A Commercial View of the Occult

Pragmatism and Occultism at the Turn of the Century

My title comes from an essay printed in the very first issue of the Occult Review—a fifty-odd-page, six-penny monthly whose run over the next four and a half decades would feature contributions from A.E. Waite, Florence Farr, and Aleister Crowley, among other noted Edwardian occultists, on such topics as vampires, the holy Kabbalah, the “philosophy called Vedanta,” the Egyptian use of symbols, and “the soul of the desert.” Yet this first issue, dated January 1905, presented an unusually sober-minded article by the foremost pragmatist thinker in Britain, F.S.C. Schiller.

Schiller advances an idea he expects to be “repudiated with fiercest indignation” by students of the occult—namely, that the only way to establish the truth of their doctrine is to “labour to develop its practical and commercial aspects.” For instance, a few now believe it is possible for thoughts to be conveyed by extrasensory means despite the fact that “at present they do not know the conditions sufficiently to be able to repeat experiments at pleasure; and consequently the fact of telepathy (if fact it be) has no practical value.” But suppose some “enlightened mystic, with an eye to business” (his third eye, no doubt), were to refine a method for sending and receiving telepathic messages. Telegraph and cable companies would go bust, helpless to compete with this “cheaper and more convenient” means of communication.

Schiller’s essay was surely intended as a provocation. In the following issue, the journal’s editor, Ralph Shirley, coyly musters a few words in defense of that “most talked-of article” and prints a three-page reply that presumably better represents the views of his readership.

The correspondent, author and freemason W.L. Wilmshurst, begins by expressing his regret at finding “Mr. Schiller’s satirical pleasantries in the first number of a journal devoted to the serious and scientific consideration of occultism.” He refuses to cede the high ground of scientific rationalism, which had lately become the dominant viewpoint in Britain and other advanced capitalist nations, and professes to speak as a proponent of the enlightened approach toward the subject to which the Occult Review—“a journal dealing in a scientific spirit with psychological questions and super-normal phenomena,” as Shirley describes it in the same issue—is itself properly dedicated. The attitude was a common one. Spiritualists and theosophists alike would assert a scientific basis for their work, and even a ritual occultist like Crowley regularly claimed the authority of empirical inquiry. The hermetic order he founded in 1907 bore the motto “The Method of Science—The Aim of Religion.”

In answer to Schiller, Wilmshurst distinguishes three classes of occult phenomena: physical, psycho-physical, and moral or spiritual. As to the first, which includes astrology, palmistry, and alchemy, he admits it is made up of subjects for scientific investigation “as legitimate… as magnetism and electricity, which were themselves occult subjects not long ago.” Into the second fall such faculties as clairvoyance, telepathy, and communication with spirits. To make use of these powers for selfish ends such as profit-making, he warns, would break a taboo against the practice of black magic and put the violator in moral peril.

But it is the third type—moral or spiritual phenomena—that is his special concern. He argues that “the present increasing interest in the occult”—the late-Victorian Occult Revival—“arises from a new attitude of the public mind,” one which “indicates the existence among us of a force which is establishing, and sooner or later will justify itself.” This spiritual renewal, which the author likens to the spread of Christianity in the first and second centuries A.D., heralds nothing less than the dawn of a new age.

For Wilmshurst and his co-thinkers, scientific rationalism alone could not satisfy the human soul—it was too reductive, too utilitarian, too tainted with self-interest. They accordingly looked to belief in the occult for a new form of faith that would give its adherents a “larger knowledge of themselves and a nobler vision of the universe, and prove to them that Mammon holds a very poor place in the hierarchy of gods.” Schiller, Wilmshurst complains, would have us “cast in the mire of commercialism the very hope which many of us think will lift people out of it.”

To claim for occultism the status of a religious faith is to exempt it from criticism on practical or epistemological grounds like Schiller’s. But will it do to consider occultism a religion? The appeal of the Occult Revival for men and women at the turn of the twentieth century was precisely that, for all its antique trappings, it offered a modern sort of belief—one that partook of the very enterprising spirit Schiller extolled and even a measure of scientific rationalism. Rather than submit to an almighty deity, the esoteric seeker aspires to master the hidden forces of the universe; the adept is believed capable of material effects more direct and more potent than those to be had via prayer. For the occultist, as Francis Bacon said, knowledge is power.

Yet this promise of personal agency and practical efficacy, which is what makes occult belief attractive as an alternative to religion, at the same time lays it open to being judged as one would any other pragmatic pursuit and deemed either useless or unworthy. By occultism’s own standards, if its effects had no reality, its teachings would be worthless. On the other hand, to publicly demonstrate its methods and use them for instrumental purposes would be to profane them and rob them of any spiritual benefit. If false, occultism is bad science; if true, bad religion. The only way out is to avoid putting it to the test. Hence its practitioners “have long grown accustomed to seclude their ‘phenomena’ from the public gaze, and would find nothing more embarrassing than a sudden conversion of the world to their ideas,” as Schiller puts it.

If late-Victorian occultism, for better or worse, failed to produce any phenomena susceptible of commercial exploitation, the movement did not thereby lack all business potential. The Occult Review, whose first two issues we have been perusing, was itself a profit-seeking enterprise, and it would prove a fairly successful one. I have suggested the printing of Schiller’s controversial article in the first issue was something of a publicity stunt. If so, it seems to have paid off. By the second issue, Shirley was pleased to report that the first had “met with a very cordial reception…. The first edition of 3000 copies was exhausted in little over a week, and was followed by a second edition of 2000 more to meet the unexpectedly large demand”—at six pence each, a net of almost 300 pounds, or nearly $40,000 today according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator. In this respect, if no other, readers of the Occult Review would have been able to turn Schiller’s own words against him: “It is futile to dispute the value of what finds a ready market, however much one may personally dislike it.”

Source

A near-complete set of the Occult Review from 1905 to 1948 is available in digital form from the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals.