Light on the Path: Advancing Occultism Through Esoteric Fiction, 1880-1940

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and America experienced an occult revival, a flourishing “occulture” that signaled the increasing presence of the occult in the popular imagination. This period also witnessed another major cultural development—a rapid expansion of print culture that offered a dizzying array of new magazines, pulp fiction, cheap single volume and even paperback novels, and emerging forms of genre fiction, all designed to meet (and create) the demands of a growing fiction readership. Light on the Path explores the surprising interdependence of these two phenomena. As supernatural fiction moved in increasingly occult directions, modern occultism itself became so entangled with popular fiction that it might be understood as a literary phenomenon. This was not coincidental. This book recounts the strategic efforts by modern occultists, including Mabel Collins, Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Kenneth Morris, and Talbot Mundy, to use popular fiction to wrest esotericism away from its traditional modes of secrecy and make esoteric experiences of self-transformation widely accessible. Through experiments to forge a new esoteric fiction genre from already existing genres, such as pulp adventure fiction, early fantasy fiction, detective fiction, romance, and even drug craze shockers, these occultists intended their novels to open gates for readers, to offer an occult gnosis through the simple act of reading a novel. In so doing, they transformed genre fiction into a tool with which to launch new religious movements that persist today.