English 9231
Late-Victorian Occulture
Instructor: Professor Christopher Keep.
Winter Half Course.
Occulture, a neologism combining “occult” and “culture,” is the sociological study of the beliefs and practices derived from the popular interest in the paranormal. The term has become especially useful for critics who are sceptical of the Weberian thesis that modern society has lost its sense of magic, mystery, and sacred meaning, and turned their attention, instead, to the what Christopher Partridge describes as the stubbornly persistent lure of the supernatural—“the lure of the perennial wisdom, the lure of an afterlife, the lure of psychic phenomena, the lure of paranormal activity, the lure of conspiracy, the lure of communication with celestial beings, and so on.” The lure of such phenomena, these scholars argue, has not only pulled people away from the political ideologies that have underpinned both institutionalized religion and techno-liberal capitalism; it has also drawn many toward new ideas of community, sexuality, and identity.
This course will examine several such heterodox social formations of the late-Victorian period, and the ways in which their belief systems, social practices, and modes of self-expression offered radical alternatives to both the Christian faith in an omnipotent deity and its ideological alterative, the materialist faith in the redemptive power of the market. The communities that came together around Spiritualism, Theosophy, Paganism, and Hermetic Magic were politically and intellectually at the forefront of their time, freely mingling experiments in communication with the dead and the prophetic powers of the Tarot with ideas about free-love, the abolition of private property, and the advantages of eastern religions over western. They also tended to be more open to women in leadership roles and accepting of a broader variety of sexual identities and practices among their members. But perhaps most importantly, they provided spaces for the formation of new knowledges, what Foucault calls “subjugated knowledges,” that tested the limits of the scientific method and encouraged their adherents to question the relationship of mind to body, matter to spirit, and the knowable to the unknowable.
The course will emphasize historical and archival research in a variety of media. The unit on Spiritualism, for example, will include a student-led seminar presentation on William Mumler’s “spirit photographs,” while another will focus on transcripts from the séances with Leonora Piper, the most celebrated of the period’s female mediums. Seminar presentations on the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, to take another example, will examine the magical theories of Aleister Crawley, but also the visual art of Pamela Colman Smith, the now mostly forgotten artist who designed the symbolic figures for use on the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. These seminar presentations will provide the context for our studies of the “weird fiction” of the period, including Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) and The Turn of the Screw (1898), Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), and short fiction by Lettice Galbraith, Amy Levy, and William Butler Yeats.
