Word: occultism
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...reformatory in Hutchinson might have shivered a bit when they learned the news: a self-proclaimed witch was in the prison. He was not a convict but Robert J. Williams, 45, one of the three staff psychologists. Williams is a member of what he calls the Gardnerian sect, an occult paganistic group that worships a two-headed, male-female godhead and performs some of its ceremonies in the nude (and refers to both male and female mem bers as witches). After the Wichita Eagle and the Beacon ran the story last November, Superintendent Kenneth Oliver was not exactly bewitched...
...preoccupation with the occult that is currently sweeping all segments of society may well presage a new age-a dark...
Others are turning to fundamentalist churches like the Southern Baptist Convention. New York Rabbi Balfour Brickner explains: "People are desperately looking for something to cling to when all other models and molds have been shattered." Still others seek relief in the occult. "Magic and the occult can explain the unanswerable and give the person a sense of control," says Drexel Institute Sociologist Barbara Hornum...
Meantime, from Aspen, Colo., where he is at work on "another theological thriller," The Exorcist's author, William Peter Blatty, grumbled: "I'm sick of hearing that the movie is a success because of a rediscovery of the occult. A thousand or more books have been written on the occult in the last ten years-they've each sold about ten copies." Blatty acknowledges that The Exorcist was plagued by a "series of disasters": halfway through the filming, fire destroyed the set, and the man who was playing the director died. But he notes: "There has been...
...insights-one that works a spell of continual, mounting anxiety. It concerns the supernatural and has an eerie, dreadful power, but it is not simply a scare show; it is in the tradition of The Turn of the Screw, not The Exorcist. Don't Look Now uses the occult and the inexplicable as Henry James did: to penetrate the subconscious, to materialize phantoms from the psyche...