The book’s success inspired Wilson’s publishers to commission another, Mysteries: an investigation into the occult, the paranormal and the supernatural, an equally bulky tome, which appeared in 1978, and then a third, ten years later, Beyond the Occult, which summed up his twenty years of research into the subject. The three books amount to a monumental 1,600 pages and also spawned many ephemeral popular illustrated spin-offs – too numerous to mention here individually – but listed entirely in my guide to his ‘Occult Trilogy’ published by Axis Mundi in 2013.
According to Wilson, the reviews ‘had a serious and respectful tone that I hadn’t heard since The Outsider’ and in his 2003 Introduction to the Watkins reprint, he wrote:
But for me, The Occult did a great deal more than make me ‘respectable’, it also served as a kind of awakening. Before 1970, I had been inclined to dismiss ‘the occult’ as superstitious nonsense. Writing The Occult made me aware that the paranormal is as real as quantum physics (and, in fact, has a great deal in common with it), and that anyone who refuses to take it into account is simply shutting his eyes to half the universe.
