Is Occultism “the Metaphysic of Dunces?”
An occultist confronts modernity
The following is the introduction to the author’s Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences (Inner Traditions, Nov 8, 2022).
To write on metaphysical themes is to live in a state of constant uncertainty. Or at least it ought to be that way. The simple fact is: we do not know the foundations of reality and when or whether anomalous experiences are “real” or subjective; whether repetition equals validity (the gold-standard of social science, which conceals its own shortcomings behind methodology “corrections,” which render its clinical literature largely irrelevant in generational cycles); and, finally, how to weigh individual testimony. We possess statistical evidence as good as any for the anomalous transfer of information, or ESP, in laboratory settings — but that fact raises more questions than it answers and is rejected by a modernist intelligentsia that regards countervailing evidence to materialism as the catechist does heresy.
Modernist intelligentsia regards countervailing evidence to materialism as the catechist does heresy.
Indeed, metaphysics and modernist thought have never fully gotten along. The authors I most admired in my late teens and early…
