Occulture

UFO religions drink deeply from the waters of occulture, while, at the same time, seeking to reconcile their ideas with a contemporary secular and scientific worldview.

With the term occulture I refer to a diverse milieu of spirituality that formed around esoteric discourses, as character­ized by Nina Kokkinen in her disserta­tion about occulture and modern spiritual­ity in turn­ of­ the­ century Finnish art, and its three notable artists Hugo Simberg (1873–1917), Akseli Gallen­-Kallela and Pekka Halonen (1865–1933) (Kokkinen 2019: 44).

Conspirituality, in fact, helps describe some of the dynamics and one of the “contexts” in which Italian Pagan conspiracy-believing is embedded—one that, at a more general level, is characterized by what Christopher Partridge (e.g., 2004; 2005; 2014) defined as occulture.