- The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus, meaning hidden or secret things.(1)
- God defines the occult as having its origin with Satan, the devil.
- Satan is a proud spirit-being, a personality created in another dimension by the all-powerful being, the God of creation.
- Occultism often denies the Trinity, the deity of Christ, His atonement on the Cross for our sins, and His bodily resurrection, but it may also promote a blend of Christian and occult beliefs.
It is a sad and frightening fact that people are fascinated with the secret or "occult" things that God has condemned.(2) One cannot see a movie like Harry Potter or read The Exorcist, which presents Satan unvarnished and portrays the truth about demonic possession in terms everyone can understand, without being plunged into the core of the occult. Today there is a tremendous fascination with the mysterious and the unknown. The great scholar, C. S. Lewis wrote, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."(3)
The modern age is strong proof of this unhealthy fascination. People are attracted to evil and captivated by it. They are vulnerable to temptation because of a growing revolt against science and technology that, for all their efforts, cannot meet man's spiritual hunger. People are asking, "If science and technology are supposed to produce all the good things, why haven't they accomplished it?" Instead, there is a continuous degradation of personality. People are not treated as human beings anymore but as computer data, numbers assigned from womb to tomb.
Today, a terrible spiritual vacuum exists in which people are forced to live because they turned from the living God and tried to fill the resulting emptiness with physical pleasure. Man crowds into this vacuum all the moral and ethical values attached to the material world. Again and again people protest, "There's got to be something more than this, because we're not satisfied." Satisfaction has not come through the dollar sign. Satisfaction has not come through the pill. Satisfaction has not come through economic aggrandizement, or political conquests, or military supremacy. Lost in a spiritual void, the human heart searches for some kind of reality apart from God and His Word, and discovers the occult reality from another dimension.
- University of Notre Dame Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid Online, s.v. "occult," http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=occulo&ending= (accessed September 25, 2006).
- Deuteronomy 18:9-12
- C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, preface. The Exorcist, DVD, directed by William Friedkin (1973; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2000).