Manifestation 10
The Occult Revival of the 1920s: Spiritualism, Secret Societies, and the Cults That Captivated a Restless Age
The decade following the First World War was, on its surface, an age of jazz, speakeasies, and mechanized optimism. Beneath that surface, however, the 1920s were also a period of profound spiritual disorientation. The war had killed some twenty million people, the 1918 influenza pandemic had killed tens of millions more, and traditional religious institutions seemed to many survivors incapable of accounting for loss on such a scale. Into that vacuum flowed an extraordinary range of occult, esoteric, and quasi-religious movements — some inherited from the nineteenth century, others newly minted for a modern, urbanizing, media-saturated public. This article surveys the major occult currents of the decade and the cults and cult-adjacent movements that grew alongside them, situating each within the cultural anxieties that gave it life.
I. Spiritualism's Second Wind
Spiritualism — the belief that the living could communicate with the dead through mediums, séances, and various forms of automatic writing or rapping — had first flourished in the mid-nineteenth century around figures like the Fox sisters. By the 1920s it was experiencing a vigorous second wind, driven almost entirely by mass bereavement. Grieving parents, widows, and siblings across Britain, France, and the United States sought out mediums who claimed to relay messages from sons and husbands lost in the trenches.
The movement's most famous advocate was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who devoted much of his later life and considerable fortune to promoting Spiritualism as a legitimate religious and scientific system. Doyle toured extensively, wrote several books defending the phenomena, and championed mediums whose authenticity was often hotly disputed. His public falling-out with the escape artist and stage magician Harry Houdini became one of the decade's most closely watched cultural quarrels. Houdini, who understood the mechanics of stage illusion intimately, spent years exposing fraudulent mediums, testifying before Congress on the subject, and publicly debunking the medium Mina "Margery" Crandon, whose séances Doyle and others had endorsed. The Scientific American magazine even convened a formal investigative committee, with Houdini as a member, to test Margery's phenomena under controlled conditions — an episode that exemplifies how seriously, and how publicly, the question of mediumship was contested during the decade.
Beyond the Doyle-Houdini rivalry, Spiritualist churches proliferated, particularly in Britain and the northeastern United States, and periodicals like Light and Psychic Science gave the movement an institutional and journalistic infrastructure. Ectoplasm — a supposed physical substance exuded by mediums during trance states, photographed extensively during the decade — became one of the era's most recognizable, and most frequently exposed, pieces of occult iconography.
II. Theosophy and Its Offshoots
Theosophy, founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, remained one of the most institutionally significant esoteric movements of the 1920s, having by then matured into a global organization with lodges on every inhabited continent. Under the leadership of Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater, the Theosophical Society's international headquarters at Adyar, near Madras, became a hub of considerable influence, blending Blavatsky's synthesis of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology with Western esotericism, root-race theory, and claims of contact with hidden spiritual masters known as the Mahatmas.
The decade's most consequential Theosophical episode was the promotion of the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as the vehicle for a coming "World Teacher," a messianic figure Leadbeater claimed to have identified through clairvoyant investigation as early as 1909. Besant established the Order of the Star in the East to prepare the world for Krishnamurti's mission, and by the mid-1920s the Order counted tens of thousands of members internationally. The arrangement collapsed dramatically in 1929, just past the decade's close, when Krishnamurti publicly dissolved the Order and repudiated the messianic role assigned to him — but throughout the 1920s the Krishnamurti project stood as one of the clearest examples of a modern guru-cult built around prophetic expectation and institutional machinery.
Theosophy also seeded several breakaway movements during the period. Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical Society, which had formally separated from Theosophy in 1912, expanded its own institutional base in the 1920s, founding the first Waldorf schools, developing biodynamic agriculture, and establishing the Goetheanum in Switzerland as its spiritual and architectural center. Alice Bailey, a former Theosophist, founded the Arcane School in 1923 and began publishing channeled material she attributed to a discarnate entity called "the Tibetan," laying groundwork for what later scholars would treat as a foundational current of the New Age movement.
III. Aleister Crowley and the Thelemic Current
No single figure looms larger over the occult history of the 1920s than Aleister Crowley, the English magician, poet, and self-styled prophet of the religious philosophy he called Thelema. Crowley had proclaimed the reception of The Book of the Law in 1904, but it was the 1920s that produced the decade's most notorious occult scandal associated with his name: the Abbey of Thelema.
Established in 1920 in a rented villa at Cefalù, Sicily, the Abbey functioned as a communal experiment in Thelemic living, organized around Crowley's dictum "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Residents practiced ritual magic, kept "magical diaries" documenting their inner states, and — according to later accounts — used substances including heroin and cocaine as part of the community's practice. The Abbey's reputation curdled into scandal after the death in 1923 of Raoul Loveday, a young Oxford-educated follower who reportedly died from drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat during a ritual, though the more mundane cause was likely enteric fever contracted from unclean local water. Loveday's widow, Betty May, gave sensational interviews to the British press upon her return to England, and the resulting tabloid coverage — branding Crowley "the wickedest man in the world" — prompted Italy's Fascist government under Mussolini to expel Crowley from the country in 1923, effectively ending the Abbey experiment.
Crowley spent the remainder of the decade in comparative decline, cultivating followers such as the American Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones) and continuing to develop the rituals, tarot system, and organizational structure — chiefly the magical order A∴A∴ and his direction of a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis — that would exert far greater influence on later twentieth-century occultism than they did during his own lifetime.
IV. Fraternal and Initiatory Orders
The 1920s also saw continued vitality in the older tradition of fraternal esoteric orders. Freemasonry itself remained a mainstream fixture of civic life rather than a cult, but its symbolic vocabulary and structure of graded initiation directly shaped a constellation of smaller, more esoterically oriented bodies. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, though it had fractured into competing successor organizations by the 1900s and 1910s, continued to influence figures across the decade's magical scene, Crowley among them, through its system of correspondences, tarot symbolism, and ceremonial grades.
Rosicrucian organizations experienced notable American growth during the decade, most visibly the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), led by H. Spencer Lewis from its headquarters in San Jose, California. AMORC's mail-order correspondence courses in "ancient wisdom," Egyptian symbolism, and mentalism reached a national membership through advertising in pulp magazines — a distribution model that prefigured much of the mass-marketed occultism of later decades.
V. American Cults and New Religious Movements of the Decade
Alongside imported and older esoteric currents, the 1920s produced a number of homegrown American religious movements that contemporaries and later historians alike have characterized as cults, in the sense of tightly bound communities organized around a charismatic leader claiming special spiritual authority.
Perhaps the most colorful was the "I AM" Activity's direct precursor movement, though "I AM" itself was founded slightly later by Guy Ballard; its intellectual roots, however, lay in the Theosophical and Ascended Master lore that circulated widely through the 1920s and that Ballard would formalize in the following decade. Similarly rooted in the decade's esoteric ferment was the Mighty I AM's cousin movement built around claims of contact with hidden masters residing on Mount Shasta in California, a motif already well established in occult circles by the 1920s through the writings of figures associated with Theosophy.
Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement took clearer institutional shape during the decade. George Baker, who had adopted the name Major Jealous Divine, established an interracial religious community in Sayville, New York, in the mid-1920s, teaching that he was God incarnate, enforcing strict codes of celibacy and abstinence among followers, and building a communal economy that provided food, lodging, and employment to Black and white followers alike during a period of stark segregation — a structure that generated both devoted loyalty and considerable controversy, including a 1931 trial in which the presiding judge died days after sentencing Divine, an event followers cited as evidence of divine retribution.
The decade's religious landscape was further marked by the House of David, a communal, celibate sect based in Benton Harbor, Michigan, founded earlier by Benjamin Purnell but reaching a peak of national notoriety in the 1920s through its traveling baseball teams, its distinctively long-haired and bearded male members, and a 1927 trial in which Purnell faced accusations of sexual misconduct with young female colony members — allegations that badly damaged the group's public standing even as the colony itself persisted.
VI. The Ku Klux Klan as Fraternal-Occult Hybrid
Any serious survey of 1920s cult phenomena in the United States must reckon with the second Ku Klux Klan, refounded atop Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915 and reaching its membership peak — several million nationwide — during the mid-1920s. While primarily a white supremacist political and terrorist organization, the second Klan deliberately borrowed the initiatory structure, secret ritual, regalia, and quasi-Masonic symbolism of fraternal orders, complete with invented terminology, hierarchical "klaverns," and elaborate induction ceremonies. Historians of American fraternalism have long noted that the Klan's organizational technology — its blend of secrecy, ritual, and manufactured mystique — drew directly on the same cultural appetite for initiatory belonging that fueled contemporaneous esoteric orders, even as its purposes were exclusively political and violent rather than spiritual.
VII. Occultism, Modernity, and the Press
A defining feature of 1920s occultism, distinguishing it from earlier periods, was its entanglement with mass media. Newspapers and tabloids covered mediums, magicians, and cult leaders as celebrities, simultaneously feeding and profiting from public fascination while often serving as the primary vehicle for scandal and exposure, as in the Crandon and Crowley cases. Radio broadcasting, newly widespread by mid-decade, and the growth of pulp magazine publishing gave esoteric and fringe-science ideas — from Atlantis speculation to astrology columns — a reach far beyond what nineteenth-century occult societies had possessed. This mass-mediated quality helps explain why so many of the decade's occult movements combined genuine devotional content with unmistakable elements of showmanship, marketing, and celebrity, a pattern that would recur throughout the twentieth century's subsequent waves of new religious movements.
Conclusion
The occult topics and cults of the 1920s cannot be reduced to a single cause, but they share a common context: a generation attempting to make sense of mass death, rapid technological change, and the erosion of inherited religious certainty. Spiritualism offered communication across the grave; Theosophy and its offshoots offered cosmic hierarchies and hidden masters; Crowley offered a radical reordering of moral law; and American prophetic movements from Father Divine to the House of David offered embodied, charismatic authority in place of distant institutional religion. Taken together, these currents form less a set of isolated curiosities than a coherent — if fractured — spiritual response to one of the twentieth century's most disorienting decades.
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