Drawing Down the Moon (77 page)

The counterthrusts to these types of arguments came from a number of sources. Some writers, such as Roszak, saw the occult resurgence as, in part, a protest against a sterile technocratic ethic. Industrial society had produced its opposite: a yearning for the sacred, the communal, the spontaneous. Others, such as Edward Tiryakian and Mircea Eliade, saw the occult as providing, both historically and in the present, fresh images for many artistic and political movements. Esoteric culture, wrote Tiryakian, “with its fantastic wealth of imagery and symbolism, is multivalent in terms of the political expressions that can be derived from it.”
¹⁸
He observed that all kinds of groups from the Sinn Fein to the Nazis made extensive use of occult images. These ideas did not belong to reactionaries any more than they belong to progressives.

Both Tiryakian and Eliade mentioned symbolist poets and surrealist writers like André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard, all of whom were committed to radical politics as well as to occultism.
¹⁹
The entire surrealist movement seemed to speak directly against the arguments that occultism and magic were antipolitical per se. Breton and the surrealists spoke out strongly against what they considered to be the three prime evils: realism, industrial rationalism, and the bourgeois social order.
^y

Another writer who compared the growth of mysticism, particularly among young people, with the surrealist and Dadaist movements was Nathan Adler. He wrote that in both cases dreams, hallucinations, and chance were used as “an antidote to the increasing sterility of industrial and mercantile life.”
²⁰
He made a careful distinction between the surrealist movement and the group he was writing about—the youth culture of the early seventies—believing the latter was anti-intellectual. In my own experiences with Witches and Pagans I have come across very little anti-intellectualism.

Tiryakian wrote that the occult, now, as in the past, seems to function as a “seedbed,” a source of change and innovation, that ultimately affects the arts, the sciences, and politics. He noted that while it was customary to regard the occult as marginal, atavistic, an odd deviation from the modernization process, another way of viewing esoteric traditions was to see them as the source for new paradigms, catalysts for modernization that appear in both the “build-ups” and the “breakdowns” of history—in the Renaissance, for example, or during the waning of the Roman Empire.
²¹

As for Harris's charge that the growth of the occult leads to befuddlement, retreat, and reaction, Roszak countered with these words: “It is not transcendent experience that should be rejected but its invidious employment and attendant obfuscation of consciousness.” The real evil, he wrote, lies in “setting transcendence
against
the earth, the body, the city of man,
for the sake of protecting
criminal privilege.”
²²
Good magic, he maintained, is rather like good art. Bad magic and bad art simply mystify; good magic and good art lay open the mysteries for all.

Still another positive view saw the occult resurgence as a healthy refusal to be content with the finite. Harriet Whitehead, as we saw, wrote that this refusal was the result of a conviction that there are gaps and deficiencies in the Western mode of comprehending reality. The search and exploration of the occult was an attempt to get at the order that lies at the bottom of things, to discover the “really real.”
²³

Is occultism a retreat from the world? It must be said that few occultists, Pagans, and Witches spend much time debating this question (or, for that matter, reading these articles). But this debate did take place in the women's movement. As we have seen, a number of women disposed of the entire notion of a split between spiritual and material reality by simply saying that it was a mistaken notion born of patriarchal thinking. They saw ritual and magic as a connecting force, like art and poetry. If there was a necessity for art, why not for ritual? Artists were merely a bit more respectable these days than magicians and creators of rituals.

Some of the most interesting thoughts on contemporary occult movements have come from historian Mircea Eliade, whose more than twenty published works range from mythography to investigations of shamanism and Witchcraft. In 1976 the University of Chicago Press published a collection of Eliade's essays under the title
Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions,
one of the sanest books on these topics to appear in years. Three essays bear directly on the themes of this book. Two are considered here; a third was discussed in Chapter 4.

In “Cultural Fashion and History of Religion” Eliade investigated the extraordinary popularity in France of the magazine
Planète,
and of the philosophy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The arguments in this essay can easily be applied to most recent occult groups.
Planète
was started by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, two authors who became famous in 1961 with the publication of
Morning of the Magicians,
²⁴
a book that combined politics, occultism, science fact, and science fiction. It raised quite a furor in France and became the basis for much excited discussion in the United States, particularly within the counterculture.
Planète
was founded with money earned by the book. The magazine also contained a mixture of magic, science, politics, and speculation.

Eliade argued that in France, after the Algerian War, there was a “profound malaise among the intellectuals.” They had become tired of living in the “gloomy, tedious,” historical moment, but Sartre and other existentialist writers had taught French intellectuals that this was the only responsible thing to do.
Planète
presented a total contrast, offering a new, “optimistic and holistic outlook” in which the universe was mysterious and exciting, and in which occultism and science combined to create infinite possibilities. The world was no longer doomed to be absurd; human beings were no longer condemned to be estranged and useless. One was no longer committed to constant analysis of one's own existential situation; instead, one was committed to the infinite process of evolution.

Eliade argued that the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin became popular in France for similar reasons. Teilhard looked at the world from a cosmic viewpoint in which human history was a small part of an infinite progressive evolution.
^z
Eliade wrote that Teilhard's universe was “real, alive, meaningful, creative, sacred.” Teilhard, despite his Christian symbolism, was really a pantheist who ignored sin and evil and who viewed human and planetary evolution as progressive, optimistic, and infinite. Eliade wrote:

How did Eliade sum up the ideas of those people who read
Planète
with eagerness and found themselves interested in the ideas of Teilhard? These people rejected existentialism, were indifferent to history, exalted physical nature, and held ultimately
positive
feelings toward science and technology. What is more, their antihistoricism was not really a rejection of history but “a protest against the pessimism and nihilism of some recent historicists,” coupled with a “nostalgia for what might be called a macro-history—a planetary and, later, a cosmic history.”

Eliade echoed Lasch, but from the other side. The indifference to history produced an ultimate optimism as opposed to the survivalism born of desperation depicted by Lasch.

Eliade's essay “The Occult and the Modern World” focused more specifically on the history of occultism and its current popularity. After discussing the nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi, who was largely responsible for the vogue of occultism in France, Eliade wrote that the generation of French occultists that followed Levi wanted to regain humanity's spiritual perfection as it was “before the fall.” This occult movement “did not attract the attention of competent historians of ideas of the times but did fascinate a great number of important writers, from Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud to André Breton and some of the postsurrealist authors, such as René Daumal.”

The use of occult themes by these writers took one of two paths. Those who wrote before the second half of the nineteenth century, writers such as Balzac, Schiller, and Goethe, all “reflected a hope in a personal or collective
renovatio
—a mystical restoration of man's original dignity and powers.” The second and later path, taken by such writers as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Breton, was the use of occult themes as “a powerful weapon in their rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ideology.” Implicit in this rebellion was a rejection of Judeo-Christian values and the social and aesthetic sensibilities of the day.

Eliade felt that the current occult scene was distinguished from the past occult resurgence in certain important ways. The present occult explosion was “anticipated” by a new wave of scholarship and understandings made principally
not
by writers and artists, as in the previous era, but by historians of ideas. These contributions included the decoding of esoteric manuscripts found in the Dead Sea caves, new monographs on Jewish Gnosticism, new studies of Chinese, Indian, and Western alchemy, new investigations of the Hermetic traditions, and new research into shamanism and Witchcraft. This contemporary scholarship, according to Eliade, “disclosed the consistent religious meaning and cultural function of a great number of occult practices, beliefs, and theories, recorded in many civilizations, European and non-European alike, and
at all levels of culture.
”

He argued that new studies had changed the thinking of scholars on many questions, including the origins of Western European Witchcraft. A hundred years ago, most historians believed that European Witchcraft was the invention of the Inquisition. The covens, the reports of orgies, and all the other accusations were seen as either imaginary inventions or declarations obtained from the accused during torture. Then came Margaret Murray, who argued that Witchcraft was a pre-Christian fertility religion. Today, Murray's theories have been pretty much discredited, but Eliade argued that her assumption that “there existed a pre-Christian fertility cult and that specific survivals of this pagan cult were stigmatized during the Middle Ages as witchcraft” was correct—and had been borne out by more recent investigations of Indo-Tibetan and Romanian materials.

Eliade also wrote that the occult resurgence continued both of the older themes, the rebellion against Western religious values and the search for renewal. But, he contended, the most important aspect for all groups from astrologists to Satanists was the hope for an individual and collective
renovatio,
or renewal. “It is primarily the attraction of a
personal
initiation that explains the craze for the occult,” he wrote. And all these groups implied, “consciously or unconsciously, what I would call an optimistic evaluation of the human mode of being.”
²⁶

One of the most important early books to chart the rise of new religious movements in the United States was the 1974 Princeton University study
Religious Movements in Contemporary America.
Among the most unusual articles in this large volume is anthropologist Edward Moody's study of Satanism, “Magical Therapy: An Anthropological Investigation of Contemporary Satanism.”
^aa
Moody spent two years as a participant-observer at the Church of the Trapezoid, a branch of Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. Moody set out to answer the question, “Why do people become Satanists?” After two years he concluded that Satanists find that something they call “magic” works for them, that they accomplish many of the goals they set out to achieve. But
how
this magic works proved to be very complex.

From the start, Moody found himself beset by difficulties. He could not find any “traditional sociological pigeonhole” into which the Satanist could be placed. He found members who were “successful” in life and those who were “failures.” He found rich members and poor ones, representatives of all classes and political persuasions. The only characteristic common to all the members he observed was a behavioral trait that placed them outside the cultural “norm.” Many of them displayed a lack of knowledge of the “rules of the social game” and often felt unable to “make the system respond.”

Moody observed that magic training for the new Satanist recruit was a combination of many practical skills designed to build up the ego and lessen feelings of guilt and anxiety. The techniques and rituals were a combination of psychodrama, tips on social manners, advice on how to make oneself more attractive, and techniques to strengthen confidence.