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Modern Occultism
An exploration
The occult is an idea. Simple in concept yet seismic in impact, it is that there exist unseen dimensions or intersections of time, all possessed of their own events, causes, intelligences, and perhaps iterations of ourselves, whose influence is felt on and through us.
Since relatively early in the revival of the search for ancient spiritual concepts during the Renaissance — by spiritual, I mean extra-physical — the outlook that I describe has been broadly, though not exclusively, known by the Anglicized term occult from the Latin occultus for secret or hidden.
We who live in the West are in peculiar situation regarding our religious past. With regard to religious history, our storyline differs from the development of religions in many of the Eastern cultures. In the East, including China, India, Japan, and a variety of Asian cultures, you encounter a religious continuum that is very ancient. Vedism or Hinduism is one of the oldest continuously observed religious cultures in the world. The same as true of Buddhism. In the Persian world, although dominated by Islam, this is true of Yezidism and Zoroastrianism. Although certain societies, like mainland China, are officially atheistic there exist ancient Taoist, Confucianist, and Animist traditions, which have timelines that extend back millennia.
But in West, including many parts of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world, we face a different situation. (I should note that I use the term “West” broadly in this case to describe the Abrahamic sphere of influence, i.e., regions defined by traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam., Hence, I am chiefly referencing those territories occupied first by Greek armies and carryovers of Alexander the Great and later by the Roman Empire, extending from Ancient Egypt and Constantinople to the Mediterranean Basin and much of Europe, as well as their offshoots, including the Americas.)
The ancient cultures of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the so-called Biblical lands, for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years maintained distinct religious traditions, often polytheistic, sometimes nature-based or deeply seasonal in practice, frequently possessed of an esoteric core and productive of practices that we today would refer to in modern terms as sacrificial, petitionary…
