At the end of May The Wild Hunt Blog included an interesting post on the large number of “occult-tinged” television programs that were the focus of an article in The New York Times. Wildhunt discusses some of these programs:

Among the new supernaturally themed shows premiering is “Moonlight” a vampire-themed romantic detective series on CBS, “Eli Stone” concerning a lawyer who has visions, “Pushing Daisies” about a man who has the power to bring people back from the dead (both of those shows are on ABC), and Fox’s “New Amsterdam” about a immortal homicide detective. These shows (and several more fantasy/supernatural-themed programs) are, according to the article, much due to the success of the super-hero drama “Heroes”

I find this development interesting on a number of levels, including the increasing influence of alternative spiritualities in popular culture in general. This has been described by one scholar Christopher Partridge, as representing the existence of a popular “occulture,” which as he describes it “includes those often hidden, rejected, and oppositional beliefs and practices associated with esotericism, theosophy, mysticism, New Age, Paganism, and a range of other subcultural beliefs and practices.” This “reservoir of ideas, beliefs, practices and symbols” may be understood as having been part of a cultural underground in the past, but it has now moved to the surface of cultural discourse, so much so that the ideas are now part of the mainstream and surface as elements within television programs as well as fantasy literature, music, films, and video games. Further discussion of this may be found in Partridge’s The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture, Vol. 1 (London & New York, T & T Clark, 2004).