Word: occultism
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Some prefer literature to current events. Albert B. Lord, Porter Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, reads "a variety of things, but at the moment I'm reading some Bulgarian short stories partly because of a paper I'm writing on fantasy and the occult." That's fine for a scholarly mood, but for light reading, Lord likes "mostly detective stories--occasionally science fiction...
Down every cobblestone street lie irrelevancies and distortions. The radicals are never identified: Holmes, who traditionally loathes the occult, wastes precious minutes .with a psychic (Donald Sutherland), and the conspirators are finally un masked as a pack of sanguinary Freemasons whose connections with power turn out to be a royal pain...
This is certainly so in The Crucifer of Blood. The play is ostensibly about a nasty case solved by Sherlock Holmes (Paxton Whitehead) with his customarily occult intelligence - a fancifully distorted version of Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four. What Crucifer is actually about is Holmes' study, a bibliophile's opulent dream, though Holmes is so busy shooting up cocaine that it is questionable whether he could lift a book. It is also about an opium den so suggestive of for bidden and abandoned pleasures that it might serve as ad copy for Yves Saint...
...dowsing is reaching. In the clapboard churches and meeting halls, the talk is all about body auras, universal grids, Jastram's entities, and illnesses that seem beyond the ministrations of ordinary medicine. At the dowsing convention headquarters in the Danville town hall, piles of books on the occult are offered for sale, from the works of Edgar Cayce to studies of UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. Dowsing buffs can also buy every kind of tool, from little plastic rods (at $1 a pair) to miraculous electronic black boxes (price: $65) that purportedly "discharge toxic vibrations from your mind, emotions...
...some extent, the public's passion for black holes is part of the faddish craze for the likes of parapsychology, the occult, UFOs, thinking plants, von Daniken and other pseudoscientific hokum. Says one astrophysicist: "For some people, black holes seem to be the Bermuda Triangles of space...