"The Occult Tradition" - interesting book review

by **starroute** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 10:33 pm

I was trying to say some of this stuff the other day on the thread attached to Jeff's latest blog posting. This review, which I just happened upon, makes the same points very neatly, so I thought I'd toss it up here. <a href="http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/books/story/0,10595,1675489,00.html">education.guardian.co.uk/...89,00.html</a> <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Katz follows historian Frances Yates in feeling it is not enough to construct a history of science by looking for thinkers in the past who got it "right"; we need to study the period when alchemy was evolving into chemistry and astrology into astronomy to see why experimental choices were made. That makes this a deeply subversive book. Scientists, if they think about the philosophy of science at all, cleave to a 19th-century narrative which says that in all civilisations as they developed, superstition came first, then religion, then science, which at last was the truth. In fact the founders of modern science were swimming in a stream of occult lore, much of which they retained and passed on to us in disguised form. Thus Paracelsus claimed to have discovered, by alchemical means, the very building blocks of the universe, and the key to their construction, which was chemistry. He passed on the occult notion of macrocosm and microcosm: anything true in the laboratory must be true in the universe at large. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for adhering to an Egyptian world picture with the sun as the centre of the universe and the chief divinity. The heliocentric universe could be analysed by Copernican calculations, but it was based on the Hermetic tradition. Newton, the man credited with being the first modern scientist, devoted at least half his active working time to the interpretation of esoterica. Newton's conviction was that a misreading of the heavens goes along with a misreading of religion. God provided two alternative sources of information: the written book of scripture and the visible book of nature. Basic metaphysical truths are obtainable from both. Coming closer to the present, Katz emphasises how much of the theory that fed into psychology and psychoanalysis was not about a sexual unconscious but a paranormal one. He invites us, in the 1870s at the height of the supposed battle between religion and science, to a seance which Darwin and Galton attended together. Co-evolutionary theorist Alfred R Wallace was preoccupied with spiritualism, eventually to the exclusion of other forms of investigation. This is a coherent picture of the persistence of weird stuff in the lives of the famous, which will infuriate both believers and sceptics.<hr></blockquote>

by * » Mon Jan 02, 2006 4:50 pm

The Occult Tradition by David S Katz Who are you calling trashy and sensational[/i] By Gary Lachman Published: 01 January 2006 Academic studies of the occult often seem to show up after the fact, like latecomers to a party that's been going on for hours. Once arrived, they inform readers about things they more than likely are very familiar with: most books on the occult are read by people who are already interested in it. David S Katz's The Occult Tradition is no exception. For Katz, a historian at Tel Aviv University, practically every other book on the subject is "trashy" or "sensationalist" and can be found on the "shelves of used bookstores everywhere" - apparently an unenviable fate. This more or less mandatory disclaimer protects against fellow academics who anathematise scholars who "come to see the occult tradition as having a deep meaning in their own lives", rather like those poor souls who study art and actually like it. Of course Katz is right in a way: there's been a lot of rubbish written about the occult. But only someone who's turned his nose up at those "trashy" books will find anything new here. And the irony is that a great many of those books will prove a more enjoyable read than this supercilious, patchy attempt to show how the occult has informed modern culture. Like medical textbooks on sex, Katz's work might have some use as a reference, but inspiring it isn't. 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. Academic studies of the occult often seem to show up after the fact, like latecomers to a party that's been going on for hours. Once arrived, they inform readers about things they more than likely are very familiar with: most books on the occult are read by people who are already interested in it. David S Katz's The Occult Tradition is no exception. For Katz, a historian at Tel Aviv University, practically every other book on the subject is "trashy" or "sensationalist" and can be found on the "shelves of used bookstores everywhere" - apparently an unenviable fate. This more or less mandatory disclaimer protects against fellow academics who anathematise scholars who "come to see the occult tradition as having a deep meaning in their own lives", rather like those poor souls who study art and actually like it. Of course Katz is right in a way: there's been a lot of rubbish written about the occult. But only someone who's turned his nose up at those "trashy" books will find anything new here. And the irony is that a great many of those books will prove a more enjoyable read than this supercilious, patchy attempt to show how the occult has informed modern culture. Like medical textbooks on sex, Katz's work might have some use as a reference, but inspiring it isn't. 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. <a href="http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article335730.ece">link</a>

by **starroute** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 4:02 am

Interesting. I thought the book sounded a bit pretentious and academic from the review I quoted, and apparently it is. It's possible that the review is better than the book. (Or perhaps the reviewer was using the book as an excuse to make their own points, which often happens.) In any event, those paragraphs from the review do have several points of interest. In particular, I was struck by the idea that all of laboratory science derives philosophically from the notion of "as above, so below." But it's useful to know I needn't bother reading the book.

"The Occult Tradition" - interesting book review

"The Occult Tradition" - interesting book review

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