L. W. de Laurence and the Machinery of Modern Occultism
Some occultists built systems. L. W. de Laurence built a distribution network.
From Chicago in the opening decades of the twentieth century, Lauron William de Laurence (1868–1936) helped turn occult literature into something that could move through catalogs, advertisements, parcels, correspondence courses, and the international mail. His significance lies not simply in what appeared under his name, but in the machinery surrounding it: books, compilations, reprints, lessons, ritual goods, promotional language, and a commercial infrastructure capable of carrying esoteric material far beyond the circles in which it had previously circulated.
That machinery made de Laurence one of the most consequential—and controversial—figures in the history of popular occult publishing.
From Hypnotism to an Occult Publishing House
De Laurence emerged from the turn-of-the-century culture of hypnotism, magnetic healing, suggestion, mental influence, and practical psychology. These subjects occupied an unstable borderland between popular science, therapeutic experimentation, New Thought, stage fascination, and occultism. They also lent themselves exceptionally well to self-instruction.
His Chicago publishing enterprise, De Laurence, Scott & Co., became a vehicle for that promise. Instead of requiring membership in a lodge or access to a private teacher, the reader could order instruction directly. Knowledge arrived by post.
This was the essential innovation. De Laurence did not invent mail-order publishing, nor did he invent the magical traditions he marketed. What he grasped was how effectively the techniques of modern commerce could be applied to esoteric desire.
The Catalog as an Occult Technology
The de Laurence catalog did more than list books. It created a world.
Hypnotism appeared beside clairvoyance; magnetic healing beside ceremonial magic; talismans, divination, spirit communication, personal influence, and practical occult instruction beside texts drawn from much older traditions. To a customer encountering this material through the mail, the catalog itself became a map of hidden knowledge.
De Laurence’s importance therefore cannot be measured by authorship alone. His operation involved original writing, compilation, editing, adaptation, republication, and aggressive merchandising. Modern bibliographic records accordingly identify him in different roles depending upon the work—sometimes as author, sometimes editor, sometimes as the publisher responsible for a particular edition.
That distinction matters. It allows us to understand his historical influence without granting him authorship of every tradition or text that passed through his hands.
The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses
Few objects demonstrate the power of that publishing model better than The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.
The text itself long predates de Laurence. His importance was as an editor, packager, and distributor of a particular English-language occult edition. The Library of Congress records the De Laurence, Scott & Co. edition as published in Chicago in 1910 and identifies de Laurence with the volume.
Its pages brought together seals, divine names, conjurations, amuletic material, Cabalistic elements, and traditions of magical authority attributed to Moses and Aaron. In de Laurence’s hands, an older grimoire tradition entered a distinctly modern system of mass circulation.
That combination—old magical material moving through new commercial channels—is central to the de Laurence story.
Hypnotism, Magnetism, and Practical Power
Before the grimoires and magical catalogs came the language of hypnotism and magnetism. De Laurence repeatedly returned to the proposition that invisible forces could be understood, trained, and directed.
Titles such as Practical Lessons in Hypnotism and Magnetism and Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Suggestive Therapeutics & Magnetic Healing belong to a much broader fin-de-siècle fascination with suggestion, fascination, personal magnetism, mental healing, and the powers of consciousness.
Practical Lessons in Hypnotism and Magnetism is one of the clearest entry points into this side of his work. Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Suggestive Therapeutics & Magnetic Healing expands that field into suggestion, therapeutic practice, mental healing, clairvoyance, and related phenomena.
These books also place de Laurence within a larger Chicago metaphysical environment. William Walker Atkinson was working in many of the same subject areas—mental influence, suggestion, magnetism, New Thought, occult psychology—but overlap of subject, city, and readership should not be mistaken for proof of a formal partnership. The surviving evidence supports a shared commercial and intellectual ecosystem much more securely than it supports claims of direct collaboration.
Crystal Gazing and the Invisible World
De Laurence’s publishing world did not stop at mental influence. It moved easily into clairvoyance, trance, divination, and spirit vision.
Crystal-Gazing and Spiritual Clairvoyance Behind the Veil exemplifies this transition. The crystal becomes both instrument and symbol: a physical object through which the practitioner attempts to discipline attention toward an unseen order.
This movement—from psychology toward occult technique—is characteristic of the period. The boundaries modern readers often impose between self-development, psychic research, alternative healing, and magic were far more porous in the literature de Laurence sold.
From Chicago to the Caribbean and the African Diaspora
The most remarkable chapter in de Laurence’s publishing history occurred far from Chicago.
His books circulated internationally and acquired lives their publisher could not fully control. Scholarship and later historical accounts have documented their importance in Jamaica and their wider presence in African-diasporic magical cultures. Works associated with the de Laurence imprint became entangled with Obeah, hoodoo, folk magic, and local systems of spiritual practice.
This history requires precision. De Laurence did not create those traditions. Nor should African-diasporic religious practices be reduced to imported American occult books. What his publishing network did was place particular printed texts, seals, formulas, and magical commodities into existing cultures that interpreted and repurposed them according to local needs.
That is a more interesting history than simple influence. A commercial occult book could leave Chicago, cross an ocean, and become something different in the hands of its readers.
Authorship, Compilation, and Appropriation
Any serious reading of de Laurence eventually encounters a bibliographic problem: what, precisely, did he write?
His catalog participated in a publishing culture in which older works could be edited, retitled, excerpted, rearranged, republished, or presented with new framing. Some de Laurence editions drew heavily upon pre-existing occult literature. Modern researchers have consequently criticized aspects of his publishing practice as appropriation or plagiarism.
For collectors and historians, however, this makes bibliographic precision more important rather than less. A de Laurence edition can be historically significant even when the underlying text originated elsewhere. The object records what material was selected, how it was packaged, what authority was claimed for it, and the audience to whom it was sold.
In other words: provenance is part of the content.
The Controversial Occult Entrepreneur
De Laurence cultivated authority aggressively, and his career attracted scandal as well as customers. Contemporary allegations and later accounts describe legal scrutiny surrounding his organizations and business activities, including the notorious 1912 episode associated with his Order of the Black Rose.
Those claims should be handled as historical allegations rather than repeated uncritically as sensational biography. What is certain is that controversy became inseparable from his public reputation.
The contradiction is instructive. De Laurence could be simultaneously a commercial showman, a compiler of borrowed material, a skilled publisher, a purveyor of extravagant claims, and a figure of genuine historical consequence. None of those descriptions cancels the others.
Why De Laurence Matters
De Laurence belongs to the history of occultism, but he also belongs to the history of media.
He understood that secrecy could itself be marketed. A book promising hidden knowledge did not become less alluring because thousands of copies could be ordered through the post. In some ways mass distribution intensified the mystery: the reader received a private package containing material presented as ancient, forbidden, powerful, or difficult to obtain.
This is one reason his work feels unexpectedly modern. The machinery has changed—from mail-order catalogs to search engines, online stores, digital archives, and downloadable editions—but the underlying problem remains familiar: what happens to esoteric knowledge when access expands?
De Laurence’s answer was to build the machinery and let the material travel.
Where to Begin with L. W. de Laurence
For the magical and grimoire tradition, begin with The Sixth & Seventh Books of Moses. For the psychological and magnetic side of his work, turn to Practical Lessons in Hypnotism and Magnetism and Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Suggestive Therapeutics & Magnetic Healing. For clairvoyance and divination, explore Crystal-Gazing and Spiritual Clairvoyance Behind the Veil.
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These editions preserve a difficult but important chapter in the history of occult publishing: not merely the ideas that circulated, but the commercial networks, editorial interventions, and physical books through which they traveled.
C.K. Lee
