From ‘machine-world’ to ‘God-world’ - world pictures and world views 1

Abstract

This article mainly consists of an analysis of the successive historical expansions of the mechanistic and the organistic world pictures into world views. In conclusion the presently popular form of the organistic world view, New Age occultism, is compared with the 'traditional' African world view. In this way the author attempts to realise three different aims: firstly to show how world pictures, developed within specific disciplines, are transformed into world views by expansionary application in other disciplines and /or cultural areas; secondly that occultism is regaining intellectual respectability by presenting itself as part of the ‘new’ organistic, scientific view of the world; and thirdly that there are strong similarities between the new Western occultism and the traditional African world view (which opens up possibilities of synthesis between these two).