Coming closer to the present, Katz emphasizes how much of the theory that fed into psychology and psychoanalysis was not about a sexual unconscious but a paranormal one. He invites us, in the 1870s at the height of the supposed battle between religion and science, to a seance which Darwin and Galton attended together. Co-evolutionary theorist Alfred Wallace was preoccupied with spiritualism, eventually to the exclusion of other forms of investigation.
This is a coherent picture of the persistence of weird stuff in the lives of the famous, which will infuriate both believers and sceptics. A great deal in this book has been said before, as Katz acknowledges in his references to other scholars. His unique contributions go to show how the occult tradition continued into the 21st-century world. En route, Katz convincingly explains how India replaced Egypt as the supposed source of all ancient wisdom, a transition which pandered to the race theory popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- it permitted the replacement of a Semitic spiritual ancestry from the Middle East with an Indo-European (Aryan) ascendancy.
So, with the introduction of power politics, the occult approaches its bizarre modern form in the predictions of Armageddon by US fundamentalists. The movement was so called after its emergence between 1909 and 1915 in the form of a dozen pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals which were distri-buted by the American Bible League. They stressed the infall-ible literal truth of the Bible and the concept of the born-again evangelical Christian.
While this is no more than a restatement of basic Protestantism which would be familiar to Martin Luther, the evangelicals have woven into their beliefs a complex theology prophesying the last days of humankind that bears only the most tentative relationship to scripture. Thus we have belief in "the rapture," the bodily disa-ppearance from the earth of true believers in the seven years of tribulations before the second coming of Christ.
In a controversial distinction, Katz differentiates between Christianity as generally practised and its incarnation as fundamentalism, which predicts the future through deciphering a document (the Bible) whose meaning is hidden. Thus, Katz argues, we find US President George W. Bush making speeches which clearly echo prophetic biblical passages from Isaiah and Revelation. Bush is truly preaching to the converted.
Some people's shelves groan with works on mysticism and the occult, and this would make an erudite addition for them. For those who will read only one book on the exegesis of ancient grimoires, this should be it.
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