Mitch Horowitz, editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin, has a new book, forthcoming from Bantam, called Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation. At the website of bestselling theorist of the occult Graham Hancock, Horowitz offers an overview of the book:
[…] the word “occult” seems like a stranger in American life. Today it is tempting to dismiss occultism as no more than the crazy auntie tucked away in the attic of America’s history. But that kind of dismissal would be a misreading of occultism’s role in America, and of America’s role in recent religious history. Indeed, the arcane philosophies grouped under the name of occultism represent an unheralded thought movement in America’s national life, one that not only placed horoscopes into nearly every daily newspaper, but that transformed a young nation into the launching pad for the revolutions in alternative spirituality that traveled the globe in the twentieth century.
Continue reading at The Official Graham Hancock Website. (H/t Boing Boing.)
Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directs the Media Enterprise Design Lab and is a resident fellow at the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture.
