Along with the amazing and influential poets and artists of our time, Wilson writes about things that continue to populate Halloween stores and cheesy movies to this day: vampires, ghosts, werewolves, demons and devils, the creatures of the occult.

In the The Occult, there is a chapter entitled Witchcraft and Lycanthropy, Wilson goes into detail when speaking about witchcraft in so-called “primitive” societies. The fear of witchcraft stemmed from a few different things. The hold religion had on everyone at the time was very prevalent. Sex and sexuality were not allowed to be expressed freely. Often this lead to cases of lycanthropy and “devil possession”. Women who expressed this frustration were often labelled as witches and therefore condemned. One of the most significant reasons for the fear of witchcraft was, frankly, the fear of women being powerful. Wilson writes “the first secular trial for witchcraft at Paris, in 1390, a woman called Jehane de Brigue was accused of sorcery by a man she had cured when on the point of death!” (554). She had healed a man and he immediately said she was under the influence of the devil. Most of these cases of witchcraft were false accusations placed on women who acted out against oppressive society, and misconceptions about women healers and medicine women. In the painting The Magic Circle by JW Waterhouse, he depicts a strong, focused witch laying her circle for ritual work. This painting stood out because it shows a woman proudly being a witch and it is not the classic ugly, green, evil old woman. He shows her beautiful and skilled, simply doing what she is trained to do. The witch in the painting is a practitioner of the occult, one of the few in the world that knows how to utilize her own Faculty X to make change in her life.

Another resource that was looked at along with reading The Occult was the movie What We Do in the Shadows. A comedy about four vampires living in an apartment in modern day New Zealand. This movie is so unique because it takes on a silly, goofy perspective all the while dealing with something as sinister as vampirism. Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi take traditional vampire archetypes, the Dracula stereotype and the Nosferatu stereotype, and completely putting a new twist on them. They become silly and more human (and even a little more pathetic). They do not use their powers for evil, they are shown in the context of doing extremely mundane tasks. One quote stood out in Wilson’s introduction that seemed to go along with this movie in particular is “in the past few centuries, science has made us aware that the universe is stranger and more interesting than our ancestors realized. It is an amusing thought that it may turn out stranger and more interesting than even the scientists are willing to admit” (xli). The occult has been seen as something “dark”, “hidden”, “evil” for centuries, even causes the violent death of so many people. Yes—the definition of “occult” does involve the unseen and the subconscious, however this does not always mean dark and evil. What We Do in the Shadows is an excellent example of how people misjudge anything as soon as it is labelled occult.

              The Occult by Colin Wilson is an incredibly intriguing book that analyzes all part of the occult, from the classic images of a woman standing over a cauldron, to alpha waves in the brain. The view he takes on as someone with a more skeptical and “scientific” perspective makes this book a unique experience. Human kind has delved so far into science, it tends to forget the roots of deeper thinking; magic and the unknown. For humanity to move forward, it must recognize the importance of looking within and evaluating what powers each person possesses. The more closely human beings listen to the world around them, “the deeper [their] sense of wonder, the wider [their] curiosity, the stronger [their] vitality becomes, and the more powerful [their] grip on [their] own existence” (xxvi).