The practice of the occult is one of the most serious sins against the First Commandment. What are the deeper roots of this expression of disbelief in God?
Distorted image of God
In Jesus Christ is revealed the full truth of the mystery of God, who is One in a perfect community of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God called each of us into existence and into a community of love with Him. He constantly surrounds us with the great tenderness, strength, and firmness of a loving Father. We exist only because God loves us. The Love of God is the Person of the Holy Spirit, the mutual love of the Father and Son. By the power of this Love the whole world was created and is kept in existence. In creating man in His own image and likeness, the Creator made him apt for love, i.e. for receiving the Holy Spirit and imparting Him to others. Man’s greatest dignity, then, lies in the fact that he can form a personal relationship with God in prayer, join with Him in the sacraments, consent to be freed from his enslavement to sin and have all his wounds, weaknesses, and diseases of the soul healed, so that he may fully respond to the Love which God bestows upon him. In this consists man’s perfect happiness: to be loved and to love with a pure, indestructible Love.
The powers of evil are constantly casting into doubt and deforming this truth about God. In the biblical account of the original sin, Satan, whom Christ calls “a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44), insinuates that God does not really love man since He denies him access to perfect happiness by His command that “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen 2:17). Satan casts doubt on God’s words: “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:4-5). To know good and evil means to achieve divine omnipotence. Adam and Eve believe in Satan and stop believing in God. They believe sin will bring them perfect happiness; they stop believing in what God has told them; namely, that sin will destroy love and lead them to spiritual death and enslavement by the powers of evil. Satan distorts the image of God in order to prompt Adam to commit the first sin, to reject his faith in what God has revealed to him. So Satan seeks to distort the image of God in all men’s hearts and minds that we may stop believing and trusting in God and, consequently, cease to pray, dismiss the sacraments, reject the Ten Commandments, and deny the moral norms only so as to be able to decide for ourselves what is good and what is evil.
Those who have a false image of God find themselves in rebellion against Him. They flee from Him and end up denying His very existence. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god
Consequently, there are no gods.” Rebellion against God becomes the cause of man’s greatest misfortune and suffering. Man continues to yearn for happiness, which is an unconscious desire for God, but he seeks this happiness at a sensory level, in various ideologies, sects, pagan religions, or the occult.
The snare of Eastern religions
The naturalistic religions of the East have no place for a personal God whom we can encounter, love, and engage in a personal relationship. God, they hold, is creation itself, an impersonal cosmic energy with which man can merge and shuffle off his essential being. According to these religions, all of nature is God. Indeed, man has only to realize that he is God, i.e. believe the substance of Satan’s first temptation (Gen 3:4-5). Thus, man strives to achieve happiness by his own efforts (yogic exercises and other meditational techniques) by merging his personal “I” with the cosmos—with that great, impersonal “totality.” All the religions of the East are merely human attempts at seeking after God. But ever since He came into the world, Jesus Christ has made all such attempts unnecessary, for God stands fully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.
Love is possible only between freely acting persons. The God of Christianity is a personal God who desires to enter into a relationship of love with human beings. That is why He created us in His own image and likeness, endowed us with reason, a free will, and an aptitude for love. In this consists the greatness of our calling. God does not want us to cast off our essential being, since by ceasing to be personal subjects we would be rejecting our capacity to love. Rather, God wants us to choose Him in complete freedom and accept His love, which draws us into the life of the Triune God. God reveals that He loves each and every one of us. He desires that we reciprocate His love. Eastern religions have no interest in our personal development and growth as loving subjects. Instead, they show us how to discover our nature, which they identify with God—a path that can lead to supreme heights of egotism. Only Jesus Christ, the God-Man, can lead us out of the darkness of sin and death. Only He can be for us “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6). For this reason God became a real man, died, and rose again so as to deliver us from slavery to sin and death and thus give us a part in His divinity, i.e. partake in the life of the Triune God. Hence He enables us, through prayer and the sacraments, to breathe His love—to receive His life, the gift of the Holy Spirit. Then, by the power of God, man’s life is raised to supernatural heights. While remaining a naturally created personal subject, he becomes divinized, fully united with God in love.
Jesus tells us: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5). We discover the meaning of life only when we believe in Christ and receive from Him the gift of divine life and breathe the love of the Father and Son, which is to say, the Holy Spirit. God tells us: “He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned” (Mk 16:16). Those who willfully deny that Christ is God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who became true man in order to save us, are, according to Scripture, “antichrists.” “Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son” (1 Jn 2:22).
Jesus Christ is our One Savior. “And there is salvation in no one else—adds Saint Peter—for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
If we will only accept Him and allow Him, through constant prayer and the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist, to transform us with His love, we can even now partake of His life and taste the joy of the resurrection and triumph over Satan, sin, and death.
Occultism
The occult is the religion of Satan. Its practice in any form is one of the gravest of sins, since it is a rejection of the First Commandment. To the domain of the occult belong such activities as: bioenergetic therapy, radiesthesia, magical incantation, spiritualism, using hypnosis and inducing trances for diagnostic or healing purposes, quackery, fortune-telling, astrology, clairvoyance, palmistry, tarotology or other methods of divining the future, Oriental martial arts, yoga, etc., etc.
Religious ignorance, a weak faith, absence of prayer and the sacraments—all these things make us susceptible to superstitions and occult practices. Those who break the bonds of faith and reject God’s love believe in their own ability to achieve happiness through health, wealth, pleasures, and power. In their bid to achieve these goals they resort to occult practices with their mysterious, immaterial powers. To realize their plans and desires they turn to psychics, clairvoyants, astrologists, touch healers, sorcerers, yoga masters, and similar practitioners of meditation techniques. With the aid of various amulets, talismans, gestures, formulas, and rituals they seek to acquire extraordinary powers that will protect them against illness or failure, enable them to control the world around them, and satisfy their selfish desires. By resorting to the occult, they turn away from the one true God, who is perfect happiness, and open themselves up to mysterious demonic forces in the false conviction that these will bring them their desired happiness. The consequence of such an attitude is enslavement to the powers of evil—even to the point of demonic possession.
There are instances of people contracting chronic headaches, suffering anxiety states, depressions, insomnia, and spiritual disorders from a single encounter with a touch healer, psychic, or clairvoyant.
The only effective way of being healed, of freeing ourselves from the destructive influences of Satan, is to undergo the therapy that Jesus Christ offers us. First of all, we need to make an honest confession and pray earnestly to Jesus that He may break the bonds binding us to the evil spirits. We need to attend Holy Mass as often as possible, even daily, receive the Eucharist, offer up to Jesus all our spiritual and physical sufferings, entrust ourselves to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray the rosary and chaplet of Divine Mercy, and read Holy Scripture.
To free ourselves from enslavement to the powers of evil and heal our spiritual wounds we need time. We need to arm ourselves with the virtue of patience and bear our suffering courageously. Then the suffering becomes a blessing for us, a path to maturing in love, walked with boundless trust in Jesus. In union with Jesus, we cannot fail to triumph.
As Saint Edith Stein observed: “All we can and should do is open ourselves up to grace, utterly renounce our own will and submit to the will of God, entrusting into His hands our soul that He may receive it and shape it as He desires. Above all, this requires a self-emptying and resignation on our part.”
Those who seek deliverance from the influence of demonic powers and wish to break with occult activity are encouraged to say the following prayer:
“Lord Jesus Christ, through the intercession of Your Immaculate Mother Mary, I consecrate myself entirely to You: body and soul, all the I am and all that I have. You alone, Jesus, are the Lord of my life. With all my heart I regret engaging in occult activity (specify the activity; e.g. spiritualist séances, pendulums, tarot cards, horoscopes, fortunetelling, clairvoyance, palm reading, yoga, touch healing, etc.) You, Lord, are my one God, the one love and one hope of my life. I renounce all the occult practices by which I deliberately placed myself under Satan’s control.” Then say: “I renounce you, Satan, and command you in the name of Jesus Christ to cease your activity in my life. Amen.”
There is no reincarnation
Scripture tells that we live on earth but once: “Do not forget, there is no coming back” (Sir 38:21); “it is appointed for men to die once, and after this the judgment” (Heb 9:27). Our time on earth is unique and unrepeatable; we die only once. God tells us this Himself. The claim that there is reincarnation is a ploy of the Evil One, who wants us to trivialize the consequences of our sins and stop believing in the divinely revealed truth about eternal death and the unrepeatability of life on earth. What Jesus Christ teaches through His Church is perfectly clear: “When the ‘single course of our earthly life’ is completed’ (Lumen gentium, 48), we shall not return to other earthly lives: ‘It is appointed for men to die once’ (Heb 9:27). There is no ‘reincarnation’ after death” (The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1013).
Those who insist on believing in reincarnation attest not only to their great religious ignorance, but also to their betrayal and rejection of Christ’s teaching, since they chase after “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ” (Col 2:8).