The Occult: A History was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1971 and marked Wilson’s decisive turn from literary criticism to the investigation of consciousness. The book is enormous — over 600 pages — and attempts nothing less than a comprehensive history of humanity’s engagement with powers and phenomena that lie outside the framework of conventional science.
Wilson begins with shamanism and the ancient mystery religions, moves through the Hermetic tradition, the Kabbalah, alchemy, and Renaissance magic, covers the Enlightenment’s attempt to suppress occult thought, and follows the revival through Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, and Aleister Crowley. The final sections address modern parapsychology, particularly the work of J.B. Rhine and the evidence for telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis.
The book’s governing concept is “Faculty X” — Wilson’s term for the capacity to grasp the reality of other times and places with the vividness of immediate experience. Wilson argues that this faculty is not supernatural but natural, a latent human ability that surfaces in moments of intense concentration or crisis and that occult traditions, however muddled their theoretical frameworks, have been attempting to cultivate for millennia.
The critical response was predictably divided: academic historians dismissed it as credulous, while readers interested in consciousness and the limits of materialism found it illuminating. The book sold enormously and remains Wilson’s most widely read work after The Outsider. Its influence on the popular understanding of the occult tradition has been considerable — it taught a generation of readers that “occult” need not mean “irrational.”
Collecting The Occult
First edition (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1971): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good/very good: $40–$100
- First American edition (Random House): $30–$80