Occult Practices in the Victorian Period
The Victorian era (1837–1901) is remembered for its strict moral codes, industrial expansion, and empire. Yet alongside its progress and propriety thrived a deep fascination with the occult.
At a time when science promised to illuminate every corner of human experience, many Victorians turned to practices that embraced the unknown. Spiritualism, ceremonial magic, divination, and elaborate rituals of mourning were not mere curiosities but central to the cultural imagination of the period. These practices reveal a society negotiating modernity while still longing for mystery.
Spiritualism and the Séance
The most widespread occult practice of the Victorian age was Spiritualism—the belief that the living could communicate with the dead. It began in the 1840s with the Fox sisters in America, whose spirit “rappings” were widely reported, and quickly crossed the Atlantic. In Britain, séances became a fashionable pastime, particularly among the middle and upper classes. Drawing-room gatherings featured table-turning, spirit slates, and automatic writing, often guided by a medium whose role was part priest, part performer.
For many, the séance was more than entertainment. High mortality rates, especially among children, left families eager for connection with the departed. Spirit photography offered visual proof of ghostly presences, while trance-speaking mediums promised wisdom from the beyond. The Victorians’ fascination with technology and the supernatural overlapped—just as the telegraph carried invisible messages across continents, the séance promised instant communication with the afterlife.
Beyond parlour séances, the late Victorian period also saw the flourishing of ceremonial magic and secret societies. Chief among these was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888. Drawing on ancient and Renaissance sources, the Golden Dawn blended Kabbalah, alchemy, astrology, and Egyptian symbolism into a complex system of ritual and initiation. Members included writers, artists, and intellectuals, among them W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, and (for a time) Aleister Crowley.
These societies provided not just esoteric instruction but also a stage for cultural experimentation. Rituals offered participants a sense of empowerment and community outside the strict hierarchies of Victorian social life. For women especially, occult groups could provide unusual opportunities for authority and leadership. At the same time, the sensationalism surrounding figures like Crowley reveals how ceremonial magic was also a form of cultural rebellion—challenging religion, morality, and the limits of social propriety.
Not all occult practices were secretive or elite. Many Victorians engaged with divination in everyday ways. Dream dictionaries promised to decode nightly visions, palmistry charts mapped personality and fate onto the hand, and astrology columns appeared in cheap print. One of the most popular forms was tasseography, or tea-leaf reading. A cup of tea could reveal images and signs that, with a little interpretation, told stories of love, travel, or misfortune.
These practices were often dismissed as mere parlour games, yet their popularity reveals how deeply they resonated. For women in particular, divination provided a space for play, imagination, and subtle subversion of social norms. In a society bound by rigid etiquette, reading leaves or palms allowed moments of agency, creativity, and intimacy. The popularity of fortune-telling ephemera—tea cups printed with symbols, fortune cards tucked into cigarette packets, mechanical fortune-teller machines in arcades—shows how the Victorians commodified even their curiosity about fate.
Victorian obsession with death gave the occult a special urgency. High mortality rates meant that loss was a common experience, and elaborate rituals of mourning shaped both public and private life.
Queen Victoria’s decision to remain in mourning black after Prince Albert’s death in 1861 lent legitimacy to practices that blurred the line between grief and spirituality. If the Queen herself could model lifelong devotion through mourning, the idea of ongoing connection with the dead found fertile ground.
This culture of mourning overlapped with the occult imagination. Memento mori jewelry, made from jet or woven from human hair, allowed loved ones to remain physically present. Death portraits and post-mortem photography preserved the image of the deceased as if still alive. Spiritualist practices offered not only the promise of reunion but also a way of making death a visible, collective ritual. In this sense, the occult was not an escape from reality but an extension of how Victorians understood family, fidelity, and the endurance of love.
Occult practices in the Victorian period reveal a society deeply invested in both science and mystery.
The telegraph and the séance both promised unseen communication; steam engines and magical grimoires alike evoked invisible forces shaping human life. Rather than seeing these pursuits as contradictory, the Victorians wove them into a single cultural tapestry.
The legacy of this fascination endures. Today, Victoriana collectors prize fortune-telling cups, séance ephemera, and Golden Dawn manuscripts as windows into an age when the occult was not marginal but mainstream. These objects remind us that progress and enchantment often walked hand in hand. For the Victorians, the occult was a way of negotiating uncertainty, asserting agency, and exploring the limits of belief in a rapidly changing world.
