Novels that Built Modern Occultism

EPOCH
22 hours ago
8 min read

Rebeka Erdelyiova │Newcastle University

By the turn of the twentieth century, the occult had become one of Britain’s most compelling cultural obsessions, so long as it remained at a safe distance. The British public devoured occult fiction with morbid fascination. Novels and a wide spectrum of newspapers, from sensational popular papers such as John Bull, Morning Leader, and World Magazine, to metropolitan, provincial, and overseas titles including Eastbourne Gazette, Evening Dispatch, The Washington Times, and Civil Military Gazette, were filled with ghosts, séances, secret orders, and sinister magicians, turning occultism into a familiar cultural language. These stories did more than entertain; they shaped public perceptions of occult practitioners, casting them as either gullible eccentrics or dangerous manipulators. Such portrayals circulated throughout the English-speaking world, shaping both public perceptions of occult communities and the ways those communities represented themselves. In a time preoccupied with new technologies, urban change, and fears of social and moral decline, fiction provided a way to process these anxieties.

Gothic and sensation fiction made these tensions relatable through familiar figures, while sensational newspapers amplified them through scandal, accusation, and moral panic. As a result, ‘the occult’ became a label that flattened diverse practices into a single dramatic image, often overlooking the true complexity of these communities. This cultural fascination was made possible in part by a changing print landscape. By the early twentieth century, cheaper print, expanding newspaper circulation, and rising literacy created a media environment far more receptive to occult themes than would have been imaginable a century earlier. The industrialisation of printing that took place throughout the nineteenth century, accompanied with a change in the demand for and supply of news, newspapers becoming more accessible, and the rapid increase in literacy rates all played a role in the way information regarding the occult spread around.

The page features a dramatic portrait of Crowley in a dark hood, several staged ritual images, and illustrations of robed figures and an altar, surrounded by dense columns of text in a highly tabloid layout. — Black-and-white newspaper page from *The Washington Times* (25 March 1923) with a large sensational headline about Aleister Crowley, calling him the ‘Head of the Devil Worshippers’. (Credit: Library of Congress).

Fiction, too, gave stigma a more durable and conspicuous narrative shape, fixing it in characters and plots rather than in passing headlines. While newspapers could sensationalise the occult in brief, arresting phrases, novels had the capacity to translate those same anxieties into recurring figures and story worlds that readers could return to, re-encounter, and remember. W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician (1908), later adapted into a film, took inspiration from real world occultists with the character of Oliver Haddo. Haddo was modelled closely on Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947), an English occultist and author whose notoriety and influence made him one of the most recognisable figures in modern Western esotericism, and helped to consolidate an image of the occultist as transgressive, manipulative, and morally dubious, binding esoteric practice to themes of excess, ritual peril, and bodily degradation. Although Crowley became its most notorious embodiment, this image was not attached to him alone, but shaped wider public assumptions about occult communities and practitioners more broadly.

A man in a lab coat and bow tie pours liquid into a beaker in a cluttered laboratory filled with various glassware. The scene is intense and focused. — Black‑and‑white still from the 1926 film *The Magician*. The character Oliver Haddo stands in a cluttered alchemical laboratory, wearing a rumpled robe over formal clothes, carefully pouring liquid between different flasks, preparing to create a homunculus. A homunculus is a legendary concept from alchemy, usually referring to a tiny, artificially created human or humanoid figure. (Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).

Yet many literary works and films deploying the occult as a plot device handle it haphazardly, a pentacle or some random pagan symbols, usually runes, zodiac signs, and alchemical symbols, scattered here and there. This means that in most cases, there is no real substance behind their usage, and no research done on behalf of the author or the production team. Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1934) stands apart. The novel makes a plethora of references to alchemy, Enochian magick, and Qabalah, as well as various classical grimoires, and lists a number of foundational works of Jewish mysticism such as Sepher ha-Zohar, Midraschim, and Sepher Yetzirah. The occult and historical setting in which the film adaptation of the book was released also played a major role in the film’s impact. Released in 1968, the same year as Rosemary’s Baby, and amid growing public fascination with Satanism, witchcraft, and alternative spiritualities, the film entered a climate already primed to read occultism as both alluring and dangerous. Wheatley’s work therefore reveals a tension that runs through modern occult fiction more broadly: these texts could caricature the occult, but they could also preserve, popularise, and reshape esoteric ideas for new audiences.

Occult groups, however, did not simply endure these representations; they adapted to them and, in doing so, reshaped themselves. Secrecy, selective self-presentation, and appeals to science, psychology, or comparative religion became strategies for negotiating suspicion and preserving legitimacy in public life. At the same time, many occultists turned to fiction themselves, recognising that the novel could do cultural work that doctrinal writing could not. Fiction offered a safer and more flexible medium through which esoteric ideas could circulate by way of plot, symbolism, and character, allowing authors to teach readers how to think occultly, dramatise internal debates about authority and ethics, and attract sympathetic audiences without openly publishing manifestos. Fiction, therefore, played a dual role in fin-de-siècle occult culture. It functioned both as a vehicle of caricature and stigma, and as a tool of instruction, self-definition, and survival. To understand modern occultism, these stories must be read not as mere fantasy, but as part of the cultural infrastructure through which occult communities were imagined, contested, and made.

This wider pattern can be seen clearly in the reading lists of occult orders such as the A∴A∴, a graded initiatory organisation founded in 1907 by Crowley and George Cecil Jones (1873–1960), an English chemist and occultist. The A∴A∴ became one of the most influential initiatory orders in modern occult history, helping to shape the development of Thelemic thought and leaving a lasting mark on later esoteric movements, magical practice, and occult reading culture. It centred its teachings around Thelema, an occult religion, philosophy, and system of mysticism founded in the early 1900s by Crowley. Magick: Liber ABA, Book 4, which compiled a range of ritualistic and religious material first published in the early 1910s and later issued in collected form, was one of its primary teaching texts. The collection is primarily associated with Crowley, including several contributions in its early formation from collaborators including Mary Desti (1871–1931) and Leila Waddell (1876–1932). Within the A∴A∴ system, the Neophyte degree was an early training stage in which students followed a set reading and practice programme as part of their formal development. In Magick: Liber ABA, the Neophyte syllabus includes a section titled ‘Other Books, Principally Fiction, of a Generally Suggestive and Helpful Kind’, where literary texts are placed alongside explicitly esoteric material. The list includes works such as Alice in Wonderland (1865), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595), Dracula (1897), Zanoni (1842), and Maugham’s The Magician (1908). Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, moreover, also appeared on the recommended reading lists of later occult organisations such as the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis due to its extensive esoteric and occult knowledge. That inclusion matters because it shows fiction being treated not as an optional extra, but as part of occult training itself, helping shape perception, interpretation, and sensibility. It is also the only section of the syllabus to emphasise fiction in this way, which highlights its distinct teaching function.

Page from a book listing "Other Books, Principally Fiction," sectioned as Book Four, with titles and descriptions detailing their value in mystical and magical contexts. — A page from the *Magick: Liber ABA, Book 4* titled ‘Section 2: Other Books, Principally Fiction, of a Generally Suggestive and Helpful Kind’. The page lists recommended reading for aspirants, including works such as *Zanoni*, *Dracula*, *Alice in Wonderland*, *The Arabian Nights*, and texts by Huysmans, Machen, and Shakespeare, with brief comments on their value for occult study. (Credit: Author’s Photo).

Page from a book titled "Literature Recommended to Aspirants," listing books and texts under "Course II." Notable titles are "The Book of the Law" and "The Vision and the Voice," providing a reading list. The page number is 455. — A continuation of the page of the ‘Section 2: Other Books, Principally Fiction, of a Generally Suggestive and Helpful Kind’. This part of the section includes titles such as *The Magician* by W. Somerset Maugham, *The Bible*, and *Kim*, followed by a note on the purpose of the reading course. (Credit: Author’s Photo).

Dion Fortune’s (1890–1946) fiction is a particularly strong example of this. Born Violet Firth, Fortune was a British occultist, novelist, and founder of the Society of the Inner Light, founded initially as the Fraternity of the Inner Light in 1924. Writing at the intersection of esotericism and psychology, she became one of the most important popularisers of modern occult thought in interwar Britain. Her importance was comparable to that of many of her male contemporaries, even if gendered patterns of recognition have too often left her less visible in both occult memory and modern scholarship. Her novels functioned as narrative extensions of her esoteric thought and helped circulate occult ideas beyond closed initiatory settings and into a broader reading public. In this sense, fiction was not secondary to her non-fiction writings on magic, psychology, and esoteric training. Rather, the novel became a medium through which doctrine could be translated into experience, allowing readers to encounter occultism not simply as a system of beliefs but as a lived sensibility shaped by atmosphere, character, and moral testing.

This use of fiction as an esoteric medium was not merely incidental but recognised within occult circles themselves. In 1932, James Taylor, an American Theosophist, published a pamphlet in which he argued that occultists often treated propaganda as a primary function of literary fiction. Read in this context, ‘propaganda’ need not be understood only in a crude or pejorative sense, but as a strategy of dissemination, a way of introducing readers to spiritual worldviews, normalising esoteric concepts, and reshaping inherited traditions through narrative form. Fortune’s fiction fits this model especially well. In novels such as The Sea Priestess (1938), Moon Magic (1956), and The Goat-Foot God (1936), she uses plot, dialogue, and ritual atmosphere to stage initiation as a gradual process of psychological and spiritual attunement. These texts do not simply mention occult ideas; they train the reader in how to perceive them, often by guiding attention toward symbolic correspondences, inner transformation, and the moral consequences of magical action.

Fortune’s fiction also needs to be placed within the wider print culture of modern occultism, where novels, pamphlets, and periodicals worked together as overlapping tools of transmission. Across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, occult periodicals such as The Occult Review (1905), Lucifer (1887), The Irish Theosophist (1892), and The Equinox (1909) did more than publish esoteric content, they opened a window onto worlds that were otherwise inaccessible to most readers, while helping to construct occult publics, sustain institutional networks, and legitimise esoteric knowledge in print. Through editorials, letters, serialised essays, reports, and polemics, these publications created a semi-public arena in which occult ideas could circulate as both instruction and social practice. Read alongside this periodical culture, Fortune’s novels appear not as isolated literary productions but as part of the same media ecology, one in which narrative fiction could perform many of the same functions as magazines and pamphlets while reaching readers through a different emotional and imaginative register.

Modern occultism did not emerge only through ritual, doctrine, or secret organisation. It took shape in fiction as well. Novels gave readers some of the first images through which the occult became familiar: the sinister adept, the hidden order, the promise of initiation, the fear of corruption. Sometimes those images deepened the stigma. Sometimes they opened a door. Either way, they mattered. As the A∴A∴ syllabus and Dion Fortune’s fiction both show, novels could do work that more overtly doctrinal texts often could not, shaping perception, modelling conduct, and carrying esoteric ideas into wider public culture. To read these texts seriously, then, is not to stray from the history of modern occultism, but to recognise one of the central media through which that history was imagined, transmitted, and made.