Occult or Not?

We Are Not Supposed to Detect the Antichrist by Ressemblance to Nicolae Jetty Carpathia · Occult or Not?

Here is a list I found on FB:

Here are some objections to it, which I found from other commenters:

Pokemon was literally blessed by John Paul II and the Catholic Church. This page is devoted to sowing division. Many of the things on this list deserve to be there but when you start adding stuff without merit you sully the legitimacy of the entire list!

Using Do-Terra oils is being part of an occult?

is this an official list from the Catholic Church? why reflexology, acupuncture, acupressure, shiatsu massage are included?

and also naturopathy? I don't understand.

To Pokemon, I'd agree that "John Paul II" was not pope, so his blessing would be immaterial, but also I would add that on this one he reasoned correctly. If you don't use it as a very oblique manual for obtaining a familiar spirit (which would certainly be occult), it's a game, a play, and as such innocent. Playing Prospero or Caliban in The Tempest or Gandalf, arguably even Ged, doesn't make you an occultist. The same would apply to Pokemon. Now, I said some may be using it as an oblique instruction in witchcraft, like how to "train" familiar spirits, but that is not as far as we know the original purpose, and it is certainly not the normal use of Pokemon.

As to Young Living and Do-Terra oils, I don't know what this is even supposed to mean. Oh, wait, these are brand marks for essential oils.

No, essential oils are not occultism. The reason that dermatologists advice against tea tree oil for treating scabies is not that they are totally ineffective, but the side effect of scourching, potentially, the skin itself. That's also the reason why apothecaries in France have been advising to use it only diluted with a neutral oil or with a neutral skin cream. These counter the effect of drying out the skin.

Whoever wrote this list was influenced by some Orthodox who were influenced by the KGB which is promoting scientism and along with that the spurious idea that the Middle Ages had no useful medicine. Naturopathy and essential oils is precisely what the Middle Ages actually had, with the full blessing of the Catholic Church. Pretending it doesn't work is part of a smear campaign against the Middle Ages. I have seen Marxists partaking of this smear campaign elsewhere, without posing as Traditional Catholics. There was a guy who pretended Medieval Cities were so dirty it is certain they had cholera. Dirt, as it happens, is a conveyor of bacteria and of viruses, but not an originator of it. Since the cholera bacterium was indigenous to the East Indies up to 1817 when a cholera epidemic from Bombay spread into European parts of Turkey and of Russia, it is impossible that cholera was present in the European Middle Ages, apart from the idea that the dirty streets is also a spurious view of the times. Dung heaps in the open was a thing, but not along every street and in every street corner. They were composts for farmers to come and collect as fertiliser. The most dangerous part of the cess pools was not contamination, but poison gas and explosions. The Medieval streets were typically clean, though muddy when the weather was raining, the Medieval theories of medicine may not have been accurate explanations, but were probably very good standins for endocrinology, and moderately good standins for bacteriology, the Medieval apothecary was not superstition but drugs, usually herbal ones, that actually worked. Usually.

And therefore this view of naturopathy and essential oils is a sin of calumny against the Middle Ages and indirectly against the Catholic Church.

Now, Medieval medicine was inherited from ancient Greco-Roman medicine, of which St. Luke was a practitioner. This medicine was developed by pagans and partly associated with pagan and superstitious practises, like the temples of Asklepios. That doesn't make the medicine illicit. The exact same thing can therefore be said about Ayurvedic or Ancient Chinese medicine, to which latter reflexology and acupuncture belong.

I take a look at other items.

Hypnosis

Thanks to the Sedevacantist blogger Introibo, I know that the Holy Office actually looked at it in the 19th C. If natural effects are sought, like modifying a behaviour or like granting anaesthesia during pain or like granting calm during stress, it is perfectly licit. But if one pretends to achieve supernatural things (like prophecy) by it, it is as certainly illicit and condemned. See the quote of the general instruction, you need to scroll down some, from July 30, 1859, on his post Mesmerized. Sorry, actually it was the earlier response sent by it under Pius IX to the archbishop of Québec, July 28, 1847.

Runes

Casting lots with runes to get a forecast is as superstitious as casting lots with Hebrew letters. Writing a Hail Mary in runes is as Catholic as writing a Hail Mary in Latin or Greek letters. And yes, one rune stone from Sweden contains our oldest Hail Mary. Other rune stones say "so and so went east and died, pray for his soul" and obviously praying for someone deceased during a pilgrimage is a perfectly pious thing to do. Whether the injunction comes in runes or in Latin letters.

Numerology

Two things are referred to by the name. They are very different.

Numerology as Enneagrams

Highly probably superstitious. At least if you find out your enneagram number by some kind of gematria of your name and then reduced sums (like 9 from 18) from that and so on, or similar for birthday date. And I recall when that was in the vogue for enneagrams. If you simply take a personality test, enneagrams are neither more nor less superstitious than personality tests used to evaluate mental disorders. Actually rather less, since many of those diagnoses are totally modern superstitions.

Numerology as Gematria

Again, I distinguish.

Gematria as a forecast of one's life

Probably illicit, but not condemned in the Old Testament and also not condemned by the Church or until recently.

Gematria in order to see some big things

certainly licit. Apocalypse 13:18 tells us to use it, and if some Orthobro says "no, the Church Fathers say it is isopsephism in the Greek alphabet" the meaning of gematria and the meaning of isopsephism is the same. The Church Fathers who said it was in Greek for Apoc. 13:18 were actually not saying this was a direct tradition from St. John (unlike the number value being 666!), they said "Hebrew is too little known, Latin has no number values for most letters, so only Greek remains" ... the thing is, by now Greek gematria is if possible even less known than Hebrew letters with number values (though not to me, I studied Greek, for Hebrew I have to look up letter by letter, whether that shape is more a tau or a teth), and Latin alphabet gematria can now be used for all letters in a name, because of ASCII. The number 318 (Genesis 14:14, victory of Abraham) has also been analysed gematrically, both as T IHC = Tau Iota Hta Cigma (Tau = stauros IHCOY, Cross of Jesus), and as Eliezer (an OT type of the Pope). That was a back and forth between a Jew and Barnabas, if he be the author of the Epistle of Barnabas.

Now, I recall ending a friendship with an Orthodox priest over a certain law in Russia, which he thought great. It banned making publicity for abortion. It also banned making publicity for herbal medicine. He defended this by saying it banned making publicity for witchcraft. Abortion is worse than just witchcraft, most of it, and herbal medicines aren't witchcraft, and calling them that is a blasphemy against St. Luke who obviously did not have the pharmacopy of Paracelsus or of Pfizer. It's also a blasphemy against St. Paul, who had St. Luke as physician.

This list probably contains way more things that shouldn't be banned as occultism because they aren't occultism and only seem like occultism to incompetent people. But I think these items are enough. This is not a substitute or even a reliable complement to Church teaching, like the decree of the Holy Office to the Archbishop of Québec in 1847.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Conversion of St. Paul
25.I.2025