Ectoplasm

[Tom Stanton]

>>Craig Clark writes:
>>Interesting question: we never hear about this stuff in the history
>>we learn at school and in our universities (at least, I didn't - I
>>had to research it myself during my post-grad studies on _GR_). Why
>>not?...

> Jan Klimkowski wrote:
[big snip]
>I think a case can be made that a whole coterie of influential 'n inbred   
>aristocrats became obsessed with two Big Ideas around this time:   
>Occultism and Eugenics.  (In passing, anybody who's looked into these   
>areas knows that 90% of what the Academy sez about WB Yeats is pure   
>garbage: try asking a 33-degree Mason from an occult lodge about Yeats'   
>symbolic system some time.)

I wonder if there's any relation between the end of Newtonian mechanics
and the rise in occultism from 1900 forward. It does seem that as we
started losing our central role in the universe, we started to develop
highly complex belief systems based on mysterious islands or ethereal 
planes or interplanetary beings, and it has become more popular since
WW2.

As to why you rarely hear about it, my guess is it's easier to teach
that the Nazis were "insane" instead of exploring the complex
relationship between someone like Himmler & his occult beliefs.
I also suspect that portraying a guy like Himmler as a madman
instead of a satanic occultist helps keep him in his historical place.