Embracing the Impossible: Arthur Conan Doyle, Aleister Crowley and the Occultural Turn in Detective Fiction

In his famous maxim from The Sign of Four (1890), Sherlock Holmes declares “the impossible" to be precisely what the detective must exclude in order to arrive at a true solution. My talk focuses on an alternative tradition of new religious literary detection emergent during the long fin de siècle—and arguably within the Holmes canon itself—that would gleefully defy this prohibition, embracing the “impossible” in the form of supernatural forces and arcane systems of spiritual law within plots that aimed not simply to thrill and entertain, but also to proselytize a disenchanted public. Focusing on the fascinating, little-known “Simon Iff” stories produced by scandalous ceremonial magician and Thelemite Aleister Crowley at the end of the First World War, Christine Ferguson demonstrates the unique affordances of detective fiction for articulating, synthesizing and testing unorthodox forms of spiritual belief—and conceptions of legality, both criminal and metaphysical—within the secular age. 

Lemonade will be served at 4:30 pm on the lower patio. The lecture will be followed by a reception.

Professor Christine Ferguson (FEA, FRHistS) is Chair in English Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland, where her research focuses on the entwined histories of popular fiction, science and alternative spirituality in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain. She is the author of three books and two edited works, including the essay collection The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Andrew Radford, and the new monograph Opens Secrets: The Popular Fiction of Britain (Oxford University, 2025), from which this talk is drawn. In 2026, she will publish the first scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist and Other Spiritualist Writings as part of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Conan Doyle. 

Unless otherwise noted, all of our lectures are free to attend and do not require registration.