In today’s online edition of The Independent, Gary Lachman expertly deflates The Occult Tradition, a new book released in the UK by Tel Aviv University historian David S Katz. As Lachman combs through his contentions, he invokes a small but wonderful list of prominent occultists from the last 150 years (including Rudolf Steiner, Aleister Crowley, GI Gurdjieff, C G Jung, Henri Bergson, William James, Isaac Newton, Daniel Dunglas Home, Eliphas Levi, and Madame Blavatsky). In doing so, he paves the way for a smart, level-headed critical engagement with the material. From the review at The Independent—

Much of what we can call the “history of the occult” is absent from this book. Central players like Rudolf Steiner, Aleister Crowley and GI Gurdjieff warrant only a namecheck, and in the case of Steiner and Gurdjieff, are misrepresented. Gurdjieff was not a “19th-century occultist;” he only came to public awareness in the 1920s, and his earliest appearance as an esoteric teacher was well within the 20th century. The home of Steiner’s spiritual movement in Switzerland is Dornach, not “Dorlach”; a typo, sure, but it should have been caught. Katz unquestioningly repeats the usual account of Madame Blavatsky’s “exposure” as a fraudulent medium, failing to relate that the original report, in 1885, by Richard Hodgson, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, was itself rejected as seriously flawed by the SPR a century later. Katz devotes several pages to cranky proto-Nazi occultists (a standard trope of debunkers), yet C G Jung, who wrote volumes on Gnosticism and alchemy, and more or less made the occult and the paranormal respectable areas of inquiry, is tossed a paragraph, within which, nevertheless, Katz manages to jam all the myths about Jung’s supposed racism. In doing this, Katz bases his account on Richard Noll’s controversial (and not a wee bit sensational) work The Jung Cult, a study that has itself been brought into question. Reading Katz, however, you wouldn’t know it. (Read more.)

A little more research uncovered two more, quite different, reviews. A more accepting, less insightful, less critical, The Da Vinci Code invoking review in The Scotsman. And a smarter, quite positive, review by Jad Adams for The Guardian.