James Webb > Quotes

“The neglected genius is a familiar figure of mythology; but there are also neglected lunatics who are worthy of study.”
― James Webb, The Occult Underground

“Up till the Age of Reason, the collection of beliefs which modern occultists have used as a quarrying-ground can be shown to have had a certain consistency. this consistency is a mystical-philosophical-religious approach deriving from the religions displaced by Christianity. This approach remains the nucleus of occult Tradition.”
― James Webb, The Occult Underground

“It was after the [great] war that Aleister Crowley attained his greatest notoriety—although it should never be forgotten that he emerged from the very fin de siècle atmosphere of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and that he was a supreme example of the type of Symbolist magus who had flourished in Paris during the 1890s.”
― James Webb, The Occult Establishment

“The needs and aspirations which during the Twenties had driven men to religion or the occult were transmuted during the decade which followed. As objects of devotion the gurus gave way to the political masters. But the vocabulary and the modes of thought employed by some of the idealistic politicians were profoundly influenced by their previous experience of the occult underground. In certain cases, whole ideological positions were taken over from occultism, and the underground became an underground no longer.”
― James Webb, The Occult Establishment

“Time was to prove that the political divisions of modern commentators into Left- and Right-wing make little difference in the world of Ideal States. The government of such a Utopia may be of a Left-wing or a Right-wing complexion; the one characteristic which marks it off from pragmatically established states is its preconception. The principles of government are known. They are not to be established by experiment. It is the Platonic, rather than the Aristotelian approach. Such states, nations, or colonies, because of the nature of the thought which has engendered them, are liable to be what is nowadays called totalitarian, but might—given the idea of a secular religion—just as well be called theocratic. The occultist might feel called, like Thomas Lake Harris, to establish Utopia on occult principles; which occult principles will then determine how the colony is to be conducted. The socialist or the nationalist establishes his Ideal State—for every revolutionary aims to establish at least some portion of Utopia—on the basis of another principle: the unity of the Volk, or the equality of mankind. The secular form of the faith does not mean that its application is any less theocratic than the application of Christian standards during the Middle Ages. There is in any society an accepted wisdom, and the struggle for Utopia represents the struggle to impose one's own interpretation of the universe on society—to become Established in one's own right.”
― James Webb, The Occult Underground