Mitch Horowitz

Mitch Horowitz (born November 23, 1965) is an American author, publisher, speaker, podcaster, and television host specializing in occult and esoteric themes. A frequent writer and speaker on religion and metaphysics in print and on television, radio, and online, Horowitz's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and CNN.com, and he has appeared on NPR, CBS News, NBC News, and Vice News.

In 2024, Horowitz began hosting the UFO-themed Discovery/HBO Max TV series, Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction, and joined Elijah Wood's podcast network, SpectreVision Radio, where he hosts a historical podcast, Extraordinary Evidence: ESP Is Real, which explores the background and data of extrasensory perception (ESP) research. Horowitz plays himself as a historian and commentator in V/H/S/Beyond, the seventh entry in the horror anthology series on Shudder, which a reviewer for RogerEbert.com described as "one of the better V/H/S anthologies of late;" the film was nominated for Best Movie Made for Television at the 2025 Critics Choice Awards. He appears in the 2025 MGM+ docuseries Let the Devil In.

Horowitz is the former editor-in-chief of TarcherPerigee and a former vice-president at Penguin Random House. His best-known works are Occult America (2009), The Miracle Club (2018), and Modern Occultism (2023).

In 2022, author and self-titled "magic experience designer" Ferdinando Buscema writing for Boing Boing noted that "Horowitz is among the most articulate and respected voices in the contemporary occulture scene." In 2025, he published a book of magick, history, and occult spirituality titled Practical Magick. Also in 2025, Horowitz began writing a newsletter for Substack, "Mystery Achievement," focused on occultism in history and practice.

Early life

The son of a legal aid attorney and a medical secretary, Horowitz grew up in Bellerose, Queens, before moving to New Hyde Park, New York. He was raised in a traditional Jewish household and had an Orthodox bar mitzvah. He developed an interest in the occult through books of folklore at his local public library, book-club catalogs at elementary school, and astrological content, such as newspaper horoscopes, whose references he historically researched. Horowitz received a bachelor of arts in English literature from Stony Brook University, where he was editor-in-chief of the school's student newspaper, The Statesman. In 1987, he won the Martin Buskin Award for Outstanding Campus Journalism. Before entering publishing, he worked as a police reporter.

He identifies as a "believing historian" and has participated in many of the spiritual movements he writes on, such as Theosophy, New Thought, Transcendental Meditation, and the Gurdjieff Work.

In the early nineties, Horowitz served as youth-section treasurer of the Democratic Socialists of America and on the editorial committee of its magazine, Democratic Left, an experience he described as "building an organization in its darkest days in hopes of future utility."

Writing and lectures

Horowitz is the author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, which received the 2010 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and was noted for exploring the impact of occult and esoteric philosophies on mainstream politics and culture; the Washington Post stated that "Horowitz teases out fascinating stories of the 'dreamers and planners who flourished along the Psychic Highway'... In showing how the paths of these figures occasionally intersected with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Horowitz argues that the influence of the occult extends beyond the séance room and into the mainstream of American thought."

He has also brought attention to the use that notable historical figures have made of occult and esoteric thinking, citing not only Frederick Douglass and hoodoo, but Mahatma Gandhi and Theosophy, Charles Lindbergh and Spiritualism, Theodore Dreiser and paranormalism, and Upton Sinclair and telepathy. He has also noted that Rosicrucianism and the Shakers have contributed to America's history of religious experimentation.

Horowitz notes the impact of Freemasonry on conceptions of religious liberty in the American colonies and classifies the Bavarian Illuminati as "radical Jeffersonians" focused on initiatory esotericism and liberal reform.

Horowitz believes that occultism is a uniquely Western tradition, and that the Renaissance-era rediscovery and adaptation of pre-Abrahamic belief systems inaugurated a new era for those beliefs, thereby making occultism, as integrated into modern society, an ancient revivalist movement.

He has sought to distinguish the complexity of New Thought works, as exemplified by Neville Goddard and Wallace Wattles, from the well-known but somewhat more simplified understandings of the law of attraction, as popularized most notably by Rhonda Byrne's 2006 book The Secret, which Horowitz notes was inspired by Wattles' famous 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich. Furthermore, Horowitz has contextualized New Age figures and books, including Goddard, Edgar Cayce, and The Kybalion, as contemporary expressions of Gnostic and Hermetic themes.

He has brought attention to the work of Australian psychiatrist Ainslie Meares, who conducted studies that demonstrated the therapeutic efficacy of "intensive meditation" on cancer patients both who were receiving chemotherapy and who were not.

His 2023 book Modern Occultism was noted for its historical comprehensiveness, surveying occult-themed philosophies from late-antiquity to the present.

Horowitz has also written on alternative spirituality for Politico, Salon, Big Think, U.S. News & World Report, Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies, Parabola, Esopus, Fortean Times, and the Religion News Service.