Not quite as dense as Sex and Rockets (and about even with Lachman's Crowley biography, in terms of readability), this book nevertheless demonstrates both a breadth and depth of scholarship on occult history that's remarkable. It's not a casual read but one that might serve as a gateway to research into other works -- a starting point for looking up the details of individual movements that might catch your eye, connecting them together on a macro scale.

I always find Lachman's books to be a slog to read, simply because their prose is workmanlike rather than polished, but he always pulls his weight in terms of sheer subject-matter knowledge. In this case, he draws out a complex genealogy of occult-informed and occult-adjacent political thought -- a chain of influence from the gnostics to the rosicrucians to Evola to Left Behind -- and illuminates the various ways certain ideas twisted over time and the infighting between occult-influenced individuals and groups over the political significance of esoteric ideas.

Just as the personal is political, the metaphysical and religious is personal: one's worldview is a continuous landscape, and categories of convenience like "politics" and "religion" rarely adequately fit, only explaining things vaguely and only for large group whose differences can be ignored for polling purposes. Occult politics is about people who don't easily fit into these categories and who often themselves work to redefine how the general population looks at the world.