The Occult. A History

Primitive man believed the world was full of unseen forces: the orenda (spirit force) of the American Indians, the Imaca of the ancient Peruvians. The Age of Reason said that these forces had only ever existed in mans imagination only reason could show man the truth about the universe. The trouble was that man became a thinking pygmy, and the world of the rationalists was a daylight place in which boredom, trivialitv and ordinariness were ultimate truths.

But the main trouble with human beings is their tendency to become trapped in the triviality of everydayness (to borrow Heideggers phrase), in the suffocating world of their personal preoccupations. And every time they do this, they forget the immense world of broader significance that stretches around them. And since man needs a sense of meaning to release his hidden energies, this forgetfulness pushes him deeper into depression and boredom, the sense that nothing is worth the effort.