Before named occultists
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.
- Dates
- before c. 3000 BCE
- Dating
- tradition or corpus
The life
Humans practised all of this for tens of thousands of years before there was anything to read. Whether it should be called magic, religion or shamanism is disputed, and the dispute is not a technicality: the categories are modern and the practices are not.
Place in the tradition
This is the prehistory of occultism rather than occultism itself. It matters because so many later movements claim descent from it.
a note on the record
History and later legend
This period left no books and no identifiable authors. Claims of an intact prehistoric occult doctrine secretly carried into the modern world remain speculation.