Occultism
This article is about the practice and movement. For the body of esoteric knowledge and subjects, see
Occult
.
Occultism is the practice of hidden or esoteric knowledge: the rites, images, initiations and cosmologies of Western ceremonial magic traditions — Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Theosophy, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Thelema — whose adherents hold that consciousness, intention and ritual act directly on reality, and that reality contains orders of being inaccessible to ordinary perception. It is the practice side of the Occult (the body of subjects), and ritual work undertaken specifically to reach non-human intelligence is deliberate occult contact. The historian of occultism Peter Levenda and the investigator William Bramley read the same traditions as a record of contact: Levenda as a working discipline for reaching intelligences that abductees and contactees also meet, by images rather than words, Bramley as the channel through which an Anunnaki-era non-human intelligence brotherhood kept its knowledge and its hierarchy alive, with ritual, scrying and invocation serving as communication technologies across the centuries when direct contact was suppressed or unavailable.
The academic historians of Western esotericism — Wouter Hanegraaff, who defines it as "rejected knowledge" excluded by the dominant academic culture of the West, and Antoine Faivre, who identifies its recurring forms as correspondences, living nature, imagination and mediation, and transmutation — treat occultism as a human cultural lineage. Levenda himself prefers "magic" to "occultism," which he says sounds like an ideology, and holds that the field resists definition from outside. A third reading, advanced by Levenda, Jacques Vallée and John Keel, is that the modern occult revival was in part instigated or amplified by intelligence services, so that genuine contact reports and managed disinformation became hard to tell apart.[citation needed]
Mechanism: image, intention and rite
Levenda holds that occult practice works through image, not argument — which is why alchemy and occultism are "replete with images and pictures" — and that this is the same channel contactees and abductees describe. The podcast host Jesse Michels describes the late-antique Greco-Egyptian ritual tradition (Iamblichus, Zosimus) as an attempt to build "sacred technologies" that channel higher consciousness into a statue, a magical implement or a temple. Levenda calls magic "an art" nearer to the creative impulse than to laboratory science, and says the demand for repeatability is what has destroyed many mediums and clairvoyants — an account of why the effect, if real, escapes experiment.
Western traditions
The traditions below are each read by Hanegraaff and Faivre as historical lineages; the final column gives the reading, where one has a named holder, that treats the tradition as a vehicle for contact.
| Tradition | Origin | What it holds | Contact reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hermeticism | Alexandria, 2nd–3rd centuries CE, in the Corpus Hermeticum attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a figure joining the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth | A hierarchy of divine emanations, the fall of the soul into matter and its ascent; "as above, so below" | Preserves the Egyptian priestly practice of ritual contact[citation needed] |
| Kabbalah | Mystical Judaism, systematized in medieval Spain and Provence; the Zohar appears in 13th-century Spain but is attributed to the 2nd-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai | Ten divine emanations (Sefirot) on the Tree of Life, through which infinite divine consciousness steps down into creation; supplies the divine names and structure of the Golden Dawn and Thelema | Encodes contact with the angelic beings of Ezekiel, Enoch and the Hekhalot literature[citation needed] |
| Rosicrucianism | Three anonymous manifestos of the 17th century (the Fama Fraternitatis, the Confessio and the Chymische Hochzeit) announcing a Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross founded by Christian Rosenkreuz; whether the Brotherhood existed at the time or the manifestos were a fiction that then attracted adherents is disputed | Reformulates Hermetic and Kabbalistic teaching for early modern Europe | A carrier of the same tradition later preserved through Freemasonry, the Knights Templar and the mystery schools[citation needed] |
| Freemasonry | Fraternal order claiming descent from the medieval stonemasons' guilds; earliest documented lodges in 17th-century Scotland and England | Initiation around the building of Solomon's Temple and the master builder Hiram Abiff | Bramley identifies it as the vehicle of the Brotherhood that has managed civilization since the Anunnaki era, with its inner degrees holding the doctrine outer members are kept from[4] |
| Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn | London, 1888, by Freemasons | A ten-degree initiatory system synthesizing Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Enochian magic and Tarot; trained William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen and Aleister Crowley | Called by the Farrars "the biggest single influence in the modern expansion of ritual magic"[9] |
| Thelema | Crowley's system after his break with the Golden Dawn; founded on the Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis), dictated in Cairo in 1904 by Aiwass, whom Crowley took for his Holy Guardian Angel | "Do what thou wilt" as a magical discipline of will | Aiwass as a transmission from a non-human intelligence, received by the channeling Crowley's training had prepared him for[citation needed] |
Theosophy and the turn toward contact
Theosophy, co-founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875, is the hinge between the nineteenth-century occult revival and the twentieth-century contact literature. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888) set out a history of humanity through the ages of Hyperborea, Lemuria and Atlantis, and she and her followers claimed to have received much of it from contact with Ascended Masters, Mahatmas such as Koot Hoomi and Morya who answered through letters to A. P. Sinnett. The religion scholar Gregory Reece names four Theosophical claims that the contactee movement would inherit: a pantheism in which human consciousness shares in the universe's, reincarnation as progress, a hidden history of vanished civilizations, and Ascended Masters who help those on lower planes; and he holds that Theosophy's channeling of beings alive in the Far East, where spiritualism had channeled the dead, is what the flying-saucer era took over. Within exopolitics Blavatsky's Mahatmas are read as non-human intelligence intermediaries or as advanced humans acting for them, and the Root Races overlap with the Anunnaki genetic-engineering narrative.[citation needed] The same Theosophical writing supplied the swastika and the "Aryan" root race to the German secret societies that preceded Nazism, which Levenda and Jim Marrs trace through the Thule Society.
Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875) had fused Kabbalah, Tarot and Hermeticism into one magical system in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1855–56) and La Clef des Grands Mystères (1861), supplying the Baphomet image and the astral light (Akasha) as the medium of operation that the Golden Dawn and later Western magic inherited. John Dee (1527–1608/09), adviser to Elizabeth I, held scrying sessions with Edward Kelley from 1582 to 1589 in which angels, as Dee understood it, transmitted the Enochian language and a cosmological map of angelic hierarchies that an operator could navigate; within exopolitics the Enochian angels are read as non-human intelligences who chose Dee, the leading scientific mind of Elizabethan England, as a conduit.[citation needed] A 2019 episode of the podcast The Confessionals carried an anonymous guest's claim that secret military units had reverse-engineered Enochian into an operational protocol for inter-dimensional contact.
Crowley, Aiwass and Lam
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), founder of Thelema and the A∴A∴, is treated by the author Alison Davidson as "one of the first contactees": the Book of the Law was, in her words, "transmitted by a trans-mundane intelligence called Aiwass in Cairo in 1904". In 1917–1918, in New York, Crowley performed the Amalantrah Working, a series of rites designed, according to the VICE writer Liz Armstrong, to create "a deliberate channel in ephemeral cosmic influences" through which extra-dimensional entities could enter. Through it he met an entity he called Lam and drew its portrait: a bald, large-headed, large-eyed, thin-bodied figure that Armstrong and the occultist Kenneth Grant both describe as resembling the modern Gray, which it predates by decades. Crowley placed the Lam portrait at the opening of his commentary on Blavatsky's Voice of the Silence without saying why.
Brian Butler, a practitioner who performed the Lam Statement written by Crowley's acknowledged successor Kenneth Grant, reports a year of sleep-state communications in which "an order of alien beings" showed him projections like a slideshow; he describes the intelligence as "a very cold, mechanical kind of computer-like intelligence... eternal... ancient... and also futuristic."
Parsons, the Babalon Working and the rocket era
Jack Parsons, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a member of Thelema's Agape Lodge in Pasadena, conducted with L. Ron Hubbard in early 1946 the Babalon Working, a ritual series intended to incarnate the goddess Babalon and closed with a rite in the Mojave Desert, which Parsons believed had succeeded. Michels calls him "such a rare manifestation" of the occult-to-technology link: someone "actually doing active occult work to try to bring about some sort of change within the fabric of reality" while he helped found American rocketry. The religious-studies scholar Diana Pasulka says Parsons "believed he was getting the inspiration for his rocket technologies through doing rituals," and notes that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, earlier, attributed his own rocket breakthroughs to contact with non-human intelligences he took to be angelic rather than deities. Pasulka adds that practices continue in the American space programme — Roman gods on mission patches, Latin mottoes — which her insider source "Tyler" attributes to "our sponsors."
A line of occult-exopolitical commentary ties the Working to the events that followed: Kenneth Arnold's June 1947 sighting of nine disc-shaped objects near Mount Rainier, the Roswell incident that July and the founding of the CIA in 1947, read as the signal that opened the modern UFO era.[citation needed] After Hubbard and Parsons's partner Betty left with money from a joint business venture, Hubbard founded Dianetics (1950) and then Scientology, whose advanced teaching holds that humans are immortal Thetans burdened by alien history: many millions of years ago a galactic federation ruled by Xenu exiled billions of beings to Earth. Occult-exopolitical commentators hold that Hubbard's part in the Working seeded the Scientology doctrine.[citation needed]
State and intelligence interest
Levenda, author of Unholy Alliance, holds that the Ahnenerbe set out "to completely remove Christianity and Judaism from the German people and replace it with a Nordic version" — in 1930s Germany, an occult one — and that the documents establish the interest even where interpretation differs. The historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke traces the movement to the völkisch Ariosophy of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels in Vienna and reads it as a history of ideas rather than of contact. On the American side Levenda says the Strategic Air Command's interest in psychic research was "the back door" for investigating paranormal phenomena and occultism, and the American government's interest in remote viewing through the Stargate Project followed the same door.[citation needed]
Occultism as intelligence operation
Levenda, Vallée and Keel have each argued that parts of the modern occult revival were instigated or amplified by intelligence agencies as psychological warfare, and that the contact dimension of occultism was deliberately confused with government disinformation, which makes genuine contact claims harder to evaluate. Their layered picture: contact events (Dee's Enochian angels, Crowley's Lam) at the core, human elaboration around them, and deliberate manipulation outermost — FBI surveillance of Parsons and Hubbard, the CIA's interest in psychics through Project Stargate, and the use of occult cover for contact programmes. Levenda describes Michael Aquino's Phoenix Program psychological-warfare work in Vietnam — manufactured ghosts and staged vampire encounters — as a working example, and says the CIA considered projecting an image of Jesus over Havana to unseat Fidel Castro. That the secrecy practices of the classified state descend from initiatory orders is the subject of Occult origins of government secrecy; the occult strand of The Cabal accounts is told at Factions of the cabal.
Places and the veil
Skinwalker Ranch in Utah's Uintah Basin, site of decades of reported anomalies, is linked by some researchers to the occult idea of "thin places" where the veil between dimensions is permeable. Its owner Brandon Fugal attributes the ranch's name to a Navajo curse arising from conflict with the Ute people and the federal government, which he says elders in the community have confirmed repeatedly. The suggestion that Western ritual practice may exploit the same unusual places that indigenous traditions and anomaly researchers each identified independently is a hypothesis of the thin-places literature.[citation needed]
References
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