From Occultism to Occulture – or when 93 became 23

Guest lecture by Kasper Opstrup, Assistant professor, University of Copenhagen.

During the 1850s, modern occultism took a shape recognisable from today with spiritualism, high magic(k), and, later, theosophy, as some of its most significant currents. My lecture will investigate the magical current from French magician Éliphas Lévi through fin de siècle magicians such as Papus and Joséphin Péladan where it became aligned with Symbolism to its arrival on the British Isles with the Golden Dawn and later Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, who, arguably, can be seen as a proto-surrealist. It was a current that entangled art, politics and the occult as it was preoccupied with creating a new wo/man to inhabit the new era prophesied already by the Rosicrucians of the early 17th century.

The current was injected into popular culture with the Beatles and American writer William S. Burroughs among many others. It then became part of a sprawling subculture reaching up into the 1990s through ideas about electronic revolutions, Temples of Psychick Youths, weird fiction, music, and comics by, for example, Grant Morrison and Alan Moore.

The lecture will examine the changing attitude towards magic in this shift from occultism to occulture. How does it make it happen? In conclusion, I will discuss the contemporary influence of this current. In the twenty-first century, the occult is visible everywhere in pop culture and beyond. Not only has myth become part of the political landscape again, but the occult has also informed academic discourses from hauntology and hyperstition to decolonisation and disenchantment. Has magic, finally, shed its utopian roots?

All are welcome (free).