COLIN WILSON AND THE OCCULT A FOREWORD BY COLIN STANLEY
When his now classic study The Occult was published in 1971, some critics, fans and scholars of Colin Wilson’s previous non-fiction – particularly the ‘Outsider Cycle’ in which he had created his ‘new existentialism’ and established himself as a philosopher of some note – were surprised, others downright horrified. It had seemed that after the terrible mauling he had received from the critics and the tabloid press, in the late 1950s, his reputation was recovering somewhat and his career taking an upturn. Many thought this leap into the rather contentious unknown was a retrograde step: both mystifying and likely to be a disaster. Wilson, they felt, was merely jumping onto the occult bandwagon in order to make money.
