The occult has been defined as being arcane.
 The term occultism emerged in 19th-century France, where it came to be associated with various French esoteric groups connected to liphas Lvi and Papus,The earliest use of the term occultism in the English language appears to be in "A Few Questions to 'Hiraf'", an 1875 article by Helena Blavatsky, a Russian migr living in the United States who founded the religion of Theosophy
 In the 1970s, the sociologist Edward Tiryakian distinguished between occultism, which he used in reference to practices, techniques, and procedures, and esotericism, which he defined as the religious or philosophical belief systems on which such practices are based

