This is the fifth post in a series reflecting on the world of 1920s as a background for discussing the early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? Or about the stories they tell?

It’s tolerably likely that you’ll see a church. The 1926 US Census of Religious Bodies will find one church for every 220 Christians, and one synagogue for every 1309 Jews. Places of worship for other religions were rarer. For example, one source states that “the first known American mosques were established in Biddeford, Maine, in 1915; in Ross, North Dakota, in 1920; in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1923; and in Michigan City, Indiana, in 1925.” Those would have been the first specific buildings for prayer, as opposed to meeting-places in, for example, private homes; the same source notes that “by the 1920s, American Muslims were widely diverse and dispersed throughout the United States, with South Asians, Albanians, Turks, Bosnians, as well as people from Syria-Lebanon, scattered in small communities throughout the U.S.”

(My usual disclaimers: I am neither American nor a historian, though I’ve written pop history in the past. These posts are reflections on things I’ve read about the 1920s, and things I’ve come to think about the time; things I find interesting, and things I think underlie the fiction in Weird Tales. If I repeat here points that are common knowledge among Americans, my apologies; I can only say they seemed relevant to me as a foreigner. I also want to apologise here for not engaging with the comments to recent posts; the past month or so has been especially rough for me fatigue-wise. Please know that I do read and value all the responses!)

So if you see a place of worship, it is probably a church. We will begin there, at any rate, because in this post I want to talk about the situation of religion and occultism in 1923; a huge subject, but directly relevant to much weird fiction and to much of Weird Tales. Therefore even if the subject’s too big to discuss in depth, it’s worth recording some facts and figures about belief in the 1920s.

The number of Christian denominations is rising, from 186 in 1906 to 256 in 1936; a bit more than 15% of the population are Catholic, roughly one American in 20 is a Methodist, and the number of Southern Baptists rises above 3% of the population during this decade. At the same time, white American Protestantism is seeing, overall, a downturn in fervour. The decade from 1925 to 1935 will see declines in church attendance, in Sunday school enrollment, and in missionary activity. One minister will state in 1930 that it was “a fairly safe generalization to say that no profession of men is so thoroughly empty of dignity and grace as that of the Protestant minister today.” And in 1927 theologian Reinhold Niebuhr will write that “a psychology of defeat, of which both fundamentalism and modernism are symptoms, has gripped the forces of religion.”

Still, the great 1929 sociological study Middletown, examining the way of life of white residents of Muncie, Indiana, will observe that: “Membership in one of the religious groups is generally taken for granted, particularly among the business class, and a newcomer is commonly greeted with the question, ‘What church do you go to?’” Further, “With few exceptions, notably the Jewish temple, churches in Middletown represent some form of Christianity. When one asked various individuals in Middletown, ‘What does one believe in if one is a Christian?’ they inclined at first to think the questioner was joking, a condition reflecting the general tendency to accept ‘being a Christian’ as synonymous with being ‘civilized’ or ‘an honest man’ or ‘a reputable citizen.’” At the same time not everyone is devout so much as simply prepared to go along with society at large:

The openly free-thinking group, represented in part in the Ethical Society of the nineties, has disappeared and in its stead is an outwardly conforming indifference among a certain minority of the business class. “I’ve joined the church,” said one prominent man, “because who am I to buck an institution as big as the church, and anyway it seems necessary to conform, but I guess my pastor knows all right how little my heart is in it.”

(The Ethical Society was an international secular movement, in the United States popularised by Felix Adler, which focussed on morality and public works.)

If the fervour of one sort of Protestant Christianity’s declining it is also true that fundamentalism is rising. For decades there has been tension within (white) American Protestantism between theologically conservative groups and modernists — who accept modern ideas such as Darwinian evolution, the age of the Earth as indicated by geology, and the ‘higher criticism’ of the Bible that analyses the Bible’s historical and literary aspects without necessarily accepting it as revealed truth. In 1923 perhaps the most prominent of the conservative groups are fundamentalists (the word was coined in 1920 to describe an already-existing movement), who believe in Biblical inerrancy: the literal truth of the text of the Bible. Fundamentalists have been influenced by a recently-published version of the King James Bible, the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible (revised in 1917), which has become particularly popular due to its notes and cross-referencing system. The Scofield Bible has introduced many fundamentalist readers to concepts like Archbishop Ussher’s chronology of creation, and dispensational theology — the idea that God relates in different ways to humanity in different eras of history.

The tension between modernists and fundamentalists will lead to led to a new term for the modernists: ‘Mainline Protestants,’ apparently deriving from the Philadelphia Main Line, a group of wealthy suburbs named for the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad that connected them; the Protestants of these suburbs belong to denominations that oppose the fundamentalists. The controversy has already birthed a major polemical controversy, especially in the North. In 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Baptist minister, preached a sermon called “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” which portrayed the dispute as a struggle between intolerant conservatives and open-minded scholars; that sparked a fierce fundamentalist response in sermons, pamphlets, and books.

This is, after all, a time when preachers and evangelists can be general celebrities. One, Aimee Semple Macpherson, became the first woman to preach a sermon wirelessly, and in 1924 she will open her own radio station in the Los Angeles area, becoming one of the first radio evangelists. Another, the former professional baseball player Billy Sunday, has developed his raucous preaching at revival meetings into a major business, thanks to the management of his wife Nell. Revivals and camp meetings, gatherings usually held over the course of several days led by a Christian preacher, have been popular for decades, particularly in rural areas where they provide not just religiosity but also community and theatricality. Billy Sunday was the best-known of the revivalist preachers, and during the 1910s his month-long meetings in specific cities drew huge audiences, his sermons were printed in newspapers, and he dined with Presidents. Unlike Macpherson, he didn’t adapt to the radio age, and his fame will decline through the 1920s.

One particularly significant series of revival meetings was held in Los Angeles from 1906 to 1915, led by African-American preacher William J. Seymour. He was a Pentecostalist, part of a new denomination that had recently emerged from the Holiness Movement within Methodism, which looked back to the teachings of John Wesley. Pentecostalism is notorious for dramatic worship services; the Azusa Street Revival was known for its spontaneous singing and shouting and preaching and speaking in tongues, and was a major reason for the rapid establishment of Pentecostalism, with many new churches founded by attendees of the Azusa Street meetings. (Aimee Macpherson, mentioned above, is another of the most prominent Pentecostalists of the 1920s.)

Moving on from Christianity, the 1926 US Census of Religious Bodies gives the number of Christian churches in the United States, but is less helpful with other religions. It does find 1247 people of the Baha’i faith, but “the Buddhist temples reported at former censuses … were not enumerated at this census, the Chinese and Japanese having no such relation to their temples as is common among the Christian bodies, where each individual church has a regularly enrolled membership. No such list is made of the worshipers at these temples, or of Mohammedans, though it is probable that there are numerous individual adherents of these faiths in the United States.”

The census is also silent about Indigenous American religions; an 1883 law called the “Code of Indian Offenses” forbade many Indigenous American religious ceremonies with the specific intent of forcing assimilation to white culture. Similarly Vodou in Louisiana has been actively suppressed for decades, though it is still being practiced; but with the United States currently occupying Haiti (and also maintaining a separate occupation of the neighbouring Dominican Republic) white outsiders are increasingly fascinated by the religion. For better or worse, Vodou turns up in early Weird Tales stories and in a ‘nonfiction’ piece in the fifth issue. Hoodoo, or conjure, a distinct tradition of African-American folk belief and magic, is thriving and changing as practitioners move north to different climates and environments. Note that in a time when stage magic acts are popular, the best-known African-American magician is a man named Black Herman who incorporates elements of hoodoo in his performances, and will discuss them in his 1935 quasi-autobiography Secrets of Magic, Mystery, and Legerdemain.

To go back to the census: despite choosing not to count the number of Buddhists in the United States, it does mention 200 members of Vedanta Societies. Vedanta Societies were founded by Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk and philosopher, after speaking in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions; lecturing across the United States, he raised interest in the Vedanta traditions of Hinduism, gathered American students, and founded Vedanta Societies in New York and San Francisco. These societies point to something about the presence of Hinduism and Buddhism in North America. Racist immigration laws have limited the number of immigrants who follow those belief systems, but for a hundred years at least some educated Americans have been interested in the religions, an interest that has escalated over the past decades even if filtered through an Orientalist screen. Speakers have presented the history and concepts of the religions, scholars have translated scripture and other texts, and poets and philosophers have tried to refer to their concepts.

This is an important process in its own right. But it also links to another characteristic of the times, and one directly relevant to Weird Tales. The second half of the nineteenth century saw more and more people searching for some kind of spiritual truth beyond mainstream Christianity, and that’s continued n the first decades of the twentieth cetury. New religious traditions have sprung up, and interest in various strands of the occult has grown. Certain parts of the country seem especially hospitable to this spiritual seeking. A San Francisco newspaper column stated in 1913 that:

It is inevitable that Los Angeles should offer rare and glowing opportunities for faddists and mountebanks — spiritualists, mediums, astrologists, phrenologists, palmists, and all other breeds of esoteric wind jammers. The city is cursed with an incredible number of these cabalistic scaramouches. Whole buildings are devoted to occult or outlandish orders — mazdaznan clubs, yogi sects, homes of truth, cults of cosmic fluidists, astral planers, Emmanuel movers, Rosicrucians and other boozy transcendentalists. These empirics do a thriving and luxurious business. They fill the papers with mystic balderdash. They parade the streets in lush kimonos. They hold “classes” and “circles” and wax fat on the donations of the inflammatory. No other city possesses so large a number of metaphysical charlatans in proportion to its population.

But if Los Angeles is already gaining a reputation as a centre for odd cults by 1923, some of the most significant spiritual and religious movements of the past decades have come from western and central New York state. One was the Latter Day Saint movement, begun there in in the 1820s; by the 1920s the largest branch of the movement, the Mormons, has become well-established in Utah (though still occasionally cast as villains, in such popular fictions as A Study In Scarlet and Zane Grey’s 1912 Riders of the Purple Sage). More significant for weird fiction was what came out of Hydesville, New York, in 1848.

Spiritualism (occasionally ‘spiritism’) was a movement that began with two Canadian-born sisters, Margaretta and Kate Fox, who claimed to speak with spirits of the dead. The ghosts communicated with them by rapping on a table in a darkened room. The Fox sisters’ abilities soon led to other people demonstrating similar talents. Although no common doctrine existed among spiritualism, a common vocabulary and set of practices developed: mediums, who communicated with and sometimes were possessed by spirits or spirit guides, sat with questioners and onlookers in a dark room in a ‘seance.’

Holding hands during seances was a later development. Into the 1920s seances were simply people sitting in the dark while odd sounds or other manifestations took place around them. Communication by sharp knocks took a long time, as spirits had to tap in code like — the comparison was frequent at the time — a spiritual telegraph. In 1860 the planchette was invented, and in 1890 the Ouija board was commercialised, which eased things. (The Ouija board was patented as a “toy or game,” and as such was spectacularly popular at once; the early 20s have seen a resurgence in Ouija popularity, with Norman Rockwell illustrating a couple communing with the spirits in 1920.) By 1878, mediums had begun to pass along messages from the dead through ‘automatic writing,’ in which their hand and arm was possessed and a text written out by a spirit.

Spirits communicated information about the other world, or reassured the living about the fates of the departed, or, occasionally, produced a new piece of writing or music allegedly created by some dead genius of the past. But they did more than that. One scholar, Janet Oppenheim, noted that events recorded at seances included “furniture cavorting around the room, objects floating in the air, mediums levitating, musical instruments playing tunes by themselves, bells ringing, tambourines jangling, strange breezes blowing, weird lights glowing, alluring fragrances and ethereal music wafting through the air.” And sometimes a strange glowing substance was produced from the medium’s body, a substance that in 1894 was named ‘ectoplasm.’

Some mediums were amateurs, while others were paid; seances were, sometimes, and to greater or lesser degrees, performances like theatre. Very many mediums were women, and there has been much written about women channeling or claiming to channel male spirits and so speaking with male authority. Some mediums went beyond that, claiming to channel the voices of speakers from other planets — thus David Lindsay’s strange 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus opens with a seance manifesting extraterrestrial activity. Hélène Smith, a medium active from the early 1890s, was the subject of a 1900 book by psychologist Théodore Flournoy, Des Indes à la planète Mars; she would fall spontaneously into trances and tell of her past lives, including a life as a Martian who wrote in a Martian alphabet. Flournoy was a skeptic who was able to show how Smith’s visions were echoes of books she’d read earlier in life, but decades later she’d be considered “the Muse of Automatic Writing” by the Surrealists.

It’s important also to note that spiritualism wasn’t a religion in the same way as was, say, Mormonism. It functioned effectively as a sort of add-on to Christianity (or, very rarely, to Judaism), though mainstream Christian churches, particularly the Catholic Church, rejected Spiritualist beliefs. There is an argument that Spiritualism was a response to a crisis of belief in Christianity prompted by new scientific materialism and Darwinian thought — believers in Spiritualism frequently claimed that spirit communications provided ‘objective’ proof of the afterlife. But Spiritualism was a decentralised movement, with no central institution or organisation establishing doctrine. There were some societies and journals, but no authority that coud dictate ‘true’ spiritualist beliefs.

Some common concepts did develop. Notably, the term “Summerland” became a general term for the highest of heavens, following the writings of psychic and medium Andrew Jackson Davis. And Emma Hardinge Britten — a medium, lecturer, and writer who was a great populariser of spiritualism — produced seven principles of spiritualism which became central to the National Spiritualist Association (later the National Spiritualist Association of Churches), founded in 1893.

But Spiritualism met considerable skepticism, and some mediums were soon proved to be frauds. In 1889 Maggie Fox herself confessed to faking the table-rapping that birthed the movement, then later recanted the confession. Spirit photographers claimed to be able to capture images of spirits (a particularly profitable claim in the wake of the Civil War), but then and now much of their work appeared to be simple double exposure. It’s not surprising that an organisation emerged to investigate claims of the supernatural.

In 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was founded in the United Kingdom to investigate and research apparently supernatural phenomena; an American branch was founded in 1885 and became independent in 1906. The SPR soon developed a new terminology; ‘psychic’ had been in use since 1870, but SPR members soon introduced ‘telepathy,’ ‘telekinesis,’ and ‘ectoplasm.’ Some members were believers, some skeptics, and some purely interested in determining what could be scientifically proven. But the SPR was frequently accused of being too credulous, and of lacking the training needed to detect skillful frauds. Other investigators, though, also tried and often succeeded in disproving the claims of mediums and spirit photographers. Stage magicians in particular debunked many frauds who used the same techniques the magicians used in their acts. Notably, the 1920s saw Harry Houdini expose a number of supposed psychics and mediums at the same time he would be associated with Weird Tales.

While Spiritualism had generated terminology and concepts about ghosts and the afterlife that had become commonplaces by the 1920s, it also had gone through a series of declines and revivals. The latest revival was sparked in 1916 when the English physicist Sir Oliver Lodge published a book called Raymond, or, Life and Death, describing his experiences with séances. The immense loss of life of young people in the Great War and the 1918-20 flu epidemic, and the grief of their surviving friends and relatives, further drove the revival (in relatively conservative Canada, 674 people identified themselves as spiritualists in the 1911 census, 1558 did the same in 1921, and 2263 would call themselves spiritualists in 1931; a rise in 20 years from 0.009 to 0.022 percent of the population). Lodge described a comforting afterlife, his version of Summerland, that was much like living existence down to smoking cigars and drinking whisky.

Noted self-promoter Thomas Edison claimed he’d build a machine to communicate with spirits. No such machine was forthcoming, but he was not alone in the dream of scientific communication with spirits; to take one example, at the beginning of the 20th century Canadian telephone engineer Maurice Aykroyd attended séances and hoped to invent ways to communicate with the spirit world through “a high-vibration crystal radio.” (Eventually, Maurice’s grandson Dan would become known for engaging with ghosts in a busting capacity.) In 1922 the respectable magazine Scientific American announced a contest with total prizes of $5000 for any medium who could present their committee (which included Houdini) with convincing proof of the afterlife. The money was never handed out.

I’ve written so much about Spiritualism because it bears so directly on early Weird Tales stories, which frequently use Spiritualist ideas; one anonymous tale in the first issue, “The Young Man Who Wanted to Die,” even seems as though it might have been inspired by the 1921 death of Spiritualist Thomas Lynn Bradford. But another major spiritual movement would have perhaps an even more direct bearing on fantasy writing, counting several major writers among its adherents. The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875, grew significantly in popularity in the 1880s, and would influence writers, musicians, and other artists for decades.

Spiritualist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was the creator and main force behind Theosophy, along with Henry Steel Olcott, a spiritualist and lawyer. Theosophy nominally aimed to study occultism, mysticism, and religion, but acquired a specific focus from the writings of the charismatic and strong-willed Blavatsky. In particular her books Isis Unveiled, from 1877, and The Secret Doctrine, from 1888, expounded a number of her key esoteric ideas.

Blavatsky claimed to be in touch with enlightened mystics, secret masters who dictated her works. She presented a myth of deep history, with a series of ‘root races’ dating back millions of years, with the first physical ‘root race’ taking form in ancient Hyperborea. Later races lived on the now-sunken continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, and Blavatsky has been credited with bringing the myth of Atlantis to a new level of popular awareness. The Secret Doctrine and much of Blavatsky’s later work was influenced by her and Olcott’s interest in Indian religious tradition, and reincarnation and cycles of ages remained elements of Theosophical myth even after Blavatsky’s death in 1891.

There have been various schisms in the movement, starting even before Blavatsky’s death. An American branch under Katherine Tingley, based in Point Loma, California, seceded from the main Theosophical Society in 1895. The German society under philosopher and mystic Rudolf Steiner spit from Theosophy in 1912 and renamed themselves the Anthroposophical Society. But in 1923 Theosophy is continuing to grow. The original Society, now based in Adyar, India, and led by Blavatsky’s successor Annie Besant, had 36,000 members in 1920 and will grow to 45,000 members by 1928.

Fuelling some of that growth is the 1909 claim by Besant’s friend and ally Charles Webster Leadbeater that an Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti is a sort of Chosen One, destined to channel a Theosophical master who will lead mankind’s evolution to a new spiritual state. The Theosophists have adopted Krishnamurti, now 18, and brought him up (mostly in England) to be a messiah-like figure. This has not been without some controversy, given that Krishnamurti’s parents are still alive, and given that Leadbeater was investigated by police in 1918 and then again in 1922 for sexual assault of boys.

Still, Theosophy’s not only adding members but drawing interest among artists. Notable figures that are or have been engaged with Theosophy by 1923 include Gustav Meyrink, Algernon Blackwood (who founded the Toronto Theosophical Society in 1891), pulp master Talbot Mundy, early abstract painter Hilma af Klint, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky. Many writers, of course, took ideas from Theosophy without buying into the belief system; Clark Ashton Smith wrote to H.P. Lovecraft that “I got my own ideas about Hyperborea, Poseidonis, etc. from such [Theosophical] sources, and turned my imagination loose.”

William Butler Yeats was a member of the Theosophical Society in the late 1880s, until he was expelled for practising occultism. In fact Theosophy had a strong influence on the occult, which had a revival in the late nineteenth century; in 1923, many of the major figures of that revival, and the orders they founded, are still around. Yeats himself joined an organisation called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890, was involved in the politics around the order’s schisms, and continued to be involved in a successor organisation until 1922. In 1923, Yeats and his wife are experimenting with automatic writing; they believe spirits are presenting them with a complex philosophical system, which Yeats will present to the world in 1925’s A Vision.

It is worth discussing the Golden Dawn and some of its animating figures in a bit more detail. In the 1880s there were several occult groups or ‘lodges’ in London; some offered membership through the mail, such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, which also maintained a running feud with Theosophy until declining after its Secretary was convicted of mail fraud in 1883. In 1886 a man named William Wynn Westcott acquired (from clergyman A.F.A. Woodford, shortly before Woodford’s death) a set of enciphered manuscripts presenting a set of rituals and teachings. A Theosophist and occultist, Westcott was also a Freemason and had been part of the esoteric organisation Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, founded in 1866; Westcott deciphered the manuscripts along with fellow Masons and former Societas Rosicruciana members Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman, and the three men founded the Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888.

At its inception the Golden Dawn had five grades, each of which taught various aspects of occult theory and philosophy. Mathers added two more grades in 1891, creating an ‘Inner Order,’ which taught practical occultism, including the creation of magical tools and the summoning of spirits. This was a step beyond what other occult organisations taught, but despite Mathers researching the Golden Dawn material intensively in the British Library, the order did not last. Woodman died in 1891 and Westcott, employed by the British government as a coroner, was forced to resign his membership in 1896. The Golden Dawn had over a hundred members in Britain, including Yeats and Arthur Machen, but Mathers’ leadership skills were lacking and the Golden Dawn broke apart when he initiated one of his friends, a Golden Dawn member noted for libertinism and for feuding with other members, to the highest rank of the society. The society fractured, and then fractured again.

Mathers, by this time, had been conned out of Golden Dawn rituals by two criminals who opened a “Theocratic Unity and Purity League” as a cover for the sexual and financial exploitation of League members. When this, and their use of Golden Dawn material, came to light in a 1901 trial, Mathers renamed the fragment of the Order that remained loyal to him the Alpha et Omega. Various branches opened in several countries over the years, even after Mathers’ 1928 death.

But what of that reprobate magician, Mathers’ friend, who had been a major part of the breakup of the Golden Dawn? Was his lifestyle actually so degenerate? Was he really so wicked as to deserve such scorn? In fact, the British tabloid John Bull will describe him later in 1923 as “the wickedest man in the world.” This isn’t quite right, as people like Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini are very much alive, but for a British tabloid it’s impressively close to accurate. This magician, Aleister Crowley, came from a devout and wealthy family; he inherited the worldly goods, but not the morality. A decadent poet and mountaineer, Crowley began having mystical experiences in 1896, leading him to esotericism and then the Golden Dawn.

His subsequent career is eventful enough that it’s difficult to summarise in brief. He travelled, married, wrote poetry, had affairs with men and women, climbed mountains, divorced his wife on the grounds of his own adultery (they remained friends), and used many different drugs quite a lot. He published a book, The Book of the Law, that he claimed had been dictated to him by a spirit; it declared Crowley the prophet of a new religion called Thelema, based on practicing ceremonial magic, and stated “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” He founded his own magical organisation in 1907 to promote Thelema, claimed to have summoned a demon with sex magic in 1909, then took over the Ordo Templi Orientis — another magical organisation, formed in 1895 and formerly known as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light (not to be confused with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor).

He was sued by Mather in 1910 for printing Golden Dawn secrets, won, and played up the image the trial gave him in the press as a Satanist (though he wasn’t one; few occultists at this time actively worshipped Satan). With his inheritance having run out, he oversaw a troupe of woman violinists called The Ragged Ragtime Girls, and allegedly was involved with British intelligence. Moving to the United States, he made money writing for Vanity Fair as well as a German nationalist newspaper. In 1920 he moved to Sicily where he founded the Abbey of Thelema, a kind of commune in which (among other activities) he wrote, painted, practised sex magic, and took heroin and cocaine. The Italian government will force him out of Sicily in April of 1923. Crowley will continue to practice magic and write, including occult-based fiction, and die in 1947.

If Crowley’s the most notorious figure to come out of the Golden Dawn, there are some other occultists worth noting. One is a writer and Theosophist named at birth Violet Firth, who, after joining the Alpha et Omega, began using the name Dion Fortune. By 1923 she’s started to publish short stories about occult investigator Doctor John Taverner; she’ll later publish several occult novels, as well as numerous books on the occult. Another of the Golden Dawn magicians is painter Austin Osman Spare, whose work is influenced by Spiritualism and Theosophy, and who was associated with Crowley from 1907 to 1912 before turning against Crowley’s love of hierarchy. Spare writes and designs his own grimoires, and has developed his own magical philosophy, Zos Kia Cultus, based on the division of the spirit and the body.

And also there is Arthur Edward Waite, an American-born autodidact and scholar of the occult, who joined the Golden Dawn in 1891. Waite wrote poetry, fantasy novels, and nonfiction on many esoteric subjects, but his most lasting work was his 1909 collaboration with artist and former member of the Golden Dawn Pamela Colman Smith on a deck of Tarot cards. Tarot decks emerged in Italy in the 15th century as the main component of various trick-taking card games and spread through Europe; from the late 18th century onwards French occultists began producing special tarot decks to use in fortune-telling. The 19th-century occultist Éliphas Lévi suggested a correspondence between the 22 cards of the Tarot trump suit and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the Golden Dawn elaborated on this system of correspondences. The Waite-Smith tarot deck was designed to reflect these correspondences in the art of the cards, as expounded in an accompanying book by Waite, The Key to the Tarot. The deck’s since become the most widely used Tarot deck in the world.

All this interest in occultism is, if not a general interest of society, at least spread widely enough to draw the attention of journalists and artists. It has been suggested, for example, that A. E. Waite inspired the character of Innsmouth magician Ephraim Waite in H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Thing On the Doorstep.” Certainly occult reading was widely available; Lovecraft mentions an occult bookstore on New York’s 46th Street in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, while in London The Atlantis Bookshop was established in 1922. Theosophist John Maurice Watkins started “Book-Notes,” a publication about Theosophical writings, in 1893, and had opened a shop by 1897; Watkins continued to publish new and classic esoteric books, and his store continues in business today.

And of course there are various other occultists and psychics not related to the Golden Dawn or Theosophy. At this moment in 1923, Russian mystic George Gurdjieff and his pupil P. D. Ouspensky are teaching a spiritual path of self-development to a group of students in a ‘Prieuré’ in Avon, France; New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield died at Gudjieff’s “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man” in January of 1923, making the Institute infamous. In America, Kentuckian Edgar Cayce has become famous for his supposed clairvoyance and psychic powers; speaking while in a trance, he sometimes discusses astrology and reincarnation, and will soon start making predictions about future events. In Germany the racist and hard-right Thule Society has studied occultism since 1918, though they’ve been declining since the fascist Nazi Party severed links with the Society in 1920.

One can find any number of other occultists and occult societies. But by way of concluding, it is worth noting certain theories about religion and religious beliefs that are now considered to have been at least overstated, but which in 1923 are widely known and quite influential. In the late 19th century, folklorists came to believe that just as geological strata preserved fossils of different eras, so human cultures might have different strata preserving cultural fossils in the form of folk customs. Thus Sir James Frazer’s 1890 work of comparative mythology The Golden Bough attempted to link European folk beliefs and customs with myths and religious practices from societies around the world; it was expanded in two later editions, then in 1922 an immensely popular one-volume edition was published. By that time anthropologists had largely backed away from Frazer’s theories, but in 1923 less-academic folklorists — the Folklore Society had been founded in 1878 — continue to be fascinated by them, along with the general public and many writers and artists.

Other scholars and archaeologists, like Jane Harrison (a well-known Classicist) and Arthur Evans (an archaeologist who excavated Knossos on Crete), have come to believe that before recorded history began there was a matriarchal prehistory, which survived in European paganism as the worship of a ‘great goddess’ — an archetypal divine female underlying stories of goddesses like Demeter, as well as archaeological remains such as Evans had found in Crete. Some thought that actual pagan beliefs had been maintained in the European countryside, including a supposed ‘witch-cult’ which had existed in secret as a religion in defiance of European Christianity. The most notable expounder of this idea is Margaret Murray, specifically in her 1921 book The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Similarly, Jessie Weston’s 1920 volume From Ritual to Romance suggests that the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail contains pagan elements and has the structure of a fertility myth. Again, these sorts of arguments were fascinating for writers; in 1922 T.S. Eliot published “The Waste Land,” which was immediately acclaimed as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, and which was in part inspired by Weston’s book.

By 1923, these ideas of paganism, witch cults, and folklore as prehistoric survival have already inspired masters of weird fiction like Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. They will go on to inspire others. Not least among those being H.P. Lovecraft, who cites both Frazer and Murray in “The Call of Cthulhu,” and refers to Murray’s ideas in stories like “The Dreams In the Witch House.” As scholarship these arguments have, by and large, not held up well over the past few decades of scrutiny, and indeed they were criticised even in their own time. But as inspiration for writers, as spurs to creativity, they’re as significant as any religious movement of the time.

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Matthew David Surridge is the author of “The Word of Azrael,” from Black Gate 14. You can buy collections of his essays on fantasy novels here and here. His Patreon, hosting a short fiction project based around the lore within a Victorian Book of Days, is here. You can find him on Facebook, or follow his Bluesky account, @bookofdays.