Sources: detective

Fascinating story of a real, early 20th century psychic and his career aiding police and inspiring detective novelists. Nicely balanced and well-told historical story which ends with this pleasing nugget of observation:

“The historian Wouter Hanegraaff has pondered the tortured relationship between esotericism and the knowledge enshrined in academic institutions, and found that the one can’t be narrated without the other. Just as chemistry deliberately distanced itself from alchemy during the Enlightenment, psychology had to make a deliberate effort to rid itself of its occult heritage for the sake of scientific validation. But the resulting « otherness » of Western esotericism could then, over time, make such banished knowledge a magnetic antidote to the emptiness of modern, secular society.”