Word: rachleff
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Dates: during 1972-1972
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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...
...designed to celebrate life. Kelly, 31, a former Roman Catholic who is a manuscript editor of physics textbooks, generally follows a variety of witchcraft called Gardnerian, after a retired British customs official, Gerald Gardner, who formulated it in England in the 1940s. Gardnerian witchcraft is what Occult Debunker Owen Rachleff calls "library witchcraft": it seems to have been largely concocted from books, perhaps combined with some rudimentary witchcraft practices of existing covens in the Hampshire hills. Kelly himself is one of the founders of a Gardnerian spin-off called the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn...
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