Occult Digest, The.
A Monthly Digest for Everybody / Dedicated to the Laws of Higher Mind-Soul Expansion / A Periodical of Reprint and Research / A Magazine for Everybody / Dedicated to the laws of higher Mind-Soul expansion.
The One Magazine that is Daringly Different. We Stand for Truth Unmasked. Make the World Safe for Intelligence
1925-1947 Monthly, then quarterly
Chicago, IL.
Language: English.
Editor: Effa E. Danielson; Jacob E. Bonggren, Chell Crozier assistant editors; Ross K. New, managing editor; Marie Harlowe.
Publisher: Occult Digest Company; 1939 on: Maha Publishing Company.
Succeeds: Psychic Leader->Psychic Power (1925); The Telepathic Magazine (merged into, 1939)
Succeeded by: World Philosophy/Buddhist World Philosophy
1/1, January 1925-23-1942, and continued thereafter as World Philosophy/Buddhist World Philosophy until January-March 1947.
42 pp. (varies, reduced during the Depression to 16 pp.), 8 1/2 x 11.
$1.00-$3.00 a year, 25 cents a copy.

This is the finest example of the transformation of spiritualist and occult journals into commercial vehicles addressed to the American mass market. It was well laid out and, at least in the first few months, had beautiful color covers (they vanished when the magazine cut back in 1926). Although the journal carried articles by or excerpts from some notable authors—"Frater Achad" (Charles Stansfield Jones, whose "The Chalice of Ecstacy. A Magical Interpretation of ‘Parzival'" ran throughout 1926), C.H.A. Bjerregaard, Max Heindel, Rudolf Steiner, Annie Besant, Sherwood Anderson(!), Brown Landone, Elbert Benjamine, Sylvan J. Muldoon, Uriel Buchanan, Krishnamurti, Holden E. Samson, Ida Mingle, Dion Fortune, Franz Hartmann, A.E. Waite, H. Spencer Lewis, W.J. Colville, Israel Regardie, Reuben Swinburne Clymer, Max Freedom Long, Aleister Crowley (excerpted from "Equinox 1910"), et al.—these were mere window dressing for advertisements and a stream of articles by unknown pulp authors (probably paid per word or by allowing them free advertising space for their books and lessons) who wrote on numerology, spirit photography, astrology, astral travel, palmistry, slate writing (with photographs of slates), "Rudolph Valentino's Last Message to the World," and especially sex. The journal regularly featured articles (or short fiction) on Kundalini, "The Astral Lover," the danger of being "Vamped" by ghosts, "An Occult Interpretation of Life's Secrets: Sex the Mystery of Mysteries Revealed," and the like. Like The New York Magazine of Mysteries which preceded it by a decade, the Occult Digest carried a massive number of advertisements for everything from trumpets through which spirits could communicate to "The French Method to Develop Your Bust," mail-order know how, "Electric Health Generators," "Perfect Vision without Glasses," means of enhancing magnetic attraction between the sexes, etc.

Throughout it all, Mrs. Danielson (1869-October 4, 1939), who began as a medium in St. Louis before moving to Chicago, contributed editorials on "The Aquarian Age," "The War against Progress," liberalized divorce, opposition to capital punishment, and the like—all throwbacks to the reform heyday of early spiritualism. On Danielson, see the note under Psychic Power. The journal under her aegis ceased with 15/6, June 1939, when it announced its suspension for three months. After Danielson died, on October 9th, the journal was taken up by Marie Gossett Harlowe (Pulley?), 1902-1986, the MaHa of the publishing company. Harlowe was spiritual lecturer and perhaps medium, anti-vivisectionist and anti-Catholic, and Unity teacher, who had written for Rays for the Rosy Cross, Philosopher's Stone, and Rosicrucian Digest. She was a notable racist (writing on "the Rising Tide of Color, an occult consideration of the racial question") and antisemite (in Omaha in 1919 she said she received a prophecy on the occult principles underlying the "Jewish Question" and the end of the Jews and finally published them in 1940 as "The End of the Jewish Race." Her goal, she said, was not to re-hash the issue of Jewish Bankers but to show the inner, karmic reasons for the "problem," in the process proving that Jesus was not a Jew and offering the karmic reasons for the necessity of Hitler. She had began the Telepathic Magazine (q.v.) in November 1937, and in November 1939 she took over the Occult Digest and merged her journal into it, cheapening the paper, reducing the page size to 5 x 8 and the number of pages to 30, and eliminating the fancy illustrations and penny-a-word articles. The first issue to appear after she took control was 16/1, January 1940. Harlowe was obviously in desperate straits to make a go of the journal, lecturing her subscribers on "rats leaving sinking ships" and offering a "life subscription" to the magazine for $100.00—certainly an unpromising investment. She advertized her lesson courses and personal services in divination according to the Yih-King or Tarot, healing, casting horoscopes, lectures, and funeral services. The journal survived into 1942 and was absorbed into World Philosophy/Buddhist World Philosophy, which was published by Harlowe and her perhaps husband William Sande Pulley (Bhikkhu Anuruddha, 1901-1975), who spent 1956-1959 in Burma as a monk and described his experiences there in An American in the Yellow Robe (1967). Under Harlowe's control, the journal became increasingly devoted to her own discourses and to Buddhism.

Bonggren (1854-1940), one of the editors, is notable because of a letter he addressed to The Canadian Theosophist in 1940 discussing the rules (abstinence from meat, alcohol and sex—or at least from illegal sexual activity) in the early Theosophical Society, of which he was a member in the 1880s, and the structure of grades of initiation through which the members were to progress.

The journal's branding was appropriated in 1971 by a group of Chicago-based occultists, but their periodical has no connection with the original Occult Digest.

NYPL; LOC; Theosophical Society, Wheaton, IL; Harvard University; University of Illinois; Ohio State University; Free Library of Philadelphia; University of Waterloo.