Victorian occultism

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

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... 

But in spite of Theosophical vitalism (to which I shall return below) and the Theosophical attack on mechanistic science and philosophy, the atomic theory Besant and Leadbeater developed in Occult Chemistry and elsewhere was in many ways a mechanical theory involving interactions of ever-more-rarified particles and their vibrations. It adapted many assumptions of Victorian ether mechanics. 

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