Occult revival

McIntosh, Christopher. Eliphas Levi the French occult revival. London Rider, 1972. 238p. 

Studies of the Kabbalah in English were virtually unknown before the "occult revival" of the second half of the 19th century, and those that did appear were largely dry and academic. The more astute students of the Kabbalah recognized that it had an application outside Judeo- Christian mysticism and related it to the wider current of the Western... 

Butler, Alison. Magical beginnings the intellectual origins of the Victorian occult revival. Limina 9 (2003) 78-95. 

In 1875, spiritualist circles in New York helped launch the Theosophical Society, another major component of the occult revival. The Society was founded by H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907). Blavatsky, who was born in the Russian Ukraine, claimed to have studied for seven years under Hindu mahatmas and even to have traveled in Tibet at a time when few Westerners were permitted into the country. Olcott had worked in the Navy Department during the Civil War he had even been one of three members of the special commission to investigate the assassination... 

This scientific sea change in the understanding of occultism was apparent even in popular fiction. For example, the most famous literary influence on the mid-Victorian occult revival was Edward Bulwer-Lytton s novel Zanoni (1842). Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) was a successful politician—serving as a Whig MP, and then as a Tory MP, and as Secretary for the Colonies—and... 

Very recent historians of alchemy, in fact, now see the spiritual alchemy hypothesis of the occult revival as historically inaccurate. They support the position held by early twentieth-century occult alchemists and historians that alchemy, in addition to its spiritual dimensions, was truly a material practice (see, for example, Principe and Newman 2001, and Newman and Principe 2002). Moreover, they deny that the chemical and physical processes in alchemical writings were simply code for entirely spiritual processes and reject the notion that alchemists had been able to transmute matter by an act of will. 

See Francis King for a brief account of the Hydesville knockings. King emphasizes the importance of American spiritualists to the British occult revival, and sees them as in many ways merely the old cult of necromancy in a nineteenth-century guise (King 1970, 31). 

McIntosh, Christopher. 1972. Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival. London Rider. 

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