Is the Occult Evil?

Or, at least, not very nice?

Crowley: The Great Beast?

When I tell people that I’m a historian of the occult — and that I’m personally a seeker into occult and esoteric questions — I receive strange looks. “I think of the occult as evil,” a home contractor, eyeing my bookshelf, once told me. In one of my favorite New Age shops in Salem, Massachusetts, I once overheard a mom dissuading her daughter from buying a pentagram necklace on…