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A Science for the Soul, by Corinna Treitel

By Psyche | July 25, 2008 | Print This Post | E-mail This Post | Comments Off

A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern, by Corinna Treitel
John Hopkins University Press, 0801878128, 366 pp. (incl. appendices, notes, bibliography and index), 2004

A Science for the Soul explores German occultism between the 1870s and 1940s, largely focusing on parapsychology, séances, mediumism, Theosophy and the spiritualist movement, their popularization, and what effects this had on the larger German culture.

Treitel opens with a look at how occultism brought science and the psyche together, helping to facilitate “the blossoming of psychological modernism circa 1900″, which she writes has been “largely ignored or underplayed in accounts of the era”.1

As a new science parapsychology received mixed reactions: “As Wundt put it, he would keep his trust in the authority of science, rather than in the authority of scientists who had wandered into fields far beyond the realm of their expertise.” 2  While others were concerned with “the unbelievably low quality of debate on séance phenomena”.  Treitel describes one man’s concern that most people “subscribing to the German spiritualist news papers… had no interest in the scientific investigation of the phenomenon, but seemed to be searching rather for confirmation of their belief in an afterlife, a belief that precluded their critical investigation of mediumism as a psychological phenomenon”.3  (A comparison could be made between today’s newage market, but a detailed exploration of this theme is outside the scope of this review.)

Using medium Anna Rothe’s 1902 exposure as a fraud as a case study Treitel delves deeper into the complex relationship between spiritualism’s fervent adherents, the mediums, and those deliberately mislead by unscrupulous individuals.  The evidence against Rothe was significant, yet the “vast majority of witnesses who were her customers had testified…that Rothe had not harmed them, and in most cases had actually helped them to solve serious physical and spiritual problems”.  Despite this, the court “judged these witnesses’ testimony objectively false” and “denied Rothe’s followers the truth of their own judgments” and put her behind bars. 4

Responses to the trial were hotly debated across Europe, and relayed an intriguing underlying sentiment:

Whether the city’s intellectual elites liked it or not, participants in the city’s popular occult movement had clearly absorbed the view that they could and should determine the truth of the world for themselves.  Moreover, they had imbibed the basic principle of the scientific worldview that knowledge should be empirical, acquired through careful investigation and reasoned cogitation.  The city’s occult movement – as much as its centres of intellectual excellence – belonged to a culture of knowledge in which experience, reason, science, and progress were all joined to the liberal vision of a society slowly evolving toward a more enlightened future.5

The introduction of parapsychology, mediums and spiritualism, Theosophy and Ariosophy, and popular occultism are all well covered, but, somewhat surprisingly, ceremonial magick and its influence are left out almost entirely.  It’s a curious omission.  That said, A Science for the Soul remains a useful contribution to the study of the history of western esotericism.

Footnotes:

  1. p. 13-14 [back]
  2. p. 12 [back]
  3. p. 13-14 [back]
  4. p. 186 [back]
  5. p. 190 [back]

Psyche is the editor of ahrfoundation.org and the curator for the occult resource SpiralNature.com, Psyche also operates a tarot consultation business, Psyche Tarot. She has been published in The Cauldron, Konton, Tarot World Magazine, among other magazines, and her essay “Strategic Magick” appeared in Manifesting Prosperity (Megalithica, 2008).

Psyche's website is http://www.ahrfoundation.org.

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