This book is the first collection to feature histories of women in Western Esotericism while also highlighting women¿s scholarship. In addition to providing a critical examination of important and under researched figures in the history of Western Esotericism, these fifteen essays also contribute to current debates in the study of esotericism about the very nature of the field itself. The chapters are divided into four thematic sections that address current topics in the study of esotericism: race and othering, femininity, power and leadership and embodiment. This collection not only adds important voices to the story of Western Esotericism, it hopes to change the way the story is told.

Amy Hale is an anthropologist and folklorist specializing in contemporary esoteric history, art and culture.  Co-edited collections include New Directions in Celtic Studies, and The Journal of the Academic Study of Magic 5. She has written widely on surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, and is the author of the Colquhoun biography Genius of the Fern Loved Gully.

Table of Contents

Introduction Amy Hale

Part I: Race Place and Othering

Chapter One: Jessica A. Albrecht: Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney: Imperial Feminism and Eugenics in Theosophical Evolutionist Thought

Chapter Two: Thea Wirsching: The Myth of Pamela Colman Smith's Blackness: Ethnic Impersonation in the Modern Esoteric Milieu

Chapter Three: Diana Brown: "Eastern Methods"/"Western Bodies": Dion Fortune's Shifting Positions on Yoga, 1929 -1940

Part II: Locating the Feminine

Chapter Four: Michele Olzi: The Devil Wears Pink: The Representation and Role of Woman in the Occultism of Maria de Naglowska

Chapter Five:  Christa Shusko: The Power of Beauty: Eleanor Kirk's Feminine Esotericism

Chapter Six: Jay Johnston: Painterly Desire: Ithell Colquhoun's Other-than-Human Art

Part III: Rethinking Influence, Power and Authority

Chapter Seven: Vivianne Crowley: Doreen Valiente: Unmotherly Mother of Modern Witchcraft

Chapter Eight: Melvyn Draper: The Crucible of Modernity: Florence Farr & the Esoteric Woman

Chapter Nine: Julia Phillips: Madeline Montalban: Magus of the Morning Star

Chapter Ten: Deja Whitehouse: 'The Seeker' - Frieda Harris's Quest for Esoteric Fulfillment

Chapter Eleven: Susan Johnston Graf : George Yeats: Amanuensis to Inner Plane Spirits

Part IV: Embodiment

Chapter Twelve:  Elizabeth Lowry: "Telling the World's Fortune": Eileen Garrett, Psychic Medium and Pioneer Parapsychologist.

Chapter Thirteen: Marla Segol: How to Make a Magician: Kabbalah, Psychotherapy and the Mechanics of Syncretism in Colette Aboulker-Muscat's Waking Dreamwork

Chapter Fourteen: Anne Parker Perkola: Dion Fortune and the Temples of the Numinous

Chapter Fifteen: Minji Lee: True Knowledge of God Obscured in Mind and Body:  Hildegard of Bingen's Medical and Religious Understanding of Adam's Fall

Index