Racism, mental health and occultism

What do these three things have in common? I’m still not quite clear on that.

I received Francis Breakspear’s new book, If It Was Easy, Everyone Would Be Doing It! a few months ago, read a few pages, then got caught up in other things. I recently picked it up again, and so far it’s as direct and funny as his first book, Kaostar!,¹as expected.²

Also as in Kaostar!, essays appear from Kate Hoolu and someone called “Dave Evans” (a pseudonym if I ever heard one).

I’ve just finished reading a two-essay interlude by Kate Hoolu, the first, titled “Stereotyping”, deals with issues of race and culture, and the second, “That behaviour is not normal! But how do you prove it?”, discusses mental health. It’s unusual to see these topics addressed in books ostensibly about practical magick, to say the least.

I’m trying to understand their inclusion, apart from the lip service paid to “expanding horizons” (which can easily be accomplished via other means). Race and cultural identity seem to be subjects that preoccupy the British and other European news media. If these subjects were rarely (if ever) addressed in earlier occult works, is it because all readers were assumed to be of white European descent, or because no-one really cared to examine the issues, and what does that mean?

Earlier in the book Breakspear cautioned against reading occult material in public.³ Not because the reader might spontaneously burst into robes and start chanting in Enochian, but for fear of what the neighbours might think if they caught you reading such mad rot. Yet, I regularly read stuff with weird symbols and esoteric titles on the subway. It’s where I do a lot of my reading, especially in poor weather when I can’t take my bike. I see other people reading Illuminatus!, Crowley, and sometimes contemporary fluff, but in a decade of reading this stuff in public, no-one’s ever denounced me as a Satanist or even so much as sidled away in horror and dismay. It’s almost disappointing. It makes me wonder, do these warnings come from personal events in the author’s life, or are they mere paranoia?

It may be naive, but I wonder wonder why people can’t just, you know, get over it the way civilized polite society⁴ have gotten over being upset about homosexuality or the proper “place” of women.⁵ There might always be a few oddballs who refuse to see people as people, but surely these people are marginal, not mainstream?⁶ Right?⁷ The riots in France in 2005 rather suggest otherwise, but I still don’t know what is achieved by the inclusion of these essays in this context? Awareness?⁸

Certainly racism is ignorant and undoubtedly harmful, and mental illness misunderstood and unnecessarily stigmatized. Recognizing potential challenges/obstacles/central aspects of one’s being is one thing, but can it be self-defeating? Perhaps endorsing a victim-complex that need not exist? And what doe it have to do with occultism?

I don’t have any real answers. I don’t even have any good questions. It just got me thinking. Purpose achieved?

Footnotes:

1. See my review of Kaostar! on SpiralNature.com. [back]
2. I’m only about seventy pages or so into the book, but once I’ve finished my review will appear on SpiralNature.com. I’ll be sure to post a link. [back]
3. p. 36 [back]
4. Polite because fear and ignorance has been eradicated, or because people no longer talk about it? [back]
5. Is this my urban Canadian bias showing? [back]
6. Is it a “Western world” bias? [back]
7. As a side note Ms Hoolu, if you happen to stumble upon this, you might be interested in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a novel in which the protagonist is stranded in a land where physical ailments are stigmatized, satirizing the way moral failings were treated in Victorian England. While we’re at it, The Globe and Mail ran a great series earlier this year titled “Canada’s Mental Health Crisis” that rather surprised me, and might interest you as well, as it covers view which extend beyond Canada’s borders. [back]
8. Then what? [back]

Psyche is the editor of Plutonica.net and the curator for the occult resource SpiralNature.com, Psyche also operates a tarot consultation business, Psyche Tarot. She has been published in The Cauldron, Konton, Tarot World Magazine, among other magazines, and her essay “Strategic Magick” appeared in Manifesting Prosperity (Megalithica, 2008).

Psyche's website is http://www.plutonica.net.