I got James Webb’s The Occult Underground (1974, previously published as Flight from Reason) a couple years back and damn, what a revelation. Like the two previous books I’ve covered this week, it’s a history of occult practice, but unlike those two other books, it has a very different motive (also important, there is a second volume, The Occult Establishment, 1976, which I have not been able to purchase for a reasonable price; it covers the Interwar period to Webb’s present). He starts in the wake of Napoleon, and covers all the major occult movements up to World War I. The chapter on Paris Bohemians that tackles the Satanism of La Bas and Abbe Boullan’s sorcerous feud, is my favorite. The one on the intersection of the occult into Christian sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses is interesting too. He ends with an evaluation of politics and the way nation-states changed due to conquest, democracy, industrialization and other factors.

Webb’s thesis is fascinating. Essentially, he argues that the Age of Reason fundamentally changed the West by sweeping away the old order of religion and sovereignty and replacing it with an increased focus on the rational, the scientific and the individual. While this was an improvement in many ways, the removal of those social and political structures (Webb calls these the “Powers that Were”) created a kind of existential crisis in a segment of the population. Occultism, with its secret traditions, became a haven and eventually, served as an intellectual core of what we’d now call the anti-establishment counter culture. There is a credible argument here judging from the final chapter, where Webb chronicles the efforts by W.B. Yeats and Lewis Spence, occultists both, to bring about Irish and Scottish independence, respectively and with differing levels of success.

I imagine that the second volume tackles the myriad ways the occult influenced the 20th century counter-culture (I mean, we know, in some ways, how the occult influenced pulp fiction, music and games!). I’m dying to read the second volume to get some sense of what Webb would make of just how irrational our current age has become.