Drawing Down the Moon (76 page)

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.
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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.
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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.

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:

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.
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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.
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(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.
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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.”
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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?”
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Is the desire for such a paradise a regression? Greeley and McCready disagreed:

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.”
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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.
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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.
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