Word: occult
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...Alchemy. In a commercial sense, occultists seem to have discovered what alchemists sought for centuries: the ability to turn base materials into gold. The field even has its own monthly magazine, the Occult Trade Journal. Among the "marketing" reports that appeared in one recent issue is an article about Pan Am's new $629 "Psychic Tour" of Great Britain, including a visit to a psychic healing center, a seance, and a day at Stonehenge with the chief of Britain's Most Ancient Order of Druids. Each tourist receives his own astro-numerology chart, and flight dates are astrologically plotted...
...trip to Europe?especially Great Britain?would be right in keeping with the current boom. England is experiencing such a resurgence of witchcraft and other occult dabbling that an ecumenical commission of Anglicans and Roman Catholics recently recommended that each diocese appoint an official exorcist to drive out demons. In France, a popular seer named Madame Soleil gives weekday advice on radio, and rumors say that Black Masses are being performed in Paris and Lyons...
German Journalist Horst Knaut estimates that at least 3,000,000 West Germans subscribe to some form of the occult, and perhaps 7,000,000 more "sympathize with the secret sciences." Staid Switzerland abounds with oddball sects, including one in which a supposedly "possessed" girl was tortured to death a few years ago. In Italy, it is not so much the quantity as the quality of occultism that has changed. Long a part of Italy's superstitious southern peasant culture, occultism has moved north to the industrialists, the doctors and lawyers of the affluent upper class...
Author Owen Rachleff (The Occult Conceit), who teaches a course called Witchcraft, Magic and Astrology at New York University, takes a dim view of the whole movement. "Most occultniks," says Rachleff, "are either frauds of the intellectual and/or financial variety, or disturbed individuals who frequently mistake psychosis for psychic phenomena." Yet for all its trivial manifestations in tea-leaf readings and ritual gewgaws, for all the outright nuts and charlatans it attracts, occultism cannot be dismissed as mere fakery or faddishness. Clearly, it is born of a religious impulse and in many cases it becomes in effect a substitute faith...
Much of the occult, after...