Contemporary Esotericism

How this book fits

Traditions: Late-modern and chaos magic
Role in the tradition: Secondary source A study of the tradition from outside it: history, scholarship, anthropology or reference.
Public attention: Unmeasured No Wikidata entry could be matched to this book with confidence, so no attention label was assigned.

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In copyright, and on this project's restricted list: cited here by locator only, and there is no lawful free edition to point at.

In this study

An edited collection on Western esotericism since the 1950s, including studies of appeals to tradition, popular culture, new media and exchanges with other institutions.

Colin Duggan's chapter on Chaos Magick (pp. 91–112) dates its emergence to the 1978 publication of Peter Carroll's Liber Null and Ray Sherwin's The Book of Results. He presents the current as a late-twentieth-century innovation shaped by Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, then developed by a second wave of writers in the mid-1980s.