Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the meta-discursive meanings of "glamour" as the concept circulated in writings by, and about, Neo-Theosophists Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant during the decades following H. P. Blavatsky's death in 1891. It shows that the fascinatingly symbiotic relationship between the tabloid press and popular occult fiction that developed from the 1890s onwards, tracing it through the gothic clubroom tales of M. R. James to the Satanic shockers of Dennis Wheatley. The book addresses the complexities of occult participation for one of the modern revival's key, if by no means exclusive, demographics: women. It examines how Pamela Colman Smith repurposed the exotic stereotypes constantly projected onto her by her occultural peers, using them to ground and fuel the pioneering process of spiritual synaesthesia that she practised and defended in the pages of her short-lived periodical, The Green Sheaf.