Devil worship brought the chaos and upheaval that characterized European society in the Middle Ages and served as a breeding ground for many peculiar ideas and events. One of the most interesting is undoubtedly the explosion of witch-hunts and related activity. This “witch mania” eventually spread throughout most of the continent leaving behind it a trail of death and distorted ideas that made an impression upon the popular opinion which is still felt in the twentieth-century.

In 1671, Janet McMuldroch and Elspeth Thomson were both arrested and tried for the serious crime of witchcraft in Dumfries, Scotland. As with many other alleged witches, testimony against these women focused on their quarrelsome nature and their tendency to scold or curse those who entered into disagreements with them. Elspeth Thomson, for example, was reported to have quarrelled with Regina McGee and her husband after she was not invited to the birth and baptism of their child; in retaliation she promised “to doe them ane ill turne and to cause them to rue it,” words that supposedly caused Regina McGee to immediately fall ill. In the nearby parish of Girthon, several witnesses testified to experiencing similar negative consequences following the curses and ill wishes of Janet McMuldroch. In one case, Janet McMuldroch “went away cursing” after being kicked by an “accidental tuitch” of John Murray’s foot; she was subsequently held accountable when John Murray lost two calves and a horse several weeks later.

There are several scholarly conceptualizations of esotericism, the most significant being Antoine Faivre’s definition of it as “a form of thought” (Faivre 1994:10–15) expressed in a number of diverse currents in Western religious and cultural history, Kocku von Stuckrad’s discursive approach focusing on claims to higher or absolute knowledge and specific means of attaining this knowledge (von Stuckrad 2005a, 2005b:6–11), and Wouter Jacobus Hanegraaff’s focus on aspects of Western culture that have at one time or another been relegated to the realm of pseudo-knowledge and consequently rejected (Hanegraaff 2005, 2007).

It is well known that the heroes of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution were themselves by no means free of the occultist modes of thought from which they were supposed to be rescuing the human mind. Far less attention has been paid to occult tendencies in the philosophy of the time. Since there was no sharp distinction between philosopher and scientist in the seventeenth-century, it would be most surprising if the savant wearing his philosophical thinking-cap were somehow immune from occult influences to which he was prone as a scientist. The main purpose of this article will be to suggest a few such influences. A secondary purpose will be to draw some more general conclusions about the definability of occultism, and its demarcation from philosophy and science.

In ‘A Confession of Unfaith,’ Howard Phillips Lovecraft remarked that he was a “genuine pagan” in his youth, having acquired from his “intoxication with the beauty of Greece” a “half-sincere belief in the old gods and Nature-spirits.” His discovery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic tales darkened the mythological faith of his childhood with “the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!”¹ He elsewFhere declared his uncompromising aesthetic distaste for the “humanocentric pose,” or the “primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.”² This “primitive myopia” for him was valueless in the cosmic scheme of things, referring to the irrational superstitious tendency of all religions and mythologies to project human finitude and egotism onto the universe, animating it with a moral realm of supernatural agencies as protection from a meaningless existence. While religion was often Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s whipping boy, what he called his “artificial pantheon and myth-background” of alien gods and the secret cults formed around their worship, which became conventionally known as the “Cthulhu Mythos,” also uses imagery adapted from a Gothic iconography of surviving pagan religions emerging out of the nineteenth-century. Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s work will be placed in relation to the decadent horror fiction of Arthur Machen who shared Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s ambivalence towards paganism. Central to my argument is that this Gothic image of paganism as something irrational, primitive, and atavistic is linked to fears regarding an evolving modern world of terrifying, existential realities.

Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger begin their analysis of witchcraft by observing that for witchcraft to have any effect, three things must concur: the devil, the witch, and the permission of God. For them, as for us, the devil provides a convenient starting point, because the witchcraft of the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ depends upon an unusual conception of what the infernal side of the Christian pantheon is all about.

Make it work for you rather than against you. Perhaps this is where the image of Satanic inversion holds true. An accomplished Satanist takes what is considered “evil” by mainstream Judeo-Christian society, turns it upside down in unexpected ways and gives it back in spades.