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of publicity like astrological almanacs fell out of favour, to be replaced by new ones like newspaper horoscopes. The yearning among practitioners of the occult to achieve respectability would never fully be realized, although it would be given a different twist after the advent of personal computers and the Internet. Today, thanks to the profusion of online sources and the changing relationship of public and private spaces which has created “virtual communities” that only exist through electronic communication, the occult is more widespread than ever, and probably more accepted as a feature of contemporary culture than it has been since the mid-seventeenth century. Whether that means more people believe in it today than did 350 years ago, however, remains dubious. Many are willing to dabble in various aspects of occult thinking without becoming intellectually attached to it as a system of belief.
    Perhaps the single most important point to be derived from this discussion is that the occult was not killed off by science or the Enlightenment. On the contrary, it coexisted with them, borrowed from them and was rarely the object of attacks from scientific or enlightened writers. In turn, this suggests something about what can be called modernity—an ideologically charged concept, to be sure, but one that forces itself into any discussion of change over the past four centuries. Modernity is a prescriptive concept, not a descriptive one: it tells us what we should be, not necessarily what we are, or even what we have been in the past. To be modern has come to mean embracing the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, while casting aside magic and “superstition.” Yet this is not what many people did in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England or Scotland—on the contrary, they were able to retain both points of view, scientific and occult, at least in some measure. In Scotland, to be sure, the Enlightenment did eventually shake off the occult, but that did not happen in England, or in Germany or France, for that matter. The Scottish case was exceptional, and can be ascribed to a century of determined Presbyterian denunciation of anything occult as diabolical.
    Throughout the emerging industrial countries today—China, India, Indonesia, Brazil—can be found occult practices and beliefs that owe their origins to very different traditions from those of western Europe. Modernity—or globalization, if one wishes to use an even more aggressively reductionist term—seems to demand that they disappear so the nation can progress into a prosperous future. In most of western Europe, however, the occult did not vanish. It remained an intellectual force of some importance until the early eighteenth century, and has since then experienced periodic revivals. It particularly appealed to those in the middling ranks of society, who have often been the engines of social and economic change. It did not retard or undermine intellectual development, and may have enhanced it, through liberating the imagination. While its survival is not assured, the occult cannot be interpreted as a sign of tragic backwardness. Of course, that should not be taken as an argument to put our trust in it, because it has always suffered from deep weaknesses as an explanatory system, as well as from an inability to sustain critical inquiry. On the other hand, we should be encouraged to lay to rest a conception of the occult as the eternal bogeyman of modernity, bent on the undoing of reason and progress. That bogeyman never really existed, except in the overheated imaginations of those who feared him. As with other devils in history, when we look beyond what frightens us, we may recognize a diminished evil. We may even notice a trace of the gleaming features of a former angel of light.

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

    1. Archives
    Great Britain
    British Library (B.L.), London.
    Additional Mss. 5767–93: D.A. Freher papers.
    Additional Ms. 15,911: letters to