Thanks so much, LuCid! I offered up a few topics that I could share something on with you all and LuCid chose one... and then I went another direction but hopefully some of you will find it raises some questions for you. Below is a short essay I prepared specially for this forum. Please let me know your thoughts.
Occultism and Elitism
Years ago I was at my annual cultural studies conference presenting in the religion section and I was on a panel with a person I presumed was a graduate student. He was arguing that esotericism has always been linked up with the elite. I was polite and gently pushed him to consider counter examples from the predominantly middle-class American spiritualist movement to the various iterations of the New-Age-inspired UFO and cryptid believers who span all strata of economic and social class. In fact, I have come to understand occultism as generally opposed to mainstream if not elite cultural values. Occult thought, which tends to bridge the spiritual and empirical worlds in ways that echo ancient and indigenous belief systems, has been stigmatized by purists who define the dominant culture. Traditional religion which is no longer hegemonic or ubiquitous but never-the-less remains powerful, tends to reject the this-worldly aim of magical endeavors. Atheistic scientism (a belief that science is the only valid source of truth) has no patience for the intervention of non-material entities in the material world.
In pre-Christian days, this kind of thinking, overlapping the spiritual with the physical, was not an outsider perspective. Or so scholars tend to think. Jesus of Nazareth performed miracles here on this earth and was one of a class of healers and miracle workers including Apolonius of Tyana who went around curing lepers and transmutating liquids. Before Christ, there were the Babylonians and the Celtic Druids and the Romans and Greeks. Long after Christ, in non-Western contexts, these beliefs persisted at Japanese Shinto shrines and Mayan temples and among traditional African and Chinese religious believers among others. But Europe began the long process of first segregating magic under the roof of the Catholic Church and then banishing it entirely from spiritual life with the rise of Protestantism.
Occultism, as a modern force borne out of the rise of scientism, has tended to define itself against this tradition. Wouter Hanegraaf traces the progress of occultism from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the New Age. Certainly, it has found its way into twenty-first century phenomena as well via UFOs, social media, and quasi-religious speculations about consciousness particularly in relation to machines. Looking back, occultists have tended to select outsiders beginning with the Gnostics and continuing on through the Rosicrucians and Renaissance magicians, astrologers, and alchemists as their ancestors. What these groups have in common is a propensity for unfettered thought that, while not necessarily blasphemous, often pushed against what was considered acceptable from a mainstream perspective. The Rosicrucians, like many alchemists before them, published under pseudonyms and wrote cryptically about the joining of the masculine and feminine in a “chymical wedding.” Alchemists and hermeticists with their speculations about the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm not to mention the presence of the deity within matter challenged Church dogma. Albertus Magnus, one of the most learned and respected German alchemists of the fifteenth century, wasn't canonized until 1931 despite campaigns by the friars of his order because he was suspected of practicing necromancy. He was also accused of dressing like a woman to learn the craft of the midwife so that he could practice the sexual magic of love potions, abortafacients, and contraceptives.
This is not to suggest that modern occultism had no relationship with the elite. Certainly, prominent leaders of the theosophical movement from Helena Blavatsky to Annie Besant and even Krishnamurti had wealthy patrons who supported their work. Blavatsky was a poor Ukrainian immigrant, making paper flowers for a living, before she met Henry Olcott. She went on to become the center point of an international movement paid for by countesses and businessmen and members of India's colonialist British upper class. At the same time, Blavatsky was a virulent critic of establishment Christianity and was suspected of raising anti-British sentiment among the occupied populace of India (which she most certainly endeavored to do). Significantly, Blavatsky was not supported by mainstream elites but freethinking elites like the Countess of Caithness who was known to provide financial support for spiritualist mediums persecuted in American courts by civil trials that accused them of fraud.
After Blavatsky came the most self-consciously elite of the history of occultism: the Order of the Golden Dawn. These ritual magicians, inspired in part by the example of the Freemasons, attempted to create a secret progression of rites that would endow members with supernatural ability. They, in turn, gave rise to Aleister Crowley, who plowed them down and established a public-facing career not unlike Helena Blavatsky's. It is significant that Blavatsky and Crowley, arguably the two most prominent names in the history of modern occultism, were concerned with disseminating occult secrets to the general public. The occult or esoteric is hidden by definition but Blavatsky and Crowley wanted to shed light on these truths and share them with the world through voluminous publishing careers. They hoped to make occultism mainstream, understanding all the while that they were articulating an outsider philosophy about the power of ascended masters or the ritual invocation of non-material entities. The general public wasn't ready for them but they wanted these ideas to be available to anyone who was. The organizations that grew out of their publications could be petty, political, and hierarchical, but the principle on which they were founded was the democratization of magical truth.
The New Age—a loose collection of belief systems including channeling and manifesting—updated Blavatsky and Crowley for the modern age in ways that should not surprise us and have largely persisted into the twenty-first century. New Age belief takes two separate but interrelated forms. There are the expensive and potentially abusive cults—Twin Flame, NXIVM, and even Bikram Yoga—and then there is the mass movement. The organizations tend to appeal to upper middle class and wealthy patrons who can afford to spend liberally on the paywalled services of the cult leader. The mass movement attempts to share tips and tricks for a magical way of being for little more than the price of a book or the time scrolling through “witch tok.” JZ Knight, who led expensive specialized classes and appeared on Merv Griffin, was a hybrid of these, sitting at the nexus of the New Age's blossoming into full fruit. Early progenitors of the mass movement included a host of Wiccan and Neo-pagan writers, do-it-yourself psychic mediums, and even chaos magicians. We must not forget that postmodernism's most iconic magical practice was founded in part by an artist, Austin Spare, who lived in a basement apartment and liked nothing more than to sketch the homeless. For their part, Genesis P. Orridge and Thee Temple of Psychick Youth were mostly a mail-order movement that never came close to the vast bureaucracy of the theosophists and remained an accessible practice for most regular chaotes.
I can't help but reflect on our current culture of elitism in this context. The obsession among a small subset of billionaires (and at least one near-trillionaire) revolves around machine consciousness; the occult notion that computer engineers can best Frankenstein by creating a conscious being with the capacity to survive the pitchfork-weilding hordes. They are driven by the fantasy (and greed and even lust) for a conscious computer. A small crew of philosophers on the tech titans' payroll labor to articulate what it would mean for the machine to think for itself and dictate a moral code to it like so many latterday Asimovs. In America (and perhaps increasingly in China as well) this is happening against the background of mass dissent. Science functions independent of a system of meaning; seeking to describe the empirical world without any concern for why it exists. Demons and golems have been conjured across the ages, but Frankenstein had the unique problem of giving life to a creature without a particular purpose beyond breathing. Occultism at its best is an effort to understand the sublimest levels of consciousness and subconsciousness. This so-called quest for machine consciousness is happening against a background devoid of curiousity about the consciousness itself. Having abandoned most any effort to understand what the vast algorithm is doing in its millions of calculations, the elite are focused on results; what it can do and not why. There is nothing any philosopher, priest, or magician can do in such an environment. But the tech elite would not be the first to underestimate the demons they produce by failing to think deeply about their means and motives; it's a tale as old as Solomon.
Is esotericism and occultism elite? Sometimes. But not by definition. A current of mass organizing for consciousness-raising across the globe runs through centuries of occult thought that cannot be ignored. Spiritualist mediums, still some of the most famous practitioners of occult ability in the modern world, were historically farm girls who woke up one day to discover a particular penchant for otherworldy intuition. They were the very definition of the disenfranchised, commanding attention in part for their outsider status. The spirits could only persuasively speak through a medium who lacked the benefit of an education; the better to prove that they were supernaturally inspired. It is not a far cry from these girls to the psychonauts and neo-shamans and chaos magicians of today who self-consciously occupy a place outside of accepted mainstream thought in order to explore and articulate the possibility of worlds beyond.
