Sane Occultism

Most people drawn to the occult never stop to ask what it actually is. Fortune starts there, and she starts by clearing the ground. The dubious psychism, the wild theorising and the evidence that collapses at first glance are, in her phrase, the detritus piled up around the base of the Mount of Vision. Not worth the powder and shot of argument.

Strip away the theories and the dogma, she says, and one thing is left that all the seers agree on: states of consciousness beyond the normal, in which forms of existence we usually have no contact with become perceptible.

That shared experience is the raw material. The systems and cosmologies are built on top of it, and she even sets aside the old traditions of superhuman teachers, because nobody can verify them.

This is also where the trouble with proof begins. Natural science lays its evidence before five senses that every normal person has. Occult science appeals to faculties that turn up only here and there, in a few people, in varying strength.

So on occult questions most of us are left with circumstantial evidence. Fortune compares the subject to classical music: it reserves itself for those whose training and gifts let them hear it, and with someone who cannot, there is no common ground to start from.

She does not treat this as an excuse. Many ordinary people, she notes, have had small psychic experiences that set them asking questions, a glimpse outside the four walls of everyday life. They deserve more than wild statements backed by no independent evidence at all.

Here is her definition, and it is more modest and more demanding than most people expect: occultism is an extension of psychology. It studies little-known aspects of the human mind, and what she calls the mind side of Nature.

That puts it under a discipline. Its findings, rightly understood, have to fit with what psychology and natural science have already established. Wherever science is in a position to test a point, “there must be no discrepancies.” Genuine phenomena, she insists, will bear investigation.

They also have a technique. Nobody expects accurate results in bacteriology without following its methods, and the hidden side of the mind is no different. A vision that contradicts a fact science can check does not get to call itself a higher truth. By her own rule, it has failed the test.

According to Fortune, what must occult science do to deserve the name of science?

• Rest on what the seers agree on, whatever science happens to say
• Be confirmed by the five physical senses before anyone accepts it
• Stay apart from science, since it studies a different plane entirely
• Agree with psychology and natural science wherever those can test it✓Correct answer

Fortune makes mutual corroboration the test: no discrepancies with science on points science can check. She does not demand five-sense proof for everything, since the faculties involved are rare, but she does not let the seers overrule a testable fact either.

Her second chapter opens with a question most enthusiasts never put to their own path: has it been worth it? Fortune calls that kind of honest heart-searching “the highest tribute to Truth,” and she thinks occultists need it more than anyone.

The reason is built into the subject. There is no agreed standard of criticism. Each student is a law unto himself, free to claim revelation from sources beyond the reach of reason. She compares that freedom to owning a private printing-press for bank-notes.

Whoever owns one can print as much as they like, and that is exactly the problem. Nothing on the paper tells you whether anything stands behind it.

She keeps the image going, and it becomes one of the sharpest tests in the book. Revelations, or realisations as she prefers to call them, really do reach human consciousness, just as bank-notes really are legal tender. But both are worthless unless they represent something actual.

A note has value only if it can be exchanged for gold at any moment. And in her words, “For a revelation to have value it must be valid in a spiritual crisis.”

A sound banker does not wait for a run on the bank to find out whether his gold covers his notes. He draws up a trial balance in quiet times. Fortune asks the same of the occultist: question what you believe while things are calm, so you know whether the reserve covers the notes before a crisis finds out for you.