Word: occultations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...result has been a soft flirtation with the world of the occult. Bach began by skulking into occult bookstores and sampling the fare. "It took nerve," he recalls, "just to go in one of those places." Since then he has tried a few mediums, but found "all that crystal-ball stuff, spirit guides, music and the darkened rooms" hard to take. Recently, though, he discovered Jane Roberts, a poet and science-fiction writer, who since 1963 has been a conduit for the spoken words of a personality called Seth. "It's all done in daylight," says
SPIRITUALISM. Spiritualists are often categorized merely as mediums to contact the "other side," as holders of seances to call up some departed spirit. In fact, that is only one of their functions. General practitioners of the occult, spiritualists often spend as much or more time healing and counseling as they do holding séances...
...investigator, claiming to have communicated with his dead son with the aid of the minister-medium the Rev. Arthur Ford. Ford and other, somewhat less flamboyant Protestant ministers had even earlier formed a group known as the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship to open a bridge between traditional Christianity and the occult. For evangelicals and fundamentalists, on the other hand, nearly every aspect of the occult still remains a demonic danger, from ouija-board prophecy to the evocation of a personal and malevolent Satan. Some fundamental ists even attribute every non-Christian spiritual movement to the inspiration of demons...
Philosopher Huston Smith of Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of many authorities who see the occult revival as a response to the failure of science and reason, a movement spurred by the conviction that technology has failed to make the world better, as Americans long believed it would. Dean J. Stillson Judah of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley suggests that today's young people "cannot live as so many of us do, without the depth of myth and symbol and the richness of mysticism that existed before the rise of the empirical scientific attitude...
Sociologist Truzzi argues somewhat similarly in a recent issue of the Sociological Quarterly. "If we fully believed in demons," Truzzi writes, "we certainly would not want to call them up." For most occultists, he says, the occult arts and practices are just a form of "pop religion," more healthy than dangerous. "It shows a playful contempt for what was once viewed seriously by many, and still is by some." Mass interest in the occult indicates "a kind of victory over the supernatural, a demystification of what were once fearful and threatening cultural elements. What were once dark secrets known only...