The Evolution of Occultism

The present-day view of the occult is highly influenced by the history of the paranormal in the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through the seventeenth century, most people believed in the active operation of occult (then termed “supernatural”) entities and forces. This belief brought comfort to some; but, for others, it became a source of fear, leading to suffering, and even death, for many. It allowed some people to rule by their reported ability to manipulate supernatural powers, and made it possible for the Inquisition to persecute thousands as witches and Satanists. It also enabled unscrupulous religious leaders to deceive people with sham relics and miracles. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, there began a serious critique of the more questionable supernatural phenomena, beginning with relics and extending to the actions of the witchfinders. As Protestantism secularized (denied sacred value to) the world, and the acceptance of scientific observation and organization of natural phenomena spread, a general spirit of skepticism was created. In the eighteenth century, this skeptical spirit created the first significant movement to challenge the role of the supernatural in human society—Deism.

 Deism affirmed the existence of God the Creator, but suggested that God had merely established a system of natural law, leaving the world to govern itself by that law. By implication, God was divorced from the world, and supernatural events did not occur; rather the “supernatural “was merely the misobserved “natural.” Furthermore, neither angels nor spirits communicated with humans; and, in turn, prayer did not reach God. Religious spokespersons responded, of course, and popularized a new definition of “miracle”—the breaking by God of his own natural laws to intervene in the lives of his creatures.

 Deist thought was largely confined to a small number of intellectual circles, among them some very powerful and influential people, including most of the founding fathers of the United States—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. In the nineteenth century, the skeptical view of the supernatural became the cornerstone of the Freethought movement. This minority movement impacted every level of intellectual and theological thinking at that time. Theologians regularly began their courses with “proofs” of the existence of God; preachers debated village atheists; evangelists strengthened their efforts to reach the godless masses. In the midst of the debate between traditional religionists and Freethinkers, a few people (known as Spiritualists) proposed a different viewpoint in which the distinction between this life and the life beyond became a somewhat artificial intellectual construct; everything was part of one larger natural world. To demonstrate and prove scientifically the existence of this larger universe, Spiritualists turned to mediums—people with special access to those realms once called the supernatural. Entering a trance-like state, these mediums would bring forth messages containing information that seemingly could not have been acquired by normal means. The mediums’ manifestations of a wide variety of extraordinary phenomena seemingly pointed to the existence of unusual forces operating in the physical world, forces unknown or undocumented by the emerging scientific community at the time. Almost concurrently with the emergence and spread of Spiritualism, a few intellectuals, having close ties to traditional religion, yet imbued with the new scientific methodology, concluded that scientific observation could be used to investigate reports of “supernatural” phenomena, especially reports of ghosts and hauntings. This sparked the formation in 1862 of the Ghost Club in England. During the next two decades, the growth of Spiritualism provided a fertile field for investigation, and in 1882 a new generation of investigators founded the Society for Psychical Research in London to study actual phenomena occurring during Spiritualist seances as well as other incidents of “psychic” phenomena.

The period from 1882 to the beginning of World War II could be described as a stormy marriage between Spiritualism and psychical research by some, while others might call it a scandalous, illegitimate affair. Spiritualism, and the movements it spawned, most notably Theosophy, uncovered the phenomena, which psychical researchers observed, analyzed, and reported on. With an increasingly sophisticated eye, psychical researchers researched, catalogued, experimented with, and debated the existence of psychical phenomena. These researchers understood that psychic events, if verified, had far-reaching implications for the understanding of the world and how it operated. Over the years psychical researchers amassed a mountain of data and reached a number of conclusions, both positive and negative. On one hand, researchers positively documented a host of basic psychic occurrences (telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition) and compiled a body of evidence that seemed to support human-spirit contact. At the same time, especially though research on physical medium ship, investigators repeatedly discovered that situations involving visible phenomena (materializations, apports, movement of objects) were often fraudulent. The high incidence of deceit and trickery, even by mediums previously investigated and pronounced genuine, created a major dilemma. It challenged the credibility of Spiritualism and, while not suggesting that every medium or member was a fraud, insinuated that the movement protected con artists and defended their work, even in the face of unquestioned evidence of guilt. It also implied that psychical researchers who produced any positive evidence were either naive, sloppy methodologically, or conspirators with the mediums.

 Spence wrote from a Spiritualist perspective, and was very hopeful that scientists would find the means of proving the validity of physical phenomena. He fully accepted the existence of materializations, teleportation, and apports. Fodor’s work, written just a decade and a half later, acknowledged the element of fraud in Spiritualism, while at the same time, retained the prominent psychical researcher’s confidence in the larger body of data gathered by his colleagues.

Since Fodor and Spence

Even as Fodor was writing, however, a revolution was starting within the ranks of psychical research. J. B. Rhine, a young biologist, suggested an entirely new direction for research. Psychical research, Rhine noted, had relied mainly upon the studied observation of phenomena in the field, and operated by eliminating possible mundane explanations for what was occurring. Investigators visited ghostly haunts, sites of poltergeist occurrences, and Spiritualist séances and then developed detailed reports of what they had seen and heard. After a half century, this approach eventually eliminated a good deal of fraudulent phenomena. However, psychical researchers had been unsuccessful in convincing their scholarly colleagues not only of the truth of their findings but of the validity of their efforts. Even though psychical research had attracted some of the most eminent scientists of the era to its ranks, it remained “on-the fringe.” To Rhine, the only way to validate future findings was to bring research into the laboratory. Only such experimental data would then be convincing to the modern, scientifically trained mind.