Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

The Romance of the Occult, or the Will to Believe, exerts a special hold on Englishmen, from the earnest founders of the Society for Psychical Research down to the present author. Clues to this voluminous exercise in belief/understanding lie in the stream-of-consciousness outpouring of the first few pages of text, which touches upon everything from Margaret Murray and Stonehenge to Madame Blavatsky and the midwife toad. Wilson's glib pen flows to embrace all, looking for links, speculating on connections. Loving time is spent elaborating the career of archaeologist Tom Lethbridge, the Cambridge don-cum-dowser who developed a vast numerology of dowsing: so many inches of pendulum swing for copper, so many for truffles (!), etc. WiLson discovers he has the gift, too: on what rational or non-rational basis could it rest? The musings mount along with anecdote, theory, myth, and case history, as he explores the major categories of the paranormal, e.g., possession, poltergeists, reincarnation, the cabala, astrology, alchemy, PK. In many instances, Wilson sees emanations of the old (White Goddess) religion or evidence for the workings of a superconscious mind. (The ""force"" may well be with us!) In such a muchness there is little critical evaluation. The reader must be wary or indulgent, aware that while Wilson attacks the Golden-Bough approach to anthropology, he is himself searching for an elemental unity in all the mysteries. He is at his best in describing the panic attacks of anxiety which beset the writer on deadline, a situation which led him to introspection and self-mastery, emerging with a Gurdjieffian concept of a ""ladder of selves."" Enthusiastic, uncritical, but withal, a certain style, a certain appeal. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Colin Wilson was born on June 26, 1931 in Leicester, England. He attended a local technical school, where he did well in physics and chemistry, and left at 16 to work in a wool factory. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a laboratory assistant, tax clerk, laborer and hospital porter.

His first book, The Outsider, was published in 1956 when he was 24 years old. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 100 works on a wide variety of subjects including philosophy, religion, occult and supernatural phenomenea, music, sex, crime and critical theory. His other works include Religion and the Rebel, The Age of Defeat, Ritual in the Dark, The Strength to Dream, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, The Occult, Alien Dawn, Dreaming to Some Purpose, The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men, and Super Consciousness. His biographies include works on Bernard Shaw, David Lindsay, Herman Hesse, Wilhelm Reich, Jorge Luis Borges, Ken Russell, Rudolph Steiner, Aleister Crowley, and P. D. Ouspensky. Wilson died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 82.

(Bowker Author Biography)