The Occult Revival

By the end of the eighteenth century the Hermetic tradition was in pieces. Educated opinion had dismissed it. Its texts were collector's items, its practitioners scattered and mostly silent. A hundred years later it had become a coherent system of study and practice, taught in graded stages and drawing together Qabalah, astrology, alchemy, tarot and ceremonial magic under a single scheme. Almost everything a student meets today in a book on Western magic was given its present shape in that century. This page tells how.

The scattered inheritance

The Enlightenment did not kill the Hermetic tradition, but it drove it out of the universities and into private hands. Alchemy continued in small circles. The fraternal lodges of the eighteenth century borrowed its symbols for their ceremonies. Physicians and natural philosophers on the margins of science experimented with animal magnetism and visions. The old books survived on the shelves of collectors, where a few readers studied them in earnest.

Two English books show how the revival began. In 1801 Francis Barrett published The Magus, a handsome compilation drawn largely from Agrippa and other old books of magic. It added nothing new, but it put the materials of learned magic back into print in English. In 1850 Mary Anne Atwood published, anonymously, A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, which argued that alchemy had always been a spiritual art concerned with the transformation of the soul, and that its laboratory language was a disguise. Soon after publication she and her father, alarmed at having said too much, withdrew the book and burned most of the copies. Its thesis survived the fire and was widely accepted by the occultists of the following decades.

Eliphas Levi

The decisive figure was French. Alphonse Louis Constant, who wrote as Eliphas Levi, had trained for the priesthood and left before he was ordained a priest, and had been a radical pamphleteer before he turned to magic. His Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, published in two parts between 1854 and 1856, presented the whole of the occult tradition as one ancient doctrine, hidden under the symbols of every religion and recoverable by those who could read them.

Much of his history was invented, and he knew less about his sources than he claimed. But he wrote with eloquence and conviction, and he supplied ideas that have been repeated ever since: a universal medium of imagination and will that he called the astral light; equilibrium as the supreme law of magic; the four powers of the magus, to know, to will, to dare and to keep silent; and the attribution of the twenty two trumps of the tarot to the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. He also gave the Great Work its best known modern definition.

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.

Eliphas Levi, Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic

Levi was not chiefly a practitioner. He records one serious attempt at ceremonial evocation, in London in 1854, and he describes its effects on him as so disturbing that he advised others against repeating it. His legacy was a vocabulary and a vision, and the conviction that magic was a philosophy rather than a collection of spells.

The magical orders

In the following decades small initiatory groups in Britain and France set out to turn that vision into training. The most influential was founded in London in 1888 by three men already active in the fraternal lodges. It claimed its authority from a manuscript in cipher of uncertain origin and from letters said to come from a German adept who has never been shown to have existed. Neither claim survives examination, and the order's real achievement lay elsewhere.

That achievement was synthesis. Its founders and early members took the Hermetic Qabalah, astrology, geomancy, the tarot, alchemical symbolism, the planetary magic of the Renaissance and the angelic magic of John Dee, and arranged them all on the Tree of Life as the framework of a single course of study. Each stage had its lectures to be learned, its practices to be mastered and its examinations to be passed, and each was marked by a ceremony. The order admitted women on the same terms as men, which was unusual for its time, and it drew in painters, actors and writers, among them the poet W. B. Yeats. Its inner order, established a few years after the founding, built its central ceremony around the opening of the vault of Christian Rosenkreutz from the Rosicrucian legend.

The order lasted barely fifteen years in its original form. Quarrels over authority and personality split it around 1900, and its successors divided again. Its papers did not stay secret. Much of its ritual was printed by a disaffected former member, Aleister Crowley, from 1909, and a fuller account was published in four volumes between 1937 and 1940 by a member of one of its successor orders. From that point the system belonged to anyone who could read.

The grades

The orders of the revival arranged their training as a climb up the Tree of Life. The lower grades were attributed to the four elements, one to each of the four lowest spheres, so that a student worked through earth, air, water and fire in turn before attempting the work of the center. Each grade bore a pair of numbers: the first gave its place in the sequence, the second the number of its sphere, counting down the Tree from the top.

Between the elemental grades and the first grade of adept lay a period of waiting and integration, called the portal, in which the four elements were to be brought into balance under the fifth, spirit. The scheme still shapes many published courses in ceremonial magic, and our page on working alone discusses how a solitary student can use it.

The popular revival

Alongside the orders, a broader public was reading about the occult as never before. Societies devoted to the comparative study of religion and to the spiritual teachings of India brought Eastern ideas into the conversation, and with them a habit of assimilating all traditions to one. In America a confident literature of mental self improvement grew up, holding that thought shapes circumstance. From that milieu came The Kybalion, published in Chicago in 1908 under the pen name Three Initiates and now usually attributed to the writer William Walker Atkinson. Its seven principles are now the most widely known summary of Hermetic thought. They belong to the revival, not to antiquity.

What the revival left

The modern student owes the revival a great deal: the tables of correspondence in their familiar form, the attribution of the tarot to the Tree, the daily rituals of the pentagram, the graded course of study, and the conviction that magic is a discipline of self transformation rather than a means of getting things. These were real contributions, and most of them were new. The revival's writers presented them as recovered ancient wisdom, and in that they were mistaken or worse.

The right response is neither to reject the synthesis because its pedigree was false nor to defend the pedigree because the synthesis is good. It is to treat the material as what it is: an ingenious nineteenth century construction, built from older parts, which has been tested by more than a century of practice. Judged as a method, it has a long record. Judged as history, it should always be checked against the primary texts.