Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences

by Mitch Horowitz

Overview

An exploration of our extraordinary shift away from materialism toward renewal of the numinous, mysterious, and uncertain

• Examines topics that evoke widespread misunderstanding, including the real history of secret societies, the wisdom of the Satanic, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, out-of-body experience, and the contemporary war on witches

• Looks at the influence of the founding lights of modern occultism, including mystic Neville Goddard, occult scholar Manly P. Hall, and surrealist filmmaker David Lynch, and debunks famous pseudo-skeptics such as the Amazing Randi

• Explores magickal practices, including Anarchic Magick, mind metaphysics, the Law of Attraction, and Ouija boards, and upends hallowed spiritual concepts like forgiveness

All of us today dwell in uncertain places--realities in which thoughts make things happen, ESP is provable by the scientific methods once used to debunk it, UFOs are mainstream, and magick no longer requires rite and ritual but is as near as your own mind.

Today’s leading voice of esotericism and the occult, Mitch Horowitz explores topics that evoke widespread misunderstanding, including the real history of secret societies, the wisdom of the Satanic, the relevance of Gnosticism, and the slender but authentic connection between today’s spiritual culture and antiquity, including in areas of Hermeticism, deity worship, out-of-body experience, and magick. He demonstrates the occult roots of wide-ranging facets of modern culture, including politics, abstract art, mind-body healing, self-help, and breakthrough scientific fields such as quantum physics and neuroplasticity. He looks at the influence of the founding lights of modern occultism, including mystic Neville Goddard, occult scholar Manly P. Hall, and surrealist filmmaker David Lynch, and provides a magnificent take-down of famous debunkers and pseudo-skeptics such as the Amazing Randi. He explores magickal practices, including Anarchic Magick, mind metaphysics, the Law of Attraction, and the history of Ouija boards and questions time-honored spiritual values like forgiveness. Mitch also examines the contemporary war on witches around the world and what it is like to be blacklisted.

Offering a thought-provoking investigation of the spiritual, the occult, the magickal, and the extra-physical, Mitch lays the groundwork for readers to continue their own journeys into these esoteric streams of consciousness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644115930
Publisher:	Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Publication date:	11/08/2022
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award–winning historian and widely known voice of esoteric ideas with bylines in the New York Times, Time, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of many books, including Occult America, One Simple Idea, Daydream Believer, and The Miracle Club. His work is censored in China.
Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award–winning historian, longtime publishing executive, and a leading New Thought commentator with bylines in The New York Times, Time, Politico, Salon, and The Wall Street Journal and media appearances on Dateline NBC, CBS Sunday Morning, All Things Considered, and Coast to Coast AM. He is the author of several books, including Occult America and One Simple Idea. He lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

From REINTRODUCTION: Power and Uncertainty

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.

Indeed, metaphysics and modernist thought have never fully gotten along. The authors I most admired in my late teens and early twenties, and whose tutelage I sought and occasionally found, were political thinkers Irving Howe (1920–1993) and Michael Harrington (1928–1989). Both were democratic socialists and literary critics who wrote with rigor, scrupulousness, and critical sympathy about radical politics. If they thought at all about esoteric spirituality, to which I later dedicated myself, they probably would have considered it trifling, more or less agreeing with Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno that “Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.”

Regardless, by my early thirties my passions for intellectual experiment shifted away from politics and toward the occult. I would like to believe that I took my literary heroes’ critical style, if not their approbation, with me. The factors that drove my shift were both personal and philosophical. My outlook had always included the spiritual, by which I mean the extra-physical. Yet I came to feel that much of modern intellectual culture excluded or neglected spirituality as a legitimate field of inquiry—I considered that a blind spot.

The defining principle of modernist philosophy is that life, in all its expressions, results from unseen but detectable antecedents. In politics this might mean economic clashes and inevitable cycles of revolution (Marx); in biology, evolution and natural selection (Darwin); in psychology, childhood trauma and sexual repression (Freud); in physics, time-space relativity (Einstein); in human performance, self-image (James); in health and illness, germs and microbes (Pasteur); and so forth across myriad fields. I believe that the modernist approach must also encompass the spiritual—or, in my sounding, the occult. Occult comes from the Latin occultus, meaning hidden or secret; it is how Renaissance thinkers referred to mystical philosophies and religions of the pre-Christian world, including those of Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, which were rediscovered in the West beginning in the mid-to-late fifteenth century.

In current terms, the occult is a freeform spiritual philosophy that draws upon or remakes ancient traditions but exists outside of any single doctrine, liturgy, or congregation. (You can substitute other terms for what I am describing; I use occult for its historical integrity.) Occultism’s philosophical gambit is that there exist unseen dimensions whose forces can be felt on and through us. Whatever you make of that prospect, the existence of nonlocal intelligence and metaphysical influence are not innately opposed to modernist thought. Such concepts clash only with the modernist sub-philosophy of materialism, or the belief that matter creates itself.

Yet materialism, which has dominated our intellectual culture since the Victorian age (and accounts for statements such as Adorno’s), covers fewer and fewer bases of life in the twenty-first century. The natural sciences are increasingly defined by quantum data, interdimensional formulas, and fields like neuroplasticity, which uses brain scans to demonstrate the capacity of thought to alter neural matter. The findings of neuroplasticity, uncontroversial by themselves but seismic in implication, are summarized by one of the field’s pioneers, UCLA research psychiatrist Jeffrey M. Schwartz, who wrote in 22 in The Mind and the Brain: “I propose that the time has come for science to confront the serious implications of the fact that directed, willed mental activity can clearly and systematically alter brain function; that the exertion of willful effort generates a physical force . . . . ” More than a generation earlier, magician and artist Aleister Crowley described magick (he used the early modern spelling to distinguish it from stagecraft) as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” Those two statements differ only in degree.

UFOs are not directly related to the occult. But it is worth noting that recent to this writing UFOs have gone mainstream to the extent that no serious person questions the existence of some kind of engineered phenomena captured on Navy cockpit videos—not natural occurrences, delusions, or “mistakes.” Moreover, evidence is mounting for primeval or microbial life, either past or present, on Mars and Venus. In late 2020, water was detected on the sunlit surface of the moon. Our ordinary reference points of life are in greater flux today than any time since Darwinism upended what it meant to be human in the Victorian era.

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We like to ennoble ourselves with the notion that every bend in our path is precipitated by some internal epiphany; but we get led by outer terrain as much as or more than private determination. Preceding my shift in focus, I got fired from a conservative political press. They wanted a progressive editor to expand their list and it was supposed to be my “dream job.” (Advice: if you are seeking a career in conservative publishing do not advocate for a book opposing the death penalty by Jesse Jackson.) I started over as an editor at what was then a backwater New Age publisher. The turn of events seemed random if fleetingly painful. But was there some portent in it?

Rather than view my new job as a springboard to a more respectable position, as many friends encouraged, I instead embraced the self-developmental philosophies I encountered. I grew intrigued with the prospect, alluded to earlier, that the mind possesses causative qualities, a claim often associated with “positive thinking” and variants of practical or therapeutic spirituality. Through the study of related ideas, both ancient and modern, spiritual and psychological, as well as my personal experiments, I came to regard many concepts of practical metaphysics as tantalizing, defensible, and powerful. I came to believe, and still do, that the popular literature of mind power, or New Thought, conceals rejected stones. As a field, New Thought has done a better job of popularizing than refining itself. The philosophy has not grown much since the death in 1910 of philosopher William James, who took deep interest in “the religion of healthy-mindedness.” There is, for example, no compelling theology of suffering within New Thought, which is unacceptable in a generation confronting pandemics, end-of-life issues, and management of chronic disease. I felt this intellectual climate could be improved.

In the Talmudic book Pirkei Avos, or Ethics of the Fathers, a student asks a teacher: “What is the best way to live?” The teacher responds: “Find a place where there are no men, go there, and there strive to be a man.” That became my guiding principle within the corner of the spiritual culture I occupied. When I experienced feelings of exile, I took succor from John Milton’s Dread Emperor: “Here we may reign secure, and in my choice.” I would develop and not flee from the uncertain place where I found myself.

My interests and personal dedication expanded to the work of philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff; my publishing list grew to include an unusual range of authors, living and dead, from filmmaker David Lynch to esoteric scholar Manly P. Hall to philosopher Jacob Needleman to the intellectual eminence of esoterica (and a personal source of inspiration) Richard Smoley. I strove, above all, to foster a climate where outsider spiritual thinkers could write seriously and be taken seriously. (Did I succeed? Author Whitley Strieber told me: “You’re the only editor I’ve ever had who I didn’t suspect hung up the phone and started laughing about the UFO nut.” So there.)
All of this activity served a greater and, for me, culminating purpose. That was rediscovering myself as a writer. Writing careers are made by the right marriage of author to subject. For me, that moment arrived when I realized the need to document and defend the lives and careers of the founding lights of modern occultism. If you do not write your own history, it gets written for you, often by people who misunderstand or are unconcerned with the values and driving factors behind your work. This is among the reasons why I disclose myself as a “believing historian”—a designation that actually describes many historians of religion, who often emerge from the congregations they write about. Most historians fear that declarations of belief invite perceptions of bias or limited critical perspective; for good thinkers, however, familiarity with, and even participation in, a thought system can produce deeper and subtler shades of critique. This approach resulted in my first book, Occult America, in 29, and much else that followed. The essays collected in Uncertain Places are part of that effort.

Table of Contents

REINTRODUCTION
POWER AND UNCERTAINTY

PART I
Strange Fire

1 RECLAIMING THE DAMNED
2 CHOOSE YOUR OWN REALITY
3 “MY WILL BE DONE”
4 IS YOUR MIND A TECHNOLOGY FOR UTOPIA?

PART II
Magickal Operations

5 ANARCHIC MAGICK
6 GOD OF THE OUTSIDERS
7 “DOWN WITH THE BLUE BLOODS”
8 SUFFERING AND THE LIMITS OF MAGICK
9 AGAINST TRADITION
10 YOU ARE YOUR MASK
11 IS MAGICK NECESSARY?

PART III
“Up, Up O Ye Gods!”

12 THE NEW AGE AND GNOSTICISM
13 HERMES RESURRECTED
14 THE DEVIL AND MR. JONES

PART IV
Incarnations
15 OCCULT AMERICAN
16 SEEING IN THE DARK: DAVID LYNCH UNCUT
17 THE MAN WHO DESTROYED SKEPTICISM

PART V
Damned History

18 THE WAR ON WITCHES
19 HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE ILLUMINATI
20 A DIABOLICAL DEVICE
21 VISIONS FROM SOMEWHERE
22 THE MAGIC STAFF
23 THE PREFACE THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT BANNED

AFTERWORD
HOW IT FEELS TO BE BLACKLISTED

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Editorial Reviews

Who are we? What are we? Have we ever really been entirely human? Whether or not we have or have not, if we want to make any advancement in this respect, we will have to delve into certain quagmires such as the occult and the paranormal to discover ourselves. This work is dangerous, but Mitch Horowitz has the courage to undertake it. As a bonus, his writing is very amusing.

author of Peacock Angel Peter Lamborn Wilson

"A fast-paced collection of essays covering a wide range of controversial topics—among them: the creative agency of the mind, the dynamic interplay of inner and outer realities, paranormal research, causality of thought, the metaphysical dimension of the human experience, and alternative spirituality. This book serves as a compass to navigate the tricky maze of occulture's house of mirrors, with its seductive dead-ends, alluring distorted images, and misinformation galore. Horowitz's essays are erudite yet accessible, persuasive and pragmatic, full of striking observation casting a new light on how we see and interpret the world."

BoingBoing.nt Ferdinando Buscema

To make the density of countless esoteric teachings and life-changing mind metaphysics accessible to nearly anyone is a gift Mitch Horowitz is currently in the practice of leaving us all with.

American visual artist and author of Misophonia Jesse Draxler

Treats esoteric ideas and movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness that is too often lost in today’s raised-voice discussions.

Washington Post

What a welcome guide in these uncertain times! Mitch Horowitz continues his program for bringing esoteric ideas out of the closet and into the public forum. Here he reveals the New Age for what it really is: the exoteric face of the Hermetic philosophy. Once we realize that the human mind is the extension of the divine creative power, the rest follows, like a flood sweeping away the debris of religions and anti-religions alike. To paraphrase: Mind is the ultimate arbiter of reality. All self-expression is sacred. The only evil is to prevent other beings from reaching their highest potential. We are all gods in the making, but more than gods, being forged in the crucible of the world. Even those familiar with this line of thought will relish the parade of characters, charlatans, and sages that emerge from Uncertain Places.

author of The Greater and Lesser Worlds of Robert Joscelyn Godwin

Here is a learned yet accessible book about the shaping power of will and intention, about the reality of an extraphysical world (or worlds), about just how wrong and stupid the debunkers and conspiracy theorists have been, and about religious belief as dissociation—the still unknown mirror in which we will someday come to recognize ourselves. Here are the ‘uncertain places’ that many of us have not yet gone but will.

Jeffrey J. Kripal

In Uncertain Places, Mitch Horowitz achieves the impossible. He provides a crystal-clear look at topics that are drenched in the murkiest of ambiguities yet continue to fascinate every living soul. Horowitz aims a brilliantly lucid lens toward the great unwashed domain of the occult, and he magically manages to bring into view shocking truths about a realm that has always been hiding in plain sight.

Dean Radin

Mitch Horowitz is at his best when he throws new light on the hidden subtext of accepted dogma. From ‘anarchic magick’ to ‘reclaiming the damned,’ Uncertain Places stands as a sweeping reinterpretation of major themes at the sharp edge of American imagination.

coauthor of TRINITY: The Best-Kept Secret Jacques Vallée

This book is nothing less than a masterpiece. It introduces, informs, inspires, and ignites critical thinking in a way that is unique to Horowitz’s creative mind. He is a constant source of infectious curiosity and openmindedness; no esoteric stone, small or big, is left unturned in his pursuit of new perspectives and connections. His mind and work are those of a restless rebel who provokes the stagnant and causally dull with sparks and nuggets of great wisdom. In many ways, Horowitz is the perfect mix of Manly P. Hall, Joseph Campbell, and Prometheus, eloquently carrying the torch of mythic and spiritual illumination into the twenty-first century.

author of Source Magic and Occulture Carl Abrahamsson

I admire Mitch Horowitz enormously. He has struggled virtually singlehandedly to get the American intelligentsia to give occult and esoteric currents the serious attention they deserve. This collection exemplifies the intelligence, sincerity, and integrity Mitch has always brought to his inquiry. He has fearlessly faced some of the most awkward subjects in his field and cast his own unique light on them. Fascinating and erudite.

author of A Theology of Love: Reimagining Chri Richard Smoley