Victorian Occultism
Gaslight, learned societies and the making of modern occultism.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary flowering of occult publishing in Britain and America. Theosophists, Golden Dawn magicians, occult Spiritualists and independent scholars translated old texts, founded societies and wrote the books that still define the field.
This shelf gathers representative works: Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and Secret Doctrine, Mathers’s Kabbalah Unveiled, Westcott’s Collectanea Hermetica and studies of numbers and the Isiac Tablet, Hargrave Jennings on the Rosicrucians, Emma Hardinge Britten’s Art Magic and Ghost Land, and Waite’s translation of Lévi that carried French magic across the Channel.
Read these books as a conversation among people who knew, cited and often quarrelled with one another. Many claimed ancient authority for ideas that were new, and much of their scholarship has since been corrected. Yet they preserved and translated a great deal of older material, and the vocabulary they created, of correspondences, astral planes, initiatory grades and hidden masters, is the vocabulary most modern readers still use. Following the connections between them is one of the best ways to understand how modern esotericism came to be.
On This Shelf (16)
A Short Enquiry concerning the Hermetic Art
William Wynn Westcott
The Light of Egypt, or The Science of the Soul and the Stars. In Two Parts
Thomas H. Burgoyne
The Light of Egypt, or The Science of the Soul and the Stars. In Two Parts
Thomas H. Burgoyne
English · Egyptian Mysticism
Art Magic, or Mundane, Sub-Mundane and Super-Mundane Spiritism. A Treatise in Three Parts and Twenty-Three Sections, Descriptive of Art Magic, Spiritism, the Different Orders of Spirits in the Universe Known to Be Related to, or in Communication with Man; Together with Directions for Invoking, Controlling, and Discharging Spirits, and the Uses and Abuses, Dangers and Possibilities of Magical Art
Emma Hardinge Britten
Art Magic, or Mundane, Sub-Mundane and Super-Mundane Spiritism. A Treatise in Three Parts and Twenty-Three Sections, Descriptive of Art Magic, Spiritism, the Different Orders of Spirits in the Universe Known to Be Related to, or in Communication with Man; Together with Directions for Invoking, Controlling, and Discharging Spirits, and the Uses and Abuses, Dangers and Possibilities of Magical Art
Emma Hardinge Britten
English · Occult Philosophy
Ghost Land; or, Researches into the Mysteries of Occultism: Illustrated in a Series of Autobiographical Sketches, in Two Parts
Emma Hardinge Britten
Ghost Land; or, Researches into the Mysteries of Occultism: Illustrated in a Series of Autobiographical Sketches, in Two Parts
Emma Hardinge Britten
English · Occult Philosophy
Asch Mezareph, or Purifying Fire: A Chymico-Kabalistic Treatise Collected from the Kabala Denudata of Knorr von Rosenroth
William Wynn Westcott
Asch Mezareph, or Purifying Fire: A Chymico-Kabalistic Treatise Collected from the Kabala Denudata of Knorr von Rosenroth
William Wynn Westcott
English · Alchemy
