Quote:
Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2
Y'know, George Gurdjieff was allegedly dead by 1949, but his alleged mystic powers should have been sufficient to survive death. If not, his followers of the Fourth Way would be running around with possible mystic abilities. |
To all appearances, the years 1901-1979 in the setting did not differ in
any way from real Earth history.
Anyone claiming supernatural powers, contact with ultraterrestial beings or other paranormal phenomena occurred during that period seems to be either lying or deluded. There is zero evidence for even the most subtle occult influences in that period and, for that matter, only the most credulous occult scholars can find much evidence of truly significant preternatural phenomena between 1890-1985.
Of course, establishing conclusive evidence of events that may or may not have occurred more than a century ago is extremely difficult, especially as reliable data on the paranormal is problematic even in the modern age. Most honest historians who are aware of the occult in the modern day accept that it is possible to rule out magical explanations for many claimed paranormal occurences in the 20th century and that there is no reason to believe magic existed in the same sense it does now for much of that period, but nailing down a firm date on which no magic functioned any longer and a firm date for when the first accspted supernatural phenomena in the modern era occurred, that remains controversial, as standards of proof differ widely.
As a result, individual occult-aware historians may hold views that range from no historical evidence of the supernatural being conclusive and the possibility that what many people call magic simply never existing until the first subtle effects started to be noticed by a select few in the 1980s, to a view of the past having been falsified to erase a history where ultraterrestial beings and the magic they shared with humanity having been intimately involved in humanity's ancient past, but the connections with the home worlds of these ultraterrestials and the influence of their magic, having waned slowly over all of recorded history, until some point at or after the Industrial Revolution, magic had faded away entirely.
In any case, if any modern group of occultists has a history dating back longer than the 1980s or more likely the 1990s, whatever they may have believed, claimed or thought they were doing, they were not practising magic or any supernatural abilities before then.
Of course, this doesn't prevent a fringe group of frauds or delusional people, or alternatively enthusiasts of occult and esoteric, but at the time utterly meaningless and useless, studies, from discovering real magic at some point after 1980 and starting to study it.
Just that unless their magical rituals, chants and symbols dated back well before the end of the 19th century, they had very little chance of interacting with the supernatural in any way, even after magic had theoretically started working, as anything 'magical' developed in the 20th century, without antedecents in some kind of older tradition that had actually worked at some point, basically had the same chance of producing a functioning ritual as monkeys hitting typewriters had of recreating King Lear's tempest scene.