Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

M
Magic and Magical Groups
Widespread acceptance of the occult had tapered
off sharply among the educated by about 1750,
but it did not cease altogether, and may have
remained more or less constant among peasants.
During the next century, the romantic revival of
neo-Platonism, medieval German mysticism, and
astrology; the introduction of Asian and especially
Indian esotericism; and the sudden enthusiasm
for secret societies, Mesmerism, and Swedenborgianism
marked the beginnings of the modern
recrudescence of the occult. With varying degrees
of popularity, faddishness, and intellectual
respectability, it has remained a nearly ubiquitous
factor in Western cultural life ever since.
In 1801, Francis Barrett, who had gathered a
working magical group around himself, published
The Magus, the first modern book that attempted
to make the arcana of magic accessible to the
middle class. At midcentury, Alphonse-Louis
Constant, who wrote under the name of Eliphas
Levi, published his Dogma and Ritual of High
Magic, a History of Magic, and Key to the Great
Mysteries. These pulled together the disparate
strands of Western occultism into the beginnings
of a unified system, and so became the textbooks
for all the later magical groups. In the 1850s and
1860s, a group using Barrett’s The Magus as a text
gathered around a psychic named Fred Hockley,
and began trying to get Barrett’s and Levi’s “magic
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formulas” to actually work. Hockley owned a set
of mysterious magical manuscripts, on which he
based his magical authority.
The late nineteenth century saw the rise of
“spiritual occultism,” which, as represented by
theosophy, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, and Ouspensky,
and a ritual-magical wing (various Rosicrucian
organizations, the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn, and its offshoots), denies that it is a
religion. It is the mindset of spiritual occultism
that leads most modern occult organizations to
deny that they are religions. However, they exhibit
the same ambiguous relation between their foundational
myths and their ordinary history that
religions in general do. Rosicrucianism has the
myths set forth in its major documents—the
Chemical Wedding, and so on—that claim survival
from antiquity, but in fact it appears to have begun
as a secret organization among Lutherans, since
Luther’s family crest was a rose on a cross.
Freemasonry in England began as a secret society
dedicated to restoration of the monarchy; when
Charles II ascended the throne, this society
remained intact, but adopted a new purpose.
That is, modern occult organizations typically
claim a great antiquity for themselves, but in fact
are all quite recent, and are almost all highly interrelated.
The scholar T. M. Luhrmann has documented
the overlapping memberships in magical
organizations in the London area in the 1980s; this