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James Webb (2) (1946–1980)

Autor(a) de The Occult Underground

Para outros autores com o nome James Webb, ver a página de desambiguação.

4 Works 251 Membros 4 Críticas

Obras por James Webb

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome legal
Webb, James Charles Napier
Data de nascimento
1946-01-13
Data de falecimento
1980-05-09
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
Scotland
País (no mapa)
UK
Local de nascimento
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Educação
Harrow
Cambridge University (Trinity College)
Ocupações
historian

Membros

Críticas

 
Assinalado
ibonewits | 1 outra crítica | May 27, 2016 |
Simply, The Occult Establishment is the story of how subversive memes detailed in his prior work, The Occult Underground, became the very fabric of the mainstream.

Having just completed reading The Occult Establishment straight off the back of its companion volume, the regard I carried for the author and the strength, good sense, and sound measure of his arguments from the previous text have been increased by some way.
I feel that my own comprehension of the world of the occult, what Webb termed "rejected knowledge," has benefitted enormously from the clearest written history of the modern occult phenomenon I have yet come across. To negotiate the ceaselessly morphing terrain inhabited by orders of ritual sex magicians, neo-pagan racialist mystics, strident prophets of "secessionist realities," biochemical techno-shamans, "illuminated politicians," radical utopian true believers, equally radical millenarian seers, cabalistic pseudoscientists, and the like; is a damn tall order in any way to see a path to a coherent narrative and conclusion, let alone to present it in under 600 pages.
Webb achieves this deftly, and provides the interested reader in the history of the irrational a sure footing in that land, a clear map, illuminated to identify the myriad illuminates, and a hint as to the nature of the polymorphic beast hidden within its swarming sulfuric salons, the magi-artist cum illuminated seer-tyrant.

The tale of how a stream of thought (or perhaps crucially, unthought) reared up to tilt at the windmills of reason, of the rationalist materialist myth of reality, the established order ("things-as-they-are," as Webb puts it, thus the irrationalists seek to foist on all the unseen world of "things-not-as-they-are," the world behind Alice's mirror) is a sweeping dialectical narrative, tempered by a certain, though hardly mawkish, measure of empathy with the objects of his study.
As Webb relays, to use the term "irrationalists" in a derogatory sense against these occult practitioners is to fundamentally misunderstand his argument. They were not, or are not, irrationalists beause they were without sense, rhyme, or any sort of reason; they were irrationalists due to the fact that they were (are) diametrically at odds with what they thought of as authoritarian reason. The flagrant overinvestment in the tools of materialism, the scientific method devoid of temperance by any regard for the metaphysical. The internal logic to their systems was often consistent, if not comprehensible to the unitiated.
One can almost get the sense in the text that they were pawns at the whim of greater forces, even the very old Gods many of their number worshipped or were inhabited by, willing slaves to ideas that the originator of much occult lore (according to the author), Plato, relayed men to be. They chose to fall in line with forces that could sweep them up with a power that was multiplied exponentially by abandonment of critical thought.

Webb's work is intensely topical in his exposition of "illuminated politics," the book's main thesis. The illuminated politician, of which Hitler is the obvious prime example here, is the seeker of possible worlds, transcendent realities, to capture bodily and immanentise them in the material plane by the force of collective will made monolithic, via the völkisch movement that helped birth National Socialism (it seems that Eric Voegelin is the natural corollary to the theory of Webb here). How a movement comprised of rejected knowledge, of an un-idea, became part of the established order is something that requires the reading of the full text. The haunted, hysterical, racially driven, bigoted, and scapegoat seeking toxic landscape of early and mid 1900's Europe is mirrored in the West, particularly the United states, this very day. The memes he describes are alive and kicking; certain toxic irrationalist philosophies (and not all were by nature so) are rising within the populace, yet again.

The world that the dreaming mind of the magus sought to free from the absolutism of reason, is no better served by the tyranny of its absence.
… (mais)
2 vote
Assinalado
AtemporalDrift | 1 outra crítica | Nov 25, 2010 |
The Occult Underground is a neglected triumph in the history of ideas. Webb's basic thesis, more than ably fleshed out, is that during the Age of Reason (or the era of the rational), there was a massive, surging welling up of a large section of the populace in 19th century Western Europe and United States into a countercurrent of unreason (or an Age of the Irrational) in direct opposition to the perceived tyrannical straightjacket represented by rational thought. A flamboyant army was arrayed against this secular theocracy in the form of the Theosophists, the Synarchists, the Symbolists, the Spiritualists, the Mesmerists, the Christian Scientists, the Martinists, occult orientated Freemasonic orders of many kinds, and utopian orientated millenarian mystics of various persuasions.

They formed a hardly doctrinally unified, yet diffusely ideologically interwoven, sociocultural resistance to (as Webb himself put it) "the Powers That Be." For Webb this irrational counterculture is the expected response due as a result of a "crisis of consciousness," where humanity found itself confronted by the bleak existential tableau conjured by the burgeoning rationalist materialist scientific method and its consequent discoveries. Alone in the frigid blackness of the universe where God is dead and death is the final and true end to all, the multiplicitous occult philosophies offered a panacea to the occult practitioner; and a means to oppose the tide of stark rationalism that so threatened the fragile human psyche.

Webb's prose is lucid and engaging, this historical narrative flows well, enabling the author to build his case and close it by the book's end. The best history of that nebulous beast known as "the occult" that I have read as yet.
Bring on the followup, The Occult Establishment!
… (mais)
1 vote
Assinalado
AtemporalDrift | 1 outra crítica | Oct 16, 2010 |
recommended by Celia Rabinovich, I also have a 1974 hardback edition
 
Assinalado
susanaberth | 1 outra crítica | Nov 9, 2014 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
4
Membros
251
Popularidade
#91,086
Avaliação
3.8
Críticas
4
ISBN
104
Línguas
6

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