I talked with Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation.
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We started out talking about the history of Halloween in America, an ancient Celtic holiday that’s become one of the biggest events on the American calendar.
“It has its roots in pre-Christian Celtic practice where you were getting ready for winter and welcoming the ghosts of their ancestors,” Horowitz said. Irish immigrants brought Halloween to America in the 1840s, and the holiday evolved over time, adding costumes and Jack o’ Lanterns and trick-or-treating.
Now, Halloween is returning to its religious roots, as Wiccans take it up. Horowitz predicted that soon Halloween will be recognized as a religious holiday.
We turned to Horowitz’s book, which he describes as essentially a history of the powerful influence the occult has had in America. “Occult beliefs have had a very serious influence, a liberalizing influence on a lot of our politics, and a very powerful and unseen impact on how we think about spirituality in America,” Horowitz said.
“There are certain things that Americans expect from their churches, from their religions,” Horowitz said. “They expect religion to be therapeutic, they expect it to be a kind of healing force, they expect it to come up with practical ideas and solutions to the problems of day-to-day existence.
“These ideas were almost unheard of about a hundred and fifty years ago. But as a culture of occult and alternative spirituality really took shape in America and took off with a kind of bounding popularity in the mid-19th Century, it changed our religion. And America became a laboratory for all kinds of ideas that later came to be called New Age or alternative religion, and exported this stuff all around the world. So occult and esoteric movements in America need to be written in to our religious history if we’re going to understand our religious history.
“To ignore them is to misunderstand how many aspects of our politics and our culture and our spirituality took shape in modern America.
“My whole aim in writing this book was not to get caught up in the truth or falsity of the beliefs. I wanted to understand the impact of the beliefs. If one were to hold any religion up to the mirror of truth or falsehood, I don’t think any could pass.”
After the program (click image for a better view)
Horowitz said: “If the validity of Judaism is based on whether Moses really parted the Red Sea, that’s got to be pretty shaky ground on which to base a belief system. But if someone could disprove to me the validity of the historical Moses–maybe such a man never walked the Earth–it does not reduce the validity of ‘thou shalt not steal,’ or ‘thou shalt not kill.’
“Similarly, even if you could disprove Cayce’s clairvoyance, it wouldn’t reduce the experience people had in getting advice from him. Cayce introduced ‘karma,’ ‘clairvoyance,’ ‘psychic’ and ‘reincarnation’ into the American lexicon.
“Karma became part of our outlook on life. Even if we don’t believe it’s literally true, it’s still a pretty good way to live, to believe that whatever I visit upon my neighbor in some way or another will get visited upon me.”
We talked about the dark side of occult beliefs in America, from the occult roots of the neo-Nazi movement to deaths in a sweatlodge ceremony just a few weeks ago.
And we discussed Christian Science, Abraham Lincoln’s occult connections, how Horowitz became interested in occult history, and more. Listen or watch now.
