"In September 1898 two respectable Victorians met in a private house in London for the express purpose of traveling to the planets..."

So begins The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. I mentioned this book here about a month ago. And it has since come into my possession. But it wasn't until early this morning -- after a lengthy session googling grafiks of Joel and the bots from MST3K; don't ask -- that I serendipitously stumbled, via Google Print, onto the following material about Freud, Jung and the occult. I've been meaning to search up just the right quote about Freud's "black tide" comment -- which, importantly, was made to Jung -- and these two clips provide more context than even I, in my near-omniscience as regards such matters, had previously known about.

In the first, Freud had been approached by several publications that dealt with occultism and asked for a contribution. He refused these requests, but to one he replied: "If I had my life to live over again I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis."

Holy cathexis, Batman! Now there's a surprise. The passage continues...

Freud apparently later forgot this admission of deep interest, but his personal involvement with occultism during the early years of the new century was real enough. As we shall see, there was a close connection between occultism and innovative approaches to the study of the mind. Indeed, Victorian science itself was sometimes less divorced from occultism than its practitioners might care to admit.

The Place of Enchantment, p. 6

Then, much later in the book, we get (sans grafik) this...

Freud recognized all too well the occult connotations of his interpretive work on dreams and, indeed, of much of the phenomena of consciousness that interested him. His simultaneous fascination with the occult and vigorous attempts to distance himself from it are matters of record. Freud feared that the occult, which he referred to as "the black tide of mud," would compromise the respectability of psychoanalysis. But his early immersion in Naturphilosophie, friendship with men such as Wilhelm Fleiss, investigations of mediumistic phenomena with Sandor Ferenczi, legendary superstitious anxieties, mixed response to the occult interests of some of his followers, and great rift with Carl Jung over just such matters suggest in briefest outline the parameters of the tensions inherent in Freud's position."

The Place of Enchantment, p. 143

But why would Freud and Jung -- the latter to a far lesser degree -- be so concerned to obscure their interest in matters occult? This is difficult for us moderns to grasp, accustomed as we've become to every stripe of spookiness that we take the howlingly irrational for granted. Perhaps fast-forwarding to a more current set of issues will shed some light. Time once again to invoke the Highbeam genie...

from: Contemporary problems in the study of Native North American religions with special reference to the Hopis by Armin W. Geertz
source: The American Indian Quarterly, 22 June 1996
via: HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 1996 University of Nebraska Press

Primitivist misrepresentations of their culture have prompted Hopi tribal officials to place restrictions on cultural research... Primitivism based on the ideas of Eliade is exemplified by the book Religion and Hopi Life in the Twentieth Century by John D. Loftin. New Age interest in the Hopi has also been a concern.

Mircea Eliade, you will remember (from and I coulda been the Queen of France! and The Stone-Age Goddess and the Storm Trooper), was once an outspoken antisemitic fascist in Romania during the Third Reich, and later the author of Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. This led to Zeppelins, stairways to heaven, and many excellent trance-and-dental raves -- one reason Eliade is today considered in certain circles to have been groovy.

In my study of Hopi prophecies about the end of the world, I documented the widespread interest in Hopi prophecy and culture by Europeans and Americans. Their prophetic message about the return of a long-awaited White Brother has moved many groups and individuals to travel to the reservation, engage in cultural collision and sometimes cultural collusion, and return home to carry on personal crusades. These crusades generally thrive on the production and proliferation of stereotypes about Native peoples, and they have more often than not indirectly and sometimes directly caused harm on the reservation and off.

Collusion? Harm? Whatever can the author be on about?

Such behavior reflects an age-old European phenomenon called primitivism," which has its roots in antiquity. Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas (1935) have shown that primitivism is the philosophical position that associates the best existence either in the beginnings of time or in "nature." Thus primitivism is part of the more encompassing idea that "nature" somehow constitutes the norm for human existence. There are two types of primitivism: 1) chronological primitivism, which locates the best human condition in terms of time, namely, primordial times, and 2) cultural primitivism, which locates the best human condition in contemporary "primitive" cultures, especially because of their perceived relationship to "nature" or their "natural" way of living. The first type can neither be proven nor disproven, but the second type can be shown to be the product of centuries of misrepresentation.

And this leads to various problems -- the following problems being perhaps the most various of all...

In The Invention of Prophecy I described European and American individuals and groups who more or less adopt Hopi ideology as their own and play out fantasies in the framework of Hopi mythology. I presented a typology consisting of the following: Under explicit identification, I noted the man who thought he had the missing corner of the ancient stone tablet of Hopi legend, the Chinese. Buddhist priest who thought he was the long-awaited apocryphal White Brother; the Flying Saucer prophet who believed that the White Brother consisted of beings from Venus and that he was their prophet; the Jungian doctoral student who thought C.G. Jung was the awaited White Brother; and so on.

And so on, indeed. There is no lack of this fascinating material. But for the nonce, this explication de texte will have to be continued...