Wilson develops an argument that humans possess abilities that are beyond. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Wilson's concept of Faculty X as elaborated in his monumental 1971 work, The Occult. Colin Wilson attempts to take a sobering historical viewpoint of the various iterations of the occult.
For Wilson, magic isn't the living fossil the arch-rationalists would like it to be, but a "science of the future." Faculty X is an evolutionary power, innately positive, inseparable from the will to live and the unshakeable conviction that, somehow, this world has some real, ineffable meaning. Introducing the Occult: Selected introductions, prefaces, forewords and afterwords by Colin Wilson (Axis Mundi Books, December 2022) is selected, edited and introduced by Wilson’s esteemed bibliographer Colin Stanley, and reflects how Wilson became sought after for such commentaries by genre writers after The Occult had become a best-seller. Almost two decades after writing his famous and critically acclaimed history of magic in The Occult, Colin Wilson re-examined the whole spectrum of the mystical and paranormal, producing a general occult theory that remains as compelling as the evidence of atomic particles.
At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity files under "supernatural" or "occult." As difficult to explain as it is impossible to omit from any honest survey of human existence, the occult haunts the modern, not just as a vestige of the past but also, perhaps, as a promise from a time to come. Beyond the Occult, the third book in Colin Wilson's 'Occult Trilogy', was published late in 1988, both in theUK and the US, by Bantam Press. The acclaimed author of The Outsider explores occult ideas, practices and figures from Kabbalah to Aleister Crowley in this fascinating history of magic.
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