Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture

Female Lucifers, Priestesses, and Witches

Miriam Wallraven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317581383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Examining the intersection of occult spirituality, text, and gender, this book provides a compelling analysis of the occult revival in literature from the 1880s through the course of the twentieth century. Bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code play with magic and the fascination of hidden knowledge, while occult and esoteric subjects have become very visible in literature during the twentieth century. This study analyses literature by women occultists such as Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Starhawk, and revisits texts with occult motifs by canonical authors such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Leonora Carrington, and Angela Carter. This material, which has never been analysed in a literary context, covers influential movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, Golden Dawn, Wicca, and Goddess spirituality. Wallraven engages with the question of how literature functions as the medium for creating occult worlds and powerful identities, particularly the female Lucifer, witch, priestess, and Goddess. Based on the concept of ancient wisdom, the occult in literature also incorporates topical discourses of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, feminism, pacifism, and ecology. Hence, as an ever-evolving discursive universe, it presents alternatives to religious truth claims that often lead to various forms of fundamentalism that we encounter today. This book offers a ground-breaking approach to interpreting the forms and functions of occult texts for scholars and students of literary and cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, and gender studies.

1 Introduction

“For the articulation of new spiritualities, the elaboration of new sacred discourses is taking place at some distance from the most academically fashionable sites of cultural production, in the most marginalized work of feminist and ecospiritual theologians, for instance”

(McClure 1995, 156)

“OCCULTOPHOBIA” AND GENDER BLINDNESS IN CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES

How does McClure come to the conclusion that “new spiritualities” are articulated only in academically marginalised contexts? Why does Surette, among other scholars concerned with the religious, diagnose academics with “the scholarly ailment that might be called ‘occultophobia’” (1996, xiv)? And why is one of the chapters in Goldenberg’s study on new spiritualities entitled “Why Witches Scare Scholars” (1979, 109) – a study published in the 1970s, a time vibrant with new religious movements and the emergence of alternative spiritualities? These questions intrigued me as more and more occult books written by twentieth century women authors came my way. Surely, there is no doubt about the fact that the twentieth century has witnessed the return of the religious, a renewed interest in various forms of spirituality, and a resurgence of occult and esoteric topics. In addition, different cultural turns in academia – such as the performative, reflexive, or iconic turn¹ – have made it clear that changes in cultural knowledge are crucially dependent on the changes in the functions of the medium in which the turns are negotiated. And literature is a central medium in this context. Thus, it is not surprising to see that a religious turn in cultural and literary studies² and the striking literary resurgence of the spiritual and occult in the twentieth century are linked phenomena. The truly surprising revelation for me, then, was the analytical neglect of the forms and functions of literature for such a revival.

Of course, the religious turn in literary and cultural studies promises a new – if still open – perspective on culture that takes into account the recent proliferation of texts and other media dealing with “religion.”³ However, instead of enlarging the perspective of cultural studies, this religious turn is really in danger of constricting its focus by a too-narrow definition of religion. The esoteric/occult spectrum of religion especially is in serious danger of being occluded, even though it is a statistically vibrant part of the return of and to the religious.⁴ And it is in particular women’s alternative spiritual and occult approaches that again tend to be marginalised or even excluded altogether from analysis and debate. Because it is women’s occult texts that constitute a major part of the occult literary text production throughout the modern and postmodern periods, the return of the occult should not be addressed without attention to their writing.

In this book, I want to show how the occult forms a specific literary voice. In fact, I show that it is literature that provides access to an otherwise hidden history of the occult. The act of literary analysis can thus function as a form of historiography. If we take into account the categories of occultism, text, and gender, this leads to a three-dimensional intersection, which in turn will prove productive for cultural and literary studies. It promises new approaches to the role and function of literature in society and sheds new light on the transmission of cultural knowledge. Seen in this light, the “occult turn” is not situated in the periphery but in the very centre of cultural and literary negotiations.

Despite the proliferation of spiritual and occult fiction in the twentieth century, academia suffers from a distinct “occultophobia,” the “scholarly ailment” that Surette diagnoses (1996, xiv). A spiritual phobia in general can be diagnosed as well, devaluing or ignoring literary texts revolving around many forms of “the human search for direction and meaning, for wholeness and transcendence” (King 1997, 668).⁵ One of the most important reasons for this neglect is the perception of modernism and postmodernism as predominantly secular and rational, a view that, as has been shown,⁶ cannot be upheld. Often this opinion comes from an exclusive focus on the Christian religion; however, whereas its alleged master narratives have fallen prey to a postmodernist rejection of grand narratives, this is not applicable to new forms of spirituality and occultism because they lack master narratives, sacred texts, and carefully transmitted traditions.

How, then, can the many spiritual/occult texts in the twentieth century be accounted for? And why is a surprising number of the authors of such writings female? What are the forms and functions of such literary texts? How are they written in order to address readers in an apparently secular age? Which narrative strategies are utilised in order to convince the reader of the existence of occult energies and spiritual beings? How are such occult worlds constructed in the texts? “Occultophobia” (Surrette 1996, xiv) in literary studies as well as an additional gender blindness concerning occult and spiritual expressions have to be addressed systematically in order to elucidate a phenomenon that runs counter to both traditional religion as well as the assumed secularisation of the twentieth century. Indeed, the very existence of those occult and spiritual texts disproves one-dimensional analyses of culture, belief, and text.

As the opening quote shows, McClure, among many others, clearly states that this creation of new spiritual discourses and worlds takes place, as he puts it, “at some distance from the most academically fashionable sites of cultural production” (1995, 156). So far, the increased interest in esoteric subjects in popular culture and in society as a whole is only now in the process of being validated by historical and sociological analyses, whereas the form and function of the literary text have rarely been analysed. But textual and discursive devices have to be examined closely in order to fully understand the spiritual text production in the twentieth century, to provide an explanation for the construction of occult worldviews, indeed whole occult worlds, and occult subjectivities.

In addition to the academic “occultophobia” in general and the lack of analyses of occult texts in literary studies in particular, a further area of disregard was striking for me: it is the neglect of spiritual/occult women writers in the twentieth century, whose writings make up a substantial part of the texts of these “new spiritualities.” How do the factors of gender and occultism reinforce each other and how are these views constructed in literary texts? How do women writers deal with the gendered restrictions in religious traditions, in new spiritual movements, and in society as a whole? Witches may have scared scholars up to now, as Goldenberg polemically states (1979), but other manifestations of a female approach to occultism, such as female Lucifers, women occultists, priestesses, and Goddesses, likewise seem to have scared scholars away from a systematic study of women’s occult fiction in what has often been regarded – and mostly with a devaluating stance – as the “wilder fringes of female spirituality” (Malmgreen 1986, 3). As will become clear, we have to take a closer look at matters of marginalisation, transgression, as well as discursive and narrative strategies of justification designed to promote visibility in the cultural mainstream if we want to understand occult women writers’ textual productions.

Not only has academia mostly neglected women’s occult writing, but such texts have not been placed systematically in the context of feminist writing and gender studies either. This fact might have its roots in the supposedly material and political grounding of feminism to the extent that religious and spiritual belief in general has been devalued as oppressive and detrimental to women’s emancipation, even though, as will be seen, these “wilder fringes of female spirituality” have provided influential spaces from which to establish a feminist voice, authority, and power. In fact, these new forms of occultism and spirituality have their basis in the assumption of gender equality and thus make it possible for women to function as spiritual leaders and writers – positions that have been denied to them by traditional religions.⁷ Thus, although late nineteenth- and twentieth-century tendencies of secularisation have brought forth and were in turn influenced by feminist movements, the re-spiritualisation of society has made it possible for the women’s movement to merge with female spiritualities, leading to a potent mixture of politics and belief that defies simple oppositions.⁸

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the discussion of the dissolution of master narratives in the Western world, including religious certainties, had already become commonplace for scholars in the context of all kinds of dissolutions in postmodern culture and society. On the one hand, it was regarded as self-evident that the postmodern world is “effortlessly secular” (Jameson 1991, 387). The dialectic counter reaction, on the other hand, was also taken for granted: The tendencies of secularisation led to a simultaneous creation of new myths often accompanied by the romanticisation of old systems of belief, a counter-reaction to the loss of myth and magic that goes back to the late nineteenth century and the beginning of modernism – the point of departure of the texts of this volume – where the loss of stable beliefs gave room to the discursive field of occult spiritualities.

The phemomenon of secularism is traced by Charles Taylor through the history of Christianity; however, his analysis also sheds light on how secularism provides ideal conditions for the rise of esoteric/occult spirituality (2007). John Lardas Modern states that “Taylor identifies the nineteenth century as a moment when a particular feeling of independence was forged and when declarations of religious freedom made their way across Europe and North America” (2011, 1). Hence, a new range of choices concerning the religious came into existence in the nineteenth century. In this way, for Taylor, secularisation does not mean the decline of religion but signifies a change in the status of the religious itself: In a secular age, religion does not disappear but becomes something that one can choose or not, as Modern puts it, “something that could be known, categorized, consumed, and/or feared” (2011, 2). Taylor shows what a hotly debated issue secularism has always been in an academic context and presents three different models of secularism: He describes the first – older – model as the retreat of religion from public spheres such as politics, the arts, or science. The second model revolves around the concept of a declining religious belief and also practice. The third model – his own – does not see secularity as a waning of religious belief and practice but a change in the status and the condition of belief itself, because at this point, the belief in God is no longer unchallenged but simply one option among others.⁹ In this way, Taylor does not see secularism as a vanishing of religion and spirituality but as a reconfiguration of it.

The subsequent recreation of old and the creation of new myths leads to a diversification of beliefs floating through a world that has lost its traditional religious systems and orders of belief but is far from secular¹⁰ and is even marked by a growing religious fundamentalism.¹¹ In his study, King similarly points out that

The secularization process that has occurred in modern Western societies since the Enlightenment has not led to the inevitable decline of religion, as some sociologists have prophesied, but rather to the erosion of the authority of institutional religions in the modern era. In this context the consequences of the Enlightenment dichotomy between public and private has been not only the delegitimization of institutional religion (i.e. religion as a social and political phenomenon) but also the increasing tendency to locate religion within the private sphere, thereby separating or excluding it from the realm of politics and power. Thus, while it is not true to say that religion is dying out in the Western world, it is certainly true to say that religion has been increasingly located at the margins of society, that is, away from the major centres of power and authority. (1999, 13)

This movement of religion from the centre to the margins, from a social concern to an individual preoccupation, from the public sphere to the private sphere shows a fundamental repositioning of all forms of the religious and the spiritual in the Western world within culture and society. This does not only hold true for traditional religions, but also for newly emerging spiritual paradigms and movements. Such new and marginalised spiritualities have so far been analysed for their tendencies of commodification, privatisation, and resacralisation – features of the spiritual that belong together in a postmodern, non-hierarchical liberal society (Bach 2001a, 11). But what about the political and gender implications of this cultural paradigm shift, and what role does literature play in creating occult worlds?

Since we can find “new” religions and spiritualities in all reaches of life because, in contrast to established religions, their methods, teachings, and tools are often advertised, “commodification” has become one of the catchphrases to describe such spiritualities. Although some scholars of religion believe that the privatisation and individualisation of belief associated with commodified spirituality may easily lead to a shrinking of transcendence, other studies regard the “self-spirituality” (Heelas 1996, 2) of the New Age¹² as a radical break with institutionalised religions and the inequalities fostered by them, as a politically and spiritually revolutionary departure from hierarchies but not from transcendence. Heelas, among others, therefore regards the New Age, which holds the self as sacred, as the prototypical religion of modernity and argues that “Indeed, much of the New Age would appear to be quite radically detraditionalised (rejecting voices of authority associated with established orders) or in other ways anti-authoritarian (rejecting voices of those exercising authority on their own, even rejecting ‘beliefs’)” (1996, 22). It almost goes without saying that spiritualities that are detraditionalised and non-authoritarian make room for women’s participation and writing.

While one answer to the modern and postmodern Western world is this pluralisation and individualisation of belief, the complementary answer is a growing fundamentalism in monotheistic religions.¹³ Religious fundamentalism profits from the loss of religious certainties in the twentieth century and is constituted by a combination of various “anti-modernist reactions” (Luckmann 1990, 173, qtd. in Bach 2001a, 11). As Bach argues, all religious forms of fundamentalism have in common their desire to establish and guarantee metaphysical securities in a world of global change and existential disorientation (2001a, 11). In comparison with occult spiritualities, fundamentalist movements appear as attempts to fill the absence of spiritual guidelines with anti-individual, anti-eclectic systems that aim at eradicating plurality.

Alternative spiritualities draw from existing traditions and are primarily focused on individual creations of new world views that are the result of a bricolage of different spiritual teachings and approaches. Therefore, they are dependent on eclectic bits and pieces gathered from an open market of spiritualities – a market that makes it easier for the individual to pick and mix, to consume spiritual products in the commodified twentieth century. The alleged “religious supermarket of modern pluralism” (Berger 1992, 147), however, fails to account for occult women’s experience as soon as they are not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Discursive Strategies and Functions of Occult and Gendered Worlds in Literature
• 3 “A mere instrument” or “proud as Lucifer”? Self-Presentations in the Occult Autobiographies of Emma Hardinge Britten (1900), Annie Besant (1893), and Alice A. Bailey (1951)
• 4 “She was a witch by vocation”: The Emancipatory Strategies of Occult Transgression in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926)
• 5 “She became a priestess”: Occult Liminality, Psychoanalysis, and the Role of the Text in Dion Fortune’s The Sea Priestess (1938)
• 6 Unreliable Occultism: Narrating the Occult – Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1976) and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977)
• 7 Occult Worlds: Utopias and Dystopias of Magical Power – Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994) and Suzy McKee Charnas’ The Holdfast Chronicles (1974–99)
• 8 “Standing before me she is familiar”: Deciphering Esoteric Connections and Feminine Occult Power in Rose Flint’s Poetry
• 9 Conclusion: The Functions of Occult and Spiritual Literature
• References
• Index