Drawing Down the Moon

A psychologist might attribute this resurgence to the need of certain neurotics to regress to a beatific infant stage. A professional humanist might bemoan the “rise of the irrational” and “the trend toward anti-intellectualism.” A Christian fundamentalist might be troubled by the “reawakening of the demonic,” and a Marxist writer might be distressed by the attempt of a wealthy leisured class to dissipate the forces of dissent by promoting ideas that mystify the “real” issues and lead to decadence and narcissism. There is an “occult explosion” nightmare to fit every ideology. And on the other side, occultists share an equal number of paradisal dreams and fantasies about the importance and ultimate benefits of their efforts.

Distortions that circulate about occult groups are generally of two types. The first and more easily dismissible is what might be called the “Exorcist-Rosemary’s Baby” view that was once put forth by much of the press and is still put forward by fundamentalist Christian groups. Although books, articles, and scholarly studies have shown this view to be pure fiction (with the exception of an occasional sick individual), the feeling persists that those who practice Witchcraft or occultism are engaged in something fearful, pernicious, illegal, and immoral. This image has a long history. It is nourished by the media because it sells. But more important, this image encourages a fear of the unknown that blunts most people’s curiosity and adventurousness.

These negative feelings are widely shared, even by well-educated people. I have told hundreds of people about my travels around the United States to various Witchcraft covens and Neo-Pagan groups, and the first response was usually “Weren’t you afraid? Wasn’t it dangerous?” This assumption was so common, and stood at such odds with the facts of my travels, that it seemed to be a clue to a general misperception. The facts were simple. I met with representatives of over a hundred groups. The majority were previously strangers. My only negative experience came when a coven of Witches walked out on me after a political disagreement. Such an event could have happened anywhere, and was certainly no more likely to occur among Witches than anyone else.

Another attitude circulates primarily among intellectuals and must be looked at seriously. This is the view that occult groups are trivial, escapist, anti-intellectual, antipolitical, narcissistic, amoral, and decadent. These charges do not come from the sensationalist press. They appear in the works of highly regarded writers and scholars, in The New York Review of Books, Commentary, Partisan Review. Many of the ideas in these articles filter down into ordinary “educated” conversation, becoming the basis for the rigid, defensive, and hostile reactions that many people exhibit when they talk about the occult.

Of course, there is another group of writers who have consistently praised the occult revival, viewing it as a seedbed of innovation. There are also critiques by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and psychologists that contain few stereotypes. These writings reveal the occult world to be complex, with many themes and many layers, a world richer and far different from that portrayed in the press, in most books, in the dinnertable conversation of certain intellectuals and, for that matter, in the simple-minded postures of certain occult writers.

This chapter serves two main functions: it summarizes some of the standard arguments surrounding the revival of occult and magical groups, and it makes accessible a number of lesser known articles and less rigid ideas and perceptions.

One thing should be made clear at the start. There is no consensus on why there has been a resurgence of Witchcraft and occultism, and some people even doubt whether such a resurgence exists. There are any number of fascinating theories and speculations, many of which contradict each other. For example, in 1971 there appeared a rather unexceptional popular study of new religious sects by Egon Larsen. The book Strange Sects and Cults, takes a pseudo-psychological approach and describes the rise of these sects as “a subconscious protest against the faculty of thinking. . . .” Larsen argues that these new sects are peopled by a “simple kind of soul.” Such people’s “personalities never mature”; they remain frightened and bewildered by rigorous mental activity.³ Several years earlier Richard Cavendish had observed the exact opposite in The Black Arts,⁴ a study of occult and mystical practices. Cavendish wrote that people who enter mystical groups are generally seeking to take the Apple from the Serpent; they want to eat of the tree of knowledge and become “as gods.” He claimed that the typical magician or mystic, far from being a simple person, is attempting to become “the complete man.” Such persons, he wrote, throw themselves into all kinds of experiences, both good and evil. They tend to regard all experience as potentially rewarding.

Here are some more examples. The Reverend J. Gordon Melton, whose Institute for the Study of American Religion has amassed perhaps the largest existing collection of modern Craft and Neo-Pagan publications, has written that control and manipulation are absolutely essential to the magical world view.⁵ An opposing view has been expressed many times by Mircea Eliade, Theodore Roszak, and others who believe the occult revival regards the universe as personal, alive, numinous, mysterious, and beyond manipulation.

The anthropologist Marvin Harris has argued that occult ideas have been used as a weapon of survival by the wealthy classes to stifle the rational growth of protest and dissent. In contrast to this view, Eliade and Edward Tiryakian have argued that many artists and writers have used the occult as a weapon to fight against the bourgeoisie.

In 1977 the scientist Carl Sagan told a symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that part of the blame for the rise of occultism and irrationality rested on an educational system that had failed to show students the mysteries and wonders of science. Meanwhile, sociologist Marcello Truzzi was writing in a series of articles that the rise of the occult was, paradoxically, a vindication of the scientific world view and that most occultists had not rejected science at all, but were furthering the process of secularization by making once-feared aspects of life (the occult, the paranormal) easily comprehensible and benign.

In looking at a wide variety of theoretical viewpoints in the next few pages, we might do well to heed the words of one editor of a Neo-Pagan journal who wrote to me bluntly: “I don’t think Pagans share any beliefs! And no Witches think alike!” We should also remember Susan Roberts, the journalist who was forced to throw up her hands and exclaim, “Witches defy categorizing,” but then went on to say that Witches did not like to wear hats and shoes, that Witches were nonconformists, that Witches were conventional on the surface, that Witches were clean, that Witches were not “hippies,” and that Witches didn’t go to psychiatrists. There are, of course, Witches who like hats and shoes, who go to therapists, who are “hippies” (whatever that means), and there are probably even some who lead superficially unconventional lives but are conformist way down deep.⁶

Theories that attempt to explain the growth of new magical and religious groups fall into several categories:

1. Theories that see this growth as evidence of regression, escape, or retreat.

2. Theories that see this growth as a positive reaction to, or rebellion against, the limitations of Western thought or the excesses of modern technology, that generally view occult^x ideas as energizing and innovative.

3. Theories that do not easily fit either of these categories.

Regressions and Retreats: Psychological and Political Approaches

Some writers who have attempted to analyze the growth of the occult talk in terms of a retreat or a regression and portray the sect member or occultist as a neurotic individual whose actions can best be explained in psychoanalytical terms. At the most simple level, the psychological approach can be seen in writers like Larsen, who view the various groups as simple souls, devoid of the possibility of growth and maturity. I knew a well-known New York psychiatrist who would mutter “Schizophrenics!” whenever the subject of religious sects came up in conversation. Andrew Greeley and William McCready have described a similar reaction:

The conditioned reflex of many social scientists when someone raises the subject of mystical ecstasy or confronts them with a person who has had such an experience is to fall back on psychoanalytic interpretations. The ecstatic is some sort of disturbed person who is working out a personality problem acquired in childhood. That settles the issue in most instances. They “know” that the ecstatic episode is in fact some sort of psychotic interlude.⁸

Despite the prevalence of these kinds of analyses, a number of psychological interpretations deserve serious consideration. In 1966 Raymond Prince and Charles Savage wrote that mystical states represented a regression to an earlier stage of adaptation, that the feeling of unity is a reexperience of unity felt by the infant nursing at the mother’s breast.

This analysis formed the basis for many criticisms of the youth movement of the 1960s.⁹ But Prince’s view of mystical experience is not so negative as the idea of “regression” implies. In “Cocoon Work: An Interpretation of the Concern of Contemporary Youth with the Mystical” (1974), Prince wrote that the increase in people seeking mystical experience could best be explained as a self-imposed rite of passage, a “cocoon work,” in which contemporary young Americans were creating a place and time for their own metamorphosis in a society that lacked a clear and acceptable image of the adult.

Prince observed that psychologists had offered two main interpretations of mystical states. The first (outlined in the earlier Prince and Savage paper) said that mystical states were a regression in which the ego descended to the earliest level of experience where the universe is simple and trustworthy. The second hypothesis was that mystical states are a form of deautomatization: the mystic restores to a state of new awareness and sensitivity those actions that have been ignored and have become automatic.

In turning to the growth of new religious groups, Prince gave the movement a name—“Neotranscendentalism.” Many of the characteristics he attributed to it would apply well to some Neo-Pagans: lack of dogma, exaltation of the body as a temple, interest in new types of social and economic relationships, and cooperative forms of living. Prince saw this movement as a rite de passage in a society that had no rituals for the passage from childhood to adulthood. People became engaged in this cocoon work and then, after a time, took up their normal responsibilities in society.¹⁰ (A less charitable description would be that most young rebels eventually sell out.)

One trouble in applying these arguments to Neo-Pagans is that, unlike the sixties youth culture that Prince describes, most adherents of Neo-Paganism are adults whose lives—with the exception of their religious practices—are fully integrated into the mainstream of society.

But why should the occult be seen as a regression at all? Part of this tendency comes from a fairly longstanding anthropological thesis, originally put forth by A. L. Kroeber and George Devereux, that spiritualists and shamans were village psychotics who were given a unique role in primitive societies.¹¹ This idea has been attacked by scholars in a variety of fields—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mircea Eliade, and Jerome Frank, among many others—but it continues in a watered-down form on the popular level. Hence the widespread notion that occultists and mystics are simply “mentally ill.”

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey wrote that this “sickness” myth had its origins in the colonialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the reductionist ideas applied to primitive societies. He argued that many well-known anthropologists were themselves in psychoanalysis at the time they formulated their theories, or at least were profoundly affected by psychoanalytic theory. They were, observed Torrey, ill disposed to see their own analysts as “analogous to those strange people in other cultures who are chanting and shaking a rattle.” But in point of fact, wrote Torrey, spiritualists and shamans “do the same thing as psychiatrists and psychologists do, using the same techniques, and getting about the same results.”¹²

Why not, instead, view the shaman as Eliade does when he writes that the shaman’s imitation of animal cries “betokens the desire to recover friendship with the animals and thus enter into the primordial Paradise?”¹³ Is the desire for such a paradise a regression? Greeley and McCready disagreed:

We humans are inextricably caught up in the physical, chemical, and biological processes of the universe. We swim in an ocean of air, held by gravity to the planet earth and sustained in life by oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen cycles. We are indeed distinct from everything else, but only up to a point; and those psychiatrists who seem to think that an experience of profound awareness of how much one is involved in the natural processes is a regression to childhood have apparently come to think of themselves as archangels who live quite independently of the life processes of the universe.¹⁴

The assertion that the growth of mysticism and occultism is a retreat is primarily a political argument, made most forcefully by Marxist theorists and other progressives. Briefly stated, the critique goes something like this: Occultism, new religions, interest in magic, and so forth are tendencies that promote superstition and downgrade scientific and intellectual ideas. Worse, these ideas devalue the material struggles in the real world and aid reactionary forces by promoting confusion and a false picture of reality. The occult is a powerful weapon of mystification.

Many writers have presented such arguments. The late Marvin Harris, an anthropologist, wrote a fascinating book, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, published in 1974. Harris used the last chapter, “The Return of the Witch,” to launch a strong attack on all the most publicized proponents of the counterculture at that time, in particular Theodore Roszak, Charles Reich, and Carlos Castaneda.

Harris wrote that the “modern witch fad blunts and befuddles the forces of dissent.”

Harris waxed eloquent in his fury against those members of the counterculture who attempted to levitate the Pentagon by magic during the antiwar demonstrations in Washington some thirty years ago. He seems to have taken them literally; he certainly did not understand their sense of humor and understanding of metaphor. He argued that their disdain for rationality and objectivity was dangerously “stripping an entire generation” of intellectual tools. In this he sounded much like Larsen. He accused supporters of the counterculture of ethnocentric thinking and amoral relativism.

But Harris’s main argument was that occultism and mystical thinking promoted the idea that one can change the course of history by changing consciousness rather than by changing the material conditions that, he believed, create consciousness. To Harris these movements were dangerous because “they prevent people from understanding the causes of their social existence.”¹⁵ Such doctrines were very useful to inequitable social systems.

Another writer who made a similar argument was Edwin Schur, in his book The Awareness Trap: Self-Absorption Instead of Social Change. Schur charged that the “awareness movement” (another catch-all phrase that included New Age groups as well as most of the groups we are talking about) addressed the problems of the affluent, the white middle class, and diverted the poor from advancing their real collective interests.¹⁶

But the most serious critique of this type joined a psychological and a political perspective. It came from the late Christopher Lasch, who wrote several articles on the “new narcissism” in America for The New York Review of Books and Partisan Review. Lasch argued that a “retreat to purely personal satisfactions,” one of the main themes of the seventies, was reflected in everything from occultism to jogging, from the new therapies to the revival of fundamentalist Christianity . According to Lasch, these new movements, unlike the millenarian movements of the waning Middle Ages which were concerned with social justice, all included a wish to forget the past, to live only for the moment. They went no further than a search for instant gratification and a kind of survivalism.

The picture Lasch painted of the present culture was one in which people veered “between unthinking political commitments and a cult of the self, between a wholesale rejection of politics and a rejection of personal life as a bourgeois self-indulgence.” While Schur characterized the members of these movements as complacent, Lasch showed them as self-preoccupied and desperate.

Lasch argued that every age has its own forms of mental illness, which simply mirror, in exaggerated form, the basic characteristics of that age. In Freud’s time the dominant mental illness was hysteria and obsessional neurosis. These, wrote Lasch, “carried to extremes the personality traits associated with the capitalist order at an earlier stage in its development—acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a fierce repression of sexuality.” In our age, by contrast, the dominant illnesses have been schizophrenia and “borderline” personality disorders. These, he wrote, seemed to signify a societal change from inner-direction to narcissism. According to Lasch, narcissism and its traits—pansexuality, hypochondria, corruptibility, shallowness, the inability to mourn— were simply the best way of coping with a warlike social environment where friendships and family life were hard to sustain, where relationships were shallow, where there was no sense of historical continuity, and where consumption and glamour were emphasized.¹⁷

Occultists as Rebels and Innovators

The counterthrusts to these types of arguments came from a number of sources. Some writers, such as Roszak, saw the occult resurgence as, in part, a protest against a sterile technocratic ethic. Industrial society had produced its opposite: a yearning for the sacred, the communal, the spontaneous. Others, such as Edward Tiryakian and Mircea Eliade, saw the occult as providing, both historically and in the present, fresh images for many artistic and political movements. Esoteric culture, wrote Tiryakian, “with its fantastic wealth of imagery and symbolism, is multivalent in terms of the political expressions that can be derived from it.”¹⁸ He observed that all kinds of groups from the Sinn Fein to the Nazis made extensive use of occult images. These ideas did not belong to reactionaries any more than they belong to progressives.

Both Tiryakian and Eliade mentioned symbolist poets and surrealist writers like André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard, all of whom were committed to radical politics as well as to occultism.¹⁹ The entire surrealist movement seemed to speak directly against the arguments that occultism and magic were antipolitical per se. Breton and the surrealists spoke out strongly against what they considered to be the three prime evils: realism, industrial rationalism, and the bourgeois social order.^y

Another writer who compared the growth of mysticism, particularly among young people, with the surrealist and Dadaist movements was Nathan Adler. He wrote that in both cases dreams, hallucinations, and chance were used as “an antidote to the increasing sterility of industrial and mercantile life.”²⁰ He made a careful distinction between the surrealist movement and the group he was writing about—the youth culture of the early seventies—believing the latter was anti-intellectual. In my own experiences with Witches and Pagans I have come across very little anti-intellectualism.

Tiryakian wrote that the occult, now, as in the past, seems to function as a “seedbed,” a source of change and innovation, that ultimately affects the arts, the sciences, and politics. He noted that while it was customary to regard the occult as marginal, atavistic, an odd deviation from the modernization process, another way of viewing esoteric traditions was to see them as the source for new paradigms, catalysts for modernization that appear in both the “build-ups” and the “breakdowns” of history—in the Renaissance, for example, or during the waning of the Roman Empire.²¹

As for Harris’s charge that the growth of the occult leads to befuddlement, retreat, and reaction, Roszak countered with these words: “It is not transcendent experience that should be rejected but its invidious employment and attendant obfuscation of consciousness.” The real evil, he wrote, lies in “setting transcendence against the earth, the body, the city of man, for the sake of protecting criminal privilege.”²² Good magic, he maintained, is rather like good art. Bad magic and bad art simply mystify; good magic and good art lay open the mysteries for all.

Still another positive view saw the occult resurgence as a healthy refusal to be content with the finite. Harriet Whitehead, as we saw, wrote that this refusal was the result of a conviction that there are gaps and deficiencies in the Western mode of comprehending reality. The search and exploration of the occult was an attempt to get at the order that lies at the bottom of things, to discover the “really real.”²³

Is occultism a retreat from the world? It must be said that few occultists, Pagans, and Witches spend much time debating this question (or, for that matter, reading these articles). But this debate did take place in the women’s movement. As we have seen, a number of women disposed of the entire notion of a split between spiritual and material reality by simply saying that it was a mistaken notion born of patriarchal thinking. They saw ritual and magic as a connecting force, like art and poetry. If there was a necessity for art, why not for ritual? Artists were merely a bit more respectable these days than magicians and creators of rituals.

Other Theories of More Than Passing Interest

Some of the most interesting thoughts on contemporary occult movements have come from historian Mircea Eliade, whose more than twenty published works range from mythography to investigations of shamanism and Witchcraft. In 1976 the University of Chicago Press published a collection of Eliade’s essays under the title Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions, one of the sanest books on these topics to appear in years. Three essays bear directly on the themes of this book. Two are considered here; a third was discussed in Chapter 4.

In “Cultural Fashion and History of Religion” Eliade investigated the extraordinary popularity in France of the magazine Planète, and of the philosophy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The arguments in this essay can easily be applied to most recent occult groups. Planète was started by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, two authors who became famous in 1961 with the publication of Morning of the Magicians,²⁴ a book that combined politics, occultism, science fact, and science fiction. It raised quite a furor in France and became the basis for much excited discussion in the United States, particularly within the counterculture. Planète was founded with money earned by the book. The magazine also contained a mixture of magic, science, politics, and speculation.

Eliade argued that in France, after the Algerian War, there was a “profound malaise among the intellectuals.” They had become tired of living in the “gloomy, tedious,” historical moment, but Sartre and other existentialist writers had taught French intellectuals that this was the only responsible thing to do. Planète presented a total contrast, offering a new, “optimistic and holistic outlook” in which the universe was mysterious and exciting, and in which occultism and science combined to create infinite possibilities. The world was no longer doomed to be absurd; human beings were no longer condemned to be estranged and useless. One was no longer committed to constant analysis of one’s own existential situation; instead, one was committed to the infinite process of evolution.

Eliade argued that the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin became popular in France for similar reasons. Teilhard looked at the world from a cosmic viewpoint in which human history was a small part of an infinite progressive evolution.^z Eliade wrote that Teilhard’s universe was “real, alive, meaningful, creative, sacred.” Teilhard, despite his Christian symbolism, was really a pantheist who ignored sin and evil and who viewed human and planetary evolution as progressive, optimistic, and infinite. Eliade wrote:

One cannot even go back to a romantic or bucolic approach to nature. But the nostalgia for a lost mystical solidarity with nature still haunts Western man. And Teilhard has laid open for him an unhoped-for perspective, where nature is charged with religious values even while retaining its completely “objective” reality.²⁵

How did Eliade sum up the ideas of those people who read Planète with eagerness and found themselves interested in the ideas of Teilhard? These people rejected existentialism, were indifferent to history, exalted physical nature, and held ultimately positive feelings toward science and technology. What is more, their antihistoricism was not really a rejection of history but “a protest against the pessimism and nihilism of some recent historicists,” coupled with a “nostalgia for what might be called a macro-history—a planetary and, later, a cosmic history.”

Eliade echoed Lasch, but from the other side. The indifference to history produced an ultimate optimism as opposed to the survivalism born of desperation depicted by Lasch.

Eliade’s essay “The Occult and the Modern World” focused more specifically on the history of occultism and its current popularity. After discussing the nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi, who was largely responsible for the vogue of occultism in France, Eliade wrote that the generation of French occultists that followed Levi wanted to regain humanity’s spiritual perfection as it was “before the fall.” This occult movement “did not attract the attention of competent historians of ideas of the times but did fascinate a great number of important writers, from Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud to André Breton and some of the postsurrealist authors, such as René Daumal.”

The use of occult themes by these writers took one of two paths. Those who wrote before the second half of the nineteenth century, writers such as Balzac, Schiller, and Goethe, all “reflected a hope in a personal or collective renovatio—a mystical restoration of man’s original dignity and powers.” The second and later path, taken by such writers as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Breton, was the use of occult themes as “a powerful weapon in their rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ideology.” Implicit in this rebellion was a rejection of Judeo-Christian values and the social and aesthetic sensibilities of the day.

In the occult traditions these artists were looking for pre-Judeo-Christian and pre-Classical (pre-Greek) elements, i.e., Egyptian, Persian, Indian, or Chinese creative methods and spiritual values. They sought their aesthetic ideals in the most archaic arts, in the “primordial” revelation of beauty. . . .

To conclude, from Baudelaire to André Breton, involvement with the occult represented for the French literary and artistic avant-garde one of the most efficient criticisms and rejections of the religious and cultural values of the West—efficient because it was considered to be based on historical facts.

Eliade felt that the current occult scene was distinguished from the past occult resurgence in certain important ways. The present occult explosion was “anticipated” by a new wave of scholarship and understandings made principally not by writers and artists, as in the previous era, but by historians of ideas. These contributions included the decoding of esoteric manuscripts found in the Dead Sea caves, new monographs on Jewish Gnosticism, new studies of Chinese, Indian, and Western alchemy, new investigations of the Hermetic traditions, and new research into shamanism and Witchcraft. This contemporary scholarship, according to Eliade, “disclosed the consistent religious meaning and cultural function of a great number of occult practices, beliefs, and theories, recorded in many civilizations, European and non-European alike, and at all levels of culture.”

He argued that new studies had changed the thinking of scholars on many questions, including the origins of Western European Witchcraft. A hundred years ago, most historians believed that European Witchcraft was the invention of the Inquisition. The covens, the reports of orgies, and all the other accusations were seen as either imaginary inventions or declarations obtained from the accused during torture. Then came Margaret Murray, who argued that Witchcraft was a pre-Christian fertility religion. Today, Murray’s theories have been pretty much discredited, but Eliade argued that her assumption that “there existed a pre-Christian fertility cult and that specific survivals of this pagan cult were stigmatized during the Middle Ages as witchcraft” was correct—and had been borne out by more recent investigations of Indo-Tibetan and Romanian materials.

Eliade also wrote that the occult resurgence continued both of the older themes, the rebellion against Western religious values and the search for renewal. But, he contended, the most important aspect for all groups from astrologists to Satanists was the hope for an individual and collective renovatio, or renewal. “It is primarily the attraction of a personal initiation that explains the craze for the occult,” he wrote. And all these groups implied, “consciously or unconsciously, what I would call an optimistic evaluation of the human mode of being.”²⁶

One of the most important early books to chart the rise of new religious movements in the United States was the 1974 Princeton University study Religious Movements in Contemporary America. Among the most unusual articles in this large volume is anthropologist Edward Moody’s study of Satanism, “Magical Therapy: An Anthropological Investigation of Contemporary Satanism.”^aa Moody spent two years as a participant-observer at the Church of the Trapezoid, a branch of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Moody set out to answer the question, “Why do people become Satanists?” After two years he concluded that Satanists find that something they call “magic” works for them, that they accomplish many of the goals they set out to achieve. But how this magic works proved to be very complex.

From the start, Moody found himself beset by difficulties. He could not find any “traditional sociological pigeonhole” into which the Satanist could be placed. He found members who were “successful” in life and those who were “failures.” He found rich members and poor ones, representatives of all classes and political persuasions. The only characteristic common to all the members he observed was a behavioral trait that placed them outside the cultural “norm.” Many of them displayed a lack of knowledge of the “rules of the social game” and often felt unable to “make the system respond.”

Moody observed that magic training for the new Satanist recruit was a combination of many practical skills designed to build up the ego and lessen feelings of guilt and anxiety. The techniques and rituals were a combination of psychodrama, tips on social manners, advice on how to make oneself more attractive, and techniques to strengthen confidence.

Moody observed a sample subject, “Billy G.,” over a period of many months. He watched this young man change from a person whose level of anxiety was so great that he could not even speak to a member of the opposite sex into a more “normal” young man who could interact with men and women, both inside and outside the church. Billy G. slowly worked through various rituals, many of which were composed of behaviorist techniques to lessen anxiety.

In one example Moody gave a new twist to that fact of contemporary Satanism most played up by the press: the nude woman who acts as the altar. In the beginning Billy G. finds this setting so disturbing that he stands at the back of the room. In succeeding weeks he moves closer. Finally, Billy G., the son of fundamentalist missionaries, is able to stand next to this woman, to talk to her, to hand her a goblet or in some way participate in the ritual without feeling ill at ease. He is given encouragement; he is told that his sexual feelings are natural and not to be denied, as his previous education had taught him. Eventually, he is able to meet women and to go out with them. He becomes socially successful. The magic works.

Ironically, Moody showed that the Church of Satan, certainly one of the less “acceptable” occult groups, actually functioned as a normalizing force, a socializing force within the larger society. It functioned much like therapy and it apparently succeeded. Moody commented on Billy G.:

If he attributes this new-found power and success to magic rather than to the insights of sociology, anthropology, or psychology, it is because such an interpretation is more in accordance with his world view and the categories of understanding which he uses to give structure and meaning to his world.

In fact, it is sometimes difficult to argue against his interpretation. If psychology explains personal interactions in terms of hypothesized “forces” at work, forces which are known and measured only through the perception of their effects, then how is that different, the Satanist asks, from magic? Satanists say, with some justification, “When magic becomes scientific fact we refer to it as medicine or astronomy.” (La Vey, 1969).

Moody ended his paper by encouraging the growth of the Church of the Trapezoid and arguing that such institutions socialized individuals for whom traditional therapy had failed and, paradoxically, served to bring people closer to cultural norms. Why is there a growth of magical groups today, Moody asked. He concluded that it was “an attempt by various people to regain a sense of control over their environment and their lives.” It is important to note what Moody did not say. He did not employ the standard cliché that people become occultists to gain power over others, although, of course, some may join for that reason. He did not say that such people want to retreat from the world. Instead, he said that they join these groups in order to gain a sense of self-mastery, to be in control of their own lives in the world. Moody concluded:

This seems to be a time when many of the gods of the Western world, like the old traditional gods of the urbanizing African, are being challenged. God is dead, but that means not just the Judeo-Christian god but also the gods of progress, science and technology. We put our faith in “him,” but now the god of progress is discovered to be a two-faced Janus about to extract a terrible price for our progress and comfort; the god of science has failed us and has not created the paradise we were led to expect, free from disease and ignorance and death. Instead he threatens us with destruction with either the apocalypse of atomic conflagration or a slow death by chemical pollution. The god of technology reveals his “true” face and our streams die, our lakes atrophy, and the very air is turned into a subtle poison. . . . In such time the people look to new gods or try to refurbish the old ones. . . .

Now that external sources of truth, the experts and scientists, have failed us, many people have begun to look within themselves for their source of wisdom and security. Some have begun to reassert the necessity of finding personal solutions. In a certain sense witchcraft^ab is a product of these needs. If the world of the Satanist is a criterion, the Satanist is training himself to be assertive and powerful as an individual. Although he draws a sense of security from his association with powerful forces, he is finding inner sources of strength. He is casting off the need for powerful gods to protect and care for him, insisting that he is strong enough to care for himself. He commands the gods and does not beseech them. He is turning from an ethereal and other-worldly orientation to a somewhat more realistic assessment and concern with the mundane and real world.²⁷

Moody’s point that the occult functions as a rationalizing force is made in another article, “Urban Witches,” in which he argued that much that is called magic is actually a learning process of social behavior and interpersonal games. Magic, he wrote, allows its practitioners to cope better “with the everyday problems of life, with the here and now.”²⁸

Sociologist Marcello Truzzi took a similar position. In 1972, in an article “The Occult Revival as Popular Culture,” Truzzi wrote that the revival of occultism involved a broad spectrum of individuals, many of whom were “not the simple identity-seeking variety that some have portrayed them to be.” Truzzi argued that occultists tend to be playful with ideas that were once greatly feared and that therefore the rise of occultism is evidence of a victory over the supernatural. He wrote: “What we are seeing is largely a demystification-process of what were once fearful and threatening cultural elements.”²⁹

In another paper, “Toward a Sociology of the Occult: Notes on Modern Witchcraft,” Truzzi wrote that Witchcraft groups have, in general, very little supernaturalism. He found most occultism to be naturalistic and pragmatic, “a kind of deviant science.” He noted that most occultists seek scientific validation of their claims and regard themselves as scientific in a philosophical sense, working within an “ultimate purview of scientific understanding,” Truzzi observed:

In this sense, it would appear that there has been a kind of secularization of magic in adaptation to the modern scientific and naturalistic world view. Thus, what were once described in the occult literature as supernatural psychic forces are now examples of extra-sensory perception of a kind basically examinable and potentially understandable in the psychologist’s laboratory.³⁰