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Friends,
This is the second episode in a series called The Spirit-Era and Its Aftermaths in which I look at the way spiritual, technological, and occult flourishings at the turn of the 19th into 20th century are still with us today, and in fact, being echoed by our own time.

The Spirit-Era is marked by occultists, paranormal investigators, and genuine spiritual teachers, magicians, and fakirs.  The intelligentsia of the time, including political figures and some of the most famous artists in the world, might go to see spirits materialize in dark rooms, join esoteric organizations, or engage in scientific explorations of the afterlife. They might write novels inspired by meeting  notorious occult figures, or root a new politics in.

New technologies were emerging and becoming popularized. There were plagues, wars, sinking ships, and questions about was real and true.

In the Spirt-Era, it seemed like there was never a moment of rest, not even for reality itself.  And because everything was changing, anything was possible.

In other words, it was a time that is mirrored strongly by our own

In these episodes, we won’t just be trying to learn from history to avoid repeating it, but rather to deeply consider the Spirit-era and conjure its best aspects.

On the last episode, I talked about the importance of ghost hunting, by way of exploring the history of paranormal investigations with Alice Vernon. 

I’m so excited to bring you the second installment in the series, with ALLAN JOHNSON Professor of English Literature at University of Surrey, meditation coach, and author of the excellent book, The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World

In that book, Allan states:

“The occult has always walked the perilous line between desiring a textual form while resisting the possibility that this form can ever be completely achieved.”

One place we find the textual form of the occult is in literature – but I don’t mean that in the way that you think…

One of my big frustrations with spiritual influencers who are online, have podcasts, write books and more is that most of them don’t seem to have a good grasp of art, but particularly literature.

One reason why is that… well reading books that have occult forms usually take a lot of work. Lots of occultists, magicians, pagans do something like this: they read literature that has magical content and create metaphors and analogies that – all-too conveniently – mirror the lessons of their own esoteric view. And they reach for the easiest usual suspects: Lord of the Rings, Ursula K Le Guin,  Star Wars, Paulo Coehlo, etc.

But the location of occult and esoteric strength in literature is in its innovative forms and styles – in novelists who wrote in tensions between absence and presence, in multiple innovative structures and voices, in elliptical maneuvers and sentences that change their direction before you finish them.  These forms were brought to us most prominently in modernist literature – in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, and more. And it’s also found in poets like TS Elliot, Ezra Pound, and WB Yeats.

In the works of modernist writers, the reader’s involvement is demanded to complete the text. They showed us that fiction itself is an occult endeavor – and that reading is a moral technology, maybe one of the only moral technologies. With literature, we meet the other mind, and we co-create reality through symbols, light, and imagination.

These are writers that ask us to meet them, to do as much in the reading as they do in the writing, bring us so far in our development.

The great modernist writers are writers who initiate us as we read their works.

Allan and I talk about all of this in depth. We also talk about Marianne Williamson, Wilhelm Reich, psychoanalysis, and more – this is such a great episode and gets across some thoughts on literature that I’ve been waiting for so long to bring to the show.m And Allan was the perfect conversational collaborator for it.

I’m so excited to share this episode with you. As always, feel free to comment below, to share the episodes, to talk about them in your media, and (especially if you’re a patreon patron!) to reach out with your thoughts.

MORE ON ALLAN

Allan offers online meditation coaching and lectures here. Here’s Allan’s academic page at University of Surrey. And here’s Allan’s short essay on buying books.

SUPPLEMENTAL READING

• Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience edited by Jean Guy Goulet and David E. Young
• The Secrets of Doctor Taverner by Dion Fortune
• Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf