Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal

British historian of contemporary alternative religion Christopher Partridge, and the American literary critic and writer Victoria Nelson. The theoretical background of such an experiment goes like this.
    Occultism, from the Latin
occultus
for “hidden” or “secret,” is a broad umbrella term that scholars use to discuss a wide variety of ideas, beliefs, and practices—everything from alchemical speculations, astrology, and tarot reading, to crystal gazing, magical practices, and various psychical and spiritualist phenomena. Things are not quite as random as they seem, however. Owen points out that this otherwise confusing diversity is underpinned and organized by a single overarching idea, namely, “that reality as we are taught to understand it accounts for only a fraction of the ultimate reality which lies just beyond our immediate senses.” 50 Historically speaking, the term also carried connotations of “a secret spiritual tradition that could be accessed only by an initiated elite,” that “there is a hidden body of revelatory knowledge, part of a secret tradition that has been preserved and transmitted over the ages by an enlightened illuminati.” Early modern occultists, moreover, also tended to believe that, “they were living in momentous times, witnessing the demise of the old world and the beginning of the new,” that they were working toward “the establishment of a spiritually enlightened new age.” 51
    On one level at least, they were quite right about this, as they inhabited a historical space that witnessed the birth of modernity. Occultism, in other words, is an eminently modern movement that arose into cultural prominence at the very end of the nineteenth century and was deeply engaged with the cutting-edge intellectual movements of the time, from the French decadent movement to psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychical research, and surrealism. Owen convincingly demonstrates that there was a particularly “close connection between occultism and innovative approaches to the study of the mind.” 52 Indeed, she places occultism and its double engagement with both secular science and individual mystical and magical experience at the very heart of contemporary debates about the nature, scope, and possibilities of consciousness itself. It is
precisely
this doubleness, at once rational and mystical, logical and mythical, that defines the occult for Owen. In her own words: “it is the crucial alignment of rational consciousness with the apparently irrational world of the myth-creating unconscious that produces the powerful experience of the occult ‘real.’” 53 This is why, in Gauri Viswanathan’s reading now, “occult knowledge is built on storytelling, which occult practices treat as a form of revelatory experience.” What we have, then, is essentially “a shift in register from belief to imagination,” which in turn played a major role in initiating the secularizing processes that created modern culture. 54 The point here is a quite radical one, namely, that, far from being an irrational escape or a collection of nonsensical superstitions, the occult “was itself intrinsic to the making of the modern at the turn of the century.” 55
    Owen focused her work on the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In his two-volume study,
The Re-Enchantment of the West
, Partridge makes a similar argument with respect to the final decades of the twentieth century, that is, the decades just behind us now. More specifically, he introduces the category of occulture in order to study the interface between popular Western culture and alternative religious movements and, more specifically, to name that reservoir of “often
hidden
,
rejected
and
oppositional
beliefs and practices associated with esotericism, theosophy, mysticism, New Age, Paganism, and a range of other subcultural