Miracles of Our Own Making by Liz Williams

Author:Liz Williams [Williams, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Religion, Paganism & Neo-Paganism
ISBN: 9781789142211
Google: t63qDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2020-08-01T01:06:49+00:00

SIX

The Victorians

The general reader might not necessarily think of the Victorian period as being a significant epoch in the history of the occult, given popular perceptions of its staunch Christianity and puritanical attitudes, but this would be incorrect. It is possible to claim that the bulk of the twentieth-century pagan revival started in the nineteenth century, with pre-Victorian poets such as those within the Romantic movement, now-obscure writers like William Harrison Ainsworth and Charles Leland, and many who are still well known today, such as Charles Kingsley and Kenneth Grahame. It also saw the work of occultists such as Éliphas Lévi and that powerhouse of modern occultism, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Revivalist Druids also made appearances throughout the Victorian period.

This was also the era of ideas coming from the East, brought in by people such as Madame Blavatsky. It was the century in which Aleister Crowley, ‘the Great Beast’, was born. One might argue that a combination of relative affluence, a reasonable amount of leisure time, colonialism and a reaction to Victorian religious repression all contributed to this outpouring of spiritual experimentation. Whatever the cause, several of the Victorian organizations that had a substantial influence on later occultism and paganism are still around today, such as the Theosophical Society, plus offshoots of the Golden Dawn itself.

I am going to look at these organizations shortly, but first I am going to devote some attention to an overview of the nineteenth century’s early literary scene, with poets and popular novelists contributing to the emergence of what we might term a pagan sensibility. This is perhaps ironic since, as we have seen, the pagan societies of early Britain were mute in literary terms, but the people who later drew upon them for inspiration used literary forms as their principal means of expression. And of course, many of these writers carried on with the classical interests of the previous century, reframing the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses within a British pastoral context.

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