The occult mind: magic in theory and practice

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...

Hermes Explains: Thirty Questions about Western Esotericism, 2019

Few fields of academic research are surrounded by so many misunderstandings and misconceptions as the study of Western esotericism. For twenty years now, the Centre for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (University of Amsterdam) has been at the forefront of international scholarship in this domain. This anniversary volume seeks to make the modern study of Western esotericism known beyond specialist circles, while addressing a range of misconceptions, biases, and prejudices that still tend to surround it. Thirty major scholars in the field respond to questions about a wide range of unfamiliar ideas, traditions, practices, problems, and personalities that are central to this area of research. By challenging many taken-for-granted assumptions about religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, this volume demonstrates why the academic study of esotericism leads us to reconsider much that we thought we knew about the story of Western culture.

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 2023

Recent years have seen a surge in scholarly monographs and edited volumes on the occult and broader esoteric topics, a clear indication of both growing interest in the field and expanding recognition of the continuing role these currents play in shaping modern societies and cultures around the world. Despite the relative newness of the academic study of Western esotericism, which is conventionally believed to have entered mainstream academic discourse with Antoine Faivre's (1934-2021) groundbreaking work L'ésotérisme (1992), the field has achieved impressive theoretical and methodological sophistication in the span of a mere four decades. The present volume, The Occult Nineteenth Century: Roots, Developments, and Impact on the Modern World, is an excellent example of the theoretical depth, interdisciplinary breadth, and topical variety characteristic of the field today, bringing together some of the biggest names and most innovative thinkers in the field of esoteric studies. The editors of the volume, Lukas Pokorny and Franz Winter, have accomplished a formidable task, masterfully combining seventeen chapters by well-established and up-and-coming scholars of esotericism into a multifaceted yet coherent collection celebrating the pioneering work of Karl Baier, Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Vienna. Unfortunately, two groundbreaking works by Baier, often referenced by the contributors, Yoga auf dem Weg nach Westen. Beiträge zur Rezeptionsgeschichte (1998) (Yoga on the Way to the West. Contributions to the History of Reception) and Meditation und Moderne: Zur Genese eines Kernbereichs moderner Spiritualität in der Wechselwirkung zwischen Westeuropa, Nordamerika und Asien (2008) (Meditation and Modernity: On the Genesis of a Core Area of Modern Spirituality in the Interaction between Western Europe, North America, and Asia) are yet to be translated into English. It is beyond doubt that this volume will be of great interest both to scholars of alternative spiritualities and to a wider audience of non-specialists who want to gain a broader understanding of various occult movements and their

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. 1 In the historiographical narratives on the history of religious studies this dimension is usually completely absent, 2 even if the connections to other disciplines emerging in the 19 th 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 academisation, professionalisation and disciplinary differentiation, and, last but not least, about the dissociation from theology, 3 but nearly nothing about the connections with esoteric currents. It is less surprising that such perspectives are missing in the research on institutional developments in the genesis of religious studies 4although Friedrich Max Müller, whose appointment to the chair for "Comparative Philology" in Oxford, established in 1868, and his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) are considered to be founding acts of religious

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.

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