occult today galbreath

7/28/2019 Occult Today Galbreath

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INTRODUCTION:THE OCCULT TODAY

By ROBERT GAL BREA TH

The idea of the adept and initiate in secret knowledge, the idea of thedivine man or woman, of the god-inspired, or at any rate of the human withsuperhuman powers, is in the air, a noted observer of the psychic scene haswritten. In many directions, he continues,

we may see . . . revivals of divination, seers and soothsayersand prophets, pythonesses, sibyls and prophetesses, tellers ofdreams and of omens, mantics of every description and byevery sort of contrivance; astrologists and even alchemists;professors of magical arts and ceremonies; cosmologists andrevelationists; necromancy and communion with spirits;enthusiasm, trance and ecstasis. And with all this, as of old,keeping pace with religious unrest and loss of faith in tradi-tional beliefs and blank denial of anything beyond the rangeof the physical, there is what looks very much like the bring-ing in of new gods and new saviours and new creeds, theblending of cults and syncretism ofrel igions; societies andassociations open and secret, for propagating or impartingnew doctrines, new at any rate t o their adherents thoughmostly old en0ugh.l

The vocabulary is dated, the observations are not. This is not a description ofthe revolution of spirit in present-day America but of the rising psychic tide


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63012 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTUREin the England of 1912. To the author, a former Theosophist and acclaimedoccult scholar, G. R. S. Mead, this ferment signified an effort to extend con-sciousness, a groping toward the spiritual, the birthpangs of an imminent ageof enquiry in which spiritual wisdom would reconcile the claims of scienceand religion to the satisfaction of the whole man.(without repeating those cited in my bibliographical article later in this issue)include New Directions report that they had sold 1,500,000 copies of HermannHesses Siddhartha as of 1970.2 Fate magazine has maintained an average month-ly paid circulation in excess of 100,000 or the past five years.3 Doubledaysoccult Universe Book Club enrolled over 100,000members in its first year-and-a-half of ~ p e r a t i o n . ~n what surely must have been a most unrepresentativepoll of 7 5 prisoners concerning their most enlightening reading, one of thelargest categories of books mentioned was that of self-help, in which suchmystical, occult, and self-development titles were named as The Tibetan Bookof the Dea d , P. D. Ouspenskys N e w M o d el of the Universe and In Search ofthe Miraculous, and Thomas Mertons N o M an Is an Island, at one extreme, andThe Prophe t, Psycho-Cybern etics, and The Powe r of Positive Thinking atanother.5 Courses on parapsychology, meditation, and the occult are popularon many campuses and in leading urban centers.6 News items in Psychic , aglossy bimonthly which emulates Psychology Today , state (with how muchjustification is not clear) that there are 10,000 full-time and 175,000 part-timeastrologers in this country, that some 1200 of the nations 1750 daily news-papers carry astrology columns, and that there are thought to be 60,000 profes-sional necromancers in F r a n ~ e . ~ccult activities are so rife in England that arecently published paperback guide to them records 345 separate groups,institutions, bookstores, publishers, periodicals, and professionals, primarily inthe London area.8

Even Meads hopes are being echoed on all sides. The new occult floodtideis colored by the apocalyptic and millenialist mood which proclaims the dawningof Consciousness 111, of Paradise Now and Bliss Apocalypse, of the Age of Aquar-ius, the K d i Yuga, and 2001. These expectations, moreover, are linked to thoseof Meads day by the visions of a substantial body of twentieth-century philos-ophers of history-among them, Spengler and Sorokin, Toynbee and Teilhard,Berdyaev and Jaspers, neo-Marxists and neoevolutionists-which agree, in thewords of an astonished commentator , that the next stage of history either mustor is likely to entail a spiritualization of mankind and a movement away fromthe present absorption with power and instinctual e ~ i s t e n c e . ~ part of thespiritualization process may be seen in the urgings of Lewis Mumford and ArthurKoestler, of Abraham Maslow and Sir Alister Hardy (and there are many more),that a humanized science be created which is res onsive to questions o f value

The ferment today is equally obvious. Some indicative publishing fgures

and meaning and to mans spiritual experiences.PO


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THEOCCULT TODAY 63113Whether contemporary occultisms involvement in this general search for

new consciousness, human potentials, and cosmic rootedness is fleeting or pro-found, it should be viewed from an historical perspective, such as that affordedby Meads comments. Ours is not the first occult wave of the century, muchless of Western civilization, nor is it likely to be the last. One should also keepin mind a sense of audience when considering the appeal of the occult. Aserious concern with occult belief systems can very well reflect a fundamentalquestioning of accepted values and a largely healthy sense of urgency in seekingout viable alternatives. In this case, the occult becomes a symbol of unlimitedpossibilities, a means of stimulating a sense of wonder, awe, and mystery, acatalyst for scientific, aesthetic, or religious creativity, and not a set of beliefsto be accepted literally. On the o ther hand, there is a sufficiently large bodyof autobiographical materials by witches, prophets, clairvoyants, astrologers,and others t o indicate that literal belief does in fact underlie the occultism ofmany practitioners and their most devoted clients. Still others, it must beassumed, explore the occult for a variety of other reasons: simple curiosity,the thrill of the mysterious, a sense of whimsy and playfulness, an escape fromfrustration and anxiety.

It would be extravagant and baseless, therefore, to conclude that with thecurrent occult revival we are witnessing a wholesale abandonment of reason anda remystification of the world ( to reverse Max Webers phrase). Reading ahoroscope or buying an occult book need not mean anything beyond the simpledesire for a diversion. Yet it seems equally foolish to agree with the historianKeith Thomas, in his otherwise groundbreaking Religion and the Decline ofMagic, that astrology, witchcraft, magical healing, divination, ancient prophecies,ghosts and fairies, are al l now rightly disdained by intelligent persons.l Cer-tainly such beliefs are not part of the value systems and world views we absorbthrough our cultural conditioning, and it is perhaps to this state of affairs thatThomas wishes to refer. Nevertheless, the occult in its myriad forms hasproved to be of more than passing interest to an astonishingly large number ofintelligent persons in this century alone, as several articles in this supplementdemonstrate.

As these comments suggest, our understanding of the occult, its nature,appeals, and functions, is still quite limited. There is no certainty whatsoeverabout the epistemological and ontological status of occult experiences. Ascultural phenomena, the occult interests of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies-the subject of this supplement-are probably less well understoodbecause so often ignored o r underestimated than those of earlier times andother civilizations. There is no t even agreement on a definition of occult oroccultism which is generally useful for scholarly purposes.broad view of the occult which could encompass mysticism, metaphysical or

In soliciting papers for this supplement, I deliberately adopted a very


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63214 J OURNAL OF POPULAR CULTUREspiritua l occultism (such as Theoso phy) , the occult arts and sciences (magic,divination, characterology, healing), Spiritualism, parapsychology, witchcraft,Satanism, religious syncretism, and the unsolved mysteries o f natu re (UFOs,sea serpen ts). Since popular interest easily shifts from one area to an oth er andthe historical interaction between them is bo th c omm onplace and co mp lex,each of these occult fields certain ly wa rrents inclusion. Th at no t all of the mare in fact rep resente d here is due no t to editorial oversight bu t to the limitationsof space and the availability of worth wh ile contrib utions .tributions which follow exhibit no less than four different approaches:sociological analysis, persona evaluation, historical-literary case study, andbibliographical. It shou ld occasion n o surprise, therefo re, tha t th e authorsconclusions are no t always in agreemen t. On th e level of sociological the or yand analysis, Marcello Truzzi provides a multi-dimensional fram ew ork fo runderstanding the occult in the broadest sense of the term. Truzzi asks theright questions, and his analysis of th e a uth ori ty o f occ ult claims is particularlyhelpful. More controversial, I believe, is his con ten tion t ha t an ano m alyparadigm is most l ikely the com mo n denom inator of a ll occult movements andactivities. Th at the occult em bodie s anomalies in the form o f knowledgeclaims which contradict generally accepted beliefs and established values,especially t ho se of the educ ated classes, is surely tru e fo r the period of thenineteenth and twen tieth centuries. It is no t clear, however, th at oc cult be-liefs were anom alous in this sense du ring the sixtee nth a nd early sevente enthcenturies.12

David Techters article o n psi advocates a fo urf old classification of occulttradition s with w hich I am in essential agreement. Indeed, at the 1 9 7 1 PopularCulture Association m eeting, for which his paper and mine o n M odernOccultism: A The ma tic Analysis (n ot included here) were indep ende ntlyprep ared, we were pleased to find how closely o ur analyses corresp ond ed.Working from distinctio ns based on differences of goal and training which areoften explicitly stated in occult li terature, Techter divides the occult in tospiritual unfo ldm ent (mysticism), occultism, Spiritualism, and parapsychology.(A further distinction, I am convinced, can be made within occultism b etw eenmetaphysical occultism and th e practice of the occult ar ts which th e formerwarns against.) He also provides us with an inf orm ed personal evaluation ofthe history of parapsychology and its prospects. Although inte rest in psiphenom ena a nd certain of the occu lt sciences continues to increase, Techterbelieves that parapsychology and especially Spiritualism and o ccultism facerather bleak futures.religions are am ong th e most formidable contenders for the position onceoccup ied in the public imagination by Spiritualism and Theoso phy . Needleman,

The occ ult can be studied, of course, fro m various angles. Th e eight con-

Th e systems of Asian mysticism which Jac ob Needleman calls th e new


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THE OCCULT TODAY 63315who is the author of the excellent The New Religions (Doubleday, 1970) andeditor of the Penguin Metaphysical Library, underscores the qualitative differ-ence between popular enthusiasm for these systems and the urgent demandswhich any genuine path of spiritual development necessarily entails. But healso asks us to think about the implications of the contrasting quality of re-sponse which these spiritual disciplines elicit from the receptive young andtheir less sensitive elders.earlier generations by means of historical-literary case studies. Russell Goldfarbconfronts the grande dame of modern metaphysical occultism, MadameBlavatsky, the inscrutable founder of Theosophy, and emerges with an ablebiographical sketch which also suggests something of the Theosophical impacton English and Irish literature. Benjamin Lee Whorf, the American pioneer oflinguistics, also felt the influence of Theosophy on both his personal values andlinguistic theories, as Peter Rollins reveals for the first time. His paper is furtherevidence of the need for a general assessment of the cultural role of occultismin modern times. Donald Thomas undertakes an analysis of the religioussyncretism of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a key figure in the developmentof racial ideology. Although Chamberlain was not an occultist, his religiousideas illustrate how syncretisms (of which occultism is frequently said to beone) and private universes can be direct responses to urgent social problems.

The final two papers are bibliographical. Donald Nugent examines recentwork on witchcraft, ancient, medieval, early modern, and contemporary, whileI survey historical and literary scholarship on the metaphysical occultism and,to a lesser degree, the occult sciences, Spiritualism, and Satanism of the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries. Together Nugent and I comment on nearly450 publications and offer assessments of the current state of scholarship.Clearly, the fascination of the occult is beginning to exercise its spell on theacademic mind.

The next three contributions all deal with the spiritual heterodoxy of

NOTES

1G. R. S. Mead, The Rising Psychic Tide, in his Quests Old and New(London: G. Bell, 1913), pp. 246, 236; originally published in Meads journal,The Quest, 3 ( A p d 1912), 401-421.21970: Some Surprises in Paperback Bestsellers, Publishers Weekly,199 (February 8 , 1971), 38-41. Siddhartha was the bestselling title for New


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63416 J OURNAL O F POPULAR CULTUREDirections in 1968, 1 969, and 1 970.

3Statem ent of Ownership, Management and Circulation, Fate, 20(January 1 967 ) , 16 0 (108, 536) ; 21 (January 1968) , 144 (116 , 274 ) ; 22(Ja nuary 19 69 ) , 144 (114 , 586 ) ; 2 3 ( Ja nuary 1970 ) , 144 (113 , 766 ) ; 24(January 1971), 160 (111 , 052 ) ; 25 (January 1 972 ) , 14 4 (106 , 691 ) .Times Book Review (Sep tember 28 , 196 9) , 42 .4Marcia Seligson, Publishing Enters the Age of Aquarius, N e w Y o rk

5What Prisoners Are Reading, The Am erican Scholar, 4 0 ( A u tu m n6See, e.g., Robert W. Ne ube rt, Parapsychology on t he Nations Cam puses,

197 1) , 701-707 .Psychic, 2 (July-August 19 70 ), 9-14; Margaret A. Blair, Med itation in th e SanFrancisco Bay Area: An Introduc tory Survey, Journal of TranspersonalPsychology, 2 (19 70) , 61-70; and Eleanor Criswell, Experimental YogaPsychology Course for College Studen ts: A Progress Re por t, Journal of Trans-personal Psycholog y, 2 (1970 ), 71-78.

7Respectively,Psychic , 1 (May-June 19 70 ), 17; 2 (July-August 19 70 ), 24;2 (June 1 971 ) , 37 .8Francoise Strachan , ed. , The Aquarian Guide to O ccult, Mys tical, Religious,Magical Lon don and Arou nd (London: Aquarian Press , 19 70 ).9Frank E. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1 96 5) , p. 15 9.10A n example is Abraham H. Maslow, The Psychology ofs c ie nc e: AReconnaissance (New York: Harper & Row , 196 6; Chicago: Gateway Editionspaperback, 1969).11Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline ofM ag ic (New York: CharlesScribners Sons, 19 7 1) , p. ix.1 2 0 n th is ques tion , see ib id . A detailed assessment of Keith Thomasswork and t ha t o f oth er historians who are applying anthropological, sociological,and psychological methods to the study of witchcraft may be fo und in Lawrence

Stones review essay, The Disench antm ent of th e W orld, N e w Y o r k R e v ie w ofBooks, 17 (December 2 , 19 71 ), 17-25.

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