About
Who runs this, and on what terms
A small, independent research project with one working rule: publish the method before the result, and label how much evidence stands behind every claim.
What this is
occultresearch.org studies divinatory practices — astrology, tarot, card-based and symbolic divination — using ordinary statistics, and separately documents what modern technology genuinely inherited from esoteric practice. The two halves share one commitment: a reader should always be able to see how a claim was arrived at, and how confident anyone is entitled to be about it.
Why it exists
Writing about divination usually arrives pre-sorted into two camps. One treats the practices as obviously true and never tests them; the other treats them as obviously absurd and never tests them either. Both skip the same step. A well-built test does not care which camp you started in, and its result is worth something precisely because it could have come out the other way.
Where we stand
We do not know in advance whether any divinatory practice performs above chance, and we are not building instruments designed to produce a particular answer. Protocols are published before data collection opens, which is what makes that claim checkable rather than merely stated. If an experiment produces a positive result under its own preregistered analysis, it will be published exactly as readily as a null one.
On the historical work
The lineage articles are not an attempt to make the occult respectable by association with science, nor to embarrass it. Alchemy really did hand chemistry the water bath and the still; it really did not hand it the philosophers' stone. Both facts belong in the same article, which is why every claim carries an explicit evidence label instead of a confident tone.
Who
The project is independently run and self-funded. There is no institutional affiliation, no advertising, and no sponsor with an interest in the outcome. Corrections are welcome and are logged rather than quietly applied.