The occult can be described by other means.
 Employing this etic understanding of "occultism", Hanegraaff argued that its development could begin to be seen in the work of the Swedish esotericist Emanuel Swedenborg and in the Mesmerist movement of the eighteenth century, although added that occultism only emerged in "fully-developed form" as Spiritualism, a movement that developed in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century
In 1853, the Freemasonic author Jean-Marie Ragon had already used occultisme in his popular work Maonnerie occulte, relating it to earlier practices that, since the Renaissance, had been termed "occult sciences" or "occult philosophy", but also to the recent socialist teachings of Charles Fourier

