longer.blue

I feel the most intelligent approach to "understanding" (ultimately an oxymoron) the occult must consist in gathering, examining, and rigorously comparing different philosophical/epistemological approaches to it and its 'truth content/value', if any. Different individuals across history—espexially the past 200 years—have shown us that there broadly different approaches... E.g., you could note, albeit by extensive generalization (and not that these are mutually exclusive, comprehensive, or exhaustive, by any means...): Anton LaVey (secularizing but dramatizing, empowering but concentrating, self-centering but broadly applying that series of 'centers'), Peter Carroll (psychologizing but empowering, nullifying but freeing), Grant Morrison or Alan Moore (aesthetizing and creating, fluid and broadening, abstracting but clarifying), Dion Fortune (mythologizing, specifying, empowering, redirecting), and Aleister Crowley (utilitarian, scientific, systematizing within specialization/individualization (and vice versa), mythologizing but adapting, empowering while dissolving, attainment by simultaneous dissolution and expansion, liberating via containing (liberty through [temporary] self-restriction))...