Three Reviews

Religion: The Occult Tradition by David S Katz, Cape, pp272

Hidden leanings

Jad Adams (The Guardian)

Scripture tells us that young men will see visions and old men will dream dreams. In these tales of Swedenborgians, theosophists, illuminati, Mormons and Freemasons, David Katz gives us much of both as we travel from neoplatonism to American fundamentalism via the Cock Lane Ghost.

Katz, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, sees the occult tradition as a coherent intellectual stream with its beginnings in Plato, flowing through the European Renaissance and industrial revolution to arrive at American fundamentalism with its detailed mythology about the End of Days based on an esoteric reading of the Bible.

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He takes "occult" to mean hidden from the senses: the belief that there is knowledge accessible by covert means which allows practitioners to know the workings of the universe and even manipulate its operation. The occult tradition is a fusion of three streams of thought, Katz says, in a book for anyone excited by knowledge and the interpretation of ideas. First came the neoplatonists with their view that things had properties which were transferable: using the heart of a brave animal such as a cock or a lion would help promote bravery; eating the breast of loving creatures like sparrows or turtles would induce love.

The second store of ancient lore he notes is the mystical contemplation of the Judaeo-Christian gnostics. Finally come the writings that were supposedly handed down from the (mythical) figure Hermes Trismegistus, who represented a body of knowledge from Egypt, therefore predating Grecian and Roman civilisation.

These form a continuous core of belief which over the centuries has informed not just religion and politics but science, too. 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. A great deal in this book has been said before, as Katz acknowledges in his references to other scholars. His unique contributions go to show how the occult tradition continued into the 21st-century world. En route, Katz convincingly explains how India replaced Egypt as the supposed source of all ancient wisdom, a transition which pandered to the race theory popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - it permitted the replacement of a Semitic spiritual ancestry from the Middle East with an Indo-European (Aryan) ascendancy.

So, with the introduction of power politics, the occult approaches its bizarre modern form in the predictions of Armageddon by American fundamentalists. The movement was so called after its emergence between 1909 and 1915 in the form of a dozen pamphlets entitled "The Fundamentals" which were distributed by the American Bible League. They stressed the infallible literal truth of the Bible and the concept of the born-again evangelical Christian.

While this is no more than a restatement of basic Protestantism which would be familiar to Martin Luther, the evangelicals have woven into their beliefs a complex theology prophesying the last days of humankind that bears only the most tentative relationship to scripture. Thus we have belief in "the rapture", the bodily disappearance from the earth of true believers in the seven years of tribulations before the second coming of Christ.

In a controversial distinction, Katz differentiates between Christianity as generally practised and its incarnation as fundamentalism, which predicts the future through deciphering a document (the Bible) whose meaning is hidden. Thus, Katz argues, we find George W Bush making speeches which clearly echo prophetic biblical passages from Isaiah and Revelation. This is discernible to evangelicals but passes by the secular. Bush is truly preaching to the converted.

Some people's shelves groan with works on mysticism and the occult, and this would make an erudite addition for them. For those who will read only one book on the exegesis of ancient grimoires, this should be it.

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De-masking the occult tradition

Michael Burleigh (The Times)

The critic Theodor Adorno once wrote that the defining characteristic of occultism was “the readiness to relate the unrelated”, rather like drawing a line of your own invention through several dots on a puzzle rather than following the numbers to draw a face. That is almost the mission statement of David Katz’s concise, erudite and often comic book: to restore a vast and coherent body of occult knowledge from the condescension of modern science or the demotic residue epitomised by the astrologer Russell Grant.

Katz covers much more than the past 500 years that he announces as his chosen period. His story begins with ancient Greece and ends with American Protestant fundamentalists planning their lives around the “Rapture”, when they will be beamed elsewhere for seven years, while the Beast busies himself with the unregenerate many. Plato believed that the universe was alive and that the world is a shadow of an ideal reality.

Neo-Platonist philosophers and the early Christian Gnostics developed these ideas. A neo-Platonist magus, or adept, could detect the hidden (or occult) properties in seemingly prosaic plants or animals, so as to redirect the “energy” in the heart of a lion to foster human fortitude; the elite Gnostics employed mystical contemplation to free the divine spark left in some people by the Higher God, while the majority made do with the botched bodies created by an evil lesser deity.

However, since the occult resembles a Russian doll, it was soon believed that Plato himself was but a conduit for a more venerable wisdom. This hailed from Egypt, which, until the relatively modern fascination with India, was regarded as the repository of truths hidden in pyramids and hieroglyphs. This belief is called Hermeticism — after the mythical Hermes Trismegistus. He was supposed to be a contemporary of Moses, an Egyptian priest, who translated the wisdom of ancient Egypt into Greek.

In fact, the relevant texts were written in about AD200, and passed off as ancient, a fact that did not curtail the enthusiasm of many Renaissance scholars for hermeticism, once a Macedonian monk turned up in Florence in 1463 bearing a selection of these writings. The translation of the entire works of Plato was put on hold so that Cosimo de’Medici could devour these occult texts.

As Katz argues, the Renaissance avatars of modern western culture inhabited a rich spiritual world to which alchemy, astrology, magic and the mysticism of the Jewish cabbala were as integral as what we might understand by science. By about 1600, the essentials of occultism were fixed, namely that the ancients possessed ultimate wisdom, and all one had to do to access this — so as to control things — was crack the hidden code.

The dividing line between occult beliefs, “religion” and “science” was diaphanous, for such august figures as Isaac Newton were obsessed with the idea that the divine architect had left hidden clues to the structure of the universe within the Bible’s descriptions of the Temple of Solomon. He devoted enormous energy to understanding the Apocalypse.

Belief in esoteric wisdom spawned esoteric societies, real or imaginary. Many people tried to join the Rosicrucian Order after its existence was rumoured, but they were destined for disappointment, since it never actually existed before being founded in the 19th century. Others transformed unremarkable medieval lodges for itinerant building workers into the equivalent of gentlemen’s clubs, where symbols derived from the building trades, such as trowels and levels, jostled with secrets allegedly brought to Scotland by the Knights Templar. When Bavarian freemasonry was itself infiltrated by a group called the Illuminati, powerful people, as well as the Catholic church, began to interpret such important events as the French revolution as the product of Masonic conspiracies. Ironically, the imaginary malign force behind the revolution became a reality in the form of the various secret societies of Napoleonic and Restoration Europe, not to speak of those progenitors of modern communism — Gracchus Babeuf and Filippo Buonarroti, the world’s first professional revolutionaries.

With his characteristically light touch, Katz outlines the main 18th- and 19th-century manifestations of the occult tradition. “Science” aided rather than impeded the rise of such things as spiritualism. The phonograph, transoceanic cables, camera and telephone actively fostered the belief that it was possible to communicate with and record the voices of the dead. After all, what was that crackling on the phone line? If occultism was rarely incompatible with high scientific endeavour, nor was it wholly divorced from religion.

The gloomy Emanuel Swedenborg, whose followers founded a sect, thought he could pass between the life to come and the present, transmigrations that enabled him to decode the “real” meaning of the Bible to which he added a book or two. In America, an angel gave Joseph Smith the golden plates of the Book of Mormon, and four years later a pair of magic spectacles enabling him to decode them, the miracle that underpins the Church of the Latter Day Saints in modern Utah.

With interest in Indian mythology stimulated by Max Müller, the Oxford anthropologist, Madame Blavatsky founded Theosophy as a means of communicating eastern mysteries to the western world, although ironically, it largely became a vehicle of Hindu nationalist self-assertion. Katz is amusing about Ernest Jones’s attempts to contain Freud’s occult enthusiasms lest these queer the scientific pretensions of psychoanalysis.

Katz brings his story up to date by treating the “dispensationalist” fundamentalist strain within American Protestantism as a branch of occultism. Although these people predicate a dire fate for Jews who have not converted to Christianity before the Second Coming, they are among Israel’s keenest supporters since, without it, the battle of Armageddon and the thousand-year reign of Christ lack scriptural location. What began in the rarefied world of Renaissance courts has become integral to the creed of 50m people in the world’s most modern nation.

GHOST BUSTERS

In 1882, the formation of The Society for Psychical Research brought together eminent scientists and thinkers with the aim of investigating the occult. A key element of its work was the attempt to prove a pillar of Victorian religion, the reality of life after death. Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge, was a keen member of the group. John Maynard Keynes said of Sidgwick, “He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true, and prove that it wasn’t and hope that it was.” Others associated with the Society were Gladstone, Tennyson, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain.

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Who are you calling trashy and sensationalist?

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.

Gary Lachman (The Independent)

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.

Credit