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A mystical renaissance is evident everywhere, from television to department stores. This year three TV series will deal with witches and ghosts. The movie Rosemary's Baby is both demonological and boxoffice. Miniskirted suburban matrons cast the I Ching or shuffle tarot cards before setting dates for dinner parties. Hippies, with their drug-sensitized yen for magic, are perhaps the prime movers behind the phenomenon. Not only do they sport beads and amulets that have supposed magical powers; they also believe firmly and frighteningly in witchcraft. Some of the hippie mysticism is a calculated put-on—as when Abbie Hoffman and his crew attempted to levitate the Pentagon last October—but much of the new concern with the arcane is a genuine attempt to find enrichment for arid lives.
The danger of overindulgence in superstition is that it breeds a kind of shortcut thinking. Already, TV commercials verge on magic: how does a deodorant differ from a love potion? Already, the incantations of New Left and New Right extremists echo the irrational chants of sinister shamans. No one has ever been hurt by tossing salt over his left shoulder; many have felt a vibration of personal peace by crying "Om!" The trouble is that superstitions, like Occam's razor, cut both ways. Before Western man gets any more mystical, perhaps he should distinguish between superstitions that destroy tranquillity and those that enhance it. If he succeeds, the rest of the world will not have to keep its fingers crossed.