Justin Hampton at The Bookloft

So how many of you remember the good old days, back when Spirtualists held seances and published newspapers in every major US city and an enterprising individual could make a few million out of some rehashed mystery religion teachings through direct mail?

Okay, not too many of you. And yes, it’s indeed sad to see how soon you all forget. Good thing we’ve got Mitch Horowitz to remind us, then, especially as esoteric potboilers like The Lost Symbol and New Thought retreads like The Secret continue to command the attention of this nation’s unaware. Alerted to this book’s presence by Horowitz’s guest-blogger stint on Boing Boing, I knew I needed to give mention of this book somehow. And of course, I’d also have to check out his two-day appearance at LA’s Philosophical Research Institute. So off I went.

Mitch Horowitz at PRS

Indeed, Horowitz is an erudite and fluid public speaker on his subject matter, and a real class act to boot. And wouldn’t you know it, but he actually possesses a second home not 20 minutes away from Eric Wilska himself, so he’s quite familiar with the Bookloft. I’m not surprised, as much of his talk on Saturday focused on a portion of upstate New York known as the “Burned-Over District” in the 19th Century, so named because of the stunning emergence of impassioned, homegrown religious sects in the area at that time.

In his talks as well as in his new book, Occult America: The Secret History Of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, Horowitz underlines what he feels is American Occultism’s paramount contribution to mainstream American society: that religion “should have a practical application to daily life.” He bears this out mainly by pointing to the self-help/Positive Thinking industry most recently exemplified by The Secret and excoriated by Barbara Ehrenreich. Much of this ground had already been covered recently by The Secret Source, co-written, incidentally, by PRS librarian Maja D’aoust. But here, it’s placed within a wider context

The most insightful moments of the book for me come with the chapter-long explorations on the life of PRS founder Manly Hall and the famed “Sleeping Prophet” Edgar Cayce, whose legacy and personal contradictions are examined with an admirable sensitivity. Throughout the book, Horowitz strikes a difficult balance between the beliefs of his subjects and the demands of scholarship. For while he’s made a name for himself in the New Age market by editing books by authors like Jacob Needleman and Daniel Pinchbeck, Horowitz wisely eschews that movement’s easy cliches.

It’s been noted online that Horowitz’s survey is hardly comprehensive, focusing as it does on the 19th and 20th century and brushing aside developments such as the Army’s investigation into remote viewing and the abandoned First Earth Battalion project with a single sentence. (Granted, the film and movie The Men Who Stare At Goats explores this in greater detail, but I’d prefer a writer like Horowitz to take a slightly less condescending crack at it.) And I personally feel that the seduction/PUA phenomenon detailed in books like The Game (written by a former colleague and college friend of mine as it turns out… more on this in another post.) can be tied to some of the innovations Horowitz details. Still, I’d recommend this for Horowitz’s voice. As I said before, the guy is truly a class act, one who gives each side equal time, and serves as a perfect model for how proponents of idiosyncratic belief can interface with the skepticism and rigor serious scholarship requires. I hope this won’t be the last we hear from him outside of the specialized publications Horowitz usually writes for.