Do you detect something of an occult revival in modern culture?
I don’t know if it is really a revival, or that it never went away. The term for hermeticism, the ‘perennial philosophy’, springs to mind. It seems to me that the shallowness of the reductionist/materialist paradigm and the foundering of science on the shoals of reality (hidden by the rubric ‘quantum mechanics’) has left people wanting, emptied of anything but a drive for endless consumption of material goods, hence the widespread use of drugs, obesity, hoarding behaviours etc. Also the lack of any form of beneficial religious feeling other than fundamentalist insanity and murder, or lack-lustre liberalism in religious ideas is showing organized religion to be another empty vessel. The vapid pick and choose nature of the ‘new-age’ movement and the constant quest for visionaries in other cultures back-yards (the latest being the overemphasis on shamans from the rain forest traditions) is also not really any good to anybody, but eco-tourists and psychedelic experience tourists. I don’t view this in a racialist way or anything, but it seems that traditions originating in one’s own historical/genetic milieu should be explored and understood before one goes off to encounter other traditions (shades of Guenonian traditionalism, I guess). Also, to me there is something unique to the United Kingdom (all the areas and islands and political permutations included). I have also ‘felt’ it in Finland. I would like to visit Iceland to see if it is the same. Despite the modernisation and everything, there is a numinous quality to the landscape, a subtle sparkle to the atmosphere, a sense of magic (for lack of a better term) that they both have.
(from beardrock.com)