Second, I hope it goes without saying that I offer my hermeneutical model of the paranormal only as a contribution to the larger project of studying such phenomena, certainly not as any final or complete solution to these anomalous events. I am as baffled as anyone by this material, and I offer no rational or religious certainties here, only intuitive hunches and possible directions. The simple truth is that we simply don’t know what is going on here. I would go further. With our present rules of engagement, that is, with our present reigning materialist methodologies, faith commitments, objectivist scientisms, and absolute cultural relativisms, we cannot know. So I suppose I am also after those rules of engagement. I want a new game.
The Fantastic Narrative of Western Occulture: The Paranormal as Story
Central to my attempted revival and re-theorization of the psychical and the paranormal is the notion that both categories are often wrapped up with profound narrative dimensions, that psychical and paranormal events are, on some level at least, very much about story. One might say that paranormal phenomena possess mythical dimensions. One might also say that they display dramatic literary features, as long as one defines that literary nature in a precise and careful way. But if paranormal events sometimes appear as if they were part of a larger living literature, just what kind of literature is it? If we are being written, in just what kind of story do we find ourselves? My own answer to this question is crystallized in a single phrase: the fantastic narrative of Western occulture. A bit of explanation is in order here.
I adopt the notion of a fantastic narrative from the Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov. My specific employment of the category of occulture draws its inspiration from the work of the American historian of British occultism Alex Owen, the British historian of contemporary alternative religion Christopher Partridge, and the American literary critic and writer Victoria Nelson. The theoretical background of such an experiment goes like this.
Occultism, from the Latin occultus for “hidden” or “secret,” is a broad umbrella term that scholars use to discuss a wide variety of ideas, beliefs, and practices—everything from alchemical speculations, astrology, and tarot reading, to crystal gazing, magical practices, and various psychical and spiritualist phenomena. Things are not quite as random as they seem, however. Owen points out that this otherwise confusing diversity is underpinned and organized by a single overarching idea, namely, “that reality as we are taught to understand it accounts for only a fraction of the ultimate reality which lies just beyond our immediate senses.”50 Historically speaking, the term also carried connotations of “a secret spiritual tradition that could be accessed only by an initiated elite,” that “there is a hidden body of revelatory knowledge, part of a secret tradition that has been preserved and transmitted over the ages by an enlightened illuminati.” Early modern occultists, moreover, also tended to believe that, “they were living in momentous times, witnessing the demise of the old world and the beginning of the new,” that they were working toward “the establishment of a spiritually enlightened new age.”51
On one level at least, they were quite right about this, as they inhabited a historical space that witnessed the birth of modernity. Occultism, in other words, is an eminently modern movement that arose into cultural prominence at the very end of the nineteenth century and was deeply engaged with the cutting-edge intellectual movements of the time, from the French decadent movement to psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychical research, and surrealism. Owen convincingly demonstrates that there was a particularly “close connection between occultism and innovative approaches to the study of the mind.”52 Indeed, she places occultism and its double engagement with both secular science and individual mystical and magical experience at the very heart of contemporary debates about the nature, scope, and possibilities of consciousness itself. It is precisely this doubleness, at once rational and mystical, logical and mythical, that defines the occult for Owen. In her own words: “it is the crucial alignment of rational consciousness with the apparently irrational world of the myth-creating unconscious that produces the powerful experience of the occult ‘real.’”53 This is why, in Gauri Viswanathan’s reading now, “occult knowledge is built on storytelling, which occult practices treat as a form of revelatory experience.” What we have, then, is essentially “a shift in register from belief to imagination,” which in turn played a major role in initiating the secularizing processes that created modern culture.54 The point here is a quite radical one, namely, that, far from being an irrational escape or a collection of nonsensical superstitions, the occult “was itself intrinsic to the making of the modern at the turn of the century.”55
Owen focused her work on the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In his two-volume study, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Partridge makes a similar argument with respect to the final decades of the twentieth century, that is, the decades just behind us now. More specifically, he introduces the category of occulture in order to study the interface between popular Western culture and alternative religious movements and, more specifically, to name that reservoir of “often hidden, rejected and oppositional beliefs and practices associated with esotericism, theosophy, mysticism, New Age, Paganism, and a range of other subcultural beliefs and practices.”56 Occulture for Partridge, then, is that dark, nocturnal, fertile side of Western culture without which the public elite culture cannot be fully understood and out of which any number of popular cultural movements have sprung, usually in direct or indirect opposition to the reigning public and elite orthodoxies.
Particularly important here is what we might call the comparative practices of popular culture, which, it turns out, are often just as radical—indeed, often more so—than those of elite scholars, whose disciplined intellectual practices often end up disciplining them right back into the established order of things, where they can get and keep a job. Popular comparative practices work differently. They often appear exaggerated or outrageous. They are. This is how they escape the various social, political, and intellectual censors of their own social surround—by being serious by not being serious. Essentially, popular culture “flies low,” well under the radar.
It is also worth underlining the fact that Partridge’s central notion of re-enchantment requires for both its logic and energy an earlier and equally profound disenchantment. Occulture is not a matter of naive belief, much less of orthodox faith. It is only possible after a robust and radical criticism of “religion.” Like Owen’s occultism, then, Partridge’s occulture is a very modern phenomenon that has already incorporated the secular and the scientific. Which is not to say that occulture is entirely secular. Far from it. The category of occulture implies that there is a sacred dimension to secularization, that Western culture is not becoming less religious, but differently religious. Occulture, then, represents a dialectic, a “confluence of secularization and sacralization,” not a final victory of one process over the other.57
I want to take up Partridge’s key notion of occulture and develop it in my own directions in the pages that follow. More specifically, I want to suggest that the experience of reality—a “reality posit,” as the cultural psychologist Richard Shweder has put it—is produced from the dialectical dance of consciousness and culture, always on a particular historical and material stage.58 As Mind and the neurobiological hardware of the human brain are “cultivated” in different social, religious, and linguistic frames, the experience of reality shifts and changes accordingly. Reality itself—or so I am assuming—does not change, but what is generally possible and impossible to experience as real does appear to change from culture to culture, as each culture actualizes different potentials of human consciousness and energy. Such a dialectical model, I should stress, is both universalistic and relativistic at the same time. There is radical Sameness. And there is radical Difference. And neither can be sacrificed to the other.
In this model, the human being can be thought of as a kind of living musical in
strument born into the world capable of playing any tune, any language, any belief system. Each culture, each historical period, each religious system, each family, however, will privilege only certain keys and will downplay, deny, or simply ignore others. Consider the research on human language acquisition. An infant, any infant, is born capable of speaking any language on the planet, but as the infant develops, the brain synapses and vocal abilities quickly lock onto a specific set of language skills until it is very difficult to learn other speech patterns. By the age of six or so, the brain is now wired for a specific language, by thirteen or so a specific culture and worldview. The universal musical instrument has become a very particular and local one.
It is within this same dialectical context that I understand occulture as a kind of public meeting place of spirit and matter, as the place where Consciousness both occults or hides itself in material and symbolic forms and allows itself to be seen, “as if in a mirror,” so that it can be cultivated and shaped into definite, but always relative, forms. Occulture, then, both conceals and reveals. Its popular and elite expressions—from a ten-cent superhero comic book to this book—should not be taken literally. Ever. But neither should they be dismissed as meaningless or unimportant. They, after all, reflect and refract some of the deepest dimensions of the real.
The provocative work of Owen and Partridge can be fruitfully read alongside Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets, a beautiful study of the Neoplatonic, gnostic, or Hermetic “soul” of Western culture as temporarily repressed and demonized. Here Nelson gives us a brilliant study of the modern demonization of the soul as puppet, robot, or cyborg and the bracketing (really repressing) of the deeper questions of human consciousness within contemporary intellectual culture. In the process, she examines what we too will encounter below, that is, the imaginative exile of Spirit into the furthest reaches of “outer space,” from where, of course, it returns to haunt us as the Alien.
For Nelson, this demonization and subsequent alienation is born of an exaggerated and unbalanced scientism, a one-sided Aristotelianism that she sees us now moving beyond before a balancing Platonic resurgence. It is not about one or the other, though. It is about both. It is about balance. Western intellectual, spiritual, and cultural life, at their best and most creative anyway, work through a delicate balancing act between this Aristotelianism (read: rationalism) and this Platonism (read: mysticism). The pendulum has been swinging right, toward Aristotle, for about three hundred years now. It has now reached its rationalist zenith and is beginning to swing back left, toward Plato. Which is not to say, at all, that Western culture will somehow become irrational and unscientific again, that we suddenly won’t need Aristotle or science any longer. This vast centuries-long process is ultimately about balance, about wisdom. It is also about making the unconscious conscious, about realizing and living our own secret life:
The new sensibility does not threaten a regression from rationality to superstition; rather, it allows for expansion beyond the one-sided worldview that scientism has provided us over the last three hundred years. We should never forget how utterly unsophisticated the tenets of eighteenth-century rationalism have left us, believers and unbelievers alike, in that complex arena we blithely dub “spiritual.” Even as we see all too clearly the kitsch of much New Age religiosity and fear the rigidity of rising fundamentalism, we remain alarmingly blind to our own unconscious tendencies in this same direction. Our conventional secular bias whispers to us that the ideas we see naively articulated on the cinema screen (ideas as blasphemous to secular humanists as they are to the religious orthodox), if they are to be taken seriously at all, signal a backward slide into religious oppression and intolerance. What our perspective does not allow us to recognize is the positive and enduring dimension of such ideas when they are consciously articulated in our culture. We forget that Western culture is equally about Platonism and Aristotelianism, idealism and empiricism, gnosis and episteme, and that for most of this culture’s history one or the other has been conspicuously dominant—and dedicated to stamping the other out.59
Such a Platonic balancing or mystical revival, of course, cannot enter the house of elite culture directly. Its kitsch clothes and tastes in movies are too easily rebuffed, demeaned, belittled, and shamed by the scientistic and pious doorkeepers. So it walks around the house and comes in the back door, through the imaginative products of popular culture and the inexorable mechanisms of market capitalism (if elite intellectuals and orthodox religious leaders don’t buy this stuff, almost everyone else does, literally). In our own time, Nelson argues, this back-door gnosis arises out of the “sub-Zeitgeist” of science fiction, superhero comic books, fantasy, and especially film.
This material is fundamentally gnostic or, better, Hermetic for Nelson, which is to say that it is very much about a cosmic form of consciousness that participates in the material world but also transcends and overflows that world. The Hermetic or gnostic soul, then, is someone who seeks a liberation from the limitations of an illusory world, who, like Neo in The Matrix, “takes the red pill” and discovers virtually limitless human powers within an unreal virtual reality. There is a dark side, a very dark side, however, to Neo’s awakening. Basically, he discovers that his body is being used as a human battery to power a world ruled by aliens who deceive their human harvest by implanting a virtual-reality existence in their wired-up brains.
Things are not always this dark, of course. A gentler model can be found in the character of Truman in The Truman Show, who realizes, with more than a little anger, that he has been living his entire life in a television reality show, in essence, on a stage set. At the end of the movie, he sails out into the fake lake, discovers “a door in the sky,” and walks through it. Whether disturbing or touching, demonic or divine, by consuming such “art forms of the fantastic,” Nelson suggests, “we as nonbelievers allow ourselves, unconsciously, to believe.”60 We fly under the radar, perhaps even under our own radar.
Nowhere is this truer than in the ultramodern genre of science fiction, a genre closely allied with the fantastic. To take just one example that Nelson treats and that bears directly on my present methods, consider the iconic figure of Philip K. Dick, the American sci-fi writer who claimed to have been “resynthesized” by a pink laser beam emanating from a vast supercosmic consciousness he called VALIS, for “Vast Active Living Intelligence System.” Valis was no abstract literary conceit for Dick. Nor was the Pink Light. Both were autobiographical facts for him of immense significance. Literally. This, after all, was a Light that beamed the noetic energies of entire books into him and hid itself in and as the material-virtual world.
Dick’s biographer, Lawrence Sutin, is very clear that Dick’s later work flowed out of the author’s metaphysical encounters with this superbeing or Sci-Fi Spirit. Dick’s encounter with Valis took place in the late winter of 1974. Hence Dick’s constant elliptical reference to “2-3-74,” that is, February and March of 1974. During this period of time, Dick, in Victoria Nelson’s words now, “had the overpowering sensation of being ‘resynthesized’ by an entity he called ‘the Programmer.’”61 He also called this entity Zebra, for its ability to hide in the world, and Brahman, for its omnipresence and mystical nature. Here is how Dick himself described it:
At the moment in which I was resynthesized, I was aware perceptually—which is to say aware in an external way—of his presence . . . It resembled plasmic energy. It had colors. It moved fast, collecting and dispersing. But what it was, what he was—I am not sure, even now, except I can tell you that he had simulated normal objects and their processes so as to copy them and in such an artful way as to make himself invisible within them.62
And this is before we even get to Dick’s fascination with quantum physics and synchronicity, manifested in such moments as when he met a woman on Christmas Day of 1970 whose name, age, relationships, and life resembled in uncanny detail a “fictional” character he had written earlier that year in Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said.63 Or his story about how he once diagnosed his young son’s otherwise invisible internal hernia while listening to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” after the pink beams of Valis zapped him. The surgery that was scheduled after Dick’s diagnosis was professionally confirmed potentially saved the boy’s life.
Dick explicitly identified this cosmic consciousness with the teachings of early Christian gnosticism and wrote eight thousand pages of interpretation in his private journals—known to his fans as the Exegesis—in order to explain it to himself. Not that he ever explained it. His ruthlessly honest interpretations ranged widely, from the possibility that he was being deluded (by what or who it was not at all clear) to the conviction that Valis was metaphysically related to his beloved fraternal twin sister, who had died shortly after they were both born. Sutin puts the matter in a way that bears directly on my own uses of the fantastic as the hermeneutical key to the paranormal:
For all the subsequent confusion he sowed, Phil never really doubted that the visions and auditions of February–March 1974 (2-3-74) and after had fundamentally changed his life.
Whether or not they were real was another question. As usual. In seeking an answer, Phil hovered in a binary flutter:
Doubt. That he might have deceived himself, or that It—whatever It was—had deceived him.
Joy. That the universe might just contain a meaning that had eluded him all through his life and work.
The dialectic lies at the heart of the eight-year Exegesis . . . and of Valis. . . . In fact, the 2-3-74 experiences resemble nothing so much as a wayward cosmic plot from a Phil Dick SF novel—which is hardly surprising, given who the experiencer was. . . .
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 5