The Luciferian Public Sphere: Theosophy and Editorial Seekership in the 1880s

Abstract

This article demonstrates the development and practice of "editorial seekership" during the early years of the prominent British Theosophical journal Lucifer, when it was co-edited by H.P. Blavatsky and Mabel Collins. Rather than promoting a particular set of occult beliefs, Lucifer instead encouraged an open-ended and sometimes self-defeatingly anarchic mode of spiritual seekership perfectly aligned to the eclecticism, seriality, and topicality of the periodical form. In demonstrating the editorial team's production of a press-mediated form of spiritual identity, my article calls for a new recognition of the occult revival’s relationship to print capitalism, and of the importance of periodicals to esotericism studies more broadly.