History
People, corpora and books
Everyone in the chronology, in order of when they lived. Find someone by any name they went by, or narrow the list to the central figures the timeline starts with.
Dates remain as the sources leave them: “c.” marks an approximation, “after” leaves the ending open, and legendary figures are not given invented lifespans to make the chronology look tidier.
83 entries across 18 periods
No one in the chronology matches that. Show everyone
I Before named occultists 30,000–300 BCE · 2
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before c. 3000 BCE
Prehistoric ritual culture
Burial, ritual treatment of the dead, symbolic art, pigment, ritual objects and probably divination, healing and altered-state practice — long before writing.
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c. 3000 BCE onward
Mesopotamian divination and magic
The earliest genuinely documented magical and divinatory systems, and one major root of judicial astrology: heaven as a field of readable signs.
II Ancient Egypt 2400–300 BCE · 1
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c. 2400 BCE onward
Egyptian funerary magic
Priestly textual traditions for the transformation, protection and continued existence of the dead — not the work of any one occult author.
III Greek mystery religion and Pythagoreanism 570–435 BCE · 2
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c. 570 BCE – c. 490 BCE
Pythagoras central
Founder of a disciplined community concerned with purification, moral practice and the fate of the soul, and the origin of almost everything later occultism means by number and harmony.
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c. 490s BCE – c. 430s BCE
Empedocles
Philosopher, poet, religious teacher and reputed wonder-worker, in whom natural philosophy and salvific teaching sit side by side rather than in separate domains.
IV The Late Antique synthesis 100 BCE – 500 CE · 9
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c. 100 BCE – 400s CE
The Greek Magical Papyri
Greco-Egyptian magical manuscripts: invocations, hymns, recipes, divination, dream procedures, curses, love magic, consecrations and rites seeking divine encounter.
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no historical lifespan
Hermes Trismegistus
A syncretic sage figure joining Greek Hermes and Egyptian Thoth, under whose name a body of philosophical and technical literature circulated.
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204/205 – 270
Plotinus
Plotinus was a metaphysician, not a ceremonial magician. His One, Intellect, Soul and material cosmos gave later esoteric thought its language of emanation and return.
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c. 234 – c. 305
Porphyry
Plotinus's student and editor, systematic philosopher, and generally more cautious about theurgy than Iamblichus would be.
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c. 242 – c. 325
Iamblichus central
Iamblichus gives sacred rites a philosophical place: contemplation is no longer the only road to the divine, and theurgy can share in divine action.
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flourished c. 300 CE
Zosimos of Panopolis
One of the earliest alchemical authors whose substantial writings survive, and the first to turn metallurgical transformation into a drama of dismemberment, sacrifice and regeneration.
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412 – 485
Proclus
Head of the Platonic Academy at Athens, and the builder of perhaps the most elaborate system of late Neoplatonism.
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active c. 500 CE
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite central
The author who smuggled a heavily Proclean Neoplatonic structure into Christian theology, under the name of a first-century convert of St Paul.
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late second century CE
The Chaldean Oracles
A theurgical revelation in hexameter verse, surviving only in fragments quoted by later Neoplatonists.
V Medieval alchemy, Kabbalah and Islamic esotericism 200–1700 · 10
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roughly 8th–10th centuries
The Jabirian corpus
Laboratory procedures, elemental and qualitative theories, numerical correspondences and the transformation of substances, traditionally attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān.
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probably 3rd–6th centuries CE – perhaps later
Sefer Yetzirah
The Book of Formation: creation through ten sefirot and twenty-two Hebrew letters, producing the famous structure of thirty-two paths.
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Arabic, c. tenth century – Latin, thirteenth century
Picatrix
A wide-ranging textbook of astral and talismanic magic: astrology, planetary spirits, ritual timing, magical compounds, cosmology and philosophy.
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1154 – 1191
Suhrawardī
Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī
Founder of the Philosophy of Illumination: reality understood through hierarchies of light rather than through Aristotelian substance.
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1165 – November 1240
Ibn ʿArabī central
The most influential metaphysician of Sufism: divine self-disclosure, the imagination as a real faculty, and the unity underlying existence.
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1240 – after 1291
Abraham Abulafia central
Founder of what later scholars call Prophetic or Ecstatic Kabbalah: permutation of Hebrew letters and divine names, with breathing, posture and concentration.
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c. 1240/50 – 1305
Moses de León central
The Spanish Kabbalist principally responsible for the central body of the Zohar, which he circulated as an ancient Aramaic text.
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circulated in Europe by the late twelfth century
Sefer ha-Bahir
The Book of Brightness: the earliest work of sefirotic Kabbalah proper, and the hinge on which the tradition turns from Merkavah ascent to a doctrine of ten divine potencies.
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medieval and early-modern manuscript tradition
The Key of Solomon
The archetypal Solomonic grimoire: pentacles, spirit work, consecrated tools, prayers and planetary timing.
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c. 1415 – 1490
George Ripley
The Canon of Bridlington
An Augustinian canon of Bridlington whose Compound of Alchymy divides the work into twelve gates, and gives English alchemy the ordering it kept for two centuries.
VI Renaissance magic 1433–1700 · 12
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19 October 1433 – 1499
Marsilio Ficino central
Translator of Plato, Plotinus and the Hermetic writings, whose medicine, music and astrology helped give Renaissance planetary magic its form.
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1462 – 1516
Johannes Trithemius central
Abbot, bibliophile, cryptographer and angel-magician, in whom concealed knowledge and literal concealment become the same problem.
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1463 – 1494
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola central
The founder of Christian Kabbalah, dead at thirty-one, who argued that magic and Kabbalah properly understood confirmed Christianity.
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1486 – 1535
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa central
Author of De occulta philosophia, the Renaissance textbook that later ceremonial magicians returned to again and again.
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1493 – 24 September 1541
Paracelsus central
Theophrastus von Hohenheim
Physician and medical reformer who transformed alchemy from a metallurgical caricature into an expansive theory of medicine, cosmos and spiritual nature.
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1527 – probably 1608 or early 1609
John Dee central
Mathematician, astrologer, navigator and adviser to Elizabeth I, whose attempts to speak with angels produced what modern occultists call Enochian magic.
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1548 – 17 February 1600
Giordano Bruno
Dominican, heretic, cosmologist and master of the art of memory, who turned combinatorial images into instruments for organising mind and reality.
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1560 – 9 September 1605
Heinrich Khunrath
Physician, alchemist and Christian Hermeticist, and the maker of one of the great emblematic books of Christian alchemy.
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1574 – 1637
Robert Fludd
English physician and alchemical philosopher whose macrocosm–microcosm diagrams became some of the most recognisable images in Western esoteric history.
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1575 – 1624
Jakob Böhme central
A shoemaker with little formal education whose visionary account of God, nature and the emergence of opposites reshaped Christian theosophy.
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1575
Arbatel of Magic
An unusually restrained Protestant-era grimoire, centred on the seven Olympic planetary spirits.
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manuscripts mainly seventeenth century
The Lesser Key of Solomon
A compilation in five books, whose first part — the Ars Goetia — gives seventy-two spirits and their seals.
VII Rosicrucianism 1614–1616 · 1
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no historical lifespan
Christian Rosenkreutz
A legendary initiate who travels east, acquires wisdom and founds a hidden fraternity devoted to universal reform.
VIII Freemasonry, Christian theosophy and Illuminism 1679–1850 · 10
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c. 1679 – 1739
James Anderson
A Presbyterian minister closely associated with early organised speculative Freemasonry, and the name on its foundational document.
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29 January 1688 – 29 March 1772
Emanuel Swedenborg
Scientist and engineer who, after a spiritual transformation in the 1740s, claimed sustained encounters with heaven, hell, angels and spirits.
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1686 – 1743
Andrew Michael Ramsay
Mystical writer, convert to Catholicism and Freemason, whose discourse turned Masonry toward chivalric origin myths.
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c. 1691 or 1712 – 27 February 1784
The Count of Saint-Germain
A real but mysterious European adventurer, musician, courtier and experimenter with interests in chemistry and alchemy.
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probably c. 1727 – 1774
Martinès de Pasqually
Creator of the Élus Coëns, an initiatory system combining Freemasonry, Christian theurgy, angelic operations and a doctrine of humanity's fall and restoration.
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1734 – 1815
Franz Anton Mesmer
A physician, not an occultist — whose theory of a universal magnetic fluid nevertheless generated hypnotism, psychical research, Spiritualist trance practice and occult ideas of subtle force.
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18 January 1743 – 13 October 1803
Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin central
The Unknown Philosopher
Initiate of the Élus Coëns who moved away from external ceremonial theurgy toward an interior path of spiritual regeneration.
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1743 – 26 August 1795
Cagliostro
Giuseppe Balsamo · Alessandro, Count of Cagliostro
Healer, adept and Masonic initiator who developed an Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry, including forms admitting women.
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probably eighteenth century in recognisable form
Grimorium Verum
A practical spirit-conjuration grimoire, presented pseudonymously as ancient Solomonic magic.
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eighteenth–nineteenth-century textual tradition
The Grand Grimoire
The Red Dragon
A demonological grimoire associated especially with Lucifuge Rofocale, and with the pact.
IX The birth of occult Tarot 1725–1791 · 2
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1725 – 10 May 1784
Antoine Court de Gébelin
A Protestant pastor and Freemason who asserted, without evidence, that the Tarot preserved ancient Egyptian wisdom — one of the principal beginnings of modern occult Tarot.
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1 March 1738 – 12 December 1791
Etteilla
Jean-Baptiste Alliette
The man who turned Court de Gébelin's speculation into an actual system of divination, and perhaps the first professional Tarot reader.
X Spiritualism and the nineteenth-century revival 1804–1910 · 5
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3 October 1804 – 31 March 1869
Allan Kardec
Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail
An educator who systematised supposed spirit communications into Spiritism, especially influential in France and Brazil.
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1810 – 1875
Éliphas Lévi central
Alphonse-Louis Constant
One of the real turning points: the man who synthesised Kabbalah, Tarot, ceremonial magic, magnetism and Christianity into what he helped redefine as occultism.
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1825 – 1875
Paschal Beverly Randolph central
An African-American Spiritualist, medium, physician and occultist who moved from passive mediumship toward a magic of deliberate will.
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1831 – 8 May 1891
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky central
Co-founder of the Theosophical Society and author of an immense modern synthesis drawing on Western occultism, Hindu and Buddhist terminology, Spiritualism, Neoplatonism and comparative religion.
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1817 – 1910
Mary Anne Atwood
Mary Anne South
English writer whose Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, published in 1850 under her maiden name, argued that the real subject of alchemy was the perfecting of the practitioner rather than of metal.
XI French occultism and Martinism 1861–1916 · 2
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1861 – 1897
Stanislas de Guaita
Poet, Kabbalist and ceremonial occultist, closely associated with Joséphin Péladan and Papus, dead at thirty-six.
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1865 – 1916
Papus
Gérard Encausse
Physician and occultist, and the central organiser of the French occult revival.
XII The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 1848–1951 · 4
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1848 – 1925
William Wynn Westcott
Physician, coroner, Freemason and principal founder of the Golden Dawn.
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1854 – 1918
Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers central
The chief ritual architect of the mature Golden Dawn, assembling old manuscripts into a working ceremonial system.
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1857 – 1942
Arthur Edward Waite
A Golden Dawn initiate who increasingly emphasised Christian mysticism and sacramental initiation rather than practical magic.
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1878 – 1951
Pamela Colman Smith
The artist who designed the images of the Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot, and whose innovation made the deck what it is.
XIII Theosophy's descendants 1847–1934 · 3
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1847 – 1933
Annie Besant
Religious sceptic, socialist and women's-rights activist who became president of the Theosophical Society in 1907, and of the Indian National Congress in 1917.
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1854 – 1934
C. W. Leadbeater
A Theosophical writer whose purported clairvoyant investigations deeply shaped twentieth-century ideas about auras, chakras and subtle bodies.
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1861 – 1925
Rudolf Steiner
Founder of Anthroposophy, with interests extending into education, agriculture, architecture, drama, medicine and what he called spiritual science.
XIV Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way 1872–1949 · 2
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c. 1866/77, disputed – 29 October 1949
G. I. Gurdjieff
Teacher of the Fourth Way: that ordinary humans live in a largely mechanical state of sleep, and require intentional work, self-observation and self-remembering.
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1878 – 1947
P. D. Ouspensky
The Russian intellectual who met Gurdjieff in 1915 and became the clearest expositor of a system he later separated from organisationally.
XV Thelema 1875–1947 · 1
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12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947
Aleister Crowley central
Edward Alexander Crowley
Golden Dawn initiate, founder of Thelema and the most influential ceremonial magician of the twentieth century.
XVI Independent twentieth-century magic 1880–1990 · 8
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30 December 1886 – 15 May 1956
Austin Osman Spare
Artist and occult writer whose sigils, automatic drawing and psychology of desire became indispensable to later chaos magic.
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6 December 1890 – January 1946
Dion Fortune
Violet Mary Firth
Occultist, novelist and founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light, who brought ceremonial magic into sustained conversation with psychology.
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17 November 1907 – 10 March 1985
Israel Regardie
Francis Israel Regudy
Writer, therapist and former secretary to Crowley who preserved the Golden Dawn's rituals in print after its original temples had fractured.
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18 March 1901 – 29 August 1990
Manly P. Hall
Lecturer, collector and founder of the Philosophical Research Society, best known for a lavish encyclopedia of esoteric symbolism published when he was twenty-seven.
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1880 – 1949
Alice A. Bailey
Theosophist turned independent teacher whose vocabulary — rays, hierarchy, the Christ's reappearance — supplied much of the language later New Age spirituality would use.
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1886 – 1951
René Guénon
ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥyā
The founder of the Traditionalist or Perennialist school, and the most severe critic modern occultism has produced from inside it.
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1914 – 17 June 1952
Jack Parsons
John Whiteside Parsons
Rocket scientist and Thelemite, occupying one of the strangest intersections in modern history.
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28 February 1882 – 12 January 1923
Herbert Silberer
Austrian psychoanalyst in Freud's circle who read an alchemical parable as a description of inner processes, thirty years before Jung's Psychology and Alchemy.
XVII Modern witchcraft 1863–1999 · 3
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13 July 1863 – 13 November 1963
Margaret Alice Murray
Egyptologist and folklorist whose rejected witch-cult hypothesis nevertheless supplied modern witchcraft with a usable story about its own antiquity.
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13 June 1884 – 12 February 1964
Gerald Gardner central
The central organiser and public advocate of Wicca, a new religious synthesis presented as the survival of an old witch cult.
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4 January 1922 – 1 September 1999
Doreen Valiente
Doreen Edith Dominy
Poet, priestess and historian from within the movement, responsible for much of the language through which early Wicca still speaks.
XVIII Late-modern revisions 1924–now · 6
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23 May 1924 – 15 January 2011
Kenneth Grant
Thelemic writer who fused Crowley, Spare, Tantra, Surrealism and weird fiction into the deliberately unstable Typhonian current.
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11 April 1930 – 29 October 1997
Anton Szandor LaVey
Howard Stanton Levey
Founder of the Church of Satan and author of a theatrical, individualist form of modern religious Satanism.
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coalescing in the 1960s–70s – continuing
The New Age movement
A decentralised field joining Theosophy, alternative healing, channelled teaching, human-potential psychology, astrology and expectations of planetary transformation.
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emerging in Britain from 1976 – continuing
Chaos magic
A postmodern current that treats belief as a technique, strips ritual systems for working methods and tests results without demanding one permanent cosmology.
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8 January 1953 – living
Peter J. Carroll
Co-founder of the Illuminates of Thanateros, and the person who turned chaos magic from a tendency into a recognisable movement with a curriculum.
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contemporary – living
Phil Hine
The writer principally responsible for making chaos magic legible outside its small original British milieu.