This is a huge issue. On the one hand, yes, a vast amount of what's going on these days is a function of once-secret patterns of esoteric thinking getting splashed around in popular culture and inevitably misunderstood. That always happens to some extent in the twilight years of a civilization, as institutions break down or become hopelessly corrupt, but it's happened in our time to an unprecedented degree -- well, unprecedented in recorded history, at least. (If there's anything real behind the Atlantis legend, it would make sense of some details of that legend if something similar happened then, too.) It's also quite correct that traditional rules of occult secrecy were motivated by the desire to keep matches and dynamite out of the hands of careless children.
On the other -- well, demonolatry is another form of the same thing. It's for people who can't hack the true magic. You get people who want to practice magic but won't accept that it's about changing themselves rather than changing the world, or in some other way refuse the demands of the path; instead of doing the work themselves, they get other entities to do things for them. Demons are always willing to do that, and equally willing to flatter and wheedle those who call on them, until they get the summoners into a vulnerable situation -- which they always do, being smarter than we are -- and start to tighten the screws.
Thus you always get an era of demonolatry in the wake of an era when occultism goes public. The original grimoires were what happened when some Christian priests who learned how to practice exorcism were unwilling to gain spiritual power through the hard but effective way of mystical practice, and settled for trying to get demons to do favors for them. In the same way, in the wake of the Rosicrucian era, you had the fad for grimoires in early modern Germany; in the wake of Lévi and the French occult revival, the era of diabolisme that inspired Huysman's Là-Bas; and now, in the wake of a genuine golden age of occultism in the US and Europe, we've got the usual era of demonolatry to scoop up the failures.
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On the other -- well, demonolatry is another form of the same thing. It's for people who can't hack the true magic. You get people who want to practice magic but won't accept that it's about changing themselves rather than changing the world, or in some other way refuse the demands of the path; instead of doing the work themselves, they get other entities to do things for them.
Demons are always willing to do that, and equally willing to flatter and wheedle those who call on them, until they get the summoners into a vulnerable situation -- which they always do, being smarter than we are -- and start to tighten the screws.
Thus you always get an era of demonolatry in the wake of an era when occultism goes public. The original grimoires were what happened when some Christian priests who learned how to practice exorcism were unwilling to gain spiritual power through the hard but effective way of mystical practice, and settled for trying to get demons to do favors for them. In the same way, in the wake of the Rosicrucian era, you had the fad for grimoires in early modern Germany; in the wake of Lévi and the French occult revival, the era of diabolisme that inspired Huysman's Là-Bas; and now, in the wake of a genuine golden age of occultism in the US and Europe, we've got the usual era of demonolatry to scoop up the failures.