Regular Episode
#150 – MAGIC: SPIRITUALISM AND THEOSOPHY, PART II
As Blake notes in his intro, the long-range destination for this series is Aleister Crowley — but the goal isn’t a sensational highlight reel. It’s the world Crowley came from. This episode builds that world.
🔬 Esotericism, Occultism, and the Crisis of Faith
John draws a useful distinction between two terms the show hadn’t formally defined: esotericism — ideas and practices once common but now regarded as marginal or disreputable (astrology, alchemy, Neoplatonism) — and occultism, the modern form that actively engages with science, borrows its rhetoric and methods, while expanding the definition of what science can test.
The fertile soil for both, John argues, was European colonialism and the intellectual collision it produced. When Europeans encountered the sophisticated philosophical and religious traditions of India, China, Japan, and elsewhere, they couldn’t simply dismiss them as “ignorant heathens.” The question of how the Buddha delivered moral teachings five centuries before Jesus prompted a genuine crisis of faith — and opened minds to religious alternatives. Combined with the secularizing momentum of the Protestant Reformation (which had already severed the legal link between church authority and the persecution of magical practice), this produced exactly the environment in which Spiritualism and Theosophy could flourish.
📖 Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the Romantic Occult Novel
Before there was Blavatsky, there was fiction. John identifies Edward Bulwer-Lytton — yes, the “It was a dark and stormy night” man — as perhaps the single most influential literary figure for the rise of Theosophy and the Golden Dawn. A colleague of Charles Dickens (whose serialized publishing model Bulwer-Lytton also used), he was, in John’s words, “the Dan Brown of the 19th century”: prolific, popular, and saturated with esoteric ideas drawn from his wide reading on mesmerism and occult philosophy.
His novel 📚 Zanoni 💵 introduced the image of a secret brotherhood of spiritually advanced masters quietly guiding humanity — a concept Helena Petrovna Blavatsky would later treat as literal truth, and which S. L. MacGregor Mathers reportedly adopted as a personal alias. Bulwer-Lytton was not actually an occultist — he demanded the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA) remove his name when they claimed him as their patron — but the lore persisted anyway, and Blavatsky was among those who sincerely believed it.
His other relevant novel, 📚 Vril: The Power of the Coming Race 💵, also fed directly into later esoteric and occult thinking.
🌏 Blavatsky, Olcott, and the Theosophical Society
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was born in what is now Ukraine, married young, left her husband quickly, and traveled extensively — though John cautions that the biographies of figures in this milieu are riddled with self-invented histories and need to be treated skeptically. She arrived in America in the 1870s, at the height of the Spiritualist movement, and made her name partly by denouncing Spiritualism from the inside.
Her key collaborator was Henry Steel Olcott, an American lawyer and Civil War veteran who had served on the commission investigating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and who had turned to journalism and Spiritualism in the years after. Together they founded the Theosophical Society and relocated its headquarters from New York to India, where the influence of Hinduism and Buddhism became increasingly central to Theosophical teaching.
Blavatsky’s critique of Spiritualism was theologically elegant: the entities mediums contacted weren’t ghosts or surviving personalities, but mere “astral shells” — remnants of a person whose soul had already moved on to reincarnate. That’s why the spirits so often got things wrong: they were just echoes, not oracles. The actual wisdom came from the Mahatmas — real, physically existing, spiritually advanced humans believed to reside in the inaccessible (and uncolonized) fastness of Tibet.
🏛️ The Golden Dawn: From Theory to Practice
Theosophy was, in John’s phrase, a “theoretical occultism.” Its practical offerings amounted largely to meditation, vegetarianism, and celibacy. A cohort of British fringe Freemasons and Theosophists wanted more — actual ceremonial magic — and when Theosophical leadership repeatedly refused to teach it, Mathers, William Wynn Westcott, and others founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888.
Their legitimacy rested on two claims: magical manuscripts held in the British Library, and a letter purportedly authorizing them to practice rites and initiations, traced to a contact in Germany. The Golden Dawn synthesized Egyptian ceremonial magic, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, astrology, and tarot into a structured initiatory system modeled on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life — an inner and outer order, degrees of advancement, and actual ritual practice that distinguished it sharply from Theosophy’s book-learning approach.
John’s point: reading the published rites (and they are all published — membership lists, ritual texts, everything) is not the same as doing them. The experiential, participatory dimension was precisely what these groups offered that Theosophy wouldn’t.
⚡ Schism, Personality, and Crowley
All of these organizations, John observes, share a structural vulnerability inherited from their Protestant cultural DNA: because orthodoxy (what you believe) matters more than orthopraxy (what you do), any serious doctrinal disagreement threatens a split. Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, and the OTO all fragmented repeatedly — sometimes over ideology, sometimes over succession after a leader’s death, and sometimes over pure personality clashes.
The case of Crowley in the Golden Dawn illustrates all three at once: a talented practitioner whose ideas weren’t the problem, but whose personality was intolerable to most of the membership. Mathers backed him; the lodge didn’t. The resulting schism helped fracture the Golden Dawn permanently. A fuller examination of Crowley’s subsequent career is promised in a future episode.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Zanoni 💵 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
– 📚 Vril: The Power of the Coming Race 💵 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
🔗 Related Links
– Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
– Theosophical Society
– Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
– Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA)
– Éliphas Lévi
– Perennialism (the “ancient wisdom” tradition)
– Orientalism
– Tulpa (discussed in MonsterTalk episode 86)
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
In this episode of MonsterTalk, we continue our discussion about Western Esotericism with John L. Crow. In part two, we talk about the origins of Theosophy, the nature of secret and occult societies in this era, and the groundwork that led to the rise of magical orders in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Theosophy figures into the modern Western conception of Tulpas, which we discussed in episode 86, and also Slenderman.
Mentioned in this episode
- Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni
- Rosicrucians
- Vril: The Power of the Coming Race
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton
- SRIA
- Eliphas Levy
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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