The Occult Tradition by David S Katz

Who are you calling trashy and sensationalist?

Much of what we can call the "history of the occult" is absent from this book. Central players like Rudolf Steiner, Aleister Crowley and GI Gurdjieff warrant only a namecheck, and in the case of Steiner and Gurdjieff, are misrepresented. Gurdjieff was not a "19th-century occultist;" he only came to public awareness in the 1920s, and his earliest appearance as an esoteric teacher was well within the 20th century. The home of Steiner's spiritual movement in Switzerland is Dornach, not "Dorlach"; a typo, sure, but it should have been caught. Katz unquestioningly repeats the usual account of Madame Blavatsky's "exposure" as a fraudulent medium, failing to relate that the original report, in 1885, by Richard Hodgson, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, was itself rejected as seriously flawed by the SPR a century later. Katz devotes several pages to cranky proto-Nazi occultists (a standard trope of debunkers), yet C G Jung, who wrote volumes on Gnosticism and alchemy, and more or less made the occult and the paranormal respectable areas of inquiry, is tossed a paragraph, within which, nevertheless, Katz manages to jam all the myths about Jung's supposed racism. In doing this, Katz bases his account on Richard Noll's controversial (and not a wee bit sensational) work The Jung Cult, a study that has itself been brought into question. Reading Katz, however, you wouldn't know it.

In the same way, informing us repeatedly of the many 19th-century mediums who were "outed", Katz fails to mention that the most celebrated of all, Daniel Dunglas Home, was never shown to be a fraud, and that the eye-witness accounts of his "miracles" were never refuted. Parsimoniously, Katz devotes only a sentence or two to main characters like Eliphas Levi, who practically started "occultism" as we know it, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, clearly the most well known magical society of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Allen Kardec, whose books on spiritism form the basis of a popular religion in Brazil.

Equally annoying is Katz's condescending tone when speaking of people like the philosopher and psychologist William James, who wrote incisively about mysticism, altered states of consciousness, conversion, the paranormal and other occult subjects, including the possibility of life after death. Had he bothered to include him, Katz would probably have taken the same tack with another influential philosopher, Henri Bergson, like James a president of the SPR and a rigorous investigator of the occult. Bergson, however, isn't even mentioned.

Nevertheless, there is some interesting stuff. Katz's account of Isaac Newton's biblical exegesis shows that the father of modern science was a dab hand at the occult sciences too. There's also Mark Hofmann's murderous forgeries of Mormon scripture, and the centrality of Fundamentalism (by definition Christian) to American policy in the Middle East. This is Katz's real subject: religious eccentrics. These sections partly make up for the rest of the book, but only partly. No, if you want to know how some of academia sees the occult, take a look. But if you want a real history of the thing, there are better ones.