Popular Occulture in Britain, 1875-1947

神秘学通常与只向精心挑选的初学者揭示的秘密形式的知识有关，它似乎从根本上反对流行文化的开放性。尽管如此，在19世纪末和20世纪初的大规模“神秘主义复兴”中，古老的神秘信仰和实践形式--占卜、炼金术、星际旅行和仪式魔法--得到了复兴或重新发明，神秘主义的思想和人物成为大众文化的素材，经常出现在流行小说、电影和戏剧中，并渗透到社会运动和政治辩论中。我们的项目旨在解释神秘学如何以及为什么成为这一时期大众想象的中心。通过关注这一时期神秘学的吸引力和影响力，我们的网络旨在更广泛地了解流行文化、宗教异端和公共领域之间的关系。神秘学复兴的流行表达可以告诉我们很多关于宗教信仰、文学品味、大众娱乐和公共辩论在我们研究期间的变化。然而，尽管它作为一个指标，不断变化的宗教，审美，社会态度的关键作用，英国流行的occulture仍然是至关重要的研究不足，往往在人文研究中靠边站，以帐户的接收神秘主义的前卫文化的现代主义。我们的网络旨在通过以下问题来纠正这种严重的忽视：1）在我们的研究期间，神秘主义思想是如何以及为什么突然进入流行文化主流的？2)1875-1947年间，英国流行文化在塑造关于社会变革、创造力、世俗化和公共领域的观念方面发挥了什么作用？3)通过将来自不同学科（历史、文学、文化和期刊研究、戏剧研究、宗教研究）的学者与图书馆员、策展人、数字人文主义者和非学术档案持有者聚集在一起，可以形成什么样的新观点？在提出这些问题时，我们试图打破神秘主义和开放主义之间的界限，精英和大众文化形式之间的界限，这些界限以前限制了对神秘主义复兴的研究。要理解像流行文化这样兼收并蓄的学科，就必须采取跨学科的方法。该项目汇集了一系列学者，策展人，图书馆员和档案的非学术持有人在三个研讨会，每一个侧重于神秘主义和英国流行文化之间的一个独特的互动在1875年至1947年。第一个将考虑神秘和流行小说和娱乐之间的相遇;第二，通过专业期刊和主流媒体对神秘主义的接受，神秘的公共领域的发展;第三，神秘思想和支持者对流行的社会运动，如女权主义，社会主义，优生学和反帝国主义的贡献。学术参与者将受益于获得新的学科和方法论观点以及非学术专家和利益相关者的专业知识;策展人，图书馆员和档案持有人将获得新的角度，以及为公众提供背景的方式，神秘主义复兴的丰富流行遗产。所有参与者都将受益于该网络对国际合作的促进和便利。该项目将维持一个网站和博客，使讲习班之间的对话能够继续进行，并将网络扩展到直接参与者之外;它将接待对格拉斯哥、都柏林和伦敦的主要神秘学档案和遗址的访问，从而鼓励学者、馆长、图书管理员、档案持有人和数字人文主义者之间的知识交流;它将对神秘学档案和艺术展览产生影响;它将产生一个精选的研讨会谈话编辑散文集，构成了第一个学术书籍，只集中在英国神秘复兴的流行层面。

Often associated with secret forms of knowledge revealed only to carefully selected initiates, occultism might seem fundamentally opposed to the openness of popular culture. Nonetheless, during the massive "occult revival" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which older forms of esoteric belief and practice-scrying, alchemy, astral travel, and ritual magic- were rehabilitated or invented anew, occult ideas and figures became the stuff of mass culture, featuring regularly in popular fiction, film, and theatre and permeating social movements and political debates. Our project seeks to explain how and why the occult became so central to the period's popular imagination. By focusing on the allure and reach of the occult in this period, our network aims to understand the relationship between popular culture, religious heterodoxy, and the public sphere more broadly.The popular expressions of the occult revival can tell us much about the changing face of religious belief, literary taste, mass entertainment and public debate in the period of our study. Yet despite its crucial role as an index to changing religious, aesthetic, social attitudes, British popular occulture remains crucially understudied, often sidelined within humanities research to accounts of the reception of occultism within the avant garde cultures of modernism. Our network aims to redress this critical neglect by asking: 1) How and why did the occult ideas burst into the popular cultural mainstream during the period of our study? 2) What role did British popular occulture play in shaping ideas about social change, creativity, secularization, and the public sphere between 1875-1947?3) What new perspectives on the stakes of popular occulture can be forged by bringing together scholars from across disciplines (history, literary, cultural, and periodical studies, theatre studies, religious studies) with librarians, curators, digital humanists, and non-academic holders of archives?In asking these questions, we seek to break down the boundaries between esotericism and exotericism, between elite and the mass cultural forms, that have previously constrained studies of the occult revival. To understand a subject as eclectic as popular occulture, it is necessary to take an interdisciplinary approach. The project brings together a range of scholars, curators, librarians, and non-academic holders of archives at three workshops, each focusing on a distinct interaction between occultism and British popular culture in the years between 1875-1947. The first will consider the encounter between the occult and popular fiction and entertainment; the second, the development of the occult public sphere through specialist periodicals and the reception of occultism in the mainstream press; the third, the contribution of occult ideas and proponents to popular social movements such as feminism, socialism, eugenics, and anti-imperialism. Academic participants will benefit from access to new disciplinary and methodological perspectives and the expertise of non-academic experts and stakeholders; curators, librarians, and archive holders will gain new angles on, and ways of contextualizing for the public, the rich popular legacy of the occult revival. All participants will benefit from the network's promotion and facilitation of international collaboration. The project will maintain a website and blog, enabling conversation to continue between workshops and extending the network beyond immediate participants; it will host visits to key occult archives and sites in Glasgow, Dublin, and London, thus encouraging knowledge exchange between scholars, curators, librarians, archive holders, and digital humanists; it will impact on exhibitions of occult archives and art; and it will produce an edited essay collection of selected workshop talks, constituting the first scholarly book to focus solely on the popular dimensions of the British occult revival.