Word: occult
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...weekly tabloid's gory old days. The paper's new day is something else. In a total turnabout, the Enquirer has banished cannibalism, sadism and sick sex in favor of a blend of upbeat success stories, gossip by and about celebrities, plus an overdose of the occult and the quasiscientific. The switch to a kind of respectability has had spectacular results. Circulation, stalled at about 1,000,000 at the height of the Enquirer's grisly period a few years ago, has risen to 2,600,000 and is still climbing...
...problems of overpopulation, war, famine, racism or crime are to be solved, rational processes will solve them. Those who squander their mental energies upon occult matters, such as astrology, tend as a class to depend upon the technologists and rationalists. I fear that if the present trend continues, our society will evolve toward exquisite dependency upon a dangerously small percentage of our members who remain in the rationalist camp. Should this come to pass, I fear that within a generation we would return to 30-vear life expectancies, rotten teeth and digging in the dirt with sticks for our food...
Recently the comics have discovered yet another field-a mixture of science fiction and the occult that lies somewhere beyond Consciousness III. In a comic book called The New Gods, for example, the forces of the good, the beautiful, under-30s, battle the forces of evil, the ugly militarists of Apokolips, in weird sequences that look and read like nightmares. Whatever they are doing, American comics, both the books and the strips, are full of life. In their 75th year, they are bursting-WUMP, BOMP, OOF! and ZAP!-from the page in a dozen new directions...
...Charlie was the logical extension of the Marlboro man, the "one who had won what's never been won," as Bob Dylan said in another context, then a number of occult societies operating in California at that time were the advertising geniuses. The three main ones that Sanders mentions are the Process Church of the Final Judgement (better known to Cambridge residents as just "The Process."); the Solar Lodge of the Ordo Temple Orientis, who drink blood, hate blacks, and religiously indulge in sado-sodo sex and magic; and the Kirke Order of Dog Blood, which means just what...
...called Manson family...I became a data addict...Day and night I roamed Los Angeles gathering data...Naturally my path crossed many others whose activities were not directly involved in family life and death but who were nevertheless weird beyond weird. Particularly in the areas of occult groups I encountered the spiritually wounded: drinkers of dog blood, the video-bugger crowd, people who hang rotting goats' heads up in their kitchens, people who rent corpses for their parties, victimizers of every persuasion ...The probability that uncaught murderers--plus groups who commit human sacrifice and from whom the family drew ideas...