IMPLICATIONS FOR THE
SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
OF OCCULT BEHAVIOR
IN THE YOUTH CULTURE
ANDREW M. GREELEY
National
Opinion Research Center
University of Chicago
There are a number of different but interrelated strains to be
observed in the deviant wing of upper-middle-class youth
culture:
( 1 ) The Woodstock syndrome: a passive, unaggressive,
withdrawal from the larger society-either temporary or
permanent-into a subculture shaped by hallucinogenic drugs
and rock music.
(2) The political protest phenomenon: ranging from the
Weathermen of the far left to various liberal and moderate
groups concerned with active participation in the existing
political processes.
(3) The &dquo;communitarian&dquo;
communes
of Taos
or
movement: ranging from the
the Big Sur to various kinds of
encounter and
sensitivity groups.
(4) The &dquo;neo-sacral&dquo; or occult, religious
or
quasi-religious
activities of both individuals and groups.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a revised version of a paper presented at the
meetings of the American Sociological Association in Washington, D.C.,
August 31, 1970.
131
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[132]
All four of these components of upper-class youth culture
interact with one another. Astrology, for example, is popular
with the communitarians, the protesters, and the psychedelics ; and marihuana permeates all four groups. Furtheryoung person can move from one
another with relative ease; someone &dquo;doing his
more,
a
emphasis to
thing&dquo; can be
astrology, and now a
engaged now in protest, now drugs, now
Maher Baba commune.
The first three elements of the upper-middle-class youth
culture are taken very seriously by social analysts, though the
fourth has thus far not been subject to much in the way of
serious investigation. But if psychedelia, political protests,
and communes are thought to be important social developments, there is no logical reason for excluding interest in the
occult from careful social scientific analysis.
Although one is tempted to suspect that many sociologists
would rather like to exclude it, drugs, political protests, even
the communes are somehow &dquo;legitimate&dquo; forms of deviance,
but astrology, witchcraft, or diabolism-that is indeed
another matter. The characteristic reaction of many social
scientists when the subject of occultism among their students
is brought up is to suggest that it is a passing phenomenon or
a fad that will soon go away. Psychedelia is not a fad,
left-wing political movements are not fads, communes are
generally not dismissed as being a fad, but occult behavior
can only be explained as a fad.
One need not delve too deeply to find the reasons why the
neo-sacral is embarrassing: it simply should not have happened. For, in the classical model according to which most
social scientists approach religion, we are now in the late phases
of the &dquo;secularization&dquo; process. The race is presumed to have
evolved away from a mythological society to a scientific
society.Man no longer needs to postulate gods to explain
storms or the progression of the stars across the heavens.
Therefore, it is argued, he no longer needs the sacred or the
religious. The more enlightened of progressive modem men,
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[133]
if they are not atheists, are at least agnostics, requiring
neither an ultimate explanation nor any contact with &dquo;the
sacred.&dquo; Those who still profess a faith or engage in religious
ritual are considered representative of a somewhat earlier
stage of the evolutionary process-but a stage which is rapidly
becoming vestigial.
Such a model is rarely stated quite so baldly or explicitly,
yet it is, one suspects, implicit, existing just below the surface
of most social science consciousness. Obviously, such a model
cannot cope with the new manifestations of the sacred on
the college campus and in the communes where the collegians
go when they flee from the campus. It is bad enough if the
superstitious-particularly the bizarrely superstitiousremains anywhere in advanced industrial society, but for it to
break out in the supposed bastion of secularity-the great
university-is clearly an affront to decent, pious, agnostic
men.
FORMS OF THE NEO-SACRAL
But despite its scandalous nature the neo-sacral is still very
much with us. There are, it seems to me, three principal
forms it takes:
(1)
Divination-that is to say, attempts either to foretell the future
or to obtain divine guidance in decision-making through such
traditional methods as astrology, the I Ching, or Tarot cards.
(2) Mysticism-frequently of the Oriental variety and on occasion
demanding long hours of silent contemplation and reflection.
The Maher Baba groups seem to be particularly popular.
(Indeed, one hears of a Baba commune in Idaho called
Babashire.)
Bizarre
cultist groups such as witchcraft covens, diabolic
(3)
communities, spiritualism groups, and the White Legion.
There also exist some rather strange relationships, to which
I must confess a lack of complete understanding, between
science fiction and the various neo-sacral movements.
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134
In the
emerging literature on the communitarian movesees that it is increasingly acquiring religious
dimensions. Some of the communes, of course, are explicitly
religious while others use religious or quasi-religious concepts
to explain their purpose and behavior. Thus, the &dquo;open land&dquo;
ideology frequently argues that land &dquo;belongs to God&dquo;; and
the emphasis on &dquo;organic food&dquo; stresses that such food is
ment
one
&dquo;natural&dquo;
or &dquo;the way God intends man to eat.&dquo;
It is easy enough to dismiss such comments and, indeed,
the whole resurgence of the occult as being &dquo;not serious,&dquo; or
&dquo;a put-on&dquo; of the scientific, rational society. The young
people who say, for example, that organic food is &dquo;God’s
way&dquo; do not really mean God in the sense of some
transcendent being, but whether they do or not is, of course,
precisely a question for research and not a valid a priori
assumption. Much of what is going on in the deviant youth
culture today claims to be religious and looks and sounds as
though it were religious. The serious social scientist, therefore, must deploy his tools of research in the sociology of
religion and determine to what extent he can build useful
models for understanding the current craze for the occult.
Whether or not it will last is to some extent a research
question and to some extent a question that must be left to
future analysis. The relevant issue at present is to what extent
the perspectives of the sociology of religion enable us to
understand the phenomenon.
PERTINENCE OF RELIGIOUS SOCIOLOGY
I should like to suggest that at the present state of the
the sociology of religion sees four principal
functions that religion plays in human life: it provides
meaning; it is a basis for community; it is an attempt to
establish contact with the &dquo;sacred&dquo;; and it provides or
reinforces norms according to which a man may live.
Clifford Geertz (1957: 426) has argued that religion is a
&dquo;culture system&dquo; providing a &dquo;template&dquo; by which man can
discipline,
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[135]
&dquo;interpret&dquo; those phenomena which baffle him. When science, common sense, ideology, and art are not sufficient to
cope with crises of interpretation and man finds himself in a
situation where interpretability itself is at stake, he turns to
his &dquo;ultimate&dquo; cultural system to find an explanation.
Religion, in other words, is man’s world view.
What sacred symbols do for those to whom they are sacred is to
formulate the image of the world’s construction and to program
for human conduct.... A people’s world-view is their picture of
the way things in sheer actuality are-a concept of nature, of self,
and of society. It contains their most comprehensive idea of
order. Religious belief and ritual confront and mutually confirm
one another. An ethos is made intellectually reasonable by being
shown to represent a way of life. The world view is made
emotionally acceptable by being presented as an image of an
actual state of affairs of which such a way of life is an authentic
expression.
Geertz’s frame of reference is essentially Weberian. In the
Durkheimian tradition, religion is seen both as the source and
the result of community ties. It is the feeling of the bond of
community which gives rise to the religious experience, and it
is religion through which the society interprets and defines
itself. Writers after Durkheim saw religion reintegrating the
community in time of crisis (for example, Malinowski’s
analysis of piacular rites as reintegrating a society in time of
death) and as providing social location and self-definition in
the midst of a complex industrial society (Will Herberg’s
development of this theme has become almost classic). More
recently, Thomas Luckman has pointed out that one feels the
need of an &dquo;interpretive scheme&dquo; precisely in the act of
discovering oneself as different &dquo;over against&dquo; others; but the
interpretive scheme is both learned from others-as part of
the early socialization experience-and also makes possible
social behavior with others.
Authors writing from such diverse perspectives as Mircea
Eliade and Edward Shils have pointed out that human
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136
religious rituals are a means of establishing contact with the
&dquo;really real&dquo;; that is, the basic order of things which
underpins the universe. Shils ( 1968) is quite explicit about
the place of the sacred in the human condition:
This I regard as given
that cognitive powers
the constitution of man in the same way
locomotive powers are given. Like those,
they are unevenly given and unevenly cultivated, so that the sense
of the &dquo;serieuse, &dquo; the need for contact with the charismatic or
sacred values differs markedly among human beings within any
society. Some persons, a minority, tend to have it to a
pronounced degree and even relatively continuously; others, far
more numerous, will experience it only intermittently and,
except rarely, without great intensity. Finally, there is a minority
which is utterly opaque to the &dquo;serieuse.
in
or
&dquo;
Although relatively little has been written about the
relationship of religion and ethics, it is implicit in the notion
that religion is a &dquo;cultural system&dquo; or an &dquo;interpretive
scheme&dquo; that religion also provides ethical meaning for life.
Geertz (1969: 101, 426) has made the link explicit. Religion,
according to him, is the &dquo;struggle for the real.&dquo; It is rooted in
the &dquo;insufficiency of common sense as a total orientation
towards life ... the events through which we live are forever
outrunning the power of our every day moral, emotional, and
intellectual concepts to construe them, leaving us as a
Javanese image has put it, ’like water buffalo listening to an
orchestra.’ And he adds: &dquo;The force of religion in supporting
social values rests on the ability of its symbols to formulate a
&dquo;
world-view in which those values as well as the forces
opposing the realization are fundamental ingredients.&dquo; The
&dquo;ethos,&dquo; then, and the world view are but different sides of
the same coin. The world view tells us the way things really
are, and the ethos, how we must live to be in harmony with
the way things really are.
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[137]
NEO-SACRAL RESEARCH TODAY
In the present state of research on the new occult
phenomena, one cannot describe with any absolute certainty
the functions that the new interest in the sacred plays in the
lives of the devout and the initiate. But one can at least
observe that the young people who are involved do most
strongly assert that their sacred, mystical, or occult interests
do indeed provide them with meaning, with community, with
a contact with the transcendent, and with norms by which to
live. Indeed, they are quite explicit in contending that they
have turned to-or returned to-the sacred precisely because
the scientific, technological society has failed to provide
them with faith, community, transcendence, and morality. If
what they are engaging in is not a more or less authentic form
of religious behavior, one wonders what kind of behavior
would be acknowledged as authentically religious.
Those members of the political new left who are not yet
into the neo-sacral nonetheless seem to share the viewpoint
of the neo-sacralists. Thus, Roszak’s counterculture and
Schaar’s &dquo;new leadership&dquo; both assume that the hyperrationalism of positive and empiricist science has dehumanized
the human being and human societies, and that only a return
to knowledge which embraces other human skills in addition
to abstract rationalization will save the race from destruction.
Schaar’s (1970) description of how a political leader ought to
behave if the rational and objective mode of cognition is
abandoned is strikingly religious:
Humanly significant leadership bases its claim to authority on a
knowledge which includes intuition, insight, and vision as
indispensable elements. The leader strives to grasp and to
communicate the essence of a situation in one organic and
comprehensive conception. He conjoins elements which the
analytic mind keeps tidily separate. He unites the normative with
the empirical, and promiscuously mixes both with the moral and
the esthetic. The radical distinction between subjective and
objective is unknown in this kind of knowledge, for everything is
kind of
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138
personal and comes from within the prepared consciousness of
the knower, who is simultaneously believer and actor. When it is
about men, this kind of knowledge is again personal. It strives to
see within the self and along with other selves. It is knowledge of
character and destiny....
The
language in which the knowledge appropriate to humanly
significant leadership is expressed is also very different from the
language of rational and objective discourse. It is a language
profuse in illustration and anecdote, and rich in metaphor whose
the human body and the dramas of action and
responsibility. This language is suggestive and alluring, pregnant,
evocative-in all ways the opposite of the linear, constricted,
jargonized discourse which is the ideal of objective communication. Decisions and recommendations are often expressed in
parables and visions whose meanings are hidden to outsiders but
translucent to those who have eyes to see. Teaching in this
language is done mainly by story, example, and metaphor-modes
of discourse which can probe depths of personal being inaccessible to objective and managerial discourse. Compare the Sermon
on the Mount with the latest communique from the Office of
Economic Opportunity in the War on Poverty, or Lincoln’s
Second Inaugural Address with Nixon’s first.
sources
are
The argument of Schaar-and many of his fellow critics from
the new left-seems to be that &dquo;not by reason alone doth
man live&dquo;; but if man must have something beyond reason,
then he comes dangerously close to needing something that
traditionally would be called &dquo;faith,&dquo; and this is precisely
what the colleagues of the new left in the neo-sacral
movement would have us believe.
Is, then, the new cult of the occult to survive? Perhaps in
the final analysis it will depend upon how deep, how
pervasive, and how permanent the alienation of a substantial
segment of the population from what they take to be the
scientific and technological society. If a sufficient number do
continue to be convinced that the nonrational or the
transrational-or even the irrational-are an essential part of
human living, then the sacred in one form or another is going
to be with us for a long time to come.
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139
The
while
of religion should not be surprised; for
the one hand he may be inclined to accept a
long-range strain toward secularization, he knows his Weber
and Durkheim well enough to be skeptical about man’s
capacity to do without faith or the sacred. While he may be
somewhat startled by the vigor and variety of the new sacred
manifestations, he realizes on reflection that Max Weber
probably would not be at all surprised, and Emil Durkheim
would even clap his hands and say, &dquo;I told you so.&dquo; There
will always be religion.
Or, to put the matter somewhat more abstractly, a simple,
unidirectional model of religious evolution from the sacred to
the secular is not able to cope with the new sacred among
sociologist
on
upper-middle-class young people. Furthermore, a more
sophisticated model based in part on the Weberian notion of
man as a meaning-seeking animal and the Durkheimian
notion of man as a community-creating animal has no
difficulty in coping with the new sacred-not, at least, after
the first shock on hearing of the existence of a witchcraft
1
coven in the apartment next door.’
But while the sociologist of religion will not be completely
taken aback by the resurgence of the sacred among the
younger generation, he is, nonetheless, presented with something of a problem, a problem which neither Durkheim nor
Weber was able to resolve. For if the sociologist of religion is
an agnostic, as the two masters were, he is caught in the
somewhat ambiguous position of arguing that society needs
religion-or that man needs ultimate meaning-while simultaneously asserting that he himself and most of his academic
colleagues need neither religion nor meaning. Religion and
the sacred are part of the human condition, but they are also
a part of the human condition from which the academic
considers himself exempt. He is more than somewhat
dismayed that some of his students do not wish to avail
themselves of such exemptions and, indeed, are on occasion
wont to imply that he is somehow less than human himself
because he has taken the exemption.
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140
NOTE
1. A student of mine descended upon my office last fall to announce that he
had been in contact with the devil. A normally sober, responsible, industrious,
Methodist-turned-agnostic, the young man was visibly shaken by his experience
with the diabolic. He and some of his friends had engaged m an emotionally
supercharged bout with a ouija board on Halloween night and became persuaded
that the devil had taken charge of the board. As my young friend pointed out, the
board knew answers to questions that nobody in the room could possibly have
known. For example, the board was able to tell the assembled group the year of
Plato’s birth and, as my friend pointed out, it was only three years off. (I did not
raise with him the issue of what kind of devil would make a mistake.) I asked him
what he had done with the board, and he said that he and his friends had been so
terrified by the experience that they took the board to a local Roman Catholic
rectory where the priest had sprinkled it with holy water and told them to break
it into many different pieces and put each piece in a separate garbage can. Having
some familiarity with the staff at that rectory, I can imagine that the story
provided much suppertime amusement for several days afterward. The young man
promised to bring me tape recordings of the Halloween interlude with the devil
(and what kind of a devil would it be that would permit himself to be tape
recorded?), but returned the next day to say that his friend who had been keeping
the tapes became terrified of the possibility that the devil might "adhere" in
them, and had burned them. All this at the University of Chicago!
REFERENCES
GEERTZ, C. (1969) Islam Observed. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
(1957) "Ethos, world view and the analysis of sacred symbols." Antioch
Rev. (December): 426.
SCHAAR, J. H. (1970) "Reflections on authority." New Amer. Rev. 8: 75-77,
———
78.
SHILS,
E. (1968) "Ritual in
Boston: Beacon Press.
crisis," in
D. R. Cutler
(ed.) The Religious Situation.
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