On living the occult-curious life

When I was a little kid, around maybe 7 years old, my best friend at the time invited me over to a play group at his house.

At his house, I sat around with a bunch of other kids and watched some kind of TV special about Jesus and the church. As this “play group” session was wrapping up, my friend‘s mom had a very tender talk with me and some other kids, explaining to us that it was our duty to accept Jesus into our hearts. Having no real critical framework, I repeated what she told me to say, and then I happily went home to my normal life.

It was a few years before I realized that this was a conversion attempt — despite the fact that I was, indeed, already a Christian, regularly attending services with my family. Spoiler alert: I was not any further “converted.” Also, this best-friendship was short lived, because the kid was kind of a jerk.

I have always had an unsteady relationship with faith. I’ve seen the upside of organized religion — the compassion, conviction, and community, all anchors in a tumultuous world. I was brought up in a loving and tolerant Protestant church, and I’ve always had great respect for the positive energy that religion brings to peoples’ lives.

But the dark and dusty side of those religious vestments are coercion and loyalty to arbitrary signifiers. I’m a cautious soul, chronically undercommitted, and I’m uneasy embracing any particular set of myths and ritual gestures, even those I’ve been brought up with since childhood. Why is there this implicit requirement that I believe, that I position this narrative in some kind of privileged place, vis a vis actual historical reality?

Of course, skepticism has two cutting edges, and not believing anything has its own hazards.

But the world is nothing if not deliciously complex and flexible. Alongside the dominant religions with all their baggage, there’s something on the margins, especially suited for the independent and curious and eccentric. Libraries have books about the faerie folk, and bookstores have tarot decks, and open-air markets have stalls with astrological diagrams. I think this is how many of us discover something like a decision point, or a chosen family, in our spiritual journey.

And there it was, from a young age: Wicca, paganism, nature magick. The hermetic. The occult.

Some of us are irresistibly drawn in this direction, and for me, I have a theory: I think that maybe, instead of absorbing lessons about courage and wisdom and compassion from my church and her sermons, I drew them from Disney movies and Lord of the Rings. Myth and fantasy had all the insights I needed, but without the insistence that I believe, unnecessarily, in some kind of objective reality of her stories.

And that opened up a gap that literature on magic and the occult — books like “Celtic Magic” and tarot guides and astrology notes — could bridge. Here was something like a belief, closely connected to fantasy and magic and mysterious lore, that offered me some kind of a choice, and some kind of “faith” that lived in harmony with the world of my imagination.

Over the years, I’ve popped my head into that room a few times. Recently, back in maybe 2021, I listened to some podcasts, including a long and fascinating introduction to magical practices. I found lots of interesting stuff in there, but what I’m now remembering is the first touch-point in the episode: the podcaster’s insistence that you, as an aspiring occultist, step outside and gather your intentions and vocalize them: “I believe in magic, I choose the path of the magician.” You were expected to speak your new self into being.

And there, again, came the voice of my childhood best friend’s mother: the calling, the loyalty test, and my knee-jerk aversion. No less than organized religion, folk traditions carry an expectation that you adopt and privilege an arbitrary set of beliefs. Do you follow the Norse gods, or the Egyptian pantheon, or the Celtic nature spirits? What is your preferred method of divination? I suppose there’s an end-run around this, by embracing Chaos Magic (the Unitarianism of the occult), but even this is locked into the unsolvable binary: do you profess belief in something as a form of loyalty? Or do you follow the heretics and atheists, taking a “leap of faith” into skepticism and leaving behind any solid ground whatsoever?

One aspect of the occult community that I deeply relate to (among several) is a love and respect for keen, penetrating ideas, for literature that’s insightful and revelatory. In this sense, I genuinely look up to the masters of magical lore, who read so deeply, and pursue knowledge so doggedly, that they become living libraries of occult scholarship.

So I’ve done some reading, and it’s been great! But honestly, I can’t compete here. I have too much poetry and science fiction to read, and too many other hobbies waiting in the wings. Again, overbroad and undercommitted… my nature is my nature.

So I’m not really here for the crystals and candles and incense, though private rituals and meditation still hold some interest for me. And I’m not willing to devote the time and energy necessary to deep-read the archives (I doubt I’ll ever get around to Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey). So what am I getting from this interest in outsider religion, which runs in parallel to all the rest of the stuff that keeps me busy and/or distracted all day?

I suppose this is the right time to come back to the ancestral meaning of this word, the “occult” — originally meaning “covered, concealed, hidden, secret.” Even now, I like using it this way… the occulted structures beneath the facade of conscious intent and whatnot. In the context of those spiritual traditions, the implication is that they preserve some knowledge or power that’s held back from mass consumption. This is only for initiates, they say… this discipline is older than money, or politics, or the pulleys and levers of modern science, but it’s still there, for those who reach for it.

For me, what keeps my interest here — the reason I’ll always have some curiosity and credulity about mysterious forces and synchronicity — is that I believe fundamentally in aspects of reality that aren’t fully accessible, that can’t be reduced to something mundane. This is what connects my narrative preoccupations (fantasy, horror, the weird and surreal) with my theoretical and conceptual obsessions (object-oriented philosophy, post-structuralism, the hard problem of consciousness).

We all occupy the clearing of Being, don’t we? Whether we believe in some master gardener who cleared it and made it livable for us… or whether we wander in uncertainty, conscious only of the natural, sublime contingency of this affordance.

As for me: I will always be among those who stand at the edge, looking out beyond the light.