Occultist

Occultism

Another feature of occultists is that—unlike earlier esotericists—they often openly distanced themselves from Christianity, in some cases (like that of Aleister Crowley) even adopting explicitly anti-Christian stances. This reflected how pervasive the influence of secularisation had been on all areas of European society. In rejecting Christianity, these occultists sometimes turned to pre-Christian belief systems and embraced forms of Modern Paganism, while others drew on Asian religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. In various cases, certain occultists did both. Another characteristic of these occultists was their emphasis on "the spiritual realization of the individual", an idea that would strongly influence the twentieth-century New Age and the Human Potential Movement. This spiritual realization was encouraged both through traditional Western 'occult sciences' like alchemy and ceremonial magic, but by the start of the twentieth century had also begun to include practices drawn from non-Western contexts, such as yoga.