ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 2
Popular Science Announces “The Modern Occult”
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In
September of 1900, subscribers to Popular
Science Monthly opened their issue to find, sandwiched between an article on
the flight of birds and one on electric automobiles, a lengthy essay with a
title this very blog might have borrowed: “The Modern Occult.”
Its author, Professor Joseph Jastrow
of the University of Wisconsin, the first person in the United States to earn a
doctorate in psychology, spent nineteen dense pages methodically taking apart
Theosophy, Spiritualism, Christian Science, astrology, palmistry, alchemy, and
the whole “motley crew” of drugless healers then flourishing across America. It
is, in its way, a direct ancestor of everything this column tries to do, a
rigorous, occasionally cutting, historically grounded attempt to separate
documented fact from popular belief. It is also, itself, a document worth
applying that same scrutiny to.
A
century and a quarter later, one of Jastrow's own most confident conclusions
has been substantially complicated by later research, in exactly the way he
might have respected…
Jastrow
opens with a memorable conceit: an imaginary Martian visitor surveying Earth's
beliefs, finding a small, hard-won minority guided by science and a much
larger, more chaotic majority clamoring “like the builders of the tower of
Babel in diverse tongues.” From there he works methodically through his
taxonomy. Theosophy gets the most extensive treatment, built around a detailed
biography of Helena Blavatsky,
“one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history,”
in Jastrow's own borrowed assessment. Spiritualism follows, dismissed as a
system whose rappings, slate-writings, and cabinet performances borrowed from
folklore, stage magic, and each other. Christian Science, still a relatively
new movement built on Mary Baker Eddy's Science
and Health, gets the harshest individual treatment in the entire piece,
with Jastrow quoting Eddy's own claims about disease being purely illusory at
length specifically to let her words condemn themselves. Astrology, phrenology,
palmistry, and alchemy round out the survey, each dismissed as pseudo-science
built on “far-fetched analogy” and “prophecy after the event.”
Jastrow
wasn't a casual critic. He would go on to found one of the first psychology
laboratories in the country, serve as a founding member of the American Society for Psychical
Research before resigning in frustration at its credulity, and later
strike up a genuine friendship with Harry Houdini, the two men bonding over a
shared crusade against fraudulent mediums; Houdini would perform tricks in
Jastrow's university classes specifically to demonstrate how easily deception
passes for the supernatural. This essay itself was folded, largely unchanged,
into Jastrow's book Fact and Fable in Psychology, published that same year.
Jastrow's
dismissal of Blavatsky leans heavily on the 1885 Hodgson Report, the
Society for Psychical Research's own investigation into the Theosophical
Society, which accused Blavatsky of forging the “Mahatma Letters” she claimed
came from her spiritual teachers and declared her case for permanent
remembrance as a masterful fraud. In 1900, that report was treated as settled,
devastating fact, and Jastrow cited it accordingly.
It
wasn't as settled as it looked. In 1986, exactly one hundred years after the
Hodgson Report's publication, the Society for Psychical Research itself
published a lengthy critical re-examination by Vernon Harrison, a professional
forgery and handwriting expert with fifty years of SPR membership and a career
spent as an expert witness in actual counterfeiting cases. Harrison's analysis,
published by the SPR's own journal explicitly “in the interests of truth and
fair play,” found the original report “riddled with slanted statements,
conjectures advanced as fact or probable fact, uncorroborated testimony of
unnamed witnesses.” His conclusion, delivered in the careful language of a
document examiner rather than a Theosophist defender: the case against Blavatsky
was “not proven.” The Society took the unusual step of issuing a press release
about its own century-old report's central failing.
None
of this makes Blavatsky's own extraordinary claims, astral Mahatmas, secret Tibetan brotherhoods,
any more independently verifiable than they were in 1900. But it does mean the
specific piece of evidence Jastrow leaned on as conclusive proof of fraud was,
by the professional judgment of the very organization that produced it,
considerably shakier than either side believed for the following century. It's
a fitting irony for an essay devoted entirely to warning readers against
accepting authoritative-sounding conclusions without checking the evidence
underneath them.
None
of this undoes the genuine value of Jastrow's essay, which remains a lucid,
still-readable snapshot of exactly which occult currents were competing for
American attention at the dawn of the twentieth century, and a serious early
attempt to ask not just what people believed but why. His closing argument,
that logic is an acquired skill rather than an inborn one, and that a
“wholesome and whole-souled interest in the genuine and profitable problems of
nature and of life” is the best defense against superstition, reads as
comfortably at home in 2026 as it did in 1900. He simply, like all of us
working in this territory, deserved to have his own sources checked as
carefully as he checked everyone else's.
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the woman a
1900 skeptic was so certain he'd settled the verdict on, we're recommending
readers go straight to the source and decide for themselves.
By
H. P. Blavatsky | Red Wheel-Weiser
First
published in 1889 as a deliberately accessible question-and-answer primer, The
Key to Theosophy remains Blavatsky's own clearest, most approachable
statement of what she actually taught, covering reincarnation, the nature of
the human being, life after death, and the practical ethics she considered
central to Theosophical practice, without the denser esoteric scaffolding of
her longer works like Isis Unveiled or The Secret Doctrine.
Weiser's edition keeps this foundational text in active circulation for exactly
the kind of reader today's post invites: someone who's just learned the most
famous piece of evidence against her is considerably less conclusive than a
century of retelling suggested, and wants to hear her case in her own words
before forming a judgment.
Reading
Blavatsky directly, rather than through a century of secondhand summary in
either direction, hagiography or hit piece, is the only way to actually engage
with the question Jastrow's essay raises but doesn't fully resolve: what was
she actually offering the thousands of sincere, often well-educated people who
found her convincing? The book won't settle whether her claimed Mahatmas were
real. It will let you evaluate the philosophy on its own terms rather than
secondhand through either its critics or its defenders.
This
is primary-source reading rather than a modern scholarly biography, and readers
wanting the fuller historical context, the Hodgson Report, the Coulomb
affair, Harrison's later re-examination, will want a dedicated biography
alongside it. But for readers who finished today's post curious what a
“masterful impostor” actually sounded like in her own voice, there's no better
place to start than the book she wrote to be understood.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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