From the Indiana Jones movies to the music of Black Sabbath to the Harry Potter books, contemporary popular culture has no shortage of underlying occult themes.
Turns out, those ideas have their origins in the popular fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to Mark S. Morrisson, professor of English and associate dean for undergraduate studies in Penn State's College of the Liberal Arts.
In his latest book, "Light on the Path: Advancing Occultism Through Esoteric Fiction, 1880-1940," published by Oxford University Press, Morrisson traces how a group of modern occultists in the United States and Great Britain used the increasing popularity of mass-market genre fiction to influence a rapidly growing reading public.
"Esoteric fiction was the bedrock for the occult revival," Morrisson said. "It's the idea that there is hidden knowledge that's passed down by transmission from a master to a pupil. You're introduced to these secrets, and you have to prove you're worthy of them. And in so doing that it changes you. It's self-transformation with a heavy dose of mysticism that brings you closer to a divine experience."
Morrisson's research spotlights major occult revival figures like Mabel Collins, Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Kenneth Morris and Talbot Mundy, who took elements of Western and Eastern occult lore and mysticism and produced an eclectic assortment of beliefs and practices that would later fall under the broad umbrella of the New Age spiritual movement that became popular in the 1970s.
"These authors were seemingly paradoxically bristling against the idea that esotericism needs to be secretive and reserved for select initiates," Morrisson said. "It's a huge part of British and American culture in many ways. But it's also where publishing practices coincide with the idea of self-invention and reinvention - and the idea of having spirituality without religious belief. That you don't necessarily need to go to church or believe in God to have a spiritual life. The possibility of even saying that comes from this movement."
The book examines occult movements spawned by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British occult society whose members included Irish poet William Butler Yeats, and the Theosophical Society, which was founded in New York City in 1875 by a Ukrainian immigrant named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and grew to include more than 100 lodges worldwide, a number of which continue today.
"Blavatsky published 'Isis Unveiled' and 'The Secret Doctrine,' which supposedly were these compendiums of knowledge by hidden masters who were not necessarily on this physical plane anymore and would appear to humans, while overseeing human evolution in a way," Morrisson said. "Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley were using occultism as therapeutics, working with damaged people. It was an effort at drawing science and religion together. Fortune's novels were highly influential on the development of Wicca, just as Crowley's helped bring his new religious movement of Thelema to broad audiences."
Also occurring during this same period was a huge increase in the number of people reading for pleasure, Morrisson said, thanks to rising literacy rates and technological advances that allowed genre fiction to be mass produced and delivered to the public via pulp fiction magazines and paperback novels.
In 1888, Blavatsky ventured into fiction writing with her novel, "The Blossom and the Fruit," which she co-wrote with the already widely known and successful romance novelist Mabel Collins. From there, Collins took her burgeoning beliefs in Theosophy and started injecting them into her own books.
Crowley, meanwhile, was putting his occult beliefs into detective fiction. And Fortune's novels were intended to be read "by serious readers who could understand the intellectual ideas of occultism, while also appealing to those who couldn't," Morrisson said.
"Fortune imagined herself expanding an audience for occult ideas through these novels. She looked at it as almost a step towards initiation," he said.
For Morrisson, the book's central figure is Talbot Mundy, a posh Londoner and "utterly colorful character" who in the early 1900s left England in search of adventure - some of it legal - in India and Africa. While on his journeys, he encountered "a lot of Eastern occult ideas," Morrisson said.
Mundy arrived in America in 1909, virtually broke, and soon after started publishing fiction in pulp periodicals like Adventure magazine, which had about 300,000 subscribers. As it happens, the personal papers of the magazine's editor, Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, can be found in Penn State University Libraries' Eberly Family Special Collections Library.
"This was true pulp fiction writing, in that you published very quickly," Morrisson said. "Mundy published a novel or novella every month, and he was part of this whole little ecosystem of pulp fiction writers. He used his colonial adventures as inspiration for his stories, and was also kind of a spiritual seeker."
After getting involved with a Theosophical community in San Diego during the early 1920s, Mundy began incorporating its philosophies into his fiction, perhaps most notably in the novels "Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley" and "The Devil's Guard."
"Each of these Theosophical novels did very well with readers and are among his most popular works," Morrisson said.
Eventually, Morrisson said, esoteric themes began to crop up in the fiction of writers with no connection to the occult, like James Hilton's 1933 novel, "Lost Horizon," which introduced readers to the fictional utopia of Shangri-La. Four years later, it was adapted into a feature film by legendary director Frank Capra.
Nearly a century later, the occult influence continues today in all manner of popular culture and the New Age spiritualism of millions of people around the world.
"It's still a viable path," Morrisson said. "How do you get esoteric ideas to be not only entertaining, but to be widely espoused by people?"
