ABSTRACT
The occult sciences were woven into the fabric of everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain. Although many nineteenth-century occult practitioners referred to their study as 'science', they rarely shared the same understanding of that category and its epistemological criteria as the nation's leading scientific institutions. The modern scientific discoveries claimed by nineteenth-century occult scientists were creatively fused with the ageless wisdom of the prisca theologia, that is, the concept, in Goodrick-Clarke's words, of 'an ancient theology deriving from such founder-figures and representatives as Moses, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, and Orpheus, who had supposedly bequeathed this unitary wisdom tradition to humankind in times immemorial'. It was not only in its treatment of the past that occult science claimed to be more ethical than its secular rational counterpart. Occult science encapsulates everything that Godwin's communitarian egalitarianism led him to reject, representing the horrific consequences of knowledge monopolization for both those who possess and those who are denied occult secrets.
