There is a Romantic religiosity which, while a product of traditional esotericism an post-Enlightenment Evolutionism, remains rooted in a worldview of correspondences. Occultism, on the other hand, as based on a mixture of correspondences and causality, and is therefore doubly secularized.
Literature of the fantastic and the new phenomenon of spiritualism possess a common characteristic: each takes the real world in its most concrete form as its point of departure, and then postulates the existence of another, supernatural world, separated from the first by a more or less impermeable partition. Fantasy literature then plays upon the effect of surprise that is provided by the irruption of the supernatural into daily life, which it describes in a realistic fashion. Spiritualism, both as a belief and practice, follows the inverse procedure, teaching how to pass from this world of the living to the world of the dead, through séances of spirit rappings and the table tippings, the table playing a role analogous to that of the traditional magic circle. It is interesting that occultism in its modern form – that of the nineteenth century – appeared at the same time as fantastic literature and spiritualism.
A profound analysis would have to take into account the relevance of the emergence of occultism not only of new ideas, but of social and political changes as well. Most important is the increasing prestige of modern science and positivist-materialist philosophies which flourished in its wake.
In order to account for the emergence of New Age religion, we need to define with precision the difference between esotericism and occultism, and construe the latter as an etic category in the study of Western religions. Occultism, then, can be defined as a category in the study of religions, which comprises all attempts by esotericists to come to terms with a disenchanted world or, alternatively, by people in general to make sense of esotericism from the perspective of a disenchanted secular world (a world which no longer harbours a dimension of irreducibly mystery based upon an experience of the sacred as present in the daily world). Occultism is the product of a syncretism between magia and science, correspondences and causality.
Reference: W. Hanegraaff (1996), pp. 514-24.
