Does "Intuitive" Mean "Esotericist?"

It's pretty obvious to just about everyone that esotericists are by their nature relatively uncommon. The study of magick has never been a subject pursued by the majority of people, and even before the rise of scientific materialism it remained in the hands of a small group of intellectuals who generally had ties to or were themselves members of the aristocracy. Some of the reasons for this are obvious - Renaissance peasants, for example, spent so much time and effort working the land that little was left over for the pursuit of any scholarly discipline, and in fact the Renaissance itself was mostly a movement confined to the upper eschelons of society. However, it also is true that throughout history the percentage of spiritual technologists, including practitioners of everything from shamanism to what today is called "high magick," has remained both small and relatively constant.

I came across this article the other day talking about the differences between what are called Sensing and Intuitive types on the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, a personality test that has been widely used for many years in both business and academia. While the article is written in an informal style and intended for an audience of musicians rather than psychologists, I studied the MMPI pretty extensively back in college and its basic facts are correct. Intuitive types are substantially rarer than Sensing types, and while "Intuitive" in this sense has to do with a style of processing information rather than anything paranormal like psychic intuitions, many of the personality traits exhibited by Intuitives are quite similar to those that I commonly observe in other magical practitioners.

70-75% of the population take most of their input directly from their senses. In the Myers-Briggs profiling system we call them ‘Sensors’. They live in a world that’s oriented towards concrete reality, verifiable proof, sensibility and security. They want things that can be verified by their senses and they typically don’t have much patience for abstract theory or far fetched ideas. They tend to seek security, contentment and pleasure and in most cases feel basically the same as other people (unless there’s a good reason – i.e. they’re 8 feet tall).

The rest of us are the weirdos. We take in information through a process of abstract pattern recognition called intuition. We look for bits of information and map them together to create a pattern or understanding of things in our minds. We often have little patience for following rules and instructions because our brains don’t naturally process things in neat and tidy sequences.

We like deep conversation and we seek meaning. We’re the ones who don’t want to adapt to the world. We’re built to change it. We’re not the ones who get married at an early age and buy houses with white picket fences and have 2.3 children and live happily ever after.

This suggests a line of research that could prove quite interesting. I'm a Myers-Briggs Intuitive myself and so are most of the people close to me, at least those who've taken the test, and it would be quite revealing to see if this pattern holds for other occultists and esotericists of various stripes. The book that the article links to suggests that there is a fundamental physiological difference between Sensing and Intuitive types, and if this is the case it could go a long way toward explaining why magick remains such a fringe pursuit. It may just be that some of us are wired for it and others are not, and that could also explain why nobody even got rich writing occult books. The fundamental level of interest just may not be out there, and more to the point it may never be.

Of course, the speculation there is a couple of levels deep, and in order to support or disprove that assertion some solid data is going to be required. It seems to me that an academic psychologist could get away with it too, under the guise of cognitive research. After all, there's nothing necessarily paranormal about investigating a correlation between an interest in magick and personality type so long as the question of whether or not the magick actually works can be kept out of the picture.