The term occult derives from the Latin verb occulere, meaning to hide, or conceal. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that although French, Germans and British were cer­tainly fascinated by forces concealed from human sight or reason, in spite of its many quasi-secret ‘Orders’, there was nothing particularly hidden about the occult movement itself. Occultists, even those who practiced a most esoteric form of occultism, lived in a modern society whose well-developed public realm left its mark on their endeavors. Participants traveled by train to their occult congresses, com­municated by phone about their clairvoyant experiences, and sold horoscopes on busy city streets. Just like today many went to specialized bookstores to buy texts that could teach them about modern occultism; others borrowed such material from public libraries set up by occult circles. Occultists mounted public exhibitions, established specialized journals available to anyone who could pay, and printed inexpensive editions of occult texts. German occultism, in short, was very much a public enterprise.

The kind of occultism that was taught and practiced at the fin de siecle laid great stress on an esoteric understanding of "the constitution of man," which emphasized interiority and was underwritten by a highly structured account of human consciousness. This occult account operated in dialogue with a concurrent innovative theorizing of the mind, but at the same time it refused a purely secularized formulation of human consciousness and sought to advance both the concept and experience of self as inherently spiritual and potentially divine.

An early German spiritualist of note was Georg von Langsdorff, who first felt the attraction of spiritualism in the 1850s in the United States, where he had settled into a dental practice following his participation in the unsuccess­ful Badenese revolution of 1848. A man of science as well as an avowed atheist and materialist, he had always scoffed at the idea of life after death. But one day he had found his irreligion called into question. While idly reflecting that atheists like himself had no compelling reason to refrain from committing murder for personal gain, he had heard a mysterious voice. "Where does that leave morality?" it had asked. Unable to find the source of the voice, and disturbed by the question, Langsdorff had returned home to his wife, who showed him a newspaper article reporting the recent discovery of the spirit world. Soon thereafter, in 1859, he began to attend seances and to experiment with somnambulists, magnetists, and mediums, convinced now of the reality of the afterlife. Reflecting on this stage of political exile and spiritual awakening in later years, Langsdorff saw 1848 as a pivotal year, politically because in 1848 Germans had risen for he first time to erect a true republic, and morally because 1848 was the year in which modern spiritualism had first appeared in the United States.

While Langsdorfflabored to marry spiritualism to progressive social change in Freiburg from the 1860s onward, another group dedicated to making spiri­tualism relevant to German culture began to flourish on the eastern edge of German-speaking Europe, in Breslau and Leipzig. This branch of the early German spiritualist movement had its roots in the late 1850s, when the professor Christian Gottfried Nees von Esenbeck, of Breslau, discovered the writ­ings of the American spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis. A radical democrat and social reformer, Nees von Esenbeck had studied with Goethe and then gone on to become a prominent botanist in Schelling's romantic mode.

As spiritualism spread across Leipzig, two factions with two different inter­pretations of the phenomena under investigation emerged. Enthusiasts of Davis in the 1860s and 1870s, Wittig and his circle began to embrace a novel interpretation of the phenomena in the early 1880s. Whereas Davis adhered to the so-called spiritualist interpretation, which held that spirits caused occult phenomena, Wittig and his circle now began to investigate what they called the "animist" view, which postulated an as yet undetected psychological force as the causal agent. This interpretive difference became the basis of an ideo­logical and institutional rift by the mid-1880s. Wittig and his colleagues at Psychische Studien became the proponents of what now became known as "psychical research," which sought a psychological explanation for seance phe­nomena. Their opponents, led by the publisher Wilhelm Besser and an apothe­cary's assistant, "Dr." Bernhard Cyriax, continued to advocate the spiritualist interpretation and founded two journals, Sprechsaal and (Neue) Spiritualist­ische Blatter, along with a variety of clubs to spread their views.

The rift in Leipzig was symptomatic of developments across Germany. In 1884, the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann published his pamphlet Der Spiritismus (Spiritualism), in which he threw his prestige behind Wittig and psychical research. That same year, the first major Theosophical group in Germany, the Theosophische Societat Germania (Theosophical society Ger­mania), came into existence with the express goal of mediating between the claims of the spiritualists and psychical researchers.

Nothing signaled this turn'toward the scientific study of the "night-life of the soul" more clearly than the founding of the Psychologische Gesellschaft (Psychological society) of Munich in 1886. A major venue for German psy­chical research over the next three decades, the Psychologische Gesellschaft attracted men from all sectors of the Bildungsburgertum. Early members in­cluded the philosopher Carl du Prel, the psychiatrist Albert von Schrenck­Notzing, the lawyer Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden, the engineer Ludwig Deinhard, the curator of Munich's Alte Pinakothek, Adolf Bayersdorfer, and the painters Wilhelm Triibner, Gabriel von Max, and Albert von Keller.

What attracted these men to mediums in particular? The group's manifesto, published in 1887 in the occult journal Sphinx, offered a multitude of answers. Philosophers, the manifesto declared, need no longer struggle to hold their own against the encroaching doctrine of scientific materialism since mediums would give them empirical evidence for the independence of the human soul from the human organism. Historians of human civilization (Kulturhistoriker), previously forced to dismiss numerous accounts of events either as incompre­hensible or unreliable, would finally be able to resolve long-standing riddles in their field. Artists dissatisfied with traditional models who assumed their poses in a waking state would discover the high expressive content of gestures and facial expressions produced by mediums in hypnotic or somnambular states. The Psychologische Gesellschaft, its members believed, would help establish once and for all basic truths about the human psyche, truths that would revolutionize philosophy, history, art, and culture at large. And they would do so in a wholly modern way-that is, through rigorous application of the scien­tific method.

Soon however there was a break-off Gesellschaft fur Experimentalpsychologie (Society for experimental psychology), led by du Prel, who pursued the vision of "transcendent psychology," while the rump Psychologische Gesellschaft fol­lowed Schrenck-Notzing in turning its attention to the elaboration of what became the new science of parapsychology.

As even a cursory examination of the thoughts and activities of these two men in the 1880s and 1890s reveals, the overlap and dissonance between these two visions was immensely significant, both for the subsequent history of the German occult movement and for the emergence of "new" psychology at century's end.

In 1874 du Prel burnished his scientific credentials with Der Kampf ums Dasein am Himmel (The struggle for existence in the heavens), where du Prel's enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Darwin merged with his dismay over the rampant materialism that had set in following German unification (1866-71). He believed in Germany's spiritual devolution and could be attributed to the cultural mal­aise whose seeds the scientific materialists had helped plant at midcentury.

"Transcendent psychology" soon became the cornerstone of du Prel's pro­gram for German spiritual renewal. This new worldview, centered around transcendent psychology and its interpretation of occult phenomena, would not promote dogma and blind faith, as religion did, nor exert a chilling cultural influence, as academic science did; “rather, by combining the best elements of both, it would provide just what late-nineteenth-century moder­nity required: scientific grounding coupled with spiritual uplift. For du Prel, this was no dead promise but a living fact, and for proof he pointed to the numerous letters he received from people testifying to the comfort and inspira­tion they derived from his scientific vision of the transcendent."

But grand philosophical issues and cultural activism were of little interest to Schrenck-Notzing, who was two decades younger than du Prel and coming of age in an entirely different cultural context. As an aspiring philosopher in the 1860s, du Prel had embraced Schopenhauer and the antimaterialist cause, then came to the Psychologische Gesellschaft in 1886 as an established public intel­lectual. In contrast, when Schrenck-Notzing joined the group in 1886, he was a young doctor who still had his reputation to make. And make it he did, by introducing to Germany recent French work on the therapeutic uses of hyp­nosis associated with the doctors J. M. Charcot, at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, and Hippolyte Bernheim, in Nancy. Charcot had begun to use hypnosis on hysterical patients in 1878; a few years later, in 1882, the French Academy of Sciences accepted Charcot's paper linking hypnosis to hysteria, thereby giving hypnosis its first official scientific recognition on the Continent. At the same time, another group of French investigators under the direction of Bernheim had begun to experiment with hypnosis for the treatment of various organic diseases.

Despite the differences that eventually pushed them apart, the coming to­gether of du Prel and Schrenck-Notzing under the umbrella of the Psycho­logische Gesellschaft of Munich from 1886 to 1889 was an important chapter in both the history of the mind/brain sciences and the emergence of the modern German occult movement. Indeed, although historians have been strangely reluctant (2004) to examine these two developments together, there is much evidence to suggest that they should have done exactly that as will be seen also in the next part involving England again.

Fechner had originated the psychophysical laws underpinning physiological psychology, it was true, but Fechner himself had never truly been a pure materialist, and his willingness to cautiously endorse Zollner's sittings with Slade reflected this fact. Wundt, to take another prominent example, had procured his influential post at Leipzig in 1875 only with the help of Zollner, whose interest in Wundt and physiologi­cal psychology was inseparable from his growing excitement about spiritualist mediums. Yet another line of support for the view that a complete history of late-nineteenth-century German psychology will need to include an examina­tion of the occult sciences can be found by exploring the many points of contact between du Prel, Schrenck-Notzing, and the gathering international movement to found a "new" psychology that emerged among scientific inves­tigators of the psyche in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century.

When the first International Congress of Physiological Psychology met under the presidency of Charcot in August 1889, for instance, Schrenck­Notzing and his parapsychological interests played a prominent role. A water­shed in the history of experimental psychology, the congress focused on five topics: "Muscular Sense ... Heredity ... Hypnotism ... an international cen­sus of Hallucinations on lines proposed by the English Society for Psychical Research ... [and] Abnormal Association of Sensations [such as] `coloured hearing."' The mysterious psychological phenomena then being investigated in psychical research circles around the globe-including automatic writing, hypnotic suggestion, and the influence of magnets-provoked particularly in­tense interest and debate, and a committee including Schrenck-Notzing and James, the American philosopher who had been conducting experiments with the Boston medium Mrs. Piper since 1886, was formed to begin work on a "statistical study of hallucinations.

The roster of four hundred or so at the congress read as a virtual who's who of the new experimental psychology. In addition to Schrenck-Notzing, Char­cot, and James, the list included the psychiatrists Bernheim and Alfred Binet, the physiologist Charles Richet, and the philosopher Pierre Janet, all from France. Also present were the Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel; the Belgian physician Joseph Delbouef; the eugenicist Francis Galton, the psychical re­searcher Frederic W. H. Myers, the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick and his wife Eleanor Balfour, a mathematician and sister of the prime minister, all from Britain; the American psychologist Hugo yon Munsterberg; the Ger­man philosopher Max Dessoir; and the prominent Italian anthropologist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso. On the final night of the congress, this stellar cast ended up on the viewing platform of the Eiffel Tower, where they cele­brated their many achievements, not least of which was the establishment of a congress to be named the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, which met under that name in 1892's. 

 

For updates click homepage here

April 17, 2004