Ever since Theodosius’s reign of terror in the 4th Century CE, Western spirituality has been an occult matter. With the coming of Abrahamic tyranny, anyone with an interest in the true nature of the divine was driven underground lest they be murdered. Between the murders of Hypatia in 415 CE and of Giordano Bruno in 1600, Westerners were subjected to the most psychopathic campaign of spiritual destruction in human history, with millions slaughtered for refusing to bow to an idol of the dead rabbi.
Occultism was the inevitable end result of these centuries of terror. Anyone interested in genuine spirituality, such as raising one’s frequency of consciousness above suffering, was forced to pursue that interest in secret. Those interested in science were forced into secrecy also. Thus occultism, genuine spirituality and true science came to overlap to a major degree (for an excellent history of the influence of this occultism on the history of science, see The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett).
Christianity started to die around the time of the murder of Bruno, perhaps because the centuries of atrocities had finally made the reputation of the religion unsalvagable. Since then, the knowledge pushed into the occult has undergone several waves of mass public interest. We are now in the third of such waves of occult revival.
The first wave came at the end of the 19th Century. Writing in 1883, Nietzsche was able to say “God is dead” in Thus Spake Zarathustra because his society had already abandoned Yahweh (he would have been murdered if he had written The Anti-Christ a few centuries earlier). This shows that society was then ready for a return to esoteric truths.
The Theosophical Society was founded in New York City in 1875, and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in the 1880s in England. Spiritualism, as a religious movement, also peaked around this time. All of these movements took an interest in subjects that were banned during the years of Christian tyranny. This was the first occult revival, and it brought spiritual concepts and awareness back to popular concsiousness for the first time in centuries.
This first occult revival was ended by the First World War. The need to overcome one’s physical enemies brought the West screaming back to materialism and the push for more shells, more bullets, more troops, a relentless focus on quantity to the exclusion of quality. With quantity comes materialism.
The second occult revival followed from the discovery of LSD in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, and the rediscovery of sacramental magic mushroom use by New York investment banker R Gordon Wasson in the 1950s. Although this wave of psychedelic use did not last long, thanks to the War on Drugs, it had a powerful impact on popular consciousness. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception brought the idea of tripping to a wide audience, and the Summer of 1969 made it a reality.
This second occult revival encompassed the New Age movement that began in the 1970s. This movement was aware that we were living in a spiritual dark age, and that most genuine spirituality had been suppressed over the centuries. The War on Drugs prevented people from rediscovering this spirituality, and neoliberalism brought them back to materialism, quantity and production.
The mini-Dark Age caused by neoliberalism did not last. In the 2020s, we are going through a third occult revival. This third occult revival seems to be inspired by a combination of the Internet and the end of what Emmanuel Macron called the end of the era of abundance.
The Internet has made it easier than ever to share esoteric knowledge. Growing up in the Satanic Panic era of the 80s and early 90s, it was hard to even find an accurate and objective book about occultism. The topic in the media was mostly scare stories about murders, rapes and insanity. Thanks to the Internet, sane (or relatively sane) people have been able to contact each other and discuss occult subjects, bringing awareness of such subjects to new heights.
Now people are much more advanced than they would have been at any time since the death of Yahweh. Every student of occultism has an esoteric lodge in their own home thanks to the Internet. Thanks to this technological advance, curious people everywhere are now deep into occult studies.
The end of the era of abundance is also driving people away from materialism. Materialism used to mean big houses, flash cars, rich food, abundant entertainment, easy travel and access to all kinds of gadgets. Today materialism means being trapped at work, paying rent, eating slop, watching brainrot: dying, like a battery drained of energy.
People are getting a much worse deal from materialism now than during the 20th Century. This is causing them to look for happiness in the metaphysical. Some of them shop around mainstream religious denominations, only to find that most of the adherents don’t even believe in God or in anything spiritual. The massive disappointment of both nihilistic atheistic materialism and of mainstream religion is turning people back towards occultism.
As part of this third occult revival, we already see groups of people interested in genuine spirituality arising and growing. These groups are forming outside of the purview of government or mainstream religious authorities. But, despite the lack of official oversight, these groups are thriving. God is more fundamental than the government, and people acting with God’s approval are more powerful than those acting with governmental approval.
This third wave might combine spiritualism and psychedelics, so that the first and second waves are both represented, combined into a new movement where all hidden qualities of the mind and consciousness are open to discovery and investigation. Perhaps modern advances in psychological science could contribute to this.
It’s impossible to say how long this third revival might last, or how far it might go. Eventually an occult revival will lead to a new spiritual order in Western Civilisation, but it’s too early to know if this one is it.
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