“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”
-from Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley
Mitch Horowitz is fascinated by the soul. To track its potential and secrets, he’s journeyed high and low, interrogating the superlunary sphere as well as–to paraphrase Charles Godfrey Leland– the “inner realm of shadows”. Horowitz has doggedly mapped occult milieus for years, and his exegeses, which have been feted both outside and beyond the pronaos, are a perfect showcase of his wide, out-of-the-way learning and commitment to the old adage of the alchemists: ora et labora.
Set for release in June this year, Horowitz’s latest book, Modern Occultism: History, Theory, and Practice, is a continuation of his tireless quest to understand and convey the longue durée impact of occult ideas on modernity.
Horowitz recently spoke to The Thinker’s Garden about a variety of subjects related to his extensive study of esotericism.
The Custodian: In your decades-long career as a scholar of and writer on esoteric currents, has there been a particular individual or school of thought to which you’ve mostly been drawn? Does this person or school feature in your new book?
Mitch Horowitz: I’ve probably been most drawn to the British-Barbadian mystic Neville Goddard (1905-1972). Neville could be considered an extreme idealist—he taught that everything you experience is the outpicturing of your emotionalised thoughts. His system is at once the simplest and most radical I’ve ever encountered. Of course, one immediately wants to argue with it, punch holes in it. But Neville proved capable of expressing his key principle in more than ten books and thousands of lectures with utter persuasiveness and freshness each time he restated it.
I wrestle deeply with Neville’s thought system: I accept nothing wholesale; I both embrace and question it. Neville figures prominently in my book Daydream Believer (2022) and in my book-in-progress Modern Occultism because he proved one of the most elegant and subtly influential independent spiritual voices of the twentieth century and today.
C: To paraphrase Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “Man’s first initiation begins in trance.” Creating and sharing altered states of consciousness have been key aspects of mysticism and religion down to the days of Ancient Greece and Egypt. Could you tell us more about the importance of dreaming and trance in the development of modern occultism?
MH: In the early twentieth century, a French mind theorist named Émile Coué (1857-1926) popularised a famous mantra, “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” Critics mocked his method for its singsong simplicity. But the radicalism appeared in how Coué prescribed using it, which is during the exquisitely relaxed trance state you experience just before drifting to sleep at night and waking in the morning. Sleep researchers call this hypnagogia. It is, in effect, “prime time” for reprogramming the psyche and for anomalous transfers of information or ESP. This last reference is affirmed by decades of academic psychical research.
Coué’s innovations are also supported in twenty-first century placebo studies and sleep research, which I write about in Daydream Believer and elsewhere. The irony is that most clinicians haven’t heard of him—Harvard placebo researcher Ted Kaptchuk is a notable exception—even though Coué displayed an early instinct for several current clinical findings. The trance state is referenced throughout spiritual and psychological literature and remains an area of active study among neuroscientists. It’s the closest we come, naturally and easily, to what might be considered a transcendent frame of mind.
C: Which occult ideas in your view have had the most liberating (mentally and socially) impact on modern-day society?
MH: I frankly admire the groundwork laid by British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) in his short text The Book of the Law, which he first recorded in 1904. Crowley later wrote in his introduction, “Every man and every woman is a star.” Nothing could be more challenging to centuries of servile or self-denying religious thought. Whatever objections readers have to Crowley personally, and I have my own, he sounded an unforgettable note of the independence of the occult search and the value of the individual seeker.
I also admire the New Thought or positive-mind tradition for the simple reason that it gave the seeker articles of personal search without any need for affiliation. I am deeply critical of that tradition, too—and I try to address some of its gaps and shortcomings, including the failure to provide a theology of suffering. But there is no question that New Thought’s pioneers in the late nineteenth century foresaw a great deal of what now echoes in perceptual studies, quantum theory, placebo research, neuroplasticity, mind-body medicine, and parapsychology.
C: What in your view are the biggest challenges currently facing scholars of the paranormal?
MH: The difficulty of studying the esoteric or paranormal in a scholarly setting is that you are expected to disavow belief. I reject that. In addition to parapsychology, the occult or esoteric is the one area of extra-physical study or historicism where disavowal of verity is a fee of entry to mainstream letters. That is slowly changing. The field of academic ESP research, about which I care deeply, is faced with a funding drought; this is due, in part, to the success of professional or activist skeptics who have misrepresented the field’s findings, replications, and statistical evidence in media, academic journals, and on Wikipedia. I hope to see an overdue reversal of that.
Finally, among independent scholars and researchers—of whom there are excellent figures—there sometimes appears the social pressure to aspire to a kind of ersatz seriousness, placing oneself above or outside popular spirituality or New Age. That is a mistake. Religious novelty has always played a key role in the individual search and it warrants serious attention. For example, the scholar of esotericism Richard Smoley, whose intellectual credentials are impeccable, has written seriously about the channeled text A Course In Miracles. I’ve endeavoured to write about the Ouija board and related phenomena. As Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) observed, nothing does more to erode independent thought than the wish for respectability.
C: The United States is a young country but it has had a massive impact on the global spread and development of modern occultism. Why?
MH: From its earliest days, the American colonies and the United States functioned as a kind of safe harbour for religious radicalism—that is part of why migrants made the dangerous journey across the Atlantic to resettle, start intentional communities, like the Shakers, and seek new definitions of one’s relationship to greater forces. That all this was occurring during centuries of slavery and the destruction of the Native American civilisation is one of the damning contradictions of our history—but it is, nonetheless, a fact of it. America has always been an engine of religious innovation. Indeed, our first religious export in the mid-nineteenth century was seances and Spiritualism, followed by new religious movements from Mormonism to Christian Science. Wherever you see new flows of migration, new religious movements appear. When people are uprooted, they often leave behind the congregations and fealties of their former home—and this produces innovation. That is, in many respects, the story of American religious life and remains so.
C: You’ve taught a number of classes on spirituality and occultism. What in your opinion has been the idea or concept that’s most surprised or shocked your students? Relatedly, what’s been most rewarding for you as an educator?
MH: The critical principle I’ve recently tried to communicate is: familiarity is not truth. All of us, including those who see themselves as part of the alternative spiritual scene, get hemmed into perimeters by sheer repetition, sometimes across centuries or even millennia, of spiritual definitions, which are usually nothing more than conceptions. Yet we are frequently paralysed when asked to venture beyond the box of Abrahamic, Vedic, or Buddhist religious traditions, as though beyond those points lies a precipice or lies nothing. That is artifice. The search cannot be worthy of its name unless it is boundaryless. That doesn’t free the individual from debts or reciprocity. But what is the search if not a willingness to self-verify and exceed decisions laid down by someone else, including historically?
Hence, I write and speak freely about my definition of Satanism, which rejects the given. I’ve paid a price for that. But I freely pay it. If we eschew blunt language—like witch, ESP, New Age, occult, and so on—and reexamination of ideas handed down to us, we lose a sense of transparency and integrity. We slip into recitation. I won’t cede definitions or ideas to critics. I encounter people who reject my approach in whole or part, as well as others who embrace it. The latter are not only my readers and audience but my colleagues on the path. A speaking agent once warned Neville Goddard to tone down some of his more radical ideas or he’d have no audience at all. “Then I’ll tell it to the bare walls,” Neville replied. The day I quit striving to honour that principle is the day I hope I’ll hang it up.
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