Culture, Digested: The Worst Book I Read This Year

When scientific progress destabilized religious authority and the lack of meaning found in a pure rational worldview revealed science’s limitations, movements like Theosophy offered a kind of third way, a path toward understanding the world between science and religion. Theosophy was in conversation with both realms, using tools like magical practi

In this era of deconstruction and recentering attention on figures shut out of oppressive structures, the occult woman is a paragon of lost wisdom.

It's true that the history of civil rights campaigns and revolutionary movements of the era is tightly intertwined with the proliferation of magical societies, mystery cults, Theosophical and Swedenborgian organizations, and other occult communities. The popularity of spirituality during this time is given a diversity of explanations, from the scie

The repetition of the word “immersed” is interesting, as it suggests this is not something these women studied, that instead it was a liquid medium they splashed around in – maybe something like the therapeutic bath Higgie takes, describing it with more depth and in greater length than she goes into the religious beliefs of any of these artists --

Easier, then, to strip the art of these larger contexts and references from the art, which conveniently also makes it easier to sell.

It is often said that this where we are now is a moment of spiritual revival. The mainstreaming of tools like astrology and tarot, the taking up of the symbol of the witch as an acceptable feminine archetype, workplaces hiring “spiritual consultants” to imbue their offices with meaning and ritual, the common use of language around “energy” and “the

The witch has turned from being a figure of alienation and marginalization to one of aspiration. No longer does the witch manage the divide between the material and the divine, acting as an intermediary. She’s just another identity that requires only declaration and no real action, like feminist , like creative . The witch without knowledge is just

Higgie at one point attends a yoga class, and the instructor “plays a Tibetan singing bowl and tells us quietly that the world needs to soften.” She makes no effort to make the connection between yoga (a Hindu-related spiritual discipline) and a Tibetan singing bowl (a modern invention with roots neither in Tibet nor in shamanism as often claimed).

Of course this is what museum culture does: it, depending on your point of view, loots historical artifacts from a context in which they are useful and meaningful in order to turn them into commodities, or it protects and preserves the works while making them accessible to curious citizens of the world. Your own perspective on this might switch, de