ABSTRACT
The term ‘occult spiritualities’ may be misleading to the modern reader. It popularly
conveys a notion of devil-worship, a misperception which is not fortuitous.
Esoteric thought represents a heterodox theology which orthodox thinkers
demonised because they sincerely, but mistakenly, believed it to be demonic. A
spurious justification could be found for this mistake in the fact that occult thinkers
tended to believe not only in the possibility, but also in the legitimacy, of various
forms of magic. Early modern occultism flourished at a time when magic was being
The archetypal image of the occult philosopher is Faustus, the semi-legendary
German magus who sold his soul to the Devil in order to gain ‘a world of profit and
delight’.2 Marlowe’s English version of the Faust legend may in fact have involved
a conscious attack on one of the earliest and most popular of Renaissance occult
Most of the victims of the early modern repudiation of magic had only a tenuous
link with the occult philosophy as such. The popular mentality involved what has
been called an ‘untutored Spinozism’ or ‘a simple, unintellectual type of neo-
Platonism’.4 The village wisewomen who were condemned as witches may have
shared much of the world-view of esoteric thinkers, since the underlying principles
of magical practice are identical to those of occult thought in general. Magic, as
Marcel Mauss argued, depends on the laws of contiguity, similarity and
opposition,5 which also happen to be the structural principles of esotericism. What
differentiates the witch from the occultist is that whereas in the case of traditional
witchcraft it is necessary to infer these basic principles of magic from observed
behaviour, the occult philosophers developed them quite consciously within the
Mauss’s argument, that ‘on the whole it is the men who perform the magic while
the women are accused of it’,7 may not be quite true in terms of who practised magic
Some ended their days as martyrs for their faith, like the Behmenist poet Quirinus
Kuhlmann, who met his death at the stake in Moscow in 1689. As late as 1795 we
Many, like Jacob Boehme, doubtlessly suffered from the petty harassment of their
more orthodox neighbours. Boehme’s case also shows the flip-side of the coin,
since in his later days he was surrounded by admiring members of the petty nobility
and the urban élite.10 Increasingly, however, the occult philosophers had little to
fear except the ridicule of their contemporaries. The biting sarcasm of Butler and
Swift may not have been pleasant, but it was surely preferable to the more savage
With Butler and Swift we are rapidly approaching the Enlightenment. That
supposed Age of Reason may not have been as dedicated to the rational as is
sometimes assumed, or indeed as the lumières themselves liked to pretend.12 It is no coincidence that the centres of the German Enlightenment were also ones of
Pietism, a religious movement thoroughly permeated by occult mentalities. Both
the Pietists and the Aufklärer emphasised individualism, tolerance and the primacy of ethics over dogmatic theology.13 Despite the assumption that the magical world-
view entered into terminal decline after the seventeenth century,14 the occult
and it was to enjoy a notable recovery in nineteenth-century Romanticism, which
was largely ‘a revival and secularization of the earlier occult religious philosophy
of the Renaissance’.16 But if the occult philosophy survived the Enlightenment
intact, and even revitalised, it was not unscathed. Ridicule takes its toll, and the
eighteenth century witnessed the beginning of the process whereby the occult
philosophy came to be seen as marginal to mainstream culture. Since the nineteenth
century, its marginality may in fact have constituted its most important social
feature for both its adherents and its opponents, transforming it into a protest against
the hegemonic culture. In the early modern period, however, the occult philosophy
was a central expression of both élite and popular mentalities. It was not without its
opponents, who certainly carried the day as far as history is concerned.
