The occult is a super convoluted and messy thing. Because it stands for hidden things, a lot of the things that we typically associate with the occult has to do precisely with the things that are erased and marginalized. The occult is also a modern phenonmenon, which means that it has to do with colonialism. In the occult section of the bookstore, it can sometimes be hard to tell which books are worth a read, which books are full of orientalism, which books are full of white man speculative bullshit, and which books are going to actually challenge you.

Here are four super interesting books that you should read.

Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy by Graham M Jones

I would read this book first, before any of the others. M Jones is my favorite kind of troll. Basically, he is an anthropologist who trolls his own field. This book is all about how illusionists/stage magicians and colonial anthropologists in the 17th and 18th centuries were not only in conversation with each other but relied on one another to validate their work. He writes about how European anthropologists who described magical practices within their colonies as "magical thinking" were not even looking at practitioners in their own cultural context but mostly on illusionists who use orientalist imagery to make their own performances look extreme. He then explains how the alliance of anthropology and illusionism to describe colonies as primitive and magical contributed to Europeans feeling like they are rational and enlightened.

But M Jones also goes further. This book is really just so great because he talks about modernity as a dual process of enchantment and disenchantment. Colonial government forces actually hired illusionists to go to the colonies and perform magic tricks because they thought that doing so would enlighten the colonial subjects that their magic is just a bunch of tricks, make them stop believing their own magicians, and also start believing that French magic is better. M Jones finds all sorts of stuff out by looking at primary documents, like how colonial subjects weren't as stupid as their colonizers thought they were and actually wrote about the stage magicians sent to sway them as continuing a humanist tradition that they were well aware of.

Read this book. It's a fun one.

Modernism and the Occult by John Bramble

So, this book is extremely impressive because it provides so much primary documentation of just how many extremely prominent writers, artists, architects, etc drew on fetishized imagery of European colonies to make their work. But it's also interesting because it explores how colonial encounters created the European medium, hypnotist, and eventually scientist really deeply. Bramble talks about the different ways that the dying aristocratic class and new liberal, bourgeois class desired, performed, and exorcised the colonies. This book is really instrumental if you want to truly understand just how science, as an institution, developed from occult roots. It's also important if you want to understand how modern occultists revived older enlightenment era ideas around primitivism.

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Jodorowsky is a filmmaker, which means that this book is about the theater and spectacle of magic. I would actually read this book with M Jones' book, since a wider understanding of stage magic and cultural magic can make you look at some of Jodorowsky's claims in a new way. The entire thing is basically his accounts of witnessing magical rituals in South America and, because it's a first person narration, it reads more like a journal or diary than a study. Jodorowsky's claim is basically that magic is a form of theater that has the power to heal people physically and, read with M Jones' Magic's Reason, you can draw a lot more conclusions Jodorowsky's representations of magicians.

Psychology and the Occult by Carl Jung

This book is pretty hilarious. It's all about how Jung was tricked by his fifteen year old niece into believing that she was channeling some spirits. Basically, she was bored and thought that she would pretend to be possessed. Jung believed her because he thought that, as a young girl, she couldn't be so clever as to make the possession look so realistic. The funny thing is, even when his niece grew a bit older and admitted that she was just pretending the whole time, Jung continued to think that she was possessed because he didn't think that she could be such a good actor. Then, he makes a bunch of theories about collective unconscious based on his niece's performances. DEFINITELY read M Jones and Bramble before you read this book and you'll enjoy it as a first hand account of how white girls having fun with being mediums, while fully aware of orientalist rhetoric, contributed to white male academic ideas about the primordial as a feminine and primitive feeling space.