[Opinion] Academic Rigor in Occult Texts

[Xenophon]

Those books are more about describing certain phenomena in the NewAge scene and the occulture, less about proving or disproving doctrines. Academics have become very respectful towards magic, and nobody uses the S-word (superstition) anymore.

Got it. I see your point.

Post automatically merged: Jul 3, 2024

This is another reason why I love my Kindle. You click on the footnote marker, it takes you to the footnote, you read the footnote, you close the footnote and then carry on

Though you mentioned you were reading the Red Book. There Jung (or his editors) put 300+ footnotes at the end of each main division of the book. You can save that for the end of each section and it's almost like another chapter. (Jung has any number of interesting insights; I don't find his prose to follow any particular line of reasoning, so disjunct footnotes are no more meandering than the text they support.)

 

[Shade]

Okay, I know I'm probably the odd man out here, but why the F*** do most "Occult" texts not reference other historical documents/other texts/etc in a more academic method, or hell, even in a slight "By the by, this is expanded upon in x text from 18-whatever". Like I'm not looking for "OH yeah, by the way, Richard Bigly did this on his youtube channel and you can SEE the octarine light spewing from his fingertips!" BUT at least be like "hey, so this idea that I'm talking about is actually talked about in this book I read a decade ago and they offer xyz opinion, however I differ in abc" etc.

Ooo I know why in my case… 1) multiple head injuries, Memory not so good plus an 8 year break, everything seems like a refresher course, I still know my own system, basic things some more advanced because I never stopped what worked for me, I was always concerned with the why and how. Not the who and where, so I didn’t even try to retain the later info for better or worse.

As for authors and those trying to teach… idk what their excuse is.