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.
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.
[I]t 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 […]
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.
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.
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.” 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.