Something I keep coming back to while researching esoteric history: the Victorian occult boom (Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, Spiritualism) wasn't some ancient tradition resurfacing. It was almost entirely a reaction to industrialization.

As factories, telegraphs, and Darwinian science stripped the world of mystery, people didn't become less superstitious — they got MORE hungry for hidden meaning. Séances were standing-room only in the same decade the steam engine went mainstream. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888) recruited scientists and poets alike, because rigid materialism left something unfed.

Same pattern shows up over and over in history: the more a society modernizes and 'disenchants' itself, the harder a countercurrent of magick, ritual, and hidden knowledge pushes back. Feels relevant right now too.

I write about this stuff — forgotten rites, occult orders, folk magick history — over at The Wyrd Archive if that's your kind of rabbit hole. Free to join.