Ye Shall Be As Gods: A History of Modern Occultism and Self-Help

Just in time for the New Year!

On this New Year’s Eve eve eve, we going to take a way too-serious look at the very idea of a (New Year’s) Resolution.

Everyone is a Faust these days—true. But how did we get here?

To find out, we’re going to return 1875—to the beginning of the Self Help Age—and learn about the weird European and American movements that spawned British Occultism, Dale Carnegie, Scientology, Est, Tony Robbins, Prosperity Christianity, Quantum Healing, and everything in between!

To get a grip on what “occultism” means, we will first watch the utterly delightful documentary The Occult Experience (1984) before we meet. Written by famed Australian historian Nevill Drury, this award-winning film will undoubtedly be the most entertaining documentary you’ve never seen. [Click HERE to watch.]

Along the way, we’ll look at the metaphors of “self” we’ve adopted from these “traditions” and taken to heart. And we’ll see how how these inconspicuous metaphors and assumptions have created an implicit metaphysics that has shaped everything from cosmetics advertising to Freudian analysis.

So join us next Thursday, December 29, for a madcap frolic through the Faustian field of dreams as we perform a fast-track autopsy of the irresistible Western imperative to discover your True Will, realize your potential, maximize your impact on reality, and Be Best!

(And if you really do happen to be an amnesiac god, we’ll discuss sure-fire techniques that will wake you up from your body-identified slumbers and let you reclaim your forgotten heritage.)

OVERVIEW: From Kabbalah to Scientology and Wicca

We will trace the ”Hermetic tradition” from the unpracticed writings of the pseudonymous Hermes Trismegistus through Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Renaissance Christian Kabbalah, Paracelsus (1492–1541), Boehme (1575–1624), Robert Fludd (1574–1637), the Catholic grimoires of the 1600s, the new pretend Freemasonry of the 1700s, and then finally Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society in 1875, where “the current” reaches its fully generic, secular, and universalist form.

Key prior influences also include Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Jewish mysticism, Pythagoreanism, Stoicism, and alchemy.

(Alchemy made an especially touching inward turn that illustrates perfectly the stratum of “religious” desire that occultism would eventually set free. The interesting and still-mysterious chemical reactions evolved from being objective facts about physical change into analogs of spiritual transformation, chemical-reaction placebos that both induced and “explained” inner processes that lacked a proper psychological vocabulary. In this way, the side effects of its originally earnest attempts at material change slowly morphed into open-eyed meditation practices.)

The ontology of self also takes an interesting journey. For Neoplatonic Gnostics, the soul was divine spark born beyond the Firmament. But this operationally useless conception gradually became more material and mechanical as the soul’s matter morphed into aether, (animal) magnetism, gravity, and finally electricity (cf. Frankenstein). On a parallel track, the mechanics of the soul evolved from humoralism, to animal magnetism, to nothing (with James Braid), and finally to a hydraulic fluid (with Breuer, Bernheim, and Freud) that releases pressure through talking.

Meanwhile, the Golden Dawn extended the initiatory theatrics and story-telling gesture sequences of Freemasonry into a more generic practice of assuming god-forms, ceremonial magic, and cosplay. Crowley then liberated the G.D. cosplay impulse from its Jewish and Greco-Egyptian fetters by “explaining” all these practices as kinds of placebo that work through what we now call method acting and social reality.

Crowley’s ideas then forked into the two sub-streams of Scientology and Wicca. His practice of inventing new practices and explanations paved the way for L. Ron Hubbard to freely invent his own “tech” and “drills” based on abreaction and 50s sci-fi, which became Scientology. And Crowley was paid by Gerald Gardner to forge a dumbed-down version of his “Thelemic” metaphysics that could be sold to British “pagans” and hippies. These forgeries became the now wildly popular “modern witchcraft” or Wicca movement.

In 1987, Peter J. Carroll finally took all of the practices championed by Crowley and Jung and boiled them down into a few simple core methods and explained them in the familiar idioms of psychology, mnemonics, self-conditioning, quantum mechanics (of course), and probability theory.

METHOD

• To prepare we will watch the fabulous and rightly renowned documentary The Occult Experience (1984) before the meeting. We’ll go over your favorite parts during the show, many of which will be replayed live for review and discussion.