I am delighted to hand over today’s blog to my good friend Mark Morrisson, who has just published an excellent book entitled Light on the Path: Advancing Occultism Through Esoteric Fiction, 1880–1940 (Oxford University Press, 2025). He and I share a long-standing interest in these occult topics, and the book is just fascinating, with so many surprising insights.
All images in this post are in the public domain
Light on the Path
Mark S. Morrisson
During the later nineteenth century, an “occult revival” (as it is often styled) in the US and western Europe signaled an increasing fascination with the occult in the popular imagination. This same period also witnessed a rapid expansion of print culture that offered a dizzying array of new magazines, pulp fiction, cheap single-volume and paperback novels, and emerging forms of genre fiction, all designed to meet (and create) the demands of an ever-growing readership. One might ask what, if anything, these two phenomena had to do with each other. Quite a lot, it turns out.
Modern occultism became so entangled with popular fiction that it can almost be seen as a literary phenomenon. The relationship extended well beyond genre fiction writers like Sax Rohmer picking up the odd occult theme emerging from, say, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or Aleister Crowley’s Thelema—or the converse, with occult leaders appropriating tropes and concepts from popular writers. (H. P. Blavatsky owed significant debts to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for example.) Rather, something much more strategic, generative, and durable was going on.
Research for my new book, Light on the Path: Advancing Occultism Through Esoteric Fiction, 1880-1940, led me to literary experiments by several key figures who helped develop a genre of esoteric fiction. They included well-known writers, such as Crowley and Dion Fortune, but also less-well-remembered authors, such as the romance novelist Mabel Collins, who was a member of Blavatsky’s inner circle, and Kenneth Morris, who wrote Theosophical fantasy novels based on the Welsh Mabinogi and even on Toltec themes. (Ursula K. Le Guin would later praise Morris, alongside J. R. R. Tolkien and E. R. Eddison, as a master stylist and world builder of high fantasy.) These and other proponents of modern occultism used their popular fiction as a space for their own “world building”—accessing and exploring ideas from the cosmos they were creating.
Perhaps more surprisingly, these authors sought to wrest esotericism away from its traditional modes of secrecy. For them, there seemed to be no better way than genre fiction to make an esoteric worldview, and its promise of self-transformation, accessible to mass audiences. In 1932 Q. D. Leavis lamented that “serious reading” had given way to the consumption of fiction that required little mental effort, appealing to the reader emotionally and through identification with a character. Dion Fortune would accept Leavis’s assessment but turn it on its head, arguing that esoteric fiction’s ability to appeal to a non-critical reader could begin to open an esoteric path for that reader. In their attempts to forge a new esoteric fiction genre from already existing popular modes, these writers intended their novels to offer an occult gnosis through the simple act of reading a novel.
A crucial locus for this mutually generative relationship between genre fiction and a deliberately exoteric approach to occult esotericism could be found at Katherine Tingley’s Theosophical utopian community at Point Loma, outside San Diego. “Lomaland” was, in many ways, the epicenter of American Theosophy for much of the first half of the twentieth century. Tingley meant to spread her Theosophical vision widely. She evangelized through musical and dramatic performances, international “crusades,” schools, books and magazines published on site, and, increasingly, through genre fiction.
The most successful Lomaland writer to widen the audience for occult esotericism was Talbot Mundy (1879-1940). Born William Lancaster Gribbon to a conservative middle-class family in London, Mundy left Rugby College for British India, working as a colonial administrator and journalist before moving on to an even more colorful career as a con man, poacher, and adventurer in India, East Africa, Australia, and the South Pacific. He arrived in America in 1909 with little more than his alcoholic second wife and a British £100 note—and was promptly robbed and nearly killed. But he turned his life around, parlaying his experiences into a highly successful career writing adventure literature for the newly popular pulp fiction magazines.
A perpetual seeker of spiritual meaning who had experimented with Spiritualism and Christian Science, Mundy arrived in Lomaland in the early 1920s and found in Theosophy the spiritual synthesis he’d sought. Because of his stature as a major pulp fiction writer who could routinely reach over a million readers—he published roughly a novel or novelette a month in Adventure and other pulps—Mundy was just the right person to realize, and enlarge, Tingley’s vision for Theosophical outreach.
Though Mundy’s novels are not widely read these days, his genre-bending achievement is with us still. In 1924, he managed to convince both Adventure magazine and Bobbs-Merrill to publish a groundbreaking contribution to esoteric fiction. It would build on all the tropes and tricks of colonial adventure fiction, not just to amuse audiences but to deliver what was essentially a spiritual adventure based directly on Theosophical tenets. With it he aimed to initiate a process of esoteric transformation in the reader. OM: The Secret of Ahbor Valley offered what would seem at the outset to be a fairly stock Mundy colonial adventure page-turner, one involving Englishman Cottswold Ommony’s perilous journey into the largely uncharted Ahbor Valley in India.
But the novel as well as its successor, The Devil’s Guard (1926), and other Mundy adventure novels in the 1920s and early 1930s changed the genre expectations of adventure fiction, allowing for such Theosophical themes as reincarnation, the wisdom and ancient sciences of Atlantis, or the Great White Brotherhood overseeing human spiritual evolution from hidden monasteries in Tibet. In OM and The Devil’s Guard, Mundy brings the reader into contact with the mysterious and ancient sources of all religions and sciences, as the adventurers encounter in deep caves the precursors of these religions and sciences in carvings and other artifacts that are hundreds of thousands of years old. Explaining these findings, the party’s guide, the Tibetan Lama Tsiang Samdup, explains to Ommony that “since the beginning of the world . . . there has never been one minute when the knowledge that was in the beginning has been utterly forgotten. . . . There have always been men who possessed and guarded the secrets; and there always will be such men.” Adventure plots that often traded on uncovering secrets in remote and dangerous locations were easily adapted to this religious esotericism. Indeed, the fictional sayings of the old Lama were so memorable to readers that they were even quoted on the floor of the U.S. Senate by California senator Hiram Johnson.
By the end of OM, a wiser Ommony has committed to a spiritual outreach mission back to the West, serving a mysterious chela who combines a Western pedigree with the secret trainings and worldview of Theosophy’s understanding of the East. Lomaland itself signaled the “new world’s” receptiveness to such enlightenment. Esoteric adventure fiction tried to bring it about.
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