A couple of weeks back I had the good fortune to have dinner with Nevill Drury and his wife Lesley, who were passing through my town while on their way to New York. Drury is an accomplished author in the field of (mainly) the Western esoteric tradition. He has authored over sixty books in some forty years of writing. I've long thought that he is one of the more unheralded writers in his field. He is similar to Colin Wilson, but more rigorous. His most recent work, Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic is an outstanding summary of the most significant facets of the Western esoteric schools, ranging from the Rosicrucians and Freemasons to Gnosticism and Kabbalah, and from John Dee to Aleister Crowley and Castaneda and shamanism. He also has an excellent chapter on the so-called Left Hand path, especially as it developed via the work of Dr. Michael Aquino and his Temple of Set. These areas are notoriously misunderstood, and in large part that is due to the entertainment industry. I am presently in the process of researching a new book, tentatively titled Hollywood and the Occult, in which I am endeavoring to shed some light on the powerful influence of the Silver Screen on the collective consciousness of mainstream society, especially as that relates to gross distortions of the Western esoteric tradition.
The idea of tackling the connections between the movie art-form and the path of inner transformation and esoterica has been done before, most notably by Dean Sluyter in his excellent Cinema Nirvana; more 'out there' attempts have included Bruce Rux's uneven Hollywood vs. the Aliens. What these two have in common is basing their work on the idea that Hollywood's expression of deeper perspectives is largely unconscious. The entire esoteric tradition involves working with the unconscious mind, via symbol, ritual, and direct inner exploration, in order to bring light into the dark recesses. This whole area was probably most brilliantly written about by James Webb, especially in his scholarly The Occult Establishment (1976). Webb's main idea is that the entire 'magical revival' of the late 19th century (which eventually morphed into the modern 'new age' movement) was based on a collective revolt against the scientific method, which in its stark decentralizing of the human element (via Copernicus' heliocentrism and Darwin's natural selection, etc.) seemed to deal a serious blow to the childishly assumed primacy of humanity. To compensate for this, Webb argued, the esoteric traditions gained many adherents, as it seemed to present the possibility of regaining our 'center of the universe' positioning.
