What it is
More readers have come to the occult through novels than through treatises, and the traffic has run both ways. Writers who practiced magic used fiction to teach what could not be taught plainly. Writers who did not practice it borrowed its images, its vocabulary, and sometimes its practitioners, thinly disguised. Other writers set out to mock or to dismantle it. A few invented books so convincingly that readers went looking for them, and in the end someone wrote them.
We are not a library of literature, and we do not try to collect every ghost story or horror novel. Following our collection policy, we keep fiction that a practitioner would study as teaching, or that a historian would need to understand how these traditions were seen. Such books are shelved with the tradition they belong to, which for most of the modern ones means the occult revival at D 5.
Where to begin
Read Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni to see what the Victorians thought an adept was, Machen's The Great God Pan for the shudder, and Dion Fortune's The Sea Priestess for a novel written from inside a practice. Then read Eco's Foucault's Pendulum as an antidote to all three.
Before the revival
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Historia von D. Johann Fausten (The Faust Book) German. Frankfurt, 1587. English translation 1592. L 2
The chapbook life of a scholar who sells his soul for twenty-four years of knowledge and pleasure, and is torn apart at the end. Marlowe made his play from the English version. Grimoires under Faust's name, the so-called hell-compulsions, followed in German manuscript and print.
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Le Diable amoureux (The Devil in Love) Jacques Cazotte. French. 1772. D 4
A young officer in Naples conjures a spirit, which appears first as a camel's head and then as a devoted young woman named Biondetta. A small masterpiece of the fantastic. Cazotte was later drawn to the circle of Martines de Pasqually and went to the guillotine in 1792.
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Seraphita Honore de Balzac. French. 1834 and 1835. D 4
A novel set among the fjords of Norway, whose title character is an angelic being who appears to a man as a woman and to a woman as a man. Balzac's homage to Swedenborg, with long expositions of his doctrine. For the Comte de Gabalis, see Rosicrucians and Christian Theosophy.
The novel and the occult revival
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Zanoni Edward Bulwer-Lytton. 1842. D 5
A romance of two immortal Rosicrucian adepts during the French Revolution, one of whom gives up immortality for love. It gave occultists the "Dweller of the Threshold", the terror that meets the candidate at the gate of the hidden world, and many of them read it as a veiled initiation. Bulwer-Lytton met Eliphas Levi in London in 1854. His later The Coming Race of 1871 gave the world the word "vril".
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Le Vice supreme Josephin Peladan. French. 1884. D 5
The first novel of Peladan's long cycle La Decadence latine, in which the magus Merodack stands against the corruption of the age. Overwritten and fascinating. For Peladan's handbooks of magic, see The Occult Revival.
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A Romance of Two Worlds Marie Corelli. 1886. D 5
A best seller about a young woman cured of nervous illness by an electric Christianity, with journeys of the soul through space. Corelli insisted the teaching was true, and thousands of readers wrote to ask how to follow it.
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La-Bas J.-K. Huysmans. French. 1891. D 5
A writer researching Gilles de Rais is led through the occult underworld of Paris to a black mass. Huysmans drew on informants on both sides of a real feud among the Paris occultists. The book did more than any other to fix the image of modern Satanism in the public mind.
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The Great God Pan Arthur Machen. 1894. D 5
A doctor's operation on a young woman's brain lets her see the god Pan, with consequences that take a generation to unfold. Machen briefly belonged to the same magical order as Yeats. His Welsh hills are full of things older than Christianity, and not friendly ones.
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John Silence, Physician Extraordinary Algernon Blackwood. 1908. D 5
Stories of a doctor who treats afflictions of the spirit by occult means. Blackwood had studied Theosophy and ritual magic, and the cases are built from their teaching.
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The Magician W. Somerset Maugham. 1908. D 5
The villain, Oliver Haddo, is a portrait of Aleister Crowley. Crowley reviewed it under Haddo's name and accused the author of plagiarism. Maugham later admitted that Crowley had been his model.
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Der Golem (The Golem) Gustav Meyrink. German. 1915. D 5
A dreamlike novel of the Prague ghetto, built on the legend of the clay man made alive by a holy name. Meyrink, a former banker, was a lifelong student of occultism, and the book was a best seller in wartime Germany.
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Lolly Willowes Sylvia Townsend Warner. 1926. D 5
A dutiful aunt leaves her family, moves to a Chiltern village, and makes a pact with a courteous Devil to become a witch. A witty and serious book about a woman's freedom, written five years after Margaret Murray's Witch-Cult.
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Moonchild Aleister Crowley. 1929. D 5
A war of magicians over the soul of an unborn child, in which Crowley caricatures his former teachers and colleagues under false names. Read for the descriptions of practice, and for the grudges.
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War in Heaven and The Greater Trumps Charles Williams. 1930 and 1932. D 5
Thrillers of the supernatural in which the Holy Grail turns up in an English parish and the original tarot deck is found to move the elements of the world. Williams had belonged for some years to a ritual order led by Arthur Edward Waite.
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The Devil Rides Out Dennis Wheatley. 1934. D 5
A popular thriller of Satanists and their opponents in the English home counties. Wheatley consulted Crowley and others while writing it. His novels, and the films made from them, shaped the British idea of Satanism for forty years.
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Winged Pharaoh Joan Grant. 1937. D 5
The life of an Egyptian princess and priestess, offered by its author as a memory of her own past life. Grant called her method "far memory". Reviewers praised it as a historical novel; many readers took it as testimony.
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The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic Dion Fortune. 1938, and 1956 after her death. D 5
A priestess of the sea and moon works an ancient magic on the Somerset coast. Fortune wrote these novels to teach what she could not set out in her instructional books, and she said so. For her other books, see The Occult Revival.
Invented books
H. P. Lovecraft first mentioned the Necronomicon, a book of forbidden lore by "the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred", in a story of 1924, and in 1927 wrote a mock history of it, with a list of its translators and the libraries that hold it. There has never been such a book. Readers asked for it in libraries for decades, and since the 1970s several have been printed under its name. We keep those with the other modern grimoires at L 2, with a note. They are a good lesson in how a book of magic acquires a history.
After the revival
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Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies) Italo Calvino. Italian. 1969, enlarged 1973. L 5
Travelers who have lost the power of speech tell their stories by laying out tarot cards, first from a fifteenth-century Milanese deck and then from the Tarot of Marseilles. A writer's demonstration that the cards are a machine for making stories. Shelved with the tarot.
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The Hearing Trumpet Leonora Carrington. 1974. D 5
A ninety-two-year-old woman is put in a strange old people's home and finds herself in a comic quest for the Grail and the return of the Goddess. Carrington, a surrealist painter, filled it with alchemy and the occult reading of a lifetime.
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The Illuminatus! Trilogy Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. 1975. D 5
A sprawling comic conspiracy novel that mixes every secret society theory then in circulation with a joke religion of chaos. It became a scripture of sorts for the chaos magicians of the 1980s.
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Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) Umberto Eco. Italian. 1988. D 5
Three editors invent a secret plan of the Templars as a game and find that the occultists of Milan believe it. A satire of the hunger for hidden meaning, built with real learning from the books on these shelves.
Older studies
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Literature and Occult Tradition Denis Saurat. French, 1929. English translation 1930. D 7
Traces Kabbalistic and Hermetic ideas through Spenser, Milton, Blake, Hugo, Whitman, and others. Pioneering and sometimes too eager to find sources.
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The Way Down and Out: The Occult in Symbolist Literature John Senior. 1959. D 7
A critic's account of how the French and English symbolists, from Baudelaire to Yeats, used the occult as a theory of poetry. Severe in its judgments.
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Blake and Tradition Kathleen Raine. Two volumes, 1968. D 7
A poet traces Blake's symbols to Neoplatonism, Hermetism, alchemy, Boehme, and Swedenborg, with hundreds of illustrations. Not every source she finds is certain, but the reading Blake did is real.
Things to watch for
- A novel is not testimony. Occult novels are often read as veiled teaching, and some authors encouraged it. Others were simply writing novels. Ask what the author said, and what the author's practice was.
- Words that began in fiction. The Dweller of the Threshold, vril, and the Necronomicon all started in novels and passed into occult writing as though they were older. Check where a term first appears.
- Portraits and grudges. Many of these books are romans a clef. Crowley turns up, thinly disguised and never kindly, in novels by Maugham, Wheatley, and others, and in his own he settles scores.
- The public image. Huysmans, Wheatley, and their imitators taught the public what a black mass and a Satanist were supposed to be. Historians of witchcraft and of modern Satanism have to read them for that reason.
On the shelves
Novels of the occult revival and after are shelved at the North Gate in class D 5, earlier fiction with the tradition it belongs to, and studies of the occult in literature and the arts in D 7. The tarot fiction of Calvino stands with the cards at L 5, and the Golden Ass of Apuleius with the mystery religions at B 1. Related guides: The Occult Revival, Grimoires and Ceremonial Magic, and Divination and Tarot. Our essay The Paperback Magi follows these books into the mass-market boom of the 1960s.