That attitude would begin to change with the research he did for The Occult, and the experience of writing the book would ultimately change the direction not only of his writing career – as he continued to write about the subject at length in books like Poltergeist, and Afterlife – but also of his life and philosophy.

It would turn out to be a book that not only helped to re-launch his career – with positive critical responses of a kind that he had not had since The Outsider – but also it was one that was, oddly, at the centre of his own general philosophy.Īlthough Wilson had always been interested in matters of the occult – as readers of his autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose, become aware – he was also a sceptic with a scientific background. Indeed, Robert Graves had advised Wilson against doing the book.īut Wilson was nearing 40 years old and he was low on money for his young family, and he took it on. I feel it important to bring up this personal aspect to this first commissioned book of Wilson’s, which he himself hesitated in writing, as the subject was such dangerous territory for a serious writer. These words were pertinent as I recalled reading The Occult for the first time in 1984, and compared it to my impressions upon re-reading it more than a quarter of a century later to write about it here. Over the years my experiences, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library my words and my world – except for a few constant landmarks – are never one and the same.” A few pages later, he expands the same idea: “A book becomes a different book every time we read it.”

Alberto Manguel, in his preface to A Reader on Reading, (Yale University Press, 2010), writes this about the act of reading: “What we believe a book to be reshapes itself with every reading.

Colin wilson the occult a history