Pseudo-Mystery: the Pursuit of Anti-Realism
The romance of mystery shapes occultism sufficiently that it can seem impossible to imagine the tradition without it; and yet it is an infatuation with a very specific view of mystery shaped by usually unacknowledged cultural forces. A few brief examples:
For the Western magician, medieval aesthetics define the investigation of mystery, as he does his best to let everyone know he is being secret. Yet today the romance of exploring life’s mysteries takes place in dedicated institutions in contemporary architectural wonders, not dressed in robes within the walls of a castle; nor do modern spies relay their secrets in alchemical symbols and secret handshakes. Many traditions - both religious and secular - are content to enter a room and lock the door; occultism has to shout across the room to let us know it will be hiding in a dark little corner, desperately trying to convince us of its self-serving mystery.
For the shaman, mystery is all feathers and twigs, dream-catchers and badly brewed medicine, a manufactured stereotype of the Native American or Peruvian tribesman. But shamanism in the West owes everything to what Michael Harner teaches middle-aged white Americans, and nothing to the Jivaro or the historically recent tradition of Amazonian Ayahuasqueros.
For the Western initiate of the African Diaspora, rattles and drums and butchered Portuguese paint a picture of a mystery primal and brutalised (and perhaps himself Politically Correct and Racially Guilty), and in the case of traditions such as Quimbanda and Palo Mayombe, even criminal and psychopathic. But the terror of these practices - which some practitioners find so alluring, and which some occult hucksters play on - is nothing but a product of our Colonial hang ups, the cheap horror of Hollywood, and the superstitions inherent in the traditions themselves. As for the attraction of dabbling with a 'primal power' from the home of the human race, the Diaspora bears only a passing resemblance to its roots in the ancient traditions of the Yoruba and Kongo; and the darkness promoted by prejudice, and those practitioners who seem to revel in the reputation of their given tradition, is at worst amorality: anything for a swig of rum and toke of cigar, and any initiation for the right price.
The mystery of occultism is actually a pseudo-mystery: a calcified notion of what mystery looks like. Worse, it’s a pastiche of what mystery looks like for a medieval european, a new age baby-boomer, a colonial Christian or the superstitious South-American poor.
Standard occult currency includes overtly secret meetings in spooky ruins, poor imitation Spare-like automatic scrawlings, top hats and tattoos, unexplainable superstitious exaggerations of synchronicities, and pompous titles that hint at profound insight for the occult equivalent of an office manager; which all amounts to a replacing of any genuine exploration of mystery with a naive indulgence of incomprehension, hard-bound and available for a meagre £40 from the local new age shop.
Despite what the occultist thinks, the pseudo-mystery of occultism is a breed of anti-realism. The occultist and his culture actively and joyfully foists up a very particular and well defined notion of ‘the mysterious’ between himself and the world; but how is a genuine and honest exploration of ourselves and reality supposed to occur if we are unwilling to see the world however it may present itself?
Is there really nothing mysterious within our immediate awareness such that we have to go searching for what looks like a mystery to the uneducated mind of a medieval peasant, or the over-educated mind of a Californian woman (frantically pursuing a desperate power animal), or the superstitious and ignorant mind of a post-colonial European?
