Retracing Eternity: Freemasonry, Theosophy and the Occult Revival, 1875-1925

Abstract

In 1875, in a small apartment in New York City, a handful of freemasons and spiritualists gathered to create a new occult society. What emerged, after hours of debating, drinking and smoking, was the Theosophical Society. Its chief representatives were the spiritualist, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and her masonic associate, Henry Steel Olcott. Together, these two mystical individuals helped inspire a trans-continental occult revival, and fundamentally transformed the religious margins of Western society. The occult revival that followed was a vast and complicated phenomenon. In an explosion of esoteric zeal, occultists sought to reform everything from art and agriculture, to education and epistemology. While there were countless books, journals and minor figures devoted to the occult movement, four societies and their founders stand out. Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society; William Wynn Westcott’s, and S. L. Mathers’ Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, and Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society. These were the most famous and significant occult movements, and in many ways, they remain culturally relevant today. However, discussions of these societies seldom, if ever, examine all four together. This is a mistake. Not only were these societies integrally connected, but when analyzed holistically, certain patterns reveal themselves. These patterns go a long way in explaining the centripetal forces of the occult revival, and point to an associational and ideational root from the early 18th century. This root is Freemasonry. Surprisingly, the profound role of Freemasonry within the ideational world of Western esotericism and the occult remains largely unfinished. What is revealed once this connection is excavated, is a centuries-long tradition of freemasonic scholarship on ancient and comparative religion. Elements of Freemasonry, it appears, underwent a religious transformation in the 18th century, and some members reinterpreted the fraternity as a meta-religion associated with the Philosophia Perennis. This association continually developed as the Western world came into contact with ever increasing numbers of foreign religions. What emerged was a highly speculative narrative of global religious development, centered on the institution of Freemasonry—and it is within this distinctly masonic narrative that each of the leading occult societies developed.