The nineteenth-century occult revival

In this lesson: Spiritualism, Éliphas Lévi, the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn, and how they shaped modern tarot and magic.

Almost everything we think of as “occult” today, from séances to tarot meanings to ceremonial robes, took shape in a few remarkable decades of the nineteenth century. If you read tarot or practise magic, you are using tools this period gave you. This lesson walks through the main movements, in order.

Egyptian tarot and the first occult readers

In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed that the tarot was an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom. He had no evidence, but the idea caught on, and within a decade Etteilla was selling tarot decks designed for fortune telling. Decker, Depaulis and Dummett trace this in A Wicked Pack of Cards. Later tradition

The French scene grew from there. In 1889 two books helped fix the idea of an esoteric tarot: Papus, the pen name of the physician Gérard Encausse, published The Tarot of the Bohemians, and Oswald Wirth issued his own trumps redrawn with occult symbols. Both built on Lévi, whom you will meet below. Historical

Before the séance: Mesmer and Swedenborg

Two eighteenth-century figures prepared the ground. The Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 to 1772) wrote long accounts of visions of heaven, hell and the spirit world. His books were read by many who later embraced Spiritualism. Historical

The Viennese doctor Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris in 1778 and treated patients with “animal magnetism”, an invisible fluid he believed flowed through all living things. In 1784 a royal commission that included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier tested his claims and concluded that the effects came from imagination. Mesmerism spread anyway, and the trance states it produced looked a lot like the trances of later mediums.

Spiritualism

In 1848 two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, in Hydesville, New York, said they were communicating with a spirit through rapping sounds. Spiritualism, the belief that the living can contact the dead through mediums, spread rapidly through America and Britain. Séances became a fashionable parlour activity. Decades later Margaret said the raps had been faked, then took back her confession. Historical

Spiritualism grew fast because it answered real needs. It offered comfort to grieving families, especially after the American Civil War and later the First World War. It also gave women a public voice: many mediums were women who spoke to large audiences at a time when women were rarely allowed to preach. Historian Alex Owen explored this in The Darkened Room (1989). Historical

Not everyone believed. Famous mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home amazed their sitters, while others were caught cheating. In 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London to investigate such claims carefully. In France, Allan Kardec’s The Spirits’ Book (1857) founded Spiritism, which is still widespread in Brazil today.

Lévi and Theosophy

The French writer Éliphas Lévi published Dogme et rituel de la haute magie in 1854 to 1856. He linked the tarot trumps to the Hebrew alphabet, drew the famous image of Baphomet and gave magic a romantic, philosophical style that inspired later occultists. In 1875 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and others founded the Theosophical Society in New York, which drew on Hindu and Buddhist ideas, often loosely, and spread the idea of hidden spiritual masters.

Lévi was born Alphonse Louis Constant in 1810 and had trained for the Catholic priesthood before turning to radical politics and then to magic. His Baphomet, drawn for Dogme et rituel, is a symbol of balanced opposites, not a portrait of the Devil, though it has been read that way ever since. A. E. Waite translated his book into English in 1896 as Transcendental Magic. Historical

Blavatsky’s big books were Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888). The Society moved its headquarters to Adyar, near Madras (now Chennai) in India, in 1882. She said her teachings came from hidden Masters in Tibet. An 1885 report for the Society for Psychical Research accused her of fraud, and that report has itself been criticized since. What is clear is her influence: Theosophy shaped painters such as Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, popularized words like karma and reincarnation in the West, and, through Annie Besant, connected with Indian political life. Historical

The Golden Dawn

In 1888 three Freemasons, William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman, founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London. It based its teachings on a set of coded manuscripts of disputed origin and wove together Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, tarot and ritual into one system.

Its members included the poet W. B. Yeats, Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith, who in 1909 drew the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot that most beginners use today. Mathers also edited the 1904 English Goetia with Aleister Crowley. The historian Alex Owen explores this world in The Place of Enchantment (2004).

How the Golden Dawn worked

The Golden Dawn’s founding story rested on the so-called Cipher Manuscripts and on letters from a German adept, “Fräulein Sprengel”, whom most historians think was invented. Its first lodge, the Isis-Urania Temple, opened in London in 1888. Members passed through grades, each with a ritual, and studied correspondences, astrology, geomancy and tarot between initiations. Women and men were admitted on equal terms, which was unusual for the time. Florence Farr and Moina Mathers held leading roles.

The order split in 1900 after quarrels between Mathers and the London members. Several successor groups followed, such as the Stella Matutina. In 1937 to 1940 Israel Regardie published the order’s rituals and teachings, and much of modern ceremonial magic, Wicca included, borrowed from them. Historical

Questions beginners ask

Were all mediums frauds? Many were exposed, and some confessed. Others were never caught. Historians mostly avoid the yes or no question and ask what séances meant to the people in the room: grief, hope, entertainment and a chance for women to speak.

Was Blavatsky a fraud or a sage? Both views have defenders. You can study her influence without deciding.

Do I need the Golden Dawn system to practice magic? No. Much modern practice uses its tools, but you can learn them as one tradition among many.

Is Baphomet an ancient god? The name appears in the trials of the Knights Templar in the early fourteenth century, in accusations of idol worship. The famous winged figure is Lévi’s drawing from the 1850s.

Myths to drop:

• “Tarot came from Egypt and the Golden Dawn rediscovered its secret.” The Egyptian story begins in 1781, and the Golden Dawn system dates from the late 1880s.
• “The Golden Dawn was an ancient German order.” Its documented history begins in London in 1888.
• “Spiritualism was just a con.” Fraud happened, but Spiritualism was also a sincere religious movement, and Spiritualist churches still exist.

A worked example

Imagine you pick up the Rider-Waite-Smith Magician card. The infinity symbol above his head, the four suit symbols on the table and the gesture of one hand up and one hand down all come from Golden Dawn teaching, by way of Waite and Smith in 1909. Knowing this, the card stops being a mysterious ancient image and becomes something richer: a nineteenth-century summary of Hermetic ideas, drawn by a brilliant woman artist.

A quick self-check. Can you put these in order without looking: the Theosophical Society, the Fox sisters, the Golden Dawn, Court de Gébelin’s Egyptian tarot? (1781, 1848, 1875, 1888.) If you can, the century’s shape is already in your head.

Try this

Draw a timeline from 1781 to 1909 and mark Court de Gébelin, the Fox sisters, Lévi, the Theosophical Society, the Golden Dawn and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Write one sentence for each.

Journal prompts: Which nineteenth-century figure surprised you most, and why? What tools in your own practice came from this period? How do you feel about a practice being younger than you thought?

Theosophy’s three objects

Historical The Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and others, set out its aims in three “objects”, which were revised several times. In the form widely used from the 1890s, the first was “to form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour”.

The second encouraged the comparative study of religion, philosophy and science, and the third the investigation of unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in human beings. Read them side by side and you see why Theosophy was so influential: it combined an ideal of universal brotherhood, a love of Asian religions and a promise of hidden powers. It also carried ideas about “root races” that many readers today find troubling, which historians discuss openly. Both sides belong in an honest history.

Why the nineteenth century, and not earlier?

It is fair to ask why so much of the modern occult took shape in a few decades. Historians point to several reasons. Cheap printing and rail travel made books, lectures and societies possible on a new scale. Colonial contact brought Western readers translations of Hindu and Buddhist texts.

Science was changing fast, with electricity, evolution and photography, and many people hoped that “occult science” might bridge science and religion. Churches were losing authority among educated people, but the hunger for meaning remained. And the Victorians loved clubs, rituals and secret societies, from Freemasonry to friendly societies. The occult revival fits all of these patterns.

A second worked example: a séance photograph

Imagine you see a nineteenth-century “spirit photograph” in a museum collection, showing a sitter with a pale face floating behind them. Using this lesson, you can describe it: spirit photography began in the 1860s, most famously with William Mumler in Boston, and was popular with Spiritualists. Many such photographs were shown to be double exposures, and Mumler was tried for fraud in 1869 and acquitted. The photograph is real evidence of what people hoped for and how they used new technology, whatever you think of the spirits.

Recap

The Egyptian tarot idea began with Court de Gébelin in 1781. Spiritualism began with the Fox sisters in 1848. Lévi gave magic a new style in the 1850s, Theosophy spread from 1875 and the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, built the system behind modern ceremonial magic and the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith tarot.

What next

My history of tarot goes deeper into the cards, and Mathers and Crowley 1904 shows how the Golden Dawn shaped the Goetia. Next lesson: the twentieth century, and how to read claims for yourself.

Further reading: Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and The Darkened Room (1989). Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996). Gary Lachman, Madame Blavatsky (2012), a readable biography.

Sources

• Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
• Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (Duckworth, 1996).
• Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Go deeper: the art history and Goetia pages on this site

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