The Occult

Brandon, Ruth. The Spiritualists. Prometheus, 1984.

• A solid, if not brilliant, overview of spiritualism.

Caillet, Albert. Manuel Bibliographique des Sciences Occultes ou Psychiques. 3 vols. Reprint, Oak Knoll, 1997.

• If you read French and are willing to do some work, Caillet gives an extraordinary survey of the occult world at the end of the nineteenth century. This is a carefully-described list, with prices, of the vast majority of occult books available at the time, with little biographies of the authors. Expensive.

Gilbert, Robert A. The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians. Borgo, 1986.

• Solid; can be tricky to actually purchase.

Godwin, Joscelyn. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany: SUNY, 1994.

• Excellent, but mostly a little earlier. A very good introduction to magical thinking in the Victorian era.

Howe, Ellic. The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A documentary history of a magical order, 1887-1923. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Also Red Wheel/Weiser, 1978.

• The best introduction to the Golden Dawn, unfortunately very difficult to find at a remotely sane price.

Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon. New ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

• Although this is really a history of what is now known as Wicca, the whole first half is devoted to Wicca’s nineteenth-century roots, and is extremely useful. Hutton is also a first-class scholar, and his notes are a goldmine.

Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. London: Virago, 1989; U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1990; U. of Chicago Press, 2004.

———. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. U. of Chicago Press, 2003.

• Both well received, though I have only skimmed the first. Very much academic works.

Waite, Arthur Edward. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. London: Rider, 1910; many reprints, and now in print from Samuel Weiser in York Beach, ME.

Washington, Peter. Madame Blavatsky's Baboon : A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. Paperback reprint, New York: Schocken, 1996.

• Rather dismissive, as you can already tell from the title, but a decent account of Theosophy nonetheless.

Webb, James. The Occult Underground. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1988.

• A phenomenally good overview, unfortunately lacking almost any analysis.

Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. Routledge, 1968; reprint Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

• If you want to play with memory, magic, and geography, this is required reading.

See also the special GoldenDawnBibliography.

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 22 Dec 2004