Book Report: Occult Underground & Establishment, part 1 of 3

[Earl Wajenberg]

My next two posts will be book reports on "The Occult Underground" and
"The Occult Establishment," by James Webb, published by Open Court, and
also available through Amazon.com. The reports, I warn you, are on the
long side -- originally done for another forum -- but I post them
because of their potential for UA players, as well as for their general
interest.

The two books are social histories of occultism, covering the 19th and
20th centuries respectively.  More exactly, "The Occult Underground"
covers the "period of great uncertainty extending roughly from the
downfall of Napoleon to the outbreak of World War One" (1815-1914),
while "The Occult Establishment" covers the period from the end of World
War One to the date of writing (1918-1974). I think it would be great if
Webb had come up with a third work, probably shorter, on the New Age
Movement, but he might have consider that it was too recent to be
examined by an historian.

The books are not, of course, just chronicles. Webb calls them "an
attempt to show how the occult revival can be used as a key to a crisis
which we have still not resolved, and how the occult relates to the
better-lit regions of society."

The crisis Webb refers to is one he calls "the crisis of consciousness."
Others might call it an "existential crisis" or something of the sort.
He refers to the way the democratic, scientific, and industrial
revolutions combined to increase the power of individuals and nations
while simultaneously destroying the social, religious, and political
structures that provided orientation in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Those centuries have been called the Age of Reason; Webb calls the 19th
and 20th centuries the "Age of the Irrational," and first published
"Occult Underground" under the title "The Flight from Reason." This
marks a negative tone in his approach to the occult, and I'm sure he is
not a Believer, but he is not a debunker, either. His "Reason" (capital
R) is not sanity or formal logic, but the received wisdom of the
dominant social institutions, of the Establishment, the Powers That Be.
(Webb often uses both those terms, and coins the antiquarian variant,
the Powers That Were.)

Conversely, Webb defines the occult as "rejected knowledge," systems of
thought and doctrine cast aside by the Establishment for whatever
reason. Thus Webb's occult includes Theosophy, Spiritualism, and
ceremonial magic, but also pseudo-sciences and fringey religions. (I
feel the books somewhat neglect pseudo-science.) These things often
overlap in membership with off-beat social movements like the Fabians,
the New England Transcendentalists, and the Parisian Bohemians of the
1890s.

That, in fact, is Webb's point. The occult community is simply the
intelligensia of the Underground, the Anti-Establishment,
Counter-Culture, whatever it is called or calls itself in a given age.
Studying their history is valuable, says Webb, not only for its
intrinsic interest, but as a window on those revolutionaries who, from
time to time, disturb, modify, or replace chunks of the Establishment.

For UA players, these books offer a rich array of historical people and
societies who can be used as historical background or re-cast as members
of UA’s modern occult underground.

Earl