Critical Reactions to the Occult A Comment

Abstract

It is an honor and a great pleasure for me to comment on Brian Vickers’ stimulating paper. First because I have to admit, somewhat to my embarrassment, that the occult itself appeals to my imagination, as it has always done to many naive minds, who have also perhaps felt the need for “a little magic” to cope with the incongruities of reality. Second, more seriously, because the problem of the occult sciences, their revival during the Renaissance, and their decline in the seventeenth century seems to me central to the understanding of the much wider issue of the transition of European culture from traditionalism to modernity. I think that, like Vickers, I am rather struck by the difficulty of reducing this phenomenon to simple terms, and like him I feel a kind of dissatisfaction with recurrent attempts to analyze its different aspects, attempts which, in spite of growing sophistication, have failed to capture it in its totality. In spite of the proliferation of attempts to analyze that transition, many of them are still characterized by a kind of one-sidedness which leaves enough space for further discussion.