A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern Book

Almost everyone is interested in the occult. This interest can range from skepticism and a desire to debunk various forms of clairvoyance and psychic phenomena, to government-funded research into applied occultism (mostly for war and espionage), all the way down to those at the other end of the spectrum who devote their lives to the search for some philosopher's stone/ultimate knowledge they hope to acquire by parsing esoterica ranging from astrological signs to the Kabbalah.

The place of the occult in German History is especially complex and thorny for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there is Germany's much-discussed Sonderweg ("Special Path") by which (contra other Western European nations) the German society, civilization, and psyche both resisted the Enlightenment and plunged deeper into its meaning (and consequences). Probably going all the way back to Goethe, the borders between science and religion, the material and the metaphysical, vexed German thinkers, artists, scholars, and scientists for several generations, sometimes to the point of madness (and arguably to the point of genocide). The way the German occult supposedly dovetailed with Nazism also makes the subject a minefield, which, it must be said, Corrinna Treitel does her best to navigate.

You can see then, why Dr. Corrina Treitel has her work cut out for herself in "A Science for the Soul." She makes a concerted go of it, and while the book is intermittently brilliant (particularly in the final third) the work doesn't quite cohere as a whole. Some sections would make good scholarly articles; others would be good subjects for seminars and conferences. Taken in Toto, though, "A Science for the Soul" is unfocused, sometimes tedious, long-winded, and yes, boring.

How does one manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of what should be an inherently-exciting and fascinating maw of wonder? Part of the problem, I think, is that academics and scholars have so much fear of the stigma that comes with treating the occult, that they feel the need to underplay their own fascination (and wonder) with the subject, in order not to seem like one of the hapless rubes who takes this stuff seriously. The philosopher Colin Wilson, for example, is an object lesson in how quickly one can fall from grace with the beautiful people in intelligentsia when they go from something deemed serious (Existentialism in Wilson's case) to something not-quite-serious (the occult, in Wilson's case).

I don't blame Treitlel for her circumspect treading, but in those passages where I sensed her heeding the call of some stronger pull, one can see the chrysalis for a much more exciting book on the subject. Understand, it isn't skepticism that I protest (I'm a skeptic myself); it's just the dryness of what is perhaps the juiciest of all subjects for all of us, lay or professional. Still, kudos for trying to scale a heck of a mountain and maintaining her equipoise high up there in the strange stratosphere.