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Give them a few more decades and I bet the Magaambya will figure out all four traditions. I imagine them and Rahadoum were two major factors in driving Golarion's magical understanding in the future that leads to Starfinder.
Considering that their present level of understanding is the work of millennia, I suspect you might be low-balling how long it's going to take. But otherwise, yes.
I think it is still useful to draw a distinction between the knowledge of theory and the practice of a magic tradition. As far as I know, casters do not need to extend their knowledge of theory beyond the basics to cast spells, and advanced knowledge if theory can but doesn't necessarily grant spells. Bards may practice Occult magic with an instinct for the interaction between art, mind, and soul, but we've seen there is no single correct approach to practicing any tradition. Witches can practice divine magic with reason, Sorcerers can practice Arcane with instinct.
I'm just spitballing now, but I see knowledge of theory being a related, but different skill set than practice. Even though the practice of Occult magic lends itself to approaches which favour an instinct for affecting and audience and drawing connections, I don't think Cha is necessarily a logical skill for synthesizing and correlating knowledge. On the other hand, while many feel that all knowledge should logically be based on reason and memory, I feel there is a case for being able to synthesize knowledge not with memorization and reason, but through intuition and holistic understanding. Recently I read an article about medieval medicine which illustrated to me why premodern medicine makes more sense as a Wis based skill than an Int one.
Given the above discussion about why Wizardry's emphasis on empirically verifiable spell craft is suited to Arcane magic and why that is different from Occult magic emphasized the need for Occult practitioners to be able to adapt to a subject without empirical truths, needing to synthesize an understanding from moving variables, it almost seems as if Wisdom would be a more fitting ability.
Nevertheless, it seems to me like the skills are divided by mental traditions and vital traditions. The theory of Occultism, like the theory of storytelling, is still based in symbols and rational patterns, provided one does not make the mistake of seeing the symbols and tropes as the substance of the magic, as...
Except the game mechanics and the lore goes out of its way to suggest that both aspects are identical in structure. Recall Knowledge with Religion or Nature is Wisdom-based game mechanics-wise, and the lore backs this up with the respective Tradition explanations. The same is done with Arcane. Occult should be treated similarly with it being both Charisma-based lore-wise and Charisma-based game mechanics-wise. It's just a bad parallel disconnect done for the sake of making Intelligence less of a dump-stat than what it already is.
Witches and Sorcerers have their spell traditions due to Patron blessings/secrets that nobody else can have (not even Wizards), and magical blood lineage that gives them power that is more inherent than logical, respectively. The game and the lore support those having a different function, and I can actually get behind those explanations. But the Occult skill is neither that or this.
Charisma is about as instinctual as Wisdom, but is more emotional than it by comparison. A wise person knows what the prudent course of action is, but the charismatic person knows what people want and will give it to them to fulfill desires (presumably of both parties). The Occult isn't a means of being wise or smart, it's a means of appealing to base desires without a care of intellect or prudence, which is often why the iconic Occult paradigm, Cthulhu and their cultist followers, function in a way that we of rational humanity cannot fathom, but those of their ilk do, in fact, function. Because it's a matter of sheer emotion and force of personality, not unlike the way Charisma is described in both the game and the lore.
I've run out of time but I forgot to mention that my perception that Occult is knowable through intellect, if not through the empiricism of wizardry and arcana, is part of the reason why I support the idea of an occult researcher, even if I don't think we've proven a broad enough field to make an independent class outside of a Witch theme.
Before I go, the lore is relatively clear that emotion and the experience of consciousness is not the domain if any one essence, but of all four essences. Chemical, cerebral, instinctual, and spiritual influences all play some part in emotional and experiential make up of a person's consciousness. Mind is not the logic of a computer, it is all so-called 'higher' thought, including the more cerebral aspects of emotion.
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Sneaky post script: I don't know if I feel that eldritch horrors actually are the iconic occult to me. They are in there, but so are things like astrology and harrow and spiritualism.
I don't think that I have anything substantive to add to this, right now, but I wanted to say that I definitely understand why some people feel that the Bard is not a 'pure' Occult practitioner, and that either the Bard or the Occultism skill have been keyed to the wrong ability. Obviously, given the body of evidence in this and related threads, I don't agree with these conclusions, but I see where the rationale comes from.
Looking at core casters from a top-down perspective, filling out the patterns, it certainly seems logical to suggest that the two Mental traditions be associated with Int ('systematic categorization of...'), and the two Vital traditions be associated with Wis ('faith in...'), especially with the skills themselves following this pattern. This would leave Sorcerer to stand out as the any-list caster.
That said, while the temptation to fill out top-down patterns is strong--I am no stranger to this urge--we know that this impulse is misguided with regard to the designers' intent in filling out the setting. Whether Occult magic should logically be Int or Cha is a question of what approach a class is using to understand it. For Bards its their creative mental essence delving into the intangible realm of stories, for Psychics it can be either harnessed emotion or strict mental discipline.
Magic is a vast topic of study and perhaps even the larger portion of it remains entirely unknown to mortals thus far. Through any-list casters, Fae, and even the history of the Arcane list itself, we know that the very traditions themselves can be hacked to achieve surprising results. I'm sure as the lore of the traditions expands we will find that there are many apparent contradictions between a basic theory of magic and the myriad ways it is actually practised.
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Secrets of magic insist that eldritch horrors should not be iconic, they are mostly involved due to misconceptions about occult and bad emotion and imagination control. They are still thematic though.
Sneaky post script: I don't know if I feel that eldritch horrors actually are the iconic occult to me. They are in there, but so are things like astrology and harrow and spiritualism.
Indeed! I think the Occult treatise may be my favourite of the four, if not a close second to the Primal. On the other hand, I would not relegate eldritch horror exclusively to the field of thematically appropriate misconceptions about Occult. Researching and rationalizing the inexplicable remains well withing both the wheelhouses of Occultism and eldritch beings and if I recall, many eldritch aberrations themselves practice Occult magic. Whatever their connection, it's more than a case of association by accidental tentacle expsure.
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I mean, I sort of think discussing the lore implications is a little irrelevant here. It's more like... Religion and Nature were arbitrarily made Wisdom skills so Druids and Clerics could be the best at them it and it's a little weird Occult didn't get a similar treatment for the game's marquee Occult casters. The in-universe explanations for why Occult is the way it is are fine, but also don't really matter because if it had gone the other way so would the justifications.
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I mean, I sort of think discussing the lore implications is a little irrelevant here. It's more like... Religion and Nature were arbitrarily made Wisdom skills so Druids and Clerics could be the best at them it and it's a little weird Occult didn't get a similar treatment for the game's marquee Occult casters. The in-universe explanations for why Occult is the way it is are fine, but also don't really matter because if it had gone the other way so would the justifications.
Actually, I have trouble thinking of appropriate justifications for all RK not being based on INT.
My two sense of the matter.
Arcane know through study so intelligence
Occult is about stories and narratives. These things are created and manipulated through charisma but when studying these things your breaking down into patterns and component parts, so it is intelligence.
Nature is the most strange as it in are world is actual science but it more spiritual. I think the most common way of understanding nature is through a spiritual connection those nature is wisdom and more scientific is covered in lore skills.
Religion is mostly understood through constipation interpatient. It not just memorization but understanding the application and the fact that there is more then one interpretation, so wisdom.
Recalling Knowledge through INT is better in world, that is why Lore skills all key off it, even though that hardly makes sense for any activity other than recalling knowledge that you might do with that lore skill.
Fundamental to the disconnect that people have about what occult magic is are the following observations:
1. "Occult" magic is a made up game concept primarily concerned with helping establish defined niche space for classes and magic with an extremely tight game balance.
2. It was a useful game concept to develop for Pathfinder, because the creative team at Paizo really likes telling stories that veer off into the terrible and dangerous mysteries of the unknown. Between Dragons and Wizards, I think Arcane covered so much heavily used knowledge that tossing in all the cosmic horror and weird just low key made it too bloated of a category.
3. Because it is a new category, it is still in the process of getting its shake out and there are a lot of different creative minds at Paizo. It is pretty unreasonable to expect all the developers to have a perfectly shared vision of what lines surround each of the traditions of magic, so it is not going to be a perfect fit all of the time for everything it gets used for (personally, I still don't get Oozes being Occult by default. Just because the ooze type shares some mechanical similarities doesn't mean that they should all be grouped together within one knowledge pool. Incorporeal creatures can be undead, elemental, or even arcane, I think Oozes could have tradition traits based upon how they come into existence).
All of this is ok, and to be expected. Which is why I think it can really help players to step back from trying to see the traditions as perfectly defined categories in game as well. Even if it were true in game, that isn't really how knowledge works in our world, and the social construction of knowledge actually makes the game mechanics fit together better too. It may seem stupid to me that creatures like black puddings could exist in swamps naturally and not be something that people in world would study naturally, but I guess in world they just freak people out too much for your typical hunter, Druid or other nature expert to pay much attention to. As a GM, I will continue to play it pretty fast and loose with the "right" recall knowledge skill, and favor flavoring the knowledge learned to the skill used and what can be learned about it, rather than defining wether anything can be learned about it all based upon those categories, but I recognize that as a house rule that I don't expect followed in PFS games. In world, people have been a little strangely obsessed with this relatively new concept of traditions of magic and all the scholars are abyss-bent on forcing everything into these categories even if that can appear a little forced to the rebellious scholars of Golarion.