English Occult Discourse as a Cultural Phenomenon

2013

The academic research on Western esotericism in general and contemporary occultism in particular has been largely neglected in earlier scholarship and has only recently gained serious academic attention. This thesis examines how the contemporary occult group, La Société Voudon Gnostique, headed by David Beth and an organization under the general current Voudon Gnosis, legitimate their claims to knowledge, mainly through three discursive strategies of epistemology offered by Olav Hammer, namely: the appeal to (1) tradition; (2) scientism as a language of faith; and narratives of (3) experience. Since Hammer argues that these strategies can be found in esoteric currents in general, but only examines theosophy, anthroposophy and New Age as well as only examining “esoteric spokespersons” this thesis aims at examine them in relation to contemporary occultism as well as in relation to both the spokesperson and to “ordinary adherents”. In order do this, La Société Voudon Gnostique works as a case study in qualification of being a contemporary occult group that has gained no academic attention before. The conclusions of this thesis are that the strategies are all prevalent, to a more or less extent, in La Société Voudon Gnostqiue and they are also used by the adherents. Besides the strategies proposed by Hammer, this thesis argues that the secrecy and elitist approach, which can be found in the texts, also can be seen as a discursive strategy of epistemology.

African American magical and religious practices combine African origins and European influences. A Kongo-influenced form of magic called conjure, rootwork, or hoodoo developed among enslaved people in the Anglo-Protestant Atlantic Seaboard colonies/states. The Voudou religion, combining West African traditions with Catholicism, developed among slaves and free people in Louisiana, but was driven underground around 1880 and replaced by something resembling hoodoo. By the early twentieth century, African Americans all over the United States had access to published books of rituals and charm formulae. The first books made available were translations of German, German-American, and French occult texts. Later on, the white American manufacturers of “spiritual products” created their own books and pamphlets of magical formulae. This article examines the ways in which European and European-American occult texts were distributed to practitioners of diverse magical and religious traditions and incorporated into the corpus of magical knowledge.

Aries, 2017

The Occult World (edited by Christopher Partridge), 2015

W hile a historical study of the occult has grown into its own discipline since the early 1990s, under labels such as 'the history of hermetic philosophy' and 'the history of Western esotericism,' no comparable developments exist for a sociology of the occult. Attempts were made in the early 1970s, but the work in this regard by pioneering researchers such as Edward Tiryakian has largely gone without notice in broader sociology. With historians of the occult neglecting or being uninterested in sociological perspectives, and with sociologists interested in the study of the occult rarely paying attention to existing historiographical work, we have a situation where incompatible defi nitions abound and misunderstandings are diffi cult to avoid.

Hermes Explains, 2019

What does Popular Fiction have to do with the Occult? From the outset, any connection between popular fiction and occultism might seem oxymoronic. After all, if occultism is supposed to be about secrecy and arcane knowledge, what could it possibly have to do with a brashly commercial form of literature which is thoroughly at home in the marketplace, seeks to gain as many readers as possible, and values entertainment more than instruction? Nonetheless, to take the case of Britain alone, 1 occult topics have been fixtures of the popular fiction landscape since the eighteenth-century birth of the Gothic onwards, featuring in the alchemical, Rosicrucian, and Satanic subplots of novels like Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). When, nearly a century later, the cumbersome and costly triple-decker novel finally made way for the sleek and affordable single volume format that has since become the industry standard, occult novels like George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) and Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) topped the newly-constituted best seller lists. In today's increasingly globalised and e-based fiction market, the allure of the occult seems only to have grown, as demonstrated by the remarkable success of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and Dan Brown's Robert Langdon novels. 2 Why has occultism so frequently and successfully been co-opted within mainstream literary genres such as the thriller, the romance, the school story, and the horror novel? What new understanding of the development and cultural impact of Western esotericism might we gain by focusing on these texts, rather than just on nonfictional works of occult philosophy which typically have far smaller audiences and lack 1 As a scholar of Victorian and Edwardian British literature, I shall largely draw my examples from this geographical context, although many of the patterns and developments I observe can also be documented more widely across the West.

MAGIC IN FANTASY LITERATURE: DEFINITIONS, MANIFESTATIONS, FUNCTIONS, 2024 / Теоретичні аспекти дослідження. Магія у літературі фентезі: Дефініції, маніфестації, функції. Колективна монографія Центру з Дослідження Літератури Фентезі при Інституті літератури ім. Т. Г. Шевченка НАН України, 2024

The paper concentrates on “modes of magicity” as general notions about the type and nature of magic in a text with the resulting genre conventions. These “modes of magicity” are closely related to the notions of the magical, dominant in Western Europe (particularly in the Anglophone cultures), which had finally taken shape by the Renaissance and continue to influence the perception of the magical until now. Three main subdivisions of the magical can be singled out: the magic of supernatural creatures (the Faërie mode), the demonized magic of women and common folk (the Witchcraft mode), and the so-called “learned magic” (the (learned) Magic mode) – an intellectualized and predominantly male practice, with its two branches: white magic and black magic. These modes can mix, yet there is a tendency for the models to be consistent. Keywords: magic, witchcraft, Faërie, fantasy, modes of magicity

ІНСТИТУЦІЙНІ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ ЕЗОТЕРИЧНОГО ДИСКУРСУ Езотеричний дискурс виокремлено як підвид сакрального з точки зору родо-видових відносин, а за адресатним критерієм – як інституційний. Продуцентами езотеричного дискурсу виступають і сутності інших вимірів, і люди. Головним принципом езотеричних учень є духовний сенс життя, а основними поняттями – енергетика, карма, переселення душ, “тонкі світи” тощо. Метою езотеричного дискурсу є зміна світогляду особистості, підпорядкування матеріального духовному. До автохтонів езотеричного дискурсу віднесено такі концепти, як БОГ, ДУХ, ДУХОВНІСТЬ, ДУША. У всіх підтипах езотеричного дискурсу ролі учасників комунікації статусно визначені: модель “вчитель/наставник (духовний) – учень”. INSTITUTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ESOTERIC DISCOURSE. Petryk T.V. The article singles out esoteric discourse as a subtype of sacral discourse from the point of view of typology correlations and as institutional one from the point of view of the discourse addressee. Both entities from other dimensions and human beings can perform the function of esoteric discourse producer. The central principle of esoteric teachings is spiritual sense of life, basic ideas – energy, karma, transmigration of souls, “thin worlds”, etc. The aim of the esoteric discourse is the change of the personality outlook, submission of material values to spiritual. Such concepts as GOD, SPIRIT, SPIRITUALITY, and SOUL belong to esoteric discourse autochthons. In all the subtypes of esoteric discourse the roles of communicants are status-defined according to the model “teacher/mentor (spiritual) – disciple”. In channeling-discourse, as a subtype of esoteric one, the role of spiritual teacher is performed by the multidimensional entity and communication may be both monologic (the entity speaks through the channeler) and dialogic (the entity answers the questions of the audience speaking through the channeler). It is characteristic of channelings to contain the element or features of other discourses (religious, philosophical, scientific and even literary – in the forms of parables either embedded in the text of channeling or as a separate channeling). Similarity with educational discourse is traced in role subdivision of the participants and the final aim – to provide the information about the sense of human life in Universe, to explain its laws and regulations, to teach a new vision of life.

This is the personal prologue and introduction to a book of essays, integrating contemporary philosophy, alternative science, esoteric and popular culture. This prologue introduces the themes and ideas central to humanity's struggle with the emerging possibilities and dangers of civilization, and its process of becoming coherent, for good or ill.

While the distinction between spiritism and science was understood affirmatively as a demarcation of true science against pseudo-science, nowadays, after several Science Wars, it is obvious for us that this distinction does not correspond to the actual practices of science but reflects a work of ‘purification’ typical for modernity in the Latourian sense. In the physico-philosophical surroundings of this boundary epistemological foundations are shaped and modern science is constituted as the primary way to knowledge. Referring to studies on the history of the occult in the Early Modern Period, the article shows that in order to understand the stakes of spiritism and its technical or personal media we should trace back this boundary to a rarely recognized conceptual transformation of the ‘occult’. It shifts between insensible and inexplicable. Following this leading difference, the article traces its function in the emergence of early occultism, the debate between Leibniz and Newton, and the rise of modern spiritism and its instrumental repertoire.

2018

2021

The first and primary thesis of this book is that religious studies have little-known and sometimes repressed origins which lie in the field of esotericism. The second thesis, which stems directly from this idea, holds that esotericism is an intrinsic part of hegemonic cultures and not a separate, small, “secret”, or “occult” field of minority groups. These two themes run through all the essays in this volume. By adopting this perspective, we aim to shed new light on the history of the academic discipline of religious studies and esotericism. In the historiographical narratives on the history of religious studies this dimension is usually completely absent, even if the connections to other disciplines emerging in the 19 century (e.g. ethnology, cultural anthropology, geography of religion) are addressed or if the connection with ideological patterns of interpretation, e.g. evolutionary doctrines, which also play a central role in occultism, is present. One can read a lot about acade...

Folkloristika 5/2, 2020

2019

Occultic rhetoric, according to Joshua Gunn, is a genre of discourse concerned with the study and practice of secret communications. The strategic sharing of secret messages involves a host of methods and conventions designed for the selective disclosure of hidden knowledge, thus controlling the boundaries of (and accessibility to power between) insider and outsider groups. Occultic rhetoric has its uses in everyday encounters, but the abuse of such manipulative strategies, especially by those in the academy and other positions of power and trust, calls for an ethical response. This dissertation submits occultic rhetoric to moral investigation by incorporating the works of Sissela Bok who examined the ethics of both secrecy and lying. By applying her principles to case studies of deliberately disguised or distorted messages in academic settings, this project suggests an approach for the moral exercise of secret communications, otherwise known as an ethics of occultic rhetoric.