'Protestant Magic' Reappraised: Evangelicalism, Dissent, And Theosophy (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the introduction to his landmark essay, 'Protestant Magic: W.B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History', R.F. Foster admitted that the most daunting task facing the rational science and secure chronologies of the historian, was accounting for the poet's 'Southern Californian aspect'. The solution presented is to repatriate the esoteric by accommodating it within a tradition of Protestant superstition, running parallel to, and informing, Irish Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century. Casting a biographical eye over writers such as Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker, he notes: [They stem] from families with strong clerical and professional colorations, whose occult preoccupations mirror a sense of displacement, a loss of social and psychological integration, and an escapism motivated by the threat of a takeover by the Catholic middle classes -- a threat all the more inexorable because it is being accomplished by peaceful means and with the free legal aid of British governments. The supernatural theme of a corrupt bargain recurs again. (1)