Bible, Occultism in the

The Bible, the holy book revered by Jews and with the addition of the New Testament, by Christians worldwide, has been interpreted in the modern world, generally, as hostile to the occult. This has especially been the case in the wake of the late medieval trials in which witchcraft was reinterpreted as the work of Satan. In the post-Enlightenment world, in which many occult practices have disappeared, readers of the Bible may miss the occult element in the text, as for example the casting of lots, a popular divinatory practice, to choose the successor of the Apostle Judas in the first chapter of the Book of the Act of the Apostles.

The Bible versus Popular Occultism

Among the major themes of the history of Israel was its struggle to institute the exclusive worship of Yahweh, the god of Abraham. This effort involved them in separating Jewish life from that of their Pagan neighbors, especially those who practiced human sacrifice, keeping to a minimum the influences of the steady stream of merchants who traveled through their land, and surviving during the Babylonian Captivity. As a result, the biblical text is replete with admonitions to abstain from following the religious/occult practices of Israel's neighbors. The most cited cases having to do with occultism concern King Saul's interaction with the woman of Endor and the encounter of Daniel with the Babylonian sorcerers and astrologers.

To understand the role of the occult in the biblical literature, however, it is necessary to recall that the Bible was written in pre-scientific times in which all people operated as if what came to be known as the supernatural or the psychic was a fact of life. Visions and dreams were a common means of receiving direction in one's life, and dream interpretation was a most valued skill, among the more famous incidents being those of Joseph interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh and of Daniel in Babylon (Gen. 41; Dan. 2). For many years Israel was ruled by psychic seers or judges, who regularly received extrasensory information, a word from the Eternal, and to whom the people could turn for guidance. Decisions were commonly made by the casting of lots. The role of judge was vividly illustrated in the incident in which the future king David met Israel's most renowned seer/judge Samuel and asked him to help find a herd of lost donkeys. (1 Sam. 9) It would be Samuel's duty to oversee the transition of Israel from the rule of the judges to that of a king and to choose the first king, Saul.

As the Jewish priesthood developed, a method of divining God's will for the nation revolved around the use of some stones known as the Urim and Thummin. These stones, worn as a breastplate by the high priest, have been lost to history, and there is much speculation as to their exact nature. However, it is agreed that they functioned as oracle stones and were used to answer questions (Deut. 33:8).

In possibly the single most famous account with occult implications in the Bible (1 Sam. 28), Saul had lost favor with God for his disobedience and had been cut off from the common means of divination used by the Jews—the Urim and Thummin and dreams. Samuel, from whom Saul had always sought advice, was dead. In desperation, Saul turned to an "ob," translated "witch" in many Bibles, but more properly translated "medium" or "oracle." The use of obs had been forbidden in the law (Deut. 18:10-12; Lev. 20:27). Saul had banished the obs from the land, but one resided near Endor where he was encamped. He asked her to call forth the spirit of Samuel. Instead of getting the advice he sought, Saul found that Samuel merely emphasized his abandonment by God. Saul lost the battle to the Philistines the next day. He and his sons were killed and as a result David emerged as the new undisputed king and God's favorite.

The most intense confrontation between the Israelites and their forms of divination and the magical practices of their neighbors occurred in the Babylonian court where Daniel had found some favor. He stood out as he followed the strict dietary regulations of Jewish law. When the king's advisors were unable to interpret King Nebuchadnezzar's dream, Daniel succeeded. He later had a number of dreams and visions which were recounted in the book that bears his name, including some of his most famous apocalyptic visions of the endtime. At one point in his confrontations with the Babylonian psychic advisors, their plotting against him led to his being cast in the famous den of lions. It appears that the Babylonian kings employed a wide variety of advisors, including astrologers, and the harshest words concerning astrology in the Bible come from this period (Dan. 2:27; 5:7-11).

Christianity

The New Testament opens with a more positive view of astrology, as three Magi (Zoroastrian astrologers) have discerned the new star in the heavens as a sign of Christ's birth and travel to Palestine to offer their worship and acknowledgement. Jesus, as an adult, emerges as a worker of signs and wonders who is able to heal, tell people things of which he had no normal knowledge, render accurate prophecies, and do amazing things such as walk on water. In the theology of the church, especially as the distinction between the natural and supernatural world is delineated, Jesus was seen as a worker of miracles, as someone possessed of supernatural power by which he was able to do things not normally possible in the natural order of things.

Saints were also seen to possess such powers but to a lesser extent. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles recounted numerous miraculous experiences of the Apostles and other church members, none more extensively than Paul, whose Christian life begins with a visionary encounter with the risen Christ. He later speaks of being caught up into the Third Heaven. The Bible closes with the visionary experiences of the Apostle John, the Revelation.

Paul spelled out the church's early understanding of its encounter with what today would be considered the psychic world (1 Cor. 12). Psychic gifts were seen as "gifts of the Holy Spirit" and included the words of wisdom and knowledge (clairvoyance and telepathy), prophecy, working miracles (psychokinesis ), discerning spirits, and speaking in tongues (xenoglossia ). The operation of the gifts was placed under the prime directive of love (I Cor. 13). However, these gifts operated in the early church and especially gifted people traveled among the congregations exercising their gifts. False prophets became a problem and by the second century had to be strictly dealt with. Later generations, especially after the church became a mass movement, had to contend with the demise of the gifts as commonplace phenomena. Thus did the church come to see the gifts as necessary to the establishment of the church, but as confined to the saints and occasional miracles in the present.

In the Middle Ages, as the world was viewed as divided into natural and supernatural realms, the church assumed a position as the focus of the miraculous realm on Earth. The super-natural was integral to the Roman Catholic Church's worldview (as was also true of the Eastern Orthodox Churches). That worldview was challenged by Protestantism, which called into question a variety of the more outrageous elements in the Roman Church's understanding of sainthood and the use of relics it encouraged.

The challenge of Protestantism was reinforced by the Enlightenment and the rise of science, and by the eighteenth century, voices arose decrying the whole division of the world into natural and supernatural. They looked for a claiming of the heretofore supernatural by the understanding of science. Many saw no need for either God or the miraculous.

The Modern World

In the wake of the early successes of science and its application to technological advances throughout the nineteenth century, new movements that were built around what had earlier been seen as miraculous experiences were launched by people such as Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer. They led to the most successful of these movements, Spiritualism, which emerged in the 1840s around the primary experience of mediums communicating with the spirits of the deceased. By the 1860s Spiritualism had spread across Europe and became a significant cultural force through the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Spiritualism claimed to reproduce the "miracles" of the Bible in a demonstrable manner. In England, in response to its appearance, a new science, psychical research, emerged and a new language developed to understand the phenomena.

Spiritualism presented a broad challenge to the church. Present within the movement were all of the biblical "gifts of the Spirit" but in a non-church setting. Church leaders responded that Spiritualism merely reproduced the Pagan phenomena forbidden in the Jewish Old Testament and cited the story of the woman of Endor as a clear prohibition of spirit contact. This interpretation still dominates the more conservative segments of Christianity. Spiritualists countered with a biblical exposition centered upon the New Testament, the encounter of the Apostles with the long-dead Moses and Elijah at the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17), and the appearances of the resurrected Jesus.

In the twentieth century, Spiritualism as a movement withered as many mediums became involved in efforts to fake extraordinary events in spirit contact, materialization, and psychokinesis. The continued exposures to which it was subjected pushed it to the fringe, led to the replacement of psychical research by parapsychology, and gave credence to the skeptical movement that disparaged the existence of all psychic phenomena.

In the last half of the twentieth century, while the mainstream of biblical interpretation has moved in other directions, a number of biblical interpreters have emerged who understand the Bible stories of miraculous events in the light of the more limited findings of parapsychology. Several church-based movements such as Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship and the Churches Fellowship for Spiritual and Psychical Studies (in the United Kingdom) have emerged to embody such perspective. However, they remain a minority voice within Christendom, and have themselves had to compete with a reborn Gnosticism as represented in the New Age Movement that has developed quite apart from traditional Christianity.

Sources:

Bretherton, Donald. "Psychical Research and the Biblical Prohibitions." In J. D. Pearce-Higgins and G. Stanley Whitby, eds. Life, Death and Psychical Research. London: Rider, 1973.

Sutphin, John E., Jr. The Bible and Spirit Communication. Starkville, Miss.: Metamental Missions, 1971.

Thurston, Herbert. The Church and Spiritualism. Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1933.

Wallis, E. W., and M. H. Wallis. Spiritualism and the Bible. London: The Authors, n.d.