Azoth.
A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Philosophy, Theosophy, Mysticism, Psychical Research, Higher Thought and Occultism / The Occult Magazine of America, Prepared by Thinkers for Thinkers.
1917--1921 Monthly
New York, NY.
Publisher: Azoth Publishing Company.
Editor: Michael James Whitty, assisted by Hereward Carrington (psychical research), Eugene Del Mar (New Thought), E. Daniel Lockwood (occultism), Frank C. Higgins (Masonry), Howard Underhill (astrology); Paul F. Case, sub-editor and then editor after Whitty's death.
1/1, January 1917-9/2, August 1921. 64 pp; 6 x 9 1/2. $4.00 a year.

Michael Whitty (1862-1920) was a Scottish physician who spent 17 years in the Australian Outback, discovered the wonders of the occult when a stranger made him a present of a variety of books on Theosophy (which he later rejected), and then founded this journal in New York. The journal was a hodgepodge of miscellaneous materials by most of the notable occultists and astrologers of the time, all geared to a general audience. It had regularly submissions by C.H.A. Bjerregaard (on occultism); Eugene Del Mar (on New Thought), Hereward Carrington (on parapsychology), Julia Seaton (on New Thought), "Amru" (on Theosophy), John Hazelrigg (on astral projection and astrology), Gertrude de Bielska (on astrology), Holden E. Sampson, J.F.C. Grumbine, , and articles by Oliver Lodge, Conan Doyle, Henry Pullen-Burry, Homer Curtis, E.W. Berridge, Theodore Schroeder (on Ida Craddock's "Spiritual Joys"), etc. Despite its title, the journal seems to have avoided alchemy. It also featured several long articles by the Compte de MacGregor de Glenstrae" (Samuel Liddell Mathers), on "The Real and True Rosicrucian Order" ("by its Head") and on "1917 in Exact Correspondence with the Ancient Egyptian Year." Whitty, the editor of the journal, was a Cancellarius of the Thoth-Hermes Lodge of Mathers' Alpha Omega group, and a friend of Paul Foster Case, an editor of and contributor to the journal and later the founder of Builders of the Adytum. Like many other journals, Azoth tried (almost certainly unsuccessfully) to raise money ($25,000) by a stock offering, to obtain 20,000 "good" subscribers. "Prospectus and Statement" 3/4 (October 1918): 241. Its final issues devoted increased space to Masonry. The journal marked the beginnings of the transformation of earlier New Thought and occult journals, which had been advocates of the practical application of the wisdom revealed or of the teachings of a particular teacher or approach, to a popular exposition of the occult in general as a topic of the general culture. LOC; NYPL microfilm; Northwestern University.

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