Was there an esoteric/occult revival in the late Victorian period?

A thread

/1

It's fairly uncontroversial in the secondary literature to speak of such a thing (see e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30053265?seq=1 and https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137448613_2, to take two examples I found on Google).

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But one historian of esotericism in particular, the Masonic writer R A Gilbert, has challenged this narrative (in his 2009 PhD thesis and other venues)

Gilbert argued in his thesis that esoteric publications accounted for only a small minority of the contemporary book trade.

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Gilbert also makes the point that the memberships of groups like the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society were never more than a drop in the ocean of the general population of Britain.

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Another line of argument which undermines the notion of a "revival" is that the practice of folk magic was *always* widespread in Britain, so we only see a "revival" if we focus inappropriately on the urban bourgeois members of the Golden Dawn etc.

https://saesfrance.org/29-30-sept-london-the-occult-revival-myth-or-reality/

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From the other side, what might be said in favour of the notion of a revival?

I would argue that esoteric beliefs and practices, broadly conceived, *did* increase in popularity in Victorian England, beyond the small circles of overeducated magi in London.

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Spiritualism is perhaps the most obvious example.

Spiritualism became something of a mass movement from the 1850s onwards, and one which had a populist, anti-establishment aspect.

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Freemasonry seems to have undergone an increase in popularity in the same period - again, far beyond the circles of London ritual magi.

Most Freemasons were not personally esotericists, of course, but the system as a whole was profoundly indebted to the esoteric tradition.

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Mormonism actively recruited in England from the 1830s onwards.

Scholars since the 1990s have done interesting work in uncovering the extent to which Mormon beliefs and practices were indebted to the esoteric tradition.

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Anglo-Catholicism can be seen as a manifestation of esotericism. Most obviously in its use of theurgic ritual - but Tony Fuller has also argued that some Anglican priests believed in an underlying theology which fit in with esotericism.

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See also the quote below from David Hilliard, which relates to a slightly later period.

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Finally, if we look more closely at Theosophy, we see that it was only part of a broader interest in Indian religion which developed in imperial Britain from the 1860s and 70s, and which promoted ideas that fed into the esoteric current.

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So I think we probably *can* speak of an esoteric revival, even if the community of hardened, card-carrying, explicit occultists amounted to something of a socially atypical fringe minority.

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And even if we focus only on them, objections to the idea of a "revival" are largely verbal. No-one is arguing that we're dealing with something as big as, say, the Evangelical Revival. A "revival" can just mean that a small fringe interest became a larger fringe interest.

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That's what I think, anyway.

/End