- You can encounter people
from every walk of life
who will describe to you premonitions,
near-death experiences,
telepathy or clairvoyance
at moments of acute crisis.
Our existence is not just cognition,
motor skill, flesh and bone.
I'm Mitch, and I'm a heretic
because I believe the occult is a viable,
practical, workable way of life.
- Radicals, dissidents, rebels, and misfits.
You can call them whatever you like.
But, what if they're right?
- I'm Mitch Horowitz.
I'm a historian of alternative spirituality,
and I describe its relevance
to the lives we lead today.
When I was a little kid growing up in Queens,
I was very interested in newspaper astrology,
and I asked myself,
"Where did all this come from?"
Why on Earth should 21st-century men and women
each know their sun sign and something about it?
And so I scratched my head
and I began my journey.
America is—in some respects—an occult nation.
It's been a springboard,
a kind of laboratory for religious novelty,
religious experiment.
In the mid-19th centuries,
people living in very rural environs of this nation
started holding what we call 'seances'
and talking to the dead.
And the movement of Spiritualism began,
literally, in American log cabins.
Thereafter, you started seeing seances
held in the salons of Paris
and the parlors and sitting rooms of London.
The occult was America's first religious export.
The term "occult" very simply
is from the Latin "occultus,"
meaning hidden or secret,
and it was a term that
Renaissance scholars used to refer to
the pre-Christian spirituality
of the ancient world.
There was a struggle for centuries, really,
between the early church and the lingering
Pagan or mystery-based, nature-based religions.
The church prevailed throughout the Western world.
And so it classified,
the former Pagan faiths as
evil or maleficent, or as the excluded.
There's a very, very basic
core, foundational principle
to the American outlook
that the mind is a tool of spirituality,
that your thoughts,
to some greater or lesser degree,
are determinative—
are an actual physical force,
and that what you think about
has a concrete effect
on the experience of your life.
Well, at its basis, that's an occult ideal.
Thought is one tool in a belt of tools
that we can reach for
to affect
actual,
palpable
change and experiences
in more than just a cognitive way.
Given that our culture is so profoundly divided,
and there seem to be such deep
political and cultural chasms,
it's remarkable that there's one
transcendental principle
that almost everyone agrees with:
It was an American ideal,
going back more than 150 years at this point,
that religion also had to be a practical agency
of problem solving in the here and now.
Some people take great umbrage at this philosophy,
while still actually participating in it.
Look at the Recovery Movement, for example—
Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups.
The idea is that the individual
needs to draw upon some 'higher power.'
A higher power that is left,
specifically, undefined.
So you'll have lots of Americans
in opinion polls today
who describe themselves as
'spiritual but not religious.'
100, 150 years ago,
most people in the Western world
would have no idea what you were talking about.
You were a Methodist, you were a Catholic,
you were a Jew, you were something.
But we live in a world today
where you don't have to be a "something."
I really believe in religious novelty.
I think people should start with
whatever they feel attracted to.
Are you interested in reincarnation
or eternal recurrence?
Are you interested in ancient deities?
Familiarity is not truth.
Don't let people hand definitions to you,
including me.
Follow that magnetic thread.
Who knows where a certain doorway will lead you?
A lot of people follow
a kind of religious novelty,
and they get led to extraordinary places.
Spirituality or extraphysicality
is so deeply intimate.
That search is, is innate
to what it means to be human.
- I don't think we ordered any room service,
but if it looks good,
you can tell him to leave it.
I may have just manifested some room service.