I just wanted to save this conversation for posterity, because it is a good one. I’ve gotten a few other letters like this before, from people seeking information, advice or inspiration on becoming some sort of occult investigator of their own. At some point, I ought to turn this into a more direct and fully-fledged article on the subject.

Anyway, here’s a letter I got, as well as my response to it, which is posted below:

Hello there, Mr. Boucher! I came across your page whilst in the search of information. I’m extremely interested in everything occult and lately I’ve been thinking that I’d like to take it farther and actually start getting out and investigating. My problem is, since I’m just starting out on this I’m still learning a great deal, and I was wondering whether or not you had some useful tips or or helping advice you’d be willing to impart my way. Maybe you could refer some pertinant books that I should read, or anything you think may be helpful. As I’ve found out there aren’t a real abundance of Occult Investigators (more than people would think, but still not enough to seem numerous when compared to other things) and even the ones I have found, none have been willing to help out a newcomer, even if I’m only asking for a few tips and help on starting out. Well, anyways, I guess I’ve blathered enough. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your ime. ^_^

hey jack. i’m happy to hear from you. i like your name, “Jack Fox.” It already sounds like some kind of comic book investigator. It’s great. Actually, it’s funny, cause comic books and movies and stuff like that is really where I took my inspiration from initially for the whole occult investigator thing. Characters like John Constantine of Vertigo Comics. Even to some extent Batman, or Indiana Jones. A bunch of others. I don’t know if that sounds silly to anybody else, but it makes sense to me. Especially because I couldn’t find any real life occult investigators who I thought were approaching this field in the way that I wanted to approach it. Also, to me, the important thing in this “field” (if you can call it that), is stories, and how people interact with them. Whether that means religion, psychology, folklore, media, memory, dreams, experience, all of that stuff. So it made sense to me personally to use actual figures in stories as role models, since I wanted to move my thinking further in that direction. Maybe you could think of it as tapping into some kind of archetypal role, or something like that.

really, the key to all this stuff is following what you love. whatever makes sense to you, chase after that and investigate it fully from all angles. adapt and adopt whatever seems useful from wherever you can find it. im not one to believe that there is any one path which is more appropriate, or any book or source which can kind you as well as your imagination and intuition can. developing intimacy and trust with those two wells will take you farther than anything else.

my own personal interest started out when i was younger, in comparative mythology and religion. from there, it has grown to encompass a lot of things like archetypal psychology and various energetic studies. all of these things, to me, seem really useful as a starting point. although maybe other things would serve you better. but, if i were to recommend one author who stands out in the above fields, it would be marie-louise von franz, who was a student of carl jung’s. shes my favorite, and has a really interesting and keen insight into how the world of dreams and stories works.

other than that, ive found it really useful to keep my online journal and website of all the different things i come across. its useful on many levels, from cataloguing things for later retrieval, to writing as a tool to develop my understanding, and also through interacting with people like you who find my work online. i’d love to see you start some sort of online journal as well, if this is something that interests you. i’d definitely read it myself.

anyway, i hope i’ve been of some help, and would love to hear back from you. one final note, let me leave you with a great quote from an interview with comics creator alan moore. its not available online, and i had transcribed this myself from a paper source a while back (or else I would just send you the link to the full article).

“Each religion is a language, and magic is linguistics. In the sense that, if you are a linguist, there’s no such thing as a ‘false language.’ It’s not like “oh yeah, Frenc is real, but Russian is not a real language.’ If you’re a magician, you have to accept ALL of those religions as being ‘real’. They’re all true languages! So, you get a different array of concepts, a different worldview in each of the religions. To some degree, I take the quantum position that ALL of them are right in a sense. In order to see truth, you have to consider a lot of different possible positions and hold them all to be true in some mysterious way. Magic, in this sense, is moving between those different positions, studying them, seeing what information there is to be gleaned from each of them, seeing how they connect up. … And you follow these chains of ideas. You do that long enough, you start a different set of synaptic connections in your brain, different pathways. And you start to see things in a different way. You start to put things together differently.”