"Given the historical orientation of philosophy, is it unreasonable to   suggest a wider cast of the net into the deep waters of magic? By   encountering magical thought as theory, we come to a new understanding of a   thought that looks back at us from a funhouse mirror."--The Occult Mind    Divination, like many critical modes, involves reading signs, and magic,   more generally, can be seen as a kind of criticism that takes the   universe--seen and unseen, known and unknowable--as its text. In The Occult   Mind, Christopher I. Lehrich explores the history of magic in Western   thought, suggesting a bold new understanding of the claims made about the   power of various belief systems. In closely interlinked essays on such   disparate topics as ley lines, the Tarot, the Corpus Hermeticum, writing   and ritual in magical practice, and early attempts to decipher Egyptian   hieroglyphics, Lehrich treats magic and its parts as an intellectual object   that requires interpretive zeal on the part of readers/observers. Drawing   illuminating parallels between the practice of magic and more recent   interpretive systems--structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics--Lehrich   deftly suggests that the specter of magic haunts all such attempts to grasp   the character of knowledge.     Offering a radical new approach to the nature and value of occult thought,   Lehrich's brilliantly conceived and executed book posits magic as a mode of   theory that is intrinsically subversive of normative conceptions of reason   and truth. In elucidating the deep parallels between occult thought and   academic discourse, Lehrich demonstrates that sixteenth-century occult   philosophy often touched on issues that have become central to   philosophical discourse only in the past fifty years.

The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice PDF

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