A Victorian chemist once kept two notebooks on his desk. One recorded atomic weights and reaction temperatures. The other contained astrological charts for timing his experiments. He saw no contradiction. Occultism and science share a troubled history because they were never fully separate disciplines, but rather competing methods of asking the same question: how does the invisible world shape the visible one? For three centuries, alchemists, astronomers, and physicists borrowed each other’s tools before their heirs declared an unbridgeable war.
Occultism and science have a relationship defined by mutual influence, violent rejection, and quiet borrowing. From Isaac Newton’s alchemical manuscripts to the founding of the Royal Society, the boundary between natural philosophy and esoteric practice was porous until the 19th century, when each side began policing the line.
What counts as “occult” and what counts as “science”?
The word “occult” comes from the Latin occultus, meaning hidden or concealed. In Renaissance usage, it described forces that acted at a distance without visible contact: magnetism, sympathy, lunar influence on tides. These were not supernatural. They were simply not yet explained by the mechanical philosophy that would eventually become modern science.
Natural philosophers in the 16th and 17th centuries operated within a framework we would now call magical. The four elements, celestial correspondences, the doctrine of signatures (the idea that a plant’s appearance revealed its medicinal use) were standard assumptions. Paracelsus (1493–1541) treated disease by matching planetary metals to bodily organs. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) cast horoscopes for the Holy Roman Emperor. These men were not fringe figures. They were the leading minds of their age.
What changed was not the discovery that magic was false. What changed was the invention of a method that could declare certain questions off-limits.
The alchemical roots of experimental science
Alchemy is the most direct ancestor of modern chemistry, and its practitioners developed laboratory techniques still in use. Robert Boyle (1627–1691), often called the father of chemistry, wrote extensively on alchemical transmutation. He corresponded with alchemists across Europe and attempted to manufacture the philosopher’s stone. His Sceptical Chymist (1661) attacked Aristotelian elements not by rejecting alchemy but by demanding better experimental evidence for its claims.
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) left behind over a million words on alchemy. His manuscript The Vegetation of Metals (c. 1670) describes a universal spirit that penetrates all matter, a concept he drew directly from alchemical sources. Newton’s alchemy was not a youthful hobby he abandoned. He worked on it for thirty years, and his alchemical experiments informed his theories of gravity and optics. The inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, which describes a force acting across empty space without physical contact, is structurally identical to the occult sympathies that Renaissance magicians described.
The Royal Society, founded in 1660, counted alchemists among its early members. Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), the Society’s first fellow, compiled Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), the first English anthology of alchemical poetry. The boundary between laboratory science and occult investigation was not a wall. It was a membrane.
The Enlightenment divorce: why they split
The separation began in earnest during the 18th century. Two forces drove it.
First, the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650) and Isaac Newton’s later followers insisted that all physical phenomena could be explained by matter in motion. Occult qualities, the hidden sympathies and antipathies of Renaissance magic, became unacceptable explanations. David Hume (1711–1776) argued that miracles were violations of natural law and therefore impossible to verify. The Enlightenment project demanded a universe that ran on predictable, observable rules.
Second, the professionalization of science created institutions that needed boundaries. The Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences in Paris, and later the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded 1831) defined what counted as legitimate inquiry. Mesmerism, animal magnetism, and spiritualism were excluded not because they were proven false but because they could not be replicated under controlled conditions. The boundary work was political as much as intellectual.
The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) delivered the killing blow to alchemy by identifying oxygen and establishing the modern system of chemical nomenclature. His Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (1789) replaced the four elements with a list of 33 known substances. Alchemy did not disappear overnight, but it lost its institutional home. Practitioners retreated to private laboratories and manuscript circulation.
The occult revival strikes back: 19th century countercurrents
The 19th century saw a dramatic reversal. As industrial science advanced, a countermovement emerged that deliberately rejected its assumptions. The occult revival of the 1880s and 1890s was not a survival of medieval magic. It was a modern invention, shaped by the very science it opposed.
The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) and Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), claimed to synthesize science, religion, and occult philosophy. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877) attacked Darwinian evolution and Victorian materialism while borrowing the language of comparative anatomy and geology. She argued that occult “adepts” in Tibet possessed knowledge that Western science had lost. Theosophy was not anti-scientific. It was anti-materialist. It wanted a science that included consciousness, spirit, and hidden forces.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, took a different approach. Its members included the poet W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), the actress Florence Farr (1860–1917), and the occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). The Golden Dawn taught a rigorous system of correspondences: planets, metals, colors, numbers, and Hebrew letters arranged in a unified symbolic structure. This was not irrational mysticism. It was a systematic attempt to map the invisible world with the same precision that chemists mapped the visible one.
Spiritualism, which peaked in the 1850s–1920s, attempted to prove the survival of consciousness after death through controlled experiments. Mediums were tested by scientific committees. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, included the physicist William Barrett (1844–1925) and the philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900). They applied statistical methods to telepathy, clairvoyance, and mediumship. The results were inconclusive, but the method was recognizably scientific.
The 20th century: physics opens the door
Quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s created a crisis in scientific materialism that occultists were quick to exploit. The Copenhagen interpretation, developed by Niels Bohr (1885–1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), suggested that observation affected reality at the quantum level. The observer effect, wave-particle duality, and nonlocality all seemed to echo occult claims about the power of mind over matter.
Carl Jung (1875–1961) and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) collaborated on a theory of synchronicity, which Jung defined as meaningful coincidence without causal connection. Their book The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1952) proposed that acausal connecting principles might underlie both quantum events and psychic phenomena. Pauli, a Nobel laureate, took the collaboration seriously. He corresponded with Jung for over twenty years and attended séances.
The physicist and occultist John William Dunne (1875–1949) published An Experiment with Time (1927), which argued that dreams could perceive future events because time was not linear. His theory of serialism influenced both scientific and occult circles. The book went through multiple editions and was still in print in the 1970s.
Not all scientists rejected the occult outright. The astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996) investigated claims of alien abduction and psychic phenomena with an open but skeptical mind. His book The Demon-Haunted World (1995) argued that science and pseudoscience shared a common ancestor and that the best defense against fraud was scientific literacy, not dogmatic rejection.
Where they stand today
The relationship in the 21st century is one of armed truce. Mainstream science treats occult claims as unfalsifiable or falsified. Homeopathy, astrology, and dowsing have been tested repeatedly and failed to outperform placebo. The scientific consensus is clear: no occult force has ever been demonstrated under controlled conditions.
But the traffic has not been one-way. The placebo effect, which modern medicine struggles to explain, is a direct descendant of the occult concept of imagination and belief affecting physical reality. Acupuncture, dismissed as superstition in the 19th century, has been partially validated by neuroimaging studies. The search for dark matter and dark energy, invisible forces that make up 95% of the universe, echoes the Renaissance search for hidden sympathies.
Practitioners of occult traditions have adapted. Many no longer claim that their practices produce measurable physical effects. Instead, they describe magic as a psychological or symbolic technology that alters consciousness and perception. The chaos magic movement, developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, explicitly borrowed from cybernetics, information theory, and cognitive science. Their model of belief as a tool, not a truth claim, made occult practice compatible with a scientific worldview.
What the conflict reveals
The troubled history of occultism and science is not a story of ignorance versus enlightenment. It is a story of two ways of knowing that share a common origin and have never fully separated. Every time science declares a boundary, someone steps across it. Every time occultism claims a hidden force, someone tries to measure it.
We at Le Grand Grimoire do not pretend the conflict is resolved. We keep both notebooks on our desk. The laboratory and the altar are not the same room, but they are in the same house. The question is not which one is real. The question is what each one can see that the other cannot.
FAQ
Did Isaac Newton really practice alchemy? Yes. Newton wrote over a million words on alchemy and conducted laboratory experiments on transmutation. His alchemical work was not a youthful phase but a lifelong pursuit that informed his theories of gravity and optics.
Is occultism considered pseudoscience? Modern science classifies most occult claims as pseudoscience because they cannot be falsified or replicated under controlled conditions. However, many historical occult practices contributed to the development of legitimate scientific methods.
Can science and occultism coexist? Some practitioners and scientists argue they can, if occult practices are treated as psychological or symbolic technologies rather than claims about physical reality. Chaos magic and Jungian psychology both attempt this synthesis.
Why did alchemy decline? Alchemy declined in the 18th century as chemistry became a professionalized discipline with standardized methods and nomenclature. Antoine Lavoisier’s identification of oxygen and his chemical nomenclature (1789) made alchemical language obsolete in institutional science.
Related guides
For a deeper look at how esoteric traditions have shaped Western thought, explore our guide to occult history. The relationship between alchemy and modern chemistry is examined in detail in our alchemy and science article. For the key figures who bridged both worlds, see our glossary of occult scientists.