"To its contemporary critics, the late Victorian occult revival represented the ultimate betrayal of the Enlightenment ideals of reason and secular emancipation
in favor of an esoteric supernaturalism. This positioning seems only further confirmed by the contribution of occult revivalists to the fragmented and
commercialized late Victorian press networks which, according to Jürgen Habermas, signaled the death knell of the once powerful eighteenth-century public sphere. There are, however, important reasons to rethink such assessments of fin-de-siècle occultism as counter-Enlightenment foil, ones nowhere more apparent than in the seminal issues of the period’s most defiantly disenchanting occult periodical, the Theosophical monthly Lucifer (1887-1897)."
