Ask a stranger what "the occult" means and watch their face first. Some of them get suspicious immediately, and want to know why you're asking.
That's what happened when somebody actually went and did it — a host of individuals quizzed on what they thought the occult was, some of them greatly suspicious of the hidden agenda behind the question. The compilation ran to over 2,000 different responses, many of them unique, and answers came from the general public and from people claiming informed insight, the latter often hinting vaguely that they'd got their knowledge straight from the horse's mouth.1
So here's the question underneath, and it decides more than it looks like it does. Is magic a corruption of religion, or was it always sitting inside it?
Ten extracts were kept, and some were kept because the phrasing is funny. Astrology, numerology, and "analysis of one's birth date" — which some respondents insisted was a different thing from numerology. Palmistry, handwriting analysis, checking the moles on your body, and reading faces.1 Then this one, quoted because it couldn't be resisted:
"looking at one's liver to find out what the weather would be like tomorrow"
Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and literally every organisation whose meetings are private. Even where meetings were open to the public and the practices common knowledge, respondents held that the members were still meeting in secret and working hidden rituals nobody knows about. Asked how they had such direct information about those hidden details, they often turned offensive.1
Then UFOs, the Egyptian pyramids, crop circles in England, and a large hole at the North Pole leading to a powerful anti-Christian world at the centre of the Earth. Divination of every kind. Charms — one respondent objected specifically to wearing charms on your wrists, which raised the unasked question of whether ankles would be acceptable. Horseshoes, amulets and talismans were called positively diabolical, because they interfere with the work of God.1
Two more are worth putting side by side, because the same move is in both and only one of them is funny. A devout Roman Catholic named ritual magic and witchcraft, and included in it praying to angels and demons — while belonging to a church that calls on the aid of angels and saints. The same man wanted it known that two famous stage magicians had sold their souls to the Devil and were working real magic, then added, apologetically, that of course there's no such thing as real magic.1 Another respondent supplied crystals, stones, herbs, and "kissing stones and the rings of the bishops and the Mafia."1
Now the tenth. A reborn Christian explained that the Roman Catholic church practises black magic constantly, by turning communion wine into the literal blood of Jesus and then drinking it. He added that the Virgin Mary is not the mother of Jesus but a pagan goddess of sacrifice, who demands the blood of the Christian god — the blackest side of occultism.1
And then the recognition, in one line. Haven't Jews been accused of ritually sacrificing Christian children to drink their blood at Passover, despite Jewish law forbidding the consumption of blood entirely?1 Same accusation, same structure, aimed at whoever is currently outside. It's a joke about a Catholic when a Protestant says it, and it's a pogrom when it goes the other way.
The survey concluded that there's no absolutely clear or exact definition of the occult at all.2 So the etymology gets consulted, and it comes back plainly enough. From Latin occulere, to cover up or conceal, from a root meaning to hide. Hidden, secret, esoteric — and specifically supernatural, mystic, magical.2
Take that at face value and something breaks immediately. All religious worship and all spiritual activities fall into the occultism category, because every one of them concerns unknown forces and powers.2 The definition is too big to sort anything.
And the other half has stopped being true. Nearly everything on the survey list has lost its hidden status entirely, and now appears openly in journals and daily newspapers around the globe.2 Whatever these things are, they aren't concealed.
Which leaves the word doing one job. It's used loosely as a reference to any spiritual activity viewed with disapproval — or with approval, by the people who call themselves occultists.2 The word carries a verdict, not a category.
Here's where it turns, because the same list gets walked a second time and checked against Jewish Kabbalah item by item. Astrology and numerology comprise major portions of the doctrine, with a large quantity of primary material devoted to them in mainstream Judaic texts and in mystical writings alike.3
Palmistry has a Hebrew name — Chochmat ha-Yad, the wisdom of the hand — and so does face-study, Chochmat ha-Partzuf. Both were practised by Kabbalists, including the examination of moles on the body. The Holy Ari read the faces of the people he met.3
One concession is made, and it's the funny one. Nobody was inspecting livers to find out about tomorrow's weather.3
And the secret societies? Many Kabbalistic schools kept their teachings hidden from all but a very restricted membership. The existence of the schools was common knowledge; their doctrines were not. They worked special ritualistic practices unknown to those outside their closest circles.3 Which is the survey respondents' fantasy about the Freemasons, except documented, and in the tradition being defended.
Divination first. The primary literature of Practical Kabbalah carries a great many kinds — dream interpretation, she'elat chalom or dream questioning, dream invocation, and the consulting of oracles called Goralot.3
Then the amulets, and this is where the detail gets specific enough to be useful. Hebrew amulets are kameot, and some of the greatest masters wrote them. Their stated purposes range from protection during childbirth, to the promotion of physical health, to the invocation of financial success, and there's an enormous literature on the subject penned by authentic Kabbalists.3
There's a modern objection to this, and the answer to it is sharper than the objection. Some hold that kameot have simply been replaced by modern medication — that a pill is what an amulet used to be. The preference stated in return is for employing kameot with understanding, rather than taking pills without understanding.3 And the principles underlying a kamea are different in kind from the mindset behind swallowing something because you were told to. That's a claim about what the practitioner knows, not about what works.
Contacting the dead isn't foreign here either. To this day practitioners prostrate themselves on the graves of departed saints and chant special incantations, to establish a link between the departed soul and their own.3
There's vocabulary for the results, and the distinction it draws is the important part. A magid can be anything from a living lay preacher to a spirit messenger, some of them spirits of the deceased. An ibur is the beneficial impregnation of a living person by a departed soul — and it's carefully distinguished from a dibuk, which is malevolent possession.3 Same event from outside, opposite events from inside, and the tradition keeps two words for them.
The survey's demons-in-the-air line has a counterpart too. Kefitzat ha-derech is magical travel from one place to another, and it involves what's termed the air of demons.3 So does invisibility. Rabbi Shalom Sharabi is said to have walked to the Wailing Wall every night at midnight to pray, in an era when the terrain was prohibited to Jews, using a special method to render himself invisible to the guards.3
The whole argument lands on one sentence about authorship. The practitioners of all these primary works were Rabbis, greatly esteemed in their own communities.4
That's the move, and it's a good one. The material can't be sorted into a respectable tradition plus a disreputable fringe that attached itself later, because the same men wrote both, and their communities honoured them for it. Astrology and the amulets and the grave incantations aren't a corruption that crept in. They're in the primary literature, under the names of the people the tradition is proudest of.
Which is why the conclusion arrives as bafflement rather than as triumph. Most of what the general public calls occult was flourishing in the very heart of Jewish mysticism — so the claims denying any primary connection between the two are hard to account for at all.4
Somebody tells you a practice isn't really part of the tradition — that it's folk superstition that crept in later, or a modern invention, or something the serious people never did.
Don't argue about whether it's respectable. Go and ask who wrote it down.
Find the primary text that describes the practice. Then find out who wrote that text, and what standing he had while he was alive. Not what standing he has now — what his own community thought of him at the time. Those come apart more often than you'd expect, in both directions.
Then check whether the tradition has its own vocabulary for the thing. Two words where an outsider would use one is the tell. Does it distinguish a beneficial visitation from a malevolent one? An amulet made with understanding from a charm bought at a stall? Then somebody inside was thinking carefully enough to need the distinction, and you're looking at a technical practice rather than a residue.
Then ask what the tradition says the practice is for, in its own terms. Protection during childbirth. Physical health. Financial success. Specific stated purposes are what separate a discipline from a superstition, and they're the first thing an outside summary drops.
And when you find that the practice is there, don't conclude that the objectors are lying. Ask when it stopped being acceptable to say so, and what happened in that century.
The evidence here is the strongest kind available for a claim of this shape, because it's about authorship rather than interpretation. Each of the nine items is tied to primary works listed in the bibliography, and the argument turns on who wrote them — which is checkable without agreeing about anything.
The concession about liver-reading is worth noting as a marker. Somebody constructing a case would have found a way to claim it.
Tension left open. The word occult is dismantled as meaningless — too broad to sort anything, and functioning only as a verdict — and then used without qualification for the rest of the argument, including in the self-description "those who, like myself, define themselves occultists." A term shown to carry no content is then carried as an identity.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 MOTIVATED REASONING — the survey was designed and summarised by the person making the argument, and the ten extracts kept are selected partly for being amusing, which is also what makes them easy to dismiss.
The two halves of this pull against each other, and the seam is visible. The first half destroys the category. There's no exact definition, the etymology sweeps in all religious worship, the material isn't hidden any more, and the word survives only as a way of saying you disapprove.
The second half then defends the tradition's membership of that category with real energy — nine points, primary citations, a bibliography, and bafflement at anyone who denies the connection. But if the category doesn't sort anything, there's nothing there to be a member of, and the denial being objected to would be as empty as the affirmation.
What resolves it isn't stated but is legible in the shape of the argument. The category is worthless as a description and enormously powerful as an accusation, and the second half isn't defending a classification at all. It's answering the accusation on its own ground, because that's the ground where the damage happens. Show that the tradition's own honoured masters wrote the amulets, and the accusation loses its purchase whether or not the word means anything. It's a tactical answer to a tactical charge, and it costs something: the argument now depends on a category it has already shown to be empty.
Labelomania — behavioral-mechanics.
Meerloo's term names the exaggerated respect people give a label over the thing it's stuck to. Two identical wines, one with gold foil and a critic's score, and most people taste the label. The label adds weight the contents never had.
"Occult" runs the same mechanism with the sign flipped. It subtracts. Stick it on a practice and the practice becomes suspect regardless of what it consists of. Which is how 2,000 people applied it to astrology, the Freemasons, holes in the poles and the Catholic Mass without noticing they'd named four unrelated things.
Set them together and something falls out that neither says alone. Both labels work because nobody inspects the bottle — and that means the defence against them is identical, which is not obvious from either side. You can't argue a subtracting label off a practice by insisting the practice is respectable, any more than you can talk somebody out of the gold foil by insisting the wine is fine. You have to make them look at the contents. Nine items, named practitioners, and a bibliography is what looking at the contents actually takes, and it's laborious in exactly the way a label is not.
Asum — Akan Talisman Doctrine — african-spirituality.
The Akan protective object is asum: feathers, hair, teeth, beads, scraps of leather inscribed with characters, tied to a limb or hung at the neck, worn against disease and witchcraft. A colonial dictionary recorded it in one paragraph and filed the maker under sorcerer. Underneath that paragraph sits a full architecture — how the object is made, what impregnates it, what it descends from.
The kamea has the same two layers. Outside, a piece of inscribed paper somebody wears. Inside, an enormous literature by named masters, specifying purpose by purpose — childbirth, health, money — and a stated distinction between wearing one with understanding and swallowing a pill without.
The insight is about what a dismissal actually deletes. In both cases the outside account is not wrong about the object. It's accurate about the feathers and accurate about the paper, and it discards the only thing that made either a practice rather than a habit: the internal literature saying what it's for and how it's built. Which gives a test that works on any tradition being written off — ask whether it has a technical literature about the object, and who wrote it. If it does, "superstition" is describing the outside of something with an inside.
Sharpest implication. If the honoured masters of a tradition wrote its magical literature, then "authentic religion versus later magical corruption" isn't a description of what happened — it's a description of what a later generation needed to be true. Which suggests the useful historical question is never whether the magic was original, but when it became embarrassing, and to whom.
Generative questions.