Book Review: Occult America
Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
by Mitch Horowitz
(New York: Bantam Books, 2009)
Reviewed by Lee Duigon
“This prophet of the New Age [Edgar Cayce] introduced hope and dignity into lives and places where conventional messages and messengers had failed to reach. And this, in the end, was the highest legacy of occult America.”
–Mitch Horowitz (p. 245)
“All humanism is occultistic … Central to all occultism is man’s desire to be his own god; practically, this takes the form of trying to seize control over men and the universe by lawless and ungodly means. Occultism in its every form is thus rebellion against God and therefore against every godly authority.”[1]–R. J. Rushdoony
Almost everyone in America believes in God, and most of those believers identify themselves as Christians. Until very recently, it was taken for granted that America is a Christian nation.
Mitch Horowitz, “a well-known voice for occult and esoteric ideas” (according to his book’s cover copy), casts doubt on this assertion. Surveying occult trends and movements in America, from before the founding of the country to the present day, Horowitz doesn’t just question our status as a Christian culture. “At work and at church, on television and in bookstores,” he proclaims, “there was no avoiding it: Occult America had prevailed” (p. 258).
Occult “Core Beliefs”
Is it true? Has occultism “prevailed”? Fortune-telling, astrology, psychic healing, “past lives regressions,” reciting special prayers to harness “God power,” gurus and secret societies, etc.—is this as much a part of our culture, or more, than the Bible?
Yes, says Horowitz, it is. As proof, he lists five “New Age core beliefs” (p. 257):
–“Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas
– “Belief in a mind-body connection in health
– “Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages
– “Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality
– “Belief that spiritual understanding is available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine.”
“Most twenty-first-century Americans,” adds Horowitz, “whatever their background, would probably agree with a majority of those statements” (p. 258). He offers no evidence to back it up—but can anyone be sure his claim is false, and that those beliefs, so strongly advanced by occultists throughout our history, have not seeped into the mainstream? What would be the results if someone took a poll?
A Rogues Gallery
Horowitz’s book is a rather superficial survey. It’s obvious that there’s just too much material to cover in depth in one volume. We learn enough herein to realize that the subject of Occult America might easily fill a library.
The writing is easy and breezy. Here and there the author pauses to give a fuller picture of some of the more important and intriguing personalities involved—Anne Lee, founder of the Shakers; Jemima Wilkinson, the “Publick Universal Friend”; Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism; “the Poughkeepsie Seer,” Andrew Jackson Davis; Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; Frank B. Robinson, the king of mail-order, do-it-yourself religion; Professor Black Herman, the magician; Manly P. Hall, who wrote an encyclopedia of occultism; and, of course, Edgar Cayce, “the Sleeping Prophet” and long-distance psychic healer. These were all key figures in the growth of American occultism. We are also treated to a whole rogues’ gallery of outright quacks, exploiters, and even mental patients who also powered the engine of the occult. It’s quite a collection.
The information given is interesting and entertaining. But because there are more important issues to be discussed here, we cannot give space to it. Those readers who would enjoy a trip down a curious side-road of popular culture will enjoy this book.
What’s Wrong With It?
So what’s wrong with a little fortune-telling? Why shouldn’t a Christian dabble in numerology, or play with a Ouija board?
The most obvious answer is, because it’s all a lot of humbug. Occult beliefs simply aren’t true, and can be shown to be false—at least false to Christianity—by testing them against the Scriptures.
Let’s return to the New Age core beliefs, listed above.
Is there a “therapeutic value” to “religious and spiritual ideas,” and a “mind-body connection in health”?
Christians would agree that “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16), especially when it comes to healing the sick. In Acts 19, “God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul: So that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them…” (v. 11–12). There may or may not be a “mind-body connection” as New Agers understand it. But what the Bible is describing is a “faith-body connection.” Fervent prayer to a sovereign God who has the power and the authority to heal is not the same as obtaining health through positive thinking or ritual mumbo-jumbo.
Can we agree that “human consciousness is evolving to higher stages?” Not if we believe God’s Word, which tells us that the human heart is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer.17:9), and that “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). But occultists are talking about a “natural” process inherent in man. Nothing could be farther from the Biblical view of fallen man. Besides which, even a fleeting glance at the daily news headlines should dispel any wishful thoughts that mankind might not be fallen, after all.
God by His sovereign grace regenerates His whole creation, including man. “After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33). To believe that this “just happens” by some evolutionary process is to dismiss the grace and power of God. It doesn’t just happen: God does it.
Do “thoughts determine reality?” Here’s a simple way to test that proposition. Just find an open manhole, sincerely convince yourself it’s closed, and try to stand on it. Happy landings.
Is “spiritual understanding available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine?” Regardless of what liberal theologians in mainstream churches say, any Christian who believes this has set aside the words of Christ Himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).
“Spiritual understanding” that is devoid of God the Son, or God the Father, or God the Holy Spirit, is no understanding at all. As Paul said to the Athenians, who didn’t listen, “And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent…” (Acts 17:30). Occultism is a willful return to the times of ignorance.
Even a superficial examination of Scripture rejects occult “beliefs” and brands them as apostasy.
Whose Fault?
Americans are famously fond of short cuts and quick fixes. On the surface, this would seem to explain much of the enduring popularity of the occult. Why rely on God—who may or may not grant your prayer, whose ways are not our ways, who alone is fully autonomous—when you can get whatever you want simply by wearing certain colors or reciting a certain “prayer” a certain way? But there’s more to it than that.
Perhaps the church has failed. Mr. Horowitz thinks so: “[M]ainstream Christian churches either had to address the problems of daily existence”—supposedly addressed by the occult—“or else risk irrelevance,” he writes (p. 115). And, “…Phineas Quimby’s mental healing, William Dudley Pelley’s reports from the afterlife, and Frank B. Robinson’s claims to have ‘talked with God.’ Each tore the lid off a yearning that existed just beneath the surface of popular religious culture” (p. 196). And Edgar Cayce “introduced hope and dignity into lives and places where conventional messages and messengers had failed to reach” (p. 245). Presumably this refers to Christian churches and the Christian message.
As Horowitz sees it, the church simply wasn’t meeting people’s needs, and they turned to the occult to fill the gaps. We presume he is talking about worldly needs; but he does not tell us exactly how the church fell short.
R. J. Rushdoony looked more deeply into the matter, going back to the “Great Awakening” and the rise of revivalism in the eighteenth century.
“[O]ccult practices,” he wrote, “returned as an ostensible Christian revival, in both Catholic and Protestant circles… The place of law in sanctification gave way to antinomianism [rejection of God’s law], and the Great Awakening saw militant free-love preaching as a part of the ‘revival’ and as ‘proof’ or salvation and freedom from the law. Although the main body of the clergy suppressed this antinomianism, it remained endemic to revivalism…”[2]
Rushdoony continues, “The Bible was put aside during revivals, because men wanted experience, not truth. Rampant humanism led not only to exalting man’s pretended sovereignty as against God’s, but to exalting man to ridiculous dimensions”[3]—by believing, perhaps, that man is “evolving to a higher state,” whatever that may be.
Certainly the church is not without blame, having failed to insist on truth, failed to defend the sufficiency of God’s Word, and even imitated its occult competitors. “Indeed,” says Horowitz, “books and sermons emanating from the twenty-first century’s ‘megachurches’ abound in the how-to appeal that marked the [Frank B.] Robinson approach” (p.115).
But before we assign all the blame to the church, consider St. Paul’s epistle to the churches in Galatia:
“I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel… O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you…?” (Gal. 1:6, 3:1)
Paul had barely left this mission field when tares of heresy and superstition sprang up among the wheat of Christianity. Had Paul made mistakes in planting those churches, whose congregations so readily lent their ears to the preaching of “another gospel”? Or is there something in the nature of fallen man that prefers the world’s lies to God’s truth?
They Want to Believe
Some people have a natural appetite for hogwash. Writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) invented a forbidden occult tome, The Necronomicon, as a literary device to tie together a series of his horror stories. Although Lovecraft himself frequently and publicly confessed The Necronomicon to be a product of his own imagination, to this day there are a plethora of websites devoted to the proposition that he was lying and The Necronomicon is real. People even claim to have seen it.[4]
What makes anyone believe in such claptrap? Horowitz does not answer the question—maybe to him it isn’t claptrap—so we turn again to Rushdoony.
“To seek the occultist route to the future is to say that the future is determined apart from God,” Rushdoony wrote.[5] And, “The occult is that which is deliberately concealed from observation or knowledge; it is so concealed because it is antinomian; it is at war with law because it is lawless.”[6]
Fallen man shies away from God: we remember Adam and Eve trying to hide their nakedness from God (Gen. 3:8). Even the destruction of Jerusalem, brought about by God after repeated warnings through His prophets, failed to convince the survivors of their folly. “But since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven,” they answered the prophet Jeremiah, “and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine” (Jer. 44:18). They chase after false gods, and occult practices, no matter how badly they are burned.
Occultism Is Rebellion
“The rise of occultism,” Rushdoony said, “thus will foster rebellion in every area of society, and the rise of rebellion will likewise foster occultism.”[7] Anyone who doubts the accuracy of that analysis needs to attend his city’s next Gay Pride parade.
Throughout the history of the occult in America, notes Horowitz, the occult and political progressivism have grown closer and closer together. By “political progressivism” we mean the use of state power to break down the people’s allegiance to God’s moral laws as given in the Bible, purposely deconstructing and coarsening the culture to make men more dependent on the state.
“[New Thought minister Wallace] Wattles believed in using mind power to wipe away barons of industry and overthrow the prevailing social order,” Horowitz writes (p. 89), looking back 100 years, helping to set “a progressive tone that marked the metaphysical culture for the rest of the century” (p. 220).
It didn’t seem sinister at first, did it? In a 1941 speech, Frank B. Robinson said, “We meet here today not on a theological background, but on the foreground of a spiritual conception, the common meeting ground of every race, every creed, every color, every philosophy, and every religion on the face of the earth” (p. 113). Who can object to such robust pluralism? You can’t get more inclusive than that.
But it’s not possible to cleave to both Christianity and universalism: they are diametrically opposed. When you try to include all religions, you wind up throwing out the Christian religion. When you exclude “theology,” you build without a foundation. In its embrace of religious universalism, the occult reveals its antinomian core.
“Rebellion is thus not an isolated fact; it is part of a much larger pattern,” Rushdoony wrote. “In the history of revolutions, of cultural collapse, the occult plays a significant role. It is evidence of radical decay and a major influence for destruction.”[8]
Harsh words, perhaps: but Christ the King is exclusive in His claim to truth—“I am the truth”—and for the Christian, there’s no getting around it. You can’t have Christ and the I Ching, Christ and the “ascended masters,” Christ and anything or anybody else.
It may seem strange to give more ink to R. J. Rushdoony than to Mitch Horowitz, in a review of Horowitz’s book. But when Christian churches ape the self-help gobbledygook invented by occultists, when supposed Christian leaders like President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, consult astrologers to help them make important decisions (Horowitz, p. 221), and when a supposed Christian nation casually embraces bits and pieces of the occult while its culture deteriorates before our very eyes—well, there’s more at stake than just “How did you like the book?”
Even if the churches were to return wholesale to Biblical teaching and preaching, they would have their work cut out for hem. The occult has been with us since Old Testament times, appealing as it does to inborn sin. Long before Saul consulted the Witch of Endor, Moses said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exod. 22:18).
We can only ask the churches to plant, and individual Christians to water. The increase, as always, must be the gift of God (1 Cor. 3:6–7).
1. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. II (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2001 ed.), 160–161.
2. Ibid.,157–158.
3. Ibid., 158
4. For example, see http://www.geocities.com/soho/9870/nechor.htm
5. Rushdoony, 162.
6. Ibid., 163.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
