From Vibratory Occultism to Vibratory Modernism: Blackwood, Lawrence, Woolf

Abstract

The relationship between modernity, modernism and occultism has become a growing field of scholarship in recent years. In contrast to Max Weber’s thesis of disenchantment, we have become familiar with the ways that scientific incursions into the domain of belief produced new forms of re-enchantment in the form of spiritualism,¹ telepathy,² or magical thinking associated with new technologies.³ Wouter Hanegraaff has argued that occultism persisted into modernity through processes of psychologisation: ‘magic has been interpreted increasingly as a series of psychological techniques for exalting individual consciousness; the original focus on learning how to use the hidden forces of the natural world has become dependent on learning how to use the hidden forces of the psyche’.⁴ Hanegraaff’s view has been challenged by Egil Asprem, who has argued that psychologisation can be equated with psychological escapism, while occultists such as Aleister Crowley were seen to ‘embrace natural scientific inquiry and tirelessly pursue such critical assessment of magical techniques, practices and results, reclaiming the subjective experiences for intersubjective scrutiny’.⁵ In both cases the authors are interested in the ways in which occultists are able to legitimate their beliefs and practices within the intellectual (and more specifically scientific) contexts of modernity.