David S. Katz
THE OCCULT TRADITION
From the Renaissance to the present day
260pp. Jonathan Cape. £17.99.
0 224 06165 8
It has never been easy to demarcate occultism and religion, except in terms of respectability. One influential distinction relates magic to the talents of the individual operator; while the transubstantiation of a wafer into the flesh of Christ might seem to have a thaumaturgic aspect, it is not dependent on the skills of the priest. If it was, and if for that reason it sometimes failed to work, it would be magic.
David S. Katz is not convinced by such J. G. Frazer-ish distinctions, and he invokes Frazer as a straw man throughout The Occult Tradition, which boldly straddles magic and religion in the pursuit of a particular shared strand. Katz knows what he wants to discuss, even if it doesn’t quite match the expectations raised by the title, and the result is an idiosyncratic book on the occult, which deliberately omits all forms of witchcraft, for example, while giving a central and indeed crowning place to evangelical Protestantism.
Katz takes the word “occult” etymologically and traces the essentially Platonic or Gnostic sense that this world of appearances is not the true world: hidden behind and above the phenomenal world, there is a noumenal world waiting to be accessed by the seeker (and for that matter the conspirator, as Katz shows). Along with this comes the esoteric world-view, with its revelations of secret knowledge and initiate readings, and at a more demotic level this embraces what some of us might see as rogue religions – Katz is suitably non-judgemental about most of them – which qualify as occult for the purposes of this book via the necessarily “hidden” nature of what is supposedly revealed. The book is about what we might regard as the culture of noumenality, although one can readily see why the present title is more viable.
Katz’s occult tradition begins with Plato, and we then embark on a whistle-stop tour across a schema that includes Aristotle, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism and the Kabbalah; the Rosicrucians; Freemasonry, Adam Weishaupt and the Illuminati, Alessandro Cagliostro, and the Comte de St Germain of the Court of Louis XV; Swedenborg; and Mormonism. Something of a second front opens up with Romanticism, traced from the Gothic and into the German philosophers (“even some potted familiarity with their views is necessary”). Kant is inevitably pre-eminent, along with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, before we visit Romanticism proper, derived here from Pietism.
Transcendentalism and Spiritualism are the next ports of call – the latter a relatively extended sojourn – before psychology and parapsychology, including James, Freud and Jung as well as the Society for Psychical Research. After a trip to India, via comparative religion and Blavatsky’s Theosophy, we are back in the West for the final “(re-)turn to religion”, notably with Christian Fundamentalism and the New Age.
Material which one might expect to play a central role – Eliphas Levi and the French occult revival, for example, along with the nineteenth-century occult revival in Britain, and the Order of the Golden Dawn – is seen off in a page and a half that also includes nugatory name-checking of Aleister Crowley and Gurdjieff, the latter unconvincingly described as “perhaps the last of the nineteenth century occultists”. The book is nevertheless an impressive work of synthesis and filled with interesting material, such as Wouter Hanegraaff’s canny analysis of New Age beliefs: after carefully reading more New Age material than most of us might care to, Hanegraaff finds its concepts to be neither new nor Eastern, but rather – in Katz’s summary – “nothing more than a réchauffé version of Western esotericism as it stood c1900”. Nor would any occult survey feel complete without something hopelessly wacky, such as the theories of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954).
Liebenfels jumped from Theosophy to the belief that pure-bred Aryans “had committed bestiality with pygmies and thereby created the mixed races and the Fall, since Adam was the first pygmy . . . . Later on down the line came Jesus, whose miracles were in fact electrical phenomena. The Passion narrative is a coded description of the attempted rape of Jesus by pygmies”.
Katz’s most serious and important material, however, is not about pygmies, or the New Age, but rather American Fundamentalism. Guided again by etymology, Katz asserts that while “people frequently even speak of Islamic or Jewish fundamentalism”, Fundamentalism is a specifically American Christian phenomenon, taking its name from a series of pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals which were distributed between 1909 and 1915 by the American Bible League. Katz’s earlier judgement, that we live in a “more sophisticated and less credulous age” than the Victorians (itself part of the cheery lack of respect that he has for much of his older material), seems a little hollow when he proceeds to tell us that 86 per cent of Americans believe in Heaven, 78 per cent in life after death, 72 per cent in angels, 71 per cent in Hell, and 65 per cent in the Devil, with over one in three – 34 per cent – further believing that “the Bible is inerrant”.
The most disturbing part of Fundamentalism is its “Armageddon theology”, and as Katz says, when Fundamentalism is embraced by American Presidents, “we might have pause to remember whose finger is on the proverbial button”. Bruce Lincoln, at the University of Chicago, has analysed the “double-coding” within a George Bush speech, whereby a mainstream public address contains more specialized messages for listeners on a Fundamentalist wavelength, “enlisting the specialized reading/ listening skills they cultivate”. Katz summarizes this as a conspiratorial address to “partners in a type of Christianity that is based on the careful reading of an esoteric text”.
We might dispute how far the Protestant Bible is an esoteric text, and rather see Fundamentalist exegesis as an over-motivated or paranoid reading of an exoteric text. Katz has nothing to say about the role of paranoid hermeneutics – as discussed by Umberto Eco, among others – within the esoteric tradition he explores, although it is surely central, and there is evidence of it in this book: there are pyramidologists who find the entire Bible represented in the measurements of the Pyramids; another scholar who discovered that when the Bible talks of “days” it really means “years”, projecting events into the modern world; and one Rudolf Gorsleben, who was very keen on crystal (Kristall) and found it to be – as “Krist -All” – central to an ancient Aryan religion later misunderstood as the Gospel of Christ.
The Occult Tradition itself is not quite free from tendencies of an excitably totalizing and benignly paranoid nature (“the unrelated becomes surprisingly related”; “once having seen where a piece of the occult puzzle fits, the rest is easy”) and some readers may feel Katz overstates the real or intertextual relatedess of this “Tradition”. Claiming to know more than one’s neighbour and to be in possession of secret revelations are resurgent tendencies in human life. David Katz’s “Tradition” effectively links Louis Farrakhan and Billy Graham into a continuity with Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, which may be an unduly exalted genealogy for them.
