In the early twentieth century, after the rationalising forces of the Enlightenment had supposedly recast spiritual life through reason, curious advertisements began to appear in popular periodicals ranging from Popular Mechanics to Weird Tales, offering arcane occult knowledge sent directly to the reader’s door. Typical of their genre, a 1902 notice in the Chicago Tribune introduced the De Laurence Institute of Hypnotism, which promised to “[unfold] the mysterious law of all personal magnetism, occult force, and influence”, while, elsewhere, the Occult Digest announced the services of the Los Angeles–based Brotherhood of Light, who had on offer “correspondence courses in all branches of occult science” by return of post.¹ Sending away for the secrets of the ages was, it seemed, disarmingly simple, part and parcel of the colossal mail-order industry that had emerged during the Second Industrial Revolution of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The rise of mail-order magic was, in many ways, both an upshot and a parody of modernity. America’s long nineteenth century had already seen its fair share of religious transformation, with movements like Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science, and the Shakers, among others, emerging from the spiritual fervour of the Second Great Awakening, each grappling in their own way with the relationship between the individual and society at large. In 1917, German sociologist Max Weber famously argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’”.² To Weber’s mind, the progress of the modern world had eradicated the need for spiritual practice, with the purposes it had once held now being carried by the cold logics of bureaucracy, science, and instrumental reason. From the vantage point of hindsight, however, Weber’s Entzauberung thesis seems less terminal than he had imagined.

In a time increasingly shaped by Taylorist factories and scientific materialism, Weber ultimately misread modernity, and his account of disenchantment confused modernity’s growing spiritual liberalism with large-scale secularisation. That is, Weber believed that the declining adherence to Christianity (which was unmistakable) signalled that the numinous had faded from modern life (which couldn’t have been further from the truth). Modernity and scientific materialism didn’t really get rid of spiritual practice as much as abstract it from an inherited, communal framework. What modernity had in fact created was a radical redistribution of belief, in which the rationalist currents presumed to have extinguished faith in powers and presences beyond oneself became the very means by which one could learn about these otherworldly forces from the privacy of one’s own home.

The new material conditions of postal exchange — linotype machines, cheap pulp paper, and rapidly improving and expanding delivery networks — made the recondite world of the occult ultra-targeted and at a scale never before seen. The consumer now got to choose if they wanted to practice meditation, astrology, tarot, Mesmerism, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, something even more arcane, or a unique combination of them all. There was no fixed template for how the instruction unfolded, but most would-be adherents began their affiliation by responding to the offer of a free sample lesson or catalogue from a magazine ad. From there, they could subscribe to courses whose scale, duration, and cost varied greatly. To give just a single example, lessons from Psychiana, one of the largest esoteric correspondence schools of the 1930s by subscriber numbers, cost around $1 each (about $20 in today’s currency) and were purchased in groups of ten or twenty lessons, with one lesson posted weekly. For students of Psychiana, as well as those who sent away to the many other smaller providers, completion of these introductory sequences usually then opened onto further tiers of instruction or advanced courses, with payment typically remitted in cash, sometimes in instalments or in arrears.

One of mail-order magic’s early innovators was Sydney Flower, the shadowy Chicago-based publisher behind The Hypnotic Magazine, The Yogi, and New Thought (the latter co-edited with William Walker Atkinson, best known as the presumed author of 1908’s Kybalion), as well as a startling range of orderable courses, through his Psychic Research Company and Magnetic Publishing Company, with titles such as A Course of Instruction in Magnetic Healing in Five Parts and A Course of Instruction in the Development of Power through Clairvoyance.

Flower emerges with almost no trace of a past, but by the time he arrived in Chicago at the turn of the century — where he would collaborate with Herbert Parkyn at the Chicago School of Psychology — America’s so-called second city had become the country’s undisputed hub of metaphysics and personal development, a cosmopolitan crossroads still reverberating with the hum of the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and the awe-inspiring appearances of Eastern gurus and spiritual teachers like Swami Vivekananda. Organised by a Swedenborgian lawyer and Unitarian minister, the Parliament assembled a diverse array of leaders from global religions in a landmark attempt to foster interfaith dialogue and introduce non-Christian traditions to American audiences. Flower quickly recognised that, alongside this lather of spiritual curiosity, Chicago’s industrial infrastructure and well-developed transportation links at the heart of a rapidly expanding country could be exploited for esoteric commerce.

In addition to his courses on voguish practices like hypnotism and clairvoyance, Flower’s 1902 course, The Mail-Order Business, guided aspiring entrepreneurs in generating success similar to his own. Described here to readers and deployed elsewhere with relish in his own business, his favourite marketing strategy was the dark art of multiplying corporate identities, of creating new imprints, supposed “departments”, and fictive company names in order to project an illusion of institutional scale and influence. A reader encountering the New Thought Publishing Company, Research Publishing Company, or the Penny Classics series could easily assume that these were each independent bodies, rather than the handiwork of Flower and a few hardworking secretaries. Later, Flower employed an agent by the name of T. W. Henry, who ran the same operation from London to serve European customers, although it was the American market that was most rapidly expanding. Flower created, in effect, an early form of what we might now refer to as “market segmentation”, allowing him to speak to several distinct audiences while maintaining a single underlying operation from the Masonic Temple in Chicago.

While none of this is, strictly speaking, illegal, Flower’s experiments with the mail-order business crossed into outright deceit in 1904, when the Post Office Department brought a case against him for fraudulent financial solicitation. Through his magazine New Thought, he had been promoting what he called the “Royal Ten”, an investment scheme that promised implausible fifty percent dividends on a ten-dollar investment. When postal inspectors intervened — charging him with using the mails to defraud — Flower had already vanished, resurfacing in the public record only years later when he was arrested on separate charges related to financial advice given on gold prospecting in 1910.³ Ever the indefatigable entrepreneur, Flower launched a magazine called The Yogi while incarcerated and edited eleven issues from his jail cell in Carson City, Nevada.

Mail-order magic was, perhaps inevitably, an industry vulnerable to charlatans, and postal inspectors found themselves repeatedly entangled with peddlers of flimflam and smoke. But it is important to point out that, despite numerous bad actors, many of these occult organisations operated with a certain spiritual earnestness that earned tens of thousands of followers and students. Their prices were typically modest (even within the context of Depression-era economics), their lessons sincere if occasionally uneven, and their promises more aspirational than exploitative. Many of these publishers operated in the same commercial domain that we would today recognise as self-help literature, and some of the most successful correspondence courses, such as Charles Haanel’s Master Key System, first circulated in weekly lessons in 1912, can still be found on the shelves of most mid-sized bookshops. Flower had demonstrated how easily spiritual authority could be amplified through the post, but there were also those occult entrepreneurs who moved in more orderly and austere directions, codifying graded lessons into vast curricula that managed to maintain the spiritual legitimacy that Flower himself had never sustained.

Many of these more ambitious occult correspondence courses drew on the dense symbolic vocabulary of Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, weaving it with the new emerging discipline of psychology in a genuine attempt to democratise personal development through spiritual practice. Rosicrucianism (an esoteric philosophy premised on the notion of a secret network of benevolent healers guiding human affairs) and Theosophy (a syncretic spiritual tradition blending Eastern religious ideas with Western mysticism in an attempt to articulate a universal, perennial wisdom) provided a map to this new breed of spiritual teacher for secret societies that balanced rational self-improvement with richly romantic mythologies. In a country that had been, since the earliest days of the Republic, enamoured of the ideals of bootstrapping individualism, these correspondence courses were enticing models of rational self-development animated by the promise of an esoteric thrill. And by the early 1930s, at a time when economic upheaval had left many Americans searching for stability, the authors and organisers of occult correspondence schools were offering a reassuring path toward inward contentment and outward success beyond the confines of the Christian church.

One of the most well-known mail-order occult societies of the time, and one which is still in existence today, was the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), founded in 1915 by advertising agent Harvey Spencer Lewis. Like Sydney Flower, Lewis initially began publishing mail-order courses on popular late-nineteenth-century practices of hypnotism and mesmerism, in works such as Four Special Lessons in Personal Influence, Hypnotic Suggestion, and Treatment by Suggestion. What happened next became the cornerstone of AMORC’s foundation story. Lewis claimed that during a visit to Toulouse in 1909 he was initiated into an unbroken Rosicrucian lineage and subsequently instructed to take the tradition to America, where it could be publicly revealed to the properly prepared. While many new religious movements that emerged from the Second Great Awakening had viewed American society as corrupt, fallen, or doomed — and summarily responded by retreating or separating — Lewis’ AMORC moved in the other direction, presenting itself as the continuing current of the secret Rosicrucian order of restorative mendicants whose job was to remain part of the world and to support its healthy growth. As its own literature explained, “the Order is primarily a humanitarian movement, making for greater health, happiness, and peace in the earthly lives of all mankind.” Members, it clarified, were “unselfish servants of God to mankind, efficiently educated, trained, and experienced, attuned with the mighty forces of the Cosmic or Divine Mind, and masters of matter, space, and time.”⁴ In spite of his mythologising tendencies and a sometimes grandiose cunning, Lewis promulgated a humanistic mysticism grounded in discipline and ethical responsibility, promising not transcendence beyond the world but mastery and harmony within it.

A 1933 advertisement from the Mystic Brotherhood University — a Tampa-based group that had recently splintered from AMORC — suggested a striking fusion of esoteric allure and practical self-help. Its eighteen-page mailer served as a recruitment tool, firstly, but also as the initial step toward concrete techniques for navigating everyday life. The cover prominently featured the Rose Cross lamen of a famed nineteenth-century British occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, while the text claimed sanction from the “Great White Lodge”, an explicit reference to the Theosophical Society’s hierarchy of ascended masters. “This School of Wisdom”, the booklet claimed, “has been ever Cloistered from the World, because it is submissive alone to the Illuminated Government, but from time to time this group of Sages have revealed to the outer World, a pathway, in order to attract man to the great Truths of their Sanctuary.”⁵ Its lessons often anticipate what would now be described as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) exercises, guiding students to monitor their thoughts, rescript unhelpful patterns, and develop disciplined habits of mindfulness. Long before CBT was codified in the late twentieth century by psychologists such as Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, occult correspondence courses like these were already drawing — sometimes consciously and sometimes intuitively — on much older traditions of Stoic self-regulation found in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and the mental discipline advocated by Epictetus. What the Mystic Brotherhood University ultimately offered were therapeutic tools for cultivating moral resolve at a time when many were searching for both practical guidance and transcendental relief.

Harvey Spencer Lewis had set the model that others would follow, although not all mail-order occult groups claimed, as Lewis had, a direct historical lineage established through initiation (either real or, more often, fancifully imagined). Mediumistic channelling provided the source material for numerous mail-order occult societies, including Maurice Doreal’s Brotherhood of the White Temple. Like Helena Blavatsky before him, Doreal explained that his teachings had been conveyed to him by disincarnate, super-evolved sages (in his case, from Atlantis), who offered a blend of early Gnosticism and Eastern mysticism, all wrapped in the mass culture idiolect of pulp sci-fi. Doreal’s lessons through the post were hugely popular throughout the mid-century, circulating alongside the era’s taste for speculative fiction and “weird tales” of reptilian humanoids, ancient astronauts, and sinister secret orders, which helped establish the rubric for many later conspiracy theories. In this overlap, we can see how the sublime realms of mail-order magic could, for some readers, harden into the kinds of conspiratorial worldviews that circulated through the pulp culture of the day.

The mail-order occult societies that withstood the test of time were those with the most internally consistent cosmologies, and which either sought to reanimate the prevailing esoteric currents of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries or, alternatively, moved in the other direction toward psychology and the philosophy of mind. Paul Foster Case’s Builders of the Adytum attempted to do both. It was in Chicago at the turn of the century, the time and place of so many occult conversions, that Case met Sydney Flower’s collaborator and best-selling occult writer William Walker Atkinson, and shortly thereafter joined the Alpha et Omega lodge, a splinter group of the incense-trailed Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he quickly rose through its degrees. The fact that Case was initiated into an established and deeply influential occult society underscores a broader truth about this milieu: in most other instances, its histories rest less on verifiable lineage than on the fleeting appearance of a half-seen (and presumably fictitious) order that surfaced only long enough to confer legitimacy on the next seeker in line, a fitting reminder of how fragile and fluid spiritual authority could be within the mail-order occult world.

In 1922, Case established the School of Ageless Wisdom in Los Angeles, which later evolved into Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), an organisation that remains active today. In contrast to the theatrical and often exaggerated claims of some of his predecessors, Case’s method was rigour and discipline, with weekly lessons combining theoretical knowledge of the Kabbalah and tarot with practical exercises in meditation and visualisation, contemplative traditions that were still rare outside of the confines of Christian prayer. Ultimately, BOTA wasn’t teaching the tarot as a method of divination but as a path of self-development with a staunch Protestant work ethic. “You will find yourself developing greater ability to concentrate”, he explains in the opening lesson. “Your perceptions will be keener. You will deepen and broaden your comprehension of yourself, and of the meaning of your various experiences.”⁶ A central feature of BOTA’s early teaching was the memorisation of what Case termed “The Pattern on the Trestle Board”, or simply “The Pattern”, ten aphoristic statements on spiritual self-reliance and sacred responsibility that functioned for members as both a moral code and a cognitive scaffold to the ten sephirah on the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life diagram. For BOTA students, there were few grand pronouncements and no conspiratorial tease. What BOTA offered, instead, were philosophically inclined treatments of the ancient mystical tradition of Kabbalah and the more recent but still conceptually ornate practice of tarot, offering influential and authoritative interpretations of both.

One of the defining features of the mail-order occult societies that proliferated in the early twentieth century was their ability to signpost routes through not just economic depression and global war, but through the deeper, subtler affliction of the modern condition itself. In a world increasingly flattened by industrial rationalism and the conveyor belt of routinised labour, mail-order magic offered an undoubtedly seductive counter-current. In his now-classic diagnosis of the malaise of modern American life, The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch argued that “people today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.”⁷ In many ways, mail-order magic anticipated this shift. Esoteric cosmologies and metaphysical systems that had once promised access to occult wisdom were being steadily reframed as tools of Stoic self-regulation, and correspondence courses such as these became one therapeutic tool among many for managing the pressures of modernity at a time when organised mainstream religion was slouching out of view.

What the mail-order mages had ultimately recognised was that the modern man and woman no longer necessarily sought a metaphysics to explain the cosmos and their place within it, but a personal metaphysics that could diagnose themselves through a recognisably American lens of radical subjectivity and self-reliance. What is lost in all this, perhaps, is the seriousness of the quest: the sense that one’s spiritual practice — whether liturgical or magical, devotional or divinatory — isn’t simply a method of self-soothing but a sincere gesture toward a transcendental world that exceeds us. Many of the customers who responded to those magazine ads were in search of genuine transcendence and were offered, instead, a commodified and reproducible illusion of initiation.