. His self-stylization as the ‘Great Beast’ of the Apocalypse, whose new religion, Thelema, was des-tined to supplant Christianity, and his systematic experimentation with every conceivable form of transgression, has made Crowley controversial even among occultists, but the impact of his writ-ings has been enormous. In many respects, these organizations and many similar ones that flourished before World War II can be seen as attempts to compensate for the prosaic world of disenchanted society by cultivating the powers of the imagination as a means of experiential access to parallel realities of magical enchantment.

Ultimately, the focus in these contexts is more on individual ‘inner development’ of the magician than on influencing events in the out-side world. This means that the very concept of magic acquires new shades of meaning particularly under the impact of popular psychology. With regard to the focus on ‘inner development’ in an esoteric context, but now without overt reference to magic, men-tion must finally be made of the enigmatic Greco-Armenian teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866–1949) and his Russian pupil Piotr Dem’ianovich Ouspensky (1878–1947). Gurdjieff developed an independent and original esoteric system that includes a neo-gnostic cosmology and a complicated training system for liberat-ing the mind from social control and attainliberat-ing spiritual freedom.

Gurdjieffian techniques were adopted by various esoteric teachers and movements after World War II, and have become an important dimension of the post-1960s concern with ‘self-realization’.