The One Occult Project that’s Indispensable
Getting from the consumer’s small-minded selfishness to a heroic far-future mindset
Compared to science and engineering, occult endeavours like Theosophy, astrology, Wicca, New Age spirituality, and the related cults and secret societies seem at first like woefully misbegotten schemes.
Science and industry work, whereas occult ideas and practices are so many lunacies and games of self-deception.
But this pragmatic question of workability is intriguing because it leaves open the possibility of what we might call “inner techniques” that fall outside science’s ambit.
Roughly speaking, there are outer and inner techniques, as in those that deliberately transform either the world outside us or some part of ourselves or our society. Science specializes in explaining nature, and most technologies apply those theories to cultivate the wilderness.
Psychology, medicine, and therapy, however, provide techniques to alter our mindsets or to heal our bodies, too. But here the question of values arises: science and Western medicine are based on secular humanistic ideals that revere the rationally autonomous individual, and that promote capitalism, consumerism, and democracy to ensure that our species dominates nature — possibly in a self-destructive, tragically heroic fashion.
The inner techniques of occult movements hold out some alternative ideals, which is why they look strange to mainstream Western eyes. Of course, many of these movements may also be bogus and wrongheaded, but they’d still serve as experiments in the existential contexts of deciding how we ought to live, and of preparing us to pursue some worthy collective endeavour.
“Occult” means hidden, and the occultist is often associated with the magician who supposedly has supernatural powers. Tales of that kind of magic are likely exoteric exaggerations, the primary point of occultism being the same as that of ancient secret societies, like the Eleusinian Mysteries.
What’s hidden from ordinary view has always been consciousness itself. Consciousness is the seemingly immaterial anomaly in nature, the source of our anti-natural improvements on the wilderness with our panoply of artifacts. What’s hidden from the five outer senses is our most precious inner being.
The occultist’s question, then, which is the same as the existentialist’s, is what we should be doing with our conscious awareness. What’s the best role of people in nature?
The natural sciences can’t answer that question, nor can scientific medicine or therapy. Rather, science can test methods of achieving certain goals, but assessing those goals is subject to philosophical, religious, or artistic inspiration.
What’s also hidden from view are the countercultures or secret societies that carry on these odd experiments with unpopular, perhaps existentially elevated lifestyles.
Evidently, these occult practices build on our instinctive facility with tribal initiations. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors lived largely as nomadic hunter-gatherers, for whom group cohesion was paramount. Eventually, prehistoric people found religious significance in their social practices and in the seeming anomaly of their self-awareness.
What kind of group, though, is fit for enlightened late-modernists? The problem is that this later seeker isn’t easily impressed; on the contrary, he or she is liable to be jaded about the prospects of social belonging or progress. After all, cults are notorious for their exploitations and absurdities.
But cults generally work nevertheless — not in gaining magical powers over nature, but in making their members feel at home in the world and in assigning them subjectively meaningful life projects. Cults compete, then, not so much with scientific theories but with the institutions of capitalism and consumerism.
Some occult questions for our time, therefore, are whether it’s wise to identify with our corporate or other First World roles, and whether consumerism itself is a worthy culture. Again, these are occult, taboo questions in that they’re hidden from mainstream thought because they threaten wealthy civilizations with subversive implications.
Most of us are initiated into capitalist culture when we’re children. We grow up being taught to respect private property, and we marvel at reports of the luxuries of the affluent class. Our culturally intended aspiration is plain: to work hard and to attempt to strike it rich so we can live “the good life.” The materialist ideology is sold far and wide by mainstream institutions, from Hollywood and the press to democratic governments and the legal enforcement of the liberal social order.
Modern wars have been fought over how to organize enlightened, post-medieval societies. Indeed, occultism is tainted by its associations with Nazi fascism since that society operated as a giant cult and the Nazi leaders indulged in esoteric fantasies to glorify their imperialism.
But liberalism could just as easily be considered tainted by its roles in the looming environmental catastrophes, in the sixth mass extinction, and in the opioid and men’s health crises. There’s a global authoritarian backlash against neoliberalism which arguably has occult significance, in the forgoing terms. Just the fact that Donald Trump is a credible contender for US president in 2024 is an astonishing indictment of mainstream Democratic liberalism, regardless of what happens in that election.
The stigma applied to occult topics is a shame, however lame and uninspiring many of these cultish experiments may be. Indeed, we can dismiss the pseudoscientific hoaxes, and turn to the occult implications of science fiction, in asking what personal and social changes of mindset would be needed to reach the kind of utopia that those authors envision. It’s easier to speculate on the improvements of technology we’d need to live in other star systems, but what about the required changes to how we think and to what we fear and desire?
An occult advocacy of that inner revolution, with its distinctive techniques wouldn’t seem so foolish.
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