Occultism in a Global Perspective

Henrik Bogdan, Gordan Djurdjevic, Henrik Bogdan, Gordan Djurdjevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317544463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

The study of the ideas and practices associated with occultism is a rapidly growing branch of contemporary scholarship. However, most research has focused on English and French speaking areas and has not addressed the wider spread and significance of occultism. Occultism in a Global Perspective presents a broad international overview. Essays range across the German magical order of the Fraternitas Saturni, esoteric Satanism in Denmark, sexual magic in Colombia and the reception of occultism in modern Turkey, India and the former Yugoslavia. As any other form of cultural practice, the occult is not isolated from its social, discursive, religious, and political environment. By studying occultism in its global context, the book offers insights into the reciprocal relationships that colour and shape regional occultism.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Occultism in a global perspective

Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic

Terms such as “the occult”, “occultism”, “occult sciences”, “occult properties” and “occult philosophy” share a good deal of semantic commonality, and all have their etymological root in the Latin adjective “occultus”, meaning “hidden” or “secret”. Broadly speaking, what distinguishes occultism as a branch of human activity is an orientation towards hidden aspects of reality, those that are held to be commonly inaccessible to ordinary senses; an activity that simultaneously shares a certain similarity with both science and religion but cannot be reduced to either of them. The texts gathered in the present volume focus on occultism as a form of theory and practice that assumed its distinctive form in mid-century France and became widely popular through writings of Alphonse Louis Constant, better known as Éliphas Lévi (1810–75), and that subsequently found its most influential organizational paradigm – in the English-speaking world – in the shape of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn towards the end of that same century. Thematic concerns of this cultural phenomenon are to a large degree similar to what is currently and commonly referred to as Western esotericism, with prominent place given to disciplines such as magic, alchemy, astrology, tarot and their subdivisions and correlates. And while it could be theoretically possible, although with significant difficulty, to separate and isolate various specific threads that inhere in the category of occultism and to represent it as a unified entity, it is more appropriate to allow for a healthy dose of thematic overlap and taxonomical fluidity when studying the subject. It is in fact one of the assumptions of this book that occultism is a diverse, multiform and complex phenomenon.

More specifically, occultism is understood throughout this anthology as referring to “modernized” forms of Western esotericism; that is, forms of esotericism that due to the impact of modernity, globalization and secularization were transformed and reinterpreted in the wake of the disenchantment of Western society.¹ Scholars such as Marco Pasi, Alex Owen, Corinna Treitel and Wouter J. Hanegraaff have argued that “occultism” should not be interpreted as reaction against modernity or as a “flight from reason”, but rather as an integral part of modernity itself. This view challenges the assumption of previous scholarly literature which often argued that occultism is characterized by an embrace of irrationalism, an escape from – or even a revolt against –rationality and the modern scientific worldview.²

What is arguably most characteristic of the occult worldview is that its mental universe is dominated by the operations of correlative thinking. A distinctive feature of this type of thinking lies in an attempt to understand the world as a network of mutually related sympathies or analogies. In the West, correlative thinking is at least as old as its formulation and elaboration in Neoplatonic philosophy, but it is by no means exclusive to this cultural sphere as it is also found to be of similar extent and importance in, for example, Indian and Chinese civilizations and their respective zones of influence, and it is quite possible that it represents a (near) universal human tendency. Needless to say, correlative or analogical thinking manifests in a variety of forms that undergo historical changes and are coloured by the conditions of their respective social environments, and thus this suggestion of its transcultural nature and age-long durability should not be read as a declaration of its unchanging form and essential character.

Whatever their underlying philosophical and metaphysical assumptions and convictions, occultists habitually attempt to engage in some form of practice that finds the rationale of its effectiveness in the notion of analogy or correspondence between physical acts (such as ritual gestures), words and ideas, and the ultimate recipients, targets and goals of these activities. By shuffling the tarot cards, for example, while concentrating on the subject of the inquiry, any received mental images and associations are brought into correlation with the matter at hand and the future outcome of the events is divined based on the conjecture governed by the alignment of mutually related analogies between aforesaid elements. It should be obvious that intuition and imagination play a significant role in the process. And while astrology, alchemy, ritual magic and related currents contain a significant core of utilitarian objectives, occultism also represents its project as worthy of loftiest goals, making it – at least in the eyes of its adherents – not only a technique but also (and perhaps primarily) an ideology that provides both an explanation of the world and a means to attainment of wisdom and spiritual perfection. The quest for spiritual perfection includes notions of the attainment of perfect knowledge or gnosis, whereby man is believed to reach self-deification or union with the godhead. This salvific knowledge, frequently shrouded in discourses of secrecy, is often interpreted as a form of experiential knowledge which is non-communicable. The search for gnosis is of course not a new feature of nineteenth-century occultism, but can be seen as a central part of Western esotericism from late antiquity onwards. For instance, while providing a definition of magic, the seminal Renaissance occult philosopher Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) wrote that, while it was obvious that the emanations of the divine source penetrate to the lowest rungs of matter – a commonly held assumption at the time – it simultaneously followed that an ascent back to the source was equally possible, and this was precisely the ambition of magic to achieve. The map of reality, in other words, could also be read as a map of journey, and the driving vehicle was, at least for some people, magic.

The cultural conditions at the time of Éliphas Lévi’s major writings were characterized by a growing sense of anxiety and disillusionment regarding normative science and its influence on human life. It is thus perfectly understandable that Lévi was able to reach a wide and appreciative audience with his suggestion that magic “reunites into one and the same science that, which can be more certain in philosophy and that, which is infallible and eternal in religion” (Lévi 1860: 2). Lévi projected a romanticized image of all branches of occultism, although a degree of his own deep appreciation of Roman Catholicism – traditionally opposed to magic – generated a palpable sense of ambivalence towards the subject, which he helped popularize like few others before him. It is perhaps rather telling that he opened his Histoire de la Magie (ibid.: 41–2) with the story of fallen angels who, according to the apocryphal Book of Enoch, transmitted the art of magic to mortal women – a mytheme that signals both the transcendental source of magical knowledge and the moral vacillation regarding the same. It is however in his portrayal of magic as the summit of human knowledge and highest spiritual aspirations that Lévi exerted his strongest influence and generated a widespread interest in the subject, what came to be known as “the French occult revival” (McIntosh 1972). Although scholars tend to agree on using Eliphas Lévi and his writings as the commencement of occultism (naturally, this is an artificial starting-point since Lévi was not an isolated case that was detached from its own context and history, and the occultism expressed in Lévi’s works drew on previous modernized forms of esotericism, such as mesmerism), it is the Anglo-American forms of occultism that have attracted most scholarly attention, in particular Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91) and the Theosophical movement, the British occultist initiatory society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) and his new religious movement Thelema, and Gerald Gardner (1884–1964) and the modern witchcraft movement. The full histories of these movements have been dealt with extensively elsewhere, and for our present purpose it will thus suffice to paint the backdrop with the widest of brushes.

The link between French and British occultism in this historical moment is exemplified by the writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73), extremely popular in his time, who personally knew Lévi. His vast knowledge of the field is in particular displayed in the novels Zanoni (1842), A Strange Story (1862) and The Coming Race (1871). Bulwer-Lytton was elected a patron of the esoteric group Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, although without any actual engagement on his part, which is of interest primarily for the fact that all the future leaders of the seminal Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were also members of the society. The Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 and consisted of several temples in England, and later France. Its organizational form, established on the pattern of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, was due largely to the genius of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918). The Golden Dawn combined into a meaningful whole a corpus consisting of ritualized transmission of knowledge (initiations), theoretical instructions (“Knowledge Lectures”) and a good deal of practical work (including tarot, astrology, astral travel, invocations and talismanic magic). The iconography and pantheon were strongly influenced by Egyptology as understood through the lenses of the occultist imaginary: in the turn of the phrase of Christopher Lehrich (2007: 1) – who on his part referenced the title of the four-volume sequence of novels by John Crowley – what was involved was not a historical Egypt but an imagined Ægypt. This should not be interpreted as something to criticize but rather to understand: that occultism – and esotericism in general – implies and requires a distinct and self-consistent episteme.

The Golden Dawn consisted of three levels or orders. In simplified terms, those were: the introductory order; the second order (Adepts); and the Secret Chiefs, somewhat resembling Madame Blavatsky’s Mahatmas, separated from ordinary humanity by an “Abyss”. Mathers argues that the bulk of knowledge deposited into the three degrees of Adeptship originated from those superhuman Chiefs, but it was Aleister Crowley’s contention that Mathers eventually lost contact with them, resulting in the spiritual and organizational collapse of the Golden Dawn. On his part, Crowley claimed to have re-established such contact by his reception of The Book of the Law (1904), a text that signalled the inception of the New Aeon of Thelema (Greek for “will”), with Crowley as the Prophet. Focusing on the notion that the primary task of humanity is the discovery of pure will and a life in accordance with it, as suggested by the precept “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, Crowley created an elaborate system of what he called Magick, containing elements of both Western and Eastern esotericism with the primary ideological anchor in the religious philosophy of Thelema. In addition, Crowley presided over two important magical fraternities: the A∴A∴ (a Thelemic reconstruction and development of the Golden Dawn) and Ordo Templi Orientis or OTO (a Thelemic reconstruction and development of a liberal masonic order accepting both men and women as initiates), both of which are still active today, as are the several reconstituted orders of the original Golden Dawn.

A mention should also be made of the still-popular work of Dion Fortune (Violet Mary Firth, 1890–1946), whose literary output added an all-important recognition of the power of female spirituality and a pagan sense of connection with the land and local mythology, and the even more, in fact extremely, influential work of Gerald Gardner (1884–1964) – himself an OTO initiate – who created the “world religion” (in the turn of the phrase of Ronald Hutton) of modern Wicca.

The above is an extremely simplified and rough sketch of the basic outline of occultism as it is usually described in textbooks and introductory works to occultism. It was our working hypothesis that most of the readers would have some basic familiarity with the subject as outlined here and it seemed rather apparent that most of the academic work in the field of Western esotericism was similarly focused on the same. As many others, we were simultaneously aware that occultism is a much larger social and cultural phenomenon and we felt that an engagement with a wider geographic locus is called for. Finally, we assumed that this wider, “global”, occult scene is in some cases and to some degree directly influenced by the French and British proponents and organizations, that there will be some reasonable similarity with ideological presuppositions and social forms of engagement with the subject even in those cases where there is no such direct link, and finally, that there are interesting and important discursive, intellectual and societal variables resulting from different cultural habitats and historical contingencies. It is this last element that we found most interesting and important to explore and focus upon.

It should be stressed that we do not adhere to the notion of a “universal occultism” – whatever that might imply. As already mentioned, occultism is understood as specific current within the broader field of Western esotericism, and the basic aim of this anthology is to understand how occultism changes when it “spreads” to new environments, that is to place occultism in its cultural, political and social context. As such, our aim is similar to those of Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (2004), Corinna Treitel’s A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (2004), David Harvey Allen, Beyond the Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern France (2005) and Julia Mannherz’s recent Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia (2012), and others. These works show that occultism develops differently in different cultural and social settings, while at the same time retaining many of the original elements of nineteenth-century French occultism encountered in the writings of Éliphas Lévi. The fact that there are obvious cultural differences in occultism were noted already in the pioneering study by Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (1996), in which he made a difference between “occultism of the left” and “occultism of the right”. The first category, “occultism of the left”, is found in the English-speaking parts of the world and it is centred on the notion of solar worship and phallicism as the basis of religion which was propagated by Enlightenment libertines, combined with a strong “pagan” and anti-Christian stance. In contrast to this, the “occultism of the right” was a predominantly French phenomenon, which was characterized by strong Roman Catholic sentiments and an emphasis on reconnecting with a universal tradition, a connection which many French occultists believed had been broken with the French Revolution. This division of a right and left occultism is a clear example of how differently occultism has developed in the English-and French-speaking parts of the world, respectively. But what about occultism in other European countries such as Italy, Germany, Turkey or Yugoslavia? Or in other parts of the world, such as Australia and South America? The present collection is not, and cannot be, a complete survey and analysis of occultism around the world. The aim is much more modest: each chapter gives an example of occultism in a specific context, and we have striven for case-studies that are usually not included in general textbooks and surveys on the occult in order to broaden the perception and understanding of occultism. The present collection should be seen as an invitation to study occultism from a wider perspective, and to acknowledge that occultism is not merely a French or British phenomenon, but rather a Western esoteric current that has travelled around the world, having been reinterpreted in a number of different ways.

CHAPTER OUTLINES

Placing occultism – and by extension Western esotericism – in a global perspective the problems connected with the notions of what we actually mean by “Western” become apparent. For pragmatic reasons, we have chosen to follow Hanegraaff’s suggestion to view the “Western” in Western esotericism as referring to the specificity of the field:

To avoid any confusion, then, it should be clear that the adjective “Western” is not understood here as a qualifier within a larger field, demarcating the occidental section of some general world-wide “eso-tericism”. On the contrary, it is meant to highlight the specificity of esotericism understood as an inherently Western domain of research, in contrast to globalizing or universalizing understandings of the term.

(Hanegraaff 2013: 15)

Kennet Granholm goes to the heart of the matter of the theoretical problems connected with “Western” in Chapter 2, “Locating the West: Problematizing the Western in Western Esotericism and Occultism”. While the term esotericism has received much theoretical discussion in the academic study of Western esotericism and occultism, Granholm argues that the term Western has not. That esotericism is a scholarly construction is widely accepted in academic quarters, but the term Western is likewise a construct – and one that is in many ways a far more complex and problematic construct than the word esotericism. The West is simultaneously a political/ideological, popular and scholarly construct, and something the constructed nature of which most often remains implicit and unmentioned. What is the Western of Western esotericism? Is it a geographical region? Is it a cultural sphere? What the West is will be different in different contexts and uses. Furthermore, the idea of the West naturally changes through history. In the contemporary globalizing world, increasingly characterized by transnational connections, the idea of a separate and distinct West becomes even more problematic. “The West” has influenced “the East” and vice versa, introducing traditionally non-Western terms and ideas into the European sphere of esotericism and occultism, and introducing “Western” esoteric and occult notions, practices and groups into the “Eastern” sphere. In an atmosphere of increased plurality and pluralism these connections take on an increasingly complex character that is harder and harder to untangle.

If we look at esoteric discourses throughout history we find that the source of esoteric wisdom is often attributed to that which is foreign, alien and far away in space and/or time. For certain Renaissance esotericists Plato represented an esoteric wisdom the origin of which ultimately lay outside Greece. Egypt was the imagined origin of esoteric wisdom for a long time, and when it became too familiar this role was assigned to India. This process goes on, and is particularly visible in occultist notions of lost continents such as Atlantis and Lemuria, extra-terrestrials and pre-Christian European paganisms representing...