Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia

By Julia Mannherz

Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia traces the history of occult thought and practice from its origins in private salons to its popularity in turn-of-the-century mass culture. In lucid prose, Julia Mannherz examines the ferocious public debates of the 1870s on higher dimensional mathematics and the workings of seance phenomena, discusses the world of cheap instruction manuals and popular occult journals, and looks at haunted houses, which brought together the rural settings and the urban masses that obsessed over them. In addition, Mannherz looks at reactions of Russian Orthodox theologians to the occult.

In spite of its prominence, the role of the occult in turn-of-the-century Russian culture has been largely ignored, if not actively written out of histories of the modern state. For specialists and students of Russian history, culture, and science, as well as those generally interested in the occult, Mannherz's fascinating study remedies this gap and returns the occult to its rightful place in the popular imagination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781609090647

Book preview

MANNHERZ_POSTER.pdf

© 2012 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper.

All Rights Reserved

Design by Shaun Allshouse

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mannherz, Julia.

Modern occultism in late imperial Russia / Julia Mannherz.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87580-462-0 (clothbound) — ISBN (invalid) 978-1-60909-064-7 (e-book)

1. Occultism—Russia—History—19th century. 2. Occultism—Russia—History—20th century. 3. Spiritualism—Russia—History—19th century. 4. Spiritualism—Russia—History—20th century. I. Title.

BF1434.R8M36 2012

130.947’09034--dc23

2012010094

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1—The Laboratory in the Salon: Spiritualism Comes to Russia

2—Occult Science and the Russian Public

3—The Occult Metropolis: Putting the Hidden to Practical Use

4—Servants, Priests, and Haunted Houses

5—Popular Occultism and the Orthodox Church

6—The Occult at Court: Mariia Puare and the Fate of Occultism during the Great War

Conclusion

Notes to Introduction

Notes to Chapter 1—The Laboratory in the Salon

Notes to Chapter 2—Occult Science and the Russian Public

Notes to Chapter 3—The Occult Metropolis

Notes to Chapter 4—Servants, Priests, and Haunted Houses

Notes to Chapter 5—Popular Occultism and the Orthodox Church

Notes to Chapter 6—The Occult at Court

Notes to Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions have helped me write this book. Financial support was provided by the Cambridge European Trust, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, the University of Göttingen, and in Oxford by the History Faculty, Oriel College, and the Fell Fund. I am grateful to all of them. I also wish to thank the staffs of the libraries and archives where I conducted my research: the university libraries of Cambridge, Göttingen, Münster, and Oxford, the Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, the Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka, the Biblioteka akademii nauk, the Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, the Sanktpeterburgskaia gosudarstvennaia teatral’naia biblioteka, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the British Library, the library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (University College London), the Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, the Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, the Natsional’nyi arkhiv respubliki Tatarstana, the Muzei tsirkovogo iskusstva, the Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga, the Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy, the Muzei Bakhrushina, and the Institut russkoi literatury.

I am most grateful to friends and colleagues without whose help I would never have written this book. Hubertus Jahn and Susan Morrissey helped me formulate the project at the very beginning, and Hubertus saw it through the stages of a doctoral thesis.

Natascha Astrina was always happy to help with the difficult features of the Russian language, and without her, Tatjana Balzer, and Elizaveta Liphardt, research trips to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kazan would not have worked out so well. Aleksandr and Ol’ga Astriny always had an open door for me in Moscow, Zoia Balandina was my host in St. Petersburg, and together with Kiril Bitner and Elizaveta Liphardt, Zoia tracked down texts about hypnosis, while Guzel’ Ibneeva, Lialia Khasanshina, and Elena Vishlenkova helped me find primary texts in Kazan. Tetyana Bogdan, Nikolai Bogomolov, Sandra Dahlke, Vera Dubina, James von Geldern, Boris Kolonitskii, Polly McMichael, and Karen Petrone have also helped me with sources or suggestions. Irina Khmel’nitskaia has done more for me than could ever be expected of a friend, providing me with a place to stay in Moscow, helping with archives, libraries, red tape, and together with Dmitrii Provodin, enabling me to conduct on-site research.

In Göttingen, Manfred Hildermeier was always ready to help, and in Oxford my colleagues at the History Faculty and Oriel College have made me feel most welcome and have supported me in every possible way.

Numerous friends and colleagues have commented on drafts of chapters or the whole manuscript at various stages of its development, and I would like to thank Clare Ashdowne, Dominik Collet, Bruno Currie, Simon Dixon, Murray Frame, Ian Forrest, Michael Hagemeister, Jana Howlett, Hubertus Jahn, Emese Lafferton, Carlos Martins, David Moon, Alex Oberländer, Will Pooley, Bernice Rosenthal, Steve Smith, Nick Stargardt, and Christine Worobec for their invaluable suggestions. At Northern Illinois University Press, Amy Farranto and Susan Bean have been extremely helpful editors in every possible way, and I am also grateful to Marlyn Miller for her thorough copy editing.

Tilman Bauer has supported me in every possible way throughout the many years I have been working on the occult in Russia; for his love and companionship I am more than thankful. This book is dedicated to him.

Introduction

In the early 1890s, the symbolist poet Valerii Iakovlevich Briusov discovered his enthusiasm for the occult, and by the early months of 1893, he was regularly attending spiritualist séances. Several times a week, he joined a circle of acquaintances who gathered in darkened rooms to experience uncanny, supernatural occurrences.¹ These assemblies were so important to Briusov that he noted them in his diary, recorded them in a black notebook with the inscription Spiritualist Séances, and mentioned them in letters.² Judging by these accounts, séances not only provided Briusov with playful entertainment and a chance to engage in mischievousness and in amorous adventures, but they also engendered philosophical and artistic contemplation about reality and were a source of creative inspiration. So deep was Briusov’s emotional, artistic, and intellectual investment in spiritualism that, bedridden in 1895, he longingly begged his friend Aleksandr Lang (Miropol’skii) to visit and to entertain him: bring the planchette with you; we’ll write and hold a séance.³ Eventually, Briusov’s séance experiences provided the basis for a novella and influenced his poetry and his self-perception as an artist.

Briusov, of course, was an outstanding poet, but his enthusiasm for spiritualism was far from exceptional. Ideas about mystical and supernatural powers played a prominent role in the cultural imagination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian society. While Briusov was walking the night streets of Moscow to join his fellow séance participants, many of his contemporaries were engaged in similar activities. No statistics are available that could shed light on the absolute numbers of those who, alongside Briusov, were drawn to occult rituals during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.⁴ Those who recorded occult activities in their letters, diaries, notebooks, or memoirs were predominantly highly educated men, but a significant corpus of sources indicates that many more contemporaries shared these interests. The widespread fascination with the occult was mirrored in, among others, the sphere of publishing. Between 1881 and the end of the empire, over 30 periodicals devoted to the invisible world appeared in Russia, but the occult was also a prominent topic in mainstream publishing.⁵ Cheap pamphlets extolled occult techniques and standard newspapers frequently reported supernatural occurrences. In February 1893, at the time when Briusov was attending séances in Moscow, the popular St. Petersburg daily Peterburgskaia gazeta (St. Petersburg Gazette) ran a series of articles on spiritualists in the northern capital entitled Peterburgskie spirity.⁶ Over the course of two weeks, the broadsheet informed its readers about some of the capital’s most famous occultists, about ghostly apparitions, reincarnation, spirit guidance in fiction writing, hypnosis, spirit photography, the importance of religion for all these phenomena, and the close relation between occult phenomena and the sciences. The series began with an interview of Viktor Ivanovich Pribytkov, and it is indicative of the allure of spiritualism that Pribytkov, "the ‘official’ St. Petersburg spiritualist, editor and publisher of the [spiritualist] journal Rebus," needed little introduction. He and his journal were well known to the newspaper’s readers.⁷

By the beginning of the new century, Briusov was moving confidently in the circles Peterburgskaia gazeta described. He made the acquaintance of Pribytkov in 1900, contributed articles to Rebus, and presented the journal’s editor with a small book of my poetry that has just come out. Briusov hoped that Pribytkov might find in the last section, where I speak openly about my cherished beliefs [...], poems [whose themes] are not entirely unfamiliar to you.⁸ Before entrusting his letters to Pribytkov to the post, Briusov carefully composed draft versions, which underlines the importance he attributed to this correspondence.⁹ Three years later, and more than a decade after he first took an interest in séances, Briusov had gained such high regard among Russia’s leading spiritualists that he offered the gravesite obituary of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Aksakov, the man who had done more than anyone else to propagate spiritualism in Russia.¹⁰

Briusov’s interest in the occult and his friendship with authors, editors, and protagonists of publications dealing with the supernatural illustrates several themes that are at the center of this study. The significance of the occult in the private lives of contemporaries and its role in mass culture are the subjects of this book. The history of late imperial occult thought and practice are traced from their origins in private salons to the public debates of the 1870s and the subsequent proliferation of the occult within turn-of-the-century mass culture. Briusov himself knew of these different approaches to the supernatural world firsthand. His acquaintance with Pribytkov and Aksakov brought him into contact with representatives of an older generation of Russian spiritualists, who prominently propagated their beliefs in the growing sphere of publishing in the 1870s and 1880s, and who confidently insisted that the occult was scientifically explicable. Briusov himself, however, moved away from this rational approach and cherished the irrational sensations that occult rituals offered. He experimented with various techniques aside from spiritualist séances, and his increasing versatility was representative of a diversification of occult practices around the turn of the century.

Popular Occultism in the Russian Empire

In late imperial Russia, occultism was made up of a cluster of theories, beliefs, and practices that included spiritualist séances; quasi-scientific theories concerning mathematics, x-rays, and light waves; hypnosis; meditation exercises; theosophical discussion groups; telepathy; clairvoyance; dietary regimes; prayers; gymnastic programs; and investigations into supernatural occurrences such as haunted houses. In most contemporary texts, the occult was used as a word with positive connotations whose meaning combined rational understanding with the discovery of higher emotional truth. As one encyclopedia described it, the occult was part of the double striving of the human soul to believe and to apprehend.¹¹

Although highly diverse and disparate, these practices formed a unity not only because contemporaries labeled them as occult but also because they shared a number of prime concerns. One of these was the common objective of all occultists to interact with and to study a hidden and greater dimension of reality.¹² In the second half of the nineteenth century, this desire to experience and explain a concealed aspect of the world that many considered to be painfully unexplored was prominently engendered by the fashionable practice of spiritualism. During séances, that is, gatherings of men and women in darkened rooms that aimed to establish contact with the spirits of the departed, spiritualists received enigmatic messages delivered through knocks or in awkward handwriting; they observed sparks of light; they saw how invisible forces moved furniture, played instruments, or left imprints of immaterial hands and feet on soft surfaces. All of these phenomena raised challenging questions about the ability of current knowledge to comprehend invisible forces and about the relationship of the here and now to another world. As shown in the first chapter of this book, spiritualism became a prominent practice in post-reform Russia that developed out of noble salon culture and combined entertainment with science. It allowed contemporaries to explore their relationship to death at a time when religious convictions concerning immortality were being challenged by scientific notions, and it moreover enabled participants to appreciate their own intense sense of being alive. Spiritualist gatherings also provided practitioners with the opportunity to fashion themselves as independently minded investigators of unexplored aspects of nature, or as unconventional artists.

In the second chapter, two areas of knowledge are examined that, according to occultists, shed light on the workings of a hidden reality: mathematics and physiological ideas regarding hypnosis. The analysis of a ferocious public debate that erupted in 1878 over the claim that non-Euclidean geometry and higher dimensional mathematics explained the workings of séance phenomena begins the chapter. The chapter ends with a description of how this intellectually relatively exclusive debate metamorphosed into a mass discussion about occult science, which in the 1880s and 1890s centered around the practice of hypnosis.

Historians and sociologists have frequently argued that occultism emerged as a reaction to the rise of science and materialism, and that occultism and rationality represent binary opposites.¹³ In fact, occultists’ relationship with science was complex and highly ambivalent. Occultists operated with scientific notions and hoped that their theories would be welcomed by representatives of established academe. Thus, numerous occult texts stressed the rational qualities of occultism by describing the study of the hidden realm as an innovative scientific discipline in its own right. Journals such as Vestnik okku’ltnykh nauk (Herald of Occult Sciences) and Mag: Zhurnal okkul’tnykh nauk (The Magician: Journal for Occult Sciences) equated the occult with the exact sciences in their titles. Other pamphlets advanced professors of secret sciences or referred to doctoral theses in the area, while Pribytkov asserted in Rebus that occultism was devoted to the teaching of nature’s mysteries.¹⁴

Occultists were not entirely unsuccessful in their endeavors to claim scientificity for their convictions. Spiritualists could point toward a number of esteemed scientists who ardently defended the veracity of séance phenomena. These included, among others, the chemist and fellow of the Royal Society Sir William Crookes, the German astrophysicist Karl Friedrich Zöllner, the chemist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov, and the zoologist Nikolai Petrovich Vagner. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, physiologists became increasingly interested in hypnosis, a technique in which occultists claimed expertise. That established scientists would conduct research into such a mysterious topic was hailed by occultists as a sign that their concerns were finally entering the academic mainstream.

While a lot of energy was spent in the attempt to situate the occult within the realm of science, occultists could also be extremely critical of scientific notions, which they argued failed to address the most significant areas of human existence: the ultimate meaning of life and death. Despite their criticism, however, occultists felt painfully offended by the majority of scientists who rejected their conclusions. Because of occultists’ claims to explain nature fully, the fervent support by some scientists, and the hostile reaction it received from a majority of outspoken scholars, occult science became a hotly debated topic in the culturally influential thick journals, and it generated significant interest within popular culture. Consequently, debates about occult science in the public sphere turned into broader discussions about the veracity of scientific truth and its relationship to the relativity and ambiguity of modern life.

Occultism, then, combined the disparate: belief about life after death, and science, entertainment and individual self-fashioning, as well as highly intellectual debates and popular culture. Indeed, one of the defining features of occult theory and practice was its versatility and eclecticism.¹⁵ Occultists were trying to understand séance phenomena with the help of geometry, and they attempted to grasp the workings of hypnosis by evoking electricity or neurology, but they simultaneously borrowed from renaissance alchemy, Jewish Kabbalah, Buddhist mysticism, Christian theology, and Kantian philosophy. This borrowing of diverse ideas, which frequently contradicted each other, resulted in notions that on the one hand attempted to unify all human knowledge, but that on the other hand often lacked intellectual rigor and coherence. The nature of occult forces was a case in point. From the spiritualist perspective, these resided mostly outside of those who observed them, that is, occult phenomena were thought to be caused by the spirits of the dead. Yet champions of spiritualism also suggested that séance phenomena might be caused by powers that resided deep inside the psyche of the living who attended séances.¹⁶ Toward the turn of the century, the border between external and internal forces became increasingly blurred and notions about these powers ever more vague. Sometimes, contemporaries experienced the lack of precision in occult thinking as problematic. In 1892, Rebus published an article entitled The Meaning of Terms Used in Spiritualism, which was intended to introduce greater semantic rigor.¹⁷ The project, however, was ill-fated from the start, for the text was based on a German document that did not take Russian usage into consideration.

Theoretical inconsistency and ideological overlap could be found across the spectrum of occult theory and practice and made a clear distinction between schools of occult thought almost impossible. How-to manuals, for example, combined instructions about spiritualist séances with fortune-telling, hypnosis with clairvoyance, meditation with the interpretation of dreams, or folklore with the fourth dimension, or they discussed the obstructive quality of corsets before turning to Indian fakirs.¹⁸ The eclecticism of occultism is discussed in chapter three, as is the move of occult forces from the outside into the human psyche, a development that facilitated a widening of the occult sphere to include ever more varied forms of practices and beliefs.

Popular occultism was eclectic and defied rigorous systematization. While this may be seen as an intellectual weakness, it was also one of its greatest strengths, in that it assured that occultism could be experienced as all embracing. After all, the object of occult study was that which, although real, was impenetrable to the normal human senses, including the rational mind.¹⁹ Occult thought, then, could not conform to standards of cold academic reasoning were it to do justice to its object of investigation. Around the turn of the century, most occultists abandoned attempts to approach the occult with scientific theories and instead relished supernatural experiences precisely because they defied reason but stressed emotion. Occultists described how supernatural experience led them from the mechanics of everyday life into the realm of the heart and of sentiment.²⁰ This journey conferred upon them highly personal visions of sublime wisdom, majestic love, and supreme power. As one disciple put it: "these sensations allow us to feel revelatory meaning."²¹ Rather than agreeing upon a set of abstract ideas and practices, diverse forms of occult penetration of higher wisdom shared an emotional, and sometimes also a bodily, experience of awe and insight. Two techniques that stressed such experience are the focus of chapter three: gaining hypnotic power over others, and the so-called occult-mental prayer. The first allowed practitioners to gain influence over themselves and others, while the second brought about a sense of belonging within a larger community of like-minded brethren. Both exercises offered an entryway into hidden reality and a technique that enabled practitioners to employ the mighty powers that lingered in this realm.

One further trait that was shared by diverse occult ideas and practices was a common ideology of seekership,²² that is, a painstaking search for a deeper truth that would bestow meaning on all aspects of everyday experience and transcend quotidian triviality by integrating all forms of knowledge. One of the consequences of occult seekership was the ever-widening scope of occult concerns, which in early twentieth-century Russia were advertised very openly.²³ Cheap pamphlets and journals taught readers how to summon a ghost, how to develop clairvoyance, and how to obtain spiritual prowess.²⁴

At first sight, mass publications dealing with the occult appear to be a contradiction in terms. The occult, which translates from the Latin as that which is deliberately hidden, cannot, it would appear, be trumpeted by cheap instruction manuals. Yet the modern popular occultism that this study deals with was highly visible. The vibrant print culture of the late tsarist empire meant that the occult conception of the universe, allegedly revealed only to the initiate, was proclaimed in journals and in the pages of cheap pamphlets, and advertised in newspaper listings. The occult truth that these organs revealed was not openly self-evident; it had to be searched for and found, but it was neither concealed nor beyond reach. It was veiled, but accessible for each individual who looked for it, and cheap instruction manuals promised to teach readers how to go about this quest. The occult insights that these publications revealed, then, were not mysteries in the sense of being inaccessible but, in the words of Jacques Derrida, in the sense that a secret provides a valuable insight.²⁵

Seekership could be individual and directed toward emotional insight; it could also manifest itself around attempts to study and to explain mysterious phenomena. In late imperial Russia, haunted houses provided opportunities for such analysis; and their boisterous character brought together convinced occultists and contemporaries who did not necessarily share beliefs in supernatural interference. These unquiet homes, which were visited by curious onlookers and inspected by the police, the clergy, and journalists, are the subject of chapter four. Reports about them featured prominently in newspapers, pamphlets, and journals, thereby confronting ordinary readers with phenomena that seemed to pertain to a different reality. The logic and narrative of accounts about haunted houses resembled dreams, and their meaning defied straightforward interpretation. By combining different notions and possible explanations, none of which, however, was presented as preeminent, debates about haunted houses continued the occult tradition of uniting the disparate in the public sphere. They also significantly expressed an attitude that accepted and even relished ambiguity, merging Orthodoxy with medicine, folklore with social thought, and bringing together the rural village in which these events took place with the urban mass culture that reported them.

Discussions about haunted houses illustrate the location of occultism in the cultural landscape of late imperial Russia. Occult ideas and practices were focused around specialized journals or instruction manuals devoted to the topic. But the occult was also prominent in the mainstream press, where it was debated by the country’s most prominent cultural, scientific, and artistic figures. In mainstream publishing, however, supernatural occurrences remained a contentious topic. Some newspaper articles implied that spiritualist explanations were plausible, but frequently writers remained ambiguous or expressed ridicule and skeptical or even scathing assessments. The occult was thus never quite accepted and retained an illicit flavor.²⁶

The focus of chapter five turns toward those who observed the occult from the outside by analyzing the reactions of Russian Orthodox theologians. It shows that theologians, like occultists, were challenged by the ascent of science as the most authoritative form to explain nature and man. Orthodox authors, like their occultist compatriots, wrestled with individualism, immortality, and the meaning of miracles. But despite these shared concerns, Orthodox thinkers were restrained by Christian teaching, and their responses to these questions stayed within the boundaries of theological tradition. Orthodox writers in turn criticized occultists for abandoning basic Christian tenets. For example, occultism allegedly did not lead believers to strive toward personal salvation and moreover lacked the redeeming figure of Christ. Occultists were indeed not much concerned with a deity or a personal relationship with God. Instead, as discussed above, they freely incorporated various religious and philosophical traditions. Notwithstanding the affinities to both science and belief, the occult was rejected by the official church as heretical and lambasted by prominent scientists as irrational. The occult, then, was also defined by its position in society. In late imperial Russia it may have been at the cultural center, but it also lay on the religious, scientific, and social peripheries.

Theologians and occultists differed not only in their ideas, restrained in the case of the first and rather imaginative in the case of the latter, but in their ties to social institutions. While Orthodox writers were associated with and bound by the traditions of the Church, the intellectual freedom of occultists was not obstructed by any institutional organization. In contrast to established churches, occultists did not create set organizations, a ministry, or even a community of fellow occultists that was clearly defined. As a consequence, occult identities were hard to grasp. Establishing who was a spiritualist, a hypnotist, or even an occultist was tricky. When it came to the occult community, the driving stimulus of seekership acted as a centrifugal force. In their search for an individual experience of hidden meaning, men and women in the late tsarist empire shopped around; very few of them were faithfully wedded to only one of the numerous teachings and practices available but moved from one to the next. Pribytkov and Aksakov, for example, remained vocal advocates of spiritualism over several decades, but they also dabbled in hypnosis. Briusov’s interest in spiritualism likewise continued over many decades, but the poet also tried yoga and followed meditation exercises.²⁷ Others later reminisced about interests that combined spiritualism with yoga, telepathy, and the training of hypnotic powers.²⁸ Moreover, while engaging in such heterodox practices, occultists also commonly asserted their Russian Orthodox identities.²⁹ And while Pribytkov, Aksakov, and Butlerov stayed faithful to occult convictions broadly defined over decades, other contemporaries moved in and out of occult practice.

Despite its failure to congeal into a clearly defined intellectual, religious, or social movement, occultism in late imperial Russia formed an entity, for it conformed to what sociologist Colin Campbell has described a cultic milieu, that is, a loose amalgamation of practitioners who are united by diverse, transient, and loosely structured practices, and by the subscription to periodicals and shared reading, all of which revolve around fluctuating belief systems. Such a cultic milieu has undefined boundaries, only a rudimentary organization, and no sacraments. It is accessible, tolerant of various strands of thought within the broader sphere of the occult (and beyond), and it makes few demands on its members.³⁰ Despite these characteristics, the cultic milieu is a single entity, not only because individual practitioners take part in its various manifestations and thus hold it together, but also because a common consciousness of deviance, a need to justify their views, and a sense of mutual sympathy and support unite followers.³¹

Its loose links set popular occultism, which is the object of this study, apart from other movements that are exclusive, emphasize hierarchies, and conduct their meetings in secrecy. Whereas societies such as Freemasons, Martinists, the Golden Dawn, sectarian groups and, to a lesser degree, theosophical groupings were tightly structured, clearly circumscribed, expounded fixed belief systems, and possessed stable institutions, the popular occult lacked this organizing principle. The teachings and writings of such exclusive occult groups may become part of the sphere of popular occultism when they transcend the restrictions of their institutional boundaries through publications or open lectures, but their secret meetings and well-guarded hierarchies keep them from full engagement in popular culture. The public visibility of spiritualism in turn explains why it plays such a prominent role in this study: its central practice, the séance, was straightforward enough to be conducted by everyone who wanted to give it a try, and the ideas that stood behind it were easily comprehensible intellectually and accessible practically through the popular press. Spiritualism moreover lacked a central organizing institution; instead it was anarchic, with practitioners meeting at privately arranged gatherings. They identified with each other through shared interests and readings and common convictions. Popular occultism more generally, then, was an unorganized frame of mind with seekership at its center.³²

Occultism in the Modern World

In the eyes of many commentators the success of occultism in post-reform Russia was shocking because belief in a different, hidden reality that was inaccessible to the rational mind was at odds with Enlightenment ideals about modern man, his independence from supernatural forces, and the powerful knowledge he used with increasing success to subjugate nature. The modern rational persona of the nineteenth century, as embodied by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev’s fictional character Evgenii Bazarov, believed in neither supernatural powers nor in the value of emotion.³³ Bazarov and real-life men like him confirmed Max Weber’s influential assessment that modernity was a world free of mysterious powers, a world that was thoroughly disenchanted.³⁴ What made occultism a sensitive topic and assured its notoriety, then, was its flourishing in a period when, in the minds of many, it should not have been around. Indeed, some sociologists define occultism as a nineteenth-century phenomenon that was in various ways closely implicated with secularization, either as a reaction against it,³⁵ or as the revival of an older esoteric tradition in a period of spiritual disenchantment.³⁶ Whereas these approaches stress the difference between occultism and the modern—a difference that in the latter understanding is based on dependence—in this work, their similarity is emphasized.

Until relatively recently, most historians have followed Weber’s assessment and equated modernity with rationalism and a rejection of mysterious powers.³⁷ In the last two decades, however, historians of religion have shown that faith and individual experiences of the supernatural remained highly important throughout the nineteenth century; indeed they have argued for a religious revival in the period.³⁸ Scholars of heterodox beliefs in turn have equally noted the relevance of such convictions in the modern age and the way in which they engaged with and were motivated by contemporary concerns.³⁹

Such observations necessitate a reassessment of the modern. Whereas traditional definitions of modernity have painted a static picture of industrialized economies, administrative rationalization, political participation, cognitive realism, and belief in progress, recent studies have emphasized cultural modernism, focusing on self-reflexivity, the fleeting, the contingent, the irrational, and the contradictory, which pervaded both popular and high culture as modernity’s defining features.⁴⁰ Like some nineteenth-century poets, these scholars have defined the experience of the modern as tied up with an acute sense that seemingly stable certainties—social structures, economic customs, religious traditions, moral values, political establishments—were changing or even disintegrating, that life had become transient and unpredictable. The experience of flux was rife in late imperial Russia: students of the period have painted the picture of a society in which developments of change, disintegration, and realignment were all pervasive. They have pointed to political reform, industrialization, and urbanization, and to the upheavals that followed in their wake: mass migration; unstable social and cultural boundaries between classes, ethnicities, and genders; the broadening of the public sphere; the emergence of a mass culture that amplified competing ideologies of autocracy versus revolution, enthusiasm for technological progress versus religious faith, fears about science gone bad, and nostalgia for a preindustrial past; traditional patriarchy versus feminism; Russian chauvinism versus tolerance and calls for national autonomy.⁴¹ As these examples show, the experience of modernity was not only one of flux but also characterized by the sensation that opposites coexist and contemporaries have to encounter the simultaneity of the un-simultaneous.⁴² The modern experience thus describes the sensation of encountering the end of the old and the promise of new empowering times, while the lingering and nostalgic endurance of the past within this modernity also warns of a future that could be threatening.⁴³

Nothing epitomized the ambiguity of the present—the simultaneity of transience, disappearance, and tenacity, and the coexistence of opposites—and the elusive promise of an unrealized future better than the occult and visions of ethereal spirits. In occultism, the past, present, and future collapsed. Occult thinking combined intellectual traditions harking back to pre-Enlightenment thought with state-of-the-art scientific theories and promised future insights that would revolutionize human understanding of the world and of the human self.⁴⁴ Jacques Derrida has read spirit appearances themselves as moments of heightened temporal ambivalence, since the presence of a person who is no more but whose eternal self points toward the future fuses the chronologically disparate.⁴⁵ Moreover, supernatural phenomena are—as is modern life—transient and ever changing, and their development defies prediction and control. Spirits appear and disappear, or sometimes even fail to appear despite great efforts of the living to summon them. Yet while the living have an image of the character of ghosts in their minds, these beings are ultimately ungraspable, they lack corporality. That makes the supernatural a particularly suitable illustration of the modern, which, in the words of the decadent French poet Charles Baudelaire, was defined by the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.⁴⁶ In this book, then, the occult is analyzed as a way of thinking, feeling, and describing the world that was enmeshed with and representative of the experience of European modernity.

Occultism and Historiography

The importance of occultism in the lives of individuals and in late nineteenth-century Russian publishing notwithstanding, the fascination with the supernatural evident among contemporaries has either been ignored or actively written out of history. Briusov provides a particularly striking example in this regard.⁴⁷ In his diary, as in his letters to his friend Lang, thoughts about art, philosophy, and literature were inextricably entangled with spiritualist experiences and sexual adventures. Indeed, the first entry set the tone by describing a séance meeting.⁴⁸ Throughout the first notebook, Briusov described in great detail his spiritualist activities and his infatuation with Elena Maslova, during both social functions and spiritualist gatherings, and he made clear that decadence, spiritualism, and passion were the important components of his artistic