Alison Butler. Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-230-22339-4. Price: US$80/₤55

The notable work of Alex Owen, Alison Winter, and Corinna Treitel has contributed to a remapping of nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural history by documenting the dramatic spike in interest in occult matters by groups ranging from elite intellectuals and artists to working-class radicals and activists. Far from seeing science and occultism as polar opposites, Alex Owen’s seminal book The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (2004) detached occultism from its associations with archaic, discarded practices and re-examined its role in facilitating modern conceptions of selfhood. Owen’s work is highly suggestive for literary scholars in its illuminating perspective on occultism as a magical practice that depends on modes of fictionalizing to create its unique effects. Occultism’s refashioning of the imagination as the means by which higher levels of reality can be apprehended, as well as a resource through which individuals are able to tap into vital life forces, blunted the edges of occultism’s negative connotations as a purveyor of malign practices. A casualty of the shift toward enchanted modernity is the downgrading of ritual magic in occult practices and an overall de-emphasis on the place of magic in Victorian occultism. Alison Butler takes issue with Owen’s focus on modernity and returns Victorian occultism back to older traditions of magic which, she argues, are reworked to accommodate contemporary needs. This is not to say that Butler does not build on the work of her predecessors. Indeed she shares common ground with her fellow historians in reading Victorian occultism as an active shaper of institutional and literary culture, ranging from the secretive but influential Order of the Golden Dawn to more obscure groups that cobbled together an unwieldy mix of Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry, all claiming to be inspired by Egyptian magic. Butler extends Owen’s insights about occultism’s role in developing modern conceptions of selfhood into a lengthy discussion of the Order of the Golden Dawn, which, she argues, refashioned earlier traditions of magic to highlight the power of individual will and creativity. The magus as manipulator of others is replaced by a do-it-yourself model of individuality whose aim is self-mastery and self-understanding. Butler’s account of the Golden Dawn’s philosophy is consistent with Owen’s reading of Victorian occult movements as vitally concerned with developing technologies to attain the higher self. In expressing the modern desire for self-realization, the Golden Dawn’s rituals, while steeped in older forms of Western magic, provided the foundation for the notion of the modern enchanted self (15). It was thus no accident that the Golden Dawn attracted some of the greatest poets and artists of the time, including W. B. Yeats, who creatively used the Order’s highly elaborate repertoire of symbols to map out various stages of psychic development. But unlike Owen, Butler sees the Golden Dawn as transforming, not discarding, older traditions of magic, which the Order mined to provide the motivation for different ritual practices. These practices are then translated into complex symbolic systems, which subsequently find their way into the forms and structures of literary modernism. Butler’s book focuses on the Golden Dawn to draw out this complex argument, an emphasis that is at once the book’s strength and weakness. The strength lies in the fact that her meticulous research into the institutional history, library collections of Golden Dawn members, and intellectual biographies of founding figures fleshes out a comprehensive account of the movement, adding valuable detail to the existing scholarship. The book is weakened, however, by its single-minded focus on the Golden Dawn which minimizes the importance of other groups in Victorian occultism--for example, the Theosophical Society--which conjoined social causes …