Unholy Spirits: Occultism and New Age Humanism
This is a book about occultism in theory and practice. I do not recommend that anyone study occultism for its own sake. If you have to study it for historical reasons, think twice.
This book goes into the philosophy of occultism and how it relates to modern humanism -- a seemingly unlikely connection.
Everywhere you turn these days, talk of crystals, channeling, astral projection, mediums, psychic phenomena, pyramid power, and reincarnation abounds. The New Age rage is upon us.
Should this give us cause for alarm? Are New Age enthusiast a serious threat to Western civilization and orthodox Christianity? Or are they little more than "kooks laughingly to be dismissed?
Here is a simple, straightforward idea which has implications you probably never dreamed of: there are unexplained events in this world. There are events that cannot, by their very nature, be explained by the standards of contemporary rationalistic science. UFOs, telepathy, healings, accurate predictions of future happenings: these events really happen. Scientists have tried to hide them for centuries, beginning with Sir Isaac Newton's successors, who hid the fact that he had been a dedicated practitioner of alchemy.
I worked on this book in several stages. I began the research in 1964, when I was a student at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. I continued it in graduate school. Jeffrey Burton Russell is the world's expert on the medieval view of Satan. I studied medieval history with him for my master's degree in 1965-66. I continued to study medieval heresies -- his specialty back then -- and occultism in the West. This is not a subject to be taken lightly.
I remember standing in the hallway of the history department's office. I was talking with someone. Dr. Russell walked up and asked me this: "Do you believe in the devil?" "Yes," I answered. "So do I," he said, and walked off.
I still do.
In 1974-75, I wrote None Dare Call It Witchcraft (1976). It was published by Arlington House. Unholy Spirits was a 1986 update of that book.
Download it here: //www.garynorth.com/unholyspirits.pdf
