Attitudes towards the occult and fortune telling during the 1950's & '60's

[Mabuse]

Because of my interest in 60's pop culture, one particular quote from this Stuart Kaplan interview grabbed my attention.
http://usgs.typepad.com/blog/2010/07/steve-winick-interviews-stuart-kaplan.html


"He (Kaplan) feared that the Tarot’s occult associations might lead to difficulties in the respectable business world." I doubts that these occult associations would have actually been a problem in 1968.

I was only 5 years old in 1970 but I'm a fan of 1950's and 1960's pop culture so I do know more than a little bit about these earlier times. It does appear that people had more casual attitudes towards the occult in previous decades.

As a proof, I submit this 1954 episode of Lassie in which a church carnival is actually sponsering a fortune telling booth! A Ouija board even makes an appearance in this episode!

http://www.hulu.com/watch/184550/lassie-1954-swami#x-0,vepisode,1,0

A lot of pop culture of my 1970's childhood would have freaked out contemporary Christian anti-occult fundies. I remember old Harvey comics with characters like Hot Stuff the Lil' Devil and Wendy the Witch but I don't recall any hostility towards them from Christian folks at the time. I suspect that if the Harry Potter books and movies appeared in an ealier decade there would be no controversy at all about them.

 

[Alta]

That is my recollection as well. This anti-occult thing seems to come with the rise of the 'new right'. And when you read about the first few decades of the 1900's, with the Theosophists and so on, and seances & the like were socially very popular. Investigation into the occult I think used to get a lot more respect than it does now.

Within the last year I read an older fairly scholarly book on angels by a respected philosopher Swedenborg and it was written seriously and meant to be taken seriously.

 

[Suzanne A]

Just my personal recollection as someone who was a child during the 60's, and kinda remembers them. There was quite a bit of pop culture about the occult at the time (I used to watch Bewitched, the Addams Family, I Dream of Jeannie), and a friend of mine had a ouija board in the late 60's, when I was a young teen. But, I think that it was only acceptable if it was done in a joking, non-serious way. I was interested in witchcraft from the time I was in 4th or 5th grade, and I knew that my interest would not be approved of by my family or church (even though we belonged to a pretty liberal church).

It's my impression that things like astrology and New Age philosophies really started to get widespread in the 70's--at least in the backwaters and suburbs where I grew up. For instance, during the 60's I really didn't know about hippies or the counterculture except as something you heard about on TV, going on somewhere exotic like San Francisco.

I do think that churches were less focused on the occult back then, because they didn't see it as much of a problem. But I can't overemphasize how strong mainstream, establishment culture was at the time--the Ozzie and Harriet view of life.

 

[Alta]

Ouija boards, right, they were widely available back then and you almost never see them now. I know that I played with them with other kids my age several times. No one seemed worried about them.

Wicca was developed in the 50's, wasn't it?

 

[nisaba]

And the Velvet Underground <swoons with pleasure> had a deck or decks out when interviewed once. They're something of a cultural icon, I'm happy with that. And when I was a child in the sixties, didn't everyone have a neighbour or classmate whose aunt or grandmother read the cards or read the tealeaves? I'm happy to accept that it was a lot more widespread than youngsters today might like to think - maybe us oldies weren't so unenlightened, after all! <grin>

 

[Mabuse]

Really?!

And the Velvet Underground <swoons with pleasure> had a deck or decks out when interviewed once. <grin>

This one raised my eyebrows! I have all the VU albums and the biography written by Victor Bockris but I've never heard of any Velvet Underground Tarot cards. I did a quick search and it appears to be a title of one of Warhol's films, THE VELVET UNDERGROUND TAROT CARDS

While searching I stumbled across this pleasing item on Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1sl2arIMtc

 

[Abrac]

By 1968, alternative religions and the occult were becoming associated more and more with the counterculture. This might have been what Kaplan was afraid of at that time. The "respectable business world" has serious problems with the radical counterculture.

 

[Guiding Cauldron]

Isn't anything not really understood by someone often labeled as "radical thinking" anyway? Again, something that someone really doesn't know much about but feels threatened/fears from and then the propaganda machine starts up to scare everyone off the topic, this has been happenings for centuries sadly.

 

[nisaba]

I've never heard of any Velvet Underground Tarot cards.

Neither have I - it was a deck belonging to one of the members, not a deck created by the band.

The link is unrolling in another window as we speak - an average three and a half minute clip takes about twenty-five or thirty minutes to become watchable on this machine, so more later.

 

[WyrdRaven]

Even though I regarded tarot as a Very Secret Thing in the late Sixties and early seventies, I never heard of or experienced any anti-tarot sentiment at the time. I lived in a large city on the west coast, though, and things may have been quite different in other areas, especially the south. I did not encounter fervent anti-tarot sentiment until the mid-eighties, and it was a real eye-opener. I lost an old friend over it, and that is a shame.
(Edited to Add: Interesting how the anti-tarot sentiment has coincided with the increased number, visibility and availabllity of tarot decks over time)