Magic by Return of Post: How Mail Order Delivered the Occult

Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.“Force accumulated always attracts, force released is wasted and neutralized”, diagram from A Course in Personal Magnetism: Self-Control and the Development of Character, the first part of the mail-order “Series ‘B’”, published by Sydney Flower’s Psychic Research Company in 1901 — Source.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.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Cover of an occult and spiritual books catalogue published by L. W. de Laurence’s mail-order company, 1931 — Source.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Advertisement for “temple incense” sold by L. W. de Laurence’s mail-order company, 1931 — Source.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. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Cover of the mail-order Course in Personal Magnetism: Self-Control and the Development of Character, the first part of “Series ‘B’”, published by Sydney Flower’s Psychic Research Company in 1901 — Source.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Cover of the mail-order A Course of Instruction in Magnetic Healing, the fourth part of “Series ‘B’”, published by Sydney Flower’s Psychic Research Company in 1901 — Source.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Advertising testimonials from students supposedly pleased with the mail-order “Series ‘B’” courses offered by Sydney Flower’s Psychic Research Company — Source: IAPSOP (CC BY-NC).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.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Religious leaders at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions. From left to right: Virchand Gandhi, Hewivitarne Dharmapala, Swami Vivekananda, and (possibly) Gaston Bonet-Maury — Source.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.Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Letterhead for London’s New Thought Publishing Company, a mail-order publisher and distributor of scientific, psychic, and self-culture literature that was founded by Sydney Flower — Source: IAPSOP (CC BY-NC).Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Order form that appeared in a June 1903 issue of New Thought, which solicits money in exchange for stock in Sydney Flower’s North Shore Reduction Company. It was this kind of solicitation that would later be deemed fraudulent during his 1904 Post Office Department legal trial — Source: IAPSOP (CC BY-NC).Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Cover of the first issue of The Yoga: A Magazine of Ferment (July 1910), which Sydney Flower founded while incarcerated — Source: IAPSOP (CC BY-NC).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.