The world is getting strange again.
Not the garden-variety strangeness of living through a pandemic or watching much of our societal and cultural harnessing glitch in real time, but the deeper kind: the moment your inherited user manual starts giving the wrong instructions. You press the familiar buttons and the machine does something else. Capabilities arrive before explanations. Effects precede causes. The future stops feeling like a linear sequel and starts feeling like someone quietly shipped a new physics engine.
We’ve been here before. The Renaissance had a word for it: mirabilia. Marvels. And marvels, it turns out, are fertile soil for magic. (side note: it’s super cool that we are living in the age of marvels again! pros and cons for sure but I genuinely do feel like the world we’ll live in a few decades from now will be much, much better on a bunch of axes than the one we’re living in right now, provided that we don’t make silly mistakes that are irreversible)
The occult boom
If you plotted occultism’s market cap across 1400–1700, you’d get a lopsided bell curve: low baseline, sudden mania, then a long, dignified slide into the weird corner of the library.
The starting capital is medieval scholasticism: rigorous, internally consistent, tight on oxygen.
Then the world breaks its own curfew. Gutenberg makes information reproducible. Constantinople falls and manuscripts flood west. Ocean routes turn from legend into logistics. Instruments reveal patterns nobody’s doctrine had budgeted for. A few centuries’ worth of “impossible” lands in the span of a couple of lifetimes.
Under that kind of volatility, learned magic becomes a sensible move. Ficino translates the Corpus Hermeticum and treats it as serious antiquity, not as decorative mystique. That choice tracks: the old system promised a tidy cosmos; the cosmos arrived messy. If continents and comets don’t obey the textbooks, correspondences start to look like a live hypothesis rather than a medieval hangover. More degrees of freedom, more shots on goal.
Print culture amplifies the effect. Almanacs sell like tourist maps to a future that hasn’t happened yet. Astrology and astronomy share a bed (and an instrument budget). Alchemy sits at the dinner table with metallurgy and medicine because nobody knows yet which conversational partner is actually listening. The cost of being weird drops to historic lows in the right circles (and the benefit of being slightly odd but very right surges dramatically - in this environment, more bets make sense). A court astrologer can be wrong about a comet and still get funded; a patrician who commissions a geomantic chart is just diversifying his epistemic portfolio.
(Side note: the Medici funded occult startups. Patronage!)
The mechanism
The pattern is simple and robust: frontier moments relax the prior on “reasonable.”
When the world delivers enough genuine surprises, the spell of canon breaks. Authorities start looking less like referees and more like lucky gamblers. The social penalty for heterodoxy drops because criticism becomes less reliable when the ground is shifting, and exploration itself turns into status currency. In that window, “hidden knowledge” is the whole game.
Occult frameworks promise leverage: secret causes, predictive signatures, techniques for health, wealth, timing, influence. They’re startup pitches for reality, and the VCs are bored nobles with more gold than certainty.
There’s also a more mechanical explanation that doesn’t require any sneering.
Frontiers create a hardware overhang. Tools work before the theory is ready. Culture then reaches for placeholder explanations that can domesticate power into something narratable. “Magic” is often just the name we give to causality we can use but haven’t formalized yet.
(When you can predict tides without understanding gravity, you are already halfway to a religion.)
But selection pressure is patient. As instruments sharpen and institutions professionalize, demarcation work begins. What can be measured, replicated, and scaled gets pulled into the new discipline called Science. What can’t gets shoved into Art, Religion, or Subculture. Astrology doesn’t die. It just stops getting invited to faculty dinners. The bell curve peaks and falls (ukemi, if you will - somehow super important in Judo but not even a thing in actual wrestling, someone please explain).
The second act
This is where the historical parallel becomes uncomfortably useful.
We’re entering our own frontier moment. AI, biotech, materials science, weird physics. The world is spitting out capabilities faster than our explanations can metabolize them.
You can feel the same three forces reappearing.
Authorities are wrong more visibly. The people who told you large language models were a dead end are now telling you they’ll definitely be safe or definitely be dangerous, depending.
The cost of being weird is dropping. Patronage is decentralized. You can be a rationalist, an effective altruist, a consciousness hobbyist, or just a guy with a Substack and a suspiciously confident ontology, and if you’re interesting enough you get funded, retweeted, invited to conferences (CONFERENCES! Fuck. Let me live a life of never attending a conference).
The boundary between “serious inquiry” and “nonsense” is dissolving in places that used to enforce it. Is longtermism a research program or a belief system? Is prompt engineering a skill or a ritual? Are we doing alignment theory or writing apocalyptica with math symbols?
Some of this is healthy ferment. Frontier fields need high-variance speculation as raw material. But some of it is the old occult impulse returning in modern dress: a search for hidden correspondences in neural nets, for predictive grammars of culture, for leverage in a world that feels overdetermined but not yet understood.
(And yes, people are absolutely casting sigils to influence model outputs. I’ve seen the Discords. Also, nothing wrong in this. The system is working. It would be silly to dismiss new ideas we know nothing about without giving them a shot. Anything that’s not breaking physics is fair game.)
The uncomfortable part
The Renaissance is a reminder that this phase doesn’t last forever.
Eventually the frontier closes. Methods crystallize. Some of the weird gets absorbed and becomes ordinary engineering. Some of the weird gets exiled and becomes a meme, a sect, or a footnote.
“Natural magic” becomes experimental method.
Hermeticism becomes intellectual history.
Chemistry divorces alchemy.
Astronomy files a restraining order against astrology.
A “new occultism” is already forming. Later we’ll sort it the usual way: some parts harden into astronomy, and the rest stays astrology.
The esoteric error is assuming the window stays open.
The scientific error is assuming it was never open at all.
The clever move is to enjoy the borderlands while they last, to treat the weird as a portfolio allocation rather than a creed, and to remember that being wrong in interesting ways is often how you end up describing something that’s actually there.