Occultism, Whiteness, Normativity: On LW De Laurence

Even if the precise nature of their spread and use remains to be thoroughly investigated, scholars frequently observe that proponents of Black esoteric religions like the Nation of Islam, Moorish Science Temple of America, Commandment Keepers experimented with the occult works of De Laurence, Scott, and Co. (Knight 2019; Dorman 2012; 2020; Nance 2009). Much less is known, however, about the man behind the publishing company: hypnotist and occultist Lauron William de Laurence (1868-1936). Drawing on archival sources—including newspapers and court records—this paper explores the various ways in which publications about and by De Laurence challenged and reinforced normative constructions of whiteness. 

Between 1900 and 1919—when he stood trial for mail order fraud—De Laurence plagiarized, pirated, and copy-righted roughly two dozen works. The most popular remains The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, an eighteenth-century German spell book on angelic and demonic powers. Among the many esoteric publishers in Chicago’s buzzing occult scene, De Laurence was one of the very few that catered specifically to Black and Brown communities. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was used by, among others, Ethiopian Hebrew congregations in New York City, hoodoo practitioners for healing rituals in the US-south, obeah practitioners to negotiate spiritual powers in Jamaica, Hindus in Trinidad, and mami wata worshippers in Ghana. This is why historian of magic Owen Davies speaks of De Laurence in terms of “transatlantic sensation” and “America’s most influential occultist” (2009, 198, 216); why, in turn, anthropologist Stephan Palmié quips that a “business history” of De Laurence’s publishing house would provide “a key more revealing” to Caribbean religious history than the more common pursuit of studying retentions of African spirituality (2002, 207). Palmié’s call remains to be executed, however—and we know surprisingly little about the man behind the publishing company.

We do know that De Laurence sold his products through mail order, a business he advertised widely in newspapers. Analysis of (digitized) newspaper archives of the Kingston Daily Gleaner (Jamaica) and Chicago Examiner (US) demonstrates that in such advertisements, he frequently donned a turban. As David Schmit (2010), Philip Deslippe (2014), Alexander Rocklin (2016), Jacob Dorman (2020) and others show, the US public began to develop an orientalist fascination with the “fantastic mental powers” of “Hindoos” in the nineteenth century. Donning a turban, De Laurence capitalized on the ambiguity of the religio-racial category of "Hindu" and its popularity in esoteric circles, where such orientalist appropriations often translated into marketability and fame. However, when asked about his turban in court in 1919, De Laurence denied posing as “Hindu”: the turban was simply a gift from a friend and he would be open to “cut out” all that “Hinduism and everything” (1919 transcript court case). In doing so, I argue, De Laurence capitalized on the affordances of whiteness. As Cheryl Harris shows in a still-influential article, whiteness signifies the capacity to possess (1993). To possess also implies here the capacity to use, trade, and discard. That De Laurence could so easily dismiss, reject, or deny to have ever laid claim to “Hindu” is precisely because De Laurence was white. The very fact that De Laurence could capitalize on the mutability of race reinforces the power of race as a technology of white supremacy, to invoke Alana Lentin’s formulation (2020). 

At the same time, though, crossing racial boundaries was not entirely without risk. Accusations of mail order fraud were not the only time De Laurence had a run-in with the law: newspapers show that, in 1912, he was arrested and briefly jailed for heading a small “cult,” with members of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds who cohabited in a wealthy neighborhood in Chicago. The female disciple who reported De Laurence to the police apparently rejected the group's “democratic co-mingling.” According to the rather scandalous press coverage, the group engaged in a series of rituals, including seances, a weighing ceremony, strict dietary practices, and worshipping a statue of a stereotypical depiction of an indigenous man. Generally referring to these rituals as “strange” or “bizarre,” The Fort Wayne Sentinel also used two very specific, racialized terms to categorize and discredit this behavior: “voodooism” and “fetish” (1912, November 13, page 9). In associating De Laurence with racialized forms of supposed religious deviance (see, for example Boaz 2024)—thus emphasizing and cementing, for a predominant white readership, his proximity to “blackness”—newspapers essentially, I argue, placed his whiteness into question. They did do purposefully. After all, De Laurence’s “cult” defied the borders of whiteness, challenged its ontological purity, as it troubled two of the then-normative discourses and practices that secured the stability of whiteness as the dominant and dominating economic, political, cultural, and social structure: anti-miscegenation and residential segregation (Roberts 2017). As a response, the press used terminology that placed him outside the borders of “proper” religion and, accordingly, legitimate and normative whiteness (see Orsi 2009; Johnson 2009).

Considering the above, this paper concludes that De Laurence at moments embraced the privileges and affordances offered by whiteness while, at other moments, pushed its boundaries and questioned the assumption of ontological purity that undergirds it. De Laurence evidently had an immensely complex and ambiguous relationship to the racial schemas, categories, and boundaries that were dominant in the US in the early decades of the twentieth century. Studying this complex relationship, in turn, challenges the frequently held assumption that forms of occult praxis are necessarily or inherently heterodox and subversive: De Laurence at once challenged and reinforced normative constructs of whiteness. As the final part of this paper will demonstrate and theorize, De Laurence’s life and writing therefore provide a crucial case study for understanding “normativity” in the study of religion and offer a critical challenge for esotericism studies, where the definition of esotericism as “wastebasket of rejected knowledge” (Hanegraaff 2012; but see Asprem 2021) remains central.