Between Spirits and Subtle Forces: The Shifting Models of Western Occultism
“In the history of Western magic, the same hand that traced a circle to call a spirit might also speak of currents, fluids, or light — the language shifting, but the aim unchanged.”
Abstract
This essay examines the historical shift in Western esotericism from a spirit model of magical causation—rooted in the independent agency of angels, demons, and other intelligences—to an energy model that explained occult phenomena in terms of subtle forces, fluids, and vibrations. From Renaissance concepts of celestial rays and occult virtues, through the scientific-spiritual synthesis of Mesmerism, to the 19th-century occultism of Éliphas Lévi, we find that the language and metaphors of magic repeatedly adapted to the dominant intellectual paradigms of the day. This was not simply a matter of borrowing vocabulary; it was a reorientation of practice and worldview. The adoption of an energy model allowed occultists to reframe traditional spirit work in quasi-naturalistic terms, and to integrate emerging ideas from physics, medicine, and psychology into their magical theory. Yet, as this study will show, spirit and energy models often coexisted, their boundaries shifting with audience, purpose, and cultural fashion.
Introduction
The history of Western occultism reveals a recurring pattern: practitioners have often framed their arts in the language of the prevailing intellectual climate. In the Renaissance, magicians drew on Neoplatonic and Aristotelian concepts of celestial rays and occult virtues, integrating them into Christian theological frameworks while claiming their arts were part of the natural philosophy of their day. By the late 18th century, the emerging science of “animal magnetism” offered a new model—one that spoke of invisible fluids and vital forces rather than planetary intelligences and daemonic intermediaries. In the 19th century, Éliphas Lévi’s astral light would provide yet another synthesis, blending Mesmeric currents with Kabbalistic mysticism into a unified magical medium.
This essay follows that transition in detail, showing how the move from a spirit-centered cosmology to an energy-centered one reshaped magical theory and practice. It also examines the complex reality that these models rarely replaced one another cleanly. The result was a complex overlap: many practitioners wove the two perspectives together, treating invisible forces as the medium through which spirits acted, and spirits as the intelligences guiding those forces. In this way, occultism remained both adaptive and conservative, able to absorb contemporary scientific concepts while preserving older ritual forms and spiritual ontologies.
In tracing this evolution, we will move chronologically: first exploring Renaissance and early modern concepts of celestial influence; then the rise of Mesmerism and its reinterpretations; then the integration of Mesmeric thought into the French occult revival, especially in Lévi’s work; and finally, the later 19th and early 20th centuries, when the energy model dominated Western magical theory even as spirit work persisted in parallel traditions.
From Celestial Rays to Occult Virtues
Long before the vocabulary of subtle currents and magnetic fluids entered Western esoteric discourse, the dominant explanatory model was grounded in a synthesis of Aristotelian physics, Neoplatonic cosmology, and medieval Christian theology. Central to this worldview was the idea that the heavens exerted influence on the earthly realm through radii—celestial rays—which transmitted the virtues, or inherent powers, of the stars and planets into the sublunary world. This concept drew heavily on Ptolemaic astronomy and the Aristotelian notion of a finite, geocentric cosmos, where the heavenly spheres were composed of a fifth element, the aether, and moved by intelligences or angels assigned to each orb.1
The Neoplatonists elaborated this into a full metaphysics of emanation: all things flowed from the One through successive levels of being, and the stars, as divine intelligences or their vehicles, radiated spiritual as well as physical influence. Marsilio Ficino, the great Florentine Platonist, described planetary rays as carriers of both material and spiritual qualities, able to affect the human body and soul when properly harnessed.2 Ficino’s astrological talismans, herbal correspondences, and hymns to planetary gods were all premised on the belief that these celestial influences could be drawn down and concentrated through sympathetic means.
In the magical theory of the Renaissance, these “virtues” were not moral qualities but latent powers infused into things by their celestial causes. Agrippa of Nettesheim, in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), catalogued an entire cosmos of correspondences linking stones, plants, animals, metals, colors, sounds, and gestures to the planetary spheres.3 To work magic was to arrange these correspondences so as to receive, transmit, or intensify the desired celestial influence. Spirits were certainly part of this picture—each planet had its intelligences and daemons—but the causal chain was anchored in the physics and metaphysics of rays and virtues.
This framework allowed magicians to present their art as a branch of natural philosophy rather than illicit sorcery. When questioned by ecclesiastical authorities, they could argue that they were merely using the hidden properties God had placed in nature, activated through lawful knowledge of celestial harmonies.4 Thus, the “spirit model” in this period was often intertwined with what we might now call an “energy model”—though here the “energy” was conceived as a divine efflux carried by light, motion, and sympathy rather than as a mechanical or electrical force.
From Enlightenment Natural Philosophy to Mesmer’s Animal Magnetism
By the 17th and early 18th centuries, the old cosmology of celestial spheres and occult virtues was eroding under the impact of the Scientific Revolution. The Copernican heliocentric model, the mechanistic physics of Descartes, and Newton’s universal gravitation replaced the finite, angel-driven cosmos of the Middle Ages with an infinite universe governed by mathematical laws. Yet even as astrology’s intellectual respectability waned, the fascination with invisible forces persisted. Newton himself speculated about a subtle “aether” pervading space, capable of transmitting light, heat, and gravitational influence.5
It was into this milieu that Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) introduced his theory of animal magnetism. Mesmer proposed that all living beings were immersed in a universal fluid analogous to the magnetic or gravitational medium. Illness, he argued, arose from blockages or imbalances in the flow of this fluid through the body; health could be restored by reestablishing its harmonious circulation.6 In this framework, the human nervous system acted like a conductor, and the trained operator could direct the flow of the magnetic fluid into the patient through touch, passes of the hands, or even focused intention.
Mesmer’s claims were couched in the language of Enlightenment natural philosophy—speaking of “fluids,” “polarities,” and “currents”—but they resonated with older ideas of the spiritus, the vital pneuma of Galenic medicine, and the “rays” and “virtues” of Renaissance magic. In many ways, animal magnetism was a modern recasting of these earlier concepts, shorn of explicit planetary or angelic intermediaries.7
Public fascination with Mesmer’s methods spread rapidly in France, where fashionable society attended magnetic séances to experience the convulsions, trances, and visions they induced. In 1784, a royal commission including Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier investigated Mesmer’s claims. They concluded that the effects were due not to any physical fluid, but to the imagination and suggestion—yet this did little to diminish popular interest.8
More significant for occult history was the work of Mesmer’s disciple, the Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), who discovered that magnetic treatment could induce a deep, lucid trance he called “magnetic sleep.” In this state, subjects could speak, respond to questions, diagnose illness, and sometimes display clairvoyant perception. Puységur emphasized the gentle, harmonious induction of this state, seeing it as a natural and benevolent process rather than the crisis-inducing convulsions often sought by Mesmer.9
By the early 19th century, animal magnetism had taken on new dimensions: in addition to physical healing, it was linked to mental and spiritual phenomena, clairvoyance, and the possibility of contact with higher intelligences. These reinterpretations opened the door for magnetism to blend with the emerging spiritualist movement and with the occult revival in France, where figures like Éliphas Lévi would inherit its vocabulary and methods.
Romantic–Spiritualist Reinterpretations of Magnetism
In the decades after Puységur’s discoveries, animal magnetism evolved far beyond Mesmer’s original therapeutic claims. The early 19th century in France was a period in which Romanticism, with its emphasis on imagination, intuition, and the spiritual dimensions of nature, reshaped the way magnetism was understood and practiced. Magnetizers and their circles began to interpret the magnetic sleep not simply as a physiological anomaly but as a doorway to altered states of consciousness, psychic perception, and even contact with discarnate intelligences.10
This transformation owed much to the growing influence of Naturphilosophie in Germany and Romantic science in France, both of which resisted a purely mechanistic view of nature. The vitalist undercurrents of these movements dovetailed neatly with the magnetic idea of a universal life force, giving it a philosophical legitimacy that the Enlightenment’s rational empiricism had denied.11
By the 1820s and 1830s, “magnetic” circles proliferated in Paris and other French cities, some formalized as Sociétés de l’Harmonie. These societies brought together practitioners who not only conducted healing treatments but also explored clairvoyance, telepathy, and prophetic utterance under trance. The magnetic séance began to resemble the later spiritualist séance, complete with messages from “higher spirits,” visions of other worlds, and diagnoses attributed to angelic or saintly beings.12
In this period, the boundary between an energy model and a spirit model became especially fluid. Some practitioners held that spirits were merely names given to the impressions and ideas that arose from the subject’s own subconscious mind, shaped by the magnetic fluid’s harmonization. Others insisted that the lucid somnambulist was in genuine rapport with autonomous intelligences—spirits of the dead, angels, or planetary beings. This divergence in interpretation often depended on the philosophical leanings of the magnetizer and the expectations of the audience.13
What emerged was not a replacement of one worldview by another, but a layering: magnetic fluid could be spoken of in quasi-physical terms for one listener, and in explicitly spiritual terms for another. Many found a synthesis—spirits were intelligences that acted through the medium of the universal fluid, much as in Renaissance thought angels acted through the medium of celestial rays. This conceptual flexibility made magnetism an ideal bridge between the declining natural-philosophical cosmos and the rising occult revival of the mid-19th century.
Éliphas Lévi and the Astral Light
When Alphonse-Louis Constant—better known under his pen name Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875)—entered the Parisian occult scene in the mid-19th century, mesmerism had already absorbed decades of Romantic reinterpretation. Puységur’s magnetic sleep and the magnetic societies’ experiments with clairvoyance, prophecy, and spiritual communication had left a deep cultural imprint. Lévi’s writings reflect this inheritance, but reframed it within a Kabbalistic and Christian Hermetic cosmology.
For Lévi, the universal fluid of the magnetizers became the lumière astrale, or astral light—a subtle, luminous medium pervading the cosmos. He described it as “the common receptacle of vibrations, images, and reflections” and “the universal agent of magic.”14 Like Mesmer’s fluid, it was a natural force, capable of being directed by the will; yet like the Renaissance concept of celestial rays, it was also the medium through which spiritual beings—angels, demons, and human souls—acted upon the material world.15
Lévi explicitly connected the astral light to the vital force traditions of antiquity and to contemporary scientific speculation. He compared it to electricity and magnetism, noting its polarity and fluidic properties, but also to the anima mundi of Neoplatonism and the ruach of Hebrew scripture.16 In doing so, he created a bridge between the quasi-physical language of 19th-century science and the symbolic, theological language of the Western esoteric tradition.
Importantly, Lévi did not discard the spirit model. He acknowledged the reality of spiritual intelligences, but argued that their manifestation in the physical world was mediated through the astral light. In this way, he synthesized the magnetic and spiritualist legacies: the magician worked upon the astral light as an energy, but also addressed and commanded spirits as independent agents. This conceptual blending made Lévi’s work enormously influential for later occult orders, particularly the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which adopted the astral light as a foundational concept while systematizing elaborate angelic and elemental hierarchies.17
Lévi’s cosmology thus represents a key transitional moment: an “energy model” that never abandoned the “spirit model,” but subsumed it. By framing the universal agent as both a natural force and a spiritual medium, Lévi ensured that his synthesis could speak the language of both science and tradition—appealing to an age fascinated by magnetism, electricity, and unseen currents, while retaining the ritual forms and theological depth of ceremonial magic.
Late 19th–Early 20th Century: The Energy Model Ascendant
By the late 19th century, the “energy model” of occult theory had largely eclipsed the older rays-and-virtues cosmology in most Western esoteric circles—though the spirit model persisted alongside it. Lévi’s astral light proved to be a flexible concept, readily blended with other global and scientific notions of subtle forces. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, drew on Hindu and Buddhist sources to speak of prana (life-breath), kundalini (coiled energy), and the etheric double as components of human vitality and consciousness.18
In parallel, Western esotericists incorporated concepts like the odic force (Karl von Reichenbach’s hypothetical life-energy), the vril (a fictional yet influential “all-powerful fluid” from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race), and the Chinese chi or qi into their frameworks.19 These were treated not as foreign ideas to be kept separate, but as confirming testimonies from different cultures to the same universal truth: that an invisible, manipulable energy underlay both magical and spiritual phenomena.
The language of physics—“vibrations,” “currents,” “frequencies”—was increasingly used to describe magical operations. Spiritualist mediums might speak of “spirit energy” or “psychic force” in terms that blurred the line between electromagnetic analogy and spiritual agency. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn integrated the astral light into its initiation rituals and magical training, teaching that it was the substance of the “astral plane” and the medium for all magical action.20 Spirits in this framework were still invoked and commanded, but their manifestation was said to occur through the shaping of astral substance by the magician’s will.
The result was a conceptual architecture in which the energy model served as the primary explanatory framework, while the spirit model was reinterpreted in energetic terms. An angel could be described as a condensation of astral light at a high vibratory rate; a demon as a disharmonic or chaotic pattern within the same medium. This reframing allowed occultists to speak in ways that resonated with both the mystical aspirations of tradition and the scientific curiosity of modernity.
By the early 20th century, this approach would extend into psychological interpretations. Figures like Aleister Crowley treated the astral plane as both a subtle energetic reality and a symbolic, subjective space accessible through trained imagination. The Golden Dawn’s magical currents could be recast in Jungian terms as archetypes interacting with psychic energy, while still preserving the ceremonial forms designed to address independent spiritual beings. In this way, the energy model proved remarkably adaptable, capable of surviving even the psychologizing tendencies of the 20th century by recasting itself as the bridge between mind, spirit, and matter.
Conclusion: Oscillating Between Spirits and Forces
From the Renaissance theory of celestial rays and virtues, through Mesmer’s magnetic fluid, Lévi’s astral light, and the Golden Dawn’s astral-plane techniques, Western occultism has repeatedly reinterpreted its models of magical causation to align with the prevailing intellectual climate. In each period, the dominant language of explanation—whether rooted in natural philosophy, Romantic vitalism, or modern scientific metaphor—has been woven into the fabric of occult theory and practice.
Yet this adaptation was never a simple replacement. The spirit model, with its emphasis on autonomous intelligences—angels, demons, ancestors, and nature spirits—has persisted alongside the energy model. What changed was the framing: spirits were increasingly described as acting through an intermediary medium, whether that medium was imagined as rays, fluid, light, ether, or astral substance. Conversely, practitioners who emphasized the energy model often retained the ritual and symbolic forms designed for direct spirit interaction, finding no contradiction in invoking both.
The resulting worldview was neither wholly mechanistic nor purely spiritualist, but a hybrid cosmology capable of shifting emphasis according to audience, purpose, and context. A magician might describe their work as the manipulation of subtle currents in one setting, and as the command of angelic intelligences in another—not as a matter of deception, but as an expression of the same metaphysical reality through different conceptual lenses.21
This pattern suggests that occultism, far from being a static survival of premodern superstition, is a dynamic and adaptive system. It continually reinterprets its cosmology in the light of contemporary knowledge, appropriating the language of science, philosophy, and global spiritual traditions to articulate its aims. In this way, the Western esoteric tradition has sustained its relevance: by framing the mysteries of spirit in terms intelligible to the age, while preserving the initiatory and ritual forms that carry its deeper symbolic power.
Footnotes
Isaac Newton, Opticks (London, 1704; repr., New York: Dover, 1979), Query 21, 370–372.
Franz Anton Mesmer, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal (Geneva, 1779), 5–10.
Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5–12.
Commission Royale, Rapport des Commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal (Paris, 1784), 6–9.
Marquis de Puységur, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal (Paris, 1784), 15–20.
Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 186–190.
Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 75–77.
Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 84–87.
Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, 41–45.
Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1856), 1:145.
Ibid., 1:149–152.
Ibid., 1:160–165.
R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1983), 42–46.
Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (London: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888), 1:259–263.
Karl von Reichenbach, Physico-Physiological Researches on the Dynamics of Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallization, and Chemism in Their Relations to Vital Force (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1851), 19–24; Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (London: Blackwood, 1871).
Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1989), 1:54–58.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 295–299.
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