Shai Feraro: Occult and New Age Spirituality Bookshops

Studying Occult and New Age Spirituality Bookshops as Sites for the Production and Exchange of Rejected Knowledge in the UK, c. 1893 – c. 1993 Dr. Shai Feraro (University of Haifa)

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This paper presents exploratory notes from my ongoing research project, which focuses on occult and New Age spirituality bookshops in Britain and aims to illuminate their function as hubs and arenas for the transference of knowledge and information within these respective milieus, c. 1893 – c.1993. Its time frame is dictated by the founding of Watkins Books – one of the first establishments in London to dedicate itself specifically to occult and esoteric literature – and by the rise of the Internet, which has become the chief arena for the exchange of relevant knowledge, thus eliminating the primacy and – in the case of the occult subcultures – sometimes even the very exclusivity of the bookshop.

I aim to show how these literary establishments were simultaneously dependent on and cultivated a large array of networks concerned with ‘rejected knowledge’. Following Webb (1976) and especially Hanegraaff (2012) we can define ‘rejected knowledge’ as a generative culture of epistemic claims, based on a fusion of heterodox religion and speculative science, which has been practiced against hegemonic religious and scientific institutions since at least the late Nineteenth Century.

This project is vital for understanding the proliferation of new and alternative religions in western societies and opens a new line of wider historiographical enquiry with the UK as a test case, answering longstanding questions regarding the material availability of ‘occult’ and ‘new age’ reading materials during the Twentieth Century and their impact on wider British – and Western – society.

My research focuses on the study of occult and New Age Spirituality bookshops in Britain between the late-19th and late-20th Centuries. I’m also interested in esoteric publishing and in the role of women in the British book trade during the same period. More broadly, I research alternative religions and spiritualities in North America and the UK during the 19th and 20th centuries. My 2020 book, Women and Gender Issues in British Paganism, 1945–1990, was published by Palgrave Macmillan, who also published two anthologies I co-edited – Contemporary Alternative Spiritualities in Israel (2016) and Magic and Witchery in the Modern West (2019).