Technoccult

From last December:

I was initially very skeptical about magic due to the enormous number of idiots associated with it. However, science cannot explain or rationalize the concept of consciousness because it cannot replicate it in a laboratory. That leaves the single biggest area of our experience of the world unexplained. With magic, all sorts of possibilities are offered as to what consciousness might be, what areas of consciousness might have strange qualities, and what might be practical applications for those qualities.

It used to be that intellectuals and philosophers could be openly interested in magic without getting ridiculed.
Magic is simply a way of exploring the world. It involves following concepts that certain individuals have been exploring since humanity’s inception. Some of them were charlatans, some of them were deluded maniacs or attention seekers, but some of them are the pillars upon which our entire reality is based. Paracelsus basically put forward the concepts of modern medicine, as well as being the first person to explore the concept of the unconscious—centuries before Freud or Jung. He was also a magician. He wouldn’t have used that term himself. He probably would have thought of himself as a natural philosopher—

Maybe we need to go back to that term. But please go on.
Many of the cornerstones of our culture have roots in the occult. The earliest writers and artists came from shamanic culture, and science comes from alchemy. Isaac Newton was an alchemist. Einstein apparently died with a copy of Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine on the corner of his desk, and there are certainly similarities between that work and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. However, magic tends to be viewed as this deranged relation that we don’t want to bring up this far along in the advancement of our culture.

Vice: Alan Moore