Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus Online

The Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC) is an open source text project, focused on book-length texts, in English, covering Spiritualism, the occult, New Thought and allied parasciences (mesmerism, magnetism, phrenology, alchemy, chiromancy and so forth) published between 1790 and 1940. Currently the SSOC consists of more than 2,200 book-length texts (more than 1 million pages) by over 300 authors, and includes many of the texts considered "classics" in Spiritualism and the occult. Every text in the SSOC is supplied, free of charge, in indexed PDF form, allowing it to be electronically stored, searched, printed and converted (to image, HTML or text). The outer, later bound of the corpus is limited by copyright law.

The intent behind this project is to provide, at low cost, a more or less complete document database of important primary book-length materials -- again, in English, at present -- to all academic and non-academic researchers, aficionados, and readers interested in Spiritualism, the occult and allied parasciences.

Texts are given by date of publication. When seen in the context of the vast body spiritualist literature that was being published at the time, Theosophy was hardly the dominant stream of ideas about the here and hereafter. SSOC is curated by the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, which is another important repository developed by Marc Demarest. Enter the SSOC portal here.