ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes esoteric culture, the cultic milieu, and the occult tarot sociologically. It focuses on a contemporary esoteric scene in the form of a cultic milieu and community of practitioners and groups in a large southwestern American urban center. The chapter discusses the notion of esoteric culture and its implications for contemporary American culture. It considers some of the implications of esoteric culture for the future of believers in the occult, their practices, organizations, and collective existence, as well as the larger exoteric culture in which they are located. The members of society reproduce and reconstruct culture socially, even though they do so in existentially meaningful and creative ways through interaction with one another. The esoteric community in the Valley was described, analyzed, and interpreted from the perspective of sociology of culture and knowledge. Modernization is the historical process whereby the exoteric culture of Western societies was created and established its dominance.
