Word: occult
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...whys and wherefores of this surprising upturn, which involved a fifty per cent jump over last year's figure, nobody knows. Back in the tinselled 'twenties, when Economics, Communism, and Astrology were relegated to the same class as occult sciences, English was a perennial favorite. Who wanted to learn about money? Everyone had plenty. And there were Bliss Perry and Copey and Kirsopp Lake and Kitty and John L. Lowes bubbling over with words of wisdom. They played to standing room only...
...monkey." Such Collier characters naturally gravitate into the company of demons, nymphs and other undesirable elements. They have only to approach a secondhand shop, zoo, greenhouse or midnight bridge when the fictitious rational world dissolves and Author Collier is at home among the fierce realities of the occult. Even a huge department store, in two tales, becomes a faery land forlorn...
...further explained that in times of depression or war, when moral habits are weakened, belief in the occult increases. Pitirim A. Sorokin, professor of Sociology, supported this view by declaring last night that in times of disintegration of society, like the present and like the time of the decay of the Roman Empire, a growing interest in astrology is likely to be one of the manifestations of the social and cultural disintegration...
Twelve years ago Madre Conchita was arrested, charged with exerting an occult influence over the assassin who shot down Catholic-hounding President-elect General Don Alvaro Obregon. She was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment in the grim penal colony on the Tres Marias Islands. With gentle, biblical good spirits she went to work as nurse, teacher and confidante. Her fame spread throughout her country...
Willie Seabrook is the Richard Halliburton of the occult. The Magic Island credulously expounded Haitian voodoo, introduced "zombi" into U. S. speech. Adventures in Arabia found Seabrook among the whirling dervishes, learning to become a trance mystic. Jungle Ways presented him studying magic on the Ivory Coast, photographing phallic monuments, eating human flesh ("like good, fully developed veal"). Asylum was a frank account of another weird region: a New York insane asylum where he was cured of dipsomania...