1 ‘The British Birth of the Occult Revival, 1869-1875’ By Patrick D. Bowen Note: This is an unpublished paper written in 2014 that was apparently lost by the journal to which it was submitted. Although the research for this paper served as the foundation for a section in Chapter 2 of my book A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Vol. 1: White American Muslims before 1975 (Brill, 2015), the present essay contains a few pieces of information not included in the book. Also, this essay contains references to another unpublished essay I wrote (‘Kenneth R.H. MacKenzie’s “Papers on Masonry” and the Spread of Islamic- Identity Organizations in the U.S. and England in the Late Nineteenth Century’), which was supposed to be released in an edited volume that has been put on hold indefinitely. Much of the research for that essay was used in Chapter 4 of A History. Finally, it should be mentioned that I have not edited the present essay since the time I originally submitted it, so it may contain some writing and research flaws. Introduction Just over halfway through his influential study of the development of Western esotericism in the nineteenth century, The Theosophical Enlightenment, Joscelyn Godwin makes an important but often overlooked observation about what he terms the ‘occult revival’ of the nineteenth century: ‘This revival may be dated from the formation of a very small group within the S.R.I.A., 1 identifiable by their use of the swastika—a symbol quite devoid, at the time, of any evil associations.’ 2 Godwin goes on to explain that this group—which consisted of the astrologer Richard Morrison (who went by the name Zadkiel) and two mystically-inclined Masons, Kenneth R.H. Mackenzie and Francis George Irwin—seems to have coalesced between 1869 and 1875, when all three men started putting the left-turning swastika on some of their books and manuscripts. Then, about eighty pages later, Godwin pauses to make a similar but much broader point: ‘There seems to have been a concerted effort in the early 1870s to give out fresh doctrines to a world already familiar with spiritualistic ideas of occult phenomena and the afterlife. The new doctrines would be known collectively as “occultism”,…’ 3 Many of the doctrines to which 1 This was the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia; for more on this group, see below. 2 Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 219. 3 Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 302.