Occulture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration to the Speculum Sophicum Rhodostauroticum (1618) by Teophilus Schweighardt Constantiens
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"Ideas enter our above-ground culture through the underground. I suppose that is the kind of function that the underground plays, such as it is. That it is where the dreams of our culture can ferment and strange notions can play themselves out unrestricted. And sooner or later those ideas will percolate through into the broad mass awareness of the broad mass of the populace. Occulture, you know, that seems to be perhaps the last revolutionary bastion." -- Alan Moore |
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Occulture is a portmanteau of the words "occult" and "culture" and is typically used to describe the many overlapping subcultures made up of those who study the occult, alternative religion, magick, consciousness exploration and Fortean phenomena, and the paranormal. In a broader sense, occulture may be simply understood as the hidden side of culture.
Etymology
The term occulture is first found in print in the 1970s, most notably in Evil and World Order (1976) by cultural critic William Irwin Thompson.
The term was given wider attention in the 1980s by British writer Simon Dwyer, publisher of the Rapid Eye fanzine.
In the first volume of the Creation Books reedition of Rapid Eye Simon Dwyer mentions how he 'stole' the term occulture from his friend David Brooks[1] who was going to use the name for a bookshop. In that book, Dwyer also explains what occulture means to him:
- "Occulture is not a secret culture as the word might suggest, but culture that is in some way hidden and ignored, or willfully marginalised to the extremities of our society. A culture of individuality and sub-cults, a culture of questions that have not been properly identified- let alone answered- and therefore, do not get fair representation in the mainstream media. It is a culture that has been misinterpreted. Not because it is 'evil' or wrong, but because it is generally apolitical and amoral, unashamedly artistic, experimental, undogmatic, intellectual and oddly evolutionary. It is a sub-culture that is forming a question that 'reality' alone cannot answer."[2][3]
Occulture is also the name of a festival dedicated to the occult, where, for example, Colin Wilson spoke in 2001.
See also
