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WHAT THE OCCULT REVEALS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2009

CORINNA TREITEL
CORINNA TREITEL*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Washington University in St Louis E-mail: ctreitel@wustl.edu
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Extract

Where does occultism fit on the map of modernity? Frank Miller Turner proposed an intriguing answer in his 1974 study Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. The book examined the lives and struggles of six Victorian men: the philosophers Henry Sidgwick and James Ward, the scientists Alfred Russel Wallace and George John Romanes, and the writers Frederic W. H. Myers and Samuel Butler. Of the six, three cultivated a serious and sustained interest in the occult. Sidgwick and Myers engaged in psychical research, while Wallace immersed himself in phrenology and spiritualism. Raised as Christians, all of them came to find Christian belief inadequate. Yet the scientific naturalism that might have provided an alternative pole for their allegiance, that was the alternative pole of allegiance for much of their generation, failed to entice them. All had ethical qualms about its refusal to comment on God's existence or on life after death. All, too, wondered about the soul and bemoaned the reluctance of scientists to investigate the immaterial and subjective aspects of human nature. Caught between the Christianity of their upbringing and the scientific naturalism of their adulthood, Turner argued, these men “came to dwell between the science that beckoned them and the religion they had forsaken.”

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , November 2009 , pp. 611 - 625
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Turner, Frank Miller, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 1Google Scholar.

2 The core belief of modern occultism is that there is a hidden reality beyond the reach of the five senses that can nonetheless be accessed and studied through special individuals (mediums, psychics, magicians, and so on). For two overviews of recent works see Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” American Historical Review (June 2006), 692–716; and Thomas Laqueur, “Why the Margins Matter: Occultism and the Making of Modernity,” Modern Intellectual History (2006), 111–35.

3 Monroe, John Warne, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 79Google Scholar.

4 Spiritualists were used to hearing communications like this one, in which the spirit of Balzac spoke: “Only one more thing for this evening: a trifle! A single petal from each flower you have loved, a single drop among the thousand drops of perfumed dew, pearls of the dawn, that adorn such flowers at break of day! A trifle, a breath to awake the insect asleep in his blossom; a sigh and all it can do to silence and forget the song of a bird; a faint murmur in the foliage—joyous and hidden frolics of happy sylphs—a shepherd's song heard and understood in a poetic sense.” Ibid., 103.

5 Ibid., 100.

6 Ibid., 115.

7 Ibid., 113.

8 Ibid., 126

9 Morrisson, Mark S., Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ibid., 9.

11 Ibid., 57.

12 Ibid., 110 and 112–13.

13 Ibid., 109. See also Appendix A.

14 Ibid., 109.

15 Ibid., 116.

16 Ramsay, Morrisson notes, “almost certainly” used texts from occult presses to inform his lectures on the history of alchemy, but provides only one possible candidate for such exposure. Ibid., 102.

17 Ibid., 9

18 Ibid., 95 and 193.