AEWCH 308: LITERATURE AS OCCULTISM with ALLAN JOHNSON / THE SPIRIT-ERA & ITS AFTERMATHS, PT 2
Against Everyone with Conner Habib
Against Everyone With Conner Habib
4.8 • 699 Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2025
⏱️ 100 minutes
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Summary
This is the second episode in a series called THE SPIRIT-ERA & ITS AFTERMATHS in which I look at the way spiritual, technological, and occult flourishings at the turn of the 19th into 20th century are still with us today.
In the second installment in the series, I talk with ALLAN JOHNSON Professor of English Literature at University of Surrey, meditation coach, and author of the excellent book, The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World
In that book, Allan states: “The occult has always walked the perilous line between desiring a textual form while resisting the possibility that this form can ever be completely achieved.”
One of my big frustrations with spiritual influencers is that most of them don’t seem to have a good grasp of art, but particularly literature. They do something like this: they read literature that has magical CONTENT and create metaphors and analogies that - all-too conveniently - mirror the lessons of their own esoteric view. And they generally reach for the usual suspects: Tolkien, Le Guin, Coehlo, etc.
But the location of esoteric strength in literature is less in the content and much more in its FORMS and STYLES. These forms were brought to us most prominently in modernist fiction - in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and more. But also by poets like TS Elliot, Ezra Pound, and WB Yeats.
In the works of modernist writers, the reader’s involvement is demanded to complete the text. These are writers who initiate us as we read their works.
This conversation with Allan offered the chance to explore ideas I'd been longing to talk about for years, I'm so excited to share them with you here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, friends. This is Against Everyone with Connor Habib. This is the second episode in a series called |
| 0:06.6 | The Spirit Era and Its Aftermats, in which I look at the way spiritual, technological, and occult |
| 0:13.5 | flourishings at the turn of the 19th into 20th century are still with us today, and in fact being |
| 0:19.6 | echoed by our own time. |
| 0:21.9 | The spirit era is marked by occultists, paranormal investigators, and genuine spiritual teachers, |
| 0:28.6 | as well as magicians, fakirs, performers, and more. |
| 0:33.0 | The intelligency of the time, including political figures and some of the most famous artists |
| 0:37.4 | in the world, |
| 0:38.6 | might go see spirits materialize in a dark room, join esoteric organizations, or engage in scientific explorations of the afterlife. |
| 0:48.0 | They might write novels inspired by meeting notorious occult figures, or root a new politics in all the strange things that they'd seen. |
| 0:57.6 | New technologies were emerging and becoming popularized. There are plagues, wars, sinking ships, |
| 1:04.1 | and questions about what was real and what was true. In the spirit era, it seemed like there |
| 1:10.0 | was never a moment of rest, not even for reality itself. |
| 1:13.6 | And because everything was changing, anything was possible. |
| 1:18.4 | In other words, it was a time that is mirrored strongly by our own. |
| 1:21.9 | I'm sure a lot of that sounds familiar to you. |
| 1:25.2 | In these episodes, we won't just be trying to learn from history to avoid |
| 1:29.4 | repeating it, but we'll be deeply considering the spirit era to try to conjure its best aspects. |
| 1:36.8 | On the last episode, I talked about the importance of ghost hunting by way of exploring the |
| 1:41.4 | history of paranormal investigations with Alice Vernon. |
| 1:45.3 | I'm so excited to bring you this installment in the series with Alan Johnson, |
| 1:49.5 | Professor of English Literature at the University of Surrey. |
... |
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