“Familiarity Is Not Truth”

How We ‘Demonize’ the Occult and Satanic

Mitch in Los Angeles. (Jacqueline Castel)

This article is based on a Halloween-eve discussion I had with artist and musician Josh T. Romero, which can be viewed in full here. In it, I consider the intersection between the occult and horror, how we allow in or exclude certain religious concepts, why it is vital to continue expanding the parameters of the search, and the impulse behind modern fictions like the Satanic Panic.

The occult is a term that derives from the Latin occulta or occultus, which means hidden or secret. It came into use during the early Renaissance to describe the spirituality of the pre-Christian world, in particular the initiatory, esoteric spiritual traditions of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Persia, which had largely vanished in the Western world and through much of the Mediterranean basin when Christianity swept through the area.

When translators, scholars and religious figures were seeking to reference some of the ideas of the antique world that were reemerging during the Renaissance, including Hermeticism and including all kinds of mystery traditions and practices ranging from astrology to divination to alchemy to spell work to number symbolism to so-called sacred geometry and so on, and as they were struggling to refer to these things that belonged to a world that had effectively vanished with the…