The postwar reorganisation of Western occulture

The American national-security state was constituted between 1947 and 1952: the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency, the establishment of the modern signals-intelligence apparatus that became the National Security Agency, the Truman Doctrine, the institutional shape of the postwar intelligence community. The same fifteen years saw a comprehensive reorganisation of Western esoteric currents. Aleister Crowley died in 1947 and Karl Germer assumed leadership of the Ordo Templi Orientis, beginning the long American consolidation of the order. Israel Regardie’s 1937–40 publication of the rituals of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn put the system’s curriculum into wide American circulation for the first time. The Theosophical Society reconstituted along its modern Adyar and American lines. The Esalen Institute opened at Big Sur in 1962, providing the institutional locus of what would become the American human-potential movement. Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966.

These developments were not connected to one another, but they shared a geography (much of it Californian), a moment (the long postwar), and a demographic (technically educated, security-cleared, postwar professional Americans). When the documented overlap cases appear, they appear in this milieu.