Origins of the Occult

Introduction to a new book

I am writing a new book based on Secret Histories and Spiritual Revolutions, my recent course on the history of the Western hermetic tradition. This is my introduction. I will publish the book in irregular installments via this newsletter. Please let me know what you think in the comments.

As the religious historian Mircea Eliade explored in his 1974 essay, “The Occult and the Modern World”, the word “occult” was first coined in the 16th Century. It meant what is “not apprehended, or not apprehensible, by the mind; beyond the range of understanding or of ordinary knowledge.” Later on, it gained another meaning, identifying “those ancient and medieval reputed sciences, held to involve the knowledge or use of agencies of a secret and mysterious nature (as magic, alchemy, astrology, theosophy).” At the most basic level, “occult” seems synonymous with hidden — but the occult is, as we will explore, a secret often hidden in plain sight.

Eliade sought the roots of  the “craze for the occult” that had overtaken the young people of his day. It could be explained, he believed, by “the attraction of a personal initiation… As is well known, Christianity rejected the mystery-religion type of secret initiation.” Occult initiation “confers a new status on the adept; he feels that he is somehow “elected,” singled out from the anonymous and lonely crowd. Moreover, in most of the occult circles, initiation also has a superpersonal function, for every new adept is supposed to contribute to the renovatio of the world.”

Eliade’s characterization remains accurate. In fact, as I found while researching my first book, almost all cultures around the world, with the glaring exception of modern industrial society, practiced some form of initiation. The essential function of initiatory rituals is to force a direct experience of a non-ordinary or transpersonal state of consciousness. The candidate attains this by undergoing a particular set of ordeals that may include fasting, dark retreats, walkabouts, ingesting visionary plants, and so on. In these societies, a person (particularly true for young men, as women are considered partly initiation by nature) would not be seen as a mature adult until they had passed through the transpersonal gateway.

Modern and archaic approaches to knowledge of the otherworld and spiritual power.

First comes direct experience; then the myriad ways one can understand and interpret such an experience. I define occultism as a domain of knowledge and an experiential path of inquiry, related to other categories such as the psychical, paranormal, mystical, supernatural, and sacred. Since the beginning of Christianity, modern movements of occultism in the Anglo-European world have sought to devise new systems of initiation while providing new interpretative frameworks for understanding these categories — vast domains of human experience that scientism dismisses as worthless. Over many centuries, the establishment has resisted — at times violently rejected — these efforts.

Occult philosophy posits that our world is shaped and guided by invisible, or super-sensible, forces.