A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

Your search term is Occult. Scroll down for the results!

πŸ” Search Within Selection

Occult is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances

Viewing chapter Occult (6 quotes)
The current interest of youth in astrology, clairvoyance and the occult is no coincidence.
β€œPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 72, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 261
Quote #5106
Year: 1969
As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating
world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP.
β€œPlayboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 72, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 261
Quote #5107
Year: 1969
Chapter: Retribalizing
[Someday we may see] οΏ½οΏ½οΏ½a kind of computerized ESP with consciousness as the corporate content of the environment – and eventually, maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience the way dreams do now.
From a lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in NYC in spring of 1965, reported in β€œThe Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, May 15,
Quote #5108
Year: 1965
Chapters: After Language | Computer | Corporate Consciousness | Extending Consciousness | From Tribal to Literate | Predictions | Present [The]
Perhaps trends cannot always be trusted. The trend toward increasing enlightenment by electric media has flipped us back into the world of the occult, that is, the world of horoscopes and hidden forces.
Letter to the Editor the Toronto Star July 24, 1974, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 503
Quote #5109
Year: 1974
Chapters: Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | LOM 4 - Flip, or Reverse into the Opposite | Oft-Cited Quotes
The techniques of '’involvement” that go with the shift from visual to audile-tactile technologies such as the electric circuit, involve a complete Orientalization of the Western world and a turning inward to a world of E.S.P. and horoscopic observation, and the occult.
Letter to John Rowan. December 17, 1969, p 1
Quote #5110
Year: 1969
Extra sensory perception is normal perception. Today electronics are extra sensory, Gallup polls and motivation research are also. Therefore, people get all steamed up about E.S.P. as something for the future. It is already past and present.
β€œElectronics as E.S.P.”, Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, October 1957. Reprinted as Verbi-Voco-Visual, 1967. Unnumbered pages in both versions
Quote #5111
Year: 1957
Chapter: Electric, Electronic

Drawn to McLuhan #14

Illustration progressing from a bare-chested tribal man writing by hand on the left, through a red-threaded ghostly bearded figure overlapping a young man typing at a laptop, to streams of glowing green binary code flowing off to the right.
β€œToday we experience in reverse what preliterate man faced with writing.”
Surreal painterly illustration of anthropomorphic roses with human faces in a garden, expressing anger, grief, and sorrow, one holding a thorned whip, one weeping, one bleeding, and one reading a letter with a quill.
β€œThe private psyche may be an artificial monster or the most precious discovery.”
Four-panel illustration in dark, moody tones showing people being watched through everyday technology: a woman checking a location app, a neighbor peering through blinds, a smart speaker listening in a kitchen, and teens on phones in a school hallway.
β€œThe entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance.”
Comic-style illustration of an older lecturer at a podium addressing a classroom, gesturing toward a student with a raised hand, with a speech bubble of bold text above him and equations on the blackboard behind.
β€œThat question is so stupid that it deserves an answer.”
Split image contrasting ancient petroglyph carvings of a bird, a hand, and a wolf on a stone surface with a glowing circular digital portal containing the same bird, hand, and wolf as emoji, set against a futuristic city skyline at dusk.
β€œPrimitive man always thought that they made the world, that they wound it up and renewed its energies by their rituals. Are we not moving very much back into that state?”
Cartoon of a distraught teenage boy hurling his phone across a living room while shouting about being unfriended, as his startled parents watch from the couch
β€œPerhaps the terrifying thing about the new media for most of us is the inevitable evocation of irrational response.”
Illustrated scene of an older man and a young man facing each other in a diner booth over coffee, while outside the window a uniform crowd of people in pointed dunce caps files past.
β€œIt has taken me a long time to take stupidity and indifference for granted as a universal and irremediable human condition.”
Cartoon illustration of a giant robot in a city street gathering white eggs into a basket, gathered from a dense crowd of people below, each topped with an empty speech bubble.
β€œInformation is the distillate of human chatter.”
Sepia-toned illustration of a man in a leather jacket standing with a raised fist and hand on hip between two towering columns of stacked books lining a cobblestone street.
β€œI am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it.” (in a 1950 letter to Ezra Pound)
Photograph of a young woman in a coffee shop holding up her smartphone, which displays a glowing image of a human brain on its screen, as she studies it intently.
β€œWe have become an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.”
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan