These words were pertinent as I recalled reading The Occult for the first time in 1984, and compared it to my impressions upon re-reading it more than a quarter of a century later to write about it here. Over the years my experiences, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library my words and my world – except for a few constant landmarks – are never one and the same.” A few pages later, he expands the same idea: “A book becomes a different book every time we read it.” Kirkus Reviews praised the history portion of the book while criticizing the other two sections of the book as "the usual pretentious, polymorphous thinking of that paraclete/ exegete on what he calls Faculty X".Alberto Manguel, in his preface to A Reader on Reading, (Yale University Press, 2010), writes this about the act of reading: “What we believe a book to be reshapes itself with every reading.
A reviewer for the Boca Raton News panned the book, saying that " expects this "Faculty X" to unite instinct and intelligence, but what this might achieve explicitly, eluded this reviewer throughout the book's 560 minutely-detailed pages." In his book Modern Occult Rhetoric Joshua Gunn acknowledged the book's popularity but criticized "Wilson's expressed agenda to prove the existence of psychic and astral forces" as an occasional annoyance that "detracts from the value of his scholarship". Joyce Carol Oates reviewed the book, remarking that it was an "excellent idea" for a book and that it "is one of those rich, strange, perplexing, infinitely surprising works that repay many readings." The Robesonian commented that the book was "vast" and "extremely well researched". Then I discovered that they had been believed in by every civilisation for thousands of years, and began to feel that perhaps my dismissive attitude was a mistake.
I had assumed, to begin with, that ghosts were a superstition.
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