Ah, you've brought up one of the big skeletons in the closet of modern occultism.
In the first half of the 20th century, most occultists in the English-speaking world were politically conservative. The popularity of occultism on the far left from the late 1960s on was not completely unprecedented -- the Theosophical society had close ties to the socialist movement in the late 19th century, for example -- but as Marxism took over the far left, its hardcore atheist ideology became pervasive all over the leftward end of things, while occult groups became popular on the right. Some of the biggest occult organizations in the US back in the day -- the I Am Movement, for example, let by Guy and Edna Ballard -- were very conservative. Burks Hamner, whose Essene teachings I've studied and circulated, ran for Congress as a conservative Republican in 1936, and turned to teaching New Thought after he and the GOP generally were trounced in that election. And of course there were also a lot of occultists on the extreme, goose-stepping end of the right: William Dudley Pelley, the founder of the Soulcraft occult school, was the head of a large American fascist organization in the 1930s.
So when the far left took up magic in the wake of the collapse of the New Left at the end of the 1960s, it was a remarkable cultural flip-flop. (It wasn't the only one; environmental conservation had been a right-wing cause before then -- that's why the GOP was responsible for creating the first national parks and passing a lot of other early environmental legislation.) The new occultists of the left-wing counterculture were horribly embarrassed by their right-wing forebears, and so swept their existence under the rug wherever possible, and the few survivors of that era -- Manly P. Hall, who loathed the counterculture and said so in no uncertain terms, was one -- were left completely baffled, as baffled as that arch-conservative J.R.R. Tolkien was when the hippies adopted his books.
Re: Reincarnation of historical figures
In the first half of the 20th century, most occultists in the English-speaking world were politically conservative. The popularity of occultism on the far left from the late 1960s on was not completely unprecedented -- the Theosophical society had close ties to the socialist movement in the late 19th century, for example -- but as Marxism took over the far left, its hardcore atheist ideology became pervasive all over the leftward end of things, while occult groups became popular on the right. Some of the biggest occult organizations in the US back in the day -- the I Am Movement, for example, let by Guy and Edna Ballard -- were very conservative. Burks Hamner, whose Essene teachings I've studied and circulated, ran for Congress as a conservative Republican in 1936, and turned to teaching New Thought after he and the GOP generally were trounced in that election. And of course there were also a lot of occultists on the extreme, goose-stepping end of the right: William Dudley Pelley, the founder of the Soulcraft occult school, was the head of a large American fascist organization in the 1930s.
So when the far left took up magic in the wake of the collapse of the New Left at the end of the 1960s, it was a remarkable cultural flip-flop. (It wasn't the only one; environmental conservation had been a right-wing cause before then -- that's why the GOP was responsible for creating the first national parks and passing a lot of other early environmental legislation.) The new occultists of the left-wing counterculture were horribly embarrassed by their right-wing forebears, and so swept their existence under the rug wherever possible, and the few survivors of that era -- Manly P. Hall, who loathed the counterculture and said so in no uncertain terms, was one -- were left completely baffled, as baffled as that arch-conservative J.R.R. Tolkien was when the hippies adopted his books.