Morris, David, The Masks of Lucifer: Technology and the Occult in Twentieth-Century Popular Literature

'''Morris, David. The Masks of Lucifer: Technology and the Occult in Twentieth-Century Popular Literature'''. London: B. T. Batsford, 1992.

An examination of "techno-occult literature," explicitly avoiding S.F., connecting well such disparate phenomena as "theosophy, ancient [extra-]terrestrialism, flying saucers, nuclear technology, and postwar anxiety." Stresses "flying saucer and related literature as a reflection of popular culture and as a source of revitalization for various forms of occult thought." Includes discussions of Immanuel Velikovsky's catastrophe theories in the 1950s, and Erich von Daniken's God-as-astronaut ideas in the 1960s and '70s. For Morris, the enthusiastic reception of von Daniken's works "echoes the optimism and celebration of technology that accompanied the NASA space flights and satellite launches of the 1960s." Deals usefully with the audience for the techno-occult, mostly what Vance Packard has called the "'limited success class'—a class at the top of the blue collar and the bottom of the white collar world. Morris asserts that the appeal of occultism for this class is its ability to reassert authority and hierarchy in updated modes," and other reactionary functions; the origin of this class is associated with the rise of a highly "bureaucratized, techno-literate military in World War II." Rev. Carmen Hendershott, Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 203-05, source for this citation, and quoted.