The Spiritual Competition Between Hermits and Alchemists: The Key To Being A Good Occultist is Clutter

Minimalists versus maximalists on the road to God

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Certain spiritual traditions seem to attract clutter — or at the very least to attract the kind of person who accumulates a lot of clutter. Without relying too heavily on stereotypes, in my own experience the type of person who was most interested in anything occult, from horoscopes to tarot to Rosicrucianism, could be counted on to drive the kind of car where things fell out onto the ground whenever you opened the passenger-side door. This included trash, of course, but the car was not merely full of trash, and for the most part the car was more cluttered than dirty.

My own first encounter with such a person came in junior high, when Meghan Hood lent me her copy of L.J. Smith’s The Forbidden Game and let me light fireballs on her dresser after school by spraying Bath & Body Works Cucumber Melon mist over a lighter. It was such a perfect afternoon that I was never allowed to go over to her house again. She always had so much stuff with her: in her locker, in her backpack, in her pockets, ready to be retrieved at a moment’s notice to answer whatever needs you could never have anticipated yourself. She had wisdoms I’d never even dreamed of, and the most valuable items from the Woodfield Mall, assembled and collated and treated with care over a thirteen-year lifetime that left me amazed.

This style of approach is a useful and necessary counterbalance to asceticism, I think. One can certainly approach the divine by getting rid of attachments, but three lefts make a right, don’t they? I’m not arguing in favor of hoarding, precisely, but there’s some spiritual value to be found in an attachment to clutter. Keeping an open mind, reserving the right to find value in something later, declining to differentiate between objects, avoiding hierarchy, refusing optimization — surely this approach is bound to turn over a few insights from time to time.