Popular Occulture in Britain, 1875-1947

神秘主义往往与只向精心挑选的门徒透露的秘密知识形式联系在一起，似乎从根本上反对流行文化的开放。然而，在19世纪末和20世纪初的大规模“神秘复兴”中，古老的神秘信仰和实践--占卜、炼金术、星际旅行和仪式魔法--被修复或重新发明，神秘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。我们的项目试图解释神秘是如何以及为什么成为那个时期流行想象的中心。通过关注神秘在这一时期的魅力和影响，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。神秘复兴的流行表达可以告诉我们许多关于我们研究期间宗教信仰、文学品味、大众娱乐和公共辩论的变化面貌。然而，尽管作为宗教、审美和社会态度改变的关键指标，英国流行的神秘主义仍然被严重忽视，在人文研究中经常被搁置在对现代主义前卫文化中神秘主义的接受的解释中。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，神秘的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，英国流行神秘文化在塑造关于社会变革、创造力、世俗化和公共领域的思想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)的学者与图书馆管理员、策展人、数字人文主义者和非学术档案持有者聚集在一起，可以形成关于流行神秘文化利害关系的新视角。我们试图打破深奥和开放之间的界限，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复兴的研究。要理解一个像流行文化这样兼收并蓄的主题，就有必要采取跨学科的方法。该项目汇集了一系列学者、馆长、图书馆员和非学术档案持有者，参加了三个研讨会，每个研讨会的重点是1875-1947年间神秘主义和英国流行文化之间的独特互动。第一个主题将考虑神秘与通俗小说和娱乐之间的遭遇；第二个主题是通过专业期刊发展神秘公共领域以及主流媒体对神秘主义的接受；第三个主题是神秘思想和支持者对女权主义、社会主义、优生学和反帝等流行社会运动的贡献。学术参与者将受益于获得新的学科和方法观点以及非学术专家和利益攸关方的专业知识；馆长、图书馆馆长和档案馆馆长将获得新的角度和方法，了解公众对神秘复兴丰富的流行遗产的背景。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得以继续，并将网络扩大到直接参与者之外；它将接待对格拉斯哥、都柏林和伦敦的主要神秘档案和遗址的访问，从而鼓励学者、馆长、图书馆管理员、档案馆馆长和数字人文学家之间的知识交流；它将影响神秘档案和艺术的展览；它将制作一本经过编辑的讲习班演讲文集，构成第一本只关注英国神秘学复兴的流行层面的学术书籍。

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.